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ask-pilgrims-progress · 7 years

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why do you like poetry wirt? and how is that you get intro it? i have read some poems that i really enjoy but i don't know how to start properly, i take a book called The importance of poetry from the library and i can't pass from the first chapter.

Poetry is–it’s a way of speaking outside of everyday life. It’s an art form. Just like a photograph can take a mundane object and draw attention to it, reveal how the photographer sees it, and make it beautiful, poetry captures a moment or an idea or an image and elevates it to something beyond itself. It’s a way to preserve a feeling, I think.

There are a lot of things that happen that are… ugly. Embarrassment, humiliation, stammered words that stumble on the tongue and fall over themselves trying to press forward when they’re needed most. But poetry can be edited. Poetry is full of timeless imagery–the stars, the sea, the heavens, God, eternal love–things whose beauty a mistake or misplaced word can never impugn.

So like any art, poetry can’t be tested. I mean, some of the greatest poets of all time are the ones who took what poetry “should” be and flipped it on its head. But they say you have to know the rules to break them, so it’s definitely worth studying.

The most important thing when you’re starting off with poetry–I guess the most important thing is to have something worthwhile that you’re trying to say. A goal for your poem. A good message is going to make a poorly written poem worth reading, but all the verbal flourish of a verbose masterpiece won’t make something interesting if the writer isn’t passionate about the subject matter.

But other than that, the most important thing is considering how the words sound. And there are a lot of ways to make a statement flow and sound nice.

The rhythm of a piece is one of the biggest things you should try to notice. Does your book say anything about that yet? Like, uh, one of the phrases you’ll come across a lot is “iambic pentameter,” since Shakespeare used it so much. It’s a rhythm that makes a sentence sound melodic and stick in your brain easier, so it helps if you’re memorizing a bunch of lines for a play. It’s a line made up of five (”penta”) feet, where an “iambic foot” is an unstressed syllable and a stressed syllable. It sounds like “ba-BUM,” like a heartbeat.

(There are other kinds of “feet” too, like a “pyrrhic,” which is two unstressed syllables: ba-ba. Like the phrase “and the.”)

So Shakespeare’s lines sound really smooth and nice when you say them out loud: “but SOFT what LIGHT through YON-der WIN-dow BREAKS.”

Another thing to notice when you’re writing poetry is the kind of sounds you use. Everyone knows that rhyming is used in poetry a lot, but equally important would be consonance and assonance.

Consonance is just when you use the same consonant sounds over and over: “the crisp clear tune carried across the calm canal” has the same hard “c” sound repeating, so it’s more catchy than saying the same thing a different way, like “the crisp transparent tune was brought across the still waters.”

Assonance is the same thing but with vowel sounds. “I liked the cycle of enticing lies that would rise from an earlier time” has lots of long “i” sounds.

One last quick thing: rhyme scheme. If you’re analyzing poetry, you’ll see lots of stuff like “abab” or “aabb.” Each letter symbolizes a word that rhymes. So a poem like:

As I was walking up the stairI saw a man who wasn’t thereHe wasn’t there again todayOh, how I wish he’d go away!

is aabb, because in this case, “a” would be “stair/there” and “b” would be “today/away.” Rhyme schemes can be simple like aabb or abab, or they can get more complex, like a Spenserien sonnet, whose rhyme scheme is abab bcbc cdcd ee.

But honestly? Just try to find a poem that you like and look up an analysis on it (if you have any English textbooks nearby anyway), or try to analyze it yourself. What lines do you like best? How does the author describe something in a way that’s different from the obvious point of view? What words do they choose to use, and why do you think they picked those specific words instead of something else that would mean the same thing? If you start noticing that kind of stuff, you’re well on your way to improving your own poetry.

I wish I had some of my poetry books here. I’d show you some specific ones. There’s an Edgar Allen Poe poem that’s pretty good (he’s really strong with some of the more technical parts of poetry, especially rhyme schemes) that starts out “Take this kiss upon the brow”–I think it’s called “Dream Within a Dream”? Robert Frost is also really impressive in that regard. And if you want to see someone who’s a master at taking a snapshot of a moment and immortalizing it, look up William Carlos Williams. Emotion-wise, Emily Dickinson is a master of describing human feeling. But those are just some of the really famous names that first come to mind.

Oh, and one of the modern poets wrote this really amazing poem about what poetry is, comparing and contrasting it to textbooks and business papers and all the other writing that we do every day but which isn’t “poetry.” I don’t remember her name–Marianne something? I remember the line “Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all a place for the genuine.”

Poetry is easy to mock if you don’t care for it. Beatrice has told me that no one likes poetry, and if you like poetry, no one likes you. But I can’t help but think that people who make fun of poetry just never took the time to find a poem that was truly meaningful to them.

I’m… running out of paper for now, so I’m going to stop there. I hope it helped.

#captaingeneralthingstudent #message in a bottle;

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