It Ain't Poetry

MR Bodkin is an aficionado of poetry. For full disclosure, I must confess that I have an active Poetic License. But what is a poem? Since three is, after all, the number of completion, let us consider three factors that might make a poem a poem.

1) The language of poetry is difficult to define. It can make use of figures of speech. For example, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" is asking whether a simile should be used to relate how someone is like a summer day. Also, in this famous sonnet, the summer day is "lovely" and "temperate". The buds of May are "darling". The eye of heaven is "too hot". It might seem to some that the essence of poetry is adjectival. Simple language with no modifiers can, however, be used so that the overall effect is poetical even though the words themselves may be prosaic (i.e. common and unromantic). A young lady acquaintance of my college years once penned the following:

                                    Mother, tell me
                                    Is the answer
                                    In the road
                                    Or in the feet?

I do not remember her name, so I can not give proper attribution; but I will never forget the poem. No adjectives, no fancy words. The important thing is how the words are used.

2) If one were to obtain 100 person-in-the-street answers to "What is poetry?", the most frequent answer might mention rhyme. Actually, rhyme has not been considered necessary throughout much of history. It does, however make a poem pleasing to the ear and provides a type of structure. The poet must find a way to fit the gestalt of the poem into the rhyming frame of a sonnet such as Shakespeare's justly famous Sonnet 18 quoted above. To do this without having the work seem contrived is a challenge. While rhyme can contribute to the beauty of a poem, blank (unrhymed) verse has been a most common form for the last four or five centuries. I have written both rhymed and blank verse.

3) The truest test of poetry is structure which includes meter and scansion. The Shakespearean sonnet has lines consisting of ten "beats" alternating lightly stressed (or unstressed) and heavily stressed syllables. This is the famous/infamous Iambic Pentameter. The unstressed and stressed syllables together constitute a "foot", the basic metrical building block. There are other feet such as Anapestic with two unstressed beats followed by one stressed. In "The Destruction of Sennacherib" G. G. (Lord) Byron gave us:
         

                               The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold

                               And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold

                               And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea

                               When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Pentameter has five feet per line as in the sonnet line given in point #1 above. Tetrameter has four feet per line as in:

You Can Not Find Them All

If I am tied to yesterday

It is with bonds so intricate

That I could not unwind the ends

If I could find them all.

For I am tied to yesterday

As colored leaves to autumn chill

Or to the wind that blows the leaves.

You cannot find them all.

The poem above by the anonymous young lady has two feet per line, called Dimeter. If the reader wants more examples, the information is widely available.

So! What makes a bunch of words set together a poem. Flowery language is not necessary. Rhyme is not always required. The real difference is in the structure. If one piles a lot of boards together, it is not a house. The boards must be arranged in a particular way. Piling a bunch of words together does not make a poem. There must be structure. Unfortunately for MR B and anyone else who might appreciate the word-art of the maker, much of what is passed as poetry today is, in fact, not poetry at all by any sensible definition. It is words half chewed and spit out upon a page. It is prose chopped up into random lines. If you doubt it, check for yourself. Investigate the work of the currently lionized (so-called) poets.

MR Bodkin is tempted to take the path of the often overwrought P. B. Shelley and simply "fall upon the thorns of life" and bleed!