Some end-of-first-semester thoughts

Here's just a few thoughts I had at the end of the semester. Well, only two really. Two important things I learned this semester about poetry in general.

1. Rules = good. I remember one man in our class wrote this poem about those...um, people at carnivals who ride motorcycles around a dome like thing....like, sideways, on the walls, in a circle? I don't know what they're called, and I'm not doing a very good job of describing it. But, one of the characters of his poem pushed the acceleration too much, got spooked by the whole thing and tried to "force the pace" and ended up "shooting the works" and losing the centripetal force that was keeping his motorcycle from dropping into the gears below (which it does, and he follows suit). I remember I said something to the effect, when we were discussing the pervasive theme of the "force", the otherness that drives the cyclists, literally and figuratively, the great overarching "force" (gravity, something higher, etc) that the poem deals with, and I summarized it by saying something to the effect of "if you try to force the force, the force forces you." And I think that's a very apt way of describing poetic writing. In trying to work within the bounds of the rules of a certain form or a certain meter, you are forced to think of images and ways of saying things that you would not have come up with had you not had those restrictions to work under. And you end up having to pay such close attention to the way your words sound in relation to each other, which really is what defines poetry.

If you had asked me to define what a poem is before this class, or what exactly separates it from prose besides odd layout, I wouldn't have been able to tell you. But now I appreciate the importance of meter- even if the meter is irregular, in a self-imposed pattern, or inconsistent- in poetic writing; even if the meter is presented one of the non-traditional ways I described before, the cadence and the sound and the rhythm of the words is what makes a poem a poem. The rhythmicness and the musicality of it are what separates it from prose. And care must be given, even when writing in free verse, to the rhythms of words. As my professor said, writing a poem without paying attention to meter or at least to the way words sound and their rhythm is like saying "I'm going to write a song, but I'm not going to pay any attention to the tempo or key."

2. "poetry" doesn't have to be "Poetry". I remember something in our textbook (written by Stephen Fry, by the way...yes, the British comedian. Yes, the book is funny. And yes, also very informative) about how most people have two ideas of poetry in their heads: "poetry" which is the actual craft of writing, and "Poetry" which denotes something larger than life or sublime, something with huge and higher meaning, whatever it is (there can be poetry in a place, like the poetry of nature or the poetry of the streets. A brushstroke or a dance can be pure poetry. Etc.) He said that when people stop approaching poetry as Poetry, as something mysterious and unknowable and "higher" than normal human consciousness, it becomes a lot easier to understand, and to appreciate. Which was a complete turnaround for me. I mean, I had always known that the language one uses in a poem is important, the "poetic" (read: rich, symbolic, etc) imagery and such was part of what made a poem good. But I thought the main important part was what the poem had to say. I thought all love poems were trite unless they were about some unconventional or unusual love or aspect of love. I thought all lyrical poems describing an object or a thing or a place were pointless unless there was some deep, higher meaning to the thing you were describing or your perspective on it.

But poetry, once you understand it as a craft, a way of composing words in relation to one another that elicit understandings or sensations, in a certain rhythmic, musical way, it opens you up to so much more. Starting with the first assignment, where our professor purposefully said "Don't try to make it anything with any deep emotional themes or anything, just write about food," and progressing slowly throughout the semester, I learned to drop the inhibition to writing poems that so frequently caused my writer's block, based on "having no ideas," or nothing to write about that felt important to me. But the truth is, you end up coming up with some truly amazing things simply because you begin with a concentration on a form, without even trying to come up with something "deep". You end up so often in writing- and here I'm not just talking about poetry, though I mainly am, but often in fiction writing and other kinds of writing too- with all these images and metaphors that somehow seem to interlock and come together perfectly in the container of the poem, or the story, so much so that it almost seems like the pieces were there for you to discover, rather than to write or create from within yourself, especially when you start writing about something you don't find to hold any particular higher meaning or metaphoric/symbolic possibilities. Something not, at first glance, "Poetic". So often we miss the poetry in our own lives- the "Poetry" we can endow them with, or come to see in them, by presenting them as "poetry" (with a little p).