On getting poetry

Fast forward to my university and I was taught something completely different in a creative writing course — poetry is about play. It isn’t about having to inspire some deep meaning. Sometimes it can just be fun to mess around with words in a way that sounds pleasing. As others have mentioned, there’s also this notion pushed in our youth that poetry has to have perfect rhyme, or follow some scheme; but as soon as you realize that isn’t the case, combined with the fact you don’t have to be searching for some obfuscated truth within poems, you start to realize poetry has been marketed as something much different than what it really is.

That’s not to say you can’t search for deep meaning in a poem, or attempt to write something meaningful into one - but really, poetry is about play, and it should be as serious as you want it to be. For me, that realization made me “get” poetry more than I did back in my high school days.

From there, wrong warp through all the consequences of that false conclusion. E.g., when a story on HN appears about a court ruling, don't do the right thing of immediately writing a screed from first principles about what the wrong LISP programmer should have ruled. Just sit there, looking at your hands, imagining them to be the hands of a judge in a far off land who, like you, also has hands, but somehow, some way, they are different hands than the ones you're looking at.

After seven years of this you'll begin to smell odors that remind you of the impetuousness of youth, and see scenes of lovers laughing as you stare longingly at words scrawled into a park bench.

Only then is it time to open a book of poetry and begin reading.

There's probably also some good poetry subreddits where you can get started.

Now the advent of recorded music means that all of that has been moved to music instead. People used to dream of having a bunch of poetry memorized -- if you were stuck on an island you could always recite Wordsworth to entertain yourself. Now you'd just hum or sing whatever music strikes your fancy instead.

I have personally found myself slightly more able to "get" poetry when I force myself to memorize it -- to me that really lets you appreciate the lyrical nature of good poetry and the use of metaphor and shorthand, which both arose from a necessity of fitting some rhythmic or rhyming scheme, but took on a life of their own.

As stated I don't get many poems, but I feel that cultivating the ability to get them probably has something to do with: 1) awareness of your own emotional state in the present moment; it's the needed reference point to connect with the poet's state at time of writing 2) awareness of your accumulated life experience -- it's the material you reference to make sense of the poem 3) sensitivity to the sounds & rhythms of words 4) a broad perspective on life that includes awareness of its ultimate frame -- death; Spanish poet Lorca wrote about a creative force called 'duende' that arises from experience of the darker side of life; I think such experience may also give rise to a receptiveness to and appreciation of the more significant things conveyed in poetry and other arts 5) desire and ability to connect content of a poem to other things, be they other poems, history, the poet's personal history or whatever; poems are not islands, they have contexts, and your moment of reading one also has a context consisting of your personal intellectual history and current mental and emotional state, among other things.

Also getting a good anthology like Palgrave's or Anthony QuillerCouch, that covers a lot of poems and poets from different eras in small portable hand book format.

Personally the most enjoyment I get out of poetry is when I seen words and phrases that leap out to you in a surge of meaning and emotion.

Like for example, these fragments:

"Do more bewitch me than when art, is too precise in every part."

"A box where sweets compacted lie,"

"Thus, though we cannot make our sun,Stand still, yet we will make him run."

"Two paradises 'twere in one, To live in Paradise alone."

"O Grave! Where is thy victory? O death! Where is thy sting?"

"There is a Book by seraphs writ with beams of heavenly light"

"And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing."

    A poem is a thought that tried
    In vain, just once, before it died
    To reach the page's
    Right hand side

Same exact thing happened with classical music. Stuff like Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Debussy, Tchaikovsky... the stuff sounds good. That might be obvious... but nowadays sounding good is extremely passé and if you write stuff that sounds good you will never get tenure as a composition professor. But people still want orchestral music that sounds good, so the people get what they want in film music like John Williams, Hans Zimmer, and Howard Shore.

Now that I'm older, I think I overcame my narrow definition of poetry, and now just accept that just like in art, there are numerous styles, and it's OK not to like many of them. I like Poe's raven a lot. I don't get anything out of most poetry. I like haikus.

Just like romantic movies, there is nothing to "get" - for some people those movies don't do anything. It's not a deficiency.

> With head uncover’d, the cosmetic pow’rs.

> A heav’nly image in the glass appears,

This example quoted in the article is why I can't stand a lot of English poetry. Either be a dutiful slave to the rhythm and come up with lines that flow naturally or abandon it with pride, don't leave your lines mangled as Procrustes' guests.

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/poetry

This article starts claiming that people don't appreciate poetry, says that Poetry Foundation is putting in great efforts to expose people to poetry and failing, etc., but then it almost immediately concedes that people _do_ appreciate poetry, in lyrics and instapoetry.

I think the issue is that there's simply no major outlets trying to publish stuff that would actually appeal to a general audience. I've spent a lot of time trying to find publications that have fun, interesting formal verse and there's zilch. You can find massive lists of paper and digital poetry periodicals _all_ publishing free verse, every other poem about someone dying or race issues.

Insofar as lyrics are formal verse, after dozens of hours of searching for contemporary formal verse I've found:

https://thelyricmagazine.com/ - formal verse, long history, still barely going today. There's usually a couple poems each release that I think "oh, that was pretty good".

https://assesofparnassus.tumblr.com/ - also formal verse, very short poems but very carefully written. Recently I really liked "Better Read Than Dead" and "Bobcats".

Also Ursula K. Le Guin wrote formal verse!

At least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_%28magazine%29 the magazine was actually founded as an avenue for poets to publish without concern for public appeal. The Editor of the commercial Rattle Magazine, "... without pretension since 1995", published this embarrassing diatribe against Instapoetry https://www.pe.com/2019/08/24/instapoetry-isnt-poetry-but-it... . If this doesn't indicate a disconnect, I don't know what does.

I think modern poetry, like many other forms of modern art is too clever for its own good and normal people can better appreciate works done in older styles.

[0]: Obviously there are exceptions.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/06/class-picture-...

I have also "never gotten poetry" while I go through 52 in 52 and sometimes more than that. The part of the problem has been for me, early on the idea I had of poetry was "romantic stuff" and as a kid, meh.

Fast forward to a few years now, reading Louise penny Armand gamache series, poetry turned out to be more than that but I still dont know where to start. I want to "get poetry" like armand and Ruth but I need a starting point.

Any help?

In my opinion, the poet who is most effective at this, is Tomas Transtromer. Here is his poem "Further in".

Further In by Tomas Transtromer

On the main road into the city when the sun is low. The traffic thickens, crawls. It is a sluggish dragon glittering. I am one of the dragon’s scales. Suddenly the red sun is right in the middle of the windscreen streaming in. I am transparent and writing becomes visible inside me words in invisible ink which appear when the paper is held to the fire! I know I must get far away straight through the city and then further until it is time to go out and walk far in the forest. Walk in the footprints of the badger. It gets dark, difficult to see. In there on the moss lie stones. One of the stones is precious. It can change everything it can make the darkness shine. It is a switch for the whole country. Everything depends on it. Look at it, touch it…

https://rolfpotts.com/walker-percys-loss-creature/

Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow.

I'm of the opinion that poetry's a legitimate art form only when there's strong rhyme and meter. Frost had to work to solve a complicated constraint satisfaction problem: Low-level constraints of syllable counts, stresses, and the sounds at the end of the lines -- combined with higher-level semantic constraints -- the words form grammatically correct sentences that tell an interesting story.

All the examples he gives -- Shakespeare, Pope, Milton, William Carlos Williams, and some poet from the 1980's I never heard of (Ashbery).

(I'll admit Shakespeare has rhythm, but his poems don't rhyme very well. I can't even begin to analyze all the things wrong with Shakespeare and Pope and such, because their language is so old-timey that I can barely understand them.)

Calling such works "poetry" is pretentious BS, in my opinion. To me, the label of poetry needs to be earned. The poet has to pose and solve a constraint satisfaction problem.

As a reader, if you're reading poetry, it means you're getting that primal satisfying linguistic sensation when one part of your brain admires the constraint satisfaction problem and its solution, while another part of your brain appreciates the story it's telling.

Often if a bad writer writes prose, people feel free to call them out on it. If a bad writer writes poetry, people hesitate to offer harsh criticism, because they feel like criticizing poetry just makes them an uncultured Philistine.

So essentially, with good poetry, the author does a bunch of constraint satisfaction problems, and the reader's brain gets tickled in a unique way.

With bad poetry, the author just writes prose, insists the line breaks go in specific places, and says "Yeah this is poetry" because they're an arrogant jerk, and their audience just sort of goes along with it.

TLDR: "How is this poetry? It doesn't even rhyme. It's prose, and it sucks" is a perfectly sensible criticism of a huge amount of poetry. But this is regarded as a hopelessly uncultured and anti-intellectual sentiment in pretentious literary circles, which leads to its further proliferation.

Most poetry is bad. I have found in my life that the ratio is around 1/20. For every 20 poems one will be something you feel totally good. Probably a few more will have parts of the poem you admire, but lose you elsewhere.

Why are most poems bad? My personal guess is that most people use poems to convey sentiments that could best be done via another form (probably an essay or Tweet). Rupi Kaur is a fine example-- her poems have a character of just wanting to say something direct, but she ends up draping it in poetic staccato. I don't want to dismiss her too much, she's clearly a more successful poet than I am or will ever be, but in my opinion her work sort of misses the central premise of the form. Often times when I read a bad poem, I feel like the author really wanted to write an essay.

Poetry should be used to convey something that really can't be conveyed by other means. You're intending to tap into "something" that other art quite can't. When you find that 1 in 20 poem, it's because it has a sense of revelation, newness, spontaneity. It tends to trigger that sense of seeing something new. I often say "I never thought to organize words that way". John Ashberry's poems have a habit of doing that, and I think that's why he gets the praise he does. Though give me Adrienne Rich any day.

Ultimately though, as I said above, I don't care if people like poetry anymore. Not every artistic pursuit needs to make millions or have millions of fans (which, poetry does, but they're relatively quiet I guess). I also appreciate that since most poets you read are just people who pursued lives of literature, they're a bit more accessible and thus a bit more free to scrutinize. They're people like you and me, writing for each other and not with world dominating aims. Their work doesn't have "Weight". You can engage frankly with their poems, and how they do them well and how they come up short. The poems become friends.

My favorite poet of all time is Michigan based poet Carol Atkins. I believe all her books were self published? I think she is about at the ratio I describe, most of her work is just ok, but when she's sublime, she's truly sublime. It feels as if she wrote art just for me. I've carried her big hitter poems with me throughout life.

And that's the best thing about poetry versus other art-- it's carryable. You get to take it with you everywhere you go, and use it as you please. I guess you can open up your phone and google a painting, or replicate a sculpture, or hum a tune, but a poem is a piece of art you carry completely with you in its full form, as long as you remember it. You're meant to ruminate about two roads diverging in a wood, at the exact moment you realize you're in a diverging road situation. A poem is a life jacket in a way, meant to buoy you just when you need it. I'm not quite sure what other art can offer that combination of simplicity, profundity and carryability.

Finally, let me end with this: read Sharon Olds.

A Shakespearean sonnet is certainly in that category.

Modern free verse might fare better if delivered by the author on YouTube.

I really don't like the way he privileges "art poetry" over other kinds of poetry. Rupi Kaur has every bit as much a claim to being a poet as Wallace Stevens does. (And Stevens in particular, of all the poets...)

And that drives me nuts, because a lot more people might like "art poetry" if he'd stop making people feel bad about not liking it.

While I'm not a voracious reader of poetry, I've got even less time for "John Ashbery, by general consensus the greatest American poet of the late-twentieth century", of whom I've never heard. And that sample is not making me rush out to read it.

It's a model of the "Purple prose with line breaks" form of modern poetry. It's not just that it doesn't have rhyme or meter, but that the line breaks don't add any structure at all except to make it look like poetry on the page. And of all the subjects to write about, "It's hard to write poetry" is the reason nobody wants to read your poems.

Here's how you get poetry: you read the poems you like. You listen to the poets you like to listen to, whether that's slam poets or rappers or singers or commercial jingles. When those start to seem repetitive or simplistic, you go read something else, something that is interesting to compare and contrast with the stuff you already like.

Exactly the same goes for painting, and wine, and everything else that rich people used to like and therefore must be important. Now we can all have it, and if you want to share your interests in it, stop yucking their yum.