Andrey's questions about poems (split from the intro thread)

[AndreyGaganov]

Hi,

I'm a 25-year-old songwriter currently experiencing a writer's block. I turned to poetry because I've recently discovered the concept of bibliotherapy (... Yes, at 25, ... I guess that's because Nevada public education sucks.). I'm hoping that somehow by magic ('cause that's how it works here in the real world, right?) poetry could solve my problems with finding my voice and writing melodies.

To be frank, so far all poetry seems to me like self-indulgent exercises in cryptography/cryptology/whatever, a triumph of style over substance, disdain for communication, treating the meaning of the poem as something subordinate. Please, prove me wrong. I just don't see anything galvanizing about it.

Thanks in advance,

- Andrey.

now, if that isn't the best attitude to have about poetry when joining a poetry forum, i just don't know what is.

My whole point is that I've always been mystified by a natural tug people have towards something that could be easily phrased in prose. 

That's weird, because I purchased a copy of Poetry For Dummies, and it says that poetry is for everyone.

No it's not.

Oh, ... well, that's very encouraging.

=================================================================================

I can't find a place on this website where people can discuss poetry penned by respectable/famous/whatever/people-that-aren't-us figures. Is there a thread for that? I'm asking because I've come across this piece by Randall Jarrell: 

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The book I'm reading suggests there's irony in the poem. I don't see any irony whatsoever. You are young, you are sent to war, you die. The end. Where's the irony ?

[Achebe]

I can't find a place on this website where people can discuss poetry penned by respectable/famous/whatever/people-that-aren't-us figures.

try posting in the 'Poetry Discussion' forum.

[rayheinrich]

My whole point is that I've always been mystified by a natural tug people have towards something that could be easily phrased in prose.

    There are lots of reasons I like to read it. But here are three or four of them:

-- I find it esthetically pleasing to speak it out loud -- it's rhythm, it's sounds.

-- Visuals are easier and sometimes unique.

-- Prose doesn't leave as much thinking up to the reader.

-- With poetry a writer can posit complex topics with just a few words and ask questions
    that in prose are quite difficult to ask.

I can't find a place on this website where people can discuss poetry penned by respectable/famous/whatever/people-that-aren't-us figures. Is there a thread for that?

    The "Poetry Discussion" forum?

I'm asking because I've come across this piece by Randall Jarrell:

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The book I'm reading suggests there's irony in the poem. I don't see any irony whatsoever. You are young, you are sent to war, you die. The end. Where's the irony ?

    Well... not wanting to go on forever, here are two obvious ironies:
    Violence can bring about peace.  
    Killing is morally justified if it's to prevent killing.
    No matter if the premises are true or false, they're still ironic.

    P.S. The interplay of "mother" and "State" with the three dichotomies: dream/wake, life/death, war/peace
    is good for generating boat-loads of it as well.

    This poem is commonly used in classroom exercises, just Google it and you'll find every explication your heart desires.

    I have a challenge for you:
    I dislike sea urchin sushi. Convince me that I like it.
    (Hint: I'm being metaphorically ironic.)

[AndreyGaganov]

Just asking: If you are unwilling to answer any of my questions below (as annoying as this practice might seem at the moment), do you know anyone who is willing?

I find it esthetically pleasing to speak it out loud -- it's rhythm, it's sounds.

I guess that's why I listen to music instead; I cannot hear anything aesthetic in a human's speaking voice. Do you know any videos with the best/most lauded poetry recitals (with the best audial aesthetic)?

Visuals are easier and sometimes unique.

How do you find envisioning something better with poetry than a more straightforward language? Also, why can't unique visuals be applied in prose? 

Prose doesn't leave as much thinking up to the reader.

How so?

With poetry a writer can posit complex topics with just a few words and ask questions that in prose are quite difficult to ask.

Can you give an example?

I can't find a place on this website where people can discuss poetry penned by respectable/famous/whatever/people-that-aren't-us figures. Is there a thread for that?

The "Poetry Discussion" forum?

And is there an official thread for that or am I supposed to create an official thread of my own so that others can't make duplicate threads? 

I'm asking because I've come across this piece by Randall Jarrell:

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The book I'm reading suggests there's irony in the poem. I don't see any irony whatsoever. You are young, you are sent to war, you die. The end. Where's the irony ?

This poem is commonly used in classroom exercises, just Google it and you'll find every explication your heart desires.

Alright, I'll look into it. Thank you.

[Leanne]

There. Have at it.

[QDeathstar]

hi.

I think that if all you get from poetry is a triump of style over substances may I recommend working first on your reading comprehension skills, then rereading the poem.

---

In prose you sift through wasted words to get meaning, with poetry it's more immediate. The difference between cancer and a bullet to the head.

[AndreyGaganov]

^ Is that what you think of guys like novelists? Do you think they waste words?

[AndreyGaganov]

Also, before I forget: rayheinrich mentioned the sound and the rhythm, the musical aspect of reading poetry aloud. Well, as someone who's been listening to music half his life, to me singing is musical; reciting a poem with a speaking tone isn't. You never see/hear someone telling a poet: "Jesus Christ, that was a horrible voice. Let this guy/girl do the reading." or someone telling a singer "Your voice stinks, but that was a great song. Here's your fifty bucks." I think I get the 'rhythm' part, but the 'sound' part ... not really. I suppose the logic here is: anyone can read poetry, no matter how good or bad the voice is. Well, where's the music in that?

[Leanne]

I like stir fries. They are quick, nutritious and delicious. I also like slow-cooked lamb shanks. They take a long time to fully develop flavour but are nutritious and delicious.

Ultimately I get the same out of both meals. They are not the same. One is not better than the other -- they are for different moods, seasons, situations.

You can't slow-cook a stir fry. It becomes tough and unpalatable, and loses its essence of freshness. You can't stir fry a lamb shank. Sinew doesn't break down and the fat has no time to render into flavour, so it just remains an unresolved pile of chunky, stringy goo.

Novels and poems, while both written and ultimately delivering nutrition of similar value, are different. This is not a competition.

[Leanne]

Also, before I forget: rayheinrich mentioned the sound and the rhythm, the musical aspect of reading poetry aloud. Well, as someone who's been listening to music half his life, to me singing is musical; reciting a poem with a speaking tone isn't. You never see/hear someone telling a poet: "Jesus Christ, that was a horrible voice. Let this guy/girl do the reading." or someone telling a singer "Your voice stinks, but that was a great song. Here's your fifty bucks." I think I get the 'rhythm' part, but the 'sound' part ... not really. I suppose the logic here is: anyone can read poetry, no matter how good or bad the voice is. Well, where's the music in that?

Can't even begin to comment on that. If a colour-blind man sees only shades of grey, does that make the sky less blue to others?

[AndreyGaganov]

Also, before I forget: rayheinrich mentioned the sound and the rhythm, the musical aspect of reading poetry aloud. Well, as someone who's been listening to music half his life, to me singing is musical; reciting a poem with a speaking tone isn't. You never see/hear someone telling a poet: "Jesus Christ, that was a horrible voice. Let this guy/girl do the reading." or someone telling a singer "Your voice stinks, but that was a great song. Here's your fifty bucks." I think I get the 'rhythm' part, but the 'sound' part ... not really. I suppose the logic here is: anyone can read poetry, no matter how good or bad the voice is. Well, where's the music in that?

Can't even begin to comment on that.  If a colour-blind man sees only shades of grey, does that make the sky less blue to others?

Your reply has to do with a physical perception, a condition no one can do anything about (supposedly). My concern here is with the sonic/musical aspect of poetry. I really don't know how you can connect these two dots.

[QDeathstar]

^ Is that what you think of guys like novelists? Do you think they waste words?

Reading comprehension again. It's tough. I know. That is not my argument. It is yours. I said that the difference between a poem and a novel is akin to a bullet to the head or cancer. They both kill you. You said you can't get ANY meaning out of poems, eg, they are nothing but a waste of words.

[Leanne]

Also, before I forget: rayheinrich mentioned the sound and the rhythm, the musical aspect of reading poetry aloud. Well, as someone who's been listening to music half his life, to me singing is musical; reciting a poem with a speaking tone isn't. You never see/hear someone telling a poet: "Jesus Christ, that was a horrible voice. Let this guy/girl do the reading." or someone telling a singer "Your voice stinks, but that was a great song. Here's your fifty bucks." I think I get the 'rhythm' part, but the 'sound' part ... not really. I suppose the logic here is: anyone can read poetry, no matter how good or bad the voice is. Well, where's the music in that?

Can't even begin to comment on that.  If a colour-blind man sees only shades of grey, does that make the sky less blue to others?

Your reply has to do with a physical perception, a condition no one can do anything about (supposedly). My concern here is with the sonic/musical aspect of poetry. I really don't know how you can connect these two dots.

And thus you prove that due to your inability to understand metaphor, the fundamental building block of poetry, you probably should give up and go back to jingle writing or whatever is easier for you to manage.

[AndreyGaganov]

I like stir fries.  They are quick, nutritious and delicious.  I also like slow-cooked lamb shanks.  They take a long time to fully develop flavour but are nutritious and delicious.  

Ultimately I get the same out of both meals.  They are not the same.  One is not better than the other -- they are for different moods, seasons, situations.  

You can't slow-cook a stir fry.  It becomes tough and unpalatable, and loses its essence of freshness.  You can't stir fry a lamb shank.  Sinew doesn't break down and the fat has no time to render into flavour, so it just remains an unresolved pile of chunky, stringy goo.  

Novels and poems, while both written and ultimately delivering nutrition of similar value, are different.  This is not a competition.

True. (I was just making a point that someone writing prose professionally, like a novelist, cannot afford to waste words, as opposed to what Pdeathstar suggested.) This is why I make (I guess almost) every effort to fully fathom the allure of poetry. 

I read that historically, devices such as pause, rhyming, and rhythm were used for better memorization of a poem when passing it from generation to generation. I got that part. But then you have Randall Jarrell writing "The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner" and making your work on a poem (god knows for what reason) instead of enjoying it (as others suggest you, the reader, are supposed to), when he could have just made his point about violence in prose. Doesn't matter how many words he uses as long as the thought is original and profound and he is not being redundant.

[RiverNotch]

Also, before I forget: rayheinrich mentioned the sound and the rhythm, the musical aspect of reading poetry aloud. Well, as someone who's been listening to music half his life, to me singing is musical; reciting a poem with a speaking tone isn't. You never see/hear someone telling a poet: "Jesus Christ, that was a horrible voice. Let this guy/girl do the reading." or someone telling a singer "Your voice stinks, but that was a great song. Here's your fifty bucks." I think I get the 'rhythm' part, but the 'sound' part ... not really. I suppose the logic here is: anyone can read poetry, no matter how good or bad the voice is. Well, where's the music in that?

If you don't find any music and sound in poetry, then yes, poetry is not for you. Fortunately, unlike in music, poetical tone-deafness has a cure: study.

Rhythm seems obvious focusing on typical prosody, but then there are other rhythms, too -- stress timed meter, for example, where you COUNT all the PUNCHy TERMS the AUthor USes, or syllabic meter, where you count the syllables. Getting used to those (I suggest starting with stress timed, since that's classic to English -- see Beowulf), you'll eventually learn how simply extending or shortening either can have certain, universal effects (see all the free verse shite of, well, I'll start with TS Eliot, actually) -- just like how Bob Dylan's songs get the point across better than most pop drivel nowadays, with the number of words he packs per line (I think he was inspired by Ginsberg).

Then sound. Music has the "advantage" of melody, tone, etc., and in fact, most of the oldest lyric (perhaps even epic) poetry were meant to be sung. Eventually, though, people learned how juicy rhyme, alliteration, assonance, etc. was -- and then the more abstract, at least to the layman, forms of sounding, the ways the words "slip off the tongue" and so, slant-rhymes and shit (my favorite examples for this are Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), etc, etc. Thus, sound. Again, good to start with the old ones -- get a solid translation of, say, Beowulf, and start rifing through it, reading it aloud (in fact, emphasis and emotion really don't matter when reading poetry aloud, if the poem's any good, as long as the pronunciation of the reader follows how the word is typically pronounced -- which, even with the separation of accents, is universal, unless dictionaries really are that useless), then moving on to the classics, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton and the Romantics and the Modernists and the postmodernists and you get the picture. By solid translation, I mean not the prose ones, duh -- I actually like the Gummere version, although its wordings are super old, but I suppose Heaneywulf could work, too.

---

Although to say that poetry to you seems like self-indulgent white tower bullshit in a forum that's explicitly all about poetry is like shouting "but this makes 0 sense" in a church/evolutionary scientists convention.

[Lizzie]

I find it difficult to believe that there's no poetry by anyone anywhere that you'd gravitate toward. Authors are so diverse. Personally, I had to get away from reading the classics, as weird as that sounds. I actually like the poetry of my generation (I'm 36 everybody! Now you know! As if anyone cares ), and I would recommend checking out some contemporary volumes from the library -- books of emerging poets and young poets.

I also find it incredible that you don't think that there's a musicality to poetry. Music is my primary form of artistic expression (I'm a pianist, as is my mother). I just read "The Raven" the other night by Edgar Allen Poe, and I read it through several times just to feel the pressure of the beats.

[RiverNotch]

Also, a moment of insight: Sylvia Plath (yeah, Leanne, I love Plath -- but I really wish I had a copy of any of Ted Hughes' books, especially Tales from Ovid) once noted how she was jealous of the novelist, envying the fact that the novelist can take literally the entirety of a moment, the moment spanning up to a century, and the entirety precluding every single detail and every single action and every single word, and use it for her piece -- whereas, by corollary, the poet can only take "about a minute". But, if your mind isn't so limited to your earlier stated opinion that poetry is a self-indulgent exercise in cryptology (and really, a lot of the better translations of the epics read practically like novels -- or even skipping the translations like say The Ballad of the White Horse, or the Idylls of the King, which I in my perennial laziness have yet to read), then you're bound to have read at least one poem that shot through your heart in less than ten minutes -- unlike a novel, or a short story, which obviously have to be so long, or if they're not much longer than a poem, have to be so detailed, taking you through the logic of things rather than getting straight to the "aha!". And back to Plath: she envied the novelist not because she was a poet that disliked her medium (I think she disliked pretty much everything), but because the ideas she had at that moment were best encapsulated by the novel. Later, she made The Bell Jar. And even later, she made Ariel and Other Poems. Both are equally cherished.

[just mercedes]

I like stir fries.  They are quick, nutritious and delicious.  I also like slow-cooked lamb shanks.  They take a long time to fully develop flavour but are nutritious and delicious.  

Ultimately I get the same out of both meals.  They are not the same.  One is not better than the other -- they are for different moods, seasons, situations.  

You can't slow-cook a stir fry.  It becomes tough and unpalatable, and loses its essence of freshness.  You can't stir fry a lamb shank.  Sinew doesn't break down and the fat has no time to render into flavour, so it just remains an unresolved pile of chunky, stringy goo.  

Novels and poems, while both written and ultimately delivering nutrition of similar value, are different.  This is not a competition.

What does a metaphor look like, to the metablind?

[Lizzie]

"Lady Lazarus" is my favorite poem, so ha! I love sad, self-indulgent, angry poetry. I own it.

River: you're right to bring up Ginsberg for musicality. Absolutely. I tried to commit "Howl" to memory once -- what was I thinking!

[AndreyGaganov]

^ Is that what you think of guys like novelists? Do you think they waste words?

I said that the difference between a poem and a novel is akin to a bullet to the head or cancer. They both kill you.

You've said more than that. You said: "In prose you sift through wasted words to get meaning, ... ." Hence the point I've made about novelists.

You said you can't get ANY meaning out of poems, eg, they are nothing but a waste of words.

These are not the words I used, nor do they precisely convey what I meant. What I had in mind was the perceived need to obscure the meaning of the poem. This does sound like an irrational stance, true (I should have thought it through the first time I posted on this forum). However, my main concern remains to be: why metaphors?

It's not so much a reading comprehension problem as it is my problem with what is at the foundation of poetry. My argument is this: why does a poet feel the need to use metaphors when we already have prose? Why contrive a confusing piece of literature and make the reader work hard on its meaning when it is only supposed to convey an idea? What practical  advantage do metaphors have over simple terms?