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

[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.