Why Is Poetry Important? Part Two

Experiments

Creativity is often used as a basis for the justification of art. I don't particularly prescribe to any notion of creativity, since I think it often stems from knowledge. Knowledge is hard to acquire and it takes patience and reflection to actually learn something. The process where we understand new stuff is limited to our experiences and knowledge is used here as a catch-all phrase that is the sum of all our experiences. Poetry exists inside a framework that is pretty well-established and that framework is a useful tool to create a basis for understanding the world, but by recklessly accepting tradition we are also accepting our current understanding of the world as a truth.

Poetry is, by its very nature, experimental, for it seeks to provoke thought and it creates this effect through a variety of means. Recently, I have re-read some of Edgar Allan Poe's poems and I am inclined to see a provocative and sarcastic tone that permeates all of the macabre and perverted narratives in the poems. I find no evidence that his poems are satirical but at the same time Poe is mocking the "stupid commoner" who is searching for a scheme to become a successful writer in his "How to Write a Blackwood Article" that is still funny reading in this day and age. The experiment in poetry is not necessarily to be found in structure and style, although these are a quite sophisticated manner of showing the skill of the poet, but also in the subject matter and, for me, it must be a goal to actually have something to say. In this regard, I find Poe rather lacking, since most of his poems are too deliberately "showy" and seek to be provocative by going for something that polite society would frown upon, while also sating that need for base grotesquerie that taboos, such as, necrophilia, death and incest had become in the mid-19th century. In other words, he is far too vulgar, but this vulgarity is also a huge part of his appeal, since it seems that there is nothing that he won't do for money, even writing "base" literature.

In more modern times and with the victory of free verse over metric poetry, I believe that the process of distinguishing good poetry from bad poetry is a lot easier than earlier. Accentual-syllabic poetry has some qualities to it that I find intriguing but, at some point, we're just rehashing old ideas. I believe that the work of the modernists and the post-modern branches of poetry are creating a fascinating and original way of engaging the reader. I just think that a thorough understanding of what these forms of poetry are rebelling against is very important.

So, when I write experiments are vital to poetry, I do so with a conservative approach that I hope to lose somewhere in the process of becoming older and, hopefully, wiser.

If you're looking for a reading suggestion with experimental poetry, just visit a local poetry slam event. These things are wildly popular and for a good reason. It's poetry without all of the elitist and stuck-up opinions of online bloggers. Another personal favourite of mine has got to be Caroline Bergvall and how she treats language in a very musical manner, yet refuses to be constrained by something as trivial as rhyme and metre.

Anne Bradstreet, the American Puritans and their Poetry

Abandon all Hope, ye Sinners.

Never before have I read Anne Bradstreet or the other American Puritans, aside from a few quickly forgotten poems at some point in my education. I've never been interested in any of the poetry by these people and it probably comes down to a few simple facts:

1. I don't believe in a god.
2. I don't like the unadorned.
3. I don't like the manner in which she is attributed with being the first American poet that was published. 
4. The following meme didn't really make me believe that she was praised for her intricate and finely crafted metrical lines. It isn't even divided into the lines of the quatrain that they are taken from (JEEBUS CHRISSY!!!). At least, the "author" kept the capitalization at the start of the lines.

But I'm doing a class on American Poetry and we started the course by looking at several Puritan poems. For some strange reason, I began scanning the poem that we were dealing with (which was "To My Dear and Loving Husband") and it all started to make a bit more sense, than I had ever allowed Puritan poetry to give me.

For those of you who don't know where to find it, I'll present a version of it below:

To My Dear and Loving Husband

If ever two were one, then surely we. 

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; 

If ever wife was happy in a man, 

Compare with me ye women if you can. 

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold, 

Or all the riches that the East doth hold. 

My love is such that rivers cannot quench, 

Nor ought but love from thee give recompense. 

Thy love is such I can no way repay; 

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. 

Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,

That when we live no more we may live ever.

 The style of the poem is quite unique for a 17th century poem. I'm not talking about the meter although the poem starts with a perfect iambic pentameter. It's rather the manner in which love is described. "Compare with me ye women if you can" is a pretty dramatic stance that is taken by the speaker and the clarity that it presents to me is quite telling as to how I read poetry. Most likely, she is saying that she wants every other woman in the world to compare their love to hers. The line is metrically quite undramatic though, so any thoughts that could lead my interest to the line is thrown away, as it is once again in nice iambic pentameter.

Just below that line, however, we find a major shift in the poem. "I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold," resonates as a wonderful line in a prosodic manner and the spondee in the fourth foot (whole mines) is shown as being extraordinary because of the prosodic pattern of the poem. Bradstreet is highlighting the value of her husband's love simply through mixing up the metrics and, for some strange reason (surprise!!!), the words also make sense in discussing this metaphor. The alliteration in more and mines also give a sense of the importance that can be found in the line. It's exactly this type of discovery in the framework of a poem that makes me like it, even though it might be quite simple in its message. The care taken to place these little nuggets of tradition, makes me feel like a detective and the investigation is filled with thrills.

I would most likely divide the poem into three quatrains and the reason for this arbitrary editing would be that the tone and register of the speaker shifts. The first four lines are mentioning love between man and wife. The next four lines speak of the value of that love. The final four lines are a praise to God and a hope that the speaker and her husband are united again when their lives end.

The poem is quite simple, but the imagery is striking and compelling. It certainly doesn't feel like it's 350 years old, except for the ancient pronunciation of "persever" which is /pɜ:ˈsevɚ/ in IPA. Notice that the stress is on the second syllable. The same pronunciation can be found in Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well, where the widow says the following in 3.7.37: "Instruct my daughter how she shall persever,". The line is found in section of  blank verse and lends credence to the interpretation that persever and ever rhyme in Bradstreet's poem.

I actually wanted to say something about the other puritans, but I'm not really in the mood for looking at the poems right now and, most likely, Anne Bradstreet is a good representation of what they actually did produce, when it was quite good poetry.

Why Is Poetry Important? Part One

The question that is posed above is probably one the most self-fulfilling questions that I have ever asked. It presumes that poetry is important and that we should actually spend some time reading it. I have an interest in poetry and because of that it becomes important to me. That's not a real answer to the question though and I won't convince anyone that poetry is sooo important, just because I like it.

In my latest update, I talked about why I even bother writing this blog and I want to stress that I'm not a poet. I enjoy poetry and writing, but the closest I've yet come to actually doing something with it has been reviewing concerts. Like many other people, I have written some horrible poems in my past and some have been downright awful, even though I appreciated them very much, as they were needed to express my emotions in one way or the other at the time. I also play the guitar and at some point, songwriting seemed like a particularly brilliant idea, since I could play music and create stuff on my own. It wasn't all that successful and I'm much better at playing other people's songs and stripping them down to something that I enjoy.

Here's a little song I wrote to my wife after I got back from Afghanistan (beware, it's in Danish):

I'm the guy on the left hidden by the microphone for the entire song.

I'd like to give you all a long list of how many ways, I didn't understand anything about poetics and that it was some sort of ignorance that drove me to abuse a long-established tradition, but I don't regret any of the decisions that I made with this foray into the world of lyricism.

The ability to fail is one of the best aspects of being human and if we don't learn from any of these mistakes, we won't get any meaningful experiences out of life.

1. Poetry should be about experimenting.
2. Poetry should attempt to capture what it feels like to be human
3. Poetry should deal with these emotions in a manner that can be understood by other people.

This is an incomplete manifesto of poetic notions and I will likely disagree with some of the elements later in life, but right now these three points seem to be what I think of as most important in poetry.