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.