What is poetry?

[Agent327]

As to poetry being in need of rhyme and meter: actually, certain poets do not use rhyme at all (like in Beowulf), while others ignore meter. I'd say, however, that meter is more important, although it very much depends on the poem - and the poet. Personally, I can appreciate the use of rhyme if it doesn't interfere with 'the message'; I don't care much for rhyme for rhyme's sake.

Here's another example of Akhmatova:


The Muse

When at night I await her coming,
it seems that life hangs by a strand.
What is fame, what is youth, what is freedom,
compared to that dear guest with rustic pipe in hand.

And she entered. Drawing aside her shawl
she gazed attentively at me.
I said to her: "Was is you who dictated to Dante
the pages of The Inferno?" She replied: "It was I."

1924

Very simple, yet very powerful: with just two verses Akhmatova sets a very vivid scene of the poet and poetry in general - one might even call it a vision. She has no need for grandiose words or a long story - which is not to say is not capable of it.

As for the translation: the only odd thing about it is that 'rustic pipe'. (The translation is again by Judith Hemschemeyer; I only corrected the third line.) In another translation I found a flute (a medieval one, with a double reed for which I don't know the English equialent). The only other attribute would be a lyre, which is also used by Apollo. But the Muse is addressed as she and not named, much like in the opening verse of the Iliad: "O Muse, tell of Achilles' anger..."

 

[Harbringer]

I think we just totally disagree on what good poetry is man

 

[Agent327]

Instead of , why not post some more of your own favourites? As to what constitutes good poetry, opinions on that have differed through the ages; I see no problem with that. But to name one ingredient I reckon to be essential: quality - which I rate higher than quantity; other than that I reckon it will always be a matter of taste what individuals like in poetry. There's traditional or conventional poetry and those who oppose it, ignore it or exist on the fringes. But apart from personal taste I'd like to present a cross-section of poetry in world literature, not just well-known poems and poets, but lesser ones as well; so any contribution is welcome.

PS: Ofcourse my personal taste will be in here; I cannot - nor would I want to - hide it.

 

[Agent327]

I thought it might be time for one of poetry's 'bad boys':


Venus Anadyomène

Comme d'un cercueil vert en fer-blanc, une tête
de femme à chevaux bruns, fortement pommadés,
d'une vieille baignoire émerge, lente et bête,
avec des déficits assez mal ravaudés,

puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplates
qui saillent, le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort.
Puis les rondeurs des reins semblent prendre l'essor.
La graisse sous la peau paraît en feuilles plates,

l'échine est un peu rouge; et la tout sent un goût
horriblement étrangement. On remarque surtout
des singularités, qu'il faut voir à la loupe.

Les reins portent deux mots gravées: Clara Venus.
- Et tout ce corps remue et tend sa large croupe,
belle, hideusement, d'un ulcère à l'anus.

Arthur Rimbaud

Venus Anadyomène

As from a coffin of green lead, the head
of a brunette, heavily pomaded,
emerges from an old tub, slow and stupid,
with imperfections rather badly patched,

then the neck, fat and gray, the broad shoulderblades
leap forward, the short back curving in and out.
Then the round hips seem to take flight,
the fat beneath the skin shines like flat plates,

the spine is somewhat red, and the whole seems of a taste
horribly strange. One notices especially singularities,
to be inspected at close range.

Two words are engraved on the hips: Clara Venus.
- And the whole of this body bends and stretches the large ass,
beautiful, hideously, from an ulcer on the anus.


Arthur Rimbaud, labelled poet, décadent and anarchist, though coffee and arms dealer might also apply, as he published all of his poems between 1870 and 1874, after which he renounced the trade and finally ended up in Ethiopia with the last of his mistresses, before dying of cancer at the age of 37 in a Marseilles hospital. In between he also had had an affair with Verlaine - who promoted him in Paris literary circles, incidentally causing a scandal. (Both of them were prone to the use of absinth and hashish as well.)

The poem quoted is strange, both in its title, which is a hybrid between Venus and Aphrodite anadyomène, 'borne of the sea' - or rather the foam of the waves, representing Zeus' seed (the supreme god being quite promiscuous himself )-, as in its content, the subject being both ancient and modern, and the treatment quite unconventional, even if the form is a classical sonnet. One might say that Rimbaud liked taking things to extremes, literally and figuratively speaking.

A note on the translation: croupe, in the laste verse, literally means hindquarters (or crotch) and I thought that plates, in the second quatrain, might possibly be better replaced with leaves.

 

[Brighteye]

Fifty is playing with you JEELEN. I don't like to assume, but I'm tempted to claim that he's neither offended by Perfection's post nor desperately keen on continuing the thread. You will see in many other threads that they claim to be best of friends and partners in spam/trolling.

 

[Fifty]

Sorry brighteye but you're wrong. However, after a nice PM exchange with Jeelen and Perfection, I'm willing to return to this great thread. I'll try to find a nice poem in between classes later!

 

[Agent327]

Glad to hear it. (BTW, is that Kramer in your avatar?)

 

[Sashie VII]

Much of the finer points of poetry is lost on me, unfortunately, but I enjoy it. Something I came up with:


In the end

It matters not

For while we have lived

It is but a dream

that fades

When we are gone

So live well, and truly

That your time in this world

means something

If only to a few

 

[Agent327]

Nice try. Sometimes the true meaning of a poem only becomes clear after re-reading, perhaps even years later. I remember putting Rimbaud's Le forgeron on my list for the high school oral French exam. Didn't get any questions asked about it, luckily, as at the time it was somewhat lost on me. (Did get a question on existentialism though, as I also had Sartre's Le mur on that list. Although I found it a good story, I coudn't explain in French what existentialism actually is...) Anyway, at the moment I'm working on another Rimbaud translation.

 

[Agent327]

I haven't finished that second Rimbaud translation (yet), so for now I'm posting this instead - it is deep, not because of style (which uses the classic sonnet form) or treatment (which is superficially lighthearted), but because of the subject:


I thought once how Theocritus had sung
of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years,
who each one in a gracious hand appears
to bear a gift for mortals, old or young:

and, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
the sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
those of my own life, who by turns had flung

a shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware,
so weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;

and a voice said in mastery, while I strove, . . .
'Guess now who holds thee?' - 'Death.' I said. But, there,
the silver answer rang, . . . 'Not Death, but Love.'

Elizabeth Barret Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese

compare this to Nietzsches Drunken song below: the subject (desire, love) is virtually the same and certainly linked; but while Nietzsche gets stuck in a melancholy mood ("all desire wants eternity..."), Barret Browning mentions - in a seemingly playful manner -the connection between love and death.

The title of 'Sonnets from the Portuguese', which contain some rather private poems from her to Robert Browning, aren't translated from the Portuguese; 'the Portuguese' was a nickname Browning used for her, based on another of her poems, Catarina to Camoens.

Next up I will answer some of the poetic criticisms - which again goes to What is poetry?

 

[Harbringer]

What is poetry? Take a thought, arrange it in a way that is not considered prose, and therefor it becomes poetry. For instance:

Take a Thought

Arrange it,

In a way,
That is

not

considered prose,
and therefor it becomes,




poetry

its a rough definition, but an accurate one as far as I can tell. You can honestly take any story with creative language and rearrange it in a way that doesn't look like a creative story and it becomes a poem. I realize a definition cannot be a "not"(or can it?) but I'll come up with something more solid later.

 

[Dachs]

So basically, you said that whatever isn't prose is poetry. Mind-blasting. I thought the dichotomy was prose/verse, not prose/poetry.

JEELEN: yes, that is, in fact, a portrait of Kramer, executed in one of the Seinfeld episodes.

 

[Harbringer]

So basically, you said that whatever isn't prose is poetry. Mind-blasting. I thought the dichotomy was prose/verse, not prose/poetry.

JEELEN: yes, that is, in fact, a portrait of Kramer, executed in one of the Seinfeld episodes.

Hey I even said in my own post that it wasn't solid yet. But you cant deny its pretty much true?

Okay, how about, "any assortment of thoughts written without metrical structure". I mean, I cant think of a way to put it that's not, "prose written funny" because its true. Prose is just an expression of thoughts, and poetry is just that as well, so the only difference being in how you write them down. You can say prose with feeling and meter and what not but it would be indistinguishable from a poem.

 

[Dachs]

Hey I even said in my own post that it wasn't solid yet. But you cant deny its pretty much true?

What about songs? Do they get the (possibly copout) definition of 'prose poem'?

 

[Harbringer]

What about songs? Do they get the (possibly copout) definition of 'prose poem'?

They're only songs because there sung, if you write lyrics out, its a poem. If you say it in a typical manner that you would a normal structured out metered paragraph then it would just be a paragraph, a grammatically incorrect paragraph, but a paragraph nonetheless.

 

[Dachs]

They're only songs because there sung, if you write lyrics out, its a poem. If you say it in a typical manner that you would a normal structured out metered paragraph then it would just be a paragraph, a grammatically incorrect paragraph, but a paragraph nonetheless.

So what about speeches?

 

[Harbringer]

So what about speeches?

They have the distinction for a reason. If you put music to a speech then its a song. The speech on paper is a poem, wouldn't you say "I have a dream" is quite poetic?Honestly I just started off making this crap up, but it actually seems to kinda work......

 

[Agent327]

Interesting. Actually, the I have a dream speech, while being rhetoric by nature, indeed uses poetic images and, like the recent Yes we can acceptance speech, repeats the subject (or rather the motto) several times along the way.

Poetry isn't 'emo-prose' though, as on a very basic level everything written (or spoken) is, explicitly or implicitly, an expression of one or more emotions - something which moves us to write down or speak out.

In this example:


On the poetry-haters

By whom, against rhyme or reason,
poetry is offended?
By asses among common
and Midas' nephews among great ones.

(Anonymous)

the emotion is being offended, whereas here the emotion is clear:


Fear

High as a man the reed.
Does he hear the fish jumping?
Does he suspect water?
The pursuers are closing in.
There is no bridge.

E. Hoornik


And ofcourse the epic Iliad starts out with 'O Muse, tell of the anger of Achilles...'

But this is nothing special. While emotions may be more subtly layered in a piece of prose (be it a novel, a story, a speech or a news item), it is always there. The difference is in the way the subject matter is treated, both as concerns style and convention, in short it is the form in which it is presented that makes the difference.

The sentence "Take a thought, arrange it in a way that is not considered prose, and therefor it becomes poetry." arranged as follows:

"Take a Thought

Arrange it,

In a way,
That is

not

considered prose,
and therefor it becomes,




poetry"

would indeed be poetic - if we ignore the missing es in the redundant 'therefor' and the equally redundant comma at the end for a moment.

(Examples taken from anthologies of Dutch poetry, translated by me.)

 

[Harbringer]

But JELEEN that's how it was supposed to be, you are changing the fabric and meaning of my poem and what I'm trying to express by applying your arbitrary English grammar rules to its structure. Instead of looking at the poem as a series of words that convey a meaning through interpretation, think of it as one big object with one singular meaning, if you will, it is not words, but the entire thing is a single letter, with its own meaning in its structure.

 

[Jus ad bellum]

Poetry is purely subjective in my opinion.