Part IV
In this part . . .
This wouldn’t be a For Dummies book without The Part of Tens. Here we tackle some of the misconceptions and myths that somehow have gotten stuck to poetry. Some are half-true, some are true only sometimes, and some are just plain bunk. We also suggest ten wonderful poems that will give you excellent practice in memorization, reading aloud, and interpretation, and ten love poems with which to woo your sweetheart.
If you have only a little time, but you want to fill it with all things poetic, you’ve come to the right part.
Chapter 14
In This Chapter
Separating poetry fact from fiction
Approaching the world of poetry with as little prejudice as possible
The following ideas sometimes get in the way of people’s enjoyment of poetry. Some of the ideas are just bunk, and others have a little truth in them. All, however, are myths.
Poetry Is Only for Intellectuals and Academics
True, sometimes scholars and academics have made it seem that poetry is their province and theirs alone. But colleges and universities are home to some excellent programs in reading and writing poetry. Thousands of interested writers flock to these programs, and many of them have had fine careers as readers and writers of poetry.
On the other hand, that’s not everything. If a poem works for you, it works — and whether you or the poet went to college is, well, maybe nice to know, but it usually doesn’t matter much.
Whenever a revolution in thought or culture happens, poets are usually the first to see it coming — and many people write about it, from all points of view and walks of life.
Not convinced? Here’s a brief list of good poets who, as far as anyone knows, never earned a degree at a university: Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Basho, Dante, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walt Whitman, John Keats, Charles Baudelaire, W.B. Yeats, Jorge Luis Borges, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou. Not a bad list at all. Next time anyone says, “Poetry is for eggheads,” you can immediately exclaim, “Well, what about these people?”
Poetry is not just for any one group. It’s for you, no matter who you are or what your background.
Poetry Is . . . Well, Hard
Some poetry is difficult. Some of it takes patience and practice to appreciate. (So do snowboarding, computer science, French cooking, and almost anything else worth doing.) But most poetry is actually quite accessible, when you get into the habit of reading it.
Some poetry is authentically hard, and you’re better off approaching it with a professional guide, like a teacher or an experienced reader. And some poems don’t really have a meaning in the traditional sense. Some poets simply create a collection of words and sentences, not consciously trying to make it mean anything. They present this work to you, the reader, and you then become a collaborator in discovering what’s happening in the poem.
Even the most difficult poems, if you dwell with them a while, tend to open up their riches generously. Most poetry, however, can be read and enjoyed with immediacy.
Now writing poetry — that takes work, practice, and devotion. Some poems just drop — plunk! — into your mind, as “Kubla Khan” evidently did into the mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Other poems take years to write, as Paradise Lost took John Milton, or “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” took William Carlos Williams. William Butler Yeats, certainly a hard worker, once complained of writing poetry that “nothing should be this hard.” (His poem “Adam’s Curse” is partly about how beautiful poetry is — and how hard to write!) Those who give writing poetry their best efforts have great satisfactions in store. Again, writing poetry is like any other skill: You get better the more you practice.
You Can’t Make Any Money Writing Poetry
Okay, so you’re probably not in it for the money. At least we hope you’re not. Although few poets get rich on the sales of their books of poetry, some do. An extraordinary example is 8-year-old poet Sahara Sunday Spain, whose manuscript of poems landed her a five-figure deal with a major publisher (with the help of an agent).
Many of the big awards and prizes in literature come with some nice prize money. Cash prizes vary: The National Book Award currently awards its winners $10,000, as does the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. The average Guggenheim Fellowship Grants will set you ahead $33,800. MacArthur Fellowships not only give poets a lot of clout but also bring them a cool half million dollars (dispersed in five payments).
Most poetry contests you see in magazines offer the winner(s) smaller cash prizes along with publication. (You usually have to pay a fee, however, to enter such contests.) Even small sums of money are rewarding; you can say you are a paid writer, too.
Poetry slams and some open mikes almost always guarantee that one or more poets go home with cash in hand. (Again, there may be entrance fees — either to get in to the venue or to perform your poems.) Some regular slam winners do quite well, performing once or twice a week at different venues and bringing in hundreds of dollars a month in prize money.
Don’t quit your day job to write poetry, though: Because there are only a small number of prizes out there compared to the number of people writing poetry, it follows that only a small percentage of poets make money writing poems.
No Poetry More Than 20 Minutes Old Can Possibly Have Anything to Say Today
We’ll meet you halfway on this one. Older poetry in English can seem somewhat distant. It takes somewhat more effort to understand. Most of that work, however, is in getting used to slight differences in vocabulary and grammar. And very often, no work is necessary.
Read the following anonymous lines:
Western wind, when will thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.
A couple of slight differences in spelling, but other than that, any problems? No? You just understood a poem from the Middle Ages.
Older poetry may demand that you sometimes uncover facts about history, biography, and mythology. (So can many new poems, too.) Luckily, ancient poetry exists in some very fine translations, and the translators take care of you. How about this one?:
So soon. Today, love, we
part. And our re-
union — when
will that time come?
A bright lamp
shines on an empty place,
in sorrow and longing:
not yet, not yet, not
yet.
That’s Jeanne Larsen’s rendering of a poem attributed to the Chinese courtesan Tzu Yeh, said to have been written between A.D. 350 and 500.
Maybe human nature hasn’t changed and maybe it has. But poems from 50, 500, and 5,000 years ago may still touch you today. The point is not to resist older poetry just because it’s old. You may as well be prejudiced against the sun!
Poetry Is for Soft, Sensitive, Emotional Types
The stereotype of the poet — and the person who likes poetry — is of a weakling. Although you can find poets and poetry-lovers who aren’t exactly linebackers, such a stereotype, like most, is unfair — and inaccurate. After Hamlet mistakenly kills a courtier, he decides to drag the body offstage. As he does, he lisps the following soft, sensitive, emotional line of poetry:
I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room.
Poetry. No doubt about it. It’s vivid and ugly — and much poetry is, because poetry often addresses the ugly side of life.
Poets are sensitive, all right — almost all poetry seeks to make readers more alive to the world. And we’ll agree with emotional as well, because writing and reading poetry inevitably involve our strongest passions. But soft? Only sometimes, when soft is exactly right, like this passage from “Upon Julia’s Clothes” by Robert Herrick:
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes.
Otherwise, poetry is a vigorous challenge to the mind and body.
Rhyme Is So Ten Minutes Ago
Incorrect! As of the 21st century, rhyme is used in more ways than it ever has been used before. Far from abandoning rhyme, the last 150 years of poetry has celebrated it. Poets such as Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, Theodore Roethke, and Dylan Thomas found new resources for rhyme.
Today’s poets use traditional end-of-the-lines rhyme, as well as a wide array of rhyming techniques, including inside lines and rhymes from within one line to another. You will find all sorts of chimes, echoes, and reflections in the work of contemporary poets and songwriters, including in the lyrics of rap artists like Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre.
If you listen with your imagination, these imaginative writers will keep enlarging the world of rhyme for your ears.
There’s No “Right” Way to Read a Poem
Sure, you can interpret a poem any way you want if all you want to do is read for yourself. But if you want to share your ideas with other people, you need to practice the art of interpretation — that is, make wise speculations about what the poem you’re reading is trying to accomplish.
Here are two things to keep in mind about interpreting poetry:
Most poems have better and worse readings. The statement “Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is all about the Internet” is silly, impossible, and wrong. (Sure, you could have a production in which Hamlet takes place in cyberspace, and it’s been done, but to claim that Shakespeare meant for the play to be about the Internet is a bit of a stretch.) The statement “Hamlet is about indecision and the terrible toll it sometimes takes” has a much better chance of hitting the bull’s-eye.
People get better at feeling their way through poetry the more they do it. Anything that requires feeling and awareness to do well — from interior decoration to swing dancing — requires a lot of patience and practice, because there’s a lot in there no one can teach you. It’s like Aristotle once wrote: “For some things, the only way to learn is to do.”
Interpretation can actually help you improve both as a reader and as a writer. Interpretation is the art of educated, careful speculation about what’s happening in the poem — not so much right or wrong, but more or less persuasive. Practicing interpretation helps you become more and more alert to the intricacies of poems.
Writing Poetry Is Essentially a Solitary Act
True, people tend to think of poetry as being the product of a single, inspired individual, passionately pouring out her soul at the behest of a fiery muse. And many wonderful poems appear to have been written in that way. But keep this in mind, too: Throughout all of history, the creation of a great deal of poetry has involved more than one person. That’s right: Often, poetry is a collaborative affair.
Much ancient poetry — including the epic poems of the Sumerians, the Greek epic The Odyssey, the Mahabharata of the Aryans, and the Psalms — may be collections that more or less came together over the centuries until some literate person had the bright idea of writing them all down. Thus, they are collaborations.
In modern day, you can find many famous examples of teamwork in the verbal art. Surrealist poets tried to get away from the controlling conscious mind, so they composed poetry by means of elaborate party games that ensured that every player — but no one dominant player — had a hand in the production.
Perhaps the most famous such game became known as the “Exquisite Corpse,” named after this line, generated during such a game: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” Here are the rules:
1. Gather a group of people.
Three or more is preferred.
2. Give each person a piece of paper and a pencil.
3. Decide on a sentence structure.
The structure article/adjective/noun/verb/adjective/noun resulted in the example that gave this game its name.
4. In the first round, each person writes a word fitting the outlined sentence structure.
If you want to create new possibilities, ignore the prescribed structure.
5. Fold the paper over to conceal the written word and pass it to the next person.
6. The next person writes a word, conceals it, and passes the paper to the next person.
7. When a round of sentences have been completed, open the paper and read the poetry thus created.
So if the prescribed pattern was
The [adjective] [noun denoting a concrete thing] of [abstract noun]
Never [verb] a [concrete noun] until the [new noun] is [adjective]
you may get
The sarcastic tractor of despair
Never diagnoses a sunrise until the prison is ransacked
Poets today are working with one another, and with artists in painting, music, dance, and other arts, to extend the boundaries of what usually counts as poetry. Performance poetry, as in poetry readings and poetry slams, often includes the audience in the composition or creation of a poem. Whenever an audience is asked to recite a refrain, its members are helping to create the poem of the moment.
Poetry Is So Literary
When people say that poetry is “literary,” they may mean that poetry involves a world of writing and reading, and that this world is sort of unto itself, hermetically sealed, with thousands of people reading silently to themselves. This myth has a germ of truth in it: Sure, the last 5,000 years have left us a great deal of written poetry, and some of it has gotten famous and become literature. And there’s nothing wrong with that — nothing to be afraid of, certainly.
But poetry was oral millennia before it was written down, and much of it is still oral today: work songs, schoolyard songs, rap songs, the tales of itinerant bards. Yes, poetry is something the “literate” and the “educated” do — and something anyone can enjoy. So not all poetry is literary, especially lately.
Poetry also has always been something you see, feel, and hear, not just something you read as a written thing. It’s often extemporaneous (done on the spur of the moment) and instantaneous. Think of the Beat poets, who improvised to the sound of jazz. That’s not what most people mean when they say the word literature. The last 20 years of the 20th century saw a great deal of performance poetry, in hit recordings, in coffee shops from here to Bombay and back, and in poetry readings. Much of this poetry is improvised, brand-new, on-the-spot, once-and-never-again-quite-this-way. So poetry is not just a printed world. Poetry is a world about the world, and it takes all sorts of forms. It’s what’s spoken or sung as well as what is written or read. And no matter the form it’s in, it’s not just the letter — it’s the spirit.
Anything You Want to Write Is Poetry
We like writing. Writing is good for you. But the idea that “if I write it, it must be poetry” is a trifle too easy.
Your signature on an everyday bank deposit slip is not going to be poetry — unless you can find some way to invigorate, energize, and renovate that mundane setting and make your readers experience the signature in a new way. (If you ever do all that, let us know.) Most of the time, however, all you’re doing is signing the slip. Same with laundry lists, notes for a class, or other writings. All are forms of thinking, and some may be forms of feeling or expression or even exploration.
But to become poetry, you have to make something new happen somehow. Something has to happen in the language, or the presentation, or the form of the piece of writing, to give your readers some new awareness or emotional experience. That’s your job as a poet, and it takes work — and patience. We firmly believe in getting great, surprising, startling, new ideas out of the blue. (Some people call it inspiration.) But we also firmly believe in this: It’s the work that makes the art. We’re not saying anything against spontaneity. Spontaneity is important, maybe even crucial. Many poets believe in the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s notion of “first thought, best thought.” And that philosophy certainly has led to some memorable poetry.
Think of the improvisational genius of a jazz soloist. The soloist improves through practice; he becomes more expert at his instrument, better at “finding the pocket” with a group of other expert players, better at thinking and feeling a way toward something new. He becomes expert at the process of improvisation.
Dizzy Gillespie, one of the great jazz improvisers, once said that to be great at jazz, the first requisite is “absolute mastery of the instrument” — and that goes for the “instrument” of writing, too.
Good poets of all kinds fill up journals with their observations and impressions. They know, however, that those things are just the very raw material, as different from poetry as a dozen eggs are from an omelet. So if you want to write poetry, don’t cheat yourself out of the chance to explore the material you gather. Cultivate a patient work ethic. Take the time to shape your raw material. And revise and revise and revise again. You may never know when it’s done — it may never be done. But it’s the work that makes the art.