What is poetry?

Introduction

This unit introduces common techniques underlying free verse and traditional forms of poetry, and how it is necessary to use these techniques in order to harness what T.S. Eliot called the ‘logic of the imagination’ (Eliot, 1975, p. 77). We discuss the possibility of using your own experience, but also the power of imagination, and of utilising different personae in your poems. You are also introduced to the basic terminology and practical elements of poetry – the line, line-breaks, stanzas, couplets, tercets, quatrains and other stanza lengths, rhyme, rhythm, caesura and metre. As you work through the unit, the key terms we discuss are highlighted in bold. Definitions for these terms are provided in the glossary at the end of the unit.

1 What is poetry?: an introduction

Poems, unlike crosswords, don’t have a straightforward solution. In fact, a careful examination of the clues laid by the poet may lead to more questions than answers. Let’s start this unit, then, with a question: is poetry simply about expressing feelings? People do turn to poetry in extremis. Prison inmates, often famously, have expressed loneliness and communicated with absent loved ones through poetry. Maybe this accounts for the egalitarian view often held of poetry – a view which doesn’t seem to apply in the same way to opera-singing or carpentry, for example. If I sing, does that make me an opera singer? Certainly if I nail together a few pieces of wood that doesn’t mean anyone would want to hire me to build their house. With poetry, as with any other craft, there are skills to be mastered. There is a need for ideas and a need for the poet to meditate on what might be termed his or her muse. But there is also a need for persistence and hard work.

A common description of the writing process is ‘10% inspiration, 90% perspiration’. The muse, expert at inspiring, may be lousy on the technical side. The art of poetry resides in the technical detail more than one might like to believe. The writer artfully uses technique with the express purpose of getting you to feel what he or she wants you to feel. The poet manipulates emotions just as a composer may write a piece of music to evoke a particular mood. The composer orchestrates not only the instruments but also the listener. This is the case in poetry too.

2 Forming the form

By and large, readers tend to agree whether a poem ‘works’ or not, even if it’s not clear how or why it works. The best poems retain a certain mystery, but subsequent analysis invariably reveals various techniques the writer has employed to key into this commonality. The form a poem takes, whether it be free or traditional, reflects those techniques, and is itself vital in the unlocking of ‘the logic of the imagination’.

The form a poet chooses for any one poem is partly dependent on process. A writer needs to have at his or her disposal a whole system of strategies and techniques. These will be supplied in part by historical example, by what writers in the past have tried to do. But techniques are also arrived at through the poet’s own exploration of these elements.

Poets may choose to write in a traditional form – say a ballad or a sonnet. Alternatively they may choose to write in what is often called ‘free verse’, ostensibly liberated from the restrictions of tradition. Yet, traditional forms of poetry can sometimes liberate. In testing the boundaries of a form you might find that you break rules. Similarly, you may find that writing free verse necessitates some new conventions and rules. While taking liberties, free verse still uses formal elements to establish things like rhythm and meaning, for instance. There are a variety of intrinsic techniques that span both traditional and free verse approaches. In this unit we will look at those techniques, the basic foundations on which you will build all your poems.

We learn to write by imitating, and, importantly, by reading. We absorb something about the poetic sensibility by listening to poets read their work and talk about their process of writing. Eventually, instead of imitating, the writer assimilates this material into a new, unique voice. This is not to say that writers reach a final resting-place, from which they can safely issue their poetic declamations. Each time the poet sets pen to paper, in a sense he or she has ‘forgotten’ how to write and is forced to learn the process all over again. Even practised writers are humble in the face of each new poem. They don’t forget the precepts of form, but continuously shift and change the application of these elements with each new horizon. Good writers constantly renew language and conventions by renegotiating the relationship between the form and content of every new poem.

In trying to define poetry, we often end up thinking archaically. We think of the work of writers such as Keats or Shakespeare, for instance, as in some way defining what poems should be like. Their way of writing poetry appears dogmatically to be the ‘right’ way to do it. We mistakenly assume that true poetry always involves a special, elevated vocabulary, as if this will earn us our stripes. It is surprising how strongly such misconceptions endure. Language and its conventions are not static. In fact, it is part of the poet’s job to locate and help define the conventions of his or her era.

Is poetry about the expression of feelings? One common misconception is that its function is simply this. Poetry, it is believed, is able and honour-bound to tell the absolute, journalistic truth. In reality poetry works quite differently. Our personal lives and history may inform our work, but the poem transforms or exchanges the one sort of truth – biographical truth – for another: poetic truth. A poem is more than a simple expression of feelings, more than what ‘really’ happened.

3 What is poetry?

We can possibly best define what poetry is by saying what it isn’t. For one thing, poetry, unlike prose, cannot be paraphrased. If you could sum it up succinctly in any other fashion you wouldn’t write the poem. One can talk about the theme of a poem, for instance, but it’s the poem itself which conveys the ultimate effect. A poem is the best possible expression of what the poet wants to say. Some might say that the form and content of art, in this case poetry, is untranslatable.

Let’s now look at a poem which directly addresses some of these issues, albeit in a humorous way.

In the lines: ‘When I dream back, the point is not the facts/But life enlarged by these imagined acts’, the speaker is extricating poetry from the clutches of fact and history, even as he apologises for the licence that he takes. When he says that ‘Imagination lives on memory’, he means not that it exists within memory, but that it depends on it. The inadequacy of memory may be a virtue, in the poetic realm. Yet there’s a hard edge to his final rejoinder: ‘All members of my tribe are bloody liars’.

Sean O’Brien’s work is weighty and unrelenting, and politics permeate every corner of it. He is both a social and a literary writer and critic, sometimes associated with a group of poets from a northern working-class tradition: Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn and, latterly, Don Paterson and Paul Farley.

4 Impersonation and imagination

Choosing or inventing another voice immediately changes how we write something. Immediately, the known and familiar is altered or invented anew by this change of perspective. Distancing yourself from what you are and who you know can be both a liberating and an enlightening experience. Using your imagination and specifically your powers of impersonation can be a powerful way of making your poems more interesting.

We can often get stuck in our writing because we forget how limitless the possibilities are. The imagination won’t tolerate rules, even if its expression is bound by them. Isn’t it convenient that writers can impersonate anyone they like without getting arrested? In fact, writers almost have a duty to entertain different perspectives, by imagining not just what but how others think and speak. By taking a different perspective you can get a broader view of the possibilities.

As we proceed to look at some poetic terms, tricks and devices – the sorts of techniques that underlie all poems – try to keep in mind all the ideas of what poetry might be, as well as some of the ideas about what poetry shouldn’t be.

5 Poetic techniques

5.1 Lines and line-breaks

Poets are skilled at noticing things, and one of the things we should learn to notice is how other poets employ the various devices at their disposal. All poems, even those which don’t conform to a pre-existing model or form, use technical elements, even if these may not be immediately apparent. In the next few sections we are going to study, discuss and try out certain technical aspects of poetic writing, starting with lines and line-breaks.

Is something poetry only if it rhymes and has ‘proper’ line-breaks? Is the following a poem?

This poem seems to break the rules about the whole purpose of a line-break. Who ever heard of breaking a line after ‘I’ or ‘its’ or ‘the? In a free verse poem like this, the line-breaks vary, and are individual to that poem.

Unorthodox line-breaks may propel the poem forwards, as in the earlier section of the above poem, but other line-breaks might be considered with reference to the ideas. For example, to finish a line with ‘Stop’ has a dramatic impact, made more so when we consider that the narrator is helpless to stop the past, as framed by a photograph. The line that finishes with ‘I’ seems appropriate to the poem, when we consider the theme, and the concluding statement of intent that ‘I’ makes, which is about the very poem itself.

On the simplest level, we might place an imaginary frame around the line of a poem, in order to enclose or focus that line’s thought, idea or image. When a line is divided in an unorthodox way, tipping the weight and sense down into the next line, we call this enjambement. Use of this device affects how the reader experiences the line, and where the emphasis is put. John Hollander, in Rhyme’s Reason, explains these effects by example:

In order to make decisions about line-breaks, you’ll want to assess the direction the poem is taking, and where you want it to go. These may be two different things. Line-breaks can:

• effect a juxtaposition of like or unlike things, within a single line or divided across two lines
• evoke a sensation (freedom, discomfort, excitement, etc.), perhaps by breaking the line in an unnatural place
• impel the narrative drive forward
• create room in which to expand a train of thought or idea
• subvert or challenge existing conventions, if this suits the theme of the poem.

Let’s start building another kind of house:

We’ll keep coming back to the building works on this ‘house’ as the unit progresses.

The following poem seems to be about line-breaks, but in fact it is about something else. The reader might deduce from the line-breaks, rather than just from the content, what that ‘something’ is.

Humour might be seen to be masking a more serious message about the nature of relationships. In this way all the technical elements contribute to the message. The poem’s brevity reiterates ideas about the transitory nature of love. It is divided into two sections, the first offering a situation and the second amplifying this situation. Somewhere in between, the penny drops. Remember Frost’s surprises for both reader and writer? This poem, ostensibly about form, discovers and makes connections between seemingly unrelated things.

Such self-reflexive poems, about form itself, clearly illustrate how form and content are integrated. The structure is neither arbitrary nor irrelevant. In a way, the Sharon Olds poem you read in Section 5.1, ‘I go back to May 1937’, was also about itself – its own history. Poems about poems generally work better if they are about something other than just themselves – or at least seem to be. Good poems usually work on more than one level: the literal level (ground level) and the deeper level (the basement). Furthermore, these ‘houses’ may have several floors.

5 Poetic techniques

5.2 Free verse

Although we can’t make rules about what constitutes a poem, we can see that even when writing free verse, where lines and line-breaks may be irregular, form is still important. Free verse still makes use of technical effects: rhythms, grammatical structures, sound effects, etc. Also, it invariably still makes grammatical sense. Free verse, with its infinite elasticity, can recreate form anew in each poem, inventing a one-off organising principle which explains that particular poem.

Too much freedom, though, can be both exciting and nerve-wracking. Writing less formally, says the poet Hugo Williams, gives the illusion of helplessness, of being out of control (Williams, 2003). That is one of its characteristics, but this doesn’t mean the writer actually is either helpless or out of control while they are writing it. Some people have misconceptions about free verse, or open-form poems, and see them as less rigorous. Peter Sansom puts another slant on this idea: ‘Writing free verse is “easier” than using a fixed form, in that it takes less effort to write bad free verse than a bad villanelle’ (Sansom, 1994, p.83).

5 Poetic techniques

5.3 Stanzas and verse

The poem ‘The literal and the metaphor’, which you read in Section 5.1, was divided into two sections. We call these verses or stanzas, and they are the poetic equivalent of paragraphs, but with more shape, weight and focus than the prose equivalent. Stanzas are like islands encircled by shores. Or, since we have been talking about houses, let’s use another image for these stanzas. James Fenton tells us that ‘The Italian word stanza means a room’ (Fenton, 2002, p. 61).

So, how many rooms should a poem have? Well, it depends. A stanza concentrates attention on a particular area of thought or image. The reasons for dividing a poem into stanzas or verses may vary from poem to poem, and might develop from the reasons for the line-breaks that we introduce, with the stanzas or rooms constituting the macro-structure of the poem and its larger purpose.

Line-breaks and stanzas, accentuated by punctuation, can be used to establish a pace, to push the poem onwards and develop the theme. The pattern they form contributes to the total effect of the poem.

This is how far we have got with the building of our poetic house.

The next aspect to consider in more detail is the fact that stanzas may be composed of varying numbers of lines, and there are names for different kinds of stanzas. This one is a couplet:

5 Poetic techniques

5.4 Tercets

The following poem is written in tercets.

The following poem is in tercets with a rogue line at the end.

The chosen stanza form is appropriate to the theme of an erotic triangle, with a third party suggested by the ‘women of nine hundred years past’, not to mention the disparity between the punishments for women and for men involved in adultery.

5 Poetic techniques

5.5 Quatrains

The following poem is comprised of four quatrains.

The neatness and regularity of the quatrains emphasises the smooth evenness of a landscape blanketed with snow; the form thus reiterates the theme. The poem’s effect comes from a simple yet formal accumulation of landscape detail.

In this poem, each stanza moves the theme forward, by developing or extrapolating from the previous stanza. The initial stanza sets the scene, with natural description. We infer the narrator has been walking near fields silenced by snow.

The first line of the second stanza introduces a new level to the poem, since we can’t be completely sure what the narrator means by: ‘The woods around it have it – it is theirs’. The narrator might not have known either, at first, but by the end of the stanza, he is beginning to understand, just as we are.

In the third stanza we begin to realise that the blank expression of the snow and the loneliness perhaps apply to the narrator as well as to the landscape.

In the last stanza we rocket upwards into the vast loneliness of space, which is nothing to the loneliness the narrator can feel on Earth. There is no actual menace in this landscape, although we can sense a certain momentary terror that the utter loneliness described, once elucidated and emphasised by the place, cannot be ignored, even in the busiest of places. There is no awful deity or devil with an agenda. On the contrary, this is all there is, and this is simply the way things are. The narrator has read into this place the isolation of his very mind, itself snowed in.