Defining Poetry

Simon Armitage – free ‘Poetry Testing Kit’

Sue Watling Defining Poetry, Raising Poetic Awareness , ,

Simon Armitage poem on stone

Image from the Stanza Stones project, a 50 mile upland walk from Marsden to Ilkley visiting the Stanza Stones carved with poems by Simon Armitage.

On the Poetry Book  website Simon Armitage takes on the role of Sherlock Holmes for solving the mystery of the difference between poetry and prose. The Poetry Testing Kit offers ten guidelines for identification of a poem with the proviso it  will never be an exact science. That’s ok. If it were, the magic would be lost and the mystery is part of the gestalt of the poetic form.

These guidelines are useful indicators for developing the necessary skills to turn plain words into something really special.

 Poetry Testing Kit 

The Eye Test – How does it look on the page? Has some thought gone into its shape? Does the form bear some resemblance to the content?

The Magic Eye Test – If you look for long enough into the poem, will it reveal another meaning or picture hidden within it? Will further readings uncover further meanings and new rewards, and so on?

The Hearing Test – How does it sound? Read it out loud – does it work on the ear in some way?

The pH Test – A test for Poetic Handicraft. Does the poem use recognisable poetic techniques, of which there are hundreds? Are the techniques subtle, or do they poke out at the edge?

The IQ Test – Not a test for Intelligence Quotient, although that might come into it, but a double test for Imaginative Quality and Inherent Quotability: does the poem have some sort of dream life you can respond to: does it have lines or phrases that might stick in the memory?

The Test of Time – Would the poem outlive its immediate circumstances? This doesn’t mean it has to be ‘classic’ or ‘great’ or have some eternal message – it might just be a case of the poem withstanding a second reading. Remember, good poems can create their own contexts, and have poetic value way beyond their apparent shelf-life or sell-by date.

The Test of Nerves – Somebody once said that a poem shouldn’t just tell you not to play with matches, it should burn your fingers. In other words, does the poem create a sensation, rather than simply an understanding?

The Lie Detector Test – Poems don’t have to tell the truth, but they have to be true to themselves, even if they’re telling a lie. Give the poem a thump – does it ring true?

The Spelling Test – Does the poem cast a kind of spell or charm? At the very least does it create a world, even just a small but distinct world, capable of sustaining human life; a world whose atmosphere we can breathe and whose landscape we can inhabit for the duration of the poem?

The Acid Test – This is the final test and the one that really counts. It’s like a test for the mystery ingredient that separates a truly great tomato sauce from its rivals. It’s the X-factor, although it might be to do with the author’s experience of poetry. Is it possible to write a good poem if you’ve never read one? Somehow I doubt it.

the power of love versus poetry

Sue Watling Defining Poetry, Poets Past and Present , , ,

Valerie Eliot 1926 – 2012

T S and Valerie Eliot

When Valerie Fletcher married T S Eliot the poetry stopped. He was 68. She was 31. They appear to have been happy but there was no more poetry. The Waste Land,  The Four Quartets  and with the rest of Eliot’’s modernist output were all written earlier. Biographical details on the life of T S Eliot are scattered across the internet and make it tempting to connect the poetry and psyche. Maybe we can only write our best when we are in difficult relationships or situations and shows how poetry requires tapping into the deeper layers; the universal experiences of grief and angst. Or do we simply get old. And what about love?

 What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

 The Waste Land. I The Burial of the Dead

 

Poetry for Remembrance

Sue Watling Defining Poetry, War Poetry , , , ,

Poppies photographed by Sue Watling

D-Day veteran Dennis B Wilson, nearly 70 years after writing poems on the front line, has published  Elegy of a Common Soldier, a book of WW2 poetry.   The website http://dennisbwilson.com contains Mr Wilson’s Plea for ‘Real’ Poetry where he describes modern poetry as ‘incomprehensible to all but a few’.

‘It seems to me to be completely pointless, and a waste of time, to write something that no one else can understand.  A poet is only completely successful if he has awakened in the mind of the reader an echo of his or her own emotional experiences, who may not themselves have been able to put their feelings into words.  I believe that modern poetry shares with modern art the operation of the ‘Emperor’s clothes syndrome,’ whereby many of its adherents do not really understand it but are unwilling to admit their ignorance in case they are thought to be stupid or uninformed.’

Poetry may be one of the most contextual of arts.  While the universality of thoughts, feelings and emotions provide common threads from Catallus to the current day, social influence changes. It helps to read poetry with a sense of the environment it was written in. Challenged by early 20th century modernism, poetic style has been freed from traditional restraints, and for many this is a deterrent to engaging with poetry. For Wilson, modern poetry is not poetry.

‘ It seems to me that to write a passage of prose and then divide it into broken lines at the whim of the writer, (which I assume to be the process involved), presents no difficulty.’

Instead, he calls for a return to metrics.

‘The true poet… has to write his thoughts in words of the correct number of syllables, with the accent in the right places, in a recognizable metric form and, (usually), with words that rhyme where needed’.

Defining poetry is not easy. Like most modern art forms, high degrees of subjectivity can be involved in naming and labelling words as poems. On days like today, 11 November, Armistice Day, the context is paramount.  Poetry for Remembrance provides one of the finest definitions of all.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

From For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon