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Poetry: Psychoactive Language
16 years ago
You can't expect to write good poetry if you don't appreciate poetry, for the same reasons a robot with no sense of taste could never be a good chef.
And appreciating poetry is EASY. But if you don't understand what it is, and why it's interesting, you won't be able to distinguish it, experience it, savor it.
Unfortunately lots of folks run around today calling all sorts of things poetry that aren't. I wonder if this didn't get started with idioms, for example, saying that a great athlete's performance is like "poetry in motion."
Poetry is something quite specific. It's not just anything anyone wants to call poetry. The folks who like to run around saying "everything is poetry!" often respond: "Who are you to say that such-and-such isn't worthwhile!"
Lots of things that aren't poetry are great. Poetry doesn't mean "Everything that's awesome." I'm not saying other works aren't *interesting* enough to be poetry. I'm just saying they aren't in fact poetry.
Suppose I said that a delicious Lasagna wasn't Pizza. Some might complain that I'd said a delicious Lasagna "wasn't good enough" to be a pizza. But that's not what I said. Lots of foods just aren't pizza-- even though I love pizza, I can't deny that many things aren't pizza.
So I would have to say: "Look, if you want to learn how to make Lasanga, you need to be able to tell the difference between Lasagna and Pizza."
Likewise, lots of things just aren't poems. And you can't learn to appreciate or compose poetry if you don't know what it is. More, I doubt you'd take the idea of poems seriously if you knew what they are, unless you knew WHY they're interesting.
Poetry is:
1. Speech
2. Meaningful
3. Rhythmic
4. Effectively expressed.
A lot of people seem to get only #2. They think any words they pour out on paper while they're emotionally intense, are automatically poetry. Here's a little composition I call "orgasm."
Orgasm:
Oh god.
Oh god!
Oh GOD!
It's not a poem. The same goes for every other emotional fit you have, if it's incoherently expressed (this includes references only the writer would understand and other sorts of obscuritanism), doesn't really have much meaning (hopefully everyone's had the experience a few times-- calling it meaningful as such is a stretch), or has no rhythm at all. (This one has a rythm of sort, but it's a painfully simple one.)
Anyway. I trust that #4, using language effectively-- good description, coherent languge, etc-- is self-evidently worthwhile. Likewise, I assume people get why saying something meaningful matters. I absolutely can't help you if you don't get that.
But #1 and especially #3, people often miss. Poetry is certainly written down. But so is music, in musical notation. The sheets of musical notation are not the music. And poems written down are not poetry. Poetry has to be heard aloud-- even if only in the ear of your imagination.
And as for rhythm, it's the real reason I'm writing this essay.
Many, MANY people, including successfully published writers, scoff at the idea that rhythm is essential to poetry. They are all, uniformly and absolutely wrong about it. Here's what they don't get: Rhythmic repetition, in almost any medium, has an effect on the human mind. It's a simple psychological fact, rhythm has the property that it "drives trance." Rhythm creates altered states of consciousness. And that is the first virtue of rhythm in poetry:
Poetry is Psychoactive Language. Yes, like a drug.
Second, rhythm serves a related purpose, which is not as exciting as it used to be. Back in the days before most people were literate, there was something called "oral tradition," which is to say, the means of retaining a text was memorizing it as speech.
People run about saying poetry can be anything, and particularly ignoring or scoffing at the role of rhythm in poetry, because they just don't get how powerful a tool rhythm is.
And appreciating poetry is EASY. But if you don't understand what it is, and why it's interesting, you won't be able to distinguish it, experience it, savor it.
Unfortunately lots of folks run around today calling all sorts of things poetry that aren't. I wonder if this didn't get started with idioms, for example, saying that a great athlete's performance is like "poetry in motion."
Poetry is something quite specific. It's not just anything anyone wants to call poetry. The folks who like to run around saying "everything is poetry!" often respond: "Who are you to say that such-and-such isn't worthwhile!"
Lots of things that aren't poetry are great. Poetry doesn't mean "Everything that's awesome." I'm not saying other works aren't *interesting* enough to be poetry. I'm just saying they aren't in fact poetry.
Suppose I said that a delicious Lasagna wasn't Pizza. Some might complain that I'd said a delicious Lasagna "wasn't good enough" to be a pizza. But that's not what I said. Lots of foods just aren't pizza-- even though I love pizza, I can't deny that many things aren't pizza.
So I would have to say: "Look, if you want to learn how to make Lasanga, you need to be able to tell the difference between Lasagna and Pizza."
Likewise, lots of things just aren't poems. And you can't learn to appreciate or compose poetry if you don't know what it is. More, I doubt you'd take the idea of poems seriously if you knew what they are, unless you knew WHY they're interesting.
Poetry is:
1. Speech
2. Meaningful
3. Rhythmic
4. Effectively expressed.
A lot of people seem to get only #2. They think any words they pour out on paper while they're emotionally intense, are automatically poetry. Here's a little composition I call "orgasm."
Orgasm:
Oh god.
Oh god!
Oh GOD!
It's not a poem. The same goes for every other emotional fit you have, if it's incoherently expressed (this includes references only the writer would understand and other sorts of obscuritanism), doesn't really have much meaning (hopefully everyone's had the experience a few times-- calling it meaningful as such is a stretch), or has no rhythm at all. (This one has a rythm of sort, but it's a painfully simple one.)
Anyway. I trust that #4, using language effectively-- good description, coherent languge, etc-- is self-evidently worthwhile. Likewise, I assume people get why saying something meaningful matters. I absolutely can't help you if you don't get that.
But #1 and especially #3, people often miss. Poetry is certainly written down. But so is music, in musical notation. The sheets of musical notation are not the music. And poems written down are not poetry. Poetry has to be heard aloud-- even if only in the ear of your imagination.
And as for rhythm, it's the real reason I'm writing this essay.
Many, MANY people, including successfully published writers, scoff at the idea that rhythm is essential to poetry. They are all, uniformly and absolutely wrong about it. Here's what they don't get: Rhythmic repetition, in almost any medium, has an effect on the human mind. It's a simple psychological fact, rhythm has the property that it "drives trance." Rhythm creates altered states of consciousness. And that is the first virtue of rhythm in poetry:
Poetry is Psychoactive Language. Yes, like a drug.
Second, rhythm serves a related purpose, which is not as exciting as it used to be. Back in the days before most people were literate, there was something called "oral tradition," which is to say, the means of retaining a text was memorizing it as speech.
People run about saying poetry can be anything, and particularly ignoring or scoffing at the role of rhythm in poetry, because they just don't get how powerful a tool rhythm is.
Your claim would mean that these languages have no poetry, hence I reject it.
Syllable weight isn't the only possible kind of rhythm (english itself also uses [terminal] rhyme, alliteration, repetition, and so on, and there are lots more in other languages), nor is it restricted to the stressing of syllables, nor perceived vowel length, nor both together. Other qualities operate in other langauges to create rythm. So:
1) No, the lack of things you mention does not mean a language has no inherent rhythms.
2) No, my claim does not necessarily mean some languages have no poetry.
But just as importantly, your "reason" for rejecting the idea that rhythm is essential to poetry is that you for whatever reason don't like the idea that some langauges might not have poetry.
So actually, yes: some languages might not have poetry. Because: poetry isn't just anything somebody wants to prestige by (mis)using the word "poetry." We don't have to pretend something is poetry just so somebody's feelings aren't hurt. Nor would we need to pretend all languages have poetry just so... you know, the native speakers' feelings aren't hurt (in fact, supposing they would be is probably the more ethnocentric approach), if a language that really had no mechanical means to create rhythms in speech were to present itself-- which I rather seriously doubt.
In fact, if you want to split hairs on terminology, then yes, syllable is the correct term. However, you are simply stretching your definition of 'rhythm' to include new concepts to avoid the conclusion.
The fact that you go on to claim that some languages have no poetry is extraordinarily ridiculous. I think the problem here is that you want to restrict the definition of poetry so that your work is a member of a more elite classification.
Which of us is really hung up on English, then? If you expected to be able to coast on this issue because you thought I wasn't aware, as a Francophone, that some langauges don't have stressed syllables, sorry to present you with an uphill argument. But yes, really: there are lots of other ways languages can create spoken rhythm. I'm not retreating, pointing this out. You are.
>>The fact that you go on to claim that some languages have no poetry is extraordinarily ridiculous.<<
I'm insulted that you didn't bother reading what I said-- if only (insulted) for the sake of the conversation. I said there MAY be languages that have no poetry. I don't know for sure, despite my background in linguistics. [1]
BUT: I called you on this already. Why MUST every single language have poetry?
I figure it's just because you think it's a nice compliment to call something poetry. IOW: the word means nothing at all to you.
If I'm wrong about that, though, do answer my question.
>>>I think the problem here is that you want to restrict the definition of poetry so that your work is a member of a more elite classification.<<
Oho. Is that what you're on about. Right then.
Writing free verse and calling it poetry is silly. By the standards of poetry, free verse sucks. Badly. It's inferior.
It's not about me being elite-- my poetry isn't. It's about free verse being dismal, feeble, and laughable, when it makes pretense at being poetry. What's miraculous is that there've been brilliant authors who've made salad (free verse) of their prose, and the saladification thereof didn't entirely ruin their work.
And a note about "the standards of poetry." No, I didn't make them up. Nor did Wordsworth or Longfellow. English poetry arises naturally out of the English language. Because rhythm is readily availble to it, and because spoken rhythm has specific effects on people.
And free verse doesn't.
"No verse is free for a man who wants to do a good job." -Elliot
"Writing free verse is like playng tennis without a net." -Frost
[1] You don't know whether there are languages without poetry either, although you're implicitly claiming to. If there's been a systematic study into the rhythm-creating faculties of every living language, I'm unaware of it.
Of course that raises the question, again, of whether by "poetry" you mean, "every language has some speakers who like some of the sounds in their language."
As many dying languages as there are in the world today, probably there are some with very few speakers in non-literate traditions who remember no poetry and are uninterested in composing any. So there may be some that in fact don't.
But knowing what I know, I have a hard time imagining there's any langauge that COULDN'T have poetry. The very idea implies such a tortuous plex of phonological and syntactical rules that I can't see why they would persist (natural languages are usually pretty functional like that-- meaning they and pomo art critics rarely get along).
But that's just it-- it's not that you want languages to be capable of poetry, you want something far more specific, and at base, incoherent: poetry without any rhythm.
Whereas, the reason I suspect every language is capable of poetry is because I suspect every natural langauge has the possibility of spoken rhythm, and because I recognize how poetry works:
It is a mnemonic and trance-inducing addition of rhythm to speech.
Speech that, becase of its rhythmic structure, is more memorable and creates altered states, would be recognized as valuable, and would persist, in any sufficiently large body of speakers of any natural langauge. So long as that language was capable of spoken rhythm.
....okay, and your personal opinion of free verse! (sorry free verse, I just can't call you TRUE poetry) :<