So then, here's a question.

Are the following extracts poems or not? Discuss.

1. Translated from Japanese (which is why the syllable counts don't fit) from the Japanese poet Basho (1644-1694)

Wake Butterfly -
it's late, we've miles
to go together.

-----------------------

Friends part
for ever - wild geese
lost in cloud.


2. from "Crow Alights" by Ted Hughes

Crow saw the herded mountains, steaming in the morning.
And he saw the sea
Dark-spined, with the whole earth in its coils.
He saw the stars, fuming away into the black mushrooms of the nothing forest, clouding their spores, the virus of God.

And he shuddered with the horror of Creation.

In the hallucination of the horror
He saw this shoe, with no sole, rain-sodden,
Lying on a moor.
And there was this garbage can, bottom rusted away,
A playing place for the wind, in a waste of puddles.

3. From "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" by W.H.Auden

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Fat from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

4. from "Little Gidding" by TS Eliot

What we call a beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.


Comments ?

I answer this question with a question:

1. I wanted to stay
But you
Wouldn't let me
So I went
And now I weep.

Poem or prose?

2. Evangelical vicar in want of a portable second-hand font, would dispose of the same for a portrait (with frame) of the Bishop-elect of Vermont.

Poem or prose?

I just seek clarification, that's all.

Depending on the intent, poem and poem (albeit in an unusual layout).

But it doesn't address the central question of whether Basho, Auden, Hughes and Eliot were in your opinion writing poetry or prose above.
Poetry is about more than just the rhymes and the metre, it's about word choice, the beauty and the rhythm of the language, about evoking images that prose doesn't quite evoke. Let's take that near-nonsense poem from my student that started this current round of is it/ain't it debate.

I'll write it out twice fo comparison.

Shinsuke is strange in the night because he plays the guitar and draws strange flowers and a strange snake in front of the mirror, but it became ten O'clock. Finish ! And his bell cried. Then came his kangaroo.

Shinsuke is strange in the night
Because he plays the guitar
And draws strange flowers
And a strange snake in front of the mirror,
But it became ten O'clock. Finish !
And his bell cried.
Then came his kangaroo.

Now there are a number of things to consider. First of all the layout of the second of these is his not mine.
The intention was to write a poem. Granted the style is a westernised pastiche of a Japanese style in which short phrases are used to build an image and a mood but is it succesful as a poem. I'd say yes. The lines individually have a rhythm and the succession of images in the first four lines build a picture of Shinsuke's strangeness. (We'll ignore the certainly unintentional phallicism of line four). The escalting strangeness is matched by the increasing line length.
Lines five and six puncture this with their sudden termination of the sequence. Line seven was simply his attempt to work in the last of the images he was working from but could be considered a sort of coda to the weirdeness.

Now I'm not suggesting for one second that any of this was consciously considered by the student but the length of the lines and the rhythm of the piece show that he was at least trying to construct something coherent from the random selection presented to him. The style indicates that he was drawing on what he knows of Japanese poetic forms -as well he should, why should we expect him to know anything at all about western metre and rhyming which are entirely outside his cultural experience?

Now let's look at the prose version. Written like this it becomes simple gibberish. There is no structure to give the reader any visual clue to his intention, it has become rather a random collection of words. Is it a poem when written like that, no it probably isn't BUT, and it's a very big but, he didn't write it like that. He sorted the words he had created from the images I gave him, and sat and wrote each line as a line. In short he wrote it as a poem, not as a piece of prose that was subsequently arbitrailly divided up into lines. The line structure was integral to his creation not separate as your question about "why is a piece of process arbitrarilly diveded into lines, a poem" would imply.

That's simply not how these things, whether by a Japanese EFL student or a former Poet Laureate, are done. The verse form is not a separate afterthought it's integral to the creation.

I hope that clarifies my view on the subject.

And yes, Shinsuke's poem is indeed a poem.

Thank you for this.

I am a little clearer thanks to your explanation. What I think you are saying is that the use of language can be poetic, even if the words do not follow the poetic "rules" of rhyme and scansion that I learnt at school.

In a way it's similar to the modern art discussion; it's art if you believe it is and can convince others. So it's poetry according to the same rules.

The two pieces I posted would seem to confirm that.

The second one is, of course, a Limerick and the story is that a hoaxer used the device to sneak an advertisement into a very staid newspaper which would otherwise never have allowed its pages to be sullied with anything so vulgar as a Limerick. I wish I'd written it!

The first one I did write in about 30 seconds this morning and, whereas the thoughts could genuinely be mine when I grieve for a lost lover, I do not feel that the effort should be dignified as poetry. I did once write a poem (not a Limerick, I hasten to add) to a lost lover, which met my standards for poems - it rhymed and scanned - and I feel prouder of that than my today's effort. To start with, my previous lament took me some hours to write and the effort alone made me feel better about it.

I would as ever appreciate feedback.

What I think you are saying is that the use of language can be poetic, even if the words do not follow the poetic "rules" of rhyme and scansion that I learnt at school.

Well, rhyme is rather modern in the scheme of things and not nearly as widespread as one would imagine in some world poetry. Prosody, OTOH, seems integral, but is not as important in modern poetry as it once was: e.g., free verse, dada. poemes concretes. Doggerel, jingles, and limericks are rather fixed in rhyme and meter, but some won't admit them as poetry (though I do). Take for example, a goodly amount of Old English or Old Irish poetry: hardly any of it rhymes (alliteration was a device more beloved at the time, at least by the Germanic poets) and the various schemes of meter are indeed difficult to comprehend for modern audiences (the question of language to one side). Indeed, many lines in Old English poetry have lines with varying numbers of syllables. Poetry was originally an oral tradition, and poems like Homer's, use all kinds of devices which seem to have originated with the purpose of helping a poet to recite large poems from "memory". For many today, poetry is a visual layout of words on a page. ee cummings had a lot of fun with this, and many others have since, too.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by BobHale:
So then, here's a question.



Wake Butterfly -
it's late, we've miles
to go together.

Basho, not Robert Flost?


Friends part
for ever - wild geese
lost in cloud.

Potent image! IMHO, if it's not evocative, it ain't poetry.


4. from "Little Gidding" by TS Eliot

What we call a beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
<snip>
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

I feel that this is like a finely-cut gem, reflecting itself within itself and building energy thereby, laser-like, until the burst of light beams forth to an exact point of meaning. A fine refutation of ever uttering the "final word."

Interesting.

So your suggestion is that evocation is the criterion?

To my mind a piece could be evocative and still be prose - but could a piece be a poem (even one that follows the "rules") if it's not evocative?

quote:

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Originally posted by Richard English:
Interesting.

So your suggestion is that evocation is the criterion?

To my mind a piece could be evocative and still be prose - but could a piece be a poem (even one that follows the "rules") if it's not evocative?

---

It seems to me that prose can be poetic, and work that follows the "rules" of poetry, but fails to evoke heightened meaning, is not poetry. As you point out in your discussion in your similar thread, poetry doesn't have to conform to a set metre or rhyming scheme. Feeling and meaning are paramount, IMHO. Thus, the answer to your question is yes.

Hmmm. So it really does boil down to - as I have on occasion suspected - a matter of opinion: it's a poem if the author (or the teacher! ) says it is.

I feel more enlightened now, and that certainly explains why I've read some works that are very poetic in nature (using such techniques as those mentioned above) yet which are definitely considered to be prose - it's presumably simply because that's how the author wanted it to be considered.

So the next time I try and write free verse (and I haven't for years due to this fear that there exist some rules I'm ignorant of and will therefore look stupid), I needn't fret over, say, where to put a line break - if it's where I feel it should go, then that's where it should go.

Hmmm - think I'll stick with structured verse until I build up my confidence a bit! For various reasons, I've had a real creative block this past decade (i.e. I've written, on average, one (rhyming) poem every couple of years), and I've amazed myself at what I've come up with in just a few months of contributing to this board! So I'll learn to crawl first before I get up and walk

So it really does boil down to [...] a matter of opinion

As does pretty much any definition of any category. At one end of the spectrum there's those who feel that poetry is merely a form of writing, (i.e., meter, rhyme (assonance, alliteration), prosody) and at the other end, there's those who say it's a matter of content (e.g., emotive, connotative writing). Thing is artists (writers / poets included) are constantly pushing at the boundary cases of a category, testing their resilience, shrinking or expanding the thresholds of meaning. Folks look at something like one of Shakespeare's sonnets, and they say, "now that is a poem." Others look at one of his plays (e.g., Hamlet, Macbeth) and they say now that's prose, when in fact it's blank verse (i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter). Others have difficulties with things like limericks because of their tone or lack of seriousness. Or take TS Eliot's The Wasteland: not much in the way of rhyme, strange meter / changing number of feet per line, hermetic style in need of footnotes. Still, I (and many others) would say that "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun", Hamlet, and The Wasteland are poems. Oh, well.

If evocation is the key characteristic of poetry, then I offer Donne's prose sermon:

"It comes equally to us all, and makes us all equall when it comes. The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney are no Epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large it was. It tels me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what man it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons is speechlesse too, it sayes nothing, it distinguishes nothing. And when a whirle-wind hath blown the dust of the Church-yard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust into the Church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again and pronounce This is the Patrician, this the noble flowre, and this the yeomanly, this the Plebian bran."

There is striking imagery beyond the prosaic. It is also powerfully rhythmic.

Karl Shapiro says that there are three voices to poetry – the voice of the language, the voice of the age and the voice of the poet.

I believe BobHale has unfairly limited the "structure" question to the visual presentation. If one hears the voice of the language, if one intuits the breathing, then that understanding communicates the structure just as well as mere line breaks.

Finally, there is Housman's distinction that true poetry must have the ecstatic element. This is related to, but not entirely the same as, the "evocative." He meant to dismiss what Pope wrote as "versified wit" and not, in his terms, poetry.

quote:

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Originally posted by Robert Arvanitis:

I believe BobHale has unfairly limited the "structure" question to the visual presentation.

---

I certainly didn't intend to. There are many thousands of wonderfully poetic pieces of prose in the language. On the other hand this current debate is about whether having the "form" of a poem (whatever that may be) automatically makes something a poem and that would be a separate debate about whether something that has the form of prose can be considered a poem (as opposed to being considered simply poetic).
Personally I think it can but it would only become a poem when spoken aloud with the right kind of diction, breathing, intonation etc. Reading the most wonderful prose in the language in a dull flat monotone would remove all potential for poetry from it.
One of the reasons that poetry is written in lines rather than as solid blocks of text is to create visual clues to aid in understanding how the author intends the piece to be read or spoken.

Thanks to BobHale for his patience -- I take his point about the current focus being on form "automatically" qualifying text as poetry.

I also enjoy the implied poetry of:
"it would only become a poem when spoken aloud." I like the idea of poetry as akin to music, a performing art.

Interesting discussion.

Definitely, there is a fine line between poetry and certain prose. Robert, while the piece you offer is beautifully written, and most definitely evocative, I see it as poetic, but not poetry. Though, maybe after this discussion I am beginning to change my mind.

Robert, can you tell us more about the ecstatic element?

Might we wander into the old bardic tradition and ask whether recited stories such as pre-Homeric Greek legends, or pre-English, such as Beowulf, might balance on the line between prose and poetry?

What about rap music? Most, IMHO, is misanthropic/mysogynistic tripe, yet I can somehow hear in the "mind's ear" some of Langston Hughes' work set to rap rhythm with great effect. I'm really surprised that somebody with actual talent hasn't done just that.

Beowulf definitely has a rhythm, though not one we are used to. However, that rhythm gets completely lost in modern English translation. It is a "rhythm" of syllables and accent.

For several years I dabbled in writing in imititation of Old Norse saga poetry. Now that is hard, because it requires the use of syllabic beats, lots of alliteration and in very specific arrangement, and the use of a kind of imagery whose name has completely escaped me. (damn senior moments!) But one example I can think of is serpent road for sea. Another would be blood ground for battlefield.

If anyone is interested I will dig out my old notes and let you know what the specific rules are for the Edda-style poetry.

"One wonders what the whistling wind
Will bring us on the morrow
Such sweet success as ever sinned
Or else unceasing sorrow"

...is ecstatic.

******

In 1933, A E Housman gave a lecture "The Name and Nature of Poetry." He contrasts Dryden and Pope with Blake. He gives an example, and says "...meaning is a poor foolish disappointing thing in comparison with the verses themselves."

"'One wonders what the whistling wind
Will bring us on the morrow
Such sweet success as ever sinned
Or else unceasing sorrow'

...is ecstatic."

Robert, perhaps I am a dunce, but I don't understand the concept of "ecstatic" when talking about poetry. I looked it up in dictionary.com, but that didn't help. I also tried looking it up in Google, but only brought up poems about "ecstasy." Can anyone explain it to me?

Kalleh:
Recovered this from long ago.
Is the site still functional?!
Robert

Wow! I give up on Wordcraft and RJA shows up! Will wonders never cease! Perhaps I was too hasty.