What is Poetry?

What Is Poetry?

            A clear-cut definition for poetry is a very difficult thing to come up with. Poetry is forever changing and being made new by poets who play with new ideas. For example, over the course of this class, my personal definition of poetry has expanded to include prose poetry and language poetry. While it is impossible to create a perfect definition for something that is continually changing, I have slowly come to realize this: poetry is the Doctor Who of literature.

            Now, I am sure some of you are wondering what I could possibly be talking about. Doctor Who, as you may or may not know, is a British television show about a man who travels through space and time and has adventures, saving the world from aliens and the like over and over again. How is this like poetry? Poetry, unlike prose, does not have to be linear. It can travel through space and time as easily as a 907-year-old Time Lord. Prose, while having some flexibility, is more or less locked in place by a need to tell a story. When prose becomes lost in time and space, it become prose-poetry. Poetry is a free-moving, willy-nilly sort of literature that can explore places prose can never even imagine.

            An example of how poetry can travel through space and time is the language poetry of Lyn Hejinian in her prose-poetry book My Life. Hejinian describes language poetry in her introduction for the Best American Poetry 2004 anthology. Language poetry, she says, does not have to have a message in it. Language poetry looks at how language is used everyday and changes it, playing with it to find the meaning that is hidden underneath. In this way, language poems are not tied down by the idea of narrative or, really, deeper meaning. The meaning is in the words itself, which allows these poems to freely jump from subject to subject, time period to time period, or anywhere else the poet might want to go. Hejinian says, “Poetry, furthermore, is not a static art form – its source of energy (its virtues) are not frozen in perfection but flow through time…” (Hejinian 12). This captures the spirit of language poetry and poetry in general. Its beauty comes in how it changes and shifts depending on the reader. Hejinian’s own poetry is a great example of this. To read the poems in My Life and look for some sort of narrative sense would be idiotic. The beauty and meaning in these poems comes from the ever-changing images, the use of words to evoke tastes and colors and memories that do not necessarily link together. “Somewhere, in the background, rooms share a pattern of small roses. Pretty is as pretty does. In certain families, the meaning of necessity is at one with the sentiment of pre-necessity” (Hejinian 7). Here, there is no real sense of story, yet each sentence evokes an image that is beautiful or interesting. Hejinian’s poems move through space and time with ease, using the disjointed feeling to imitate the way we think and feel and remember, as well as using language to shape how we are feeling as we read the poems.

            Another poet who moves through space and time quite easily is G. C. Waldrep. In his book, Disclamor, he uses form and difficult-to-decipher content to imitate his thoughts and feelings as he wrote his poems. His battery poems, nine poems describing different locations, are good examples of this. The lines and stanzas stagger across the page, bringing to mind a man pacing back and forth or thoughts wandering freely from one subject to another. His content skips around, usually moving in a somewhat narrative way but often coming out like a stream of consciousness, making little sense when first viewed but on closer examination having a theme. “To the east, Upper Fisherman’s Beach/ pale bodies against black sand./ To the west, Point Bonita’s vigil./ And the south tower of the bridge, its harp, its/ iron mandolin curding the city/ into strips, grey, vertical,/ gleaming -/ Can you believe I once stood for war?/ (Can you believe I once stood against it?)” (Waldrep 10). The first six lines are all part of one story, but the last two lines skip somewhere else, a different location in time, a different though process. Waldrep’s poems, like Hejinian’s are not bound by a necessity to tell a story, but instead to show how Waldrep thinks and feels as he experiences new places. In the end, both poets’ poems tell the reader something about themselves. The freedom of these poems allows the reader to find a meaning unique to themselves.

            However, there is another side to poetry, as there is another side to Doctor Who. The Doctor does not just travel through time and space. He has a mission; to protect the universe and keep it going on a good path. Some poets believe poetry should also have a mission. The poet Yusef Komunyakaa writes his own introduction for the Best American Poetry 2003 anthology. In it, he talks about how poetry should be used to tell a story, to reveal something about the world so that people can become aware of it and do something to change it. “In some exploratory texts, those of over-experimentation, disorder becomes the norm – a blurred design that is supposed to depict wit, opacity, and difficulty as virtue” (Komunyakaa 14). Komunyakaa believes that poetry without a meaning behind it, language poetry that focuses on the words more than the meaning, is bad poetry. His idea of good poetry is poetry that shares something, for example, witness poetry.

            The book Against Forgetting is an excellent place to find good witness poems. This book is a collection of poems written by poets who experiences the terrors of war and then wrote about it. The poems found within describe how horrible life was during war, for both the poets and their enemies, in many cases. One poet found in this book, the poet I chose to research, is Walt McDonald. A Texan, McDonald was an Airforce pilot and teacher during the Vietnam war. Much of his poetry describes how life was during the war in Vietnam, “…Children/ climbed those bulldozed heaps/ for food, for clothes, for trash/ piled up to blaze. I saw them/ crawling the last flare of the sun/ spangled on garbage, the dump/ blazing in the sweat and blink/ of my eyes, children and old men…” (McDonald 685).  McDonald’s poetry began as a way to explore his feelings over the war and to talk about his fallen comrades. His witness poems show the reader how life was in Vietnam during that time. His mission was to show it as it was and change people’s opinions, make them understand how terrible it was. Even today, people use poetry for a similar reason. Poets like Heather Spears, whose poem “A Sent Photo” describes the ugliness of the war in the middle east, talk about the problems of today. Poets using the black-out method of poetry take pieces of literature and choose words from within them, using their poems to protest inequality and hate. These witness poems have a clear goal – to change how people think about certain subjects.

            Other poets have a simpler goal – to tell a story. Maura Stanton, for example, in her book Immortal Sofa, uses her poetry to tell the simple stories of everyday life using imagination and imagery. She can take something as simple as a trip to the vet’s office, a sofa, or a plant growing in her backyard and create a story out of it. She uses metaphor and form to make these poems unique, twisting time to suit her cause. Many poets use poetry to tell stories about simple everyday life, to connect with the audience by examining images that we all experience every day. Waldrep, in his own way, does something similar. Poets who use poetry for a distinct purpose, like Komunyakaa would advise, creatively handle their mission and change the way we think by revealing something to us about life.

            These two sides of poetry encompass many things. Language poetry is perhaps the most post-modern, while witness poetry is a more classical and, arguably, popular way of telling a story. Despite their differences, though, these are all poetry. It is amazing to think that two such different ideas can come from the same literary form, but poetry has that ability.

            How, then, is poetry different from prose? Prose, while able to examine language and tell a story, is much less free than poetry. Prose must, for the sake of its readers, stick to some sort of chronological order. Prose could never change subject, time, and theme from line to line, as Hejinian’s poems do. While it can play with form, there is only so many ways to arrange sentences on a page. Prose cannot dance around on itself like Waldrep’s or McDonald’s poems, imitating walking or climbing in a purely visual sense. Prose, while obviously telling a story and using metaphors, cannot boil an image down to its bare bones and redress it the way poetry can. Prose is trapped to one dimension. Poetry can go anywhere.

            Poetry is a literary form that can do anything it likes. It is not held back by any kind of rules or regulations. Poetry is a way of exploring this world and many others. In a way, poetry is like a garbage dump, collecting all the pieces that do not fit into prose. In this way, poetry, like Doctor Who, can do anything it wants. It can go anywhere in time or space, tell any story it wants (or none at all), it can save the world or simply look at it in awe. Poetry is anything and everything, dismissing hard-set rules for experimentation and purity, taking the images of life and laying them out for all to see.

Works Cited

Hejinian, Lyn. “A pause, a rose, something on paper.” My Life. Los Angeles, CA: Green Integer, 2002. 7-9. Print.

Hejinian, Lyn. Introduction. Lyn Hejinian and David Lehman, eds. The Best American Poetry 2004. Scribner, 2004. 9-14. Print.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Introduction. Yusef Komunyakaa and David Lehman, eds. The Best American Poetry 2003. New York: Scribner, 2003. 11-21. Print.

McDonald, Walter. “The Children of Saigon.” Against Forgetting. Ed. Forché, Carolyn. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993. 685-686. Print.

Waldrep, G.C. “Battery Rathbone-McIndoe.” Disclamor. New York, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007. 10-13. Print.