The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: poetry

  • Rhyme for a Reason

    I am the first to admit that as an appreciator of art, I am bone lazy. I like my paintings and sculptures pretty, my music melodic, my novels to have plots and sympathetic characters, and my poetry to rhyme.

    Yeah, the nerve of me!

    Each weekday morning I drift into consciousness to Garrison Kiellor’s Writer’s Almanac on NPR. Each morning he reads a poem by a contemporary author. None of them rhyme. What is up with that?

    I’ve been told that rhyme and rhythm are for children and song lyrics. As if Kipling wasn’t writing drinking songs? As if “Banjo” Patterson got his name because nobody in the outback could spell Benjamin? As if Robert Service wasn’t whooping it up to the strains of a ragtime piano himself?

    Poetry was once written to be memorized, recited, spoken aloud, listened to. This was how people entertained themselves and one another while riding the rails as hobos, while crouched over a campfire in the back of beyond, in the officers’ mess of a remote outpost, between decks as the ship pitched in the swells.

    The Iliad, when recited in ancient Greek, scans and rhymes. So do the Canterbury Tales, if you happen to be familiar with middle English. Rhyme and meter are primal. How did we lose them?

    I ran across a great line in a book I read last week. The author was remembering a conversation he had with a college English professor. The professor said that in Dickens’ time great literature was written to appeal to an audience of millions, but today great literature is written to appeal to a few hundred. I say that if only a few hundred get your stuff, you’re doing it wrong.

    Screw artistic pretentiousness— give me something I’ll enjoy.

  • Poetry in literal motion

    In college, I took a class on writing poetry—I needed another creative writing course to graduate, and this was the only one I didn’t have credit for already that was offered that semester—and it only served as confirmation about something I already knew. Poetry and I don’t get along. The final for that class was to describe who we were as a poet, and I believe I summed it up best by saying: “I am a reluctant poet.”

    It’s not that I believe poetry is a lesser art form, it’s just that it doesn’t click with me. I like things straightforward most of the time. If I read a poem about a dandelion, to me it will be about a dandelion—not the intangibility of life.

    I spent an entire semester writing poetry and having far more meaning read into it than I’d intended to put there. My usual response to “What were you feeling when you wrote this poem?” was “That it was due in less than an hour and I still hadn’t started it.” (more…)

  • On the Mixture of Forms

    I envy poets.

    I don’t “get” poetry, and honestly — I don’t go out of my way to read it. It doesn’t resonate with me as a reader, and I absolutely cannot wrap my mind around it as a writer. I wrote poetry as a teenager (please, feel free to laugh) and it was awful. I’m not just being self-deprecating here. There was no rhyme, reason, or rhythm to the poetry I wrote — it was just a sixteen-year-old girl ranting with arbitrary line breaks.

    The thing is, the poets I know who also write prose have some of the most gorgeous, intelligent prose that I’ve ever read. I imagine it has something to do with the form: that whole rhyme and rhythm thing. I feel like when a poet sits down to tell a story, they’re still bring that poet’s sensibility to the way they present their words. And the end result is something that makes me utterly green with envy.

    (Obviously, I’m generalizing a bit — I’ve known poets who had some trouble getting their thoughts out using prose.)

    I’m frequently told, “Oh, you should try it; it’ll inform your writing.” I firmly believe that. A form that requires you to use every word for the maximum amount of feeling? That encourages multiple meanings? That provides multiple forms, from the old school to the mathematical? As a writer, I can’t see a downside.

    It doesn’t stop me from being daunted. The very idea of poetry ties my stomach in knots. It feels like I’m expected to scale a wall without any safety equipment. It strips all the things I feel comfortable with in my writing — characters and dialogue and setting — and instead demands the introspective of me. I could write poetry as a character, sure; I could tell a story instead of reflecting on my feelings. (I have a friend who does both these things, and well.)

    I am a person with a lot of feelings, but the starkness of feeling that (I feel) poetry requires is a bit much for me.

  • Other Nasty Habits

    Ooooooooh, poetry. Yeah.

     

     

     

     

    Sigh.

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  • No Longer a Poet: A Cautionary Tale

    When I was about seven or eight, I fell in love with poetry.

    I don’t quite remember how it happened, but one day I started begging my parents for books of poetry in much the same way that other girls beg for Malibu Stacy dolls. My dad was happy to help find the poetry book he grew up on:  Best Loved Poems of the American People, a Readers’ Digest treasury.

    Anyway, shortly after reading all the way through that, I began my own first poetic efforts, typing out a rhyming line at a time on an old electric typewriter. Those early creations meditated on the seasons, and on jump roping–topics near and dear to my third grade heart.

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  • What Rhymes with Poetry?

    I’m too literal for poetry. I have a cautious appreciation for those who enjoy it and can do it well, but I tend to like more story-like poems like Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” or my personal favorite, the book Zombie Haiku by Ryan Mecum.

    I respect writers of poetry, even if I don’t understand half of what they’re saying. I appreciate a well-crafted sentence as much as the next writer, but when I’m writing, I focus less on the art of the words and focus more on the art of the storytelling.

    That’s not to say I haven’t written an unfortunate poem from time to time. I have taken a couple of poetry classes and produced some clever stanzas in my day, but I’ve also written a fair amount of emotional drivel.

    My best experience with poetry was probably when we were studying Shakespeare’s sonnets in my Shakespeare class in college. I found myself strangely moved by his iambic pentameter. Moved enough that I composed my own sonnet. I had thought at the time I’d write a whole series of them, and number them like he did, but I never got past that first one.

    Still, I think it’s an impressive piece of work and I had fun doing it. Not to mention, it’s about the only time I haven’t minded poetry that rhymes. I feel that rhymed poetry sounds too much like a nursery rhyme or children’s song.

    Most of my poetry is really just prose that most people would consider literature. Which is fun to do now and then, but I rarely share it when I write it. It leaves me feeling a bit exposed, for some reason.

    For me, prose is a much better medium. When I tell a story, I don’t want my words to get in the way. I want my writing to be perfectly clear so that by the time readers finish reading my story, they haven’t thought about my words once.

  • That Poetry Beat

    Poetry isn’t for everyone. I love poetry for how it makes me feel, the same way some people feel about opera or ballet. But it wasn’t always that way.

    Howl by Allen GinsbergI came to the poetry scene late in my academic career. Like so many kids my age, I thought poetry was either something written a long time ago (before they had books) or something in a greeting card.

    I was taking an undergraduate literature course in college when the professor gave a lecture on poetry. She was discussing iambic pentameter and emphasizing — over-emphasizing, really — the beats in each line. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.

    Then, pow! Like a code-breaker cracking an enemy cypher, I had this wonderful understanding. I not only heard the meter to poetry, I felt it, deep inside me. It made sense. It had order. Poetry had previously been a closed door to me, but I had been given a key to unlock it.

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  • Words Matter

    I don’t usually do this, but I thought I’d let you all peek behind the curtain this week.  Maybe give you a little taste of my initial thoughts when I found out I’d be writing about poetry. Okay, kids. Buckle up, here we go:

    “I got nothin’.”

    That pretty much summed up my initial draft.

    Now for all of you out there who are ready to take up your collected works of Walt Whitman or Carl Sandburg and drive me into the forest night, I ask for just a few more moments of your time. I have mad respect for poetry. I love its economy of words, the rhythm of phrasing, and the demands of form that rival even journalism in its need for precision. If you’re wading into the lyrical waters of poetry, you better have a talent for word choice and understand exactly what you want to say and how to say it.

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  • Poetic License

    “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” – Paul Valery

    I have a lot of respect for poets. I wish I could do what they do. My great-great-great grandfather was a poet. He wrote some of it as an underage kid fighting in the Civil War. I have a great admiration for the things he wrote, especially considering his writing environment. I’ve always felt a common artistic bond with him.

    A lot of people who read my writing assume that I must also write poetry. I have a pretty literary style and like to work with sounds and syllables. Unfortunately, I’ve never learned to write it, though I do jokingly call myself a warrior-poet.

    Poetry has rules, oddly complex ones that require the bending of words into works of art. I wouldn’t even know where to start.

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  • A Poem is Red, the Verses Are Blue (Week Ending June 23)

    When readers think of favorite books, most would probably choose a favorite literary genre, or maybe a non-fiction book like a biography or memoir. A few theatre-minded types might pick their favorite dramatis personae in a play. But these days, the general populace of readers don’t think about that other flavor of writing. We’re talking about the yin to prose’s yang: poetry.

    Despite what your English teachers may have drilled into you in school, poetry is not something that stopped being written in the 1800s. Poetry is alive and well and lives on today in new forms and with new voices. So we decided to ask our writers here at the cafe whether or not they have dabbled in verse, and what they think about it in general.

    So, what about you, dear reader? Are you in love with lyrical alliteration? Do you find yourself dreaming in iambic pentameter? Give us your thoughts and comments below!

    Until Next Week,

    The Cafe Management