Shortly after the development of language, primordials would gather around the fire and tell tales. The more interesting ones might be preserved as stories, their characters and events saved for posterity. These fables, myths or sagas might be recounted differently each time. Thus:
Prose is information.
Ideally, it would be enjoyably presented information. Occasionally, someone would "nail it", recounting a narrative so perfectly that attendees would want to preserve it exactly as performed. This might include gestures and inflections but would, at the very least, require that the words not be changed. Thus:
Because of its cultural, entertainment, legal, religious (e.g. the verses of the Bible, Torah, Quran, etc.), and historical value, preliterate societies expended considerable resources memorizing poetry. One of humankind's first sciences was prosody: a collection of crowd-pleasing memory aids designed to ease the task of retention. Thus:
Prosody is mnemonics.
Because it needed to be memorized, poetry became more concise and featured more repetitions: phonemes (assonance, consonance, alliteration), syllables (rhyme), feet (rhythm), stich length (meter), words and phrases (anaphora, anadiplosis), whole lines (repetends), and stanzas (choruses).
Thus, [prose] stories are told. Poetry is recited. Also, "forgettable prose" isn't an oxymoron.
Imagine if a solar flare destroyed every page and every byte of data. Even without a phenomenal "photographic" memory, we could likely recreate most of the canonical poems and none of the classic prose.
Learning Poetry - 1. Definition (in three minutes)
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Poets. Readers can pick up a poem, enjoy it, toss it aside and never give poetry another thought until they encounter it again. They don't need to be told what they like and they don't need to be told what they should consider poetry, good or bad. In fact, readers should be telling us what poetry is. In a roundabout, filtered, slow, convoluted and arcane way (i.e. prosody), they do! Or, at least, they used to.
Only the magician needs to know how a trick is designed and performed. Similarly, poets--and judges, editors, critics and creative writing teachers--need a workable definition simply because they are on the supply side (including quality control). Imagine if you ordered a 6th Century European armourer to manufacture a gun, saying only that guns are things that kill people. What do you suppose the chances are of that craftsman producing anything that fires a bullet?
"Yes, but unlike the armourer, budding contemporary poets have seen a poem."
True, but those new poets have also seen a lot of things presented as poetry that, frankly, weren't. Thus, they're back at square one, all the more confused.
What, then, is poetry?
Definitions and evaluations of poetry fail due to a number of reasons, chief among them:
They confuse an application with a definition (e.g. "Poetry is a form of seduction");
They confuse the subset (e.g. metrical, formal, classical) with the whole (poetry);
They confuse quality (i.e. good versus bad) with identity (i.e. poetry or not);
They confuse the cause (poetry) with the (emotional, intellectual, informative or humorous) effect; or,
They confuse a mode (i.e. poetry versus prose) with a genre¹ (e.g. fiction, non-fiction, horror, romance, mystery, drama, humor, etc.), the vessel (poetry) with the cargo (content).
Because modes are independent of content, any statement that begins with "Poems must convey..." or "Poems must be about..." is demonstrably wrong. How many times must we hear a judge or critic saying "this poem is great because of [its subject, storyline or message]"?
Of course, many of the definitions that we'll encounter were never meant to be taken seriously; the commenter is merely posing for tourists. For example, this nonsense could describe anything from the Midnight Express to a hemmorhagic fever:
Boris Pasternak:
"Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild ..."
It is as if they are entrants in a contest to see who can produce the most ridiculous and useless "definition". If so, this would be my contribution:
"Poetry is a dagger to the heart, minus the dagger."
Nor does it get any better when these people try to define poets, as this leg-pull suggests:
e.e. cummings:
What is a Poet?
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn't. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel -- but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. and poetry is feeling -- not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people; but the moment you feel, you're NOBODY-BUT-YOURSELF.
Clearly, none of these definitions would help us write a single line of verse. Where else to look? Why, a dictionary, of course! How can we go wrong there?
Well...
Collins English Dictionary (2003):
poetry [NOUN] from Medieval Latin poetria, from Latin, poeta POET
1. literature in metrical form; verse; 2. the art or craft of writing verse; 3. poetic qualities, spirit, or feeling in anything; 4. anything resembling poetry in rhythm, beauty, etc.
Hmm. #1 and #2 ignore free verse while #3 and #4 involve poetry as a metaphor. How can we speak of "poetic qualities" or "resembling poetry" before we define poetry itself? Let's try a more aesthetically inclined source:
Merrian Webster's Encyclopaedia of Literature (1995):
poetry [Middle English poetrie, from Old French, from Medieval Latin poetria]
1. Metrical writing. 2. The production of a poet; poems. 3. Writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through its meaning, sound and rhythm.
#1 is the usual confusion of subset and whole. #2 is tautology. #3 comes close but fails by stating that all poems attempt to elicit an emotional response.
Flaubert Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880):
"I should rather be skinned alive than exploit my feelings in writing. I refuse to consider Art a drain-pipe for passion, a kind of chamberpot, a slightly more elegant substitute for gossip. No, no! Genuine poetry is not the scum of the heart."
In fact, many if not most poems in the 20th century have sought to provoke a decidedly intellectual response. Ballads often serve no other purpose than relating the facts of an event, like a news story. Is laughter an emotion?
At this point, many will fear that a definition of poetry is impossible. Think of all the conditions such a definition would have to satisfy, starting with:
It must be independent of culture and language;
It must be objective and verifiable, relying on identifiable and universal traits;
It must not amount to "prose with linebreaks" or "whatever the writer presents as poetry";
It must be acceptable to different significant audiences, present and past; and,
It must include all existing genres, from nursery rhymes and humor to epics and Shakespearean dramas.
So far, the best attempts to define poetry have focused on its components: rhythm(s), rhyme, sonics, deft use of grammatical constructs and rhetorical devices, original language, trope, etc. These are certainly improvements on Frost's synechdochical fallacy ("Poetry is metaphor") and they dismiss the legions of vendors hawking "poetry without poetry". The problem with this approach is that by not pinpointing poetry's most fundamental characteristic we miss the one unifying principle that accounts for the very existence of all these technical refinements. We'd like a more fundamental and succinct description, one that helps us identify what poetry was even before these techniques and devices were developed.
It's time for some good news: Not only can poetry be defined, it can be done so in one word! What is more, it is a definition that I believe everyone can accept.
Before getting to that, though, we need to take two side trips. First, we need to go to our local library and look up Aesop's Fables in a number of different sources. Note that the wording changes from one telling to another.
Second, we need to travel through time back to the advent of language itself. Standing around campfires, our cave-dwelling ancestors would have had two forms of entertainment: prose/storytelling versus poetry/song. What arbitrary distinction separated these two? The answer is as obvious and undeniable as the difference between "The Iliad" and Aesop's Fables.
Storytellers needed to get their facts straight but, beyond that, exact wording was unnecessary. Indeed, it may even have been incumbent on them to change the wording with each recounting. Five speakers could tell the same story and it might still be interesting due to these variations.
By contrast, poetry had to be presented word-for-word. If someone liked a particular rendering of a story so much that they memorized and repeated it, that became a poem². This, then, is poetry's definition, one that has not changed in the millennia since the dawn of language itself:
Poetry is verbatim.
Of course, others have said much the same thing:
W.S. Merwin: "Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you have lost the whole thing."
Oscar Wilde: "A poet can survive everything but a misprint."
Étienne "Stéphane" Mallarmé: "My dear Degas, poems are not made out of ideas. They're made out of words."
Yes, I know that it seems disappointingly slap-your-forehead obvious³ and simplistic, but there you have it. Radically revise the words, but not the facts, to a story and it remains intact; make wholesale changes to the words of a poem or song and you have a different work.
Let us not underestimate the profound impact this fact has even today, though. It goes well beyond our remarkable ability to recall song lyrics. We see the ramifications not only in our canon but in every poem published and in every slam, open microphone or recital ever held. If nothing else, it explains why some performers want to shoot themselves if they mess up even one word.
With the development of writing and, later, the Gutenberg press, prose seemed to have become a verbatim art form. After all, your copy of Timothy Findley's "Headhunter" is identical to mine. Nevertheless, we can finish the greatest novel of our time, not remember a single sentence of it and still consider it a classic. Even today, some people memorize Homer's epics but not Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" or Herman Melville's "Moby Dick". We can note how fiction outsells poetry 1,000 to 1 yet it is poetry that is quoted more often. What about the theatre? Scripts have to be memorized by performers but is the audience tempted to do so? What plays are quoted other than Shakespeare's dramatic poetry? Poetry will always remain the only verbatim art form where it matters: in the minds of performers and, more importantly, audience members.
The memorization of poems became a major cultural, historical and religious undertaking in preliterate societies. Prosody may be humankind's first science, predating even astronomy and the crudest medicines. Its raison d'être was to facilitate the memorization of poetry by measuring how easy it was for reciters to assimilate and for audience members to be impressed by the phrasing. Over the eons, whatever worked became technique or device; whatever didn't would be soon lost. Poetry, then, became what was memorizable for the reciters and memorable for the listeners. In short, poetry is what remained.
This retention wasn't left to chance. Memory aids were developed. Thus, if we don't mind going from the standard (i.e. verbatim) to the method we might say:
Prosody is mnemonics.
Of course, this is simply another view of:
Don Paterson: "A poem is just a little machine for remembering itself."
The tricks used in designing these "little machines" can be categorized in two words: concision and repetition. In the case of "minipoems" or "poemlets" (e.g. haiku, tanka, small aphoristic or imagistic pieces, slogans, etc.) compact size may be the only "mnemonic" required. There is no challenge in memorizing this:
Christmas Tsunami, 2004
Look! Starfish on treetops.
Some argue that this compression itself defines poetry.
Ezra Pound: "Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials."
The argument is that poetry is the most efficient use of language. Aside from ignoring all of the repetitions we see in poetry, the flaw in this position is that it isn't true--or at least it isn't exclusively so. Any imperative ("March!") or road sign ("1" on Highway #1, "55", "Stop") is at least as clear, concise and informative as any poemlet. So why is Basho a poet while the typical drill sargeant or sign writer isn't? The command or signage demands to be understood and, we hope, obeyed. A poem asks only to be remembered and, perhaps, quoted. Thus, what matters is not the language distillation itself but its purpose.
Short poems are by no means the only ones that practice concision; even epic poets demonstrate an economy of words. As poems get longer, though, we need to use more and more "pit stops" or repetitions. Everything is repeated, from phonemes (assonance, consonance, alliteration) up through syllables (rhyme), feet (rhythm), stich length (meter), words and phrases (anaphora, anadiplosis) to whole lines (repetends) and stanzas (choruses). To stretch a point, form can be viewed as one poem repeating others. While reciting a villanelle we know that Line #3 will rhyme with Line #1.
Stories are told. Only poetry is recited.
PoetryProse
GenreGenre - e.g. fiction, nonfiction, - e.g. fiction, nonfiction, romance, comedy, etc. romance, comedy, etc.
Type Metrical - e.g. trimeter, pentameter, etc. Nonmetrical - free verse - prose poetry - pre-prosodic
Form - formal - e.g. sonnets, ghazals, etc. - non-formal verse - meter/stanzas but no recognized form (e.g. sonnet) - open - e.g. free verse, prose poetry
Footnotes:
¹ - This is the basic error that Lewis Turco made in "The Book of Forms". Unlike a mode, a genre is defined by its content. For example, romantic fiction must be mushy and untrue; poetry or prose can be about anything.
² - We shouldn't overlook the fact that it was the audience, not the authors, editors, publishers or critics, who determined what was poetry. No audience? No poetry.
³ - Because we're trying to distinguish poetry from prose we won't get into the hybrid, "prose poetry", right now.
Learning Poetry - 1. Definition (in three minutes)
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Did you know that dolphins have vestigial limbs and fingers? It would seem that, at some point in their evolution, they crawled up onto land and experienced a few winters, forest fires, hurricanes and landslides before deciding:
"Screw this! We're crawling back into the ocean."
Who knows? Perhaps their collective mythology refers to a disastrous time of dry, as opposed to flooded, land.
Given that they have little more to do than eat, swim and chat, dolphins have developed vocal centers that are larger and more complex than those of humans, as is their overall brain size. Dolphins emit a signature whistle--a name assigned to them before they are a year old--to identify themselves. Just as some human societies are matrilineal, the name-sound of a male dolphin resembles its mother's more than its father's and more than those coming from a female dolphin (e.g. the sister/daughter). This suggests highly developed social and verbal skills--quite possibly higher than ours. If so, our scientists' efforts to learn their vocabulary might be like an infant from Beer Bottle Crossing, Idaho trying to learn Hungarian.
Bottlenose dolphin
Is it unreasonable to conclude that some dolphin communication might be poetry? Hardly. Indeed, their prosody may be so superior to ours that it makes our finest verse sound like Dr. Seuss or Charles Bukowski. Can we prove that dolphins create poetry, though?
Actually, yes, we can. Rather easily, in fact.
I assume you're familiar with the "Telephone" game, where we give a message to the first person in a queue, have them repeat it along the line and then compare the final person's version to the original.
Dusky dolphin
Try this. Then try it again, this time using a rhyming couplet. See how much closer that outcome is to the original than when the message was prose.
If you understand that, by definition, poetry is verbatim, the solution is obvious. Have a computer run file comparisons among those recordings of dolphin communication. If spectrograms uncover identical samples too long to be dismissed as phrasing (e.g. salutation, idiom, cliché, etc.) or messaging you have music and/or poetry. If there are words you have poetry (perhaps including one if its subsets, song lyrics).
The next time people tell you that a definition of poetry is useless, impractical or impossible, tell 'em about the dolphins.
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Densuke watermelon are darker and firmer than their North American counterparts. They grow only on Hokkaido island and can cost $6,100 each. If you owned a fine dining restaurant, would you put these on your menu?
Of course not. For one, there are only about 65 Densuke watermelon grown each season. Given the number of haute cuisine outlets worldwide, you'd be lucky to get even one of these per year. Why create a market you can't serve? Do you want to make this a spectacle of some sort? Will your diner enjoy eating it in front of so many gawkers? What will the rest of your clientele say about being passed over? Will people wonder what else is available but not on the menu? Might not such exotica make your normal à la carte items seem bland by comparison? Will your suppliers and guests wonder if you are "moving in another direction" (i.e. abandoning them)?
Clearly, life is simpler if you stick closer to home, doing what you do best for your customers. Why even bring up the subject of delights you can't provide? Let your menu speak for itself. No Densukes. Tell your staff that they should never bring such a delicacy into stock--not even as a surprise for a once-in-a-lifetime occasion. Some owners might adopt a more proactive Densuke Defence against such blips in quality, contacting distributors in Hokkaido and telling them that under no circumstances are they ever authorized to send their area's produce to their restaurant.
This analogy explains the Realpolitik of "the watermelon problem". It explains why the better funded poetry publishers are so editorially consistent, such that their output doesn't generally range from the awful to the great. Submission guidelines tell
authors to read existing issues with an eye toward contributing more of
same. MIMO: Mediocrity In, Mediocrity Out. Exceptional writers get the message: they must either reverse engineer their masterpieces¹ or find another venue. Not surprisingly, these print outlets have not mentioned, let alone published, the five greatest poems or the two greatest poets of our time. Given that no year since Shakespeare's retirement has produced even a handful of anthologized poems, there simply isn't enough supply to incorporate such treats. If academic readers and contributors are your bread-and-butter, why rock the boat by featuring something that crystallizes their inability to compete? In such a symbiotic relationship, why bite the hand you feed?
This comes before you are confronted with the central question: "Why can't all of the poetry you put out be this good?"
(Indeed, in an extreme case, an editor might go to a tiny milieu known for its poetic brilliancies--e.g. a third of 2013's AWP speakers, 4 of the top 5 critics' choice poems and all three of this century's best poets, the last 14 Nemerov winners, etc.--and announce a ban on all of its verse, along with that of any stranger who dares ask questions about the policy.)
Above all, this explains why, if you want examples of great poetry, you will need to go to smaller-budget, independent publishers. Bring your hip-waders; you'll need to trudge through a lot of sewage. To narrow your search, start with The HyperTexts and then look at some [mostly defunct] 'zines produced by knowledgeable editors: Lucid Rhythms, Autumn Sky, Shit Creek Review, The Chimaera and The Flea.
Good hunting!
Peter John Ross
Footnotes:
¹ - Ain't gonna happen.
The issue isn't "artistic integrity" or some such nonsense. It is exceedingly difficult for a stellar poet to unlearn everything they know, ignore every aesthetic instinct and resist every temptation to infuse some element of art into what they are writing. No doubt you've read the story of Usenetter Peter John Ross valiantly attempting to write as badly as Billy Collins. After 20 minutes he gave up, having authored a villanelle which, by all objective measurements, was better than anything BC has ever produced.
Mathematicians will tell you that theirs is a universal language but, trust me, anything more complex than the simplest arithmetic is well beyond most capacities to comprehend. Especially mine.
This is the difference between "universal" and "cross-cultural".
In fact, music is the only truly universal language. There is no better example of this than Jean Michel Jarre's 1976 classic instrumental recounting of the history of oxygen (along with Earth and life on it), "Oxygène". The fact that even squirrels can understand this storyline illustrates how widespread music appreciation can be and how limiting language is.
By contrast, we have Robert Frost telling us that "poetry is what is lost in translation." This is cross-cultural. For example, this couplet by Erica the Red is iconic and considered profound among squirrels:
The world loves most whom dawn finds first.
...but barely makes sense once translated into any human language. It is like the story of the expression "out of sight, out of mind" being translated into Russian and back into English as "invisible idiot".
Since Frost's death half a century ago things have gotten significantly worse within the anglophone world, where only a tiny fraction know the rudiments of English verse. This makes it arcane--the polar opposite of universal. Oh, and let's not even get started on "accessibility" issues!
Once music [on the radio] supplanted poetry in the 1920s the question became: "How can something almost no one understands compete with something everyone does?"
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Previously, we've talked about technicians/geeks, jobseekers, performers, poets, editors, publishers, critics and "the public" (i.e. everyone else). Two groups we haven't examined are audiences and hipsters. This is because, unfortunately, the former don't exist and the latter do.
For our purposes, a hipster is defined as a pseudo-sophisticate. These range from the pseudo-intellectual jabbering on endlessly and exclusively about empty, content-based "-isms" (e.g. ideationism, conceptualism, etc.) to the gadfly who knows how to enter the poetry world but not what to do once there. If nothing else, these parrots serve to remind us of a fundamental principle of hypermodernism: what is fashionable can never be original.
From the gabby to the groupie, no hipster will self-identify as such. One can always find a bevy of them barnacling themselves to the nearest critic, editor or publisher. They are almost as numerous as cockroaches and every bit as welcome. The only thing sadder than a young hipster is an old one. Indeed, it seems their main function in our society's fabric is that of pity-point:
"I may be jobless, homeless and 6 digits in debt paying for a degree that doesn't even get me into Hamburger University but, hey, at least I'm not a hipster!"
Contrary to popular misconception, hipsters come in both genders. Or neither. Whatever. At least it isn't hard to distinguish them from their professional counterparts: careerists want to get paid while hipsters want to get laid. Similarly, the difference between hipsters and hucksters is that the latter occasionally succeed.
Never lacking in confidence, all of these wannabes believe they live in a dark age, their prodigious genius unrecognized. They can be spotted at open mics and slams, trying to leverage sparse talent into boisterous applause. You've seen them laugh at random moments during poetry readings, hoping you will assume they have caught a humorous nuance you missed. Contrary to popular misconception, a hipster does cast a reflection in the mirror, leaving us to wonder why they dress the way they do. Because their imagination begins and ends with the delusion that they have any imagination, hipsters will often scour journals looking for ideas to borrow and trends to overanalyze. That brings us to a sobering realization:
Hipsters may be the closest thing to an audience that poetry has.
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As you may know, there are five types of poetry, distinguished by what tools are or are not employed to make them memorable:
1. Metrical - Sonics (e.g. alliteration, consonance, assonance, hard versus soft and/or long versus short sounds), rhythms and, most importantly, the quantification of something (e.g. alliterations, feet, beats, syllables, etc.). Meter dominates commercial poetry but is far less common in poetry books and 'zines.
2. Free Verse - Sonics and rhythms without quantification. After brief successes with monorhythms in the 1920s and polyrhythms in the 1930s, free verse soon gave way to arhythmic variations. Today, less cautious speakers refer to all non-metrical poetry synecdochically as "free verse". In truth, very little contemporary poetry qualifies.
3. Prose Poetry - Sonics, but neither rhythm nor quantification. Given that, as far as we know, ancient languages were not accented, the earliest poetry could not have been rhythmic as we anglophones define the term, at least.
4. Pre-Prosodic Poetry - None of the above (i.e. no repetitions of sounds, rhythms or quantifications) but a basic level of congruity. Prose, absent any vestige of poetic technique or form. A cursory glance at most poetry being published today establishes this as the dominant form--as it was before mnemonics were developed to commit verses to memory. Hey, we've come full circle!
5. Computer Generated Poetry - Randomly generated text,¹ lacking not only sonics, rhythms and quantification but coherent design as well. Many will disregard Computer Generated Poetry because of its silliness but note how difficult it is to distinguish this inchoate writing from the Pre-Prosodic Poetry in the "bot or not" Turing Test.
Computer Generated Poetry isn't remarkable because it can speed up the "100 monkeys with 100 typewriters trying to produce Shakespeare" process from 100 years to less than 100 nanoseconds. It isn't noteworthy because it can inspire human poets to produce masterpieces or because no less than two of the five greatest poems of this century were flukes. No. It is significant because, in the absence of a market, this emulation is the closest facsimile of how poetry came into being originally. Consider the similarities:
You hit a button and the computer produces some text offerings. You consign most to oblivion by ignoring them. No quota is implied. When you see something you like you deem it a poem and you save² it.
Were you a prehistoric cave dweller, you would hear dozens of stories and consign most to oblivion by ignoring them. No quota is implied. Were you to see something you like you'd deem it a poem and save² it [in memory].³
² - As in saving it for future use and as in saving it from oblivion.
³ - By contrast, a modern editor would read thousands of submissions deemed as poems by their authors, pick the best [or least awful] of the lot and, having gathered enough pieces to form a book or periodical, publish them. Rejected pieces might be saved [by their authors, at least].
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