Poetry in Three Minutes

      This is a quick and dirty introduction to poetry basics.  A slightly more comprehensive approach is "What You Need To Know About Poetry".

      You may want to pause the video in places and review each one a few times.

      By clicking on the titles ("Definition", "Basic Scansion", "Sonics", "Performing") you can read the underlying articles for each topic.

       If you have questions please feel free to post them below.

Learning Poetry - 1. Definition

     The first three minute video establishes the one word definition for poetry, regardless of epoch, culture, language, theme, genre, or form.

Learning Poetry - 2. Basic Scansion

 

      Here, one is introduced to the elements of meter.

 Learning Poetry - 3. Sonics

 

      At the root of poetry is sound.

Learning Poetry - 4. Performing

 

      The whole point of this mode of speech is performance.

 

Learning Poetry - 5:  Free Verse

       Free verse (not to be confused with prose poetry or prose qua poetry) and its niche.

Learning Poetry - 6. Rhyme

     The repetition of sounds in related positions.

 


      We hope you enjoy this series and find it helpful.

Earl Gray, Esquirrel

 

 

Contexts

Law of Poetry #72

     Even when English language poetry was alive it benefited from context.  Shakespeare used plays not to change the English language, which he certainly accomplished, but to attract and entertain an audience.  Contemporary dramatic poetry isn't "a thing" but there are other ways one can find listeners.  In order of current and potential success these would include:

1. Song Lyrics

2. Humor/Parody

3. Narrational Poetry

4. Embedded Poetry

5. Occasional Poetry

Law of Poetry #171

     If you have social media accounts, ask yourself:  "How often have I Shared [on Facebook] or Retweeted [on Twitter] a stranger's contemporary poem with my [non-poet] friends?"  Other than songs and jokes, that is.

     We asked readers in four different active forums--novice, expert, blog, and social media--to imagine a serious poem (not song) that they might pass on to friends.  No response.  Not only could people not write an interesting poem, they couldn't even imagine one.  This is to say that not only is English language poetry dead, but we can't envision it being alive.  (N.B.:  In non-anglophone demographics people cannot fathom a society where poetry is dead, a country where few can recite a stanza written this century.)

Law of Poetry #141

     Just as it is failed artisans who blame their tools, only failed poets will blame their audience.  It is especially absurd when that audience doesn't exist.  If poetry is to revive, there needs to be well crafted verses of interest.  More than that, though, it needs to overcome the negative stereotype of what Leonard Cohen called "other forms of poetry advertised as poetry":  artless ranters, corazoners, linebreakers, cryptocrappers, et cetera.

     Novelists, playwrights, and journalists do not present their work as "prose".  Similarly, poets need to categorize their work by genre (e.g. comedy, drama, news, political commentary, romance, sports, horror, etc.), not mode of speech (i.e. prose versus poetry).

     In the coming days we hope to address ways to use context to attract--or at least to not alienate--an audience.

What about readership?

   Poetry is a mode of speech, predating the advent of writing by millennia.  People read poems with a view toward quoting, if not performing, them--in their imaginations, at the very least.  Listening and reading were a chicken-and-egg scenario, but in this case hearing came first, anthropologically at the macrocosmic level and chronologically in microcosm.  Reading a poem allowed us to, among other things, examine why it worked so well when we heard it.

    Put simply, if there is no audience, how can their be a readership?  Why would anyone want to study failure?

Timely Versus Timeless

Earl Gray's 153rd Law

     Most poets keep their art and their politics separate.  We have different blogs for each.  Recently, a critic demanded to know why we pursue pressing issues in prose but not in poetry.  It's a fair question, at least until we consider the difference between those two modes of communication.  One spreads out in two dimensions, going viral as it spreads from one venue to the next.  The other spreads in four dimensions, as it ascends into listener's memory and is carried verbatim into the future.

     Without degrading professional standards we can write a news article in the morning, post it, and see it picked up by social or print media immediately.  It is part of that 24- or 36-hour news cycle.  

     Prose is timely.  You can get up the next morning and start all over.

Earl Gray's 42nd Law.

     To write a poem worthy of the name may take, on average, a month.  Find le mot juste, satisfying demands of sound, sense, cadence and form.  Performing it may require weeks of additional practice and film editing before uploading it to, say, YouTube.  Once presented, it needs to build an audience, one who can quote it on appropriate occasions.  Were poetry alive, this may take another month.  Given current reality, it may take a generation or more before enough listeners can inspire enough other listeners to hear and absorb your verses.  Once they do, you will have a demographic affected by your words, one that might pass them on to future generations.

     In any event, a poem about the current state of public affairs won't have an impact until well after the next election, if ever.  If it does, though, it can cease and go on preventing inequities forever.

     Poetry is timeless, even though its effect might not begin until long after your final sunrise.