Lately though, I've been writing, and thinking a lot, about poetry. Poetry is something that I grew up with, but not in any major way. When I was home-schooled in third grade, my mom taught me about poetry and made me memorize some poems. I was into the normal boy stuff, I memorized some poems about the Civil War and shorter ones by Edgar Allen Poe. In high school, with everyone else who took American Lit., I learned about various aspects of poetry; rhyme and meter and whatnot. Throughout high school and college (thus far), I have been stricken --from time to time-- with random sparks of verse, only ever a fragment of a poem. If the mood is right, I sit down and try to push it out. Sometimes (again, if the mood is really) right, a satisfying poem will emerge. Many times though, I'm stuck with one or two lines clever phrasing and crap around it.
In this past semester of school, I've been thinking a lot harder about poetry. I joined an online poetry critique "forum" (in the Roman sense). The crowd there are quite strange. Many seem to be middle aged (although anonymity is a selling point of the website, apparently, so it's hard to tell much about any of them). Some are assholes, belittling people trying to get honest feedback, some are people giving honest feedback in the harshest words imaginable, and some are nice old mothers, shocked at some of the disturbing poetry that the online community contributes. In the middle of it, I'm trying to find my voice. After having written lots of groups of lines, some with particular rhyme, some only with emotional spewing, I still don't know what a poem actually is. What makes something a poem, rather than a couple of sentences? Sometimes it's obvious, but sometimes it's not. For example:
1 Is this a
2 poem, just because
3 I spread it over
4 a couple of lines?
5 Or are these sentences
6 that happen to rhyme?
7 I don't know. I
8 hope this isn't a poem.
But compare that with this, who any scholar of poetry would try his best to argue is a poem:
1 seeker of truth
2 follow no path
3 all paths lead where
4 truth is here
2 follow no path
3 all paths lead where
4 truth is here
What is the difference here? This has been what's puzzling me for the past couple of months. What separates my non-poem from E. E. Cummings' Seeker of Truth? As a student of semantics, this is particularly interesting for me. I've spent the past three or so years diving into a theory that I had no idea existed four years ago. The theory's central tenet of belief is that of compositionality: the meaning of a sentence is composed of the meanings of its individual parts. I think it's an extremely cool question: how do we understand that other people mean, with only the words they use, in the order they use them? If you believe that I've spent three years making sense of the idea (and trying to make it work), and that others have been doing so for thousands of years (e.g. Socrates dabbled in semantics), you'll also believe that's it's not an easy question to answer. But we only study normal sentences and discourse (a few sentences in a row). If I told my advisor that I wanted to do a paper on poetry, he'd probably slap me.
But why? What makes a poem special? Why can't we describe it in our theory of semantics? One thing that I believe to be true about poems is that often their meaning --the message they carry-- is much more than just the meaning of its parts. Poems seem to elicit stronger emotions than every day speech. In fact, I imagine that you wont be moved at all after reading this blog post (except by the E. E. Cummings poem, maybe). A poet (which I wouldn't dare call myself) has the gift to bring up these emotions by choosing only certain, very specific, perhaps the only right word for the situation, and then find other words that work with this word in a unique way. Rhyming must elicit some pleasant emotion, and so must a rhythmic meter. Its how you say a poem that makes it good. Still though, we're humans and poems are the output of some linguistic mechanism anyways. An effective poem must be recognizable by a native speaker, and that reader of the poem has to connect the particular words to particular meanings, and combine those meanings in a particular way. The same (adult) reader could probably tell the difference between a poem and a non-poem, and this begs the question: how?
I think if someone knew, we'd have a theory of poetry as developed as semantics which is hardly developed at all, but at least it's a start. If we had a theory, anyone could be a poet, assuming they learned how to apply the theory correctly. But when human emotions are in play, there's a lot of variables that we don't yet know much about. I think poetry is an interesting place to start.
1 comment:
Intriguing post...It definitely has me thinking, but I would have to muse on it for sometime to be able to share any good thoughts. Don't worry too much about what to write or having something interesting to say. That is what keeps me from writing more I worry too much about other people. Just let yourself be and don't censor yourself.
A true artist has no audience.
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