Just my 2 cents: I think a lot of the reason why we feel we need to “get” poetry in the first place comes from our education system. When poetry is taught in the classroom, it is always done so under the guise of there being some hidden meaning that, if you are unable to discover, makes reading the poem feel utterly useless.
Fast forward to my university and I was taught something completely different in a creative writing course — poetry is about play. It isn’t about having to inspire some deep meaning. Sometimes it can just be fun to mess around with words in a way that sounds pleasing. As others have mentioned, there’s also this notion pushed in our youth that poetry has to have perfect rhyme, or follow some scheme; but as soon as you realize that isn’t the case, combined with the fact you don’t have to be searching for some obfuscated truth within poems, you start to realize poetry has been marketed as something much different than what it really is.
That’s not to say you can’t search for deep meaning in a poem, or attempt to write something meaningful into one - but really, poetry is about play, and it should be as serious as you want it to be. For me, that realization made me “get” poetry more than I did back in my high school days.
"Introduction to Poetry"
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
You're absolutely right. Poets play with words, sounds, and ideas. And extracting the meaning shouldn't be your first aim - perhaps it should be enjoying the sound and the cadence and the imagery.
Consider the first stanza of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale:
A few things that you'll probably pick up with no effort at all:
1) the puzzlement of what "Lethe" is or what it even means
2) the joke of calling your mouth a "drain"
3) the cleverness of "being too happy in thine happiness"
4) the way the long third sentence keeps going and going, ending in the release of singing, just like a bird flies, sits on a branch, and sings "with full-throated ease"
At a first read, the poem is delightful to me just because it speaks of the happiness of a bird and the unhappiness of being human. The musicality is so lovely I want to memorize it, and bring it out whenever I see a bird or want to sing like one or fly like one.
And then you can read the reams of analysis people have drawn from this poem.
Edit: He also likes to play around with lipograms and similar constrained writing techniques, check out “Eunoia” if you are into that: https://youtu.be/zhQjfr8b9Wg?t=39
> As others have mentioned, there’s also this notion pushed in our youth that poetry has to have perfect rhyme, or follow some scheme....
This is an idea that actually makes more sense in the context of poetry as play. Schemes and poetic forms are just rules you could play by, and it’s usually more fun to play by some set of rules.
This is absolutely correct, and figuring it out is what allowed me to start enjoying literature in my 20s, after hating books in school and even university due to exactly this style of teaching.
Play is so important. My own 2c is (simply) that the further prose moves from spoken word / technical detail, the closer it gets to unrestrained abstract imagination.
Everybody is constantly translating the world into brain signals, and then translating it back again to words. And some of those translations are more visceral than others, and follow natural and playful routes to reality.
Add to it overly lyrical poems that basically have nothing interesting in them for young people (or even me). Even if there is story, it is hidden behind flowery language that feels artifical. And the whole result is just drag.
I was well into adulthood when I found out that poems can be actually made fun and pleasant.
A good way in for the common HN reader is to start by considering that an obviously true thing could be false. Like, take the obviously true statement, "Courtroom judges are simply inept programmers who don't understand LISP." Now imagine it were false.
From there, wrong warp through all the consequences of that false conclusion. E.g., when a story on HN appears about a court ruling, don't do the right thing of immediately writing a screed from first principles about what the wrong LISP programmer should have ruled. Just sit there, looking at your hands, imagining them to be the hands of a judge in a far off land who, like you, also has hands, but somehow, some way, they are different hands than the ones you're looking at.
After seven years of this you'll begin to smell odors that remind you of the impetuousness of youth, and see scenes of lovers laughing as you stare longingly at words scrawled into a park bench.
Only then is it time to open a book of poetry and begin reading.
There's probably also some good poetry subreddits where you can get started.
I think a lot of the enthusiasm for poetry has been sapped by the availability of music. Poetry, at least in its initial incarnations, was a mnemonic for memorizing. Classically, poetry was often chanted or sung, but even without that help, it is easier to remember then prose. The article talks about the "music of poetry" but only in metaphorical terms rather than literal.
Now the advent of recorded music means that all of that has been moved to music instead. People used to dream of having a bunch of poetry memorized -- if you were stuck on an island you could always recite Wordsworth to entertain yourself. Now you'd just hum or sing whatever music strikes your fancy instead.
I have personally found myself slightly more able to "get" poetry when I force myself to memorize it -- to me that really lets you appreciate the lyrical nature of good poetry and the use of metaphor and shorthand, which both arose from a necessity of fitting some rhythmic or rhyming scheme, but took on a life of their own.
I'd go a bit further and say that song lyrics are poetry in its most populist and accessible form. The distinction is artificial.
Of course there's a very wide range of quality, but lyrics written by the best songwriters are also much better as poetry than the vast majority of what gets produced by ivory tower poets who consider themselves above all that. The gatekeeping, obscurantist mindset that has taken over in contemporary poetry is really unfortunate. You won't be taken seriously as a 'real' poet unless your work is completely impenetrable to the average person.
> The gatekeeping, obscurantist mindset that has taken over in contemporary poetry
North America and the UK are now at least two decades into trends like slam poetry being ascendant, i.e. poetry that emphasizes being accessible to the public, tackling real-world hardships and political struggles, etc. The publishing decisions of major poetry presses like Faber & Faber are now largely centered around that.
Sure, there are still more hermetic or ivory-tower poets around but the heyday of their influence was only up to about the 1980s or 1990s. Nowadays they are mainly publishing in small-press editions that few people will even see copies of (especially due to the death of the bookstore), let alone read.
I would agree with the music. Which is unfortunate because music doesn't tend to encompass all the different forms that poetry possesses, and both have their place. But, on some level, they both explore condensed use of metaphor/rhyme/etc to create powerful emotional effects in the audience, so they share a lot of similarities.
For me, learning to write poetry and explore has been great, although funny enough one of the best books to help me with the writing of poetry was Writing Better Lyrics by Pattison, as his advice helps a great deal with poetry (with the above caveat about forms still holding true).
Can it? Sure. But so far I've never heard of say a Sestina being made into a song (at least in modern times). Would such forms fit when tied to melody? I have no clue.
The author suggests that knowing poetry's rules, and the history of how poets have broken those rules, can help people "get" poetry. I'm skeptical that cerebral understanding alone can help much. On the rare occasion that I've "gotten" a poem, it never happened through reason. If I tried analyzing while reading it I don't think the getting could have happened at all.
As stated I don't get many poems, but I feel that cultivating the ability to get them probably has something to do with: 1) awareness of your own emotional state in the present moment; it's the needed reference point to connect with the poet's state at time of writing 2) awareness of your accumulated life experience -- it's the material you reference to make sense of the poem 3) sensitivity to the sounds & rhythms of words 4) a broad perspective on life that includes awareness of its ultimate frame -- death; Spanish poet Lorca wrote about a creative force called 'duende' that arises from experience of the darker side of life; I think such experience may also give rise to a receptiveness to and appreciation of the more significant things conveyed in poetry and other arts 5) desire and ability to connect content of a poem to other things, be they other poems, history, the poet's personal history or whatever; poems are not islands, they have contexts, and your moment of reading one also has a context consisting of your personal intellectual history and current mental and emotional state, among other things.
Cerebral understanding can help carry you further inside how a poem works, and increase your enjoyment of it. It's a lot like the scientist who asks in wonder "Why does it do that?"
But you first start with the sense of wonder coming to you unaided, and the author makes a mistake in assuming that. You're absolute right that you can't think your way into that sense of wonder.
There are poems that inspire it, though they vary from person to person. And it will change through your life. If you feel it, you can be like a scientist, and study it, increasing the feeling for yourself without losing that sense of wonder.
It may increase your taste for the more exotic and abstruse, but the author makes a mistake that those exotic ones are better and more meritorious. The more exotic they are, the more personal the appeal will be. It really sucks that some people get to be elites and tell you which ones are the good ones -- and then they get to write the textbooks.
This being HN... where are the poets writing about Silicon Valley, about rationalism meetups, about starting one day too late for the IPO, about the feeling of finally debugging something that's been a recurring problem since before you started with the company... ?
You might have to accept allegorical instead of literal association—most often anyway (that's the case in any subject).
If you break what you're asking down into lower principles or themes, then poets have been writing about that throughout all of human history.
If you want to see beauty in the mundane, the raw heart of a person experience life as it comes to them, or illustrations of a soul battered by the torrent of the world around it, (which seems to me like what you've described) then you have an immense amount of artwork to draw on, and I'll name three of my favourites: Al Purdy, Milton Acorn, David McFadden.
You will be forced to associate with the writers on those themes in manners outside of the superficial aspects of your daily life, but that's more or less at the core of all art.
I've finally finished,
Go to Hacker News and put up a post
But that shit had zero upvotes
Somebody left a comment
Telling me my home page ain't responsive
> This being HN... where are the poets writing about Silicon Valley
See Vikram Seth's 1986 novel in verse The Golden Gate [0], which mentions a Silicon Valley in its relatively early years and even drops the terms RAM and ROM in the first lines.
Stanislaw Lem wrote a poem about computers within The Cyberiad. [1]
Gauloises
Smoke
Algorithms
a different type of thinking
Tonight mechanics of language ring
like bells or machinery
Or lust
after longing
Circuits cut on paper
Writ on paper
Walls of paper
carefully positioned
Nights and nights
Missing it missing you missing.
Time to close to end it
and/or just hit Enter
Smoke
Algorithms
Cigarettes
Return
Getting a good text book like Cleanth Brookes/Robert Penn Warren "Understanding Poetry" would be the way I suggest to get into reading poetry.
Also getting a good anthology like Palgrave's or Anthony QuillerCouch, that covers a lot of poems and poets from different eras in small portable hand book format.
Personally the most enjoyment I get out of poetry is when I seen words and phrases that leap out to you in a surge of meaning and emotion.
Like for example, these fragments:
"Do more bewitch me than when art,
is too precise in every part."
"A box where sweets compacted lie,"
"Thus, though we cannot make our sun,Stand still,
yet we will make him run."
"Two paradises 'twere in one,
To live in Paradise alone."
"O Grave! Where is thy victory?
O death! Where is thy sting?"
"There is a Book by seraphs writ with beams of heavenly light"
"And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing."
Why did poetry die? Because it migrated away from rhyming metrical poems that sound good (eg William Blake, Robert Frost) to basically abstract prose with carriage returns. However demand for the good stuff did not vanish, it’s now just satisfied by pop music, with the academic poets publishing in irrelevant chapbooks.
Same exact thing happened with classical music. Stuff like Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Debussy, Tchaikovsky... the stuff sounds good. That might be obvious... but nowadays sounding good is extremely passé and if you write stuff that sounds good you will never get tenure as a composition professor. But people still want orchestral music that sounds good, so the people get what they want in film music like John Williams, Hans Zimmer, and Howard Shore.
I grew up thinking "poetry" was synonymous with "perfect rhyme scheme" and was thus disappointed and disliked all poetry that didn't have a rhythm. It felt lazy and pretentious. It felt like people pointing at a pile of sticks randomly thrown on the ground and calling it "carefully arranged artwork" (complete miscategorization, and abuse of the word "poetry").
Now that I'm older, I think I overcame my narrow definition of poetry, and now just accept that just like in art, there are numerous styles, and it's OK not to like many of them. I like Poe's raven a lot. I don't get anything out of most poetry. I like haikus.
Just like romantic movies, there is nothing to "get" - for some people those movies don't do anything. It's not a deficiency.
I believe poetry was the default way to write texts in ancient times because texts were spread by mouth, not by transcribing it. There was no printing press and it was costly.
I'm no expert on this by any means, but songs which rhyme seem to me to be closer to what was once considered a poetry than what we call a poetry nowadays.
Modern poetry looks like that modern art where someone splashes a bucket of color on canvas and if you don't understand it, you're just a dumbass pleb without artistic feeling.
Modern art is subjective, only few will understand it (which I still doubt, it's more like a fraud to confuse the tax man about real value). Traditional art was objective as it aimed to be appreciated by many.
I still consider poetry to be a rhythmic text, otherwise it is just a bucket of words spilled on a paper.
> songs which rhyme seem to me to be closer to what was once considered a poetry than what we call a poetry nowadays.
Rhyme is certainly not required for something to be called poetry and European languages did without it for centuries, including English. For instance, Beowulf, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, all the Latin poets, etc. don’t have rhyme, they are governed by totally different rules.
It is worth quoting here Milton’s introduction to Paradise Lost where he expresses his opposition to rhyme as a newfangled and undesirable fad:
"Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them."
This example quoted in the article is why I can't stand a lot of English poetry. Either be a dutiful slave to the rhythm and come up with lines that flow naturally or abandon it with pride, don't leave your lines mangled as Procrustes' guests.
There's a lot of responses here that are based on the premise that there _is_ something to get with regards to the material these groups publish and that if you don't get it you're doing it wrong. I'm not saying there's nothing to be appreciated, but maybe the problem is that "poetry" as defined by these groups stuff written by poets pandering to poets?
This article starts claiming that people don't appreciate poetry, says that Poetry Foundation is putting in great efforts to expose people to poetry and failing, etc., but then it almost immediately concedes that people _do_ appreciate poetry, in lyrics and instapoetry.
I think the issue is that there's simply no major outlets trying to publish stuff that would actually appeal to a general audience. I've spent a lot of time trying to find publications that have fun, interesting formal verse and there's zilch. You can find massive lists of paper and digital poetry periodicals _all_ publishing free verse, every other poem about someone dying or race issues.
Insofar as lyrics are formal verse, after dozens of hours of searching for contemporary formal verse I've found:
https://thelyricmagazine.com/ - formal verse, long history, still barely going today. There's usually a couple poems each release that I think "oh, that was pretty good".
https://assesofparnassus.tumblr.com/ - also formal verse, very short poems but very carefully written. Recently I really liked "Better Read Than Dead" and "Bobcats".
It is much easier to get older poetry, e.g. Kipling or Robert Service or even Shakespeare than it is to get modern poetry. Modern poetry eschews rhyme[0] for various reasons (some good, most bad in my opinion) and because it is less structured it is hard to know how it is supposed to be read unless you hear a recording of it.
I think modern poetry, like many other forms of modern art is too clever for its own good and normal people can better appreciate works done in older styles.
Good discussion ;) One of my favorite short stories about the preeminence of poetry in a young soul is "Class Picture" by Tobias Wolff. About a visit by an elder Robert Frost to a boys' prep school in the JFK era:
I have also "never gotten poetry" while I go through 52 in 52 and sometimes more than that. The part of the problem has been for me, early on the idea I had of poetry was "romantic stuff" and as a kid, meh.
Fast forward to a few years now, reading Louise penny Armand gamache series, poetry turned out to be more than that but I still dont know where to start. I want to "get poetry" like armand and Ruth but I need a starting point.
I've always liked a few poems but I was never able to get into most poetry.
I recently learned that reading it out loud fixes that, particularly with modernist poetry. I'm able to naturally find the rhythm/meter and suddenly it clicks. So yeah, if you've never "gotten" poetry, I'd recommend reading out loud to yourself.
Like music, or anything else, when you find one you like, read more. Find out what the writer(s) you enjoyed liked to read and read that, and so on.
I came to love of poetry through music, but also feverous reading in high school followed by an unfinished classical education. So I started out just doing that first—enjoy something and then follow up on it. It resulted in my spending every spare period in the library going through the stacks and making friends with the librarian who let me access to the officially banned books that they kept stashed for special sign-outs.
The writers I still read the most of are the ones I came to through my own meandering interest. That said, I've been introduced to writers and approaches that I never would have outside of the halls and impositions of university and I appreciate the insight that provided.
So if you're ever invested in the pursuit enough, you'll definitely be exposed to art you never knew existed if you take a poetry course at a local college or university. Some of it will be a drag, and you'll also meet some people with their heads jammed deeply up their asses, but don't let that ruin it for you—those types are everywhere, just a different flavour. If you're lucky you'll find a kindred spirit, either in a writer or in a classmate.
Poetry doesn't win you a lot of friends in North American culture, but I made one when right after I left high school and we still enjoy talking and sharing art to this day.
It's tricky. So for me the first poem that i clicked with was Gray's Eligy Written in a Country Churchyard[1]
Just enjoy the writing and don't go looking for hidden meanings etc.
Now in terms of a different approach, I seriously can't recommend this book enough: The Ode Less Travelled, Fry.[2]
It in effect teaches you in a more classical sense how poetry is constructed and very much increased my ability to enjoy poetry again after a long hiatus.
I would also steer almost completely clear of any modern poetry or academic analysis of it. It's mostly boring rubbish.
Also note longer form poems that tell stories are a good way to enjoy it.
John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost, for example.[3]
I would steer clear of any commentary that modern poetry is boring rubbish.
Look for hidden meanings if you feel like it, what you find is what you find, regardless of what the author intends or how others read it. Or don't.
The Ode Less Travelled is a good entry into appreciating form and meter, but Fry, as you, oddly dismisses non-rhyming poetry with a clever but unsupported metaphor: tennis without a net. No one's perfect, I suppose.
I can think of a great deal of 'modern' poems that I enjoy reading, that I get something out of or are at the very least, not boring (re: Lara Glenum.)
I think of Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinović, and how he writes about the emerging normalcy of the need to dodge sniper fire or get emergency rations from the UN while living in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war.
CORPSE
We slowed down at the bridge
to watch some dogs tear a
corpse apart by the river
and then we went on
nothing in me has changed
I heard the crunch of snow under tires
like teeth biting into an apple
and felt the wild desire to laugh
at you
because you call this place hell
and you flee from here convinced
that death outside Sarajevo does not exist
- Semezdin Mehmedinović trans. Ammiel Alcalay
To those considering writing poetry, I'd suggest:
Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation by William Stafford.
To those who enjoy picking things apart and the technical 'why' of poetry, there's John Hollander's "Rhyme's Reason." He's not a post-modernist by any means, but much of what he writes applies to contemporary poems.
For the record, Paradise Lost is amazing, and I memorized a good chunk of it. It's boisterously dramatic to recite, and vocalizing its elisions feels like playing grace notes in a piano piece.
It's entirely my opinion, but certainly I consider the example you used to be not at all to my taste; indeed actively bad to read. I completely agree with Fry on that point.
I stand by my assertion that most modern poetry is to be avoided, especially for someone introducing themselves to the form.
I've never actually fully read all of paradise lost, but this discussion certainly shall see me revisit.
I just had a read of the work you recommended. Genuinely terrible I'm afraid.
To get Poetry Write poetry. If philosophy is the wrong words in the right order, poetry is the right words or their blatant absence in the wrong. You probably conjure poems and not realise it, in the highest and lowest moments of your days alike. Learn how to reel them out on paper, then copy them and clip their leaves and tend to them to make them pretty in your eyes. Submit them, get rejected, go back to read other poems to make sure you are better than them and appreciate in awe the beauty of your fellow’s silent thoughts.
Listen to rap. Poetry and music have always been intertwined, and most poetry throughout history is written to be performed, not read on paper. A rap verse is much closer to the genre of Shakespeare and Homer than any free-verse poetry on paper.
In my experience, it is possible for certain poems to transmit meaning in rather a direct way, where the reader ends up becoming aware of something without quite knowing how. I find this incredibly fascinating.
In my opinion, the poet who is most effective at this, is Tomas Transtromer. Here is his poem "Further in".
Further In by Tomas Transtromer
On the main road into the city
when the sun is low.
The traffic thickens, crawls.
It is a sluggish dragon glittering.
I am one of the dragon’s scales.
Suddenly the red sun is
right in the middle of the windscreen
streaming in.
I am transparent
and writing becomes visible
inside me
words in invisible ink
which appear
when the paper is held to the fire!
I know I must get far away
straight through the city and then
further until it is time to go out
and walk far in the forest.
Walk in the footprints of the badger.
It gets dark, difficult to see.
In there on the moss lie stones.
One of the stones is precious.
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine.
It is a switch for the whole country.
Everything depends on it.
Look at it, touch it…
For me, one example of a "good" poem is Robert Frost's Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening:
Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow.
I'm of the opinion that poetry's a legitimate art form only when there's strong rhyme and meter. Frost had to work to solve a complicated constraint satisfaction problem: Low-level constraints of syllable counts, stresses, and the sounds at the end of the lines -- combined with higher-level semantic constraints -- the words form grammatically correct sentences that tell an interesting story.
All the examples he gives -- Shakespeare, Pope, Milton, William Carlos Williams, and some poet from the 1980's I never heard of (Ashbery).
(I'll admit Shakespeare has rhythm, but his poems don't rhyme very well. I can't even begin to analyze all the things wrong with Shakespeare and Pope and such, because their language is so old-timey that I can barely understand them.)
Calling such works "poetry" is pretentious BS, in my opinion. To me, the label of poetry needs to be earned. The poet has to pose and solve a constraint satisfaction problem.
As a reader, if you're reading poetry, it means you're getting that primal satisfying linguistic sensation when one part of your brain admires the constraint satisfaction problem and its solution, while another part of your brain appreciates the story it's telling.
Often if a bad writer writes prose, people feel free to call them out on it. If a bad writer writes poetry, people hesitate to offer harsh criticism, because they feel like criticizing poetry just makes them an uncultured Philistine.
So essentially, with good poetry, the author does a bunch of constraint satisfaction problems, and the reader's brain gets tickled in a unique way.
With bad poetry, the author just writes prose, insists the line breaks go in specific places, and says "Yeah this is poetry" because they're an arrogant jerk, and their audience just sort of goes along with it.
TLDR: "How is this poetry? It doesn't even rhyme. It's prose, and it sucks" is a perfectly sensible criticism of a huge amount of poetry. But this is regarded as a hopelessly uncultured and anti-intellectual sentiment in pretentious literary circles, which leads to its further proliferation.
I've been an avid poetry reader for nearly a decade now, I went from not understanding why poetry wasn't a big part of people's lives to not caring one bit and I think this was a healthy evolution.
Most poetry is bad. I have found in my life that the ratio is around 1/20. For every 20 poems one will be something you feel totally good. Probably a few more will have parts of the poem you admire, but lose you elsewhere.
Why are most poems bad? My personal guess is that most people use poems to convey sentiments that could best be done via another form (probably an essay or Tweet). Rupi Kaur is a fine example-- her poems have a character of just wanting to say something direct, but she ends up draping it in poetic staccato. I don't want to dismiss her too much, she's clearly a more successful poet than I am or will ever be, but in my opinion her work sort of misses the central premise of the form. Often times when I read a bad poem, I feel like the author really wanted to write an essay.
Poetry should be used to convey something that really can't be conveyed by other means. You're intending to tap into "something" that other art quite can't. When you find that 1 in 20 poem, it's because it has a sense of revelation, newness, spontaneity. It tends to trigger that sense of seeing something new. I often say "I never thought to organize words that way". John Ashberry's poems have a habit of doing that, and I think that's why he gets the praise he does. Though give me Adrienne Rich any day.
Ultimately though, as I said above, I don't care if people like poetry anymore. Not every artistic pursuit needs to make millions or have millions of fans (which, poetry does, but they're relatively quiet I guess). I also appreciate that since most poets you read are just people who pursued lives of literature, they're a bit more accessible and thus a bit more free to scrutinize. They're people like you and me, writing for each other and not with world dominating aims. Their work doesn't have "Weight". You can engage frankly with their poems, and how they do them well and how they come up short. The poems become friends.
My favorite poet of all time is Michigan based poet Carol Atkins. I believe all her books were self published? I think she is about at the ratio I describe, most of her work is just ok, but when she's sublime, she's truly sublime. It feels as if she wrote art just for me. I've carried her big hitter poems with me throughout life.
And that's the best thing about poetry versus other art-- it's carryable. You get to take it with you everywhere you go, and use it as you please. I guess you can open up your phone and google a painting, or replicate a sculpture, or hum a tune, but a poem is a piece of art you carry completely with you in its full form, as long as you remember it. You're meant to ruminate about two roads diverging in a wood, at the exact moment you realize you're in a diverging road situation. A poem is a life jacket in a way, meant to buoy you just when you need it. I'm not quite sure what other art can offer that combination of simplicity, profundity and carryability.
> My personal guess is that most people use poems to convey sentiments that could best be done via another form (probably an essay or Tweet).
I'm guilty of this. Why? Because I suck at remembering information in the moment, and writing a poem about it makes it easier to call forth from memory when I need it.
For example, if prompted right now about who Karl Popper was I'd just mumble a sentence and that'd be all my mind can cough up. Once I get around to writing some sort of poem about who he was and what he did, I'll be able to talk at length whenever it comes up around the dinner table.
Very well said. Funny enough, reading this comment in addition to the main article has greatly helped my understanding of the genre. I liked some of the 'pre-modern' stuff while in college but I could never get into the 'free-verse', 'spoken word' deal we have to day. Just personal preference I guess.
> 'a poem is a piece of art you carry completely with you in its full form, as long as you remember it'
I'm no expert but this almost sounds I daresay poetic or at least the beginnings of it!
> I read a bad poem, I feel like the author really wanted to write an essay.
I think this is key, poems that are trying to make me feel something ... whether a single emotion (simple or complex) or, ambitiously, experience the gestalt of being in love for decades or standing in a dark, quiet forest ... tend to resonate.
Trying to change the mind of reader via reason ... meh.
This reminded me of what Audre Lorde said about poetry in the documentary "Berlin Years (84-92)": one of the objectives of poetry is to change feelings. This made me look at poetry differently and slowly grow an appreciation for it.
I found the article indigestible. Your comment sums up a lot of how poetry works for me, and "Poetry should be used to convey something that really can't be conveyed by other means" really strikes the anvil.
Stag's Leap is fantastic, it was the first book of hers I read. It goes into her mental state after a divorce, but no matter how removed your life and its concerns might be from a situation like that, she manages to pull you in.
I'll also recommend Adrienne Rich's Diving Into The Wreck and W.S. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius. I actually read all three at the same time, all three quite good works.
I think you and the grandparent underestimate your own abilities. I CAN replicate a lot of art if I were to put some effort into it, and I CAN create original art without replicating it.
It's just that I don't wanna, and I appreciate other people's efforts more than my own, etc.
Art is not about effort -> result, it's an interesting combination of factors.
My own framing: art isn't an object, it's an experience. I call an object _intended_ to trigger art experiences an art-object, but people often have art experiences that don't involve an art-object.
I think this framing makes it clearer that you could copy an art-object that previously gave you an art experience with perfect fidelity and not end up with an object that gives _you_ an art experience (though it help others have an art experience).
> I define art as something I can't replicate, even having seen it.
I dislike this definition because it conflates mechanical skill with meaning. I cannot replicate a Thomas Kinkade painting. But I don't care to either, because his work does absolutely nothing for me.
> High art as something I couldn't have imagined existing until I had seen it.
I like this more, but it also sort of conflates novelty with insight.
To me, the best art shows me a detailed picture of something I have experienced but been unable to perceive clearly. It is like someone painted a picture of my own soul. Like a light has been turned on in some dark corner of my psychology where I had been stumbling for years.
Art is less "better than I can do" and more "something taken from a VERY specific perspective, but still somehow resonates with the person experiencing it." Skill in an artform certainly makes the depth of that resonance more powerful, but often people can surprise themselves if they put in the effort.
Not to say just anyone will be Shakespeare, but much of what makes art great is the fact you can't see the process that lead them to the end. I've had things that people loved but felt "normal" to me because I remember the map of the route I took to get there. All they saw was the end result.
I quickly googled the saying - which was familiar to me - to check and it is indeed etymologically correct.
The origin is the proto-germanic word kunnan, which means “to recognise, to know (how to be able)”.
According to Wikipedia, the first known usage of the phrase by the German poet Johann Gottfried Herder is actually a bit more complex and references both the knowing and the being able to:
“Kunst kommt von Können oder Kennen her (nosse aut posse), vielleicht von beiden, wenigstens muß sie beides in gehörigem Grad verbinden. Wer kennt, ohne zu können, ist ein Theorist, dem man in Sachen des Könnens kaum trauet; wer kann ohne zu kennen, ist ein bloßer Praktiker oder Handwerker; der echte Künstler verbindet beides.”
Quick and dirty translation:
“Art is derived from being able to do and knowing, maybe from both, at least art must combine both in proper measure. Who knows, without being able, is a theorist, whom one cannot trust with regards to being able to do; Who can without knowing, is a mere practician or craftsman; the real artist connects both.”
By the way, I don’t know you, I don’t want to offend you and the very little info I have from your comment is evidence that you’re a intelligent, well educated, open-minded and complex person…. but to be honest, when I see the phrase “Kunst kommt von Können” my first association is of a narrow-minded square, who doesn’t like anything they are not familiar with. Again, this is not directed at you, I just wanted to share what kind of associations this phrase creates in me in general from my personal, limited experience with people, who used it.
German (married to one, not a real student of the language) makes a useful distinction between kennen and lernen[1], the latter of which seems more likely to be hidebound, since the knowledge isn't fully internalized yet.
I understand the assocation with narrow-mindedness, it could be used by someone who thinks all modern art is crap or some such. But then, 90% of everything is, in fact, crap (citation needed), so there's plenty of opportunity to use it.
One of the central characteristics of art, is that it is trying to break out of boxes. As such it resists any attempt to define it and I personally think that’s is actually a really good example of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance).
But, in my opinion, even if a definition could capture what’s art, it won’t be a lazy definition like "Art" is "better than I can do”. Art cannot be limited like that and there are many things people do “better than I can do”, which are not art.
Art has a long and complex history of grappling and negotiating with the role of skill, perspectives range from equating art with skill, over seeing skill as a tool for carrying out a vision to a conscious rejection of virtuosity. Even the rejection of virtuosity can create great art.
For example in dance, my profession, there are whole fields like postmodern dance or non-dance, which reject traditional dance skills, and non-dance artists like Jerome Bel create amazing, touching art, by authentically showing people failing to do “better than I can do”.
(Although you could maybe argue that in this case the artistry is just shifted to another level, the level of composition and ideas instead of the dance itself.)
To see one example of how an artist reflects on the importance of skill/virtuosity in art, here’s an excerpt from Jonathan Burrows “A choregrapher’s handbook”:
“Virtuosity is just another way to help the audience to care what happens next.
Virtuosity raises the stakes to a place where the audience knows something may go wrong. They enjoy watching this negotiation with disaster. Will the performer fall, or forget what they’re doing, or will they get through it?
The resulting anticipation, poised on the brink of success or failure, suspends time in a moment of in-breath. This slowed-down time, in the midst of risk, is as much of a pleasure for the performer as for the audience.
However, if everything is virtuosic then there’s nothing against which to read the virtuosity: it has to be in balance with other modes of engagement.”
> it won’t be a lazy definition like "Art" is "better than I can do”. Art cannot be limited like that and there are many things people do “better than I can do”, which are not art.
Sure, "better than I can do" is a going-in position, like my default review of anything: "It would have been twice as good if it was half as long".
I like the stated concept of virtuosity. But once the artist is sufficiently decoupled from the structure of the event by their refined genius, are not all 'mistakes' demoted to 'variation'?
I really don't like the way he privileges "art poetry" over other kinds of poetry. Rupi Kaur has every bit as much a claim to being a poet as Wallace Stevens does. (And Stevens in particular, of all the poets...)
And that drives me nuts, because a lot more people might like "art poetry" if he'd stop making people feel bad about not liking it.
While I'm not a voracious reader of poetry, I've got even less time for "John Ashbery, by general consensus the greatest American poet of the late-twentieth century", of whom I've never heard. And that sample is not making me rush out to read it.
It's a model of the "Purple prose with line breaks" form of modern poetry. It's not just that it doesn't have rhyme or meter, but that the line breaks don't add any structure at all except to make it look like poetry on the page. And of all the subjects to write about, "It's hard to write poetry" is the reason nobody wants to read your poems.
Here's how you get poetry: you read the poems you like. You listen to the poets you like to listen to, whether that's slam poets or rappers or singers or commercial jingles. When those start to seem repetitive or simplistic, you go read something else, something that is interesting to compare and contrast with the stuff you already like.
Exactly the same goes for painting, and wine, and everything else that rich people used to like and therefore must be important. Now we can all have it, and if you want to share your interests in it, stop yucking their yum.
Just as an aside, I had to laugh a little at your comment re: Ashbery. His poetry is notoriously "difficult" even for "serious" readers of contemporary poetry, that is, until you read enough of it that you start to understand the internal logic - then it can be very impressive.
I suppose it depends on your patience for book-length hyperconvoluted and hypercontextual poems. I think his best material comes from some of the later and longer works - "Flow Chart" would be a good starting place.
For Rupi Kaur, it's probably best to think of that material as the equivalent of training wheels on a bicycle. At least it gets people reading a book that claims to be related to poetry in some way, right? You have to remember, her target demographic is the middle school to early 20s crowd, and most of it was intentionally designed to be easily consumed on social media more than for any attempt at literary merit.
the casual videos of John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" / "Art of Looking" have taught me (an ignorant pleb) more about how to "get" art than any opinions from art critics. There is so much pretentiousness and gate-keeping in this field it's insane. Just enjoy and see what it brings to the surface is all there is to it IMO.
Oh, and as a Shakespeare actor and director, there are a lot more things to say about Hamlet than seem to be dreamt of in his philosophy. He appears to be demanding the "To BEEEE... or NOT... to beeeee" school of acting. That's not how actors work or how actors connect with audiences.
I had a high-school teacher who pointed out that the modern RP English accent isn't what Shakespeare would have spoken, and had us read aloud in a light (albeit butchered) Southern drawl instead. It had the desired startling effect on how I perceived the writing.
The best introduction to Ashbery is his long (but still readable in one sitting) poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which deals with a subject most of us here can relate to: being profoundly moved, stirred up, heartwrenched by a work of art – in this case Parmigianino's painting of the same title – and unable to stop coming back to it again and again.
Later Ashbery is more hermetic and often downright inane, but Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror justly won a trifecta of American literary prizes in the year it was published.
Thinking about it, maybe "Shadow Train" would be more accessible - those ones are all capped at 16 lines each, which gives you a healthy dose of the typical Ashberian verbal delirium without throwing you straight into the deep end.
> Now we can all have it, and if you want to share your interests in it, stop yucking their yum.
I don't think the author is talking to the people enjoying what he (derisively) called Instapoems. Those people like what they like and don't feel bad about it.
The author, on the other hand, laid out 3500 words in a New Criterion article to reassure those who aspire to be the type of person who enjoys "real" poetry that they are on the right path. The readers of this are there for the yucking.
That's a very good point, and my lens on it comes from seeing it here on HN rather than being in the target audience.
I believe, unfortunately, that it's New Criterion writers who tend to write the poetry textbooks, and I think that drives away a lot of potential poetry readers. They do often include plenty of poems that the students have a chance of genuinely enjoying -- Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, maybe Byron or Tennyson. But even so, a lot of students come away think of that as a search for "symbols" hidden in the poetry, and are then thrust into seeking the same symbols in modern poems.
I was thinking of Stevens in particular. There was a popular meme going around, parodying "Forgive me for eating your plums", about the Ever Given. What is it about that poem that made it memorable, such that it could be the touchstone of a meme? Is it because it's a great poem? Or because it's the epitome of really terrible poetry that students recall because it's so short? Both? Neither?
It's a question worth engaging... one more interesting that anything I learned in high school about Stevens.
Completely agree. I've been looking to get into poetry, so wanted a daily poem via RSS. The stuff that's available is all purple prose which I couldn't stand.
Shameless plug: I wrote my own feed, currently delivering Robert Frost daily: https://github.com/felipeochoa/rsspoetry/ (also a good ocaml learning experience with some notes about it for the curious)
Fast forward to my university and I was taught something completely different in a creative writing course — poetry is about play. It isn’t about having to inspire some deep meaning. Sometimes it can just be fun to mess around with words in a way that sounds pleasing. As others have mentioned, there’s also this notion pushed in our youth that poetry has to have perfect rhyme, or follow some scheme; but as soon as you realize that isn’t the case, combined with the fact you don’t have to be searching for some obfuscated truth within poems, you start to realize poetry has been marketed as something much different than what it really is.
That’s not to say you can’t search for deep meaning in a poem, or attempt to write something meaningful into one - but really, poetry is about play, and it should be as serious as you want it to be. For me, that realization made me “get” poetry more than I did back in my high school days.