More on Poetry & Poets

Now where were we? Oh yes, we were discussing how poetry should be easy to write. 

My last argument for its apparent ease of creation is that you find it everywhere...

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen 

The sad truth is this: There's nothing easy about writing poetry...

If the author had said "Let us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem. ~Author Unknown

It's a world unto itself...

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~Carl Sandburg
 
It requires the tossing about of impressive yet mysterious words such as abecedarian, acatalectic, clerihew, dactyl and trochee. This is but one reason why so many find themselves in awe of the poet. There are others...

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. ~Sigmund Freud

The poet doesn't see the world differently but he's more in tune with its shadows than are the rest of us. He feels the world deeply... 

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music...and then people crowd about the poet and say to him:  "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." 
~Soren Kierkegaard

The fact we almost expect poets to experience a certain degree of suffering is perhaps why they're allowed a great deal of latitude...

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.  ~Thomas Hardy 

We expect to be moved by poetry, and even if we don't understand a certain poem, we know somewhere someone does and that person is certainly moved... 

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. ~Thomas Gray 

However, we also expect poetry to outlast us...

Browsing the dim back corner
Of a musty antique shop
Opened an old book of poetry
Angels flew out from the pages
I caught a whiff of a soul

The ink seemed fresh as today
Was that voices whispering
The tree of the paper still grows.

~Terri Guillemets 

And lastly, why this is true, I don't know. But, it is... 

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.  ~G.K. Chesterton

It Should Be Easy

April is National Poetry Month. Let me greet you here with lines of my own design...

Two tattered hearts
Each quiet with wear,
Each still wondering
If love's waiting there.

It feels finished to me. I'm fond of its conciseness and of what it doesn't say, yet others have cried out for more. If you feel strongly compelled to add to these lines I'll post them here!

On the face of it, poetry should be easy to write. It possesses far less words than most short stories. That is, unless you're of the Beowulf persuasion... 

They have seen my strength for themselves,
Have watched me rise
from the darkness of war,
Dripping with my enemies' blood.
I drove five great giants into chains,
Chased all of that race from the earth.
I swam in the blackness of night,
hunting monsters out of the ocean,
And killing them one by one;
Death was my errand
and the fate they had earned.
Now Grendel and I are called together,
And I've come.  

There are another 3173 lines to this classic of Anglo Saxon literature. I think we can call it an anomaly.

Unlike a mystery, poetry doesn't require red herrings be dropped at every corner. Some poets even find it unnecessary to tie up the loose ends that would wildly irritate readers of the mystery genre. 

Is this how the term poetic license came to be? Believed to have been put into usage between 1780 and 1790, it basically allows lovers of words to follow their heart's desire without dragging the baggage of rules and expectations with them. Write utter nonsense, claim poetic license and all wisely nod, "Ahh...of course." 

There once was a girl with no fanny,
Who had a hard time getting tanny.
The problem was that
Her backside was flat,
And the rays of the sun hit uncanny. 

As many swear they can't understand poetry, one can also be as obscure as they like. Your audience will simply feel they aren't on par with your brilliance or with poetry in general. You sail on your merry way, leaving it to critics and scholars to debate your meaning. I'm quite sure this was the intention of Laura Riding Jackson in her Elegy in a Spider's Web...

Photo by Mike Hall, My Shot

Oh pity poor pretty
How thorough life love
No matter space spider
How horrid reality
What to say when
What when
Who cannot
How cease
The knowing of always...
 
To read the entire poem, click here

I now must go,
Cause I say so.
There's more to tell
It will be jolly swell.
So return soon,
Less you think me a loon.

There is truly more to say on this subject but I now must...well, you read the poem. Stay tuned my friends.