[robert mezey]

In a way, a fruitless question. I don't think
there's just one thing that it all comes down
to. I can think of good poems that contain no
metaphors, and some that don't say anything
(at least anything comprehensible)---but if I
were tied to a stake and forced to answer, I
guess I'd say verse, it has to be verse---not
necessarily metrical, but verse; the fiction
must ring true. Don't mean a thing if it ain't
got that swing. The question of a poet's moral
duty is a very complex one and couldn't be
answered briefly. Maybe the sine qua non is
readability, pleasure, some kind of charge, and
yes, memorability. But a good poem can do without
so many things. Here is one of my all-time
favorites---not poignant, not intense, not very
figurative, not this, not that:

Carnation Milk is the best in the land;
I've got a can of it here in my hand.
No teats to pull, no hay to pitch---
You just punch a hole in the sonofabitch.

[Caleb Murdock]

This thread has gotten so long, and I didn't get into it from the beginning, so I'm just going to post my opinion on the main topic without reading everything that's been said.

I really think that it's rhythm that sets poetry apart from prose. How regular or definable those rhythms should be is debatable, of course. In prose, the stresses are all related to the meaning, whereas in poetry, the rhythms have a purpose all their own (to please the ear). Prose tends to be spread out, with fewer stresses per line. If, for example, I were to scan the sentence I just wrote, it would look something like this:

PROSE tends to be spread OUT, with FEWer rhythms per LINE.

In poetry, however, the stresses are more frequent and rhythmical:

prose TENDS to BE spread OUT, with FEW er RHYTH ms per LINE.

Note that the "poetic" scansion of that line results in a shift in stress from "prose" to "tends", so that the rhythm is affecting the meaning. Such a thing never happens in prose.

It is because rhythm is so important in poetry that I despise the prosaic "plain" style that has become so prevalent.



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited August 12, 2001).]

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

What a fascinating conversation this is, on "what makes it a poem"! The fact that it can't really have any one answer makes no difference: what's important is that so much of value has been said, challenged and explored. I'm especially drawn to Richard Wakefield's "turning in 3 dimensions," because it echoes something that I've always felt and told my students: that poetry is a place where 3 roads meet. Those 3 roads have something in common with Graywyvern's "yugen," "calliditas" and "melopoeia," but they're not exactly the same. The poems that reach me at once and stay with me for life are those that join music--language used for the sake of pleasing the ear--with image--the visible made real in a way that makes the ordinary not quite what it was before--with a kind of short-cut in communication that makes me feel I've been spoken to directly, maybe by someone who lived hundreds of years ago.
A poem that works completely that way makes you feel wide awake, not just intellectually but physically, the way music does when you stand up on the dance floor to dance to it.

In fact, that's how I decide something is poetry: when it feels like that to a degree beyond the ability of prose to do so, even if it doesn't look metrically regular on the page, even if I can't scan it or recognize at once the devices that have been used to create the effect, even if it's not at all like what I write, I call that poetry. What Peter Richards calls "transportation from the ordinary" is part of that, an invitation to look at something you thought you knew intimately and see how strange it is, or conversely--as Coleridge says--how familiar something you thought "exotic" turns out to be.

Either way, it's the surprise that makes it poetry, the sense that you have not yet "seen everything," that the world can still seem new. As for the devices used to achieve
that, don't they depend on the poet's temperament, educa-tion, preferences, ear, experiences? I agree that everyone who wants to write ought to learn all of the tools other poets have used, and practice using them, because knowing more can only make him better at what he does, but whether what he builds is a poem or not doesn't depend on the tools he uses, but on the structure itself. If he can do it with a nail file, 3 toothpicks and a can-opener and it works--on the ear and the mind and imagination, I mean--isn't that valid?

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Yes, Caleb, of course this line is from Hopkins, from "Pied Beauty"--a poem I love--and the correction did come to me unbidden during the night, but you're too quick on the draw for me! I think I'm telescoping it with something from Whitman, a passage in which he celebrates the words drawn from occupations, but I don't remember where exactly that is.

As for using 3 unaccented syllables in a row, why not? Isn't it perfect in the line from Hopkins? But I would put the accent on "moles," not "all." I think all the rules have a single exception: "Never do x except when it works."
And of course there's no knowing in advance when it's going to work, because every poem brings its own requirements with it! That means failure is more than possible: it's likely, because you're taking risks with every line. You have to be prepared to admit it when something doesn't work and then willing to throw it out--my house is full of waste baskets--but isn't that better than being "safe" every minute? I think the thing about meter that makes it useful, aside from the sheer delight of measured speech, is the way it lets you ALMOST spoil things, almost break things you value, and then, if you know how, pull back at the last minute and not break anything: the reader--and the writer too!--should be a little nervous, not quite sure of what's going to happen next. If 3 syllables in a row allow you to do that, or an unexpected spondee, or a word that has to be pronounced slightly differently because the meter demands it (provided than surprising pronunciation adds something to what's being said), then all of those could be useful almost-failures.

[Caleb Murdock]

Rhina, thank you for your response to my post (which I posted on the thread entitled "Introduction to Rhina Espaillat"). I just happened to be roaming the board shortly after you posted, and I didn't mean to correct you about the source of that phrase -- you would have figured it out soon enough, as you did. To be honest, I use any excuse I can to post Hopkins because of the unusual rhythms in his poems.

As for how to pronounce that line ("For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim"), I scanned it with 5 beats in my post, forgetting that it is accentual meter with 4 beats per line. However, pronouncing it with the emphasis on "moles" is something that never occurred to me -- I don't even know what "rose-mole" means, and can't find it in the dictionary.

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited August 18, 2001).]