Poetry Lives

Poetry is as alive as it ever was although its modern form seems a world away from its traditional arrangement of close rhyme and tightly rhythmic  verse. With the general tendency towards shortened English (eg textspeak) in common use and with the perceived (although not by all of us) reduced importance in grammar, it is not immediately obvious why anyone would want to keep alive a form of our language which is by definition circuitous. Yet, despite all this, poetry thrives.

Perhaps it is because deep down there is a poet in all of us. I think poetry comes into its own where prose fails to capture the overall picture we are trying to convey. For example, with prose, certain nouns and verbs tend to be tied together. As an illustration, let's imagine we've seen a group of ducks crossing a very still duckpond first thing in the morning. In prose, it becomes very matter of fact - we need to use a collective noun like 'flock' or 'paddling' to describe the duck group and it ends up being, 'A flock of ducks paddles gently across the still water of the pond' whereas a poem might say, 'A flotilla of ducks sails majestically across the mirror-smooth waters'.

Another use of poetry is where the poet alludes to a specific topic without actually naming it and where we want the reader to decide exactly what the poem is referring to. The same illustration, rewritten in this light would remove any specific naming of the ducks or even the water, leaving the reader of the poem to stop and think about what the poet is trying to say. Of course, the reader may come up with a totally different interpretation of the poetry but that is part of the charm of the poem - it is what we decide it to be. Thus our illustration now becomes, 'Carved silhouettes of dappled feathers slice the morning mirror'.

Many of us have felt the urge to pen a few lines of verse at some time or other. Why? Why would we deliberately not choose the shortest way of saying something? The answer is similar to why we choose to play or listen to music. A poem is equivalent to a song and the poet is the musician or songwriter. I think that poetry extends beyond the simple level of just communicating a fact or message, it attempts to provide a 3-D picture. This is in the same way that a song is more than the lyrics and some notes played by an assorted motley of instruments.

Maybe you agree with me or then maybe you don't, but that's why we call it poetry!