You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [5]
The defining characteristic of poetry, as opposed to prose, is that poetry is written in lines. Verse is another term for poetry. It comes from the Latin versus, which means "a turning." A line of poetry doesn't stretch completely across the page. It turns back before reaching the right-hand margin, and another line begins. Then again, some poems have lines longer than the width of the page. Unlike prose, poetry doesn't depend on the right-hand margin to determine the length of its lines. As with the poet's selection of words, the placement of this line break is important. You'll read more about line breaks in chapters six and eight, but for now, as you read poems, notice the line breaks. Consider why the poet chose to turn the line there. Does the line break stop you for a moment with punctuation (an end-stopped line)? Or does the line turn in midphrase and lead you quickly on to the next line (an enjambed line)?
Like other specialized fields, poetry has its own terminology, its own lingo, that describes the various aspects of a poem. If a carpenter calls for a saber saw, for example, he doesn't want a reciprocating saw, circular saw or band saw. If a doctor talks about a tibia, she doesn't mean a fibula, femur or patella. The terms may seem troublesome at first, but poets use these terms to speak to each other precisely and effectively about poetry. It's also simpler and more direct to say line break instead of the place where the line turns.
My students in Introduction to Literature courses often thought of poems as puzzles to be figured out. This common misunderstanding results from the very nature of poetry, which is meant to be rich with meaning. With a good poem, you notice something new each time you read it, just as you notice something new each time you view a painting, watch a film or listen to music. Reading a poem for the second, fifth or twentieth time, you notice a certain nuance, perceive a verb's double meaning or hear the repetition of certain sounds. You see (and hear) the poem's intricacies. The poem may be subtle and complex. It means what it says and says what it means.
So how should you begin? If you enlisted in the navy and didn't know how to swim, the navy used to have a simple lesson (perhaps it still does): Heave ho, overboard you go. Sink or swim. Learning what a poem is, and learning how to write poems, is similar. Jump in. Immerse yourself. Float, dog-paddle and then swim. The more you're in the water, the better you swim. The better you swim, the more you're in the water. With poetry begin, say, by reading Shakespeare:
SONNET 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
This is a poem of complex metaphors, yet it's clear enough. The speaker compares someone, the thee, favorably to a summer day. As summer turns to autumn, that someone also ages and pales, but the speaker goes on to say in the final line that as long as this, the poem, survives, that someone also survives. In lauding that person's beauty, the poem keeps that person alive.
Reading poetry helps you understand for yourself what poetry is. What do you like? What do you dislike? Read Shakespeare, his poems and plays. Read poems by John Keats and William Butler Yeats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams.