Introduction

Writing can be broadly categorized as verse or prose and poetry can be both of those things. Verse most often refers to text that is metrically structured or lineated deliberately (as opposed to at the end of a line in your word processor); prose is text without a metrical structure, text where the line breaks are dictated by the size of the page or the screen in your word processor. We most often picture poems as text in verse. Consider these lines from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet LXV”:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

Shakespeare’s sonnet might be most closely aligned with your idea of a poem. It employees perfect rhyme, is written with a clear rhythm (called iambic pentameter), and, of course, is lineated, or broken deliberately, in the middle of sentences. Consider, by contrast, Stephané Mallarmé’s “Glory”:

A hundred posters absorbing the days’ misunderstood gold, the letter’s betrayal, fled, to all the city limits, my eyes even with the horizon, departing by rail, pulling away before spending a moment in silence, in a pride hard to understand, which yielded to an approach to a forest at its time of apotheosis.
Mallarmé’s “Glory” may be written in prose, but it is still a poem. What makes a poem, then? A poem is a form of writing that may use strong, vivid language; meter or rhyme; imagery, figurative language, or other tools for describing. It is not an essay or a short story or a novel because it does not make the same argumentative or narrative demands of those forms. The more you read poetry, the more you’ll feel certain you can identify it when you see it.

An Introduction to the Poetry Genre

Poems, unlike crosswords, don’t have a straightforward solution. In fact, a careful examination of the clues laid by the poet may lead to more questions than answers. Let’s start this course, then, with a question: is poetry simply about expressing feelings? People do turn to poetry in extremis. Prison inmates, often famously, have expressed loneliness and communicated with absent loved ones through poetry. Maybe this accounts for the egalitarian view often held of poetry – a view which doesn’t seem to apply in the same way to opera-singing or carpentry, for example. If I sing, does that make me an opera singer? Certainly if I nail together a few pieces of wood that doesn’t mean anyone would want to hire me to build their house. With poetry, as with any other craft, there are skills to be mastered. There is a need for ideas and a need for the poet to meditate on what might be termed his or her muse. But there is also a need for persistence and hard work.

A common description of the writing process is ‘10% inspiration, 90% perspiration’. The muse, expert at inspiring, may be lousy on the technical side. The art of poetry resides in the technical detail more than one might like to believe. The writer artfully uses technique with the express purpose of getting you to feel what he or she wants you to feel. The poet manipulates emotions just as a composer may write a piece of music to evoke a particular mood. The composer orchestrates not only the instruments but also the listener. This is the case in poetry too.

By and large, readers tend to agree whether a poem ‘works’ or not, even if it’s not clear how or why it works. The best poems retain a certain mystery, but subsequent analysis invariably reveals various techniques the writer has employed to key into this commonality. The form a poem takes, whether it be free or traditional, reflects those techniques, and is itself vital in the unlocking of ‘the logic of the imagination’.

The form a poet chooses for any one poem is partly dependent on process. A writer needs to have at his or her disposal a whole system of strategies and techniques. These will be supplied in part by historical example, by what writers in the past have tried to do. But techniques are also arrived at through the poet’s own exploration of these elements.

Poets may choose to write in a traditional form – say a ballad or a sonnet. Alternatively they may choose to write in what is often called ‘free verse’, ostensibly liberated from the restrictions of tradition. Yet, traditional forms of poetry can sometimes liberate. In testing the boundaries of a form you might find that you break rules. Similarly, you may find that writing free verse necessitates some new conventions and rules. While taking liberties, free verse still uses formal elements to establish things like rhythm and meaning, for instance. There are a variety of intrinsic techniques that span both traditional and free verse approaches. In this course we will look at those techniques, the basic foundations on which you will build all your poems.

We learn to write by imitating, and, importantly, by reading. We absorb something about the poetic sensibility by listening to poets read their work and talk about their process of writing. Eventually, instead of imitating, the writer assimilates this material into a new, unique voice. This is not to say that writers reach a final resting-place, from which they can safely issue their poetic declamations. Each time the poet sets pen to paper, in a sense he or she has ‘forgotten’ how to write and is forced to learn the process all over again. Even practised writers are humble in the face of each new poem. They don’t forget the precepts of form, but continuously shift and change the application of these elements with each new horizon. Good writers constantly renew language and conventions by renegotiating the relationship between the form and content of every new poem.

In trying to define poetry, we often end up thinking archaically. We think of the work of writers such as Keats or Shakespeare, for instance, as in some way defining what poems should be like. Their way of writing poetry appears dogmatically to be the ‘right’ way to do it. We mistakenly assume that true poetry always involves a special, elevated vocabulary, as if this will earn us our stripes. It is surprising how strongly such misconceptions endure. Language and its conventions are not static. In fact, it is part of the poet’s job to locate and help define the conventions of his or her era.

Is poetry about the expression of feelings? One common misconception is that its function is simply this. Poetry, it is believed, is able and honour-bound to tell the absolute, journalistic truth. In reality poetry works quite differently. Our personal lives and history may inform our work, but the poem transforms or exchanges the one sort of truth – biographical truth – for another: poetic truth. A poem is more than a simple expression of feelings, more than what ‘really’ happened.
We can possibly best define what poetry is by saying what it isn’t. For one thing, poetry, unlike prose, cannot be paraphrased. If you could sum it up succinctly in any other fashion you wouldn’t write the poem. One can talk about the theme of a poem, for instance, but it’s the poem itself which conveys the ultimate effect. A poem is the best possible expression of what the poet wants to say. Some might say that the form and content of art, in this case poetry, is untranslatable.

Let’s now look at a poem which directly addresses some of these issues, albeit in a humorous way.

Sports pages I: Proem

From ancient days until some time last week

Among the poet’s tasks was prophecy.

It was assumed the language ought to speak

The truth about a world we’ve yet to see;

Then in return for offering this unique

And eerie service, poets got their fee:

And yet, what any poem has to say’s

Bound up with all the vanished yesterdays.

Imagination lives on memory:

That’s true of love and war and thus of sport:

The world we love’s a world that used to be.

Its sprinting figures cannot now be caught

But break the flashlit tape perpetually,

Though all their life’s a yellowing report.

Forgive me, then, if speaking of what’s next,

I make the past a presence in my text.

For me it starts in 1956,

The Test against the Indians at Lords

As Roy runs in to bowl and Hutton flicks

A long hop to the crowded boundary-boards.

Or did he miss? Or hammer it for six?

But I don’t care what Wisden’s truth records.

When I dream back, the point is not the facts

But life enlarged by these imagined acts.

Forgive, then, the large licence I assume:

What I know’s not the truth but what I like.

The Matthews final found me in the womb

But still I went to Wembley on my bike.

When Zola Budd sent Decker to her doom

The gods had aimed their wishes down the pike.

This isn’t just a question of my bias:

All members of my tribe are bloody liars.

Sean O’Brien

In the lines: ‘When I dream back, the point is not the facts/But life enlarged by these imagined acts’, the speaker is extricating poetry from the clutches of fact and history, even as he apologises for the licence that he takes. When he says that ‘Imagination lives on memory’, he means not that it exists within memory, but that it depends on it. The inadequacy of memory may be a virtue, in the poetic realm. Yet there’s a hard edge to his final rejoinder: ‘All members of my tribe are bloody liars’.

Sean O’Brien’s work is weighty and unrelenting, and politics permeate every corner of it. He is both a social and a literary writer and critic, sometimes associated with a group of poets from a northern working-class tradition: Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn and, latterly, Don Paterson and Paul Farley.

What is Poetry?. Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/literature-and-creative-writing/literature/what-poetry/content-section-0?active-tab=content-tab

“Poetry Lesson”. Licensed under CC BY 4.0

“Introduction to Poetry (Poem by Billy Collins)”. Licensed under CC BY 4.0

Summary

Defining the broad category of writing known as poetry can be tricky, especially as you start to realize that poets utilize tools that are not exclusive to making poems. Much good writing uses figurative language and imagery, for instance; it is the scope of the poem and the poet’s use of other poetic structures, such as formal verse or metrical parameters, that help determine whether or not a piece of writing is a poem.

It’s important to remember that poems do not need to be written in verse. Verse, or lineated writing, may be the first thing that comes to mind when you picture a poem, but it’s good to read examples of prose poems, too, to see the ways that writers use techniques other than lineation to create a piece of poetry.

In short, poetry is powerful language, often condensed or distilled. It may be freed from the constraints of narrative—with the exception of epic poetry, like The Odyssey or Beowulf, there’s rarely a plot. Instead, a poem often conveys an emotional state, an experience, or an instance.