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Prose & Poultry & Poetry | The differences



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Tue Feb 12, 2013 10:00 am
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Audy says...



This was written primarily for poets, because sometimes we need reminders about what it's all about. I sure know I do.


When you read a short story, or novel, or even a letter from a friend, what you are reading is prose. When you eat scrambled eggs with some sizzling bacon for breakfast, where those eggs came from, is poultry.

So what is poetry?

The fact of the matter is that people have a hard time defining poetry. Poetry has a long history and has evolved and acted as many different things, from oral verses, to ballads and sonnets, to free-verse. People define it in different ways, but while we may all have our own personal definitions, I feel it's important we should come to consider and understand where all of our different perspectives may come together.

So often, we get critiques or reviews on this site with people saying "This poem doesn't seem like poetry" -- "This poem is like prose" -- "This poem sounds more like a song" -- "This poem is too long" and so forth, and so forth. And where do you draw the line? How is a poem successful? What should a poem do? What is poetry? Again and again.

So, what better way to define something then to compare it?

First, look at chickens. They are made of feathers and they are birds. Even though, they can't really fly, they're still birds, and they function as birds, because they lay eggs (among other things). This seems to be the key to the mystery behind the common misconception of poetry...

There seems to be
this misconception
that poetry is just
sentences broken
up to look like this
where there may be
an even number of
syllables or something
in each line, so long as
it flows well and looks
somewhat even, maybe
throw in a rhyme, baby!
or a metaphor like how
the sky is like an endless
field and viola, poetry.

Well. Huh. That's rather arbitrary, right? I did say it was a misconception. Some people seem to think, well, poetry and prose, they both have feathers, but one of them has line breaks and rhythm and metaphors, and while that may be true. It's not entirely right either. Structure does not inform function. Function informs structure.

You see, the function of prose is to be straightforward. It is all about who, what, where, when, why. It's about telling stories and expressing information. So, as we're reading and scanning the page, we register one word at a time, and take in whole sentences as ideas, and all these ideas go on and on like a train-ride of stories and experiences and each just builds and builds and builds upon the next. And so often we get this action of cause /effect, cause / effect, cause / effect.

So, what does that look like? Well, it looks like a lot of text that typically goes from the left to the right margins of the page. Kinda like a never-ending train. Function/ Structure.

While poetry can also tell stories or present information or express emotion and imagery - a poem doesn't necessarily need to do any one of these things to be called a poem, because the function of a poem is not about being straightforward (though it can be, but in a different way!) - poetry is not a train.

Poetry is diving up into sky

whilst teleporting underwater
dissolving into threads
while forgetting
how to breathe
waking up in a dream
stepping into yourself
and finding
no matter where you end, you were
a piece and a part
of the journey
all along.

Poetry is about language. It's about creating art with words, just like a chef who creates gourmet meals with food; the difference between our every day language and poetry should be the difference between eating junk food and eating five star meals.

That doesn't mean you have to use big words. That doesn't mean poetry can't be about the everyday, or have a conversational tone. What that means is that you should aim to express your thoughts in a way that has never been expressed before. (The above example is horrible, I know)

Everyday conversation is like: "Hey" "What's up" "How are you?" "Fine" and it's boring and dreadful. What poetry does is it reawakens and revitalizes language to the point that a single line in a poem can create a story, an image, a feeling, or experience. It makes language fresh, it is an art. Don't make poetry be: "Roses are red, violets are blue" -- you are just repeating what others have said.

Make poetry be "roses are dirty" or "violets are flirty" or "roses are my brother's toy firetrucks/ the ones he maneuvers to save the day" The point is poetry should aim to make language the poet's own. What you say in a poem should never be something I've heard before. A good poem makes the reader appreciate the way the words fly on a page, and it doesn't matter what the poem is about, or what kind of feathers it has.

We know without a shadow of a doubt rooster's black marble, it's poetry.
  








We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer