Where Does Poetry Begin?

Any person who is above the age of five, and quite a few under, know what poetry is. That is, they know what a poem tends to look like and feel like. They can recite “Mary Had a Little Lamb” without a second thought and then move on to the “practical concerns” of everyday life. But what is a poem? What constitutes it? What gives it power? What use is it? And even if we answer all of these questions, how can we use this to actually make a difference in what we’re writing?

Most people who would call themselves poets will readily acknowledge that they know very little about the source of their poems. For most of us, poems are those things that come into our rooms at 3 AM and sit on our shoulder until we decide to throw them onto a piece of paper. When we pick up that piece of paper and read it back to ourselves in the morning, it often comes across as something mysterious, something that was channeled through us as if poets were literary shamans. In this article, I will outline one way of looking at a poem that will help the burgeoning writer make sense of what she has scribbled out the night before.

Poetry – The Snapshot

This is one description of poetry that is especially close to my heart, probably because I’m such a visual person. Poetry operates according to a different logic than prose (often this comes across as “no logic”), so readers who are used to the methods of prose will often find themselves stumped when they’re presented with a poem to read.

Prose often works through a series of events, normally following a plot that emphasizes the arc of a character toward a transformative end (though I won’t even try to bring Joyce or Faulkner into this). Prose tends to be more “mathematical,” though I use that term loosely. Main Character’s natural tendency to fear monkeys + Heroine’s natural ability to identify fruit + Villian’s desire to get the Golden Banana + Final Epic Battle = Story. I’m not saying that prose is a bad way of writing, just that it works in a fundamentally different way than poetry. Presenting a sequence of events, the form of prose connects perfectly with the human mind’s way of constructing and analyzing information.

Poetry, in its purest sense, is a relationship between two seemingly unrelated objects. Often, these two objects cannot be rationally harmonized with each other. It’s more like a snapshot of life that has a title scribbled on it that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the picture. For example, if you were given a snapshot of a sunset, and it had written on the back in blue sharpie, “the heart of the earth,” there are tons of ways you could interpret this. The red of the sunset connects naturally to the color of the human heart, and so the sun is a heart that is receding into the earth. This could mean that the earth is slowly hiding its heart from us because we’ve hurt it with our pandemic pollution. This simple interpretation came from comparing the image of a sunset with the nature of the human heart.

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Just for the sake of having a more literary example, here’s a famous poem by Ezra Pound:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

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I know you’re probably thinking that I left out some piece of the poem. Actually, I didn’t. That’s the entire thing. This is a poem that is consistently placed in literary anthologies for one reason — it is representative of the simplest that poetry can get. It is based on one image and one description of that image. In a way, it is an atom of poetry.

But what is constant throughout all of these examples? It’s a little term that we all heard back in grammar school and are probably still hearing today — metaphor.

The Fact of Metaphor

The poet must use this system of comparing one thing to another through metaphor as his primary method of getting to the riches of the text. This method, however, is part of what has been so off-putting to some who read, specifically those who despise, poetry because it does not “come right out and say it.” But this is necessary in poetry, and any poet can attest to this, because it is impossible for a poet to “come out and say” anything, since the thing that the poet wishes to communicate is something that lies eternally “behind” the words.

The fact that not all readers recognize this revealing effect in reading poetry is not a strike against metaphor, but is rather a sign of its ingenuity. When a magician is performing some trick on the stage, he or she is trying to show the audience something that is not physically present on the stage. The magician does not show the audience her wires, the holes in her cloak, or the trapdoor leading to the basement. She hides them not because these things are not necessary to the illusion, for in fact they are vitally necessary, but rather because if the audience sees these things as they exist physically, it will never see clearly the illusion presented by the cooperation of the objects in the metaphor.

Now this metaphor naturally leads to some negative conclusions concerning the work of poets, but not all of these negative conclusions must be disregarded. Poets do lie, just as painters lie. Poets make it seem as if things disappear and that bunnies really do come out of hats. The difference between the magician’s audience and the poet’s audience is that the readers of good literature realize that, in a way, things do disappear. They recognize that on some other level, things are not as they seem, and that they can never quite explain why they feel this way. This is the beauty and magic that makes poetry so consistently exciting.

Conclusion

This is only one way that you can look at the art of poetry; trust me, there are plenty of others. Whenever you’re hunched over your Cheerios trying to work through the mess of last night’s draft, try taking a look at your work through one of these lenses and see what happens.