You know how it starts. A lost soul entrenched in idyllic surroundings, strings together complex and inflated words to describe what he feels is the most breathtaking sight he has ever laid his eyes on. We swoon, we gasp, we are even spellbound by such artistic and abstract representation. On the other hand it maybe the solemn musings of a scorned lover. High on a few drinks, he lets out all of his heartburn through the quill. Letting words do what he cannot. Again, we are affected profoundly by the protagonists shattering prose. But does our fickle and questioning mind ever ask, what is the point of it all? I do. Almost half-embarrassingly so.
I have to admit upfront that I’ve never seen the point of poetry. Now before you attempt go baying for my blood to refill the ink pot for your quill, read me out. It is not like I am incapable of differentiating a good poem from a useless one. But I fail to see beyond the nominal lyrical value of such an endeavour. It’s rarely of any functional value. There’s really nothing that a well written story/ article can’t express. Imagery and the acoustic sense, normally championed by poets, can very well be conveyed without the unnecessary and at times, redundant, language labyrinths. Plus with poetry, you have to write within it’s perimeters of rhyme and segmentation and can't fully express yourself. Other forms like haiku, offer much more flexibility in that sense. The biggest drawback I feel is that you need to be dramatic while writing a poem and it’s almost next to impossible to write about otherwise normal and ordinary predicaments or situations. At times the poem tends to veer off and end up far from the theme. But I guess that’s a part of writing something like that. The meaning of a poem, in the process of sounding grand and abstract, sometime gets lost as the debate between the literary and metaphorical value takes over.Pedants reading this will probably assault me on the blog title by saying that poetry is totally different from prose. As someone I know, once likened it, “Poetry is like liquor where mere prose is bloating beer.” But that’s hardly the point.
I remember coming across this poem on some Yahoo! Answers forum a while. Sums it up quite eruditely :)
“Those poets they are a useless lot
they drink red wine and smoke wicked pot.
They alliterate and use imagery
Meditate for hours upon some bloody tree!
But who has built a house of words?
Crops are not sown by a man admiring birds
And writing that his love is lorn
His life in tatters, his heart all torn.
Pick up a spade, you lazy clods
Plant the seeds, turn the sods
Do something useful, something real!
And bury your artistic zeal”
I don’t mean to discredit all the acclaimed poets who’ve devoted their lives to poetry. Nor those who enjoy the form. It’s just not my cup of tea, that’s all. Maybe it’s because I can write a poem to save my life. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been attracted enough to try!
5 comments:
poetry ain't redundant. Its slow and delicate.Its succinct. At times devious. The best poems are simple without the "need to be dramatic"
I do not claim to understand poetry. Nor is it my cup of tea. But savoring it is an art not privy to coarser tendencies such as mine.
Maybe we'll have a longer conversation in person on this, later :)
I guess I just don't have the patience for it then. Like I mentioned, I can appreciate a good poem, while it lasts. But at the end of it I'm invariably stuck with a sense of hollowness. Maybe it's my overactive mind looking for 'tangible' benefits out of everything. I've found some of the work by Tennyson, Frost, Yeats interesting but very few poets tend to maintain the delicate balance between content and lyrical value. But like everything else, that's just my take on the whole thing!
P.S. The conversation shall most certainly take place and who knows maybe my next post will titled 'The Understated Beauty of Prose' :)
It is always a matter of personal choice.
I have met a few everyday poets whose love-ridden rhymes I CANNOT bear to read. yet they churn poems at an astounding rate: all saying the same things, the words are maybe different, I can't say. They're dull beyond comprehension.
Yet, i have come across beautiful poetry: Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My captain", My Boy Jack by Kipling, Tennyson's Charge of the light brigade, The old Highwayman and Lord Ullin's daughter. To name a few. Not to mention the "Veer Ras": Dinkar gives me goosebumps everytime I read Rashmirathi/Kurukshetra.
I judge people who don't get poetry like this :P
Well, not so much. It's not for everybody. Temperaments differ. Though for those who do appreciate even some of it, it is a world of pleasure :)
No judgements here. Ant kind of art, whether it be movies, music or books, it's very subjective. Some you get, some you don't. There's too much too catch up to bother!
Poetry is of two kinds. One is as you say 'restricted by metre, rhyme and verse'. That is the common-or-garden kind of poetry. I don't claim to understand poetry either, but I like it. And sometimes, there are somethings that you'd like to express free from the organized restriction of prose. Sometimes it's just random words popping in your head connected to random images that your emotions (essentially chemical secretions by your brain) are arousing. I believe I have written on the self-same subject myself, if you care to check, here it is:
http://sentrytower.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-poetry-and-flow-of-thought.html
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