Poetry as Art

I've belonged to a lot of poetry forums and noticed something quite stark. Many people post their poems for comment, but few actually comment on them fully. Poetry is a form of expression, and as such, we want people to fee it and love it. So, we tend to get a little hurt when nobody comments on a poem, or even worse, when someone says, "I don't understand what it means." We can't take criticism so very well on our literary babies. If a poem is not disciplined, it can be a little unruly. So, while I myself am struggling to enhance my poetic prowess, I do know good poetry when I chance it (usually). I've learned that what I was taught about poetry in creative writing classes and in college is not just a bunch of malarkey intent on skewing my abilities, or turning my poetry into a product of conformity.

I've realized that, what I used to think was the "right" way to write, was the lazy way to write, and in doing so, I wasn't releasing anything. To be a good writer, you have to tell the truth. Anne Lamott said so in her book about writing, entitled, Bird by Bird. Bonnie Friedman said so in her book, Writing Past Dark. Oh, and so did Kurt Vonnegut in Man Without A Country. Good writers tell the truth. Poets are writers, too. Plato said, "Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history." So then, the poetic sounds I once believed made a poem a poem don't dig deep enough into reality to make them poetry. In trying desperately to make a poem sound poetic, or trying to make the poem rhyme, I would fore sake the true meaning of writing it.

So how, then, does one go about being honest in poetry? One must first define poetry. Then, one learns the tools available to make a poem a poem. Leonard Cohen said, "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." I love that, because I love Leonard Cohen's work, and because the saying is so vivid. If all we see is an ash, then we know something is burnt. Writing poetry isn't about explaining all the details. It's not about telling people what's nice, horrid, beautiful, ugly, stupid, or meaningless. It's about showing people a piece of whatever it is that's nice, horrid, beautiful, ugly, stupid, or meaningless, and letting the reader feel whatever they'd feel if they were privy to the poets experience. Showing such slivers of reality is what makes poetry honest. If my daughter says she had a bad day at school, I won't fully understand, but if she pointed to a torn jacket and said, "I had to sit next to the school bully," I'd feel her torment.

I realize that people write poetry as a form of expression, and that each person has an expressly different way of doing that. Many folks will cringe at the idea of people pointing to potential pit-falls in a deeply emotionally charged poem, but the idea is not to cower into someone else's idea of what a poem should be, but to scrape away the mud from the corners of the language and make it true, personal, yet stark.