what is poetry writing? isn’t it what is left after you’ve written the poem? how do you know you’ve actually written one? is it because it works on someone else, or because it works according to what you think a poem should be?
doesn’t critique of your writing explain to you how you wrote? but, doesn’t this depend on a good critic — someone who’s as much a poet as you are…
poetryandpoet 
I think that poems are another way to express oneself. Poems can have a message and a theme that the poet want to portray. It’s very hard to judge poetry because a poem is someone’s opinion compared to a scientific paper or a book.
so, how do you know you’ve written a poem and not a grocery-list… which is also an expressive thing, expressing your desire and need… no? what’s a poem? something that makes you feel? a grocery list — cheese, onions, etc. — makes me feel stuff too.
what about the look of the poem? is it that it’s got a bunch of short lines, instead of just one long paragraph? what is actually a poem?
This quote is perfectly self-explanatory.
‘I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.’ by A. E. Housman
I don’t think A.E. Housman was a poet. He wrote nice verse, but it’s always a story-telling thing… never an attempt to make a musical thing with images.
where, beyond Housman, do we learn what a poem ‘is’? do we intuit that writing with feeling is more than writing a list? what about stories? don’t they come from feelings too? aren’t most ‘poems’ written just stories with funny line-breaks?
so, what is it? is it the intention to write something beautiful in words? won’t that reflect your verbal talent… how well you can read and how skillful you can find your thoughts and wrap them in emotions? that it’s about writing, not about feeling? you can feel a silk scarf, feel your emotions in the texture… expand and see the colors as emotional nuance… creative act which allows you to move into the second and third dimension: you’d been lost in your one-dimensional ego self, and stepped out of it into the other, joining two others ( texture and color ) into your mono-chrome urgy-ness need.
so, naively, you write a report on how the silk felt like your unhappiness and the colors looked like something else, like a sunset or something, and your report isn’t anything but prosey blog but you don’t even care, because you’re back in your ego-monochrome world where anything you do at all is wonderful. and, you want praise for being a good little boy or girl, acknowledgement that you can identify the typical like everyone else, but more specially. blogging journal entries with funny line breaks. and, because you wrote it while you were listening to the Beethoven forty-twentieth symphony, you’re cul-tur-al…
it’s part urge-to-merge and partly an artiface about the art-of-face painting an image that shows-up in the cracked-mirror of our many-reflections — evidence of the duality we’re in, where every round thing begins …
yes, all that stuff you used to say on poetry critical. but, we’re writers here, not groupies… what makes a poem look and act differently than, say, another romantic object: a grocery list you’re making for a dinner for your lover? it may be, jerry, that you don’t want the imperial and cosmic distance that a poem demands of you… ( snarff, snarrf…!! )
like, when you get into a poem, it’s like dancing to an alien’s music. you’re maybe too down to earth to get that far from an emergency hug.
if you really want to get into it, here’s my current idea on poetry-creativity; any creativity:
there’s ego, and then mind. and, when you exit ego in the creative act, you go out into all the mind’s experience in putting things together to make a whole. so, you drop into a mood, and then, string-theory, drop into the same mood 20 years ago and join the two into an image as you re-enter ego, re-become your ‘you’. the reader can follow a train of thought, and in poetry, the astute and highly literate type can see/hear your two time-space objects simultaneously both singularly and as a merged new feeling. that’s why i’m always saying that poets invent feelings, instead of saying that poet talks about feelings. as you read a poem the emotion is invented as you read the poem: it has no name, there’s no name for the emotion, except the title of the poem.
emotion. ok, emotion is real but has no content: it’s a reaction, not a state of mind discovered…
emotion. ok, emotion isn’t real, but is a state of being, hidden from reality. reality is a game, but emotion is the energy and expansion of reality.
so, you exit ‘feeling’ and enter into emotion… play with joy and hurt — two kinds of heartbreak. What language do you speak when you’re in pure emotion? do you speak in ‘hug’? ‘slap’?
how do you connect a language to emotion? — not with mind, not with cleverness — talking your way into someone’s heart for a reward… not like that.
what is creativity? is it the automatic merging of two emotions — the ’emotion’ of thought with the emotion of feeling? what does that say about expressionism? that expressionism is just a cartoon reflection on some heavy events?
maybe, creativity is a space, the way emotion is a space…? maybe creativity is where there are no static eternal places in the heart or mind: but, instead, a space where places and emotions are defined…? After all, if you were really only lost in emotion and yet still able to say something in words… wouldn’t that say you were, at least, superficial? …able to chat about how bad you were feeling?
building a rhythm of oracular words and phrases makes the reader stay inside the poem itself, and not have to just tag along with the ego-driven author’s telling us how love him. i hate that crap, hate ginsburg and wordsworth and keats, shelly and shakespeare: bloggers with line-breaks. i like a couple of the last Yeats and John Donne’s sonnets, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos — also, some of HD, though i think she was culturally bent by people like Pound… that if she’d be able to write honestly, she would have been the best modern poet.
What’s an ‘oracular word’? a word used as an icon, in the poem but suggesting other realities outside the poem. any word can be used this way — it’s sonic quality and syllable forms around the oracular word which allow it to float above the local words.
One of life’s annoying things is prosey pop lyrics made serial by some singer’s bending them into ‘song’. It’s been going on for awhile, and really became a problem during world war two, when, i guess, people started to get serious enough to want literature, but still wouldn’t bother reading poetry. it’s when rhyme started seeming old-fashioned to people who had no fashion.
“serial” means that ordinary prose chat, where words are meant to be used only as place-holders waiting for new info, is connected artificially into something like a poem, through melody. there’s no internal or external rhyme to build a duality of beat and accent, heart patterns, just utility functional connection, like boxcars in a train — nothing at all in common except they’re on the same track.
Jerry, i just saw your current posting on poetry critical, the post that sounds like a personals ad in AARP for geriatric swingers. You know that that’s not realistically going to get you anything here, don’t you? i mean, what do you have to offer that we’d want, if you’re not offering it all in consciousness of your writing. i really don’t care if you get a hug again in your life, as long as you’re face to face with your poem and trying to be honest. i don’t think you’re being honest, but that’s ok… but, i do think you think we’re sort of dumb and could be seduced by words into liking you. we invent words… and, in your cliche-ridden text, it looks like someone else has invented all your words and verbal moves. how you write isn’t shamanic, pointing us to the other, it’s vegas with eyeshadow just so’s we can’t see who you are.
need a gordon ramsey to come into my life and tell me what a spoiled parasite i am and how i should be writing short stories every night and cleaning out my inner cinema with bleach.
poetry is writing a new dance, and reading poetry is learning a new dance step. what the singer says is part of the fun, but it’s the pattern with music which is important — a ballet in the head.
reading to watch the author write the poem or paint the picture or photo image, or make the music. we find outselves in the poem, but we’re looking for something anyway. we need to feel, but our feeling is created by our energy, not as passive reaction to the world; we invent the world and make it real for us — no one else does.
all the world’s emos want to be loved and accepted for what they are, and they’re mostly immature writers because of just that — writing letters to mom or something. and they cheapen poetry into prose-product and say that it’s all a matter of ‘different’. and, yes, like the KKK and westboro and the anti-choicers are all god’s childrens too.
it’s because poetry as a thing isn’t important to them yet. neither is music or painting. it’s all about them and what they do, and that makes it easy to just ignore them and not love them for what they are. it’s always about the extraordinary people, people who have to find out who they really are and what they can really do.
suppose you want to say what poetry is, and I’ll suggest that it is the linear wave of information coupled with the vertical standing wave of place, both to form an harmonic wave greater than the two alone.
right, alc?
in modern terms, you meditate into a dream space, and that consciousness becomes the place you see the reality of your momentary self. you see and sense on all sense levels whatever you NEED to say, and you express out into shared space (the reader’s space) wording strings which you, with your other mind, form into poetic form and phrasing.
there are two directive rhythms in a poem — the rhythm of what you saw and when you saw it in your own wordings, and your own heartbeat rhythm controlling the speed of your expression.
there are other ways of saying this, but this is the poet arty new age way of saying that making the poem involves the poet in dissolving time and creating space.
intuition is the atomic structure of your being identifying the atomic structure of the other, through electrical connection.
the senses then find pattern in the other and sense it as a thing. the mind then identifies the thing by finding and acknowledging or creating structure, shaping the thing into a nameable.
all that, and you’re still neanderthal. the artist uses more than one sense at once on the object and feels object in its complexity. that’s the intuitive level that people misidentify as the butt of intuition. giving this more complex thing to the mind — which, is, after all just the interface with society — provides the mind with a more realistic and usable solution to the unknown. artists are always the people who actually see what’s real and what’s going on.
crafts people aren’t artists on this level; no artist is satisfied with satisfying what’s already been satisfied