As someone once said, “I really want a poem to spout roses and spit bullets.” I agree. It’s no wonder that one of my favorite songs from a while ago was Send Lawyers, Guns and Money by Warren Zevon.
Now I'm hiding in Honduras
I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan
So what constitutes a good poem? For me, it is something that says more in a few words than a novel can in five hundred pages, with wit and word-play. It has an extraordinary mixing of music and image, word and thought. The job of the poet is to choose the right words, not only for sound (the music of poignant language) and connotation (landscape), but even for the countenance of them.
The poem corresponds to a centrifuge of sound, alliteration and rhythm. The reader will be walking into a world for the very first time; a world of terseness and parsimony.
Poetry IS about words!
Another person also said, “What makes a good poem? A good poet.”
So I have two great poets to recommend to you: Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub. They are two of my favorite poets.
Zbigniew Herbert is an avant-garde poet from Poland, who experiments with precise, restrained rhythms. His poetry is continually exposed to the impersonal, external pressures of politics and history. He started writing poetry during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and during the years of Stalinism his poems were continually banned. A. Alvarez says “Irony", such as Herbert’s, “is a two-edged weapon, which turns on the poet as readily as on the world outside. It is based on a sense of his own ineffectual fragility when faced with the steam-roller of political force." His politics is of sanity and survival; something that is completely relevant for this new century.
Also a survivor of WWII, Miroslav Holub was conscripted as a railway worker under the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He went on to become one of his country’s most important scientists, as a research immunologist at The Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine. He argued that, “The emotional, aesthetic and existential value is the same (that scientific method and poetry-making are basically similar)…when looking into the microscope and seeing the expected and when looking at the nascent organism of the poem.” He felt an affinity for the aesthetic of his fellow doctor-poet William Carlos Williams, who is also one of my favorite American poets (along with Wallace Stevens).
So here’s Holub spitting a few bullets at you-
Here too are dreaming landscapes,
Lunar, derelict.
Here too are the masses,
Tillers of the soil.
And cells, fighters
Who lay down their lives
For a song.
Here too are cemeteries,
Fame and snow.
And I hear murmuring,
The revolt of immense estates.
Does anybody have any poets that they would like recommend to me?
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TheWillTurnerNovels
Beth Mann
TheBadScot
Mimetalker
Christo46
FusunA
Salon.com
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Thank you - this is an excellent open call.
♥R
http://open.salon.com/blog/fusuna/2010/04/07/im_listening_to_istanbul
The other poet is the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy . Most of his works were translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. I don't read Greek, but based on the translations, many of his works fill the criteria you spoke about. Here is one:
IN THE SAME SPACE ~ C.P. Cavafy ~
The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood
that I’ve seen and walked through years on end:
I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.
And, for me, the whole of you is transformed into feeling.
There are also some excellent poets on Open Salon whom I like to follow. Great post. Thank you.
I don't care for or about rules in poetry. so my idea of a poet is one who creates with words. rules are the anathema of poetry. poetry is poetry is art. you compose. you create a mental cadence. rhythm. pictures or a mood.
art does not follow rules. rhymes annoy me unless they are so subtle and delicious, the fact of the rhyme is besides the point. rhyme for the sake of rhyme is either boring or sublime. every time I try to write a poem that rhymes I end up writing a limerick. limericks are great. they're fun. they're light. bringing light.
then there's bukowski.
a drunk vantage
mean filthy there was
a poet. he
in lonely broken
stinking
still of cheap shit wine
I like hunter thompson, who was a journalist but in my opinion, he was a poet.
Oh yes, whitman. i sing the body electric!
t.s. elliot then of course e.e.
and sylvia plath and maya angelou last but not least.
course poetry is so subject to personal taste, can it really be recommended?
W.B. Yates (sounds like Yeets)
Browning
Frost
Dickenson
Tolkein (who do you think wrote all those poems and songs in his novels?)
Poe (oh, man, one of the best in his time and still today)
Solomon (from the songs of Solomon in the bible)
Maya Angelou
Dylan Thomas and
Bob Dylan
Bernie Taupin (penner of much of Elton John's work)
Billie Joel is awesome!
Joe Strummer
Sting
I completely disagree that poetry is formless and rules less, otherwise how could it become poetry? The intent and idea to me is all about how to create rhythym, meter, timing with words. It is also, in contrarywise view at times, how to create a vision, a meme, a picture of something in a few choice words, using them like stones in a pond, rippling outward, each creating their own waves over the previous and leading up to the next in order to present an idea, a thought, a view.
Prose, like Shakespear's and his sonnets are all about form and tight structure, while remaining within those rules, he created things of utter beauty which are reachable and at times deeply touching to anyone with stirrings of emotion within them.
Send Lawyers, guns and money,
Get me out of this jam.
Music is but poetry set to sounds to add melody, rhythym, tempo and it gives it a kick.
Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull)
John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison (Richard Starkey is funny, but not much of a poet)
Dave Matthews
Snoop Dogg
Many of these are acquired tastes and acquiring them is part, I think, of being a poet one's self. You must stretch your mind, your point of view and your comfort zone to attain your own poetic voice. Anyone can write a country western 'cry in your beer song' all you gotta do is have your feelings hurt or returned and BAM you got a hit! (not really true, but you get the idea.)
Poems don't have to have a rhyme, many of mine don't. Rhyme can be simple, iambic pentameter (the ABAB or AABB sort) with a rhyme and rhythym that is strong, relatively inflexible and still make a decent impact on the reader. It takes a certain amount of thought, skill and deftness with words to make them work, which is why I recommend at least working on them for a while. I think they help focus the mind on how to structure thought, vision and words.
Consider it beginning instruction in poetry. Anyone can grab a paint brush and start slapping and swinging away at a canvas, calling themselves 'artist.' Saying it doesn't make it so. Learning techniques, brush strokes, paint mixing, the science and art of shading and presenting 2D as 3D, and good drafting skills are all essential components of making an artist better.
In other words, pure talent is great, but it is always enhanced by acquiring skill. Skill does not come without practice or learning from others. Poetry is considered an art form and therefore, to my view, it seems it complements itself with skills learned from practice and the study of masters in the field.
And don't forget experimentation. Anyone who wishes to truly dig in and get poetic will, at some point in time, try something they have yet to see others do. Not to compete, but to attempt to create something heretofore unseen, unknown, unconsidered.
I started writing poetry at age 12. It was my first real foray into writing of any kind beyond, "What I Did For Summer Vacation" essays at the time. It started with a recurring dream that awoke me each time with tears on my face, not of fear, but of sorrow and beauty.
If poetry sometimes seems childish, remember that sometimes it's the heart and mind of a child who produces it. It is still capable of extreme wisdom, beauty and impact if you take that into account.
And there's a difference between childish or childlike and juvenile.
The key, ultimately, to poetry is an affinity and comprehension of meaning in words. Archaic, obsolete, colloquial, double meaning, alliteration, otomotopeaic, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms and common useage, slang, hip and rebellion related useages are all important in their turns.
As I write prose, it is nothing like my poetry (most of the time.) As I write poetry, I am attempting to convey something with a few choice words, their placement and their meter, as well as the meaning of the words and their careful juxtaposition on paper (or on a screen of phosphors, pixels and thin films of emissivity.)
Okay, that's my view. Hope to find out more about this from the perspective of others. Words!
Here is an example:
The Red Kiss:
Deep lilies sway. The sorrow-mussel's pearls itch and bleed. Heavy fish streak between the stones. One the breast bottom, the heart of fear pounds fourteen feeble beats. The limbs still suffer. Corals hide fat and skin. Her lips seek the surface to be saved by oxygen. But on the sludge bottom, the tracks of the red kiss still glow.
I am currently reading Ventrakl, the poems of George Trakl ( an Austrian poet who died in 1914) translated using very unusual methods by Christian Hawkey. Creating poems that are more Christian Hawkey than Trakl.
Here is an example:
WHITETRAKL
A fountain sings.
Clouds, white and tender along the edge of night, white birds
Fluttering up the wandering boy's white nightgown.
Softly a white night drifts in.
And myrrh blooms silently over the white eyelids of the dead.
We meet
With shepherds and white stars. We drink
The white waters of the pool. Mother even carries and infant in her
white moon.
Yet more radiant is the white stranger, a white shirt made of stars.
Or, on a cold night, the white cheeks of sisters, their white eyebrows, white heads.
rated with love of all kinds of poetry.
R