For the nature of this thing we call a poem…

According to Aristotle, by way of Jimmy Abad, depends on it being “a representation of a human experience.” While some may not agree with this Formalist approach, the poems we will read and write in our (classroom and online) class deal with human experiences transformed into words.

As representations of human experience, poems deal with objects — that is, with what are represented — meaning, “human action or behavior” (Abad 61). Poems are thus mimetic in that they try to capture the experience contained in the human action or behavior represented. But they are also didactic in the sense that poems point to “a theme or argument (the subject of someone’s reflection)” or to an “insight into human experience” (Abad 62). The human action or behavior represented is always that of a speaker or persona “speaking and acting in his or her own person in a particular human situation”(Abad 63).

The manner of representation may vary — from the dramatic to the narrative modes; or poems may use combinations of these modes — according to the speaker’s or persona’s action or behavior in the imagined situation.

Tell by Show

OK, we hit a few bumps there and made such a rattle it scared away some of the definitions we were stalking. The problem was our prey knew we were coming. We told them we would be hunting them. We should have just crept slowly near, and taken them. So let’s try another tactic:

Roger Mitchell, in The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach (ed. Robin Behn and Chase Twichell; New York: HarperCollins, 1992), proposes an exercise he calls “Breaking the Sentence; Or, No Sentences But in Things.” His instructions is very simple: “Write a poem that is simply a list of things.”

His exercise is meant for poets who are sometimes caught in the determinism of language, especially those imprisoned under the dictatorship of the sentence. He offers this exercise as a way of breaking free from that oppressive rule.

I’ll appropriate this exercise for a different reason, which Roger Mitchell also mentions: “What happens in this exercise is that you find you only have images to manipulate” and you “begin to see the possibility of ‘speaking’ only in images….” (I’ll show you a sample of his work in class.) It will also help you practice how to not say, to show rather than tell.

Let’s see what you can come up with in your blogs…

Stalking Definitions

Janet Burroway lists down several definitions of what a poem is in her Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft (New York: Penguin Academics, 2003). Some of these are:

• the natural language of all worship
• devil’s wine
• an imitation of an imitation
• more philosophic than history
• painting that speaks
• a criticism of life
• fine-spun from a mind at peace
• a way of taking life by the throat
• the language of an act of attention
• an escape from emotion
• the antithesis to science
• the bill and coo of sex
• a pause before death
• poetry is memorable speech (from W. H. Auden)

Aim your sight at one of these creatures (I mean, definitions) — the one that you think and feel closely resembles what poetry is for you. Then try to pin it down by writing what you think may pass itself off as a poem, using the idea or what images may be triggered by the creature’s (again I mean definition’s) words caught in the crosshairs of your gun’s sight.

Then click on any prey at Blogroll for who gets bragging rights. Brag or comment away.

A Way with Words

What is poetry? Nobody can say exactly, but everybody (okay, almost everybody) will try to tell you what it is or isn’t.

My Literature teachers back in college and grad school would say “poetry is…” this or that, with their definitions cancelling out the other, and I’d be left on shaky literary grounds with no definite definition of what this thing called poetry is except that it looked like a creature covered in a fur-like coat of verses. Or did it, because when I looked again it resembled nothing like prowling stanzas but more like a stampede of prose paragraphs.

Let’s stalk this thing. Please put on your safari costume and your “the pen is mightier than the sword or rifle” and let’s hop on our trusty steed “Games” (see sidebar and click there) and or just scroll up to start “Stalking Definitions.”