Making poetry accessible

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, poems, poetry, reading

While we lived in Oklahoma, from 1986 to 1995, we were members of the Stillwater Gem and Mineral Society. For part of 1994 I edited their monthly journal, The Rockhound Gazette. In the July 1994 issue I placed a little ditty I had written, shown here. About the end of the year, much to my surprise, the regular editor, Ruby Lingelbach, presented me with a plaque and award letter! She had entered the "poem" in some sort of contest at a conference of the Rocky Mountain Federation of Mineralogical Societies. It won first place.

So, can I call myself a "prize winning poet"? Just maybe!

For the aficionado, the meter is Trochaic Heptameter followed by an unaccented syllable, a 15-syllable line. That is rare for "ordinary" poetry, but is a meter useful in song. In fact, were I to add an appropriate chorus after the second and fourth verses, it could be sung to "O! Susanna".

You're not an aficionado? No worries. You can get a bit of grounding in such matters in How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse, by Thomas C. Foster.

Now, maybe you don't want to read poetry "like a professor". After all, when I read a poem, I don't really want it to be hanged, drawn and quartered and dragged to the four winds. I just want to enjoy it. I suspect most folks are the same.

Frequently, knowing a bit can help us enjoy a poem more. In this book, should it interest you, you can indeed learn a few things about drawing out more of the meaning the poet put in there. The author covers a lot of ground, from the way a poem strikes both eye and ear (much poetry is intended to be heard), to the various structures the poem or the lines might have – including whether there are rhymes; and the matters of symbols and symbolism. Although, on that latter point, it is well to remember what Sigmund Freud said about symbols in psychology, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

I am glad I had a few years of classical education before starting public school, even though the level of poetical understanding I got was rather basic. So I know that the word "iamb" is a trochee, and "trochee" is an iamb; that is, both are two-syllable "feet", but an iamb trips along with the emphasis on the second syllable while the trochee resembles a heartbeat, "LUB dub". The other two sorts of common poetic feet actually sound their meaning: "dactylic" is emphasized like "pówdery", while "anapest" is emphasized like "underfóot".

I have often said that a poem needs structure, and if it has "neither rhyme nor reason [rhythm]", it isn't poetry. The author shows how some "free verse" isn't as free as we might think, having structure just as rigid as a sonnet (with its 14 lines of 10 syllables in primarily iambic meter, in 8- and 6-line sections). However, he concedes that there is a huge amount of "bad" verse of any kind we might imagine, and for free verse in particular, it frequently differs from plain prose only in having the lines broken off short. So I continue in my belief that, if it can't be chanted or sung, it is probably not a poem.

However, read the book and judge for yourself. Perhaps if you tend to avoid poetry, you'll find it more enjoyable in the future. A fun read, this book!