The Poetry Book

By Xlibris US

The Poetry Book is more than a collection of poems, it is instructive as to poetic technique and convention as well as types of poetry. In it there are no prose paragraphs that have been restructured into stanzas, or mysteriously configured and presented as poems with diction and subject little more interesting than closed garage doors in a tract home subdivision. There is free verse here, and traditional rhythm and rhyme, but it is all poetry. And it is poetry, not because the author wants it to be, but because of the poetic techniques and conventions he has employed. A stanza does not a poem make nor does bombastic delivery. If the traditions, rules of writing, and conventions of literary history are of no value to poetry, then there is no poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493173808

Book preview

Contents

A POEM IS LIKE

BARNS

A POEM FOR THE SUN MAGAZINE

NEW AGE POETS

THEY DON’T MAKE THEM THAT WAY ANYMORE

KNOWING

LET THE EAGLE FALL

THE PLACE

FAR AWAY

BETWEEN FIRST & THIRD

HARD FEELINGS

OF KITES AND DREAMS

FALLING LEAVES

LIKE THE REDMAN GOES

ENVIRON

HER

THEN

DARK LOVE

TIME

BE

JUST THAT WAY

OF ME AND YOU

RAINY WEDNESDAY BLUES

URBAN RENEWAL

COLORS

LA SALLE

GREEN

FALL

CALLING

WEATHER

DISSENT

HAIKU WANNABE

MEMORY

PERHAPS

WEREANDIS

THE WRONGS-DONE

SIGN LANGUAGE

ALREADY THERE HAVE COME SOFT RAINS

OH, KENTUCKY !

MADELEINE

A MAN WHO DIED

THE SECRET

GOLD WATCH TIME

REMEMBRANCE

AND YOU

IDENTITY

WHY COME THESE THINGS?

DOGGY RAP

A PLEA FOR RECOGNITION

CALIBER .44

A CHRISTMAS SCENE

COMPLAINT

FROM THE RUBAIYAT OF ME I AM

WHO RANG THE DAMN BELL ANYWAY?

DON’T TAKE IT

TO A ROOKIE

THROUGH ALL THE YEARS

NEVER SHOULD HAVE

RESPONSIBILITY

GROWING UP ON 5TH AND MAIN

MANY

ALREADY SEEN

BUGS

ABOUT OL’ BUCK

OVERHEARD

LIMERICKS

OLD MEN

CHILDREN MINE

OF AN AFTERNOON

BACK THEN

WEEK’S HIGHLIGHT; ONCE

WHERE THE HEART BEAT TRUE

RADIO DAYS

ROSE

AND OTHER THINGS

LAMENT

AFTERWORD

Dedication

This effort is dedicated to all those lovers of poetry who know poetry as something of beauty and technique instead of a prosaic venting against past societal slurs and current wrongs. It is, too, I will add, a thank you to an English teacher named Mrs. Bolt who saw something worth her time in a boy from the wrong side of the tracks all those years ago at State High in Terre Haute, Indiana. Finally, it is dedicated to my family, my children, my grandchildren, and my wonderful and deeply loved wife, Dorinda. She is a woman who is peerless as a professional, a mother, a wife, and a life-long companion and lover. She has always been my harshest critic and my most devoted fan. And I am totally devoted to her.

FOREWORD

This is a book of poems with comments about poetry; especially as compared to prose. Poetry and prose are language forms. And as such they can be dramatic and beautiful; and often they are about everyday things. Prose is what we speak (though there are those who deny this). It is what we write in ordinary letters, it is what we read in the newspapers and magazines, and it is what we enjoy in well-written novels and other books employing high style and superb diction. It is usually very good then (some would say it is only in such examples that it is truly prose); better than what most of us utter throughout the day. That’s why we pay money for it. But we don’t spend much money on poetry. We aren’t as familiar with poetry as we are with prose.

We encounter poetry all the time, but unless it is in music we usually ignore it. We can’t escape it entirely, however. It is in advertisements and in phrases which we utter with no realization that they are poetic. It is present among little groups of older adults meeting in neighborhood church buildings and in colorless classrooms in junior colleges and high schools at night to learn about and to write poetry. Some of what they write is good. A lot of it is poor in quality.

The good poetry is in books on library shelves; most of the books are old, most of them haven’t been read for a very long time. That means that the poetry in these books is also old. It’s true. And what is also true is that this poetry has been written according to long-held tradition and well-established rules about the writing of poetry. This cannot generally be said about many of the new poems of today. The poets of today, even some of our poet laureates, write so-called poems which are no more than prose paragraphs rearranged into stanzas. Such efforts are as plain and uninteresting as closed garage doors in a tract-home subdivision. Reliance on stanzaic form alone cannot make of prose something that it is not.

Poetry doesn’t have to always be about love, or romantic memories from the past; it can be about anything. But there are some requirements. Although a poem may be about the most common thing in the world, it should speak about that thing in an uncommon way. If a subject is not grand or extraordinary, or interesting, a poet makes it so by the manner in which he writes about it; he creates a poem by doing this. Prose and poetry are what they are because of how they are made.

Today, the traditions and rules about the writing of poetry are under attack, and poetry is faced with change unlike any that prose has ever had to contend with. New poems of today, like rubber bands stretched to their limits, are connected tenuously to their predecessors and hardly seem to be poems at all when compared to the stuff in those old books on library shelves, sitting there, full of poetic gold, and seldom ever taken down and read.

It doesn’t take much to break a rubber band stretched to its limit. Some people believe that the connections between old poetry and new poetry have been broken for some time now. The thing is, if you walk back along the line which poetry has taken to get to where it is today, you will find places where there seems to be little resemblance between the then and the now in poetry.

There is an old rule about what poetry is and is not that applies here: if it is necessary to question whether a piece is exemplary of either prose or poetry, it is probably prose. Much of today’s poetry falls into this category of is it or isn’t it? And therein lies the conflict between traditionalists and modernists. A traditionalist might say, between the real poet and the wannabe. A modernist wouldn’t deign to even comment; having written off tradition long since.

This point of controversy, stuck like a dirty little piece of something unwanted on the sole of the poet’s shoe as he walks along the path of history, had its beginnings over two centuries ago in the emergence of something called free verse. The official definition of free verse follows: rhythmical lines varying in length, without any fixed (pre-determined) metrical pattern; usually unrhymed, and often with a pattern of some kind of repetition (not metrical) and parallel grammatical structure.

One might say this definition is very vague. It certainly is permissive in its demands on the poet. It completely cancels the need to master rhythm, rhyme, figurative language, alliteration, or diction—indeed, much of what makes a poem a poem. And for those poets who dislike the restrictions of meter and rhyme, and who disdain the stature of subject found in much of poetry’s classical or traditional periods, this lack of governance is welcome. In fact, this is an understatement. It has been embraced and carried to extremes beyond the intentions of those who contrived it in the first place. A popular belief by many of today’s poets is that if the writer thinks that what he has written is a poem, it is.

Things get old, people become used to them, and a yearning for something new and different arises. If you are an artist, a writer, a poet, you are swept up in the wave of change and you do your best to keep from drowning. That might mean you are able to adopt the new while retaining some of the old. If you are good, especially if you are very good, you might find yourself on the leading curl of the wave. One of the very good ones was e.e. cummings (he wrote his name that way). He lived in the twentieth century. Matthew Arnold was also very good. He died in 1888.

Each of these writers, and many others like them, broke new ground with the poems they wrote. But their poems were still attached in several important ways to the traditions from which they had evolved. Readers still recognized them as poetry. Nobody had to argue with anyone about what they were. They were undeniably poetry. They were a departure from the norm, yes; they were new and different, yes; but they were poetry and not something else. They certainly were not prose. They could not be made to be prose by rearrangement of any kind. They were seen as poems because they contained, indeed were made of, poetic conventions and structures; conventions and structures used in a particular way which placed them in a category apart from prose and declared that they were poems.

I have said that poetry can be an everyday thing; but it still has to catch the reader’s attention and elicit a certain amount of admiration; and it must not be so obviously easy to have written it that the reader may say to himself, My ten year old could have written that. Good poetry demands knowledge of the rules and conventions of writing poetry; knowledge and the ability to apply it.

One of the most difficult things to do in the entire realm of literary criticism is to define poetry. It is more than prose. A piece of prose may use metaphor and simile, it may contain alliteration, it may be dramatic and create mood in the reader’s mind. And a poem may do the same thing. What then makes one a poem and the other prose? Well, if the piece uses rhyme, that makes the distinction easy; it is a poem. What if it doesn’t use rhyme? If it uses a pre-determined, controlled, regular rhythm which is iambic pentameter it is blank verse; that makes it poetry. Beyond that, the determination of its identity rests on judgement based on the number of and types of poetic conventions it contains as well as the combinations of such conventions; i.e., the manner in which they are employed. You might guess that not just any old body plucked at random from a crowd can make such a judgement. Your guess would be correct. If this is considered a weakness in the entire process of defining what is and what isn’t poetry, it is a well-founded consideration. And