Well, I am exaggerating for effect of what I mean That is the kind of thing I remember doing at primary school! haha!
I would say that some semblance of this idea is present in the more eccentric work of E.E. Cummings. The layout of the words is as much a part of the information the reader is given for pace and cadence as the words themselves. The bulk of his work was of a more traditional presentation as regards how it was printed on the page, but he's known most for the items I mention.
https://tribrach.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/concrete-cat-by-dorthi-charles/ (I had to study this one for a class.)
Can't say I'd call that a poem, Spence, but I get the point. The Stephen Fry book I'm reading has so far only dealt with the basics of the iambic pentameter, so poetry which doesn't follow this ten syllable, five-footed, ti-tum, ti-tum pattern is still a mystery to me.
Whether or not we call it a poem doesn't matter, lol. It technically is poetry. I think iTs plain silly, haha.
It's not something I've ever come across so maybe I'm missing something, but how is it technically poetry? It's simply the names of each part of the cat (ear, whiskers etc) arranged in such a way as to represent the image of a cat. There isn't even anything which tells us how it should be 'read'.
A lot of beginners do that because they think it makes their writing look 'poetic.' This is why I don't like reading poems that are centered, or some other weird formatting; I prefer to read poems where the writer paid careful attention to the language he or she used, not the shape their paragraphs take.
I mentioned at some point in this thread, that the meaning behind some poems was utterly lost on me, and that I found this a worry. But a few days ago I bought a book by Stephen Fry called The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within and would like to share a short extract from his thoughts on this, taken from the second of his three golden rules at the start of the book. Opinions welcome.
I guess it kind of depends on your definition of poetry. Mine includes words as a way to convey images or ideas. Those words literally make up a picture of a cat. It's essentially a painting made of words. Isn't that what poetry is? Painting with words. The title Concrete Cat also goes to give it some meaning. It's showing an extreme definition of using concrete language. I'm not sure a poem could be more concrete than the parts of a cat made to look like a cat. I think if we discount the use of visuals, white space, alignment, shape, form, etc., we're missing an elementary that can make poetry special. I've read some really incredible poetry that's been weirdly composed to help make meaning. As @Wreybies mentioned, E.E. Cummings comes to mind. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/47244 Take a look at this one by Cummings. The words crammed together without spaces convey what it was like for Buffalo Bill to fire his weapon and break a bunch of clay pigeons in sequence. How can we say that this format isn't helping the poem?
I always found something rather cheekily accusatory in this poem, like the only reason for Death to take the likes of Buffalo Bill was for some below-the-belt fun. When you get to the final innuendo and then re-read the poem, the sexual nuance is hardly nuance at all. It's right on the surface. He rode a watersmooth silver stallion. Mm-hm. I bet he did.
Not his only poem to obviously make metaphor of the sex act. She Being Brand is the more famous of such poems he wrote. And again, its unusual orthography, spacing, and other visual elements are typical of his more celebrated works, though not typical of his overall body of work. https://genius.com/E-e-cummings-she-being-brand-annotated
Yes. It's a poetry form. Shape in poetry can matter. Poetry that is not appealing to the eyes can be bleh to me.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one I can derive not one shred of sensory pleasure from Concrete Cat.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not poetry. There are plenty of poems I can't enjoy. It doesn't make it non-poetry.
Very true, but then I wasn't claiming this to be so. One school of thought says anything can be art (and likewise anything can be poetry) I just happen to be of the opinion that this isn't the case. dfguig efbg geiugfgf ueig efihjeihf oihfeuhf heufhuef iefhieoihfoiehfhf fheofihhfh hfheuehfuehfufe hfu uehfhf efhuhuehf ehuhfe eufhhf uehf ufhhecueh efhuhfehfefh ehf fe Is that poetry just because I say it is?
Yes, but E.E Cummings could write great poetry before he started playing with the shapes of his paragraphs. I am not saying 'Oddly shaped paragraphs' are bad poems, I am saying that oddly shaped paragraphs are not what makes writing poetic; it enhances the poems, not makes the poem.
Exactly. As I mentioned earlier, his more famous, more eccentric poems don't actually represent the body of his work. They're just the ones most people know because they're unusual. His ability to play with visual form came after his mastery of what words can do on their own. Sometimes it's also just a matter of letting yourself buy into the new. Had my AP English teacher not used Cummings to get me to know that not all poetry is high-handed and high-brow, that it's not all Millay and her All I could see from where I stood was three long mountains and a wood... had he not gotten me to buy into the saucy nature of Cummings, the rebellion of Ginsberg, I doubt I would have learned to appreciate the prose of writers like Delany later in life.
I just don't think we should ever throw away a tool in the toolbox. I'm not a master poet, or even a good one, but if I think right or center justifying a poem will add to its meaning, I'll do it. I don't like unnecessary constraints on any form of writing. I do, however, think there should be a reason. Playing with the format just to make it seem poetic might not work, but how can we say that? I think it's ridiculous to say only a master poet can play with white space and form.
I think it's a moot point personally. We can write anything and call it poetry, simply because we wrote it and have decided to claim it as so, but that doesn't mean others have to like it, and I while I agree no one has the right to categorically state it isn't poetry, I do think they have the right to hold that as their personal opinion.
I wonder if anyone who's studied poetry on an academic level - whether that be self-taught or otherwise - could offer me some help? As I've stated elsewhere I'm currently working through a study book which contains a series of exercises, but when it came to the one I did last night I really struggled to get my head around it. The exercise dealt with iambic, trochaic tetrameter and trimeter, as well as 'docked weak endings'. In it we had to write a quatrain in trochaic tetrameter (four-line stanza, each with a stressed opening, unstressed ending, four beats, eight syllables) where the second and fourth line had 'docked weak endings' (effectively turning them into stressed/strong endings). As always the author included his own 'on the spot' attempts as an example. In this case it went: News of bombs in Central London - Flesh and blood disintegrate. Teenage voices screaming proudly, 'Allah akbar! God is great!' If you follow the syllable beats, starting with an 'up' (stressed syllable) you can clearly see it follows his rules; a regular four-beat on each line, the first and third line with eight syllables ending on a weak (unstressed syllable), and the second and fourth line with a dropped eighth syllable (so seven syllables) ending on a strong (stressed syllable) When I came to have a go myself, however, a strange thing happened and I became totally deaf to the stresses and non-stresses in words. I'll show my effort shortly, but I just couldn't tell is if I'd started with a stressed syllable/word or not. The four-beat, eight syllable part is not a problem - I can do that - but I discovered I cannot naturally write, or at least 'hear', a trochaic (strong/stressed opening) Here's what I came up with (I've highlighted the proposed four stresses in each line): Visions of hills and rain-filled cloud, Slate-grey lakes and dotted lark. Take this with you and go feel proud, For soon enough only dark. Crap, I know, but no more crap than his I'd say. But my point is, did I follow the rules? Is this written in trochaic or iambic? I know it's a somewhat complex question, so if you got this far, I thank you very much.
No. It has no words and thus has no meaning. As far as I am concerned, poetry must have meaning. Formal poetry is tried and true methods for rhyme and rhythm. This is why it is used. Yet... form can be altered to create beauty. Spencer recently assisted me in editing a poem. I decided on an altered form from the original one I had used. The form is not the most important piece, yet it can enhance the poetry. How a poetry sounds/read, how it appears, and word choice, are the tools at our disposal as poets. Were we to simply ignore them, we would be ignoring possibility. Simply knowing them opens you up to greater skill. So I will state that shape poetry has it's own beauty. -Unknown writer. Found at http://www.funny-poems.co.uk/ This example... is more beautiful because of it's shape. The sadness it carries because of it's shape would be a beauty lost if it was written without shape. Form can enhance a poem. Even the shape poetry that is getting a bad name here. It doesn't "make" the poem. Yet without it, I find less beauty. Do you disagree?
Iambic Pentameter is the easiest form of meter to learn; however, meter is one of the most academic aspects of poetry and cannot be approached in any other fashion due to its complexity. Meter has many difficulties that someone studying it has to be aware of, an example would be the word 'Fire.' in some dialects, this is a single syllable word, in others it is a two-syllable word. There are some solid books on meter out there, but the most beginner friendly Book is 'Mary Oliver's rules of the dance.' Your examples are neither. Some lines are Trochaic, and others are Iambic. Also, I can tell you don't have the ear for this yet, Nouns and Verbs always take stresses over prepositions or conjunctions (there are exceptions though). Most of the time in compound words the first word takes the stress.
Part of the reason I don't write much poetry anymore is that meter is so incredibly difficult. I spent a lot of hours, to little avail, trying to develop an ear for it.
