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On Disliking Poetry
- tjradcliffe 11y agoThis analysis of poetry is like declaring that the purpose of physics is to build perpetual motion machines and then saying we all dislike physics because it fails in this transcendent purpose. The author trots out uncritically the entire corpus of Romantic twaddle, swathed in sufficient technical language that most poeple will feel too intimidated to challenge it. But twaddle it is. The failure of poetry in the modern world is a result of the rejection of concrete experience as the foundational matter of poems. This has been accompanied by the abandonment of the physical rhythmicities of speech (including rhyme) as the basis of poetic structure. There's nothing transcendent about good poetry. People are made out of meat, and we communicate by flapping peices of meat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ Poetry reflects our meat-based lives, the physicality of our meat. When we abandon that, when we abandon concrete, sensual experience for floating abstraction, as the Romantics did, or for purely internal emotional states as modern confessional free verse does, we abandon the very thing that makes poetry possible and necessary: meat. Poetry is speech, specifically speech where the rhythmical structure dominates the gramatical structure. The rhythmical structure can be strong and overt (rap, Kipling, etc) or subtle (even the best confessional free verse manages this at times, or the L A N G U A G E poets at their most surreal, although I don't have any use for their political programme.) The rhythmical structure of speech comes from the way we form sounds with meat, and nothing else. Nor does poetry have to be about anything out of the ordinary, although it certainly can be. Poetry is, amongst other things, the literature of moments. It's a way to capture and communicate a fleeting experience. Consider: young girls in blue shorts street corner in summer rain light changes, they run Way more memorable and evocative than "I saw some girls wearing blue shorts on the corner waiting for the light to change and they ran when it did 'cause there was a hard summer rain falling." Poetry makes the mind work in useful ways, focusing on structure and meaning and meat. We are physical beings capable of abstract appreciation of the world. Poetry exists at the intersection, grounded in one, guided by the other. What's to dislike?
- walljm 11y agolike For me, its always been about Rhythm and Contrast, which, if you think about it, is the foundation of all art. Poetry, and prose, in a different way, use rhythm and contrast to draw attention to things, to make words mean more than their surface implies. its an endowment of depth. I love that you pointed out that poetry is the "literature of moments". I never liked really long poems, as the rigid structures often get in the way of the narrative, preferring short verses that capture a moment or feeling.
- innguest 11y agoYou're absolutely right. Those are the right reasons to like Poetry. Which is why I tell people that the stuff that the "Poetry Society of America" has been plastering NYC subways with is not poetry (none of them care about any of the beautiful traits of a Poem that you enumerated). (Chase Twichell, Jim Moore, Seamus Heaney, Tracy K. Smith, see them here: http://web.mta.info/mta/aft/poetry/poetry.html http://web.mta.info/mta/aft/poetry/poetry.html)
- matthewowen 11y agoIs this a joke? Your position is that Seamus Heaney's work (etc) isn't poetry? And that's because you don't think there's rhythm and melody to what he writes? I find that very disheartening.
- atmosx 11y agoI believe poetry is the highest level of expression, using words. It's the purest and most powerful form of writing. Now talking about poetry and programming (object oriented programming), here's a nice pun: [...] What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. [...]
- murbard2 11y agoPoetry is hugely successful in the modern world, it just happens to be set to music most of the time.
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- wwweston 11y agoI'm seeing some parallels to writing software here: "you’re moved to write a poem because of some transcendent impulse... but as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. So the poem is always a record of failure. There’s an ‘undecidable conflict’ between the poet’s desire to make an alternative world and, as Grossman puts it, ‘resistance to alternative making inherent in the materials of which any world must be composed’" Or, for that matter, the desire to transcend/reshape a current market we sometimes name as the entrepreneurial impulse. Though I think poetry is a much purer form.
- weeksie 11y agoPoetry is pretty popular. Most of it is called hip hop now, though.
- JadeNB 11y agomurbard2 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9708591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9708591) made a similar point earlier.
- zyxley 11y agoTwo examples that come to mind... Grandmaster Flash's "The Message": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqky4dSGJnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqky4dSGJnE http://genius.com/Grandmaster-flash-and-the-furious-five-the-message-lyrics http://genius.com/Grandmaster-flash-and-the-furious-five-the... Kanye's "Jesus Walks": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYF7H_fpc-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYF7H_fpc-g http://genius.com/Kanye-west-jesus-walks-lyrics http://genius.com/Kanye-west-jesus-walks-lyrics Both are lyrically dense and poetic enough that the only thing really making them "music" rather than "spoken word poetry" is having a backing track.
- peter_l_downs 11y agoYou might also like Milo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwGwD-0OYuM&list=PL_KFGCl1leB8YOEz9ZEvKMiRV76MvnOl- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwGwD-0OYuM&list=PL_KFGCl1le...
- ExpiredLink 11y agoSome of it is called hip hop now. Some of hip hop is poetry.
- scriptman 11y agoI think a poet is like a sculptor that is always forced to sculpt using Lego. Words are a coarse medium for expressing art as their look, sound and interaction with surrounding words defines their meaning. Stray too far outside of convention and people reading your poem won't understand it. I can understand this being frustrating.
- calinet6 11y agoNever have I read more love between the lines of such an intelligent, thorough, and obtuse criticism. Nowhere will you find more humanity than the impossibility of perfection, and what is poetry but the shared search for that humanity? Imperfect as it must be.
- dschiptsov 11y agoThe worst aspect of most arts are critics. Programming included. All these pseudo-intellectual categories, analysis of sizes (forms) and styles, anthologies stuff like that. BTW, for those who can read Russian, Nabokov's the Gift (Dar) is the best reading about poetry - how it is not a a mere classification of rhythms (I imagine hipster idiots, advocating well-typed pairs of words and type-checkers for poets) but an inner sudden insight from a pre-linguistic, non-verbal mind (which people call "heart") verbalized on the spot. This is what programming is also (read On Lisp) - one express his own sudden insights by giving it a structure in terms of a programming language (and trying it till it is hot), which means it should be restricted as less as possible (this is fucking why Lisps or Smalltalk or Erlang feels so special). Poetry is not the a mere form with some vague meaning, it is these sudden insights and some structure a poet gives to it. That is why we could enjoy Rumi without being able to read Persian. We are excited when we found an unexpected, rare gem, a verbalization (an expression!) of what we felt ourselves, but still been unable to express (same experience with reading source code of the best (Norvig, rtm+PG, Sysoev, etc.)) The rate of gems to stuff is 20/80, so do not expect to much. Read arc.arc to understand what I mean. Like it is with everything (at least with literature, music and programming), 95% of poetry is narcissistic or graphomanic crap, like blogs. That's why, perhaps, most of people are convinced that poetry is something which has a rithm in it. Read Nabokov or Pamuk.
- peter_l_downs 11y agoNot sure what you mean by hipster idiots in this context, although I agree with your overall point. I can explain at least one reason to write a rhythym-based poem generator [0] – the problem lends itself to some interesting code :) I'd never claim that it's a valuable tool for creating "art", but it was fun to write and because of it I've thought a lot more about what "art" is and isn't. And, Sussman liked it! > We are excited when we found an unexpected, rare gem, a verbalization (an expression!) of what we felt ourselves, but still been unable to express (same experience with reading source code of the best (Norvig, rtm+PG, Sysoev, etc.)) Really well written; the frisson of recognizing one's own experience described by someone else is both validating and comforting. [0]: https://github.com/peterldowns/bard https://github.com/peterldowns/bard