Poets and Poetry
Monday, 28 May 2007.
In the poetry section of bookstores, I repeatedly come across books like The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Poetry, and other similar works. My opinion on the matter is, if you need a guide to writing poetry, then I don’t care what your teachers or parents or supporters say: you're not, and probably never will be, a poet. You may yet become a creative and talented writer, but you are certainly not a poet.
This is because a poet doesn’t try to write poetry. They don’t care about fourteen lines or iambic pentameter or rhyming couplets. While they may make use of the such structural tools, poetry is not about structure. Poetry isn’t even, strictly speaking, about content: it can be about marigolds or butterflies just as easily as it can be a charge to action. Poetry is about the poet: it is about the questions they ask, the answers they seek, the childlike wonder and curiosity with which they see the world. Poets look at the world in a way all else can’t even comprehend: they see the same objects as others do, but they see through a different medium; the world they see is one where the whites are whiter and the darks are far, far beyond black… where the color becomes gray, and the gray becomes color. A poem is thus the poet’s attempt to communicate, in any way possible, what they see to those around them. It is only then interpreted as poetry, after-the-fact.
In Wilder’s Our Town, recently-deceased Emily takes stock of how much she missed during her life, and asks, “Doesn’t anyone ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?” The Stage Manager, sort of a pan-aware being, replies, “No. Saints and poets, maybe; they do some.” I think that the world of the poet is the world children are born into; somewhere along the line, we sadly forget, we lose that magic, until all but a few have only the shadow of it lurking in the backs of their minds.
One cannot develop this gift of seeing into a parallel world—this third eye—by trying to develop it directly. One is either born with it, or is granted the seed at some point in their life, perhaps in response to a difficult experience. Whichever of the two it is, it is not given through practice; practice may make a poet into a good poet, but it will not, cannot, make a non-poet into even a bad poet.
A writer may yet write beautiful words that resemble poetry, in theme and in structure; yet they will not yet be a poet. And if they're not a poet, then it’s not really poetry that they write. This is not to say poets are superior to writers; merely to say that they are very, very different. And thus books (written, no less, by writers) on writing poetry can be seen as nothing more than a farce. Rather, I'd put my faith into a poem on living (and thus, an account of what it is to live a poet’s life).
