What is poetry, anyway?

The Nobel Prize organization obviously thought so when they awarded Bob Dylan the Prize for Literature, but it is definitely not as straightforward as words + rhythm = poem = song. To answer that, we must look at what poetry is, and that is a question that has remained, for the most part, a bone of contention. There are, of course, a few identifying characteristics, but these aren’t hard and fast rules, which makes the interpretation of poetry as a concept, rather challenging. But I’m happy to do it if, in the end, I can reach at least a mildly convincing bottom line – and I cannot deny that my biases will lead us in a particular direction, but objectivity is a bit much to ask for in literature, don’t you think?

Let’s begin by asking ourselves – what is poetry? This may prove to be a minor divergence, but a rather enjoyable one if I dare say so. I asked the internet as much, and among dictionary definitions, which we will keep for later, it threw up a stunningly articulate piece written by Mark Yakich for the culture column in The Atlantic. It discusses many facets of poetry, but I have picked three that I thought were particularly important.

The first of this is how poetry begs to be read – in terms of form, you’re much more likely to skip over a well-justified six-line paragraph, than a ten-line left-aligned poem with haphazard enjambment, and in terms of how historically, we’ve been told over and over, from literature class in high school to a complex critique, that the meaning and idea is hardly ever what you interpret it to be the first time around. Essentially – you’re intrigued by form, and challenged by what’s hiding. Mr Yakich puts it perfectly-

A poem practically dares you not just to look but to read: I am different. I am special. I am other. Ignore me at your peril.

The second is how so many poems are such bland jumbles of words, so completely lacking in the ability to excite the human senses that many people are put-off at the very mention or sight. They’d probably much rather experience the moment the poem aspires to capture in a lushly descriptive piece of prose, or a well-performed fight or kiss on the television screen, or in three minutes of an immersive and memorable piece of music.

A poem moves a reader, physically or emotionally, very rarely. But seriously, isn’t a poem a home for deep feelings, stunning images, beautiful lyricism, tender reflections, and/or biting wit? I suppose so. But, again, other arts or technologies seem better at those jobs—novels offer us real or imaginary worlds to explore or escape to, tweets offer us poignant epigrams, painting and design offer us eye candy, and music—well, face it, poetry has never been able to compete with that sublime combo of lyrics, instruments, and melody.

Which begs the question – what does drive the few of us who can be bothered? Answering this means we are down to our third aspect of poetry. A well-written poem, to me, is an incomplete thought. It’s an outpouring of an emotion so intimate, or an experience so intense, you believe you say more by saying less. Poets are great at the cloak-and-dagger, skimping with the words in a way even a miser wouldn’t accomplish with money. And if you’re lucky enough as a reader to chance upon what is most likely a tiny piece of someone’s soul and memory, you can, on most occasions, make something of it for yourself. It’s like stargazing, in a way – you’re looking at the same stars that everyone else, but what looks like a bear to you may well look like a soup ladle to another. Freedom of interpretation.

Readers have a certain amount of “freedom” in navigating the poem. The caveat is that freedom often requires more work, more self-motivation, and a certain degree of confusion.

What we have discussed thus far – the invitation, the lack of invitation and the interpretation – will not, however, help us bin a piece of text either as a poem or a not-poem. So, let us look at dictionary definitions. I have chosen three of them, with no particular reason.

Oxford Dictionaries says a poem is a literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.

Merriam Webster defines poetry as writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.

Cambridge Dictionaries defines a poem as - a piece of writing in which the words are arranged in separate lines, often ending in rhyme, and are chosen for their sound and for the images and ideas they suggest.

If we’re looking at something more creative, then Ted-Ed’s “What makes poem… a poem?” lesson does a neat job of the definition and pinpoints a few characteristics for a poem – condensed language, intense feelings and musical qualities.

A poem, then, if we could summarize, is an aesthetic arrangement of the choicest words that recreates an emotion or an experience. This is how I’ve always interpreted it - if you can be extravagant and economical in the same six lines, then congratulations, you’ve written a poem!

Notice that the common string in all of these definitions is rhyme and rhythm. When we talk about rhyme and rhythm, we’re essentially talking about musical qualities. Rhyme is the correspondence of sounds at the ends of lines, and rhythm, the measured flow of words and phrases in verse or prose as determined by the relation of long and short or stressed and unstressed syllables. So, what is so pleasurable about rhyme and rhythm that its usage has lent the world an entirely new form of literature? Ted-Ed has a fantastic video on the pleasure of poetic pattern, and it would be a good place for us to start.

The beat is built into the very fabric of our being.

The creator, David Silverstein, says, and not unreasonably, that rhythm and repetition are the building blocks of poetry. It’s the first instinct when we start reading a poem – checking for a glaringly obvious rhyme scheme, and if found, reciting it in the same sing-song voice we were taught in nursery school, complete with the infinitesimal bop of the head. It’s also the first instinct when we’re taking a poem apart – it’s far more satisfying to claim it’s iambic pentameter than to say it’s irregular. Both of these were indispensable to poetry, past tense. With the advent of blank verse – unrhymed but metered – and free verse – unrhymed and unmetered – if you’re practised in reading poetry, you’re likely to have, at the very least, dulled the instinct. It is, then, an identifier, but not a pre-requisite. And when Poetry Foundation suggests that since the early 20th century, most of the published poetry is in free verse, you begin to wonder for how long it will last in the human memory as even an identifier.

But assuming rhythm is still inextricably tied to the art, what makes it so different from song lyrics? It would do us some good to note here, that Oxford Dictionaries defines a song as a short poem or other set of words set to music or meant to be sung.

That means if we were looking at this through strict definitions, we don’t have to go much farther. Poems are not always meant to be sung. Lyrics are meant to be sung. But popular perception complicates the issue. The debate had always been around, but was ignited afresh when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” The boundaries of literature had drastically been re-defined, and that it was initiated by an organization as revered as that meant you had to sit up and take notice. It drew mixed responses, ranging from (quoted in the New York Times) –

Some prominent writers celebrated Mr Dylan’s literary achievements, including Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie, who called Mr Dylan “the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition,” adding, “Great choice.”

… to

Jodi Picoult, a best-selling novelist, snarkily asked, “I’m happy for Bob Dylan, #ButDoesThisMeanICanWinAGrammy?”

Bob Dylan’s writing has regularly waded into literature – Cambridge published a companion, and the Oxford Book of American Poetry included his song, but perhaps more personally memorably, we had to study “John Brown” as part of our literature coursework. We, as students, were never led to perceive it as any less than literature but some people obviously do, which then leads us to the question – why, and what are the barriers to an arrangement of words becoming literary? In a Forum Response for the Boston Review, the writer suggests that the barrier may be man’s biggest threat to a bigger, brighter, and more open world – bias. The word literature is heavy with implications – the Oxford Dictionaries meaning by itself carries words like ‘lasting artistic merit’ and ‘greatness’ – the instinctive assumption is that for a piece of work to be deemed literature, it requires absolute mastery over what is, for the most part, rather vague and undetermined.

By holding poetry to a literary standard, and either granting or denying that standard to song lyrics, we locate the worth of an artistic endeavour in the most superficial qualities of language, ones that are actually peripheral to what makes a poem worthwhile.

But uncomplicated and hard-hitting as this stance is, it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not popular. Simon Armitage, one of Britain’s most popular poets, in a piece for The Guardian in 2008, claimed, not pulling any punches,

Songwriters are not poets. Or songs are not poems, I should say. In fact, songs are often bad poems. Take the music away and what you’re left with is often an awkward piece of creative writing full of lumpy syllables, cheesy rhymes, exhausted cliches and mixed metaphors.

The question here, then, is – do songwriters claim to be poets? Probably not. They’re still focussed on selling the music – the melody and the rhythm – but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that when there is effort involved in writing out lines for a song, there is the inherent expectation that the effort will be given due acknowledgement. And if not as poetry, what else?

Rap music has regularly, if not widely, been recognized as poetry. Literature students in Illinois study the works of Jay Z as poetry. The professor who teaches the course finds “discussing the lyrics of rapper Jay-Z a good way to engage young literature students and get them thinking about concepts like allusion and alliteration.” Eminem has already, in some sense, achieved recognition for his ability to use rhyme effectively. The crux of rap music lies in creating and sustaining a rhythm. Now, where else have we had rhythm being stressed (no pun intended) over and over?

We can probably conclude here that it’s impossible to come up with a checklist for the big tectonic shift from Spotify’s Pop Rising to a full-fledged The Best Of …. – An Anthology. What is possible is to open up the boundaries of literature. In keeping the gates shut by holding up requirements that were found in 18th-century poetry, we are doing literature itself a disservice. All expression is expression – whether it be in the perfect structure of a Petrarchan sonnet, or blackout poetry from a newspaper clipping, or vocals against a gentle piano. Poetry is expression at its heart. Musical and aesthetic expression, but still expression. Emily Dickinson famously said this -

If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry.

I have only this to ask – if you listen to a song and it makes your body so cold no fire can ever warm you, is it not poetry?