POETRY: A MODE OF CREATIVE WRITING

“A poem is an exploration rather than a disquisition.”

-by Robin Skelton

DEFINITIONS OF POETRY AND WRITING POETRY

When we think of poetry, we think lines and stanzas, rhythm and rhymes schemes, fancy language, and beautiful words. Writing poetry is very easy and difficult too. Nearly anyone can become a good poet, if not a great one. It is not necessary to learn how to write poems, but it is necessary, finding the right things to write about.

WHAT IS POEM?

A poem isn’t a way of stating something you already know in a clear and precise manner. Instead, it’s how a poet tries to figure things out— a way of trying to organize one’s thoughts and feeling about a subject, to find a pattern in the chaos, and come to some sort of resolution or conclusion.

A poem is generally ‘a metrical composition’ or ‘an elevated composition in verse’. In general, we can say, as a basic definition of poetry: poetry is an imaginative language arranged in lines and set to a particular rhythm. But basically, all poems are not lined which are called ‘prose poems’. The poem exists primarily to fulfill the poetic function: to please us.

So we have enlisted a number of definitions of poetry given by different poets:

•          ‘…..the best words in the best orders.’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

•          ‘…..the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’ – William Wordsworth.

•          ‘…..emotion put into measures.’ – Thomas Hardy.

•          ‘……not the assertion that something is true, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.’ – T.S. Eliot.

 

THE FOUR FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE

1.                  The Rhetorical Function: Language used to persuade someone of a particular point of view.

Example: A politician’s speech.

2.                  The Definitive Function: Language is used to define and describe the world.

Example: A scientific report describing a new species of birds.

3.                  The Informative Function: Language used to convey information.

Example: An Encyclopedia.

4.                  The Poetical Function: Language used for pleasure.

Example: Poetry.

 

Most pieces of writing will contain a mixture of these four functions but will emphasize one. For example, a politician giving a speech will mostly try to persuade you of his or her position.

 

WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT AND HOW TO START

Poets generally write about those things that they feel strongly about and find out those who affect the reader most. Anything which causes a strong reaction to your emotions, then you will be able to write about strongly & honestly. A poem expresses your contemporary life and environment through the medium of language.

To become a poet takes a combination of talent, sensitivity, pride and humility, knowledge and insight, and fascination with the process of language as a living phenomenon. You will rely on your thinking, feeling, and thought process; one without the other is addressing a half the process of creating a poem. All you should keep in mind is the responsibility for refining, distilling, and transforming that raw into art, and the fact that your reader needs to empathize and participate in your poem.

Emotion and feelings are often used as synonyms, but have an important distinction you need to keep in mind:

•                    Emotions—Any of the states designated as fear, anger, joy, surprise, disgust, hate, love, grief, etc.

•                    Feelings—Appreciative recognition, a partly physical and partly mental response.

A poem involves two people—the poet and the reader—and emotion is what connects each other. ‘A good poem moves the reader ’is a critical and artistic truism and it is an emotion that gives atmosphere to the poem and feeling is what you, the poet, reaching out to your readers on a physical and emotional level, impart. The reader may be ‘moved’ from purely ‘aesthetic reasons,’ which is ‘delighted’ by your skill and craft.

A poet has a whole world of imagination with lots of ideas if you let your imaginations loose upon the environment—‘Appreciate subjectively, but appraise objectively’. All around us exist us exist countless reasons for poems –people with whom you come in contact, read or hear about; events you witness; relationships you experienced or observe; the phenomenon of the natural environment—and many more.

 

POETRY AND PROSE

POEM:

•                    A poem is an integrated literary composition, tightly expressed, that is not restricted to discursive progression and logic but operates on a traditional level.

•                    Poetry has form, shape pattern, agreement as well as theme and subject.

PROSE: ‘Prose is ordinary speech on its own behavior’, it is the conventionalization of speech that is made by the educated or articulate person when s/he is trying to assimilate speech patterns to thought patterns

The main difference between verse and prose is rhythm. Also, the verse can absorb a much higher concentration of metaphorical and figurative speech than prose. A common mistake made while defining poetry is to see it as having a distinct subject matter, a form, and an apprehension. By mode of apprehension, we mean that the poet has looked at the external world in a particular way and transmitted this raw material into poetry. But after all, poetry is ‘a way of thinking, writing, distinctive use of language.’

 

ELEMENTS OF A POEM

•        SHAPE

o   It is determined by a traditional form, or by an organic form that results from the free play of ideas, or the design that evolves from working with open techniques.

o   The poem also has nature, an inner quality that is its essence.

o   The combination of shape and nature gives the poem its appearance. We are responsible for ensuring that the shape and nature of the poem combine in a synergistic level whole.

 

•        FORM

o   It may be defined as how a poem is composed as distinct from what the poem is about.

o   The form could be the meter or verse that is used in the poem, the words that the poet chooses to express ideas, emotions, etc.      

 

•        TECHNIQUE:

o   Poetry is ultimately an art of sounds. Enjoyment of poetry comes out with hearing it. Poetry appeals to our all senses—the eye, tongue, ear, limbs, heart, bones, and blood.

o   The heard and felt experience of poetry is the first step in the risky business of writing it.

 

•        RHYTHM

o   We can write poetry without rhyme and meter, but impossible to do without rhythm. So, making use of the rhythm of the language is vital for making poetry.

o   Rhythm in poetry includes stress or accent, quantity, and pitch.

o   Rhythm is the natural beat as it exists in the words themselves.

 

•        METER

o   Metrical stress is the emphasis or weight imposed in the line, dictated by the design of the meter.

o   It is the number of beats organizes into a pattern.

 

• n  The (‘) sign identifies the beats for long ones or stressed syllables and (˅) for short ones or unstressed syllables. In other words, beats are measured in time, rather than by pitch and volume alone.
• n  When we read poetry in English, we count by syllables and stress to determine how many syllables there are and what kind of stress, and this helps us to measure the line in feet. A foot is a measurable, patterned unit of poetic rhythm.

 

•        SYLLABLES

o   It is something “held together” and can be defined as a group of letters taken together to form one sound, an uninterrupted unit of utterance, a complete word, or part of a word.  

o   In syllabic verse, the measuring element is not quantity, stress, or word accent, but the number of syllables in a line.

• n  Patten plays an important part in this kind of poetry and the more complex the pattern unit, the more complex the rhythm.

 

•        IMAGES

o   The image in poetry describes something in terms of concrete detail to form a word picture.

o   Imagery is the term used to denote the totality of images appearing in the whole poem or a section of it.

o   The most impressive quality of images is that they evoke mental pictures in the reader’s mind so that the experience of reading the poem becomes a visual one along with the auditory.

o   Imagery can also be mental – the focus is on what happens in the reader’s mind.

o   Figures of speech – that use language in ways that are different from everyday speech.

o   Symbolic – representative of something.

 

•        INVENTION

o   It defines the qualities of originality you can bring to bear on your choice of form or structure, diction and tone, and the poetic/linguistic devices you make use of.

 

•        SYMBOLS

o   It comes from the Greek verb symballein, ’to put together’.

o   Some symbols are universally understood, others are specific to the creative work itself and need to be decoded by the reader i.e. traffic signals, flags, logos, doves, etc. are universally understood symbols.

o   In poetry, the symbols have significance, as it allows the poet the freedom to exploit connotative and denotative meanings in a wider sense for intensification, tightness, heightening expression, and so on.

o   Symbols help poets to express that which cannot be articulated directly and needs a more abstract means to bring out the meaningfully.

 

• n  The form of a poem is easier to understand and detect than its contents, that is, ideas and their development, metaphor, mood, tonality, emotion, intensification, climax, and resolution.
• n  The content elements are understood through an interpretation of details, the development of imagery, diction, syntax, color & atmosphere, etc.

 

RHYME AND REASON

•        RHYME

o   It is commonly understood as the recurrence of duplicate or similar sounds at predictable intervals at the end of lines.

o   The rhyming unit is the syllable.

o   The meaning of rhyme is ‘a metrical rhetorical device based on the sound identities of words’.

o   The arrangement of final words in succeeding lines is called a rhyme scheme.

o   It also serves to meld the poem‘s lines into the pattern of the stanza and emphasize the melodic quality of the poem’s diction.

o   There are four types of rhymes:

·                     Perfect, pure, true, or complete rhymes: The final syllables of two lines match in sound.

Example – A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit

 

·                     Masculine and Feminine rhymes: When the final words that form the rhyming pair are one syllable each, the rhyme is masculine and when the rhyming word has two syllables or more, with the second syllable being unstressed, the rhyme is feminine.

 

·                     Internal rhyme: When the rhyme occurs inside the lines.

Example – And fate will wait to mate with the night.

 

·                     Initial rhyme or head rhyme or alliteration: When the rhyme comes at the beginning of the words in the line.

Example – She sells seashells on the seashore.