Poetry

I'm just back from a successful outing to read my poetry. I was well received, and sold quite a few books (some I even autographed!). There was some good conversation about poetry, too. What makes a poem a poem, I find myself wondering.

I write a lot of blank verse, but I'm clear that it is verse, and not just broken up bits of prose. I don't quite know what the difference is, but I know it when I see it (or, indeed, when I write it). I can identify elements that clearly contribute, but it's still a mystery. It's perhaps clearer to spot the distinction between good rhyming verse and mere doggerel, but even that can be tough, and not everyone will draw the line in the same place.

Of course, in both cases, it has to do with what every word is doing, and what words are doing together, and how they relate, in sound, in shape, in meaning. Certainly it's about a lot more than just what's happening at the beginning or the end of a line. And it is the poem as a whole that counts - I don't think poems can or should be open to dismemberment or dissection. Not without killing them first, anyway.

I think that some at least of my own verse is, after all these years, quite good. But in reality, what constitutes good and not good, where poetry is concerned? Some of the poems submitted to a journal I looked at a while back were technically poor, with rhymes that failed to work, metres that broke down, trite observations and hackneyed similes - BUT, they were someone trying to say something that had to be said, something that was bursting out of their heart. You could see that, even if the finished work wasn't of the best. I have no right to say that those words aren't poetry, even if the style doesn't work for me.