by Valerie Volk
I grew up with a father whose simple
philosophy was expressed (often!) in verse quotations:
Life
is mainly froth and bubble;
Two things
stand like stone,
Kindness
in another’s trouble,
Courage
in your own.
From Adam Lindsay Gordon to Longfellow:
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.”
These were my father’s
creeds - but he would never have
classified himself as a lover of poetry. How intriguing that lines of verse
expressed best the values that were so important to him!
Why
does the word ‘poetry’ set up barriers?
Two preliminary thoughts spring immediately
to my mind, and they are both significant. One is the poignant moment when I
stood in an Adelaide bookstore and watched people pick up my just-released
verse novel Passion Play – only to
put it down immediately saying “Oh, it’s poetry ...”
The second, equally sad, comes in that very
popular 1989 film, Dead Poets Society, where before the advent of the charismatic Mr
Keating, a poetry lesson consists of the dreary reading aloud of chapter one of
a ponderous tome on the topic “What is poetry?”
Perhaps this second thought explains the
first. Too many schoolrooms where the study of poetry has been a soulless
dragging through besmirched classics with a relentless analysis of rhyme,
rhythm, symbolism, similes and metaphors
- and let’s not forget
alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia – these have been the breeding ground
for a general automatic response: “Poetry is hard work!”
But
prose writing is relatively recent!
“Too hard’ is a sad reaction, because
poetry has been throughout the centuries the instinctive response of people (not just that breed we call ‘poets’) to an experience that they wish to
communicate as vividly as possible to others. It’s interesting to recall that
novel writing, prose fiction, any of the non-poetic genres of today, are
comparative newcomers on the scene, only a few centuries old, where poetry was
the natural form of expression for thousands of years.
In ages before people could read and write,
audiences in the great halls of castles, gatherings around camp fires,
villagers welcoming travelling minstrels, fair ladies being wooed by optimistic
troubadours, all were being entranced and entertained by poetry. What did it
offer them?
Certainly, for the pre-literate ages the
use of verse made communication much easier. The epic poems, the sagas of a
heroic age, depended heavily on the devices and techniques that made the oral
traditional tales easy to listen to and to remember. Rhyme and rhythm were
important as an aid to understanding and literary devices such as assonance,
with its repetition of vowel sounds, and alliteration, with its use of repeated
consonants, were there not to be clever or ‘poetic’ but to get right into the
hearer’s consciousness and memory. So still today works like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf,
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s plays are part of our literary
heritage, all of them in verse.
So
what does poetry offer us today?
Here we come to the crux of it: what really
does poetry offer? It provides the opportunity to capture experiences,
emotions, ideas in a more precise and meaningful way, for this is what poets of
all ages have wanted to do: to communicate at the deepest level with readers in
ways that make their words a shared experience, and one to remember. Poets want
to open our eyes to see things in a new way, whether it’s Wordsworth standing on
London Bridge on a fresh new morning, a
sight so touching in its majesty, or Shelley, listening to a skylark, and
marveling at its unpremeditated art,
or Wilfred Owen, bringing home to us the horrors of World War One, with its
returning soldiers bent
double, like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags.
Difficult? No. The fact that poetry has
been, traditionally, broken into lines seems to make casual viewers think that
some special initiation into this art form is needed. Yet the line divisions in
fact give us the chance to pause, hesitate, feel the emphasis on words in a way
that allows them to carry special weight and power. Similarly, the language use
in poetry is often richer and more flexible than that in everyday speech.
Again, it heightens our responses. The potential of even standard devices, such
as alliteration, is recognized in today’s advertising world – how many product
jingles depend on alliteration! Try watching commercial television with an ear
to this, and you’ll swiftly see its value in making an impact.
We read poetry to be moved and challenged
to see the world in new ways. When Hopkins writes The world is charged with the grandeur of God we catch our breath
with the sudden shock of his words – and that’s exactly what he wants.
This one line actually crystallizes what
I’m saying. Take that word ‘charged.’ In a single word it opens so many
thoughts, from the sense of electric vitality and force with which God created
the world to the responsibilities we are charged with as custodians of the
earth. It would take prose several paragraphs at least to explore these ideas,
but in the succinctness of poetry they are evoked with one word. That is
poetry’s potential.
But
what we are talking about with this term poetry
anyway?
Let’s move away from the blanket
definitions, like Coleridge’s famous ‘the best words in the best order.’ It’s
not a genre in itself, but almost needs a series of discussions on the various
types of poetic genres: epic poetry, narrative poetry, descriptive poetry,
lyric poetry with odes and idylls, dramatic poetry and the dramatic monologue,
didactic poetry with its focus on teaching a lesson, satirical and humorous
verse, specific forms such villanelles, sestinas, triolets, rondels, ballads and sonnets,
foreign forms like haiku, tanka and cinquain. What about song lyrics or rap
poems? Poets can write in strict rhymed forms with lines that follow a huge
variety of patterns, or they can choose unrhymed forms such as blank verse or
the even more open free verse. Or further still these days, prose poetry, where
it is only the heightened language use and phrasing that makes the
classification ‘poetry’ possible.
Why
do I write poetry?
I write poetry because I want to share as
intensely as possible a scene, a person, an idea, that has been important to
me, and I try to communicate this by calling on all that poetry makes possible.
I try very hard to overcome the threatening reputation this genre so unfairly
has acquired.
What makes me happy is when someone reads
my work and says: “I’ve never read poetry, but you know, I could understand
that. It really didn’t seem like poetry.”
I like to think my Dad would have felt the
same. And I’m intrigued by the realization that many of the important ethical
lessons he taught me I recall easily because they are expressed in poetry.
This blogpost was also published on Australasian Christian Writers.
**************
Meet Valerie Volk:
As a seven-year-old I wrote embarrassingly bad fairy stories. Now, many
decades later, I’m still writing ... but
I hope there’s been improvement. In between, there have been years as an
academic, a researcher and an education program director in three Australian
states – but at last I’m a full-time
writer with awards for both poems and short stories, which are to be found in
journals, anthologies and magazines.
My first published collection, In
Due Season, won the national Omega Writers CALEB Poetry Prize in 2010. The
following year produced A Promise of
Peaches, a verse novel, (Ginninderra Press), while my third book, Even Grimmer Tales, (Interactive
Publications) is a dark and wickedly funny modern take on Grimms Tales, but, as
the sub-title warns, definitely ‘not for the faint-hearted.’ My fourth book, Passion Play, an extended verse novel (Wakefield
Press), is a modern reincarnation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with the medieval pilgrims replaced by
twenty-first century characters travelling to the famous Passion Play at
Oberammergau. Next came two shorter collections of verse, Flowers & Forebears and Indochina
Days, while 2015 brought a Biblical fiction prose work, Bystanders, (Wakefield Press) and 2017
will launch Of Llamas and Piranhas,
South American poems.
My main interests, apart from writing, are reading (especially crime
fiction), film and theatre going, music, and food - both cooking and (as a
lover of good restaurants) eating. I’m an enthusiastic traveller, especially
overseas, but my focus is always the writer’s first question: What if ...?
