The Six Myths of Poetry

by Tex Norman⁽¹²⁾

There are a lot of myths about poetry, and much as I wish to dispel those myths I’m not all that good at spelling.  Growing up, my mother had volumes of poetry in the house:  Mother’s Goose, A Child’s Garden of Verses, stuff by Edger A Guest.  Everything rhymed and had the maudlin values of  a greeting card.  Like most baby boomers, my next exposure to poetry was from school lit books.  While modern poetry was being written, in the 1950s the lit books were full of poems by Edger Allen Poe, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Wadsworth Longfellow, and that that ultra modern poet Robert Frost.

In the 1960s poetry was taken up by the hippie youth movement and made all personal and shocking, and poems could only be poetry if they violated all the rules we learned back in the 1850s.  Most people were just fed up with the saccharin sweet poetry of their youth, and this allowed a lot of myths and misperceptions about poetry. 

Myth One:  Poetry must rhyme.   

The truth is, today, most poetry does not rhyme, or at least most poetry does not use that much END rhyme.  Actually, poetry has not always rhymed, it got to where it rhymed for a while, and now it is back to not rhyming so much.  As far back as the Civil War years, poets were breaking with the rule of rhyme.

From My Last Years by Walt Whitman
 

 

 FROM my last years, last thoughts I here bequeath,
Scatter'd and dropt, in seeds, and wafted to the West,
Through moisture of Ohio, prairie soil of Illinois--through Colorado,
California air,
For Time to germinate fully.

 

Myth Two:  Contemporary poetry can rhyme. 

The Affair by tex norman 

 

 

 Sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup,
I watch her tug her panties up.

“This is it. The last time, she said
snatching clothes from the floor by the bed.

I call it her, “This is it” speech.
Her breasts sway as I watch her reach
for her lacy 38C racy red bra.
She’s got the best body I ever saw.

“I can’t do this any more. I’m married! ”
It was a speech that never varied.
“It kills me. Larry suspects nothing, ”
she said, “and I keep him believing
that everything’s the same between us.”

Wisely, I elected not to discuss
the comforting lie she used to ease her mind.
But tomorrow – at noon – I know I will find
her waiting in the lobby of the Marriott
all flushed, and wet, ready and hot.

 

from poetryhunter.com

 

Myth Three:  The best poetry is written when authors are depressed.

It’s hard to know how a poet was feeling as he or she wrote their poems.  I assume you can write whimsical poetry and be ready to cut your own throat, but I tent to think fun poems reflect people who are not dominated by angst and despair.

Celery by Ogden Nash
 

 

Celery, raw
Develops the jaw,
But celery, stewed,
Is more quietly chewed.
 

Myth Four:  Good poetry doesn’t make sense.

There was a time, as the baby boomers became hippies and the hippies wrote estoteric poems, that the general aim was to write something so odd and personal that no one but the poet really understood what they were writing about.

Consider this section of Canto 13 by Ezra Pound

 

Kung walked
by the dynastic temple
and into the cedar grove,
and then out by the lower river,
And with him Khieu Tchi
and Tian the low speaking
And "we are unknown," said Kung,
"You will take up charioteering?
"Then you will become known,
"Or perhaps I should take up charioterring, or archery?
"Or the practice of public speaking?"
And Tseu-lou said, "I would put the defences in order,"
And Khieu said, "If I were lord of a province
"I would put it in better order than this is." 

 

Much of the best poetry being published today is very easy to understand:

 

Selecting A Reader by Ted Kooser
 

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

 

Myth Five:  Good poetry has to use BIG words.  Consider this passage from Edger Allen Poe’s poem The Bells.

 

While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

 

There is profit in knowing how to do everything that poetry can do, to rhyme, use meter, use similes, metaphors, verisimilitude, personification, slant rhyme.  It might help to know how to follow fixed forms like the sonnet, the limerick,  the ballade, sestina, the Rondel, triolet, villanelle, clerihew , double dactyl, etc.  Eventually, once you can do anything you should choose to do whatever it is you want to do.  You write what you want to write.  Create.  Leave a trace of your life in creative works.  Oh, here is the last myth (for now):

 

Myth Six:  You don’t have to be famous, or recognized, or published for your creative work to matter.  All life has meaning, and every human act is important. 

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Article submitted Saturday, June 06, 2009 & read 442 times.

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