back to top13 Comments to “Friday poem”

1. BY drill 11.16.07 AT 1:47 PM

   At the risk of incurring all the righteous wrath of the assembled doctors and learned masters once again, after months of behaving myself . . . this, hang it all, is PROSE. Not poetry.

   I cannot perceive any poetic rhythm or any linguistic ‘music’ in the structure of the thing at all, read silently or read aloud. It is absolutely a good description and interesting, but exactly what is it about this work that makes it definable as poetry any more than a randomly selected paragraph from (say) the Red Badge of Courage or some other work of prose would be?

   This is a serious question to me. I know this question irritates the excellent Mr. Key but, nevertheless, there it is, I have to stand and ask, otherwise I would be someone other than me.

   IS there a difference? And if so, what IS it?

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2. BY VS 11.16.07 AT 2:05 PM

   Entertaining and descriptive, yes. Poetic? No. I completely agree with Drill.

   Harrison, if you’re looking for an example of some good poetry, read the bio of “Litoralise” from the list of World Mag regulars above. Maybe you could ask her permission to use her poem on a Friday? Although I don’t think I’ve even seen any posts from her since we changed over to the new format.

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3. BY Random Name 11.16.07 AT 2:37 PM

   I read the poem. Something bothered me.

   I read drill. “Right on, drill,” I said.

   I read VS. “Write on, Right on, VS,” I said.

   “Pile on, everybody!” I said to everybody.

   [I reserve the right to disagree with and irritate drill, VS, and anybody and everybody else in the future.)

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4. BY Pauline 11.16.07 AT 2:54 PM

   Good poem. I agree it’s not particularly poetic, but more so than some of the other unpoetic poems Key has posted here. There is a certain rhythm to it, though at times an uneven rhythm – rather fitting for a poem about learning to ride a horse, when you haven’t figured out how to fit with the horse’s rhythm yet.

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5. BY Harrison Scott Key 11.16.07 AT 3:00 PM

   Actually, I agree with the assessment that this poem has enjambments (the prosody term for line breaks) that seem to mean a little less than usual for good poems.

   I do like the story it tells, and the fact that it’s a nice scene with a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s hard to do in such little space. And it’s also clear and doesn’t fidget with vocabulary – in other words, it’s easy to understand and pretty simple. I like simple poems from time to time, as long as they’re not simplistic, which this one borders on being.

   I also like the pedestrian, everyday nature of it. Quotidian poems are sometimes the best.

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6. BY llama 11.16.07 AT 3:07 PM

   All of the so called poems I see here are nothing but prose as I have said manyu times. Nice to see others agree.

   I am afraid that the younger set, is so poorly educated, they do not know what poems are. If they did, they would hate them like normal folks and me

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7. BY arcadia 11.16.07 AT 4:06 PM

   I learned two things from an early riding teacher. He held a nervous filly in one hand and gestured with the other, saying “Listen, keep one leg on one side, the other leg on the other side, and your mind in the middle.

   He turned and mounted. She took two steps, then leftthe ground, I thought for good. But she came down hard, humped her back, swallowed her neck, and threw her rider as you’d throw a rock. He rose, brushed his pants and caught his breath, and said, “See that’s the way to do it. When you see they’re gonna throw you, get off.”

   I think that this is a whole different critter.
   The mere fact that a poem breaks up the structure of a sentence in order to highlight or alter the rhythm of its reading is sufficient to turn it into poetry.

   Of course
   That doesn’t work
   necessarily
   for all sentences,
   duzzit?

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8. BY paula 11.16.07 AT 4:14 PM

   Made me think of Will Rogers.

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9. BY Random Name 11.16.07 AT 4:58 PM

   Get off.

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10. BY Harris 11.16.07 AT 5:11 PM

    As Horace was supposed to have said, “even Homer sleeps.” That’s the risk with narrative or epic poetry: sometimes the story overwhelms the attention to words. Poetry can be pretty prosaic.

    One of the features that marks off writing as poetic or as poetry is the compression of action. Scenes move to an internal rhythm, almost dream-like. Notice the shift between the first sentence and the next. One moment the poet is looking back, the next he’s there in the corral with his riding instructor. Good prose would give some connecting lines, but here it just shifts — like a dream.

    In the second stanza, there’s a nice description of the filly bucking, flinging off its rider “as you would throw a rock” (btw that’s a really odd phrase — it’s not precisely observed), but the next sentence the instructor is getting up. No transition line. As I said, we move here as in a dream — the pace of action is different from that of prose.

    And finally, why does he say he learned two things? Again he doesn’t draw it out, we fill it in. This allusiveness is again a mark of the poetic framework.

    So I think it a poem. That said, I hesitate over some of the choices the poet made. The line breaks align too easily at the grammatical pauses so there’s no particular surprise or tension in the words. And there is a sloppiness in the word choice which others have noted. As a result the instructor’s closing words don’t have as much surprise or energy as they deserve.

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11. BY drill 11.16.07 AT 5:54 PM

    Thanks, Harris. That is good information you give on what constitutes a poem. I am not sure I would agree entirely (I meandered on endlessly on this topic in a post over in Harrison’s ‘call for entries’ thread he introduced in response to this thread). But that is very understandable (the two poetic ‘definables’ you cite – dream-like sequencing and allusiveness.)

    Other folk might not be interested in this question (what constitutes a poem and why); I am. I write a good bit of poetry myself, some of which has been published in a small way many years ago, when I thought I cared about publishing at all.

    But I do care about this. I really and earnestly do. I am glad that Harrison is doing this and doing it well.

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12. BY Serious George 11.16.07 AT 7:24 PM

    I appreciate Drill’s question. It’s the one we should ask about a poem. Why is this poetry and not something else?

    First off, there’s the matter of some degree of trust — trust that the poet isn’t trying to foist something off as a poem just because he or she says it is. For instance, Taylor also writes poems with more obvious structure to them. So when he breaks a line, I figure he probably means it, and will give him some slack. What he means by a break may differ from poem to poem, and even from line to line within a poem. As Arcadia shows above, there does seem to be a difference between allstrungtogether prosody and the “enjambed” version. Sometimes the linebreak is a break in time, setting the meter, rhythm and sounds of one line up to play against another. Sometimes it’s a loop, maybe knotted with punctuation to slow the reader down for a breath. Sometimes it works more like a winch, pulling the reader down closer to the text of the next line. In any of these cases, the placement of the breaks can elicit a certain kind of attention — attention that may be hard to quantify or codify, but that in quality simply feels different to read than prose. Then again, I’m no expert, and tend to be pretty forgiving as long as I don’t get the sense of being jerked around.

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13. BY Kyle A 11.17.07 AT 11:44 AM

    I like this poem very much. The irony is brilliant. I suppose in the end we could use Coleridge’s defintion of poetry: the best words in the best order.

    Does this one cut it? I would say it’s not the best example of a poem, although it’s a nice bit of something. What bothers me is that there is almost no figurative language or wordplay of any kind and no attention to rhythm that I can detect. There is vivid description, so the Imagists would like it. And, as I pointed out, there’s witty irony.

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