Letter to the Editor: We Can Love Poetry With Different Points of View

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In Bill Moeller’s column of 10-16-19 he said, “We seem to be given the impression that poetry today doesn’t need to rhyme or have a meter the way it did when Robert Frost, Robert Burns, Emily Dickinson or William Shakespeare bared their souls. Kristofferson’s songs prove that the art is not totally dead. Perhaps a new word could be coined to separate the new poetry from the old.”

Actually, the only thing separating old poetry from “new” poetry is time. William Carlos William said, “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.” 

Ezra Pound said, “Poetry is news that stays news.” The word poetry derives from a classical Greek term that means “maker” among other meanings.

For Aristotle, language, rhythm and melody make up the matter of poetic creation. Socrates said, “I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.”

Poetry and music are similar in that they can go beyond logic to directly pierce the heart. While a lot of country music is of the “she took my pickup and my dog and left me alone” genre there is real poetry in some of it. Bob Dylan was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his hundreds of beautiful lyrics.

Free verse types of poem, without rhyme or rhythm, have been around for hundreds of years. Robert Frost commented that writing free verse was like “playing tennis without a net.” It seems as though Bill is criticizing poems that don’t rhyme, suggesting, perhaps, that the poets concerned were insufficiently skilled. But a great deal of poetry in the English language doesn’t employ rhyme. Blank verse, for example — by definition unrhymed — was a form of poetry often favored by Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats and Tennyson amongst many others.



Rhyme can be a way in which a poet can imbue verse with a sense of structure and meaning. When I write a sonnet, a ghazal, a haiku or a paradelle, I use the traditional form. Rhyming can be so easily overused that it becomes like a nursery rhyme. Rhyming tends to make a poem predictable when a verbal surprise may be in order. I generally find free verse less inhibiting to what I wish to convey. Bill is a good friend, a raconteur, an actor and quite the entertainer. He and I will both continue to love poetry with different points of view.

For those seeking a local poetry venue, check out Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Chehalis. About once a month, they offer readings by various northwest poets.

 

Larry Kerschner 

Centralia