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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Lecture II
The PJW Lecture Series is a cycle of interactive cross-genre lecture workshops by Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley on various aspects of craft and technique for creative writers.
Writing Poetry: What Makes a Poem a Poem?
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the second lecture in the Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Lecture Series, a creative writing workshop for Sea Breeze Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writings. In the first lecture, I introduced the writing process, speaking generally about the three genres of writing. I also touched on our place in the literary tradition and the connection between writing and the African oral tradition that forms the basis of most of what I write. At this point, I invite you to join me as I speak specifically about the writing of poetry.
Here are some of the points I will cover in this lecture workshop:
Before I go further, let’s examine some of the comments I made in the introductory lecture. If you were with us, I said the following about the connection between poetry and the African oral tradition:
- The song, the dirge, the saying, the praise song, the war song, the work song, and the call song are all VERSE. They may be oral, but they are in verse.
I also said that:
- A poem is a poem not because someone arranges it to look like a poem. It is a poem because of what it achieves for the reader. It is, because the reader can feel, see, hear, learn and enjoy something profound about the way the writer says what she or he has to say. It is a work of art, like a painting, like a song, it brings about some kind of enjoyment and becomes larger than what it has said.
WHAT MAKES A POEM A POEM?
Every time I come across something that is written in stanza or verse, I ask myself, “Is this a poem? What makes this a poem?” The question of whether a “poem” is a poem is a good question to begin with any time you want to understand poetry, to write it, or to critique someone else’s or your own poem.
How do you know whether something you have written is a poem or not?
Structure
A poem is mostly written in verse or stanza; therefore, when we come across a poem, we say to ourselves, “Oh, this is a poem.” But structure alone cannot define a poem. The poem must be first a work of art, or it must utilize certain literary devices that help create an artistic, visual reality.
Poetry, like painting, music or other forms of art like drama, the dance or other genres of literature uses language to achieve an aesthetic reality. Its main purpose is for enjoyment, for the senses of feeling and seeing first, for the poet as an individual, and then for the audience.
Let’s look again at the African oral tradition as we examine the connection between poetry, art, aesthetics, and the audience in our attempt to define “what makes a poem a poem.”
In the Grebo village tradition where I come from or in any African village with a similar culture, the townspeople usually gather after harvest for festivities marking the end of a good farming year and the end of the year. They perform all kinds of traditional Grebo dances, including the Dorkloh/Khan/Wlee (War Dances of all kinds) in the day time and certain dances like Wayee (a women’s dance) the Sumu (a women’s dance) in the night, depending on which dance is in fashion. During those times, singers perform, oral poetry is recited, musical instruments of many kinds are brought out for experts to play, etc.
Often, minstrels from other villages come out and perform, storytellers work for days to entertain, and the town crier hollers all day long, passing out information to villagers. Much of these performances are done in poetic recitations. All of this is art in its highest form, unlike what the early colonizers told us. These performances are hundreds of years old, and are not only for the purpose of celebrating, but also for enjoyment of art as art.
These art forms in varying forms can be found throughout West Africa, and often, help define our ethnicity, culture or heritage. In this art form, performers and planners of the ceremonies take the audience into serious consideration. Villagers from far and near travel miles across the region to these festivities, and the town is usually filled with people coming to be entertained.
Language
The plays, proverbs, sayings, dirges, praise songs and everything sung or performed during these festivities are usually meant for the ear and the eyes, and the major tool in accomplishing this purpose is language, a twist of words to achieve artistic beauty, something every poem, written anywhere in the world should strive to achieve. This is why I believe that poetry has no borders, no language, but aesthetic excellence, and cannot be monopolized by any one group of people or country, therefore, no country can say, “we write poetry, and you don’t.”
Language therefore is important if a poem must achieve its aesthetic purpose of enjoyment. You read a poem, and the poem may have a specific message, but what first strikes you is not the message, but the way in which the poet has connected to you through the use of language. Often, a good poem says something to you in a new way, in a fresh way, in an unusual way, in a way no one else can say what you have just read.
You realize after reading a good poem, that structure (verse or stanza) helps you physically identify the poem, but what really connects you to the poem and to its meaning is that the poem uses language in a certain way. Language is revealed in images, figures of speech, and style.
Now, let’s examine the Image as a literary tool.
ELEMENTS OF POETRY
- How important is Imagery (the Image) as a poetic device? How significant are figures of speech–simile, metaphor, and other elements of poetry?
When we speak of language in poetry, the literary tools or devices that contribute to language are figures of speech like the simile, metaphor, hyperbole, etc. These help the poet to translate what is in his or her mind on to the page. All of these devices help the poet achieve freshness and density.
The American poet, Robert Frost once said, “Every poem is a new metaphor or it is nothing.” I understand Frost’s statement to mean that unless your poem has something to say in a fresh way, it is not a poem. In other words, a poem is not merely a metaphor; it is a “new” metaphor, something that does what a metaphor does in a newer way than anyone else has done.
The most significant figure of speech in poetry is the Metaphor. If you examine the metaphor as a literary/poetic device, you will notice that nearly every figure of speech is in a way a kind of metaphor.
What does the metaphor do in a poem? A metaphor, as you may already know, helps a poet compare two things that are dissimilar by implying that they are actually identical. The metaphor helps a poet make meaning out of a world that may otherwise be meaningless by implying that something that is unlike another is identical to that thing.
Let’s look at a simple metaphoric implication for a moment:
- My mother is a wall. (A simple metaphor)
- When the rains came, the river swallowed up our town. (A not so simple metaphor)
Both of these are metaphors, but the first is a very simple, very clear metaphor. In the first statement, the mother, a human being is likened to a wall by implying that she is identical to a wall.
In the second statement, a bit more complex, the river is likened to a creature that has the capacity to drink or eat a town. In this metaphor are a personification and a hyperbole. Let’s break the second, more complex metaphor down by analysis:
- To say that a river “swallowed up” is to say that the river is identical to a creature that can swallow up things (metaphoric).
- To say that a river “swallowed” a town is to give a human/animate quality to a non-living thing (personification).
- To say that a river can “swallow up” a town that is probably larger than a river is to exaggerate or overstate a fact, which of course, poets are licensed to do (hyperbole).
This simple exercise is intended to help you see that a poem is a poem when it uses certain literary tools to do things that are not ordinarily common. When you read a poem in which the line, “When the rains came, the river swallowed up our town,” the line does a lot to your mind and to your senses. You develop feelings for the voice of the speaker because you immediately know that the speaker has suffered a tragic experience, but you not only see the ugliness, but you see the unusual way in which this information comes to you.
You see an image (the rain), and another image (the river), and another image (the town), which, of course, means that there are people, their belongings, their lives, their farms, etc. All of this put on paper tells you something, and makes you feel something. With the arrangement of the lines, the images, the figures of speech, the voice (a powerfully, sad tone), you realize that the poem is powerful just because it has one or two or there of such lines that make you feel. Another thing to note is that the poet achieves this visual, emotional reality in your senses because the images are "concrete" images instead of abstract images. As a poet, you have to keep in mind that “poetry dwells on concrete images.” Abstract images are good, but alone, they only drag down a poem. A poem must show, and the best way to show is by concrete images–things that we can see, feel, or touch.
Look closely again at the imagery created in the metaphoric line just analyzed. Do you notice that the imagery created by the line could well be a long or short story, but that one line, and only one line, does this sort of thing to you, the reader? This is what a poet wants to achieve, to make long stories short, but keep the impact of the feelings alive. Now, if this were not a poem, this is how anybody in ordinary conversation would say this same thing:
- The last time it rained, the water from the heavy downpour caused widespread flooding; besides, the river’s water level rose and overflowed its banks, and the flood destroyed our entire town and all of our possessions. It was a total loss because everything we had was wiped out by the flooding.
Imagine turning ordinary speech like above into line breaks for a poem. And yet, this is how some people write poetry– they break up such conversation, and call it poetry. Why would someone marvel at these lines simply because you arrange them in verse structure?
What makes the original, metaphoric line different, or why would the use of metaphors, hyperboles, etc. cause someone to sigh?
How do these figures of speech contribute to the voice of the speaker or connect us to the speaker?
WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LINE?
The line of a poem is the most important distinguishing element of poetry. In all of the earlier discussions, I implied that. It is the line that we see on the page that tells us that this is a poem. Prose is not controlled by the line breaks we see in poetry, and the prose writer or the short story writer does not have to worry about the rules of the line breaks on the page since this is already decided by convention.
A poet, however, is the controller of his or her own lines. You decide from your imaginative creation where your line breaks should be, even if after editing, you choose to revise the line breaks, it’s still yours. What I often notice is that many beginning writers let the computer decide their line breaks when they either centralize the page or set automatic margins as they write their poem. One of my first exercises in my introductory creative writing classes is to give students an opportunity to see the difference between taking control of their own line breaks and having the computer do it for them. Of course, they often choose the power of shaping their own lines.
Another problem I’ve had is when internet magazine editors decide without permission to rearrange the lines of my poem or jumble the poem together out of its original structure.
I often wonder: “Who are you to change my line breaks?”
The line arrangement of a poem should not and cannot be changed by someone else to make space or because they do not know how to work the web setting for a poem. Whenever that happens, I am quick to tell such an editor to restore the poem to its original form or take it down. The structure of a poem is art, and should remain in the original frame the artist intended it to be in. You must be the creator of your own lines, not someone else or the computer.
CLARITY AND DENSITY
Avoiding Clichés, Archaic Usage, Obscurity, or Ambiguity
One of the points you may have gathered from the small exercise on metaphors is the issue of density and clarity. Poetry, unlike fiction uses every word, every image, and figure of speech with brevity. A poem should not seek to be long and detailed; instead, it should seek to be brief, but powerful. The way to achieving this excellence, again, is by the use of literary devices.
Clarity is something I touched on in the introductory session of the series. When you pick up a book of poems, you want to continue reading because it is clear in the use of language, because the narrative voice or the speaker in the poem is strong and unusual. You know all of this when the poet uses language in a clear, vivid way. If the phrasing of lines is ambiguous (not clear) or if it seems to be clouded with vague meanings, you are tired out by the poem or poems, and you often will put such a poem or book down before long.
The key to a good poem is its meaning, and the way to understanding meaning is clarity, not obscurity or ambiguity. Some people believe that if a poem is good, no one should be able to discern its meaning. If that were the case, many of us would not be in the business of writing. If no one can understand your poem, no one will read your poetry.
The other thing to speak to is archaic usage. Archaic words are those words that are so old that we no longer speak like that. How would you sound if you were writing a poem like this:
- -Thou art beloved my dearest if thou becometh betrothed to me.
I know, this sounds extreme, but many students think this is poetry. Or let’s say, you believe that the only form to write in is rhyme and therefore use forms that old English poets used long ago, forms that have no relation to you, your own cultural and linguistic worldview, and are not even relevant in poetry today. This way of writing is outdated, and could apply to what I just said about archaic usage.
KEEPING YOUR POEM FRESH
Let’s look at freshness.
What is a cliché?
I am often tickled when beginning writing students put together their first poem for my class. Often, they will write what they have heard others say because they think this is poetry. A cliché is a word that has been so overused that it no longer has any significance or meaning. It is a statement that is so old, everyone knows it; its overuse has reduced its meaning or impact. This sort of word makes a poem dull to the ear.
When Robert Frost says, “Every poem is a new metaphor or it is nothing,” this is what he means. In order to achieve freshness, your poem has to be “your” poem. It has to come from inside you, inside your world, from your vision, and it has to be so fresh as if it were a new leaf on a tree in the spring. It has to be new in the way it says an old thing about an old world. This is the job of a poet.
VOICE, FEELINGS, POINT OF VIEW
I’d like to speak to the issue of voice, feelings, sentimentality or avoiding sentimentality, and the entire business of voice and what it is the poet seeks to convey.
Voice is one of the most important things every poet has to come to terms with in order to grow. The issue of voice is more important to Africans writing in the Diaspora because we find ourselves writing within a culture that is different from the one we were brought up in. We are writing in a culture whose audience is unfamiliar with ours, who may not understand and therefore may not care about, love, or see what it is we have to say simply because ours is a different voice. But that’s okay, we still must write in our own voice because our voice and perspective is just as necessary in the literary tradition here in the Diaspora and in Africa. I always say to myself:
My voice and my stories and my poetry and my people’s issues are the most important in my world, and if I don’t bring them to life, who will?
I believe that unless a poet understands how important their original voice is to their development as a poet, they are just walking in circles. For this reason, when I write, I have no trouble with writing in a voice which is authentically of my background, from my upbringing, not being ashamed of my pain, my anger, my terrors, and expressing myself within the context of my images with all of the total person that I am. So that when you read my poem, you see me, feel me, hear me, and if my voice angers you, then you become angry not just by what I say, but by the manner and tone with which I say what I have to say.
All of this is what makes a poet the poet that is relevant to his or her poetics and to the era within which she is a poet. When someone reads your poem, do they see you, hear you, feel your personality, know you, and does the reader see a powerful voice, an authentic, honest voice or does the reader see someone who is trying to be like another poet, using another person’s style of saying something?
My first lesson in writing poetry came from my father, a college graduate, but not a poet. He examined the book of poems I had handwritten and bound as mine, and said to me, “These are not your poems. They are some old English poets you took from the book I gave you. But you can be better than them if you want to be. So, be yourself, and write like yourself and like your own people.”
I have never lost that vision my father instilled in me when as a young adolescent, he said to me, “Be yourself. Write like you, like we speak, like we feel, like we know life to be.”
Who is your mentor? What voice are you writing in? How do you express your deepest feelings?
Poetry is birthed from deeply-felt emotions, we were taught. Another way to say this is what our people say back in Liberia: “When someone is really hurting, they cry in their mother tongue.” Have you ever heard that saying? When we are really hurt during times of grief and tragedy, we do not cry in English. We cry in our language, whatever it is, or we cry in the roughest, most unpolished, Liberian colloquial instead of perfect English. I recall arriving at the Roberts International Airport in Monrovia when my mother died. As I entered the airport, quiet, but sad, someone greeted me, wanting to know why I was returning home. Of course, 2000 was no time to just get up and return home, so I was not surprised at the question, but just as I tried to explain, I burst out crying, not in perfect English, but in Grebo. “Neh-de, oh, Neh de, oh,” without even caring who was listening. That translated simply means, “My mother-oh, my mother!”
This is what writing poetry is like. The language of poetry is deep and profound, and when a poet says something, it is often from a deep place somewhere in the poet. Therefore, the language the poet uses must be fresh and different, unusual and unique. Often, when I read a poem that has nothing to say or that thinks that confusion is poetry, I wonder whether the poet has to be a poet at all.
RHYME AND RHYTHM
Does every poem have to rhyme? NO! Contemporary poetry around the world today does not rhyme, and poetry that rhymes is not easily accepted by publishers today.
I love my introductory creative writing students at Penn State, Altoona, this semester. They are some of the most brilliant creative writing students I have had in a long time. I am proud when I listen to them explain how rhyme often interferes with the poet’s ability to control the poem or when the rhyme is so forced, the poem loses its meaning and power.
Now, let’s speak to the issue of rhythm. Rhythm has become one of the most important elements in today’s hip-hop, spoken word or performance poetry, but rhythm is also important to narrative or lyric (more traditional) poetry. Let me note that rhythm is very significant to African poetry because we are from a culture that believes in the power of rhythm, the drum and the beat.
How important is rhythm to poetry in general?
Poetry depends on rhythm, whether the poem is narrative (storytelling) or a lyric poem (musical) poem. The poet cannot do without rhythm just as much as he or she cannot do without images. As a poet, you must listen to every word in every line of your poem for beat and music, and you must work so that the words in your poem do not collide or clash. The poet depends on his or her ear for this element. Some poems are heavy with beat while others are soft, some are narrative, storytellers, but the best poets will mix rhythmic, lyrical beat with narrative style. Keep your ears open for the sound a poem makes. Rhythm is now more important in our contemporary poetic world than many years ago.
ENDING YOUR POEM AT THE END
It is easy to overwrite your poem or rather, to ramble on forever before you really get to the beginning of the poem. I am often tickled when my undergrad poetry students write a poem in which they keep us in suspense until the end, and bam, they conclude with that final closing remark.
Poetry is not like an essay that needs to wrap up or conclude. The poet knows that the reader is not stupid, therefore, we do not expect a summary or a conclusion. If a poem you are writing seems difficult, you need to introduce concrete images, and as you do, things begin to happen, and your poem takes on new life.
Finally, after you’ve written your poem, give it to a friend, read it out loud to yourself over and over, listen to the rhythm, the tone, the speaker’s voice, and look at it on the page. Did you say what you really felt and do you believe that your reader feels exactly what it is you the author of the poem felt when you wrote it?
If your answer is yes, congratulations!
WRITING ASSIGNMENT
Now, here is your assignment.
Write a poem about either of these two:
- The most painful, most horrible, most bitter, saddest, worst experience in your life in two to three stanzas, using very concrete, vivid images. Make sure your poem does not make me cry for nothing. In other words, show me something that makes me feel enough to cry so that my tears are not wasted for nothing. I have many more things in this life to cry over, so make me cry for a really good reason.
- Or: Write a poem, two to three stanzas about the best, most wonderful thing, experience, happiest moment, most exciting thing that ever happened to you. You must do the same as in the first assignment by showing instead of telling, using concrete details that make me laugh, happy, excited, etc. Give me a good reason to laugh by showing me on the page what that experience is. Is it funny, strange, wonderful? Do not use the words wonderful or sad, but use concrete images to show me what the experience is.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Lectures
Copyright © 2006 - 2007 Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
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