On poetry

Can anyone write a poem?

This post is rather off-topic, and definitely away from any formal expertise we can claim.  We’ll use the holiday season, in which one does different things than normal, as an excuse.

A few weeks ago we showed our tutoring consultant giving advice to graduating students, advice that had little or nothing to do with the subjects he nominally teaches.  One admonition was to learn a poem by heart.  He did not urge the students to write one, because he’s not certain everyone can.  Take one incident: our astronomer lived for four years in Chile, and for much of that time took private lessons in Spanish.  (He already had some capability in that language, though not as much as he thought he did.)  As an exercise, at one point he challenged himself to write a poem in Spanish, and chose a meter from a certain English poem with an interesting treatment of vowel sounds.  None of us know just how the result would strike a native-speaker, or even whether it would be comprehensible.  The point is that his teacher was impressed that he could produce a poem at all, and assured him that she couldn’t do it.

Well, it’s possible she could, and shied away from the idea in the same way many students try to avoid math.  But math up to secondary-school level is applying rules, and students in general (special needs kids are sometimes exceptions) should be able to learn rules and apply them.  In the same way, they should be able to master prose to the point of being able to write a coherent, grammatical essay on a given topic.  The combination of creativity and rules involved with metrical poetry may put it beyond some students’ reach, even leaving aside questions of quality.

But if we could be assured that it was indeed possible, our tutor sees great promise.  He himself has take up the challenge of a couple of difficult meters, just to see if he could do it.  The process of fitting ideas into the right words, and the right words into the right cadence, was difficult.  But it extended his grasp of the sounds and the meanings of words, and the results were very gratifying at the end.  Not only did he produce verses in the proper form, but they indeed expressed what he wanted to say, with at least some of the shades of meaning he sought.

However, there is an irony here.  He had always been unimpressed by the more complex and scholarly poetry, those poems that alluded to obscure things and seemed almost to be written in a code known to few.  What he regards as his own best effort turns out to be in that category.  A university professor of English, and an old friend, could not follow some of his ideas.  Ah, well.

But there is one form of poetry he has not tried seriously: free verse.  He’s still not sure what it consists of, or how to use it to say what he wants.  It could be the hardest meter of all.