As the semester has gone by, the nature of the poetry we've been reading has changed. For the first month we read what I would consider more "conventional" poetry (more on the definition of conventional later), from Hopkins and Dickinson to Traherne and Bryant. Then we hit the great wall that is "The Waste Land". From there on, the poetry we read seemed to take a marked shift in content and style, to the world of the modernists. Lately, we've been reading poetry that have to do more with everyday things in life, as in "Montage of a Dream Deferred" and "Lunch Poems".
"Lunch Poems" in particular seems to break from the more traditional style of poetic writing. We've seen prose before in poetry, like in William's "Spring and All", but that was distinctly separated from his poems disperesed throughout the work. Reading "Lunch Poems", on the other hand, seems to me almost like an episodic story written without regards to grammar or punctuation, a conflation of poetry and prose. It's like reading someone's diary or blog post, in which they kind of just stream their thoughts, but O'Hara adds some poetic flair that kind of makes you contemplate whether what you're reading is poetry or prose. Take, for instance, Personal Poem (32), in which O'Hara describes walking around at lunchtime, passing places and describing seemingly arbitrary, random details like his musings on wanting to be a construction worker, a person getting clubbed outside a club, and a lady soliciting money "for a terrible disease" (i'll leave the interpretation up to the jury but I'm actually inclined to agree with Harry that she's a postitute because that is what I initially thought too and it's not so far fetched an interpretation because sexuality is constantly talked about throughout "Lunch Poems"). In any case, this "poem" doesn't really read like a conventional poem, but then again it's not prose; it's more like just a written stream of thoughts and observations strung together without proper English punctuation and grammar.
So is this poetry? What really is "conventional" poetry? I guess, to me, it is really just my subjective conception of what I consider poetry to be, from my experience reading it in middle and high school. I had never read modernist poetry or beyond, so poetry to me was the the romantics and Victorians. The poems we've been reading lately are obviously very different. So what is considered poetry? Can it just be any written piece that simply doesn't adhere to the rules of English grammar and punctuation? Is it really like that old adage, "poetry is anything you want it to be"?
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2 comments:
It really seems that modern poetry is an apt description. It is not poetry, it is modern poetry. The distinction is made that the poetry is different, that it has evolved, or de-evolved, whatever the perspective, but most importantly that it has changed.
This question about calling it poetry in the first place is well founded, I think. What is poetry? How does, or should, poetry appeal to our senses? Sure, poetry and the literary arts in general have changed over the ages, but sometimes, reading modern poetry, I feel like these poets are writing obtusely for the sake of writing. We live in a world that demands production -- so perhaps they, in striving to produce, have ceased to put forth that which matters, which I take to mean that which is comprehensible, and have started to present... well, for example, the banalities of Lunch Poems.
I haven't really read enough samples of modern poetry to present my case sufficiently, and I do feel that while the obtuseness is irritating, it is written with the intent of "goading" the reader into reading, so to speak. In the end, though, the quality of the literature is not being called into question. The relevancy is.
This all seems to point back to the very first essay we wrote for this course and that was our diagnostic essay with the topic being none other than “What is poetry?” It’s interesting how a simple question can be so bewildering. There seems to be an infinite number of answers to that question. Although, I do believe that most would agree that poetry is defined by each individual and isn’t likely to have just one definition. It is just as we noted on our writing about criteria on poetry. As a class, we found out that some people felt that good poetry had a conclusive, straight to the point meaning, while others felt that poetry was meant to be discussed and have the potential to mean more than one thing. In any case, poetry to one may not be poetry to another.
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