Medium Specificity

What’s in a word

                or two or three

                or two?

In the matching and setting and pairing of words

There’s a magic, a sound; it’s, like, almost a taste.

It’s a rhythm, a flavor from copy and paste

Like a Utah boy hearing Australian birds.

Words.

It’s more than just a story,

unless it’s just a story.

But it rings when it’s true

                it dings when it’s true

It rings and it dings and it sings when it’s true.

And there’s thought involved

                    thoughts involved

              and thoughts evolved

       when the heart’s involved.

or

Once upon a later evening, at Grandma’s house, your dad believing

You and brother would enjoy a sampling of poetic form.

Though you don’t catch all the meaning, something in it feels like dreaming,

Or like moonlight softly beaming –

Beaming on a darkened shore.

When it ends you’re left to ponder feelings never felt before –

Which you’ve held forevermore. 

It’s comfortable, harsh, consistent, contradictory, meticulous, natural, and overall

concise.

It’s poetry, proof that words can express.


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                What’s there to say about poetry?  Honestly, it’s a hard topic to deal with.  For some reason, these past couple generations haven’t upheld the medium as others have, and so it has gained a pretentious connotation or is seen through a light full of flowers, and wussies, and silly romantics.  But it’s an art form.  That’s what it is. 

                My approach to this poem of poems was to utilize different poetic techniques.  The first stanza, of course, quotes Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  I also kind of pulled from Eliot by repeating myself and creating a sort of structured form only to abandon it.  And I abandoned it for my favorite rhyming pattern:  A B B A (words, taste, paste, birds).  This stanza was originally how I intended to start the poem, using a structured rhythm and rhyme, which, for a long time, was one of the distinguishing features of the medium.  I chose to bookend the piece with more of a free verse style, instead, keeping the more structured (including ascetically structured) in the center.

                Some poems are more narrative than others.  Of course Edgar Poe’s “The Raven” is one of the most famous narrative poems.  To pay tribute to the narrative style and to the poem itself, I told a story through the structure of “The Raven.”  The story I told was of the first time I heard the poem.  My dad read it to my brother and me, before bedtime, while we were living at my grandma’s house sleeping on futons.  It haunted me for reasons I didn’t understand.  I was maybe 8 or 9 years old at the time and didn’t know much about pallid busts of Pallas or about plutonian shores, but I did know about ravens and shadows and souls, and I understood the feeling of the words.

                That’s the magic of poetry to me:  one word pared with another pared with others and placed together just so perfectly so can create feelings and moods beyond what the words themselves mean.  And speaking of moods, that’s one of the chief characterizations of poetry to me.  If another work of art is, to me, poetic, like a movie for example, it will often be less through its symbolism and metaphors and more through its use of tone and mood.  I tried to keep a consistent focus on word paring and a consistent mood of wonder.

I began this poem asking about words, and I ended it by referencing a phrase that I wish more people would forget.  Often times, people say “words can’t express.”  Words can’t express what you mean to me, what the view was like, the horror of the situation, etc.  I disagree.  Words can express, it just takes time and careful paring.  Many poets, as Cody loves to discover, write a single thought over and over throughout dozens of poems until they get it right.  The last poem of the series will often pull lines from the previous struggles, pull them and place them just so.  Then the thought is captured and the poet moves on.