In anticipation of the second show in By Jove’s Season of Violent Women, an epic poem based on Euripides’ Bacchae (written and performed by By Jove’s own SJ Brady with music by Vivienne Youel) Alexander Woodward addresses the impossible question of what makes a poem.
Hello. This is going to be a discussion of what makes a piece of writing or speech a poem rather than some other form of written or performed work. There are differences in techniques that are relevant in preparing a poem for stage or page; those distinctions shall not be discussed here. We are merely interested in what makes a thing a poem rather than something else.
To give you some context: I tend to check my emails late at night so they’re familiar to me when I actually answer them in the morning. Unfortunately, late at night means it’s after a gig and some drinks with my poetic colleagues. While I slept off my Artistic Endeavours, By Jove co-artistic director and all-round Efficient-and-Talented Human, David Bullen, responded. Apparently my gin-infused-self volunteered. And now I find myself having to write about bloody poetry.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve written poetry for seven years, and been performing it regularly “in the scene” for two-and-a-half. I can write poems (I’ve written for six By Jove productions, and I’ve been shortlisted for a national award. I know what I’m on about, you’re in safe hands.) It’s just that having been quite happy writing and performing poems, I find myself having to define poetry.
My problem is that I don’t know myself what makes a poem. I know literary techniques, but one can use them to create works which are not poetry. The best definition of a poem I’ve ever heard was that of my friend, and organiser of the magnificent Frogs and Jays, a regular spoken word night in London. “A poem is just particular words placed in a particular order for particular reasons.” Any definition of poetry has to be this broad because there are marvellous poems which would break the rule of a narrower definition. I could list anecdotes about bad poems, but that wouldn’t be relevant to this piece. SJ is a marvellous writer and performer, and you should buy tickets here.
The point of poetry is to use language to convey a specific meaning. The way it differs from other uses of language is the way it does so. By writing poems, we free ourselves from certain standard conventions. Poems do things thing with language which are not usual in most other scenarios. A phrase that would seem weird in a novel or article can be let through our filters because we say to ourselves “Oh, it’s a poem. That’s probably allowed here, right?”
We have a concentration of attention. Our non-standard use of language means an audience or reader has to pay a little bit more attention to extract the meaning from a piece of language. The unusualness means you have to pay attention; your attention means we have to make what we write worthy of attention at the level of minute detail.
Then we have the aesthetic quality. I don’t like the word beauty here. I have a particular fondness for love poetry, and my favourite ones are most definitely beautiful. Some topics, though, are difficult. Esoterica. Philosophy. Politics. Illness. Assault. Grief. Violence. Donald Fucking Trump. These topics are not beautiful. They are, however, worthy of our attention. By playing with sound, rhyme, rhythm, etc., poets can make the bitter things they discuss a little easier. Poetry is like Lucretius’ honey around the rim of the medicine cup.
Related to this, we have poetic imagery. A poet’s job is to make a thing humans are unsure about, or unable to explain, clearer than they would otherwise be. We use comparisons; have things stand in the place of other things; make nouns into adjectives; draw your attention to aspects of reality you not otherwise have considered. A poem can spend more time on its subject and make you really look at it and see things you might not have noticed, or at least see it in a slightly new way. It’s all very well to say “Isn’t that the attractive woman who is supposedly the reason for that famous war which destroyed that famous city?”, but you give your audience a much more interesting account of the events if you were to say “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/ And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”
Of course, with any of the aspects of poetry that I’ve named or you could think of, you can think of a poem which does not use them or a not-poem which does. All writing is just “particular words placed in a particular order for a particular reason”. So what makes a poem a poem? I don’t know, but you’ll know that something is a poem when you encounter it. You probably knew that before. Now, though, you have read several hundred words on the internet telling you it, so you know it definitely must be true. Also, hopefully realising even poets don’t think there’s anything particularly unique about poetry, you’ll be less wary of encountering it. Celebrate your freedom from fear by buying a ticket to Here She Comes and treating yourself to a magnificent evening of some words in an order.
You can also embrace your poetic side by getting involved with #PoetryonthePavement – film yourself reading any poem (your own or someone else’s) for 30 seconds to a minute and post it on social media with the hashtag. By Jove will share and retweet it, and we’ll build a hive of poetry BLASTS for everyone to enjoy.
