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| Poetry Workshop (Photo credit: Steel Wool) |
Okay,
let’s talk poetry. I’m not interested in the fundamentals – form, structure, or
metric fluidity, right now. I’m more at home with unwinding the spool of mystic which
wounds around the craft like a shawl; the touch of poetry on the soul and the
spontaneous ignition that accompanies the reaction.
I’ve
heard people argue that the human emotion has no business meddling with the
heartstrings of poetry. This school of thought points out that far too much
research and constructing goes into the making of a poem. And so, they stress,
to fling the craft at the mercy of a thousand nameless emotions is, stating it
mildly . . . flimsy. I disagree, though. Well, I’ll give them due
fairness and add that these school does
not deny entirely the relevance of our feelings to the flow of cadence.
Actually, they view them as mere poetical attachés and nothing
more. They assert that sensations are fickle and lacking in depth to be a route
to the core of poetry.
Well,
I don’t know about that one. What I do know is I’m out to understand the
essence of poems and I’m taking into consideration the pick-and-choose nature
of the craft. The selectiveness of verse, its choice of delicate words
differentiates it from prose. I like explaining it to myself like this, if
narrating in non-fiction is telling, if in story writing it’s showing,
then in poetry above all, it is feeling.
Of course, I speak in defense of poetry; the
emotion is an indispensable ingredient in every form of writing created to have
a personal edge. Maybe, just maybe news reporting might be excused from what Stephen
King calls Wordsworth’s Criterion.
The
poet feels his way through each word applied to each line of verse, skillfully
selecting, streamlining, and fine-tuning them to sync with the emotive flow of
the entire tapestry. Poetic language is attentive to meaning, nuances, and
sound patterns of words a poet repairs to in creating his art. This is
something readily overlooked in any other form of literature, (Like I stated
above, only writing that does not call attention to feelings maybe exempted.)
except of course, music which at its finest is characterized by elements of
poetics. By the way, writing which appeals to human emotion always always is
the offshoot of poetics.
Aristotle
said, ‘The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor’.
You would easily agree that without metaphors poetry would be one first class
piece of dead meat. The metaphor is the evocative force of poetry which paints
mental pictures of sweet delights within a reader.
Robert
Frost was thinking the same thing when he remarked, ‘There are many
other things I have found myself saying about poetry but the chiefest of these
is that it is metaphor . . .’ Poetry is the vehicle of emotion just the
same way the emotion is the writer, the driver of poetics.
Robert
Wallace puts a ring of finality to it when he says, ‘The metaphors
virtually stand for or present the emotion.’ Remember, William
Wordsworth’s definition of poetry; Emotion
recollected in tranquility?
The
metaphors are visible passions which lend their charm to the poem. In other words,
they ain’t just the thrust of feelings in the verse but the seen aspect of
emotions recollected.
Keep
your pen bleeding!
Akpan
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