Poyms

I decided pretty early on in life that there were a few words in the English language that had gone slightly wrong and needed a bit of help. WREN was one of them. Stupid spelling, I thought, of a bird which is quite clearly should be known as a WERN. And POEM. What kind of a word what that? There was no way I was ever going to pronounce it as POH-EM . Surely a better pronunciation was POYM, and that was how I was going to say it, so there.

I finally gave way on the WERN when I found out that you said it out loud as REN. But POYM I have stuck with, doggedly, through much teasing, and I don't care.

I was asked yesterday about the poem that I put on my blog: how can you tell that's a poem and not just bits of prose chopped up?

Good question, I thought. Then I started thinking - - well, what is a poem, as opposed to verse, and what is a poem, as opposed to prose?

At school, too many of us were bored nearly to death by poetry. "Oh, give us double maths instead!" we cried (oh, okay, that's probably exaggerating a bit) "for I shall die if I have to look at one more line written by Alexander Pope!"

I don't know what they thought they were trying to teach when they plonked all those dreary old classics in front of us - - but it certainly wasn't to love poetry. You had to look up one word in three and that wasn't likely to inspire us in any way "and this is a satire on the Foreign Minister of the day" - - - "OH, GIVE ME DOUBLE MATHS INSTEAD!"

So what makes something a poem, instead of prose?

To me, each new line should move it forward, should have a new thought, a new idea. Rather than making it harder to understand, the layout should make it easier.

Here's my perfect example:

There was a young girl from Australia
Who went to a dance as a dahlia
But the petals revealed
What they should have concealed
And the dance - as a dance - was a failure

Now, I would say that's verse rather than poetry - to me a poem has to have something a bit deeper to it - but each line moves it on beautifully, to the punchline at the end. Also, to me, ideally the words of a poem should have rhythm.

I like rhyme, too, though it's not vital - - but it has a comforting, soothing quality and can also be very funny. I hate it when writers will twist anything round to get a rhyme, though - to me anything that has a line like "the birds did sing" is really bad writing.

And a poem should be somehow greater than the sum of its parts - - that particular combination of words, of rhythm, of rhyme should immediately either suggest something to you that makes you go "oh, I never thought of that" or "oh YES, that's just what a summer's afternoon feels like" or it takes you straight to a certain feeling.

We think poetry can be "difficult" - but it shouldn't be and I hate it when poets write just to show off how clever they are. The best poetry should take you straight there - to wherever the poet was wanting to take you.

And, to be fair, that's probably what old Alexander Pope's writing did in the eighteenth century - it's just that because he was writing about topical stuff it's not relevant now. It'd be like showing some of the great Spitting Image episodes which we loved so much to a modern eighteen-year-old: they wouldn't have a clue who many of the characters were.

I think it's a terrible shame that so many of us had such a dull experience of poetry at school and I do think that the teaching of poetry - and the poems that are chosen - have improved since then. But it's true that poems do arouse strong feelings - and it's possible to recognise that something's a good poem, and still hate it: or to know that it's not very good, and still love it.