which is better? a poem or a booK?

[cacian]

*a book here representing a story as oppose to a poem.

and does writing a story influences the way we write a poem so that poetry today reads like a short story rather then a poem?



to me poetry reads between the lines although I feel that poetry more and more veers towards short story telling and therefore its aim is rather losing touch. I feel that the more we entertain ourselves with long complex stories and the more we expect the same from poetry. there is a sense of wanting more of the same from it. our minds is more bookish then poetish it seems.

a book however states the obvious.

and so I would rather contribute poetry then stories.

[Lokasenna]

to me poetry reads between the lines although I feel that poetry more and more veer towards short stories and therefore its aim is rather losing touch. I feel that the more we entertain with long complex stories and the more we expect the same of poetry. there is a sense of wanting more of the same from poetry . our minds is more bookish then poetish it seems.
a
book however states the obvious
and so I would rather contribute poetry then stories.

..?

I have literally no idea what any of this means.

[cafolini]

..?

I have literally no idea what any of this means.

Or: I clearly see that it doesn't make any sense.

A master of con-fusion probably thinks that the problem is in certainty, not even suspecting that the certainty is due to con-fusion to begin.

[osho]

At times you are so wise and at others......I do not want to say. Maybe this question was unnecessary or cannot provoke the thoughts you are expecting. Or at least this does not make sense. You might have writing this post in your sleepy state.

[cacian]

At times you are so wise and at others......I do not want to say. Maybe this question was unnecessary or cannot provoke the thoughts you are expecting. Or at least this does not make sense. You might have writing this post in your sleepy state.

I am not sure what you mean by: this question is unnecessary?
I have rewritten the post. I have to admit I do not write when sleepy I am usually in bed by then haha

..?

I have literally no idea what any of this means.

hi Loka. I am asking whether one prefers poetry to books or vice versa?
I am also saying that I think poetry today reads like short story telling and that I feel that was not the primary aim of poetry.
a book however ie a story is predictable because one knows already there is a dilemma/conflict that is about to crash or be solved.
then I move on to explain that I feel that more and more we have gotten used to the idea reading lots of books and studying them too that our minds is bookish rather then poetic. therefore when writing or reading poetry we expect more of the same concept.

[JCamilo]

Cacian, I have a question...

I have a book with many poems. However,due to use, one of the pages got loose, splitting a poem in a half. What should I prefer, the part left in the book or the part in the page?

[cacian]

Cacian, I have a question...

I have a book with many poems. However,due to use, one of the pages got loose, splitting a poem in a half. What should I prefer, the part left in the book or the part in the page?

a book for me means a story. a poem is just a poem. so you have one story ie one book versus one poem.
you mean to say one of the pages got ripped. a loose page is just loose and usually comes off a book.
anyway to attempt an answer I would say I prefer neither because the poem is no longer visible.

[stlukesguild]

Cacian... you forget that The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid, the Canterbury Tales, Dante's Comedia, Paradise Lost, Orlando furioso, Os Lusíadas, La Gerusalemme liberata, The Faerie Queene, Goethe's Faust, Blake's Milton, Byron's Don Juan, Endymion and Hyperion by Keats, The Prelude by Wordsworth, Browning's Ring and the Book, The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel by Nikos Kazantzakis, Neruda's canto General, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill, Omeros by Derreck Walcott and any number of other works are poems that are also narrative and as long as many novels.

Now I believe there is some merit to your question about the current preference for narrative works... especially long narrative works... over lyric poetry... which quite often is not narrative in nature. While others pointed out that "a book" is not necessarily a novel or long narrative work... a great many others here and elsewhere make similar assumptions. I cannot count how many times I happen upon lists of the "Greatest 10... 25... 50... 100" Books" in which not a single poem, play, or work of non-fiction is included... as if Hamlet, Les Fleurs du mal, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were not books.

So why is poetry less popular today? Children begin reading with poetry (Dr. Seuss, etc...) and Middle-School kids are enthralled by poetry in the form of song lyrics. But our education system is doing much to dissuade reading poetry... and even fiction... and the idiots behind curriculum push more and more for students to spend the majority of their time reading dry non-fiction in the belief that as most careers don't entail the reading of fiction... let alone poetry... we shouldn't be wasting our time teaching such.

[MorpheusSandman]

+1 to what stluke said.

[mona amon]

*a book here representing a story as oppose to a poem.

and does writing a story influences the way we write a poem so that poetry today reads like a short story rather then a poem?



to me poetry reads between the lines although I feel that poetry more and more veers towards short story telling and therefore its aim is rather losing touch. I feel that the more we entertain ourselves with long complex stories and the more we expect the same from poetry. there is a sense of wanting more of the same from it. our minds is more bookish then poetish it seems.

a book however states the obvious.

and so I would rather contribute poetry then stories.

I have to confess that I don't like reading poetry! I like some poems that I've read, some of them very much, but on the whole poetry just doesn't get my motor running. I think it's a question of training. over the years I've trained myself to read prose and drama well (just by reading a lot), but poetry has a different set of rules and I just haven't bothered with it yet. At first I thought it was the absence of plot, but as you say, some poems do tell a story, and for me that doesn't help. I once mentioned this to someone, and she knows I love Kubla Khan, so she suggested I read Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which has a story. I did, but nope. I just did not get it.

[free]

I like both if they are well written and have communication with me, when they hit the point of my interests. As for the poetry looking more like stories than like poems, it has started with the abolishing of classic poetic form. To me it makes sense as a poem only if the words a poet choses are strong in their expressivity. It seems that it is much more difficult to be a good poet today than it was before.

[cacian]

Cacian... you forget that The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid, the Canterbury Tales, Dante's Comedia, Paradise Lost, Orlando furioso, Os Lusíadas, La Gerusalemme liberata, The Faerie Queene, Goethe's Faust, Blake's Milton, Byron's Don Juan, Endymion and Hyperion by Keats, The Prelude by Wordsworth, Browning's Ring and the Book, The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel by Nikos Kazantzakis, Neruda's canto General, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill, Omeros by Derreck Walcott and any number of other works are poems that are also narrative and as long as many novels.

Now I believe there is some merit to your question about the current preference for narrative works... especially long narrative works... over lyric poetry... which quite often is not narrative in nature. While others pointed out that "a book" is not necessarily a novel or long narrative work... a great many others here and elsewhere make similar assumptions. I cannot count how many times I happen upon lists of the "Greatest 10... 25... 50... 100" Books" in which not a single poem, play, or work of non-fiction is included... as if Hamlet, Les Fleurs du mal, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were not books.

So why is poetry less popular today? Children begin reading with poetry (Dr. Seuss, etc...) and Middle-School kids are enthralled by poetry in the form of song lyrics. But our education system is doing much to dissuade reading poetry... and even fiction... and the idiots behind curriculum push more and more for students to spend the majority of their time reading dry non-fiction in the belief that as most careers don't entail the reading of fiction... let alone poetry... we shouldn't be wasting our time teaching such.

true however to poetry a meaning and narrative epic pieces do not do it any justice.
it is one thing to read a story and another to read a poem but it seems that poetry is lacking that fizziness of what a poem really sets out to be.
I feel the neglect of poetry is at the cost of story writing. we are therefore loosing it to long narrative writing.
one difference between a story and a poem is that one is obvious but the other is not.
one never knows what a poem is going to be about whereas a story can more or less predict what it is going to be about.
poetry is spontaneous and unpredictable whereas a story is planned and verified ie one has read similar before.

[mortalterror]

Checking my 80 favorite books it breaks 33 for poetry and 47 for prose. Though I will add that most of my favorite poetry is long and narrative driven rather than short and lyrical.

[JBI]

Western Canonical understanding has a tendency toward placing the value of authors on a general longer form - that means, as Borges has argued, no matter how perfect Keats' odes are, they will never be as esteemed as Don Quixote, despite Quixote's numerous mistakes, awful poetry, and other weak parts.

That is more or less true - we will not, as a general population, put the single lyric above others - we will talk about Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, or whomever, but we generally discuss them as a collection (however edited) rather than as single poems. I suspect if one poet wrote a single perfect poem, and then never wrote again, nobody would pay them any heed.

That being said, this is more or less a Western concoction that overlaps onto some other cultures as well. In general, the West having developed late, has always had a preference for narrative, given that narrative is consumable by a mass population who cannot read. Lyrics too, except that something like Sea Ballads, or Border Ballads do not work as well as lyrics. In general for most of English history the most popular form of literary entertainment was most likely this form of vulgar art, which adores narrative, chorus, and any other tropes we find verbose, or pointless in other forms.

Now with that said, in terms of established art forms, the lyric has been quite dominant. Every single person who was anybody seems to have been writing sonnets or pamphlets in 16th century England. In terms of prose fiction, the only example that comes to mind is The Unfortunate Traveler, and I find that today quite difficult to read (antisemitism and xenophobia aside).

Lyric has always been centered on specific privileged communities. Traditional Odes were mostly written to celebrate things connected to rich people. Pindar praising a chariot race is in essence praising the rich man who owns the best chariot, not the poor slave who drives (chariot racing being the only sport then when the winner didn't even need to participate).

The actual circulation of Renaissance lyrics only adds to this - most were moving in circles of friends and contacts through manuscripts. Thomas Wyatt's They Flee from Me now contains the math homework of someone who had the manuscript after him. Even until the time of Donne, the manuscript was still dominant, with most works still moving between friends on paper, and not into bound books. Narrative, which generally tends to be longer, requires two things. First of all, if it is oral, it requires an audience, which plays a part in changing and adapting the narrative (I am certain that textual Homer, though in essence was the same as Original Homer, was not an exact copy). Secondly, if it is recorded, it requires people to be able to read, and afford a copy. The burning of the library of Alexandria shows how fragile the ancient world's texts were. There are countless other examples floating all the way until the invention of printing. Roman authorities even demonstrated one could actually be totally removed from historical and cultural records by the process of chopping ones face off a sculpture. This same feat was later accomplished in Maoist China, with the famous portrait of the founding of the communist country constantly being changed to add the new favorites into the front row (in 1949 Deng Xiaoping would not have even been invited to the standing room, yet somehow he is sitting front row?).

Print changes things, but up until the mid-19th century, printing was incredibly expensive in England. Pulp did not exist in the sense it does today, and paper was mostly made from used garments. Books, if they were privately owned, would be limited to the rich elite, whereas public books would be restricted to the new reading class, an upper-middle class who could afford copies from the lending libraries (usually requiring subscriptions). Public libraries, mass literacy, female literacy, and popular literature (as written literature) are all relatively late inventions, despite Gutenberg bringing printing centuries before.

Now, all this being said, lyric poetry has always been something relatively private. Elitist poets would have big audiences - of a couple thousand of people. Alexander Pope did not have wide circulation in today's terms, but he was quite simply the embodiment of a colossal poet in his time. Nobody from any lower class would have encountered his work, and his Homer, which was his narrative masterpiece, could not have had much of a circulation.

What is a book then? well, it now is a mass product that can be sold. Before it was a mass work that could be appreciated (Given that it wasn't cheap at all to buy, I use appreciated in the sense of has use, including manuals on medicine etc.). and now is slowly becoming an obsolete form.

Since sales are so important. It does not surprise me that since Wordsworth the dominant form of poetry, both lyric and narrative, has been the anthology as a book. Lyrical Ballads is the first great anthology I can find, in that it has both cohesion as a collection, and with its preface, it also contains a sort of ars poetica built into it. Compared to other important anthologies, such as Tutle's Miscellany which contains much of Wyatt and Surrey, we see there is a complete shift in genre.

This can be said to mark a transition - you cannot sell lyrics one by one. You may get them into magazines if you are lucky, but more often than not, you will not get them into the same publication every time, and it will not generate the money or buzz a collection will. Secondly, it marks a shift in poetry as a casual form (meaning a casual sonnet written, for a girl, or as a poetic exercise) to a collection of works, showcasing an individual poet as personality and style.

In truth much of modern literature has been preoccupied with this - distinctive style. One cannot say that I write in x style a work and then have that criticized or reviewed as a specific concoction in this mode. We like to think of poets now as independently grouped, so that the single work in one style is not even possible anymore. I have the feeling that similar-styled poets were considered fine poets back in the Renaissance, and the place of the single poet alone, misunderstood, and distinct is a completely modern conjecture.

We now place emphasis on the book of poetry more than all, reading something like four quartets as a collection, instead of one section of one poem at a time - Eliot surely had this in mind when he wrote it. We cannot speak of one poem from Harmonium, we need to discuss the collection. This is the dominance of the book over poetry.

Other cultures are different, but even they show signs of the book taking form. Japan is relatively unique in that the poet did not seem, from my understanding to be in the centre, but the poem. Anthologies were grouped by theme and topic. Later China would group anthologies by genre (meaning prosodic category), yet the fat collected works and personal anthology would remain dominant. Still, it is no surprise that narrative works end up taking off by the Yuan, and though a few lyrical poets reach great acclaim in the later years (particularly the early Qing), the vast majority of canonical works from the period are in prose (usually classical prose, though sometimes vernacular).

So perhaps the dominance of the book over the poem is in a sense a development of the means of production. Certainly a single poem cannot sell a million copies.

[MorpheusSandman]

Good post, JBI, and I agree on most everything but:

I suspect if one poet wrote a single perfect poem, and then never wrote again, nobody would pay them any heed.

Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard? He may have wrote again, but never produced anything as remotely as critically heralded as that.