Poetry to be Read

I have a complicated relationship with poetry. I do love good poetry, but I write very little. And of all the poetry that exists in the world, I hate the massive majority of it. I can't even stand most of the classics or greats. The problem is that I have very strict beliefs when it comes to poetry.

First of all, there are two kinds of poetry: poetry meant to be read and poetry meant to be heard. They have very different characteristics, so each one will get its own entry. Today, as you may have guessed, is poetry meant to be read.

Before we get into the specifics, I think it is important to remember that all poetry is writing and should cover the universal characteristics of writing. It needs to tell a story or show a scene. Characters should be interesting, relatable, believable. The world needs to be concrete. It needs to be entertaining and satisfying on a first read and also on subsequent readings. It should provoke thought in readers.

Most of the reason I hate so much poetry is that it does the exact opposite of good writing. It is incredibly vague. It tells instead of shows. It beats around the bush and never gets to the point. Instead of showing a scene of two people in love, doing something that expresses that love, they simply talk about the concept of love itself. And not only that, but they never even use the word love. God forbid you call a spade a spade.

Poetry is the densest form of writing.

I often hear poetry called the essence writing. I disagree. Lyrics are the essence of writing (more on that in a couple days). The essence is the core, the simplest, smallest part that makes it what it is. Poetry is not that. Poetry is condensing a short story into a paragraph (or stanza) or a novel into a page. You haven't stripped anything out of it; you have crunched it all into a tight, tiny space (like when a star goes nova and collapses into a neutron star or like when you take a handful of fluffy snow and mash it into a snowball).

Dense writing means every level is doing as much as it can. The sounds, words, phrases, and sentences are all providing as much meaning as possible. They set the mood, the scene, characterize people, describe action. They show the the set-up, point of tension, climax, and resolution of a story. Poetry uses groupings that prose doesn't use, namely line breaks and stanzas (though stanzas function similarly to paragraphs), which allows it to drop the fluff in prose (like grammar and transition words), leaving only the densest words.

I have been told that poetry should be experimental. I think poetry can be experimental. I also think that most of those experiments fail miserably. Most "experimental" poetry is either weird or confusing. Like I said earlier, poetry is still a form of writing. If it doesn't entertain, it has failed because nobody will want to read it, let alone think about or study it.

'Poetry' is one of those terms that has no solid definition. It seems that just about anything under the sun can be called poetry. While people may not agree on a definition, I do have one. Poetry is dense writing. If you want to know how to write poetry, the first step is to write a story. Then all you have to do is make it more efficient.