Can you imagine how aeronautical engineers felt when helicopters were invented? A bunch of them likely wanted to call them airplanes, pure and simple. They flew. They carried people. They had motors inside. If the motor quit, there was only one direction to go: down. So these early conservatives no doubt felt they had a strong case for calling those things with the rotating wings AIRPLANES, don’t you think? Consider poetry now.
Flashback to Monday. I’m substitute teaching in a language arts class at a major midwestern middle school and it’s lunch time. And I don’t have a bleeping dime to my name. So I sit alone at the desk in the class room reading the September issue of Poetry — super magazine, though I’m sure they wish I’d call it a “periodical.” It seems so much more relevant that way, don’t you suppose yah? Particularly rewarding is “sorrows” by Lucille Clifton. Powerful poem!
I am bothered enough by my surfeit of incapacities as a hungry hummin’ bean to invient a new word, which I will share after I explain its genesis.
We have a word for regulary metered rhyming poems. We call them verse. Verse which shows no siginficant originality and coats of cliches over cliches, we call doggerel. We have a word for irregularly metered poems which do not rhyme. We call them blank verse. Finally, we have a word for blank verse with synthetically contrived or random-length lines. We call it poetry. We should not. We should call it something else.
We know what prose is on sight. At least some of us who don’t “buy” prosesody do. We also know verse on sight. We do not know irregularly metered blank verse on sight, and there’s “the rub.” Beginning to read a blank verse “poem” only to discover eight to 15 lines into it that there is not even one part of rythm per million frusttrates me. I have only so many hours left on my life’s “meter,” and I don’t want to spend time to discover the inviting poem I thought was an apple was instead the residence of a half-consumed, squirming former inhabitant. We need another word for that kind of verbal creation: something to identify words that aren’t prose and aren’t poetry. I call my new word
poese
POE seh
Halfway between prose (one syllable) and poetry (three syllables) poese is a new artistic medium for creative writers. Furthermore, until people start publishing entire books of poeses, each poese title should have an asterisk preceding it so that readers don’t bite several lines into one only to realize it is not what it was assumed to be.
“*Brim of Piquant Cucumber Wine Goblet”
“*Dust Gently the Jagged Avuncular”
or whatever poese titles you care to write. Just don’t call it poetry.
Why? For the same reason those in the know don’t call a helicopter an airplane.
Non-poets will be more inclined to consider poetry after poese takes its rightful place in the lexicon. They won’t be confused by the appearance of Carole Lombard only to discover it’s actually Imo Phillips in drag. Those who prefer poetry won’t waste our time with what is not.
It is time to introduce poese to our language.
Live long . . . . and properly.
An interesting read. I don’t write in meters myself but then its not free verse either. No matter what, a doggerel remains a doggerel.
1 babayaga — thanks for your good words. Since your poems are not in consistent meter, do you have an idea, as you begin an interim or final draft of a new poem, what purpose you intend to serve or artistic goal you want to achieve as far as the appearance of your poem on the page? When writing blank verse, I most often try to make it easy to read the poem aloud so that a line does not end
before a phrase or part of a phrase is complete. I find even when I read any poem, including one of mine, silently, I somehow manage to “hear” it with my mind’s ear. How about you, 1 babayaga and other readers of this commeht?