Making chaos out of logic!
Poetry rhymes, prose doesn’t.
This means that Leaves of Grass, or Howl, are not poetry.
Tiger, Tiger is.
Here’s the problem. Walt Whitman wrote a really cool book, Leaves of Grass. It was genius, and it caused a shift in the way people viewed poetry. Suddenly everybody thought that all you had to do was string together eclectic images, virtual nonsense that sounded cool, and they could call it poetry. Prose is a lot of words; poetry has class.
This idea, of stringing images together was brought to a head in Howl, by Allen Ginsberg. Started the whole ‘beat’ thing, and everybody thought they had broken out, were much more better than them old fossils who wrote all that rhymin’ stuff.
But everybody misses out on a crucial factor, Whitman and Ginsberg understood what poetry was before they broke it.
You can’t build a car from the ground up unless you understand how the cars that came before were built.
We now have uneducated people, inspired by money grubbing zine people who don’t want to work, writing tons and scads of prose and calling it poetry.
Nothing wrong with good prose, but people need to understand what came before prose before they deconstruct it and reassemble it into cool conglomerations of electric images.
This is not to say that I put one over the other. I just know the difference. I’ve written poetry, such as…
Your Soul is My Soul
I put a poem in my computer today
but an EMP wiped it all away
and though I exist as cosmic dust
poetry is immortal I truly trust
the meter and rhyme on electronic page
last long after bombs of nuclear rage
for though that poem is burnt and gone
for a moment, just a moment, my head held song
and my head is your head and together we are bound
my song is your song and you heard the sound
my soul is your soul and the universe ends
your soul is my soul and we transcend
no need for body or the things that we measure
no need for the universe or the things that we treasure
no need for paper or computer or flesh
I hold you in spirit and forever we rest
And I’ve written prose, a whole book of it that rivals Leaves of Grass in its concepts: Neutropia.
What you write is up to you.
