essay on poetry

[ROGER BAGULA]

Dear scruz.poetry,
This essay is for a future issue of TFTN. I wrote it this morning after
reading poetry newsgroups last night.

Respectfully,
Roger L. Bagula
tf...@earthlink.net
11759Waterhill Road
Lakeside,Ca 92040-2905
tel: 619-5610814
URL: http://home.earthlink.net/~tftn
Poetry Today
By R. L. Bagula 24 April 1998 ©
Poetry is alive and well and living on the Internet. A young woman poet
behaves live a harlot from the bible and struts her erotic verse on her
web pages. E-zines offer “Poetry Cafe” and beatnik nihilism. The egos
and ids of the young poets are pranced freely for all to see, like
peacocks spreading their tales.
What is poetry? Where did it begin?
In ancient times very few could read and wisdom and knowledge was
passed on as an oral tradition from one nomadic bard to the next. The
epic poem was the major form, beside the ever present love song of the
mating primates. What form was invented in a mathematical sense was an
associative memory aid. Rhyme schemes and alliterative forms helped the
bard to remember much as CRC and parity checks help the computer to
remember and transmit data on noisy telephone lines. A long file from
England sometimes comes through whole today. We have the Iliad and the
Gilgamesh to show that these forms worked to transmit data through
history. So poetry has a tradition of using mathematical forms of rhyme
and meter that is much like the forms of music: how many people hum a
tone and the words of a song come to mind? Poetry set to musics is
ancient as well: kings used it to move patriotism in their masses with
great anthems that set one man to war against his neighbor! Today we
see poetry used in commercials to sell hair color and eye shadow to
women from the TV. We don’t see it as poetry, because it hasn’t been
named that, but it has the rhyme and feel of the poetic.
So the use of words in “poetic” forms is a tool of the creator to pass
on or persuade the reader or hearer of some thought form, wisdom,
concept or history. The lover sells his love: the bard sells his
history. The science of expression in words by poetic form gives a great
number of teacher income and has since the university began. From the
classics to T. S. Elliot the poet has changed the attitudes and swayed
nations without the use of the major news media. Poetry will not die.
Even without a place in the “News” in the everyday paper that it has had
in the past. Humor and stories also find a place in the poetic: the
dragon, the fairy, and evil of sorcery have come to us in poetry.
Free verse has been the “liberation” of the poetic thought, but it has
also been it’s shame. Like abstract art free verse has allowed the
common man to think that it isn’t hard to do that, anyone could do that.
I find that thrown at me about fractals as well which just isn’t true
even of the fractal artists. Good poetry is still a hard earned craft of
carefully shaped words and thoughts. The really good poets these days
seem to gravitate toward the Japanese “form” poetry. Why should we find
poetry going back to ancient forms such as these in it’s life? No one
can say that a good( truly good) haiku poem is easy. The respect that
poetry in going to freeforms has lost, these poets feel has to be
regained. What poetry is about is the beauty of communication. In a
world of so many technical manuals for every machine we use, we lose
site of conveying our thoughts well and in a way that pleases. There is
no crime in rhyme when it delights the senses and catches the memory.
Mathematics of meter and rhyme have a long time place in poetry and
shouldn’t be ignored. A poem that is hard carved from words so that it
stays with us as if carved in stone is not to be scorned. All forms of
expression are allowed in free poetic thought.