Meter, Rhyme, and Imagery

I'm still working on this page. It is the core of this website, and of my whole approach to teaching poetry.

The one thing to remember, while I'm working on getting the rest of the page up, is that poetry originated as a way to maintain the oral histories of groups with no written language. It was recited aloud by the tribal storyteller. So it incorporated rhyme, to make it easier to remember the poem, and meter, to draw reader and listener alike onward through the tale. We can do far worse than write as well as they did. That is true living poetry.

As an example of the difference between poetry and the stuff that is really prose with line breaks in funny places, here are two paragraphs:

I saw them again today next to the river -- one long current of starlings alight on the telephone wire like a row of shivering candles in the late autumn wind before they flew off together -- a black plume of birds rising and falling over the fields left to right to left.

Scattered leaves blown by the wind swirl and eddy round the yard, gather in a quiet nook. Scattered lives blown by the wind swirl and eddy round the world, gather in this unreal land. Peace and hope and dreams they find, growth and healing, till they can dance upon the winds again.

[Starlings, Again is by Andrew Green, published by Yankee Magazine in October 1999, reprinted here for instructional purposes]

Read the two of them out loud. Mr. Green's "poem" is a beautiful paragraph of prose, the kind of thing I wish I could write. But, though he and the editors of Yankee Magazine clearly disagree with me, I feel that it is not poetry. Mine, when turned into a normal paragraph, still has something that sets it apart -- the meter. When you recite my poem, your voice falls into the pattern that I set for it. It dances, like those wind-blown leaves.

Mr. Green writes beautiful prose. I write, in all honesty, second-rate poetry. But mine is poetry, in the ways that his is not.