The Tall Grasses

Genre: poetry

So what is poetry, and should we read it?

It's almost pointless to attempt to define what poetry is, and I wouldn't want to try. Everyone's different and people are drawn to different qualities at different times. Though I believe poetry is almost certainly not everyday prose cut into short lines to make it look more interesting. Neither is it anything that simply happens to rhyme.

Poetry has certain qualities frequently absent from, or limited, in prose. It's often concerned with the image, as the Modernists said, and often has a more pronounced rhythm and musicality. Modernists claimed three distinct qualities for poetry: what Ezra Pound termed phanopoeia, melapoeia and logopoeia. It's a good enough starting point.

Phanopoeia: "the casting of images on the visual imagination."

Melapoeia: "wherein words are charged over and above their plain meaning with some musical property."

Logopoeia: the use of words "not just for their direct meaning" but also ambiguities and implications.

In short, does it engage your mind? Does it engage the music in your soul? Does it induce you to visualise? Does it make you think? Does it make you feel? Did the poet have any of those possibilities in mind when they wrote, or composed, it?

Here are two poems from this collection, one with a more formal structure and one unstructured, or 'free verse'.

The Last Kiss

I came to see you then, in the old days

when we were young. We once sat hand in hand

and I hoped then that you would understand

when we talked of hope and doubt, and dreams betrayed.

Those doubts my dear that brought us here to this,

those promises, those phone calls late at night

that spoke of love and filled the days with light,

are locked within this last long, lingering kiss.

My fingers tighten on your parting hand,

a final touch and then no further thrill

at those glancing eyes. Then the going, while

aching for a breath, catching as you stand.

Tonight we have a last time faced the dark,

our lives entwined together, so we said;

those dreams we dreamed, half living and half dead

are faded dear, brief as the morning star.

La Strada

Time dragged by

and we could not walk any more.

Straw hat pushed back,

she sighed with relief,

pleaded for rest.

We sat by the roadside

among the tall grasses,

her hands around her knees,

chin resting, still

the cotton skirt fluttering

wayward in the breeze.

I gazed along the empty road

as the sun poured down upon us,

and butterflies lighted noiselessly

on bushes of wild lavender.

An old car clattered by.

Poetry and me. I've written poetry on and off for years. It predates the fiction I've written and continue to write.

I hesitated before putting this collection together, but in reality it's merely the poetry I haven't yet discarded. I used to discard a lot of poetry, but I do that less now. I realise most people don't read much poetry, but here it is anyway, modestly priced, practically free.

Onnabop (or Oh No, Not Another Book Of Poetry) is divided into three main sections. Poems about Iran, sonnets, and miscellaneous poems. I find that some poems fall out of you in minutes and some have to be crafted over time. I don't know why that is, but it is.

Some of the poems have a formal structure, like the Iran poems and the sonnets, and some are free verse.

Thomas Hardy famously preferred writing poetry to writing novels and stories, and after Jude the Obscure gave up novel writing to concentrate on his first love, poetry. I'm no Thomas Hardy, but I still write poetry on and off. It keeps your visual imagination and sense of rhythm sharp. More than that, it's a challenge, and we all like a challenge, don't we?