William Wordsworth famously defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and Emily Dickinson explained the sensation of poetry this way, “If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry.” Today, Mark Flanagan writes for About.com that poetry is “the chiseled marble of language,” because poets use an economy of words and consider emotive qualities, musical value, spacing, and even words’ spatial relationship to the page to evoke intense emotion. “Defining poetry,” he writes, “is like grasping at the wind – once you catch it, it’s no longer wind.”

These days, this grasping at the wind is most often done outside of traditional forms. We call what we are doing free, open or blank verse. Our contemporary efforts do not require set rhyme patterns or particular line lengths or numbers of lines. The ends of lines, though, are significant for the sound and meaning as are stanza breaks (the way the lines are grouped in the poetic equivalent of paragraphs). In addition to what we name free, open or blank verse, poets continue to receive much pleasure from writing at times in the prescriptive forms practiced over the centuries by poets around the world: sonnet, ballad, sestina, ghazal, couplets, villanelle, acrostic, chant, cinquain, ode, pantoum, haiku and tanka, among others. Many poets report that using the structures of these forms provides valuable resistance for them to struggle against in the form of meter, rhyme, patterns of repeated lines and numbers of total stanzas and lines; this struggling against the parameters causes them to find new ways of mining their interior selves for wisdom and beauty. Although there is no way to grasp the wind, there are many shapes to the structures through which it blows.

 Why do people write poetry?
Poets are passionate about the work of poetry. They shy away from using highly literary language in favor of using our common language, but by using an economy of words, images that appeal to the senses, metaphors and sound that emulate emotions, they heighten language’s ability to evoke understanding. Poets exalt poetry and the feelings it arouses. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet:

As the bees bring in the honey, so do we fetch the sweetest out of everything and build Him. With the trivial even, with the insignificant (if it but happens out of love) we make a start, with work and with rest after it, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without supporters and participants…

Poets believe, as Louise Glück phrases it in Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, that “speech and fluency seem less an act of courage than a state of grace.” Poets feel that experiencing this act of grace, they are in a “continuing conversation” with their culture–“querying it, amplifying it, rebelling against it, subverting it, anesthetizing it, enhancing it,” as Harvard poetry scholar Helen Vendler explains in Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology.

Individual poets have idiosyncratic ways of explaining what it feels like to blend imagination with a sense of language. In On Being a Writer, editor Bill Strickland records famous poets’ words on what they do. Allen Ginsberg: “You say what you want to say when you don’t care who’s listening….so it’s a matter of just listening to yourself as you sound when you’re talking about something that’s intensely important to you.”  Nikki Giovanni: “I shoot the moment, capture feelings with my poems.” May Sarton:  Writing poems means “not being knotted up to a purpose, but open to any accidental and fortuitous event.” In Poems Outloud.net, B. H. Fairchild explains, “There is also the endless work/eat/sleep routine…, which can make one search for some point to it all and then eventually to locate it in literature, where life always comes to a point.” Philip Levine once told an audience during a Seattle Bumbershoot arts festival that if he doesn’t write, he feels ill.

Whether we write from joy, sorrow or wonder, our poems record our responses to being intensely alive. Many authors today are writing about the way only poetry, both reading and writing it, has helped them cope with sorrows: I do in my memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, as has Madge McKeithen in Blue Peninsula. Writers have also turned their attention to the way poetry helps when most other therapies and conversations don’t, David Rico in Being True to Personal Growth and John Fox in Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem Making.

Writing poetry, we mourn the passage of time, celebrate connections, yell out at injustice, cry from the pain of unrequited love and exclaim our joy and gratitude. Over the years, I have known I would start poems because of seeing the wet outline of my husband’s swimming trunks through his slacks as we drove after arguing, because of attending a traditional tea ceremony with my daughter as she was coming of age and the tea ceremony hostess’ mother was dying, because of awe I felt at the fragility of human life after looking down the Columbia River Gorge with my young son. I’ve written a poem because a blue moon in August made me sit down and consider the feelings I had when my daughter left for studies in Japan. Usually, I have had only the feeling of needing to write and no knowledge of what I would write. But as I wrote poems, I began to understand poem making as a way of finding out what I might not otherwise have known I had to say.

Subgenres of Poetry: Lyric Poetry, Narrative Poetry, and Prose Poetry

As I summarize the subgenres of poetry, I hope you will click on the links I’ve supplied. By reading example poems in the various genres you will better understand the differences and similarities in the subgenres.

Lyric Poetry
The word lyric poetry comes from the Greek, “sung to the lyre,” and the term preserves the idea that sound is of utmost importance in the lyric poem. In today’s lyric poetry, the speaker is speaking from here and now even, when thinking about a there and then; the poet is addresses an absent listener upon a specific emotional occasion. When a reader reads the poem, he or she feels at one with the speaker and understands the poet’s urge to speech.

Here’s an excerpt from Stanley Plumly’s lyric poem “Wildflower“:

It is June, wildflowers on the table.
They are fresh an hour ago, like sliced lemons,
with the whole day ahead of them.
They could be common mayflower lilies of the valley,

day lilies, or the clustering Canada, large, gold,
long-stemmed as pasture roses, belled out over the vase–
or maybe Solomon’s seal, the petals
ranged in small toy pairs

or starry, tipped at the head like weeds.
They could be anonymous as weeds.

Again, although most lyric poems today are written in blank, open or free verse, poets often return to the traditional lyric forms as well, including the sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, ghazal, and sestina. To quickly find examples of modern poets using lyric form visit Poemhunter.com and type the name of the form you are interested in into the search box. For example, if you type in “sonnet” or “villanelle,” many titles will show up!

If you are interested in reading collections of lyric poems in traditional forms, two anthologies are particularly good sources for contemporary poetry in traditional form: An Exultation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, edited by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes and The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Bolan.

Narrative Poetry:
The word “narrative” comes from the Greek word for story. Older narrative poems were usually lengthy and concerned a serious subject and heroic deeds performed during culturally significant events. Homer’s The Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid and Milton’s Paradise Lost are examples of long narrative poems. Ballads are less formal narrative poems; they tell a story, often elevating a local figure to hero status in common language; “God’s Judgment on a Wicked Bishop” by Robert Southey and “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer are two examples.

Here are two stanzas from Southey’s poem:

Rejoiced such tidings good to hear,
The poor folk flock’d from far and near;
The great barn was full as it could hold
Of women and children, and young and old.

Then when he saw it could hold no more,
Bishop Hatto he made fast the door;
And while for mercy on Christ they call,
He set fire to the Barn and burnt them all.

What Is The Difference Between Lyric and Narrative Poems?
Lyric poems often tell stories as part of what they do (since we are temporal beings and to us everything moves through time, everything we compose has plot or story), and narrative poems obviously must use sound and rhythm to tell their stories with force. So what is the difference between the two subgenres? I think it is the difference between intending to write a poem to tell a story and having a story creep into a poem as one searches to evoke a feeling and perception. In narrative poems, the form is used foremost to tell the story. The focus is not on the poet observing the story, but on the story itself.  In a lyric poem, the focus is on the poet’s observations, feelings and thinking. Again, searching Poemhunter.com for “narrative” and then for “lyric” will help you experience the difference.

Prose:
Peggy Shumaker, author of Gnawed Bones and Just Breathe Normally, writes in Brevity.com that prose poems are brief pieces of prose, meant to stand on their own, capture our attention “via compression.” She admires Naomi Shihab Nye for taking “on big questions” in her book of paragraphs entitled Mint Snowball. Shumaker quotes Nye as saying, “I’ve never heard anyone say they don’t like paragraphs. It would be like disliking five minute increments on the clock.” Shumaker says to write the prose poem, poets give up line breaks, but to be as cutting as a stiff wind, they rely on “bits of dialogue, quick exposition, complex rhythms” and sentence variety in the highly compressed prose they use.

Ideas about the prose poem seem to date back to 1842, when Aloysius Bertrand wrote Gespard de la nuit, published a collection of fantasies written in rhythmical language. In 1869, Charles Baudelaire introduced what we call prose poetry to a larger audience with his volume Little Poems in Prose, in which short prose pieces employed regular rhythm, a definitely patterned structure, vivid, sometimes surreal images and emotional heightening. He explained the form this way:

Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of a miracle of poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?”

Today, Michael Benedict writes in his introduction to The Prose Poem: An International Anthology that prose poems have the “special properties” of “attention to the unconscious, and to its particular logic”; of “an accelerated use of colloquial and everyday speech patterns”; of “a visionary thrust”; of a reliance on humor and wit; and an “enlightened doubtfulness, or hopeful skepticism.”

This is an excerpt from a prose poem by James Tate entitled “The List of Famous Hats”:

Napoleon’s hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that’s not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all honesty wasn’t much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities.

A Few More Contemporary Poetry Subgenres:
Language, Performance, and Cowboy Poetry

Language Poetry
For language poets, the structure of language dictates meaning rather than the other way around. By breaking up poetic language, the poets require readers to find a new way to approach the text. In her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry, language poet Lyn Hejinian’s writes:

Language is nothing but meanings, and meanings are nothing but a flow of contexts. Such contexts rarely coalesce into images, rarely come to terms. They are transitions, transmutations, the endless radiating of denotation into relation.

Writing about language poetry, or as the language poets write the term l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e p=o=e=t=r=y, Suman Chakroborty quotes David Melnick’s 1978 contribution “A Short Word on my Work,” published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: “The poems are made of what look like words and phrases but are not … What can such poems do for you? You are a spider struggling in your own web, suffocated by meaning.” Charles Bernstein maintains in an interview that this kind of poetry contains “features of language” that can “roam in different territory than possible with tamer verse forms” so “the poems do not necessarily mean one fixed, definable, paraphrasable thing.”

Here’s one of Charles Bernstein’s poems:

These Horses Do Not Move Up and Down
by Charles Bernstein

Dialogue’s a dream from which
We cannot wake. The dog sniffs
Dirt to see if there is some mistake.
Little by little crowds gather round
Teapots explode, asterisks expound.
The silly sailor says to us the ship
He built is broke, Heaven help the
Nincompoop who shakes instead of bloats.
Take two steps forward, you’re halfway there
Xeno’s laughing, watching your bag!
Eyes in terror seek the shade that comes
Like buckets of lemonade. The bridge you sought
Is torn; no matter, never mind. Try the tunnel
Anyway – take a break, build a flake.

Performance and Slam Poetry
During the 1980s, performance poetry became the term for describing poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution. According to Wikipedia, a 1980’s press release used the term to describe Hedwig Gorski’s audio recordings of her poetry in collaboration with the music of her band, East of Eden. Gorski, who relied on the rhetorical and philosophical expression of her poems, wanted to distinguish her text-based vocal performances from other performance artists, especially the work of Laurie Anderson, who worked with music at that time.

All performance poetry practitioners believe in person-to-person transmission through in- person and broadcast performances. They see themselves as keeping poetry’s original oral tradition alive in an age where broadcast technology surpasses books in reaching mass audiences. They believe that poetry created for performance has more in common with the original art form than written poetry does, because written verse evolved to make use of books, journals and newspapers as printing and mass distribution evolved.

Chicago poet and construction worker Marc Kelley Smith started the slam poetry subgenre of the performance movement at a reading series in a Chicago jazz club. In the 1990s, San Francisco, New York and Austin became centers for the small clubs in which slam poetry artists fostered competitions by inventing and performing poems on the spot. Their work was performed alone or in teams before small audiences who judged the performances. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and Def Poets flourished using the performance and slam forms.

Performance poets see the form as a democratic voice for those outside of academia and the unheard starting with Beat poetry readings of the 1940s and 50s. Hip Hop and Rap poetry are two contemporary extensions of the performance poetry movement. In these forms, too, words and the sounds of the words convey feeling and intensity not possible if not performed. Here’s a video of Taylor Mali, a performance poet you will enjoy.

Cowboy Poetry
Cowboy poetry grew out of a tradition of composing on the spot in the evenings after cattle drives and work on ranches. Around a campfire, cowboys entertained one another with tall tales and folk songs using poetic forms rather than writing to memorize the work. The genre’s audience today is composed of performance lovers as well as those with an interest in preserving the themes and lifestyles of the American West. Cowboy poetry is still being created and recited. The frequent rhyming couplet style in cowboy poetryis similar to the structure of country music and most cowboy poetry uses rhyming verse rather than free verse. Here’s a video of cowboy poet Waddie Mitchell reciting the poem “The Walking Man” written by Henry Herbert Knibbs in 1914, which begins:

Sunny summer day it was when loping in to Laramie,
I overtook the Walking Man, reined up and nodded “How!!”
He’d been a rider once, I knew. He smiled, but scarce aware of me
He said, “If you would like me to, I’ll tell my story, now.
“They’ll tell you that I’m crazy–that my wits have gone to glory,
But you mustn’t be believing every Western yarn you hear.

****

Now you know! Poets invent, copy, and alter ways to use language for getting to the heart of their minds and hearts, whether they come from royal court life, the peasantry, a ranch or the intelligentsia. Pick up some poetry books today and see what you think. I like to remember Edward Hirsh’s words from How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry when I read poems: “I encounter–I am encountered by–a work of art. For me, that encounter is active, inquisitive, relentless, disturbing, exuberant, daring, beholden.  Poets speak of the shock, the swoon, and the bliss of writing, but why not also speak of the shock, the swoon, and the bliss or reading?” The more poets write poetry, the more they read others’ poetry, absorbing strategies for delivering perception and exploring topics.
Currently on my desk and coffee table:

Vengeful Hymns, Poems by Marc J. Sheehan. Marc, who is an associate editor for Fourth Genre literary magazine, shares two poems from the book: “Job Accomplishments” and “Blue Ribbon,” on his website. On You Tube, he shares another poem, “The Musical Fountain.”

Octopus, Poems by Tom C. Hunley. The Dental Hygienist and Interdisciplinary Studies appear among sample poems online as do Musives and a Silent Crump and Out of Body Experiences. Tom Hunley runs the poetry press Steel Toe Press.

My Kind of Animal, by Jefferson Carter. Poemhunter.com has three of Carter’s poems from previous books. He’s been department chair at a community college in Tucson, Arizona, where he taught composition and poetry writing.

Eve’s Red Dress and What Feeds Us, by Diane Lockwood. Her blog and her website include sample poems and lovely information about the author and her work. Several poems have been heard on The Writer’s Almanac and there are links on her home page where you can listen to these poems and read and download them.

Gnawed Bones, by Peggy Shumaker. You can hear Peggy Shumaker, who teaches for Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers’ Workshop, read from previous poetry volumes on YouTube. Read a review of Gnawed Bones.

The Alchemist’s Kitchen, by Writing It Real contributor Susan Rich is just out. She is in the process of giving readings around her schedule as faculty at Highline Community College and at writers’ conferences. See her website for a schedule of events. Read a review here.