Poetry is Written for a Universal Audience
Poetry is Written for a Universal Audience
By Dennis Siluk
I’ve been writing, reading, and singing poetry for 46-years, and I’ve never heard anything so silly as poetry cannot be enjoyed universally, or it is strictly made for the poet. It is, if given a good translator: translatable, I’d say perhaps 50% of poetry. And most poets do not write for themselves, they wrote for the world, the last of the truth givers. One half the Old Testament is written in a form of poetic prose, if not, epic, ode, elegy, or dramatic. Most of your songs today are poetry in motion, a form of personification, a figure of speech that gives human qualities to inanimate objects or ideas, or can. Homer’s Trojan War is poetic; without it we’d have never known there was a war in 1250 BC in Asia Minor.
I do agree with the fact, perhaps a large hunk of poetry is not translatable from one language to another, but most epic poems are, like the Epic of Gilgamish; it frees the spirit, it is like music. In most of Faulkner’s early writings you will see a pattern, a form of poetry, he had a hell of a time trying to avoid mixing genres of poetic prose fiction into his historical novels and short stories.
In poetry virtually every line of any poem contains all levels of meaning, condensed: poems are short stories, if stretched out. Thus, you do not have to run around town and buy 20-novels to get to the end of the story.
I’ve read poetry from many ages, from the Old English, representing works in oral tradition, the old bard who had to memorize to make sure it got to its right place, with its accented syllables per line. To Anglo-Norman or Middle English poetry, where we get the French lyric forms.
And I can go on to the Renaissance which their poetry gave rebirth to humanistic culture, focused on mankind rather than on God; to the 17th century of Neoclassicism, all the way to what we have now Postmodernism.
In poetry we have what we call verse, meter, both words for poetry itself, meter is the pattern created in a line though. So if anything, you have in poetry the best of that language in a poem.
Like anything else you write, the poet and reader needs to know the audience, who is the audience he is writing for or to. Some folks say they can’t understand Faulkner, to me he is an easy read, I’ve read all his stuff; and Hemingway, is like he is writing to me. But there are some authors I get lost with after a few sentences. The poet doesn’t necessarily write to the whole world at large, no one does, but some can. And like any story, you got to know what the main subject of the poem is (or in a story: the theme, plot and insight), and if the poet can’t give it, he perhaps is not as good as he’d like to be, or you’re not as good as you think you are in reading a condensed story, in poetic form.
You also have to figure out: does the poem belong to a genre, again like reading fiction or nonfiction; these are normal questions we ask ourselves, usually when we read anything. And like many writers, such as William Burroughs, and his friends of the 50s, you have to take into consideration what figure of speech is being used in the poem, just like the story. Nowadays people do not want to take any work in reading, but it requires this to have a good read. And you may want to know what the poet’s life and times were. If I read Fitzgerald now, he is like plain music, but in his day he was a flash of lightening.
See Dennis’ web site: http://dennissiluk.tripod.com