Dixon's Forum Posts from Dixon

Long ago, upon a time, I thought I was a poet, and thought certain things, in the Realm of True Poetry, to be true:   Poetry is an art form, so therefore bears responsibility to touch as many lives deeply as possible, and the capacity to stir and sway the solo soul, meld and mold the manifold mind.   I truly thought Poetry could do that, and sensed Structure is the ideal device for fulfilling this responsibility; the rhythm and rhyme of the poem, it’s . . . captivating.   This is what sets poetry apart, enhances it beyond other wordal communicative forms, is what I thought, when I thought I was a poet.

The reason I thought this, when I thought I was a poet, was:   All of Earthly life is based upon rhythm — the cycle of the Sun and Seasons, the monthly Moon and Tides, the beating of our hearts and breathing, rhythms of our lives.   From the first quickening of life on Earth’s earliest sounding shores through every aeon since, the essence of every life on Earth’s been structured, and governed, by rhythms.   Our inmost, most personal, primal quality — emotion — is linked, and responds, to rhythms.

Back when I thought I was a poet, I believed that Poetry should be enjoyed by more people more, that the world would be better off if more of us got our thoughts provoked more, and took it as fact that unstructured poetry appeals more largely to a narrower sector of the intelligentsia than to the larger audiences enjoyed by that most entrancing and rhythmic, simplistic poetric structure, Song.

Besides, unstructured, more like broken lines of prose than actual, true poetry, I thought, which it couldn’t actually, truly be without actual, true structure, I thought, when I thought I was a poet, is far less a wordsmithing challenge than Song;   though Structured like Song’s a simpler sound, it’s much more artful in effort, and so more worthy to be called true Poetry, I thought, when I thought I was a poet.

No matter how elegant, erudite, nor eloquent the prose, the words speak only to our intellect; the feelings they stir are driven by the thoughts they evoke, colored, tempered, channeled by our views; a clever turn of phrase relays them deeper.   The structured poem taps out emotions primevally, with the rhyming itself yet another dimension of rhythm, taps them out in concert with the intellect, in or out of harmony with the thoughts; feelings are reciprocates of the thoughts, movers, shapers, marshals of the thoughts, subject to and over each the other, vice-versa . . . versy vices . . .   Via vision veering verbal, the Hearer is touched by Structured in a richer, deeper, fuller way.

The converse is not, by my thought, also true; since Structureds take more efforts they are fewer, more carefully crafted “per-capita”, likelier, statisticalogically, to be less not worth hearing than the usual ubiquitous unstructured works, I thought, when I thought I was a poet.

’though, just as skill in versifying doesn’t necessarily make one create something more worth hearing, neither also then does skill in storytelling nor stringing together random-line-length rarely-a-rhymes.

Since these create easierly than structured forms — with any wordage sentence structurage allowed anywordlywhere, exempt from requirements and strictures in Structured’s standards — it follows then that there are more pieces of unstructured poetry not worth hearing than structured not, I thought, when I thought I was a poet, probably a factor in Poetry’s unfilled potential popularity.

(The Universe appears fair, here, though, on this particular point though:   it is impossible for unstructured, no matter how bad, to sound as bad as badly structured Structured; better structure dwells behind the language, the language rests upon it like comfortable furniture whereas badder structure creates awkward wordings like “round the rample we did dance” and twists the very words out of shape like, emp·PHA·size·ING the WRONG syl·LA·bles.   I never did do that.

Interesting, though, I thought, when I thought I was a poet, and took these ideas as fact, that, while the more common form of poetry (Unstructured) most appeals to the most uncommon of people (intelligentsia), the more uncommon form (Structured (You knew that.)) most appeals to the commonary.

Intelligentsia are pretty smart, really.   Too bad mostly nobody listens to them.   Prob’ly ’cause they liked unpopular poetry, I thought, when I thought I was a poet.   Too bad too few listen to them.   They’ve got a pretty good handle on what makes societies, industries, economies, Humanity, tick.

Intelligentsia has brought humankind up from gather-hunter cave-painter-thump-drummer to space-explorer-gene-splicer concert-haller-art-exhibiter, from fruit-nut-berry carry-baskets, hunt- and battle- spear-and-bow to interstellar-prober-skyscraper-MRI-and-internetter, all by striving for knowledge to affect the object properties and forces affecting everything, keeping good track of our and Nature’s effects upon all that everything, resisting and defying the eternal and gargantuan powers of disknowledge and unchange.

They’ve got a good grip on everything, from subatomic interactions to deep internal psyches, geopolitical tectonics to vast and cosmic wonders, bumbling rumply about the halls, commonly forgetting to groom and feed themselves.

This is a true story, by the way.

When I first started thinking I was a poet, curious what I was stepping into, I went to a poet-gathering, a “Reading”, they called it, and scanned the politely-bored interest-feigning faces, unstructured poetry spattering about the room.   Yet in my turn, they perked up at the very first stanza, I thought because I was reciting rather than reading my piece, which I had guessed, wrongly, all the other poets would also be doing, but then why would they call it a reading, duh, but really, they perked up, I’m guessing again now in hindsight, now that I know I’m not a poet, was because it was such an oddity to have an actual versifier show up, and, the word images my first piece held within

, and they clapped more at mine than the real poets’!   I was very proud of the dancing half-rhymes in this piece, though didn’t know at the time they were called “half-rhymes”.   This was made up way back, when I first thought I was a poet, Readers can tell easily from the beginnerly clums.

Noticed from time-to-time the poetry experts like to dissect and examine the great works, finding meanings in wordings nuances the poet may or not have also realized, and new interpretations of the poets’ wordings, phrasings, kind o’ like puzzles, I guessed.

Some geniuses are poets, but all poets are not geniuses.

I don’t want my meanings in this piece to be unclear like that but they prob’ly are, so, to be clear, for the Reader wondering, what the imagery meant was, what the steeples, domes, spires, smokestacks, all hold out (which can mean “offer” and “refuse” at the same time, yes!), what’s held within that they hold out within the bleakness of their shadows’ cast is:   hope, the promise of brighter futures.