I must say, I listened to Amanda Gorman the very first National Youth Poet Laureate read her poem The Hill We Climb at President Biden’s inauguration and was inspired.
Inspired to write this column, the poem was drivel.
Correction, it wasn’t a poem. It was a collection of sentences expressing sometimes admirable sentiments with a sort of rhythm to it impressed on the words and phrases with a hammer.
It did however rime in some places which is better than most of what Maya Angelou wrote and Angelou doesn’t appear to know an iamb from an end-stopped line.
An iamb, according to the indispensable The Poetry Dictionary by John Drury, is “a foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stress. Iambic words include arrange, complain, and revenge.”
An end-stopped-line is, “A definite halt or strong pause at the end of a line” often marked by a period, question mark, colon, etc.
Now in anticipation of the howls of outrage and cries of, “How dare you bully that sweet young lady?” I’ll hastily say yes, she does seem to be a very nice young lady who has overcome an auditory processing disorder which makes her hypersensitive to sound, and a speech impediment in her youth.
She also appears to be highly intelligent and was raised by a mother who limited television exposure and encourage her to read voraciously – and may the Lord send more mothers like her for the sake of our children!
What her mother and her reading didn’t teach her was how to write poetry, for which she is not to blame. Nobody is taught how to write poetry these days.
In fact, nobody appears to be aware there is or ever was a curriculum for how to write poetry.
Once upon a time if you showed up at any of the Western world’s most prestigious universities and said, “I want to be a poet,” they’d say “Sure,” and give you a course outline.
Because there was a curriculum for it, and it was a damn tough one that would have you writing poems in classical verse forms in Latin and Greek!
They did not invite you to sit gazing at a sunset and wait for inspiration to strike like a bolt of lighting from heaven, you studied the structure of poetry.
Surprise! Poetry has structure, in fact a myriad of structures. And they have names.
A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines in iambic pentameter with a rime scheme which begins ABBA/CDDC. It’s an Italian verse form and is more difficult to write in English because we don’t end all our words with open syllables.
Have you ever heard of trochaic tetrameter, and did you know it was unknown in English until Longfellow stole it from the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland and made it into The Song of Hiawatha?
You may be aware that Haiku is a Japanese verse form which adapted well to English but they thought of it first.
I love poetry and can recite pages of it from memory, but I’m not a poet. I am however a durn good interpreter of it and have some examples on my video channel.
Because becoming a poet is not just a matter or inspiration, but long hard hours of work put in to master the technique.
If your children express a desire to write poetry, don’t send them to school for it it’s not there. Get them Drury’s book and tell them to read lots of poetry aloud.
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