Walking down the creative writing path as a mature student calls for a rational response to a field of literature that I have long neglected—poetry, even though—What is the point of poetry if I am writing prose?—played like a looping record in my mind.
Memorising and reciting the poems of many Russian and Soviet poets in the Soviet school I once attended, was a mechanical act of obedience. Prose and poetry analysis, like everything else, was conducted through the ideological prism. When I disavowed ideology, Mayakovsky’s Soviet citizen poems still rang in my ears. And ever since, poetry remained an undecipherable realm of literature for me, even though I loved it for its performative and artistic appeals, especially when pontificated along the axes of social, cultural and literary referencing.
Now, in the formal setting of the university programme, the assertive brutality of inferencing and the aural appeal of succinct and packed-with-meaning splendour had me in awe with some poems, while others left me in tatters of bewilderment. Regardless of the underlying complexities of this genre, here are three personal takeaways from my beginner’s encounter with poetry.
- Finding anchoring imagery in poetry isn’t that different from that of prose.
You scout the landscape of your imagination for the right and fitting description of the selected object, emotion and interaction that is conveyed through allusions and inferences. One particular exercise, ‘riddle me,’ unleashed the child in me. We were tasked to describe our favourite thing as if it were a living creature.
- Lineation in poetry could be used as an effective editing technique in prose, especially for short, word-count-sensitive pieces.
In finding poetry in prose exercise, we lineated prose. First, at a sentence-per-line level, and eventually breaking down to poetic beats—phrases and words—an ingenuous manipulation that provides a magnifying-glass clarity for wordsmithing opportunities.
- Brevity is at its finest in poetry. The economy of language is pertinent and relevant across all literary genres. Conveying profound themes in a laconic and concise manner is an invaluable skill.
There is a poet in all of us. I had to believe that going forward, surrendering to the novelty of the experience of creating new worlds of words, having no fear but a child’s curiosity, getting messy with words, and disregarding the rules while listening to that bit of your soul.
What is the point of poetry if I am writing prose? Words are like bees cross-pollinating all genres of literature; the bigger your literary prairie, the more honey is gathered.