The other day I made a post about poetry that immediately gathered a bunch of comments that can be summarised by a single example. "I hate poetry." That particular comment was made by a prize-winning science fiction author whose début I enjoyed a few years back and who likes my own work a fair bit.
A lot of people say they hate poetry. That's fair enough - the school system bears a considerable responsibility for that. Nothing sucks the joy out of something like taking it apart, force-feeding the pieces to children, and requiring them to vomit them back out.
Poetry is a distillation, the highest concentration of linguistic content, and like all strong flavours it won't be for everyone at every stage in their life.
Another side of the coin of course is that many readers don't understand what poetic language is. They often don't know they're reading it, even as it affects them.
A well-know blogger who liked Prince of Thorns very much told me that he didn't think my prose was at all poetic. It turns out that to him poetic prose is prose with lots of curls and twiddles, prose with endless description, flowers and clouds a la
Wordsworth's famous daffodils.
I
do write poetic prose. No question about it. But I'm more of the
Philip Larkin school. I also write
actual poetry, but poetic prose is a different beast, it's poetry diluted to taste.
Poetic prose, done right, is about wringing more out of a single line.
There are currently
1066 individual quotes listed from my writing on Goodreads. Some of them because they tickled someone's funny-bone, or encapsulated a moment/character, but many because the poetry gives them power, makes them noticed.
The 4th most popular quote is an example:
There’s something brittle in me that will break before it bends.
It could easily have been:
You can only push me so far before I snap. It does the same job. Nobody would ever have listed it as a quote, 369 people wouldn't have troubled to push 'like' on it, nobody would have remembered it.
There’s something brittle in me that will break before it bends.
is a poetic line - the alliteration, the cadence, the imagery ... all of it is the language flexing its muscles, getting inside your head, making the line matter.
They say that in a great book the language, the words, should be invisible, you should forget that you are reading. I both do and don't agree with that. You certainly shouldn't notice the language for any reason other than it does great things for you. From a story-teller's point of view you shouldn't notice it ever - but from a writer's point of view, it's OK to notice it occasionally - to be stopped by one line not because it's awkward or grating, but because it makes the hairs on the backs of your arms pay attention.
The blogger who thought my prose was not poetic had read this:
I tried to look at her. No point in her held
constant. As if definition were a thing for mortals, a reduction that her
essence would not allow. She wore pale, in shades. She had the eyes of everyone
who ever cared. And wings – she had those too, but not in white and feathers,
rather in the surety of flight. The potential of sky wrapped her. Sometimes her
skin seemed to be clouds, moving one across the other. I looked away.
That practically is a poem.
So - you may say you don't like poetry, and perhaps even without a formal education you would have never taken to it, but don't close yourself off to the power of the language and the fact that as prose edges toward the poetic it says more with less. Books are about story, but they're also about words, and lines. Take a moment to appreciate the parts as well as the whole. Often they're the reason a passage or scene sticks with you your whole life.
****
When it comes to actual poetry in fantasy books - I'm less keen, partly because often it's bad poetry. I did feel though that some of the poems in Lord of the Rings added to it, specifically:
The Road Goes Ever On
All that is Gold does not Glitter
The World was young in Durin's day
I also liked from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant this cheerful ditty that sets the tone:
These are the pale deathWhich men miscall their lives:for all the scents of green things growing,each breathe is but an exhalation of the grave.Bodies jerk like puppet corpses,And hell walks laughing -
And from Stephen King's IT this haiku:
Your hair is winter fire
January embers
My heart burns there, too.
