27 August 2009

Poems vs. Prose

In my personal opinion, poems are prose. At least to me. I mean, I write poems, and people say they are good, and they have been published. But really? All I am writing is a paragraph. I just break up the lines in odd places, to make the poem look creative, and free-style.
Then there are rhyming poems. I write them too. I think rhyming poems should be funny, because when a poem has rhyme and rhythm, humour just feels right in it. So, yeah, peoms are an art form. I'm not saying they aren't. And I'm not saying not they aren't hard to write. Poets are often perfectionists, in my opinion, who edit a poem so no one can tell it was edited, and maybe no one can see all the literary devices and all that were used, but everyone (mostly) can appreciate it none the less.
Sometimes I just think people read too much into a poem. There was one I wrote, about a ship in a storm, and a fiddler. We had been asked to write a simile-poem comparing two dissimilar objects, like the poem (I can't remember the name, and I Googled the content, but once again, couldn't find it), about a woman in a wheelchair and how her fingers were like a pianist's fingers, so graceful.
Anyway, I wrote a rhyming poem, which I quite liked, and was about a ship in a storm, and a fiddler, and the beat of the music matched the strength of the waves... Anyway, a girl told me she really enjoyed it because she thought it was ingenious how "the ship and the fiddler were both being controlled by the waves" and I stood there, kind of hanging my mouth open, thinking, 'Oh? That's what it's about. Huh.'
Because I wasn't really thinking anything much when I wrote it, just trying out lines to see if they fit, and rhymed and all. So then, I was thinking, is that true with all poems? Or is it unique to mine? And maybe that theme of the controlling waves was the true theme, and I subconsciously added it to the poem. Hmmm.

No comments: