I'm taking a class in creative writing this semester. I write a fair bit, on and off, but I've never studied it before. Also, it's a poetry subject. Which I've never written. Ever. Sometimes I write prose which I feel is quite poetic, but it's not poetry. So I'm a little nervous.
I do write songs, though, which is a bit like poetry. And over the past year or so my grandfather has been a little obsessed with figuring out the difference between poetry and lyrics. (And by obsessed, I mean that he's mentioned it to me every time I've seen him, which isn't that often since I live in a different city.) But it sort of got me thinking - what is the difference? The first thing that comes to mind is that it's easy to get away with shit lyrics in a song, because you've got the music to distract the listener. You don't have that luxury in poetry. The words sit starkly on the page. They have to speak for themselves. In a song, you can set the mood with a pretty accompaniment, or link unrelated thoughts together with a catchy riff. You can also repeat words or phrases over and over to go with the music, which can be a good or a bad thing. It can be mediative, or it can be lazy. I suppose you can actually do that with poetry too, but probably not a whole chorus - just a line or a word or something. Also there's no standard length for poetry, not like the 3minute song, so the incentive to repeat things just for the sake of it isn't there.
Anyway, in my first 'workshop' (Creative Writing's answer to the tutorial) last week, we were discussing what makes a poem a poem, instead of just a collection of words on a page. And I had this brainwave of comparing poetry to modern art. Like, what makes a red square on a page art, and not just some shit I could've done myself. (This afternoon I discovered that my 'brainwave' was almost exactly the same as a comment in the required reading for the week, which I failed to do in advance. I'm still claiming it as my own, though.) I didn't really come up with an answer at the time, but I've been thinking about it a lot and I think that what makes the red square on a white canvas 'art', despite the fact that I could've painted it, is the fact that I didn't. I didn't think of painting a red square on a white canvas. No one did. Until someone did. And even though it isn't technically (technique-ly?) very difficult, when it was created it was conceptually new. And that's what makes it art.
Someone else (or maybe the same guy, don't remember) in the reading this week said that 'every time you write something and call it a poem, you answer the question "what is poetry?"'. Which is what I've been doing this afternoon. Trying to write a poem. I'm not sure if it's any good yet. It's definately not finished. But I'm giving it a crack.
