Ok...so this post is going to be a little different. I'm going to hit you with Discount Delrica's cliff notes on items such as poetry's definition, modes or writing, levels of poetry as well as definitions to help you along.

Why you ask?

Simple! Because you are all writers and funny enough, in my research, even our emcees are poets based on "poetic" theories and types.

So... even though this targets our poets moreso than our emcees, to help you all understand your respective crafts a little better, I will be giving you some information out this really good reference book called "The Book of Forms" (which when accompanied w/ its partner, "The Book of Literary Terms"...is straight power). Some of this will be paraphrased as I didn't feel like typing everything out verbatim. All definitions will follow in the responses to this thread.

I hope this is helpful to at least one if not more than one of you.

Peace

p.s. I don't know this stuff off the top of my head and I'm not trying to be a know it all. This is a learning process for me as well, so I figured I'd share what I'm learning with you. (just in case this is running through anyone's head...i just needed to let you know the deal).

The terms poetry and poesy are often used interchangeably, but the former (poetry) means that body of literature which is identified as being poems, and the latter (poesy) means the act of composing poetry (and we just thought it was called ... writing!).

There are three traditional major genres of poetry and an infinite number of minor ones. The three major ones are:

1. dramatic poetry - poetry written in dialogue
2. lyric poetry - aka songs
3. narrative poetry - aka story poems

Epics, romances and ballads were originally considered to be poems, and they correspond to our modern novel, novella and short story.

Prose poems - aka long narrative poetry, versus verse poetry.

In the Old Testament (bible ya'll), songs were written in the prose mode (examples - The Song of Songs, and Psalms). The original version of The Book of Job has been somewhat labeled the earliest known drama.

Modes of Writing

The Oxford English Dictionary defines prose as "The ordinary form of written or spoken language, *without* metrical structure" , and it defines verse as "a succession of words arranged according to natural or recognized rules of prosody (definition coming momentarily) and forming a complete *metrical* line ." To put it even more simply, prose is unmetered language and verse is metered language. To "meter" is to count. Generally, what the poet counts is syllables.

The Levels of Poetry

If fiction is "the art of written narrative," and drama is "the art of theatrical narrative," both of these using language as a vehicle to tell a story, and the various nonfiction genres are "the art of rhetorical exposition," using language as a vehicle to make didactic or argumentative points, then what is poetry, since it can do, and originally did all of these things? Since poetry is the product of the poet who is interested in the vehicle itself, in language as the medium for expression, then poetry is "the art of language." Like the other genres (see The Book of Literary Terms), poetry also has four elements, but in this case they are levels of language usage, those of typography, sound, tropes ("figures of speech"), and theme. And there is fusion as well -- how do all these levels com together to make a poem?

A prosody based upon the typographical level - what poems look like on the page - is called carmen figuraturm, or spatial prosody. An ordinary poem - that is, a poem written in prose or verse, but in in shaped stanzas - is variously called hieroglyphic verse, pattern verse, or the calligramme, but a concrete poem is an idiograph, a figure that represents soemthing else, but without naming it, like a character in the Chinese language, whose impact is almost wholly visual; for instance, in English the ideograph & (an ampersand) may be pronounced "and," "besides," or "also," as in, "We went ot the party & found many others there, including Bob and Fred; & Jane - & Bill and Nancy off in a corner somewhere."

Spatial verse may utilize positive or negative shaping; the former utilizes the words to make the shape, and the latter utilizes the words to surround the shape.

There's more...but I'll move onto the next level.

Prose Poetry

Some nonmetrical systems for writing poetry are based upon constructional schemes - sets of correlated things such as grammatically parallel sentence structures - and these systems ought properly to be considered as prose prosidies when verse systems are not in use for structuring poems. Parallel sence structures are constructional schemes, and the prosody that uses them is called grammatical parallelism.

Proportion by treatment has to do with choosing the meters, forms, length of lines, stanzas and strophes to suit the architectonics (the overall structure) of the whole poem in order to treat the subject of the poem in an appropriate and effective manner.

Prose poems written in parallel structures will set up prose rhythms that have some of the effect of verse, but they will not be free verse because verse is metered language and prose is not. Amy Lowell (1874-1925) called prose poetry that utilized many sonic devices polyphonic prose rahter than "free" verse.

There is more (a lot more...very extensive section) ...but onto the next level!

"Figures of speech" (imagery) or tropes are word pictures; they are to be ofund on the sensory level of poetry, and they are intended to evoke the senses of taste, touch, sight, smell, hearing, together with the inner "sense" of feelings. Therea re four basic kinds of tropes: descriptions, similes, metaphors and rhetorical tropes.

Description: utilizes adjectives or adjective phrases to modify nouns (GREEN morning, tons OF LOVE), or adverbs and adverbial phrases to modify adjectives (VERY green morning), verbs, (swim SWIFTLY), or other adverbs (swim REALLY swiftly). Many of those who are newly come to poetry don't understand that figurative language (as distinguished from literal language - that is, having to do with actuality) uses few modifiers, but many tropes. As a result, new writers tend to fill up lines with adjectives, adverbs and other modifiers through descriptions.

Similes: Although similies cannot always be identified by finding the words "as" or like," those words are indeed, the tip-off. Omiosis means examination of different things by comparison - "Her smile was like the sun, / As warm as morning light upon the rose" - and by contrast: "But her eyes were cold as the lumen of the moon." Analogy is the means by which simile proceeds, comparing things that are not identical ("He stood as if he were an oak / Braced against the winter wind").

There's more on the simile, but I'll move on to...

Metaphors: The difference between simile and metaphor is the difference between analogy and allegory. Similes show the likenesses between things, but no matter how much one modifies a substantive or verb, it will remain essentially unchanged. How does one change a word essentially? The answer is, the poet makes it equivalent, equal to, somehting else. The nature of allegory is to speak about one subject in terms of another, allowing the subject to ecome new again, making it clearer and sharper. The heart of allegory is metaphor. Metaphors go one step further and equate two dissimilar things: A = B. There is no hedging: "The sun is a coin" - the sun is the tenor or subject of the metaphor, and the coin is the vehicle of the metaphor, the predicate nominative that bears the weight of the language equation. Here the obvious point of similarity is the roundness of both coin and sun.

There is more...but I'm moving on to...

Rhetorical Tropes: Rhetoric is the art of speaking and writing; it creats an effect in the listener and affects him or her as well. Some tropes are called rhetorical tropes because they create their effects through nonmetaphorical figurs of speech. A complete disquisition on the subject of rhetoric and rhetorical tropes is to be found in the companion volume to this text (Book of Literary Terms).

A poem is an artifice of thought as well as of typography, sonics, and tropes, and there is no thought except in symbols, in forms. Every element of language is a form of some kind. The letters of the alphabet are forms - conventions, the meanings of which we have agreed upon in order to communicate. Syllables are forms as are words, phrases and sentences. The poet is interested in all of these forms, since his or her medium is language. On the ideational level a writer deals with the subject of words, specifically in their grammatic and syntactic forms, which are called schemes or schemas. There are orthographical schemes, constructional schemes (which have much to do with syntax or word order in a sentence), exclusive, inclusive, substitutive, and repetitive schemes, diction and voice. All of these subjects are covered in length in The Book of Literary Terms, but many applicable terms are explained in the glossary.

*WHEW* done!

Prosody - a theory of poetry composition or an organizing principle - within the bounds of which one can build the sructure of the poem. The poet may use any aspect of language on which to base a prosody, but most English language prosodies have to do with counting syllables (aka meter).

Meter - ("numbers") means "measure," and when one measures a line by counting syllables in that line, one is writing VERSE, not prose. If one is counting simply the number of syllables in a line and measuring out a certain number of them per line, then one is using syllabic prosody, and one is writing syllabic verse. If one is counting in each line only those syllables that, for some reason, are more HEA-vi-ly EM-pha-sized (stressed) than others, then one is using accentual prosody and one is writing in accentual verse.

If one is counting not only all the syllables in theline, but all the stressed syllables as well, and arranging them in an alternating pattern of some kind - in series of "verse feet" - then one is using accentual-syllabic prosody. If one is not ocunting syllables at all, but is arranging lines in grammatical parallels or phrasal units, then one is not wriring verse, but prose, which many people erroneously refer to as free verse.

Really found this information helpful AND interesting. UP

for Nat'l Poetry month