What is poetry? Well, I used to think I had some sort of idea and could at least distinguish a poem from ordinary prose when I saw one, but apparently such attitudes belong back in the Ark.
This, to me, is not a poem. But by the canons of modern taste, it sure is one! Some better and more astute critic referred to "chopped-up prose" in the context of modern poetry, and that is what this is (at least, to my eyes). Remove the line breaks, and you have a bog-standard piece for online space-filling. It'd fit perfectly in one of those cooking or hobby blogs where the producer is semi-professional and needs page scrolling to generate income, so they fill up the spaces with tons of reminiscences about Grandma in the kitchen on those summer/autumn/winter days cooking up the recipe, and tons of filler blah, until you eventually get to the recipe or knitting pattern or advice on how to embezzle from your employer.
I'm not expecting modern poetry to neatly rhyme and fit into the patterns of past poems, but I do at least expect a poem. Not a 'pome'.
Irish Linen, by Lane Shipsey
Pure Irish Linen
a phrase from long ago
woven into those plain tea-towels
that smoothed away wet suds
from Mother’s wedding set
Her good linen cloths
were kept to buff glass and china
or left safely in the drawer
while gaudier prints took on the grime
and stains of daily wear
I teased her for it then,
not knowing the grown-up equation
of good with expensive
And you didn’t buy Pure Irish Linen,
it was a thing you were given
A cloth spun and woven
from flax pulled and scutched
across the border, a fact on which
we did not dwell much, in Dublin
where we never called it Ulster linen
The words Pure, Irish, and Linen
no longer form an automatic cluster
Instead we buy the best fabrics we can muster
regardless of origin
whilst a machine blows our dishes dry.
As I said, remove the line breaks and you have a twee, faux-folksy piece of musings suitable for anything from a mommy blog to a chin-stroking piece on Norn Iron and how we down South approach it to a meditation on modern living and/or cottagecore aspirations, applicable for print or online media, traditional or social.
Edition version below and you look me in the eye and insist "No, that is a true real poem", I dare you.
"Pure Irish Linen" - a phrase from long ago, woven into those plain tea-towels that smoothed away wet suds from Mother’s wedding set. Her good linen cloths were kept to buff glass and china or left safely in the drawer while gaudier prints took on the grime and stains of daily wear.
I teased her for it then, not knowing the grown-up equation of "good" with "expensive". And you didn’t buy Pure Irish Linen, it was a thing you were given.
A cloth spun and woven from flax pulled and scutched across the border, a fact on which we did not dwell much in Dublin, where we never called it "Ulster" linen.
The words Pure, Irish, and Linen no longer form an automatic cluster. Instead, we buy the best fabrics we can muster regardless of origin, whilst a machine blows our dishes dry.
This has been a howl into the abyss on behalf of dinosaurs everywhere.
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Notes -
I consider meter and rhyme to contribute heavily to the crafting of good poetry. Linguistically, I probably lost that battle before I was born; the word "poetic" is easily ascribed to beautiful prose, after all. But when I taboo the word "poem" I am left wondering how to describe such writings. I conclude approximately this: words that have meter and rhyme are more beautiful than words that do not. But beauty demands effort, and sometimes effort is better spent elsewhere, and other kinds of beauty can also be crafted into words.
If I could spontaneously make all the points I needed to make by singing immaculately metered-and-rhymed improvisations, I would absolutely do so, and it would be a superior way of speaking. I'm just not that smart.
Is "Irish Linen" a poem? Sure, if you like. No one will be confused if you call it that. Some effort has been put into refining its beauty.
Is it a good poem? Eh, it's okay.
My plaint here is that it's not a poem precisely because it can be converted so easily back into prose, and conversely it reads like a prose piece chopped up into "poem" length units.
There's a lot of modern poetry that can be blamed for the same fault, including William Carlos Williams' famous "This Is Just To Say". But I do think there is something more to a poem than just "throw some lines on a page". It's the difference between a song and an instrumental piece. You could probably hum Beethoven's Fifth (or at least the famous opening) but that doesn't make it a song.
Photographs can be art, but a photo and a painting are not the same thing. "Here's a bit what I scribbled out" is not a poem.
Well, yes--but what's to delineate "a bit what I scribbled out?" I still think this is a taboo-your-words problem. Is a haiku a poem? Well, whether it is a poem or not, you can still call it a haiku. You could also call a haiku an instance of "blank verse" (metered-but-not-rhymed) though this might be confusing since the tradition of blank verse arose quite separately from the tradition of haiku. "Free verse" is blank verse without the meter. We can describe all these things without the word "poem," if we want. So what words you use will depend a lot on what you're trying to do; the categories were made for man, not man for the categories.
One of my favorite poems is Phyllis McGinley's "The Doll House." She was certainly a poet; she wrote many metered-and-rhymed poems. I think this one is also a poem; I think it is a good poem. It has some rhyme, albeit only limited instances of meter. It would not quite be the same if you just converted it to prose.
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