Always the Penumbra asked: In promotion of ACTUAL knowledge of established poetic tradition to counterbalance the overabundance of questions from would-be poets seeking needy validation for their personal poems, I’ll give best answer status to the person who FIRST answers all 5 questions below SATISFACTORILY.
I already know the answer to the first four, so it’s #5 that’s make or break as your subjective response. Make it cogent and articulate!
1) What are the three basic types or modes of poetry? Provide names and definitions.
2) Name one Elizabethan poet, one romantic poet, and one modernist poet.
3) What is “prosody?”
4) Who is the current poet laureate for the US?
5) How is poetry relevant to you in a 21st century society?
Obviously #2 can have several answers. Just make sure you match the poet’s name to the appropriate era.
Thank you to those who gave such thorough responses, even those with dissenting viewpoints. My point in promoting this Q&A session is to promote a foray into the grand tradition of poetry which seems all too infrequent in the Poetry Yahoo! Answers section.
For those of you who suspect me of pedantry or pretentiousness, I find myself slightly amused for two reasons. First, some of those same people seem to have no qualms establishing their own poetic credentials to assume a position of authority. This leads me to my second point. Engaging poetry at a certain caliber DOES often require people esoteric knowledge. Poetry writers and readers alike should take the time to know the tradition from which the art form derives. Just because someone learns to play four or five chords on a guitar doesn’t make him or her an accomplished musician, sorry to say.
And as far as my particular Q&A session being the litmus test for who’d be a good reader or writer of poetry, I never claimed nor would ever claim such a foolish thing. I wanted to engage people with like-minded background knowledge of the poetic tradition and maybe encourage those who weren’t as familiar into a little research.
And as to my stance on free verse, some seem to interpret my insistence on a knowledge of poetic tradition to be a condemnation of free verse. Untrue. However, “free” verse can be a very dangerous thing to a young poet who naively assumes it means writing whatever lines he or she wants. Well-written free verse must follow its own internal structural demands or risk succumbing to prose writing with arbitrary line breaks.
And last but not least, a confession: I had thought that Donald Hall was still poet laureate, not Charles Simic. Egads. As Socrates would indicate, knowledge starts with admitting that one knows nothing.
