Finding the Pieces That Turn Words Into Poetry

The L.A. Times Off the Shelf blog discusses the writing of poetry.

From the piece...


Looking back, I somehow knew I should be a writer instead of a graduate student, and when I sat down before a keyboard, poetry was what happened. Why poetry and not novels or stories or screenplays is a mystery to me. Maybe it had to do with some deep internal need, or maybe I didn't have the stamina or concentration to write something longer than a page or so.

Mostly at the beginning I was putting down stray lines, and trying to fit them into what it seemed to me at the time were poems. The problem was that I had absolutely no idea what a poem was. Or maybe I had too many shallow ideas. I knew what you were if you were a good poet -- a winner of the Nobel Prize, a professor, published in the New Yorker -- but I didn't know why the poems those people wrote were considered good. They were all so different. Once I started reading literary magazines, and books haphazardly recommended to me, I just got more confused.

One burning question I remember having at the time was: Why doesn't poetry rhyme anymore? From what I could remember, the limited amount of poetry I had read in high school and college was formal. Even the 20th century poets we read -- Yeats, Frost, Auden -- wrote in forms. The only exception was T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," which was completely baffling to me.

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