What is Poetry? | Close Reading Poetry for Beginners

[@letterscreative]

I become genuinely joyful inside when I see such delicate sensitivity blossoming and nurtured in the world. Oftentimes it is either supressed or tainted by other people's limitated understanding.

[@GordonSymons-BEYOND]

I love how you love real poetry

[@sartreshizi7038]

As someone interested in poetry and looking to get a better understanding of the art form, these videos are a godsend. Thankyou🙏

[@nostraa6125]

❤It's wonderful that you're creating these videos. Thank you!

[@melyssadurazzo8284]

High quality content. Thank you for sharing your knowledge on the subject with us!

[@cmoneman3025]

You've made a strong argument for enjoying poetry as more than just its "meaning"... thanks for the reminder! I've always adored poetry but have been recently confused by a poetry book in my hands and thus came to you

[@williamfahey6066]

I enjoyed this very much. Thank you, Jeff

[@nouvelraka]

I really love how you explain it and you've given me another perspective of understanding poetry. God bless you!

[@robertgainer2783]

Although the content is very similar to your previous treatment of the subject, the delivery is better. There is less background noise and the audio is clearer. I like the relaxed format. 👍

[@closereadingpoetry]

Glad to hear that! I wanted to provide something that was cleaner and hopefully clearer!

[@sunnywu2801]

You've brought a new insight for me in appreciating poetry. I am going to view through all your clips and learn more about poetry. Thank you 😊😊

[@marcelocampbell1679]

Excellent introduction to poetry. Thank you!

[@tmann986]

This video is about 21 minutes long but it took me much longer to watch it all because I had to pause and ponder. I wish I studied more about literature. I am in college now so maybe it isn’t too late! Thank you though this was so thoughtful and inspiring!

[@dharmrajbasdeo4822]

To get the real feel/taste of literature study it rather than about it ,please.

[@KátiaPesquisadora]

Thank you for sharing! Hug from Brazil!

[@mysticmouse7261]

Beautifully and clearly explained.

[@Xosky1]

Great video. Greetings from Chile.

[@sudesahin7448]

It’s a excellent video about the poetry! Please you can will read Turkish poems? Turkish people are veryyy emotionally…

[@delenda1231]

Do you recommand an author in particular? Or a poem? And do you happen to know if there are good (English, French or Spanish) translations to go along with it for someone who doesn't speak Turkish?

[@TimiScou]

Are you available to have a brief discussion in regard your Udemy course

[@tamaradovgan5318]

Thanks from Sankt-Petersbourg, Russia

[@harperelder8301]

Thank you!

[@jonathanrascol]

Bravo! Beautiful! Homages! ⚡️⚡️⚡️ JAR[RA] [壺 tsubo] Let’s define POETRY formally, for the GOOD SAKES of ALL SENTIENT-BEINGS & the MILKY+VORTEX KŌSMOS' LOGOS: POETRY as Rhythmic Epitomes of [Sublime] Beauty expressed through 10 [+3] DEUSAS MUSES’ Flowery Petals [a.INTERPRETED.as good GUD’s elegant writing; & further the Sacred Paths, Divine Symphonies of the 4 SEASONS LOTUS]. ⚡️⚡️⚡️ JAR[RA] [壺 tsubo] Time to...

[@CasperLCat]

“Hikers go for the exercise, walkers go for the view “ ? As a lifelong hiker AND walker, my experience is exactly the OPPOSITE, or at best, it’s lacking this neat distinction. Hiking is walking upward; and that’s where the VIEWS are.

[@purpledanny1958]

Fantastic intro!

[@SwelihleMvelase-ct8qq]

was your definition of poetry trying to be exhaustive off all poetry there is in the world or were you defining poetry as practised by the Anglophone West? This is because every culture have different forms of poetry through mediums such as song or even musical accompaniment. And every poetry there is is produced by different languages which flow with different rhythms. Not all poetry is rhymed some cultures like mine.. we appreciate, in our traditional poems, rhythm more than rhyme .Even if you were talking about Anglophone poetry...where are your oral poets? The ones on stage coz not all poetry is written. Other poets are on their desks and others are performers!

[@closereadingpoetry]

"Verbal art" encompasses literary and oral traditions.

[@renewilters4972]

❤❤❤❤❤

[@apricotAfterglow]

I dont get it. Sound like a challenge for a writer but not something worth reading for yourself.

[@austinhelix9739]

A slight slightly different approah. Language is sound. There are something like 4,000 languages and about 200 languages that have a written form. So language is sound, not just writing. Poetry is sound that calls attention to itself. Writing poetry is like writing prose, a sequential creation of squiggles to record the agreed squigly recording of the sound. in other works we have squigglt lines to remind us of the sound of the words we want to convey Reading involves the reader resurrecting the sound and making mental associations wiwth the sound. The reader in a sense recreates the sound and builds a cognitive complex by associating emotions and ideas with the squiggles. The important thing is that words or syllables as such have no container into which I can put these emotions and associations. I have to depend on the reader. I have to trust the reader to create something out of their brain, their history, their emotions. All reading (and hearing or parsing) is a mental labor of the recipient. Reading poetry is a more complex system, perhaps, than reading prose. But both arre creative acts. You are teaching, it seems, a skill.. More emphasis on skill and less on expensive books - well, I at least. would welcome that. Thanks for doing this. As a closet writer I have shown my work to a few people. Any breach of strict privacy involves giving up control. You will be judged. You are trained well and have your documentation all lined up. But this will not protect you from misunderstanding and insult. I like what you are doing. But you cannot evade public scorn and nastiness with the truth. Be bold and just say what you want, it's easier. PS Ezra Pound said : poetare est condensare. Poetizing is condensing. I guess I'm saying that writing poetry is a way of showing off.

[@closereadingpoetry]

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here!

[@austinhelix9739]

@@closereadingpoetry In innocence, I am talking about thinking outside the box. Rules of logic and deduction can only take us a short distance toward the goal which I think is to speak the truth. Consensus is generally an indication in real life of a false opinion. The true, the good, the worthy - these get low levels of approval measured by the actions associated with them. Bling is popular. Trash is a hit. Blather is more marketable than originality. I'm not a fan of reductionism. But I like simplicity. Language is sound and there are two kinds of sound in language. How do they differ? One kind, prose, is aimed at delivery of meaning. The other, poetry, is aimed not just at a package of meaning, but also at a deliberate sound structure on top of the linguistic sounds. It is important to read poetry out loud, to perform a poem. Much of English Prose scans perfectly as blank verse. Read Hooker, for example. Poetry can convey a narrative, but it's the music the makes the magic. A friend of mine and I read all of Paradise Lost out loud to a blind man. I knew he was highly educated, he had a PhD in Philosophy. I also knew that all of Shakespeare was available in Braille. But since I had already read it out loud to myself, I knew it was an indescribably complex experience that he could not have except by hearing it. There are many schemes used in poems in other languages. We English speakers generally use accented syllables to make patterns. Latin prosody is based on the length (short or long) of syllables. Hebrew poetry, they tell me, is based on stressed syllables. There are those of us who think it's not a poem unless it scans and rhymes. Spanish poetry recognizes assonance alongside rhyme. That is, a song or poem can use either rhyme or assonance in its structure. So casa and paja ( vowel assonance) serves as a rhyme in the rhyme scheme. Deduction from this mass of data will be difficult But for me, I see it just as the data in poems of different kinds. the KJV is a talisman. All the other translations, ancient or modern, are measured by it. Even its inscrutable passages are interpreted and some how made holy. I keptt a copy of Howl with me for a long time. I didn't read it often, but I kept it to remind me of what we could do now. Howl cleared the air. So discussions of language as a method of sending packages of meaning miss the point. Music is sound, language is sound. It is impossible to imagine that I would find something sensible to say about music. And I find the same difficulty when it comes to language. The German critics thought their translations of Shakespeare were better than the original. The difference I found from a superficial examination was that where Shakespeare used nonsense syllables like "Hey nonny no' or "daffi down dilly', the Germans inserted some common sense platitude. A great writer, I guess, would never revel in nonsense even in a song. At least the Germans thought so as far as I could tell. After the Restoration the English stage admitted women to women's roles in place of young males. And the audience no longer accepted that Cordelia or Juliet or Ophelia died. So they changed the plays of Shakespeare to have happy endings. Samuel Johnson was one of the major figures in restoring the original text. So textual studies present a mixed picture of texts enduring and changing. And it shows the worthlessness of public opinion. Scholars are generally conservative. Life rushes on and the university endures as an ivory tower. You seem not to be able to read and absorb ideas unless they are fit into a diadem made of ideas you have studied. The world is not that considerate. It is more interesting than that. It is unpredictable. The unknown is overwhelming. To quote a Christian hymn: Breast the wove, Christian. I take that to mean: Learn to swim.

[@KL0098]

First truth is complete bullshit: prose and verse are the same. Poetry is something that either prose and verse can achieve. Aristotles knew that (in fact he may have invented this view) as did Sir Philip Sidney and the Romantics in general.

[@derynjoy]

I think the average barnes & noble shelving organization would disagree with you 😂

[@KL0098]

@@derynjoy Because there weren't 2500 years of European culture before Barnes & Noble.

[@vehement-critic_q8957]

In Arabic, even poetry in verse, the words & diction must be poetic which means unusually meaningful & figurative.

[@KL0098]

@@vehement-critic_q8957 That's circular logic. What's poetry? Something's that poetic. How do we know diction and words are poetic? Well, they're in poems. That's very unhelpful. If you really think language must be unusually meaningful e figurative, which I agree with, then you must perforce admit that a lot of what passes for poems isn't poetic at all. On the other hand, the prose of Gorgias or al-Hariri and John Lyly are extremely poetic, more so than entire books of poetry.

[@KL0098]

2:38 Wow, you have some serious powers of cherry-picking: if you can quote these bits by Sidney and Wordsworth, why can't you quote the bits where they say that there's effectively no difference between prose and verse? Have you ever read their texts from start to finish or did you just hunt for quotes in Google? If anyone's looking for unusual views, they certainly won't find them thanks to you.

[@closereadingpoetry]

Let's get the terms right. *Verse* is the regulation of language into visual lineation or sound patterns. Eliot said that whatever else verse may be, it is at least a "system of punctuation." I hold that to be true and mention that distinction in other videos. *Poetry* is a much broader term, which, before the Romantic period, meant any kind of imaginative literature. The question as to whether there should be an essential difference between *verse* and prose began in the 18thc with William Enfield and others, although Wordsworth's 1800 Preface usually gets credit for it. Wordsworth and Enfield didn't want to destroy the distinction between prose and verse (although yours is a common misconception); rather, they wanted to apply the syntax and diction *of prose* to their verse. And for what it's worth, what Sidney and Wordsworth believe about poetry was similar but different in important respects. Sidney considered all imaginative literature to be poetry, while maintaining a distinction between verse and prose. This distinction was fairly common in the Renaissance and wasn't particular to Sidney. See Puttenham and many others.

[@KL0098]

@@closereadingpoetry "Verse is the regulation of language into visual lineation or sound patterns." How does that accommodate Gorgias, the Arabic maqama or John Lyly's euphuism? By the way, if verse is the regulation of sound patterns, then what do you make of so much verse poems that are utterly unmusical? Better yet, what do you do about the prose of Nabokov or William H. Gass that is more musical than many books of poetry?

[@closereadingpoetry]

@@KL0098 The simple answer: there is no definition of poetry that accommodates every definition of the word since Plato's Gorgias. My selection of quotations are listed to give viewers a sense of that diversity of thought. No where do I claim to be comprehensive. If you want someone to wax digressive upon the nuances of every conception of poetry in the history of global literature, you're looking in the wrong place. I'm a reader speaking to other readers here.

[@paulau.villalobos830]

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