Thanks to Eric Lee:
Sure, it's a poem. Anything the author calls a poem is a poem...but what makes it "poetry"?
We've all been told, by now (Gee, thanks, Mr. Elliott!) that rhyme and meter aren't what does it. Free-Verse is all the rage, lately. Personally, I urge all poets to learn the forms and to write in rhyme and meter if only for the practice: this fad can't last forever, and besides, it can only improve both your vocabulary and sense of usage to work in structure.
But what DOES make poetry...poetry? What distinguishes a poem from a piece of pretty and evocative prose? Here's my opinion...
Prose is the art of making word-constructions, conveying to the reader a sense of place or of feeling through the use of language.
Poetry is the art of making the language transcend itself, and offering the reader MORE than can be explained in just the meanings of the words and sentences presented. We make use of the sounds and shapes and odd combinations of the words...we use rhythm and tension and contradiction and juxtaposition...we use, even, the visual shape of the poem itself as it flows down the page, to present a whole greater than the sum of its defined parts.
Poetry is, oddly, not as popular as it once was (though you couldn't tell it by the number of Internet poetry forums, could you?) A chart of recent sales of poetic anthologies would make a picture of a really challenging down-hill ski course. Personally, I attribute this to the recent upsurge in technology...we no longer have to hire a band to hear music, we can turn on a radio, and music completes poetry in many ways. Now we buy albums instead of books of rhymes.
So, given that...maybe poetry is still just as popular as ever...we just take it with accompaniment. By far, our biggest exposure to poetic expression comes as lyrics, and that's a real good place to look for the things that make poetry work. For an example of how a line of poetry can offer more than the words actually say, I'd like to present one of my personal favorites...a song performed by Brooks and Dunn called "Texas and Norma Jean". (Don't like Country Music? Well, don't worry about it, we all have our shortcomings. I promise, I won't sing it.)
Texas and Norma Jean
v1
It was a foggy morning, south of San Jose.
We were sittin' in a crowded coffee shop with nothin' left to say.
My cup grew cold and a teardrop rolled down her cheek,
and I brushed it away...
I remember it all, just like Yesterday.
CH--
And I see it now...
I feel it still.
It's a day I can't forget and never will,
and I hear her voice on the winds of Abilene.
She used to call me Texas, and I called her Norma Jean.
v2
I still see her wavin' through the radiator steam.
She was stranded by the roadside on her way to bigger things.
She threw her bags in back, said she liked my hat,
her name was Marilyn Justine...
I fell into her California dream.
CH--
And I see it now...
I feel it still.
It's a day I can't forget and never will,
and I hear her voice on the winds of Abilene.
She used to call me Texas, and I called her Norma Jean.
refrain...
Yeah, we took a lot of detours on our winding way out west...
livin' for the moment, forgettin' all the rest.
The life that she had waitin' and the one I left behind:
now I'm back here, tryin' to sort it out
one fence-post at a time...
v3
In that coffee shop, the road just stopped, and we faced reality...
the place that she was goin' had no place for me...
CH--And I see it now...
I feel it still.
It's a day I can't forget and never will,
and I hear her voice on the winds of Abilene.
She used to call me Texas, and I called her Norma Jean.
Let's take a look at the first line of the second verse...this is truly classic.
"I still see her wavin' through the radiator steam."
In a single, short sentence, we're told that
1) the speaker is looking into memory.
2) the remembered subject character was calling for attention...
3) "through the radiator steam"...that simple prepositional phrase speaks the volumes that so impress me...we can now see an entire scene, from the smallest of descriptives...a woman, hood of her car up, steam pouring from an overheated radiator (so it's obviously a hot and therefore very bright day)...this is a magnificent example of poetic description!
The rest of the song is good stuff in this light, but that one line is one of the finest examples of short-and-sweet scene setting that I have ever seen. The next line, "She was stranded by the roadside on her way to bigger things...." offers us the perfect and very concise image of a woman travelling with no more certain destination than "a bright future".
"She threw her bags in back, said she liked my hat, "...in those few words we are told that the speaker not only stopped to help, and offered a ride, and that she accepted, but we are very clearly told (without being told at all) that the speaker is a cowboy in a pick-up.
I'm not going to do a full "line-by-line", I think that you are all ready to see what I'm talking about, and I'd like it a lot if some of you were to pick a single line from this (or another) song, and show me all the things that you can find yourself realizing from a very few words...but there's one more line here that, to me, spoke literal volumes of descriptive...maybe it's just my heritage and upbringing...check out these very sparce words, and all the things conveyed in them...
"now I'm back here, tryin' to sort it out
one fence-post at a time..."
Extra points for the student who gives me all of the things I see in this brief and terribly simple description...and that's all for this week's lesson on what makes poetry. In a nutshell...it's the ability to put it---
---in a nutshell.Get what you can from this...I hope you find it helpful.