Yolanda U. Trapp
Poets are moved to write the way a minstrel is moved to sing. The poetic urge emanates form a wellspring of beauty, love, and truth, or darker cousins – ruin, fear, deception. Blake heard voices. Dickinson heard hymns. Gabriela Mistral heard voices of children in her dreams. Prose writers usually heard other voices – editors’ – readers, agent’s, deadlines. Poets experience few of them and so may ruminate and revise to perfection.
Most poets choose topics containing metaphysical insights or hard earned truth. These are conveyed throughout a poem via thems – depicted by images and metaphors that build in intensity, foreshadowing an epiphany, or universal truth, in the ending. Moreover, poetry is the mother of drama, and, as such, also employs soliloquies – meditations on matters of substance, usually told in the introspective voice of a confidant.
Unlike other genres, poetry does not use paragraphs or chapters but lines and stanzas. A line is as long or short as the poet requires to present an image or an idea in free verse and/or adhere to a certain meter – repeating pairs of light and hard stresses – in formal work. (2)
A poetic line packs punch because it usually opens powerfully, conveying topics and theme; states one clear idea per unit; begins and ends with a strong noun, verb or adjective, and plays off lines immediately above and below it. Poems are as varied in style and form as music. No one poem can represent the range and richness of verse. Consider Mistral, where her voice as a poet is her most valued possession. Through it she sings the chromatic scale of human emotion.
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“Piecesitos de ni–o,
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azulosos de frío,
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quien no os ve
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ni os cubre,
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°Dios mío!”
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Little child’s feet
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coldly blue.
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Who does not see you
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and does not cover you,
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My God!
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(transl. by Y. Trapp)
