The Two Languages.

In his book Making Your Own Days, Kenneth Koch begins his discussion of poetry by identifying poetic language as its own language within whichever language it’s written. He regards poetry as a mysterious being, as no one has quite been able to explain where poetry comes from. The ancient Greeks called the Muse the source of poetry, which others have said it comes from some residually creative place in the unconscious. To Koch, in order to write poetry, the writer must understand this poetic language– the kind of words and phrases used, the rhythms, the importance of the words.

Because the sound of a word is just as important as the meaning of a word, poets must be well acquainted with the vocabulary of poetic language, and choose their words wisely in order to make good poetry. Koch refers to the sound of poetry as “making music out of words”. He claims that poetry has the power to make convincing whatever it says, in part because it is communicated in such a beautiful manner. Understanding poetry as a musical language, one must also realize that this language is not hard and fast, nor is any language. Rather, the techniques used by one poet may become adopted to the language and used by  many poets afterward.

Another aspect of poetic language is its natural bent toward using literary devices, such as personification, apostrophe, hyperbole, and the like. So, the formation of poetry is very much like playing with your words. Things that may be nonsensical in our conventional use of English, suddenly become somehow understandable in the language of poetry. One poet Koch cites as capturing the musical quality of poetry is Shakespeare.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken…

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~ by lavendertomatoes on 5 October, 2011.