Poetry, Art and my Ramblings on Them

First, as a disclaimer, I've never taken a course on Aesthetics. Thus, this post is in no way grounded in any historical account of aesthetics; it is merely my own take on something I have never been much good at: art. Consequently, there is most likely a few thousand pages discrediting everything I'm about to say. Owell.

Poetry
I’m not a big fan of poetry, never have been. I’m all for using uncommon words and constructing your writing in unique and inventive ways, but I don’t feel that you need poetry to achieve those effects. I hate dry, monotonous diction and syntax just as much as the next reader, but poetry, while certainly avoiding monotony and constantly playing with sentence structure, remains unappealing nonetheless.

I don’t doubt that there is much meaning to be had in poetry. But for me, there is a good deal of difficulty in discerning good poetry and bad poetry. That doesn’t exactly give me much hope for poetry.

I do however, enjoy rhyming. I think it takes a lot of skill to rhyme. Chaucer used a decasyllabic meter with an A-A, B-B rhyming scheme for the entirety of Canterbury Tales (I could be slightly off on this). That my friends, is impressive. It takes discipline. But this discipline is predicated on structure. Rhyming forces the writer to subject his thoughts to structure, but not in such a way as to lose the value and individuality of the thought. Rather, whatever the writer is attempting to express, s/he must always form the expression within a pattern, or structure.

Now you could say that this is stifling creative thinking and writing. And while I do not disagree, you then open the writing up and no longer is it able to be subjected to criterion. Dissolving the structure of the writing, at the same time, absolves the writing from judgment. No longer can the reader say, this piece of poetry is good, or that piece of poetry lacks quality. In fact, the designation (of the “this” or “that” as poetry) itself becomes less certain.

Prose is more than capable of giving us the creativity and ingenuity to stimulate and fill our imagination. (Read you some Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde)

Art in General
Within structure, the skill and thus, quality can be determined. I suppose this despising of poetry stems from an issue I have with art as meaning-making in general. With no structure as a guide, no end-point by which to base the work on, the creator no longer requires skill. Hence why the distinction between good poetry and bad poetry becomes muddled.

Great artists rarely are considered great by one piece of art. It takes a collection; a repeated creation and production of art by which, we can then judge the artist. A single piece can be magnificent, but that does not make the creator magnificent.

We don’t praise haphazardry (if it wasn’t a word before, it is now) because it doesn’t involve skill. There is no specificity, and thus, it is open for all to achieve (if you wish to call it an achievement).

Pablo Picasso: “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”

I love that quote. There is always “something” there first, and then the artist abstracts away. This “away” is taken directly from the Latin prefix ‘ab’, and entails a “something” first there, from which we move. But this abstraction, this removal (or movement away), is not done simply. It is technically done, it involves skill. And through this movement away, a trajectory or structure of the piece is then discovered. And through the structure, we then are able to judge the quality, the skill, of the artist.