3 Week 3 – Poetic Language
Candace Bergstrom; Leigh Hancock; and Alan Lindsay
creativecommons.org/kimli
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “he (or she) was just being poetic.” It’s a phrase you wouldn’t be surprised to hear after someone utters some flowery description of a sunrise or a snowstorm. It describes a use of language that is perhaps pretty but also meaninglessly ornate. It’s an unfortunate use of the word. Authentic poetic language is very different.
Poets use the same words (“house, bridge, fountain, gate”) that everyday people use. There are no words that are reserved solely for poets. But they use them in ways that often exploit and play at the poem’s accepted meanings.
For one thing, poetic language is often figurative rather than literal. But what does that mean? Literal language says exactly and directly what it means: “The president rules the country” Figurative language, on the other hand, goes beyond dictionary definitions, perhaps representing one thing by means of another thing, i.e., referring to the President as “the head of the country.” Figurative language capitalizes on the subtle, multiple connotations a word may carry and it works to develop new meanings for words. Figurative language strives to communicate what a literal statement cannot.
Poems are often the most concentrated expressions of language’s inherent poetry. Poets are more conscious and deliberate in their use of language. Sometimes they heighten or intensify ordinary ways of using language; sometimes they pack maximum meaning into each word. Sometimes they play with the multiple meanings (connotations and denotations) in every word, a practice that can make poems seem contradictory and hard to understand. But these multiple and subtle meanings are also what give poems their richness and power.
It’s important to note that poems do not use only–or at times even very much–figurative language. For example, consider this poem by carpenter-poet Clem Starck:
ME AND MALONEY
Job’s nearly over,
me and Maloney all that’s left of the crew.
Sunk in the hillside,
hundreds of tons of reinforced concrete
formed in the shape of a drum
ninety-two feet in diameter, eighteen feet deep—
it could be a kiva, or a hat box, or look from the air
like a missile silo.
It could be a storage tank for toxic waste.
It could be a vault to house
the national treasure.
In any case, it’s finished,
ready for backfill. Now it’s the earth’s.
And I’m left with Maloney,
who likes to drink beer after work
and tell stories.
Construction stories. Ex-wife stories. Stories
like how he clubs possums to death with a two-by-four
when he finds them
prowling in back of his warehouse at night.
He laughs, telling the stories.
Maloney quit drinking once.
After a year and nine months he decided he’d rather
die of alcohol
than boredom.
I know what he means. I work
for Maloney Construction.
When it rains we work in the rain. When it snows
we work in the snow.
I am Maloney’s right-hand man:
when he laughs I laugh t