Subgenres of Poetry Help (page 2)

The Three Main Subgenres of Poetry: Lyric, Narrative, and Prose

Basically, although all poems operate by heightened language, there are three categories into which most poems fit.

Lyric

The term lyric poetry comes from the Greek, "sung to the lyre," and preserves the idea that sound is of utmost importance in the lyric poem. In today's lyric poetry, the speaker is speaking from here and now even when thinking about a there and then; the poet is addressing an absent listener upon a specific emotional occasion. When a reader reads the poem, he or she feels at one with the speaker and understands the poet's urge to speech.

Here's an excerpt from Stanley Plumly's lyric poem "Wildflower" (www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15494):

It is June, wildflowers on the table.
They are fresh an hour ago, like sliced lemons,
with the whole day ahead of them.
They could be common mayflower lilies of the valley...

Struck by the flowers, the poet goes on to reflect on all the flowers he has had in jars, named and pressed.

Although most lyric poems today are written in blank or free verse, poets often return to the lyric forms I've mentioned—the sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, ghazal, and sestina among them. You can read examples of contemporary lyric poems in traditional forms at sites like Poets.org and Poemhunter.com by typing the name of the form you are interested in into the search box. Two print anthologies are particularly good sources, as well: An Exultation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, edited by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes, and The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Bolan. In addition, The Teacher's & Writer's Handbook of Poetic Forms, edited by Ron Padgett, offers a good introduction to forms.

Narrative

The word "narrative" comes from the Greek word for story. Older narrative poems were usually lengthy and concerned a serious subject and heroic deeds performed during culturally significant events. Homer's The Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Milton's Paradise Lost are examples of long narrative poems. Ballads are less formal narrative poems; they tell a story, often elevating a local figure to hero status in common language: "God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop" (www.poemhunter.com/poem/god-s-judgment-on-a-wicked-bishop/) by Robert Southey and "Casey at the Bat" (www.poemhunter.com/poem/casey-at-the-bat/) by Ernest Lawrence Thayer are two examples.

Here are two stanzas from Southey's poem:

Rejoiced such tidings good to hear,
The poor folk flock'd from far and near;
The great barn was full as it could hold
Of women and children, and young and old.

Then when he saw it could hold no more,
Bishop Hatto he made fast the door;
And while for mercy on Christ they call,
He set fire to the Barn and burnt them all.

What is the difference between lyric and narrative poems? Lyric poems often tell stories as part of what they do (since we are temporal beings and to us everything moves through time, everything we compose has plot or story), and narrative poems obviously must use sound and rhythm to tell their stories with force. So what is the difference between the two subgenres? I think it is the difference between intending to write a poem to tell a story and having a story creep into a poem as one searches to evoke a feeling and perception. In narrative poems, the form is used foremost to tell the story. The focus is not on the poet observing the story, but on the story itself. In a lyric poem, the focus is on the poet's observations, feelings, and thinking. Search poemhunter.com for "narrative" and then for "lyric" poems to experience the difference.

Performance and Slam Poetry

During the 1980s, performance poetry became the term for describing poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_poetry) a 1980s press release used the term to describe Hedwig Gorski's audio recordings of her poetry in collaboration with the music of her band, East of Eden. Gorski, who relied on the rhetorical and philosophical expression of her poems, wanted to distinguish her text-based vocal performances from other performance art, whose work was based in music.

Performance poetry practitioners believe in person-to-person transmission through in-person and broadcast performances. They see themselves as keeping the oral tradition alive in an age where broadcast technology surpasses books in reaching mass audiences. They believe that poetry created for performance has the most in common with the original art than written poetry, because written verse evolved to make use of books, journals, and newspapers as printing and mass distribution evolved.

Chicago poet and construction worker Marc Kelley Smith started the slam poetry subgenre of the performance movement at a reading series in a Chicago jazz club. In the 1990s, San Francisco, New York, and Austin became centers for the small clubs in which slam poetry artists fostered competitions by performing poems on the spot. Their work was performed alone or in teams before small audiences who judged the performances. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and Def Poets flourished using the performance and slam forms.

Performance poets see the form as a democratic voice for those outside of academia and the unheard, starting with Beat poetry readings of the 1940s and 1950s. Hip-hop and rap poetry are two contemporary extensions of the performance poetry movement. In these forms, too, words and the sounds of the words convey feeling and intensity not possible if not performed. To get a sense of the energy in performance poetry and audience reaction, view poet Taylor Mali at www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv=SCNIBV87wV4.

Cowboy Poetry

Cowboy poetry grew out of a tradition of composing on the spot in the evenings after cattle drives and work on ranches. Around a campfire, cowboys entertained one another with tall tales and folk songs using poetic forms to help them memorize their work. The genre's audience today is composed of performance lovers and those with an interest in preserving the themes and lifestyles of the American West, as well as creating and reciting new cowboy poetry. The frequent rhyming couplet style in cowboy poetry is like country music; most cowboy poets use rhyming verse rather than free verse, just as earlier practitioners of this form did. "The Walking Man" by Waddie Mitchell is a famous cowboy poem. Here's an excerpt:

Sunny summer day it was when loping in to Laramie,
I overtook the Walking Man, reined up and nodded "How!!"
He'd been a rider once, I knew. He smiled, but scarce aware of me
He said, "If you would like me to, I'll tell my story, now.
They'll tell you that I'm crazy—that my wits have gone to glory,
But you mustn't be believing every Western Yarn you hear."

*****

Poets invent, copy, and alter ways to use language for getting to the heart of our minds and hearts, whether they come from the court, the peasantry, work on the ranch or are among the intelligentsia who want to rebel against academia. When I read poetry, I like to remember Edward Hirsh's words from How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry: "I encounter—I am encountered by—a work of art. For me, that encounter is active, inquisitive, relentless, disturbing, exuberant, daring, beholden. Poets speak of the shock, the swoon, and the bliss of writing, but why not also speak of the shock, the swoon, and the bliss or reading?"