What Modern Poetry Is–And Isn’t

I love poetry as much as anybody. More than some, I am sure, though of course certainly less than others. I’ve studied it, written it, even been praised by a respected poet as having “it.” So I think I have some credibility in saying that much of what passes for modern poetry is not poetry. It is prose—sometimes pretty good prose—with odd line breaks. It is written simply by stringing together some words, maybe making some odd juxtapositions here and there, and then breaking it up so the appearance is that of poetry. Apparently the writers and readers of this non-poetry have no clue that this is not, in fact, poetry. Even some very well known “poets” are guilty of this.

I really don’t want to point fingers at anyone in particular. In all likelihood, the majority of the people who write this non-poetry earnestly and sincerely believe that what they are producing is poetry, and their feelings would be hurt were I to give some specific examples. Just as it isn’t productive to squash the first efforts of a child, I choose not to squash anyone in particular. It is highly likely that those who write this stuff, should they stumble upon this post of mine, will think I am talking about someone else anyway.

Yet still, if some people recognize themselves in this and are able to get past their hurt feelings and/or egos long enough to absorb what I am saying, the world may be a better place, with less faux poetry and more real stuff.

And anyway, maybe I am just being old fashioned here. Maybe what I should do is just relax and let people call any old string of words poetry. Heck, a computer program could be poetry. But—there is a deeper issue here, and perhaps that issue is worth exploring.

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The Simply True Show

I recently designed and edited Ingrid Katal’s book, What is Your Honor Code? Ingrid is starting a talk show soon, called “The Simply True Show.” This show is connected with Oprah, so many people will see her and her book, I am sure.

In her book, Ingrid offers food for thought and quite practical, do-able tools for understanding and improving many areas of one’s life. The gist of Ingrid’s message is that we are each responsible for our lives and that we create our own realities. I was very much in tune with her on this, which made editing the book a pleasure.

One of the strongest points of Ingrid’s book is that it uses a question-and-answer format, with bulleted answers, to help people learn about and understand the roots of a given issue, and take positive steps toward making matters better in that area. It is the kind of book that gets used, rather than just read. You can purchase used ones from Amazon.com; I think it will also soon be in Borders and Barnes & Noble, and of course you can order it directly from Ingrid’s Web site.

The Lord of the Rings versus Dungeons and Dragons

There are a lot of fans of fantasy who have come to the genre so recently that they don’t know its history. In not knowing the history, they end up making unwarranted, disparaging comments about classics in the field. Let me give you a few examples.

• When the Lord of the Rings movies came out, I heard people say that yes, they were good, but they were “derivative” of Dungeons and Dragons.
• In reviews of the television version of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books, many reviewers commented that it was okay, but man oh man, the school for wizards—that was soooo derivative of Harry Potter. (The Earthsea television series was, in fact, rather horrible and bore very little resemblance to the books; the wizarding school was one of the few elements that it retained.)
• The Spiderwick Chronicles series of books has also been accused of being derivative of Harry Potter as well, because it has magic and magical creatures in it.

Tolkien versus Dungeons and Dragons

J.R.R. Tolkien’s magnificent work, The Lord of the Rings, was first published in three volumes in England in the mid-1950s. Note that date. It was later published in the United States in the 1960s, first in an unauthorized edition, and then later in an authorized one.

The Lord of the Rings was enormously influential on a number of writers, including game designers E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, who created Dungeons and Dragons in the early-mid 1970s—about 20 years after the first publication of The Lord of the Rings. Although Gygax says he was only minimally influenced by the book, he did definitely take the concepts of halflings, orcs, treants, elves, dwarves, etc. from it. (Initially, he used the terms hobbit and ent, for example, but was forced by the Lord of the Rings copyright holders to change those terms. Also, he changed the height of halflings from Tolkien’s description of being about the height of a ten-year-old boy to about the height of a two-year-old toddler.)

In a nutshell? The Lord of the Rings story can in no way be derivative of something that was published twenty years later.

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