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Poetics

Tom Spencer

Let me introduce myself. I am Tom Spencer. I am a self-taught poet. I have read poetry all of my life, and wrote poetry before I even read it.

I am a poet and I take poetic license to be as young as I care to be and as old as I need to be. I am known among my writing friends as a "form poet".I have forced myself to write every type of poem and form of poetry that I have encountered There is nothing I enjoy more than encountering a new form of poetry. I love to dissect it and see what makes it work.

I have been asked to write some of my thoughts in a column for the Writers' Village University, T-Zero Xpandizine.I would be pleased if you would let me know your thoughts on what I have written. Good or bad, I want to hear them; for that is the only way I learn.

I have chosen for my first column the Rhythms of poetry, as I understand them.

Have you listened to a baby cry?
Listened to the traffic passing by?
The clickity clack of the train rolling through the night?

These are rhythms and everything has a rhythm. Your breathing is a rhythm. Without the rhythm there is something wrong. The same is true with poetry. Every poem has a rhythm. The English Sonnet has the rhythm of rhyme combined with syllable count. The Haiku has the rhythm of syllable count alone. The Haiku is used to introduce a thought, usually profound with a double interpretation. The English Sonnet usually tells of a short scene in life or an emotion, quite often having to do with love and romance, but not restricted to love alone.

To me, most everything in life has a poetic motion, a rhythm. I look for that rhythm, as I believe every poet should look for the rhythms. If you as a poet are able to capture a rhythm in your poem and relay it to your reader, the reader will perceive your words as poetry.

It will be poetry to them even if they do not understand the language or the words. The rhythm is the foundation of the poem.

There are many different ways to create rhythms in poetry. I have mentioned the Haiku and the English Sonnet, both very popular forms of poetry. They both use syllable count. The most popular poetry of today, Free Verse, has to be written with a rhythm. Sometimes it is written in a polyrhythmic, like Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" but if those rhythms aren't there, the readers are going to stumble in their reading. Stumbling will distract from the comprehension of the thoughts being conveyed by the poet. Thus the lack of rhythm causes the poem to lose effectiveness.

Other ways to create rhythms are by the use of hard syllables and soft syllables, repeating of lines, repeating words and even the visual structure of the work as it is printed or written on the paper. I will get further into the rhythms of other forms of poetry in future articles. You can look up forms of poetry such as the Sestina, Tercet, Tanka, Villanelle, Triolet the list goes on. Study the ways they are written and you will soon be trying to create your own form. I can assure you there will be rhythm in it when you finally feel it is right.

Beyond the sunset
Someone sees the sun rising
It will set for them

Tom Spencer