I discovered something new today, and it was only more questions.

As a writer, I’m not an advocate of poetry, although I have turned my hand to it on an occasional whim.  It’s an incredibly subjective art, and a true manifestation of the proverb: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I like poems that rhyme.  Rhyming poems have a purpose in life, and that purpose, if you will, is to rhyme.

A poem with no rhyming, and no structure is simply prose, decorated under another name.  It is a collection of coherent sentences which do not add up to being a coherent result.  A poem with no structure, and no rhyme, is a story with no beginning, no middle, and no end.  It has no destination, and thus cannot take the reader anywhere.  If it cannot move you, then what is its function in being?

Poetry, to my mind, can be one of two things.  It can be a raw, and a beautiful expression of the unadulterated human emotion.  Or it can be a quirky method of story telling.

Poetry that can be described as an expression of human emotion is difficult to place.  Without a structure to the poem, how can it be considered as anything more than a snippet of prose?  Arranging prose into verses on the page does not make it a poem.  But in adding a classified structure to constrain and to tame the prose into a form of poetry, inherently deprives it of its raw and primitive nature, and ceases its ability to be a reflection of the human spirit.

I went to a poetry reading this evening with my preconceptions ready in my bag. Poetry has no bounds. If publishable poetry can show itself in the form of a shopping list, or a snippet of everyday conversation, then everybody is a poet. Some of us are lucky and attain publication.  Some are dedicated and drive themselves unquestionably to success.  Some spend the rest of their days collecting their ‘art’ in a folder of scrap paper, never deemed to be more worthy than the next one.  Never deemed to be even equal in stature to the one that got published.

If poetry is about the people, then surely the science and precise code of writing poems distracts from the true purpose of the exercise.  If Prose tells the story, then poetry tells of the inspiration.