What should I write a poem about?

Why write a Poem when you can write a book? What's the difference?(Details inside)?

• This is bothering me to no end so please help me; I do not understand what seperates a poem from a story. Yes, I understand the way of expressing an idea through experimental grammar, punctuation, and word usage. Why, though? What makes a poem so damn alluring? I've written poetry for years, now, but when you think of it...why? Is it to show off your vocabulary? STINGER QUESTION HERE: I mean seriously, why should anyone use poetry to express their emotions and thoughts when they could easily do so in formal writing? Please, answer in detail. I'd really like a well thought out answer.

• Answer:

  There are many theories about the importance of poetry as opposed to prose. Here are a few perspectives: 1. All writing is essentially telepathy. The point of writing is to communicate thought from one mind to another. The economy of language, therefore, is better than a surplus of it; although "The man whose name is John sat down facing forwards on his backless chair leaning forward, looking intently at everyone, and had about him a facial affect and presence that commanded respect and loyalty and implied majesty, began to talk out loud" is perfectly accurate and comprehensive, "Perched regally on his stool, John spoke" is far superior in terms of immediate communication. In the author's mind, this scene exists instantly: BANG! There's John in his chair. In long prose, the reader has to piece the scene together very gradually, and the impact of the scene is necessarily lost in the time it takes to understand it all. By the same token, a work by Ezra Pound, modernist proponent of no-wasted-words, is very different when extended. So, here's my prose: "As I walked into Grand Central station, everyone's heads were soaked from the rain, hair wild and mottled. Everyone seemed miserable and ghastly in the evening bustle, and the upturned collars, the soot of the smoke stacks, and the slung, pallid heads above the dreary black of trench coats and cocktail dresses seemed to articulate the murmur of a funeral reception: hushed in its business, morbid in its tenor." And his poetry: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough." His strikes the reader immediately, and leaves it to his mind to fill in the gaps. Though neither is inherently better than the other (though, in this case, I'm certainly no Pound), they ARE inherently DIFFERENT, and anyone intending a fast, dense burst of description to a lengthy effect of story-weaving would be better served writing poetry. By the same token, why use a photograph when you can shoot a movie? Because sometimes the feeling you get from looking at a photograph is more intense than the feeling you get watching a film. 2. It's a greater challenge. Skiing the downhill slalom is much easier without flags to go around, equestrian riding is much faster without hurdles to leap. It is the finesse and beauty involved in overcoming these challenges, however, that make the attempt worthy of celebration. The sheer difficulty of fitting an entire expression of your heart's desire in fourteen lines of ten syllables of alternating stress, revolving rhyme, and an ending couplet makes a poem that describes that feeling beautifully more easily estimable than a short story that does the same with no constraints. 3. Tradition. Milton wrote "Paradise Lost" in iambic hexameter because Virgil wrote the Aeneid in it and Homer did the same with the Odyssey and the Iliad. His aim was not to tell everyone what Satan did after he fell from heaven; he wanted English Christians to have an epic story that would rank among the greatest in history, and he succeeded. If it had simply been a book, if there had been no challenge in its composition, it would not have joined the canon of truly monumental literature. 4. The little things. When I think of women I've loved over the years, the first things that come to mind aren't the great narrative of how we got together or the dialogue over a dinner; I remember the warmth of my arm being drawn against someone's side as we held hands, a wine glass balancing precariously on the corner of a table, and two small hands wrapped around a paper cup of coffee. As you can see, even here, I've written these down with an economy of language without even thinking about it because writing "my bicep being brought against someone's side with her free hand on my elbow as she intertwined her fingers with mine on the bound-up arm" takes so long and is so mechanical that the feeling of it is entirely lost. Sometimes something this small has to be that short, and if it has to be very short, one has to use the smallest, most potent words one can, and that's the process of writing poetry. 5. Because it's quotable. :) "Truth is beauty, beauty truth: / This is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" is more immediately powerful than trying to summarize all the pith and torment that reaches its catharsis in Jane Eyre's "Reader, I married him." * Now, if you mean poetry in the way most people seem to understand it (lines of random length about something weepy or inspirational that rhyme somewhat at the end of each), then yes, many times those bloody e-mails and terrible first-drafts on forums can be more easily (and fruitfully!) expressed in prose. But if you read good poetry written by good poets, you'll have to recognize that nothing, nothing, nothing can make you feel quite the same as digesting a really superb poem, in just the same way as most (short) poems can never give you the thick identification and feeling of accomplishment and companionship afforded you by a great novel.