What is poetry? Well, I used to think I had some sort of idea and could at least distinguish a poem from ordinary prose when I saw one, but apparently such attitudes belong back in the Ark.
This, to me, is not a poem. But by the canons of modern taste, it sure is one! Some better and more astute critic referred to "chopped-up prose" in the context of modern poetry, and that is what this is (at least, to my eyes). Remove the line breaks, and you have a bog-standard piece for online space-filling. It'd fit perfectly in one of those cooking or hobby blogs where the producer is semi-professional and needs page scrolling to generate income, so they fill up the spaces with tons of reminiscences about Grandma in the kitchen on those summer/autumn/winter days cooking up the recipe, and tons of filler blah, until you eventually get to the recipe or knitting pattern or advice on how to embezzle from your employer.
I'm not expecting modern poetry to neatly rhyme and fit into the patterns of past poems, but I do at least expect a poem. Not a 'pome'.
Irish Linen, by Lane Shipsey
Pure Irish Linen
a phrase from long ago
woven into those plain tea-towels
that smoothed away wet suds
from Mother’s wedding set
Her good linen cloths
were kept to buff glass and china
or left safely in the drawer
while gaudier prints took on the grime
and stains of daily wear
I teased her for it then,
not knowing the grown-up equation
of good with expensive
And you didn’t buy Pure Irish Linen,
it was a thing you were given
A cloth spun and woven
from flax pulled and scutched
across the border, a fact on which
we did not dwell much, in Dublin
where we never called it Ulster linen
The words Pure, Irish, and Linen
no longer form an automatic cluster
Instead we buy the best fabrics we can muster
regardless of origin
whilst a machine blows our dishes dry.
As I said, remove the line breaks and you have a twee, faux-folksy piece of musings suitable for anything from a mommy blog to a chin-stroking piece on Norn Iron and how we down South approach it to a meditation on modern living and/or cottagecore aspirations, applicable for print or online media, traditional or social.
Edition version below and you look me in the eye and insist "No, that is a true real poem", I dare you.
"Pure Irish Linen" - a phrase from long ago, woven into those plain tea-towels that smoothed away wet suds from Mother’s wedding set. Her good linen cloths were kept to buff glass and china or left safely in the drawer while gaudier prints took on the grime and stains of daily wear.
I teased her for it then, not knowing the grown-up equation of "good" with "expensive". And you didn’t buy Pure Irish Linen, it was a thing you were given.
A cloth spun and woven from flax pulled and scutched across the border, a fact on which we did not dwell much in Dublin, where we never called it "Ulster" linen.
The words Pure, Irish, and Linen no longer form an automatic cluster. Instead, we buy the best fabrics we can muster regardless of origin, whilst a machine blows our dishes dry.
This has been a howl into the abyss on behalf of dinosaurs everywhere.
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Notes -
(Looks you in the eye) This is a true poem.
I'd agree here with @omfalos. Still, I would suggest no one has to like the same kinds of poems. That you dismiss this one is your good right.
This poem has some nice evocative imagery, and various types of rhyme, including in some cases eye and slant rhyme.
Consider the play of wet with wedding; grime with china; were, drawer, wear; then, linen, given; Dublin, linen, origin; scutched, much; cluster, muster. Even in the final stanza linen, origin, and, yes, machine.
Now not everyone loves free verse, which I would say this poem is an example of. And it's true I am not as close to the material (the context, whatever) as you may be. I might have a similar response to something written about, say, the rural South of the US--and I am, for example, not a big fan of folk art for perhaps this reason. It's too close to me, or I am too close to it (not physically). You probably know everything I'm saying already, maybe even better than I do. Without knowing who I'm writing to it's hard to know what to write.
Below is one of my favorite poems, by Anne Sexton, who taken alone
would have beenwas a fantastic poet, but who unfortunately was mimicked by enough writers that the whole dubious subgenre of so-called "confessional poetry" ended up producing a lot of poor writing. When I first read this one--about thirty years ago--I was blown away. I could try to explain why but I don't know how good a job I would do. Poems are like jokes--you either get them or you don't, or you get them and they're still not funny to you. Either way, explaining them never works. (I have put little dots between stanzas because I don't know how to get them to separate.)Some Foreign Letters
I knew you forever and you were always old,
soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold
me for sitting up late, reading your letters,
as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me.
You posted them first in London, wearing furs
and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety.
I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day,
where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes
of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way
to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones.
This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will
go to a bazaar at Bismarck's house. And I
see you as a young girl in a good world still,
writing three generations before mine. I try
to reach into your page and breathe it back...
but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.
This is the sack of time your death vacates.
How distant you are on your nickel-plated skates
in the skating park in Berlin, gliding past
me with your Count, while a military band
plays a Strauss waltz. I loved you last,
a pleated old lady with a crooked hand.
Once you read Lohengrin and every goose
hung high while you practiced castle life
in Hanover. Tonight your letters reduce
history to a guess. The count had a wife.
You were the old maid aunt who lived with us.
Tonight I read how the winter howled around
the towers of Schloss Schwobber, how the tedious
language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound
of the music of the rats tapping on the stone
floors. When you were mine you wore an earphone.
This is Wednesday, May 9th, near Lucerne,
Switzerland, sixty-nine years ago. I learn
your first climb up Mount San Salvatore;
this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes,
the yankee girl, the iron interior
of her sweet body. You let the Count choose
your next climb. You went together, armed
with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches
and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed
by the thick woods of briars and bushes,
nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo
up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated
with his coat off as you waded through top snow.
He held your hand and kissed you. You rattled
down on the train to catch a steam boat for home;
or other postmarks: Paris, Verona, Rome.
This is Italy. You learn its mother tongue.
I read how you walked on the Palatine among
the ruins of the palace of the Caesars;
alone in the Roman autumn, alone since July.
When you were mine they wrapped you out of here
with your best hat over your face. I cried
because I was seventeen. I am older now.
I read how your student ticket admitted you
into the private chapel of the Vatican and how
you cheered with the others, as we used to do
on the fourth of July. One Wednesday in November
you watched a balloon, painted like a silver ball,
float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors,
to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional
breeze. You worked your New England conscience out
beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout.
Tonight I will learn to love you twice;
learn your first days, your mid-Victorian face.
Tonight I will speak up and interrupt
your letters, warning you that wars are coming,
that the Count will die, that you will accept
your America back to live like a prim thing
on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come
here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose
world go drunk each night, to see the handsome
children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close
one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you,
you will tip your boot feet out of that hall,
rocking from its sour sound, out onto
the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall
and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by
to mumble your guilty love while your ears die.
(1960)
But that which you give me here, that is a poem. You can't easily reduce it back to a prose piece. And rhyme alone doesn't make something a poem. That linen piece isn't free verse, which has its own form and structure; it's a set of words which could be prose for a magazine article on various topics.
I didn't expect you to change your mind about "that linen piece " Chacun à son goût.
Apparently this is a common quebecois saying? I think this phrase should die immediately, it’s a phonetical chimera.
Either go with :
“chacun a son goût” – each has his own taste
or:
“à chacun son goût” – to each his own taste
You're probably right. Please ignore my accent grave, my French sucks.
I mean it's correct, both in the sense that it's written this way usually, and grammatically, but it's ambigous if you say it, so I don't like it.
How about "To each, his own." Her. Her own. I refuse to say "To each, their own." I will die on that hill. Thus, the attempt at French.
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