| I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never really figured out poetry. Certainly, I can appreciate that there’s beauty to a lot of it, but for the most part, seeing the ebb and flow of syllabic feet is about as easy as spying the hidden image in a “3D Magic Eye” picture. I could stare at those dang things for hours, yet completely fail to see the hidden image of, say, a sailboat. It feels like I have the same issue with those syllabic feet--I can never make them manifest into some higher appreciation or understanding. Then again, maybe I just have some kind of problem with other people’s feet.
The problem could lie in the fact that poetry takes on so many different forms. But really, form shouldn’t have anything to do with whether the poem itself is good or bad, should it? If you went with the idea that a poem is good simply on the merits of its form (ie, it fits well into a song), then you’re suddenly stuck with a masterwork of the art being:
There she was, just a walkin’ down the street;
Singing doo-wah-ditty, ditty-dum, ditty-doo.
Yeah, right.
When I was young and impressionable*, I was once in a situation where, in the company of my mother, I was watching some kind of drama workshop for teenagers. It was there that I first became acquainted with Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky. I had no earthly clue what the older kids were saying while they were performing a dramatic reading of it in rehearsal, but “Jabberwocky” -- being a really fun word to hear as a kid -- got lodged in my brain. My imagination started trying to build a mental picture of the thing -- I had no idea what the hell it was, but I knew it jabbered a lot. Then my overly-literal kiddie mind latched onto the nearest thing I could think of that could be a “wocky,” and as a result, I was then plagued for weeks by the image of Chewbacca running around, talking at me incessantly. (Jabbering Chewie would be the closest thing I’d ever have to an imaginary friend, incidentally -- he’d keep my head filled with noise for hours on end, although he’d never actually interact with me. He mostly just quoted lines from Bugs Bunny cartoons.)
Talkative wookies aside, Jabberwocky serves as an interesting example of separating/distinguishing poetic form from function. Widely regarded as one of the greatest pieces of “nonsense” poetry ever crafted, nonetheless it’s a perfect form of classic English poetry: it has four lines per verse, it’s rhymed, and it uses iambic pentameter (i.e., feels like dah-DUH dah-DUH dah-DUH when you read it). But, since Carroll makes up a large part of the vocabulary used in the poem, you don’t have a damn clue what he’s talking about. Still, you’re left with a feeling that even though you didn’t really grasp the specifics of the piece, left with a vague idea of what you just read. (You can get the same kind of effect after watching a David Lynch film, by the way.)
 So the important issue in appreciating poetry doesn’t seem to be the form of the poem after all; it’s what you as a reader or listener builds as a mental image because of it. In Jabberwocky, form has been rendered pretty irrelevant by vocabulary, and yet you still kind of get the gist that some damn kid rolled out to the Jabberwock’s neighborhood with a sword and killed the damn thing… much to the joy of his father (who apparently never thought of trying to call the professional monster killers at 1-800-BEOWULF).
So feel free to critique poetic technique all you’d like, but to me, form simply doesn’t outweigh function. Every foot can be stressed to perfection, every rhyme scheme tweaked to its utmost wittiness, but in the end, form can only serve to add to function. The basis of the work, the vocabulary, the imagery, must be there first. Otherwise, you’re simply putting white picket fences around empty dirt lots. Sure the fence looks kind of nice, but with no house there, what’s the point? (And besides, if there’s no house, then where will Chewbacca host his weekly poetry slam?)
* “Young and impressionable” could probably mean anything up to the age of 17 in my case. But here I mean more like “six to eight.”
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