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Nickoli Gates

Professor Beadle

English 115

4 October 2017

Poetic Space

As humans we tend to strive for a certain type of order and structure in situations because

its what weve come to know and understand in our daily lives, yet this is not always the best

route for communicating our values. When you think of rhetoric spaces most seem to be struc-

tured in a set of rules or guidelines such as formal debates, advertisement billboards, and even a

classroom. Poetry however, is a space in which being unstructured is more effective. Because of

its abstract and emotional nature, the rhetoric space of poetry must remain unstructured and free-

flowing in order to compel its audience emotionally to the greatest extent. Freedom of thought

and creativity are most essential to poetry while blandness and over-structured poems are mon-

strous in nature.

Poetry is by nature an emotional and artistic space which we write in, meaning that most

of the rhetoric within it is purely pathos based, pathos being the use of emotion in [a] debate or

argument (Rhetoric 46). Pathos appeals to peoples sense of morality, humanity, and philosophy

all of which are some of the most common themes in poetry. As famous English romantic poet

William Wordsworth states, poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its

origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. What we can take away from Wordsworths

statement is that powerful feelings are what drive a poem to its ultimate potential to relate to the

audience and thus argue its point.

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Understanding the pathos aspect of poetry allows us to conceive what might be mon-

strous in this particular rhetoric space. If raw emotion is the tool of the artist, then the destroyer

of an artists creation must then be apathy and blandness. In other words a painter does not paint

monochromatically with structured strokes if he wishes to capture the color and expression of a

landscape. The poem is supposed to inspire and perhaps extract emotion from the readers in or-

der to implore them to take up a cause or see in a certain perspective, and so if the poem were to

be written as if it were an academic piece, instructional, it would lose its purpose. In Understand-

ing Rhetoric we are introduced to Frederick Douglass autobiography which uses pathos to per-

suade an audience as well, stating things such as: there I was in the midst of thousands, and yet

a perfect stranger (Rhetoric 75). Though not specifically poetry, Douglass writes in a form of

poetic free verse that is intended to persuade people to abolition. Has this been stated in a bland

and non-creative manner, perhaps if he had just said he knew nobody because he had been a

slave, the sense of urgency would evaporate.

If lack of creativity poetry is found to be monstrous, then what can this mean about the

values of the poetic and artistic society? Much like we find in My zombie, Myself: Why Mod-

ern Life Feels Rather Undead, a lack of creativity in society leads us to a point of tedious and

pointless repetition. Such as Klosterman relates the death of creativity and individuality when an-

alyzing the effect of the internet and media on our society, ultimately assimilation into a mun-

dane and standardized modern lifestyle, we can find that the lack of aesthetic word choice and

freedom from structure in poetry can be quite monstrous. Klosterman states that zombies are

mere allegories of how [our] day to day existence feels due to the technological advancements

which have aided in structuring melancholy modern life, and this monstrous factor about media

is essentially the same idea of what is monstrous in poetry (Monsters 41). Poetry is more of an
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escape from structured thought into an open abyss of possibilities and is not meant to be tied

down like other forms of writing.

In my own experience, I find that most people my age do not appreciate poetry because

it is overly daunting for them to write creatively. This can trace back to the beginning of our edu-

cational careers since writing is taught to us as a structured activity or formatted experience.

There is no doubt that writing is and should be structured, we would not make any sense if it

were not, but what of the ideas conveyed in the writing? In only teaching students the structural

aspects, we are limiting their perspective on what writing is and how to use it. Since middle

school I have been expected to write in order to explain the ideas of a novel I read, or to recall

what was heard in a speech, but never has there truly been freedom of thought within a writing

assignment. I found an escape through poetry but not the style that school taught me. Educators

have always seemed to teach poetry as another structural form of writing by demanding students

to write in forms such as sonnets, or in iambic pentameter, and so on, but I ask my fellow class-

mates who enjoys poetry and they almost never respond with enthusiasm to the art. Carol Clark,

author of Poetry in Six Dimensions, states that poetry often has the ability to reach the heart of

the young reader with more intensity and more immediacy than some of its prose counterparts,

but it seems to me that young adults like myself never want to give it a chance because they find

it draining when it should be invigorating (Clark 1).

The standardized thought that is becoming apparent is monstrous because it is becoming

harder and harder to contrast humanity to sentinel beings. Humanity is differentiated from these

emotionless sentinels because of the ability to empathize. When I write my own poetry in a per-

sonal journal, my objective is to appeal to my audiences ability to empathize with a situation or

event. I stray away from what I consider informative because I am not intending to present what
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is happening but rather evaluate what the consequences and fallouts of what is happening are.

This reveals my value of having a diverse and creative lifestyle, with the freedom to express my

views in a manner I deem appropriate. The reason over-structure in poetry is so evil is because it

narrows a writers ability, meaning that instead of focusing on what is around them or what they

are feeling, they feel the need to format their writing to societal demands which takes away from

their own expression. I find that if we start with the most basic aspects of learning, elementary

education for instance, and teach standardization and structure, we will take away from human-

itys natural creative expression. Poetry is the escape from this structure, so to attempt to struc-

ture an abstract art is essentially to give into a moderated and near dystopian future society in the

long run.

Its as Robert Frost said, writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. Po-

etry takes down the nets of society and allows you the freedom to express and empathize your

views with the audience, to break the rules of a society even. Poetry may have structure but

never should it be a direct approach such as an A to B analysis, as this would not be poetic. Hu-

manity needs to have a rhetoric space to escape into that strays from the everyday logical neces-

sity of formatted life, and poetry is this space.

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Works Cited

Clark, Carol. Why Teach Poetry. n.d., Accessed 3 October 2017. PDF File.

Klosterman, Chuck. My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead. Monsters,

edited by Andrew J. Hoffman, Bedford St. Martins, 2016, pp 40-44.

Losh, Alexander, and Kevin and Zander Cannon. Understanding Rhetoric. 2nd ed., Bedford St.

Martins, 2017.