Bad poetry (3.28.18)

Bad! (Or Is That Actually Good?)

What is a bad poem?  What does it look like on the page or sound like in the ear?  Maybe we should ask whether there's really such a thing as a “bad” poem at all, or are so-called “bad poems” just poems that are out of step with fashion or convention or the times?  This is the project we set for ourselves at Wednesdays@One.  Let's be honest, W@1 deals in bad poetry, often.  That's part of its reason for being, to provide a forum for writers of poetry to write better poetry today than they wrote yesterday.  In this context, I thought it would be helpful to have a conversation about poetic value, to explore what we mean by "bad poem" or "good poem" and whether these value judgments can be generalized in any way.

Before going any farther, take my advice: forget about "good poems" and "bad poems."  Instead, work on yourself as a reader of poems (your own included).  Become a more rounded, articulate, sensitive, and knowledgeable student of the art form--and keep doing so your entire reading and writing life--and stay away from judgments about goodness or badness.

Now, on to the rest.

No doubt, poetry is a matter of personal taste, as in, “I know what I like and what I don’t like.”  And in forums like W@1, where many writers are dilettantes, hobbyists, amateurs, personal taste stands in often for critical thinking.  Of course, that taste isn't really personal at all.  It's highly conventional, shaped by high school English teachers, dead poets, and old college lit survey anthologies: poetry, in English, must be accessible to a first reading; it must be musical; and it must be clever or "inspired."

This personalization of taste means it's merely relative, that is, to a person’s experience and whatever knowledge that arises from that experience.  The narrower a person’s literary experience, for example, the less meaningful or useful or trustworthy is that person’s understanding (and, by extension, opinion) of any piece of literary art.  If you’ve read only one certain period, style or subgenre of poetry—Victorian, Elizabethan, haiku, Beat, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, confessional, ancient, “MFA,” feminist, black, New Yorker, American Poetry Review, little mag, ‘zine, prose poem, French Surrealist, narrative, lyric, dead, living, Instagram, blank verse, formal, free verse, imagistic, conceptual, experimental, sentimental, limerick, light, rhymed —perhaps because you know what you like and what you don’t like, then your poetry reading experience is inevitably impoverished.  Your ability to recognize—to value—a poem as either “good” or “bad” is necessarily impaired.  You wear aesthetic blinders. 

What might be called “reading savvy” might produce a deeper understanding of the value of any particular poem.  Technical knowledge about poems and the conventions out of which they are written AND READ (consciously or not), influences your understanding of the value terms “good,” “bad.”  Do you know a dactyl when you see one on the page?  An Alexandrine line?  A fully enjambed line?  A caesura?  A tercet?  A stressed vs. an unstressed syllable?  A metaphor?  A symbol?  Have you in your reading encountered poems without punctuation, or poems that deliberately misuse punctuation?  What about syntax (word order)?  Use of synonym, homonym, synecdoche, metonymy?  Are you able to hear and to recognize labials, dentals, gutturals, aspirants, epiglottals, alveolar, nasal/oral sounds?  Reading savvy also tells you whether a poem is written in an older or a more contemporary style, a colloquial or formal style, a discursive or rhetorical style.  But savvy technical reading gets you only so far in sizing up a poem as good or bad. You still may not distinguish the difference between a bad poem and a good one, or a good one and a great one. It takes a broader literary experience—see above—to tell you whether a style in any poem you're reading is dated, passé, hip, classic, derivative, innovative . . .

Determining the goodness or badness of a poem also involves authenticity and believability.  "Authentic voice" has become cliché in most poetry circles.  Somebody used the phrase somewhere in a critical review, I suppose in the 1960s or 1970s, and it became a litmus for goodness and badness.  No one ever really explained what is meant by "authentic"--does it mean "real" or "personal" or "honest" or the true poet speaking in his or her own voice?  Of course, no poem really is authentic in this way.  Poets don't speak literary when they're complaining to their grocer about tired produce.  Authenticity in a poem should mean you somehow get the sense (only experience reading the poet's work will tell you) that the poet is bullshitting herself, posing, playing a role too self-consciously, being The Poet.  The poet doesn't really believe what he's writing, nor should you.

Then, there is the commitment thing.  I don’t mean just the commitment to read widely among subgenres and periods and cultures and themes and styles—though this kind of commitment is decidedly valuable—but the commitment to read a poem through twice, three times, a half-dozen times, that is, to engage a poem right at the level of its language, and especially to do so when a poem seems at first simple and straightforward or, conversely, impenetrable, even nonsensical.  To see it on the page and then to hear it by reading it aloud not once but several times using different rhythms, “voices,” pitches, speeds, and so on.  And by the way, you can always tell the commitment of the writer of a poem to have read widely and repeatedly and carefully and patiently.  Sometimes it's glaringly not there.

A poem, as I’ve argued before, is a record of choices made by its writer.  Some of those choices are based on the writer’s reason, ear, eye, intent, and sense of audience; some are based on the writer’s knowledge—conscious or not—of literary convention and history.  And some are more or less unconscious choices, editorial or creative decisions made inadvertently, by “mistake,” by luck.  And some “choices” go unnoticed by the writer; they are so under the writer’s radar that only a reader—you, maybe—can detect them. 

So what’s a bad or a good poem and what does it look like?  Here’s a (latent) definition (actually, a set of value statements)[1] by, of all people, David Foster Wallace:

• “so totally beautiful and merciless that you can’t forget them even if you want to
• “good/alive/powerful/interesting enough to persist in [a] reader’s mind more than 60 seconds after completion”
• “tightly controlled”
• “possess both metrical and narrative logic”
• “what meter and alliteration there is [sic] is [sic] unheavyC
• “realistic imagery is concrete . . . descriptions compact and associations tautly drawn”
• “surreal imagery/associations never seem gratuitously weird; i.e., they end up making psychological or emotional sense given what the [poem’s] about”
• “Any puns, double entendres, metapoetic allusions, or other forms of jeu d’esprit come off as relevant/serious and never seem like their main purpose is to make the writer appear clever.”
• “If there’s an argument, the argument is tight, comprehensible, and if not persuasive then at least interesting.”
• “moving”

These rules of thumb work as well as any, I guess.

So, good or bad?  You decide . . .

I loom over you for one long moment, before I fall to play and plunge and pillage.  Could I have been a pirate in some other life?  If the heart had been at prayer I think I heard it speak a word so softly it must have meant amen.  --- The houses are haunted By white night-gowns. None are green, Or purple with green rings, Or green with yellow rings, Or yellow with blue rings. None of them are strange, With socks of lace And beaded ceintures. People are not going To dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather.

Some days up ahead will come down empty and some years fuller  than the fullest ones we’ve known before.  Today has been the best day yet.                 I thought you ought to know that.  And I thought it time that I said thank you  for whatever might have passed between us that in your mind you might have felt missed my attention.  It didn’t and it doesn’t and it won’t.  Thank you for the everydays that you make                 into holidays.  I close up more often now, not just to you but even to myself,                       within myself. I know I should be always open. At least I ought to make                    a better try.  I will.

  

how could you think you are weak. when everytime you break, you come back stronger  than before.  ---  i hear you sleeping and i am reminded that love doesn’t stop, it simply beats.  ---  We are  meant to be, once we find each other.  ---  Then a thousand kisses To make a kind of Florida of us  Where the sun will shine And oranges grow in the yard  And if a hurricane blows through, A thousand more to rebuild.

it’s ok, darlin’. learning eyes sometimes leak.  ---  children of immigrants know the struggle of being a book opened to a random page and told to understand  ---  and if you are to love, love as the moon loves;  it does not steal the night— it only unveils the beauty of the dark.  ---  I know my worth. I’ve paid dearly for every ounce of it.  ---  so much depends upon  a red wheel barrow  glazed with rain water  beside the white chickens

---

[1] In a review of an anthology of prose poems, but I have culled those statements that seem to me to apply to poetry in general.

Allusion (3.14.18)

Allusion is one of those practices that makes poetry impossible to understand.  And snobbish.  And boring.  And useless.  

These are some of the arguments people have made to me about (against) poetry.  Usually, these folks are lit survey students (or were, when I taught survey courses eons ago), or people who've come to the reading and writing of poetry relatively late in life.  

Usually, the opinion comes out more like this: I don't read poetry; it's too hard to understand.  Once in a while somebody will say, Why don't they just say what they mean, without all the difficult stuff?

I suppose we have poets like Ezra Pound to thank for this.   

Fact is, I argued to my fellow W@1 writers, most of us who write poetry work in allusive material all the time.  Bennett works his Southern small town culture into almost every poem, much of which revolves around the kitchen.  Doug and Janet insert political references pretty regularly, most from current events, most in fact from the day's headlines.  June drops lines and images into her poems from her beloved New Jersey--place names, famous people.  Delaney loves to reference middle earth and Tolkein-flavored material as well as recognizably Goth content.  Curt includes references to the American songbook and theater (he's a stage devotee).  It goes on and it's fairly predictable.

Anyway, we set out at Wednesdays@One to challenge this view that allusion makes poetry too hard to read and write by writing consciously allusive poems ourselves.  I shared some definitions and examples with the group to help them get underway . . .

“. . . poetry [that] uses a powerful word, phrase or cultural reference that readers should understand in order to simply portray a complex concept.” www.wisegeek.com 

“Allusion is a figure of speech in which one refers covertly or indirectly to an object or circumstance from an external context.  It is left to the audience to make the connection; where the connection is directly and explicitly stated [the figure] is instead usually termed a reference.” Wikipedia

“Allusion in a work of literature is a brief reference, explicit or indirect, to a person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage.  In Thomas Nashe’s ‘Litany in Time of Plague,’

Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair,

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye,

there is an explicit allusion to Helen of Troy.  Most allusions serve to enlarge upon or enhance a subject, but some are used in order ironically to undercut it by the discrepancy between the subject and the allusion.  In lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, describing a modern woman at her dressing table,

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble,

the ironic allusion, by the indirect mode of echoing Shakespeare’s words, is to Antony and Cleopatra (II . ii. 196 ff.):

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne

Burn’d on the water.

. . . a number of modern authors . . . often employ allusions that are highly specialized, or else are based on the author’s private reading and experience, in the knowledge that very few readers will recognize them without the help of scholarly annotation."

                                             ─M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 3^rd. Ed.

Abrams wrote the statement above as a kind of warning to the uninitiated (that would have been me, in my Freshman or Sophomore year of college and taking a first lit survey course--the teacher wisely included this helpful little book in his course text requirements) that the poems by Pound and Eliot and MacLeish and Auden and Allen Tate and H.D. and Marianne Moore and others that the professor (probably a graduate teaching assistant) was likely to make us read for the semester were going to sail right over our heads.

I argued to my fellow writers at W@1 that a poem's allusions do not have to be recognizable to everybody who reads the poem, nor immediately recognizable to anybody except the writer.  But a poem whose allusions are impossible to ferret out at all is really just obscure.  A poem whose references only an initiated few are meant to grasp is just a cult piece.  It's all right to make your reader work a little bit, even a lot, I urged my fellow writers.  But the more private a poem's allusions, the more likely a reader will be turned off.

Part of the reward of writing allusively is finding that balance of personal or specialized reference, that lends a poem a heightened or exotic or learned quality, and a more general cultural reference that a reader might recognize.  And part of the reward from achieving that balance is making your reader work just enough to "get" the allusion to feel rewarded herself for getting it, without alienating her or sending her off to somebody else's poem.

Ekphrasis (3.6.18)

This week's project was ekphrasis, poems addressing, describing, alluding to, or in some other way engaging with a painting. Instead of sending the writers off to find their own painting to work on through a poem, I pointed them to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (to several audible groans). I wanted to see what would happen if everybody riffed on the same piece, where the poems would differ in approach, structure, specificity, tone, subject, style, etc. I wanted everyone to be able to compare his or her engagement to the others'.

Nighthawks was a good piece, I thought, for several reasons. For one thing, it's hardly an unknown artifact; in fact, it's pretty much a cultural meme (cliché?), as any web search will reveal pretty quickly. I knew the W@1 writers would be familiar with it. For another thing, the painting has been interpreted, parodied, copied, made fun of, you name it, countless times, not treated ekphrastically by any poets so far as I know (certainly not as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus has been). Maybe one of us would write the next great "Musee des Beaux Arts"! And for a third thing, the painting is so glumly atmospheric--and ripe for parody for all that--that I thought the W@1 writers couldn't possibly come back with mere description, or worse, art-sentiment.

A little more background. Ekphrasis once was a fairly rules-bound rhetorical exercise. To the Greeks, it meant making a close description of a thing, usually an artful thing. Homer describes in fine detail the shield of Achilles made by Hephaestus (and describes the manufacture process as well). If you want to read it, you'll find that piece in the Iliad, XVIII. A note on ekphrasis at poets.org adds that the form also covered descriptions of buildings, fine furnishings, clothing--virtually any carefully designed and built artifact.

So ekphrasis originally was a form of appreciation, an attempt to capture the beautiful in words. (The word means "recount.") In our time, ekphrasis has been more narrowly applied to painting, sometimes photography, while at the same time has adopted a much wider thematic scope. Modern poets writing in English at least, "engage" with paintings, as if in conversation with them or, as poets.org tells it, in confrontation with them. The modern ekphrasitc poem interprets its subject (the painting), or attempts to re-depict a painting's content in words, or "speaks" to the painting and its perspective or meaning, and so on. In other words, in modern ekphrastic writing, the painting is a jumping off point or a tool for making another autonomous work of art, in this case, a new poem.

In our case within Wednesdays@One, an ekphrastic poem could be simply an attempt to describe the painting Nighthawks, qua painting, though as I say, I hoped that engaging with this particular piece of art might propel the writers to something more than description. If the writer opted for the descriptive, I suggested a look at the painting from a certain perspective: objectively (e.g., its painterly qualities) or thematically (its subject matter) or historically (its provenance). 

And if the first of these, I suggested a plan of attack, such as top to bottom, border to center, or, using perspective, front to back (or perhaps even more literally, painting surface to canvas)--an approach that would have to account for color, light, shadow, darkness, brightness, line, and certain techniques like foreshortening. If the second, the writer might need to study the figures, the surrounding architectural forms, the potential meaning of the positioning of the figures, the time of day, and so on. And if the third, then the date of the painting would have to be considered (or at least guessed), the styles of the figures' clothing described and situated, and maybe even the cultural nostalgias of "counter service" or "night out," or "corner café" or "nightcap."

Alternatively, the writers' ekphrastic poems might try to get at the mood of the painting, the ethos or feeling it projects, its atmospherics, the feeling it instills in the viewer. Or the poem might take the subject, characters, style or mood of the painting as jumping-off points, departures into some narrative or lyric that is generated through an attention to the painting, but that might result in a poem with little of the painting actually in it.

I provided references to some poems in the (loosely) ekphrastic form:

“Musee des Beaux Arts” (W.H. Auden). This one’s an example of thematic ekphrastic, where Auden takes Brueghel’s theme of the fall of Icarus and works it into his poem. The poem is based on the painting hanging in the Musee des Beaux Arts in Brussels, so, given the choice of title, it's about the experience of standing before the painting as much as it's about the painting or its subject.

“Pictures from Breughel” (William Carlos Williams). This one is a series of studies of some well-known Brueghel paintings and a good example of descriptive ekphrastic—that is, the poet merely trying to describe the painting (and its effect) through poetry.

“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (John Ashbery). This rather famous contemporary poem—not so contemporary anymore—begins as descriptive ekphrastic . . . 

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand

Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. . . .

. . . but then veers way off into other images, ideas, leaps of imagination, all more or less precipitated by Ashbery’s contemplation of the famous self-portrait painted from the artist’s image in a convex mirror. The resulting poem can't really be described as a faithful rendering of the Parmigianino painting, except to say that Ashbery's poem is a verbal recreation of the artistic statement, art distorts.