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.
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