At this week's W@1 session, talk wandered into a technical issue about use of modifiers in poems, especially in descriptive passages. Inevitably, one writer quoted a former creative writing instructor's admonishment to get the adjectives out of your poems and to use language that's "concrete" and "active." And everybody nodding in agreement around the table--all those who almost weekly deploy weak verbs and noun modifiers with abandon!--seemed to accept this prohibition without much reflection.
That got me to thinking about why teachers of writing of all kinds dismiss the lowly adjective and adverb. I remember my own writing teachers saying the same thing, like they were delivering a commandment for the tablet. I also remember thinking that if I can't qualify this noun with some adjective or other, or that verb with some kind of adverb, how am I supposed to convey what I'm describing?
Nobody ever explained why I shouldn't drop modifiers in front of the nouns and verbs of my poems. They just implied that it's not good writing. If anybody ever called them out about their implications about what "good writing" is and why it doesn't make room for modifiers, most arguments I've heard just fall back on (or into) a kind of speechless, "Well, one simply knows good writing when one sees it, and it avoids adjectives." Like pornography, I guess.
Enough rant. I've been thinking about why adjectives preceding nouns and adverbs preceding verbs make for weak poems. Injudicious use of certain modifiers is a little like trying to make somebody understand you by speaking louder. Or like following up a punch line with "Get it?" It reveals a fear that your reader won't get it, so you either raise your voice or you "spell it out" for them.
Either way, what you're doing when you overuse modifiers is demonstrating your distrust of readers. More importantly, you're trying to control outcomes. In other words, you don't trust your reader to see what you saw or feel what you felt in exactly the way that you saw or felt it. So you pile in the adjectives and adverbs.
There's some justification for this fear. A person's experience is . . . personal, to some extent even unique. Writers, poets especially, work to recapture that uniqueness. It's only natural that a writer will strive to share the uniqueness of her vision. It follows that modifiers, when deployed as figurative language, will aid in the recapture, bringing memory closer to the remembered event. So why is the opposite true?
An inexperienced writer may assume that his experience, what he has chosen to write about, is personal to the point of complete uniqueness: no one has ever seen the sea the way that I see it now. An inexperienced writer assumes that the point of a poem is to convey this unique vision for all to see exactly as he has seen it. And the goal is to prevent readers from seeing it any other way--no, no, that's not what I meant! That's not how I saw the sea!
But a more experienced writer, who also assumes the uniqueness of her experience, understands (perhaps through the reflection that writing permits) that conveying the unique experience is impossible. Language can only approximate; it's a very imprecise tool for capturing reality. Words mean more and less than we want or need them to. An experienced writer knows that every poem is a failure in this sense, and that piling on modifiers, for instance, merely compounds the failure. Doing so actually impedes conveyance. Less is not more, it is liberating.
So what's to be conveyed through a poem, if not your original experience, perception or insight? If as your reader I'm paying close enough attention, I get to experience your experience of trying to recreate an experience. What? What I mean is this: every good poem is the record of its own writing. The proper reading of every good poem is the experience of or insight into the struggle to create that record. The original experience--whatever that may have been--is secondary at best, and at an eternal remove from the reader's understanding.
I don't care to see the sea exactly the way you saw it. Even if I did, I know that I never shall. Even if I had stood next to you upon that precipice, I couldn't have seen that sea in quite the way you saw it. I do care to see (i.e., experience through reading) how you've struggled to articulate what you (think) you saw. The more you try to influence my seeing what you saw in the way that you saw it, the less visible your vision becomes to me. More modification won't help. Less is liberating.
That got me to thinking about why teachers of writing of all kinds dismiss the lowly adjective and adverb. I remember my own writing teachers saying the same thing, like they were delivering a commandment for the tablet. I also remember thinking that if I can't qualify this noun with some adjective or other, or that verb with some kind of adverb, how am I supposed to convey what I'm describing?
Nobody ever explained why I shouldn't drop modifiers in front of the nouns and verbs of my poems. They just implied that it's not good writing. If anybody ever called them out about their implications about what "good writing" is and why it doesn't make room for modifiers, most arguments I've heard just fall back on (or into) a kind of speechless, "Well, one simply knows good writing when one sees it, and it avoids adjectives." Like pornography, I guess.
Enough rant. I've been thinking about why adjectives preceding nouns and adverbs preceding verbs make for weak poems. Injudicious use of certain modifiers is a little like trying to make somebody understand you by speaking louder. Or like following up a punch line with "Get it?" It reveals a fear that your reader won't get it, so you either raise your voice or you "spell it out" for them.
Either way, what you're doing when you overuse modifiers is demonstrating your distrust of readers. More importantly, you're trying to control outcomes. In other words, you don't trust your reader to see what you saw or feel what you felt in exactly the way that you saw or felt it. So you pile in the adjectives and adverbs.
There's some justification for this fear. A person's experience is . . . personal, to some extent even unique. Writers, poets especially, work to recapture that uniqueness. It's only natural that a writer will strive to share the uniqueness of her vision. It follows that modifiers, when deployed as figurative language, will aid in the recapture, bringing memory closer to the remembered event. So why is the opposite true?
An inexperienced writer may assume that his experience, what he has chosen to write about, is personal to the point of complete uniqueness: no one has ever seen the sea the way that I see it now. An inexperienced writer assumes that the point of a poem is to convey this unique vision for all to see exactly as he has seen it. And the goal is to prevent readers from seeing it any other way--no, no, that's not what I meant! That's not how I saw the sea!
But a more experienced writer, who also assumes the uniqueness of her experience, understands (perhaps through the reflection that writing permits) that conveying the unique experience is impossible. Language can only approximate; it's a very imprecise tool for capturing reality. Words mean more and less than we want or need them to. An experienced writer knows that every poem is a failure in this sense, and that piling on modifiers, for instance, merely compounds the failure. Doing so actually impedes conveyance. Less is not more, it is liberating.
So what's to be conveyed through a poem, if not your original experience, perception or insight? If as your reader I'm paying close enough attention, I get to experience your experience of trying to recreate an experience. What? What I mean is this: every good poem is the record of its own writing. The proper reading of every good poem is the experience of or insight into the struggle to create that record. The original experience--whatever that may have been--is secondary at best, and at an eternal remove from the reader's understanding.
I don't care to see the sea exactly the way you saw it. Even if I did, I know that I never shall. Even if I had stood next to you upon that precipice, I couldn't have seen that sea in quite the way you saw it. I do care to see (i.e., experience through reading) how you've struggled to articulate what you (think) you saw. The more you try to influence my seeing what you saw in the way that you saw it, the less visible your vision becomes to me. More modification won't help. Less is liberating.
No comments:
Post a Comment