I know you've experienced this phenomenon. You've been working on a poem--first draft, second, maybe a third--making changes as you add new lines, images, paragraphs or stanzas, ideas. Eventually, and sometimes suddenly, everything about the poem "feels right." You can't explain why, except in the vaguest or most general of terms: now it has a beginning, middle and end; it moves; the poem arrives somewhere. Beyond that, it just feels right.
Your poem, finally, reads and moves and makes the kind of sense your mind and body inchoately knew it would when the idea or the spark for it first happened. Almost as if its present form had been there all along and all you had to do was unearth it. You're an anthropologist! An excavator!
But why does a draft of something you've been working on begin to feel right at some point, and what does this mean?
Well, a poem starts to feel right because you've begun to recognize certain elements as you work with it. These elements are literary conventions. You are starting to make your poem conform to a tradition that was established long before you took up the pen. And no matter that you never bothered with earning a Ph.D. in Literature or even took a few courses in poetry writing in high school or college. Somewhere along the line, you absorbed the conventions you've now begun to see in your poem, that make it "feel like a poem."
My senior year at university. I am taking a course in the history of literary theory from Professor Gross, a man whose intelligence and erudition I not only admire but am in awe of. It's as though he's in constant personal conversation with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Thomas Aquinas, right on up to Jacques Derrida and Frank Lentricchia. He is a generous man and patient teacher. I'm not the only student who reveres him. One day after class, I present to Prof. Gross a small packet of poems I've written, thinking that a man of his intellect and learning ought to be able to tell me whether I've actually written some poems, whether they are any good. I have no idea whether they are any good, but I want them to be. Prof. Gross leafs through them briefly and then hands the sheaf back to me. "Well, they certainly look like poems."
What? Was? He? Saying?
He said exactly this: my efforts fulfilled, on the page, some of the major conventions of Western poetry. They looked like poems (lines, left justified, stanzas, a title). Beyond that critique, Prof. Gross was not willing to go. Workshops were not his thing. And that is why they "felt like" poems to me. As to their quality as poems--were they any good--well, that's another matter, one of taste and currency.
A draft poem begins to feel right because it takes on some of the forms and characteristics of all the poetry that has ever been written in your particular tradition. For our Wednesdays@One cohort, this must mean Western poetry from Homer to what you read in the Sunday New York Times or whatever poetry journal you've subscribed to . . . and also to what your W@1 colleagues bring to the salon each week. You are steeped in the Tradition of Western poetry; rather, you are waist deep in that Tradition and, like quicksand, you can't extricate yourself from it, even if you try.
And you do try, sometimes. Trying is what advances poetry and what lends it currency. Sometimes you only gesture toward the Tradition, as perhaps with a "sonnet" of 15 lines of mixed trimeter. Sometimes you write what others might call gibberish but what you prefer to call "experimental" poetry. But experiments are necessarily understood in relation to expectations. I once overheard a poetry dilettante say of another poetry dilettante's poem, perfect! not a word too much or too little and every word in its proper place! What Dilettante #1 meant was that Dilettante #2's effort fulfilled, exactly, her expectation of what makes a poem, that is, of the Western Tradition of poetry.
Your poem feels right--feels like a poem--because it deploys the figures, the voices, the meters and rhythms, the points of view, the syntax, the structures, even the themes and the attitudes toward those themes, as well as the emotions you associate with them, that have been handed to you one way or another, formally or otherwise. That inchoate sense you have of rightness comes from Culture.
How far you stray from what's given, or how hard you try to stray from it, is your business alone--and that is the business of the poet. The more you're able to do so consciously and conscientiously, the better your writing experience will be, and maybe the better your poems will be, too.
Your poem, finally, reads and moves and makes the kind of sense your mind and body inchoately knew it would when the idea or the spark for it first happened. Almost as if its present form had been there all along and all you had to do was unearth it. You're an anthropologist! An excavator!
But why does a draft of something you've been working on begin to feel right at some point, and what does this mean?
Well, a poem starts to feel right because you've begun to recognize certain elements as you work with it. These elements are literary conventions. You are starting to make your poem conform to a tradition that was established long before you took up the pen. And no matter that you never bothered with earning a Ph.D. in Literature or even took a few courses in poetry writing in high school or college. Somewhere along the line, you absorbed the conventions you've now begun to see in your poem, that make it "feel like a poem."
My senior year at university. I am taking a course in the history of literary theory from Professor Gross, a man whose intelligence and erudition I not only admire but am in awe of. It's as though he's in constant personal conversation with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Thomas Aquinas, right on up to Jacques Derrida and Frank Lentricchia. He is a generous man and patient teacher. I'm not the only student who reveres him. One day after class, I present to Prof. Gross a small packet of poems I've written, thinking that a man of his intellect and learning ought to be able to tell me whether I've actually written some poems, whether they are any good. I have no idea whether they are any good, but I want them to be. Prof. Gross leafs through them briefly and then hands the sheaf back to me. "Well, they certainly look like poems."
What? Was? He? Saying?
He said exactly this: my efforts fulfilled, on the page, some of the major conventions of Western poetry. They looked like poems (lines, left justified, stanzas, a title). Beyond that critique, Prof. Gross was not willing to go. Workshops were not his thing. And that is why they "felt like" poems to me. As to their quality as poems--were they any good--well, that's another matter, one of taste and currency.
A draft poem begins to feel right because it takes on some of the forms and characteristics of all the poetry that has ever been written in your particular tradition. For our Wednesdays@One cohort, this must mean Western poetry from Homer to what you read in the Sunday New York Times or whatever poetry journal you've subscribed to . . . and also to what your W@1 colleagues bring to the salon each week. You are steeped in the Tradition of Western poetry; rather, you are waist deep in that Tradition and, like quicksand, you can't extricate yourself from it, even if you try.
And you do try, sometimes. Trying is what advances poetry and what lends it currency. Sometimes you only gesture toward the Tradition, as perhaps with a "sonnet" of 15 lines of mixed trimeter. Sometimes you write what others might call gibberish but what you prefer to call "experimental" poetry. But experiments are necessarily understood in relation to expectations. I once overheard a poetry dilettante say of another poetry dilettante's poem, perfect! not a word too much or too little and every word in its proper place! What Dilettante #1 meant was that Dilettante #2's effort fulfilled, exactly, her expectation of what makes a poem, that is, of the Western Tradition of poetry.
Your poem feels right--feels like a poem--because it deploys the figures, the voices, the meters and rhythms, the points of view, the syntax, the structures, even the themes and the attitudes toward those themes, as well as the emotions you associate with them, that have been handed to you one way or another, formally or otherwise. That inchoate sense you have of rightness comes from Culture.
How far you stray from what's given, or how hard you try to stray from it, is your business alone--and that is the business of the poet. The more you're able to do so consciously and conscientiously, the better your writing experience will be, and maybe the better your poems will be, too.
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