Titles redux (5.31.21)

A poem is only as good as its title?

Not so.  Surely there are great poems by great poets with so-so titles that add little to the work.

But whether you write a poem from a title or apply the title as a finishing touch, a kind of coup de grace, it says something about your poem, your art, and you.

This is why poems titled "Untitled" are so lame: no commitment.  

Titles are as subject to convention as any other part of a poem.  They can be trendy.  "Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump," "Diving Into the Wreck," started a trend in titles beginning with present participles: "Doing this . . . doing that."  They can be over-cooked, sentimental, cliched, self-regarding, too clever.

For a while many years ago, it was de rigeur, it seemed, to write titles as long as the poem, that folded over into a second, even a third line of text.  And then it was fashionable to make the title the first line of the poem, that is, a non-title title.

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We're trying an experiment this week at Wednesdays@One.  Everyone is submitting a poem without title or with the title removed.  We'll read each other's work and then make up titles for the poems.

This exercise has a couple of benefits.  One is that letting others title your work may give you deeper insight into how your poem strikes readers.  It might also suggest to you meanings or effects in your poem that escaped you.  Another benefit, though, is for the reader, and this for me is the value of this project . . . to help readers think a little more artfully about what they read, to be a little more active as readers.

What I'm banking on then, is that we'll all approach each other's work this week (and forever after?) as readers with some skin in the game, as more engaged and interested.  How each of us titles the poems we read might say something about how each of us reads, the attention we pay to each poem we read, our interpretive capabilities, our creative bent.  It might give us new appreciation for how poems work, how our own process unfolds.

As a part of this project, you might want to go back to "The Flag You Fly," my post of May 26, 2019.

Get it? (5.29.21)

We all grew up educated that poetry is a specialized language, or at least, a specialized use of language.  When asked to describe that species, aficionados will say something like, "It's all about compression.  That's what makes poetry different from other forms of writing and discourse."

And we agree.  We think we know what that means and we assume everybody thinks the same meaning about the idea of "compression."  But have you, has anyone in your experience, ever really dug into that idea, tried to define it, even to explain it in poems, what it looks or sounds like?  Here are some stabs at definition that I've heard over the years:

• Compression is intensity of expression.
• Compression is language stressed beyond its normal limits or uses.
• Compression is what you find in Imagist poetry.
• Compression is the right word in the right place, every time.  I.e., exactness.
• Compression is economy, that is, saying more with less.
• Compression is concreteness, that is, the opposite of abstractness, generality.

The list could be endless.  But one thing you'll note in the above "descriptions" of the idea is that they are no clearer or more definitive than the word "compression."  What is "intensity of expression," really?  Yelling?  And what is the compressed element in Imagist poetry?  Petals on a wet, black bough?  And what, exactly, is concreteness (as if this idea hasn't been debated since Philip Sydney!)?

Among less experienced writers, if compression is a goal, "being poetic" is to cut out words at every opportunity.  Thus, you get "poems" like this . . .

Sun-smeared window

on crisp fall day,

red-crested bird on high branch

hidden in yellow leaves 

. . . with all the articles, conjunctions, relative pronouns and subordinating clauses removed, and an adjective for every noun.  Ergo: intensity of expression!  Economy!  More said with less!

So what really is compression in a poem?  The best way to think of it, for a practicing writer, is in terms of:

• metaphor
• allusion
• caesura
• ellipsis
• enjambment
• ambiguity
• word juxtaposition
• jump-cutting
• lexical and semantic splicing
• pun
• misdirection

Not a single one of these figures involves cutting out parts of speech, as the so-called "poem" does above.  None have that much to do with "economy" of expression, or needn't have much to do with it.  Even the lengthiest passages in "Song of Myself" provide some of the most highly charged--"compressed""--language you're likely to find in American poetry.  But most of the items listed here rely on shared knowledge, on the reader's ability to "get it" ("it" being a usage, a word-pairing, a splicing together of familiar expressions in unfamiliar ways, a linking of unlike elements, etc.), if not at first, then over time and multiple readings.  Jokes work the same way, by compression . . . those who "get" them successfully unpack the material.

This last thought is crucial to me, because I don't always get the joke . . . and I don't always get the poem.  It's possible to over-compress the language and the imagery of a poem to the point that it's just obscure.  Its allusions are too distant, its metaphors too far-fetched, its syntax too idiosyncratic, and the "it" of the poem too uninteresting to make "getting it" worth the effort.  But it's also possible that I haven't brought enough acumen, sensitivity, literary smarts or other tools to the reading--in which case, I may learn something, enhance my literary sensibility.

Well, we just finished a project on compression at Wednesdays@One, and I'm here to tell you that a fair number of the writers in that group understand the concept.  They know how to apply it in a poem.  Their poems are a joy to read and reread.

The People Are Listening (5.25.21)

A story in the NYT today about how the poets of Myanmar are faring under the new dictatorship.  Spoiler alert: not well.  

Four have been murdered outright in the past several months, and a couple dozen have been locked up, all for sharing their poems online.  Granted, the poems are anti-junta, written in protest, but Myanmar's poets are not being silenced just for the content of their work.  No, they are being murdered and imprisoned for a more radical reason: 

The People Are Listening

And so they keep writing and posting and suffering.  

I am reminded of the poets of Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other East European nations in the post-War years up until the collapse of the Soviet Union.  They too suffered for their writing, and they too had grand audiences.  The poet, Peter Meineke, once told me he'd read his poems in Poland--this would have been in the 70s--to crowds of as many as one thousand!  And not just on some campus in one town, but everywhere he went, people turned out.  I asked him what accounted for such numbers.  The Truth, he told me.  No one trusted state-run media; only poets and artists were trusted to speak the truth.  And since their work was censored by the state, precisely because it told the truth, it couldn't be published.  Meineke told me, "Imagine entire books of poems--my own poems, too!--run on mimeograph machines and handed out across the country."

Walt Whitman famously wrote that great poetry demands great audiences, and that America was destined to produce great poets for that reason: the audiences borne of Democracy were the greatest audiences the world would know.  I wish I could believe that today.  But I believe that tyranny makes for great audiences and so the poetry they thirst for.  Censoring the truth makes it truer and more precious . . . and more certain that the people will find a way to it.

The people are listening to the poets of Myanmar because they speak the only truth citizens are likely to hear right now.  And the poets are paying for it with their lives.

It's a poem! No, it's a song! What is it? (5.20.21)

Bob Dylan seemed nonplussed when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature a number of years back, so much so that he sent another poet-musician androgyne, Patti Smith, to Stockholm to accept the award.  Alan Ginsberg performed, or "read," to large wild adoring audiences backed by bands like The Clash.  Joni Mitchell always thought of herself as a poet, even to the point of ironing the melodies of her "songs" (in "Mingus," for one) down to speech.  

John Prine, to his credit, said, "I'm not a poet, I'm a songwriter," when somebody asked him whether he should get a Nobel, like Bob Dylan.

Last weekend's review of a history of Millman Parry and Homeric studies, in the NYT Book Review, reminds me that the line between "poetry" and "song" has always been fragile, readily transgressed.  It's not really a line but a convention.  

I studied Old English poetry and epic in graduate school.  And I studied orality as a literary theory in graduate school.  And I've read much of The Iliad and The Odyssey aloud.  I haven't decided that poetry is performative and textual at the same time; I have experienced it that way.  And that experience has shaped me.  I am a speaking animal who interiorized the technology of writing.

For the past few years, as I've worked with my own band to render classic poems back into music, I've begun writing songs.  I should say "again."  For at least a couple of reasons.  For one, I used to write songs.  In fact, I think the first "poem" I wrote, at around age 10, was actually a song, or something sparked by a theme song from a Saturday morning TV Western (It was about a cowboy).  For another, if you take Millman Parry's ideas into account, all poetry is rooted in song insofar as it starts with sound and rhythm and is performed.  So, if I'm writing a poem, historically I'm writing a song anyway - I never stopped writing songs.

But what prompted John Prine to respond as he did to the Dylan Thing is probably the same thing that nags me about songwriting and poetry: the two practices are close cousins but they have different mothers.

Here's a song I wrote recently:

Open up your eyes to me

Like a book and let me read

There of tales of chivalry

Until the sky falls down

Make your wisdom plain to me

Your secrets and your poetry

That I might close my eyes and see

Until the sky falls down

It goes on from there for another two verses ("stanzas," if you will), but you get the idea.  It's not rhyme that differentiates this from poetry but nearly every other aspect of the text.  The direct, unabashed and almost pleading address makes this a "plaint" in the antique sense of poetry, that is, in a kind of poetry that was once much more closely related to song (Renaissance love poetry, for example; Medieval ballad, for another) than our contemporary American forms, which are more closely related to conversational speech.  

The romantic treatment is the stuff of mood and feeling, of Romance, in other words, a gauziness that we don't associate with good poetry today, where we expect to engage ourselves and our motives, our blindness and our insight in more penetrating ways.  The "soft themes" of chivalry, open books, secrets, falling skies are not the "hard" stuff of contemporary poetry.  

The song's words are vehicles to meaning.  They are not "material" as they would be in a poem.  Which is to say, they are Rhetoric, not Poetry.  And the structural setup of three lines with a repeating fourth is for song.  Where poetry uses this kind of repetition, it borrows from song and is therefore less "poetic."

This last point is important to me: what it means to be more or less poetic.  For this is not meant as a value statement about poetry.  Poems are hybrid things.  Since their raw material is language, and since language is made up of words that denote and connote, poems must be part rhetoric and music.  And since language - through vocabularies and lexicons, usage and etymology - is historical, subject to change, currency and disuse, "aging," innovation and novelty, poems denote and connote, too.  There's no such thing as a "pure poem," for that would be pure language manipulation, as if words bore no common meaning and were nothing more than typology and utterance.

The best poems start from an understanding that language is material that is to be shaped, molded, twisted, torn apart, reassembled and so on in the service of art.  A word for this is "making."  That was the ancient Greeks' word for it, too.  But they don't stop there.  They go on to meaning, which is either thought or feeling, or both.  To get there, they partake of the same devices and conventions as song.

Still, poetry is an attitude toward language where song is an attitude toward mood or feeling.  Apples.  Oranges.