What is a poem? (3.23.22)

We had what I consider to be a rewarding debate about poetry during today's Wednesdays@One salon.  In what surely was frustrating to some in our group, we spent nearly two-thirds of our time together discussing just the first two poems in our reading list.  

I love it when that happens!  (Not the frustration, the exploration.)

I also recognize that some in the group likely feel that we over-analyze individuals' poems from time to time.  But what we are really doing when we spend so much of our time on only one or two pieces--I should say, when I steer the conversation that way--is exploring certain foundational aspects of the art and how we practice it.

Today, the debate was around a writer's intention, the degree to which one can or should express one's emotions through a poem (without consideration for artistic matters), and how closely a writer should hew to poetic convention.

As you might expect, the discussion was all over the place, largely because we are not professional writers of poetry, not academicians of the art, and each of us is motivated to write for different reasons or needs and from different starting points as writers.  And also because our poetic vocabulary is not very uniform, even though the group has remained very stable over the years.

But because of those differences, our discussion was rewarding!  

Here are the questions that kept nagging me throughout the discussion:

• How do we decide that a piece of writing is a poem and not something else?
• What's the role of the writer's intention in the writing of a poem, and how important is that to the finished piece?
• Is "self-expression" justification for making poetry, is that what a poem is?
• How beholden should we be to the literary conventions associated with poems?

One writer stated that rhyme is what makes a poem a poem.  I was surprised that no one in the group pushed back against that notion.  Rhyme has not defined poetry for 150 years.  And we've devoted a great deal of time at W@1 debunking the "a poem must rhyme" idea in favor of "a poem must make language visible or palpable."  (See this blog entry or this one or this one for some discussion about the materiality of language as a requirement for poetry.)  Insofar as rhyme calls attention to language and how it works, yes, a poem may rhyme.  But rhyme's not the definer of poetry.  

Another of our writers implied that a poem's got to have metaphors.  Well, isn't all language metaphoric?  Next time you have an opportunity to read a legal brief, say in a contract of some sort, pay attention to the rich soil of metaphor the writing arises from.  So, the question isn't really whether a poem contains metaphors, but rather how metaphors are used in the poem, and why they are used.  And this idea returns us to the definition above, that a poem is a work of art in which language is made visible or palpable.  

A third writer insisted that poetry is free, in other words, there are no hard and fast rules about what makes for a poem, and in still other words (implied), a poem is a poem because I choose to call it so.  (Check out this blog discussion.) To which I would answer, a poem that appears to be "free" of the rules and conventions of poetry only appears to be so.  Otherwise, it's not a poem, because if it were actually free of convention, it would be unrecognizable as poetry.  In my experience, writers who insist that their poems are "free" of convention are ignorant of literary convention, and to their own use of it, and to how deeply they are beholden to it.  I've often found myself in that position when writing a poem, thinking that I've "dispensed with" certain kinds of rules, when in actuality, I've been thinking about them through the entire writing process!

Finally, all of what we said about poems and poetry today circled that old drain, "what is a poem?"  I hope we didn't totally go down the pipes and that there is still enough water in the tub to foster more discussion of the nature of poems and poetry in the months ahead.  And as much as we may like to relapse into the "je ne sais quoi" of the mystery of poetry, we really should, as dedicated writers, keep trying to define exactly what it is that makes a poem a poem.  We'll never get totally to the bottom of it, but the learning and growth will be in the trying.

Post-finally, I am thinking it's time for another project that forces us to consider our assumptions, and to work to define what poetry actually is.  I'll give it some thought.

Art & War, Siblings (3.18.22)

The Ukranian Poet

Art sat at a table in the kitchen in Lviv, shelling 

peas under the swinging bulb that could do no other 

than to cast light in all directions, into every corner 

of the room and even beneath the wooden surface 

of the table scarred and pitted from all the pots

and pans, plates and paring knives that for a lifetime 

had made their kind of music, a family music

composed of tears and uncontrollable laughter.  

Art softly sang a song it had learned as a child 

from a grandmother or a grandfather or an aunt 

or an uncle, about home and country, sang it 

to no one in particular, just as art's grandmother 

or grandfather or aunt or uncle had sung the song 

solitarily softly and to no one in particular.

Art had always done this--shell peas 

at the kitchen table while singing the song--

for as long as it could remember.

War got up from a chair in the living room 

and hurled a glass into the fireplace, upset a table lamp, 

tore a curtain from the window, threw a book 

across the room, pulled over a chest of drawers, 

not understanding why it did so, only that doing so 

felt liberating and righteous, no doubt because 

the order of a living room, its furniture and its keepsakes, 

was an outrage, an affront, a wrong, a hypocrisy, 

a treachery, a lie, an insubordination, a challenge, 

an insult, and a mockery and must never be tolerated.  

War, too, sang as it went about its business 

wrecking the room, sang to nobody in particular

and with gusto and with joy, and the song it sang it, 

too, had learned from the grandmother or grandfather 

or aunt or uncle who also had sung with gusto

while tearing the living room apart, dashing

every family photo to the floor, flattening 

keepsakes and heirlooms with the family bible.

Art listened a moment to the hubbub emanating 

from the next room, bending forward over the table 

of shelled peas to peer into where war intoned 

and wrecked, wrecked and intoned (to the sounds of glass 

shattering and drapery ripping and chair legs snapping), 

then continued shelling peas and singing the song 

it had learned from the grandmother or grandfather 

or aunt or uncle when so young and once upon a time.  

Art said, Brother, why so busy and so intent?  

Can you not sit for a moment and be still?  

War heard nothing.  War saw nothing.  

War broke glass, tore drapery, war snapped 

the legs of living room tables and chairs.  

War said, Sister, will you never finish with those peas?  

You have only me to feed, and I am hungry.

Pith & Patois: lingo as a starting point for a poem (3.12.22)

Vernacular, colloquialism, idiom, slang . . . in its many forms, this aspect of language is so close to the language of poetry as to be (maybe) the untranslatable je ne sais quoi stuff of poetry.  We've addressed it variously over the years, mainly by talking about figurative language generally, and more particularly here and here.

For us, the patois of our poem is preferable only if partnered with pithiness, that is, it's perfectly fine to deploy a cliché, idiomatic phrase, colloquialism, piece of jargon, a "familiar," so long as we deploy it packed with meaning for the poem we're writing.  And that does NOT include, usually, mere cleverness.  (I'm one day soon going to write a piece here about cleverness in poems, because I abhor it.  And you might or might not be surprised how often cleverness creeps into the poems of even the most celebrated writers.)

But this week's project.

We're writing a poem that uses some form of untranslatable English as our foundation.  This can be anything, as I've tried to indicate above, from cliché to saw to proverb.  By "untranslatable" I mean anything in a language that carries such subtle meaning as to be impossible to communicate in any other language.  The figure I use above in the first paragraph, je ne sais quoi, is a pretty good example.  Sure, you can transliterate it into English as "I don't know what," but to the French historical and cultural context is everything when it comes to French idioms, patois, lingo, bywords and the like.  Just as it is to native speakers of English, or Russian, or Vietnamese.  It's the nativist part of your lexicon.

And context is the idea in this week's project: taking a figure of speech or a proverbial saying or expression and rendering it anew in some new context.  Now hear this: your first impulse may be to take an expression like "ignorance is bliss" or "a bird in hand is better than two in the bush" or "catch as catch can" and humorize it.  Make a ha-ha poem out of it.  Please   The give it a more serious try in the first draft or two.  The poem you write may very well turn out to be funny, but it should be funny even without the figure.  Funny should be the essence of the poem (NOTE TO SELF: ANOTHER TOPIC FOR A BLOG POSTING: CAN POETRY BE FUNNY?). 

Maybe I'm beginning to confuse you now by over explaining.  I'm certainly confusing myself!

So, let's just leave it at this: write a poem that deploys a common figure of speech in some new context.  Your objective is to reintroduce us, as it were, to the expression.

Good luck!

Adapt-a-Myth (3.9.22)

We've circled back to myth for what, the umpteenth time in our Wednesday journey?  This week, we're writing poems that are based on a myth, a classic or classical tale, that our poem attempts to retrieve into the present once again.  

What we're not after is a mere summary of or retelling of the tale in our own words.  After all, somebody's already written the story, and time and repetition have made it, well, mythical.  We repeat it to our children, which really means, we tell it over and over to ourselves.  Whatever tale it is, it's there mostly to teach us (and/or remind us) of our humanity in all its strengths and weaknesses.

What we're after this week is an application, of the meaning or theme of the myth, to something more contemporary, or more akin to our dailiness, or personal to ourselves.  We want to process the tale into present terms the way W. H. Auden did with Musée des Beaux Arts.  He wrote of the Breughel painting of Icarus in 1938, a time when horrible, horrible events had already begun to unfold across Europe as life went on as usual in America and England and everywhere but German ghettos.

Speaking of the Auden poem, I opened yesterday's Sunday New York Times to find this wonderful explication by Elisa Gabbert.  I hope you read it and enjoy it.

Then I hope you will try writing a poem that doesn't just retell a myth in your own words, but grabs its essential meaning(s) and brings it (them) into your own dailiness.

Good luck!