Talking about poems, Part 2: poetry and its materials (8.31.22)

We had a lively discussion of poems and poetry today at our weekly salon. One topic of discussion, the materials of the craft, is a good place to start a series on how to talk about poems. It has to do with perspective - how and whether you see poetry as a mode of personal expression, for instance, or as an art.

The fact is, poetry is both and more. Like other art forms - sculpture, painting, music, dance - poetry has its materials that poets must work with in order to make the art. Those materials are not words, per se, but language (words and grammar, competencies, figures of speech, idioms and colloquialisms, usages). But the difference between language as the material of poetry and, say, stone as the material of sculpture, is that words come pre-freighted with meaning - denotative and connotative - and history. Words' meanings, usefulness, value and eligibility change over time, so the history of a word, its etymology, complicates its use in a poem. As writers of poems, we must keep both these characteristics in mind when we write.

So in very real ways, the material you use when you write a poem is dictated to you. Your understanding of language and the words of which it is made are not yours alone. And this is why, in my opinion, making poems can be a much more fraught experience than making a sculpture or a piece of music.

But when we talk about a poem at Wednesdays@One, we should all start with this perspective: poetry is art before it is anything else, and the chief material of that art is language, not what the words of that language "point to" in the world, but the language itself. And when we begin there, we can then talk about a poem materially, that is, whether and how apparent its material is in the finished product and the role that material plays in our experience of the product.

So, rule No.1 in talking about a poem:

A poem is poetic to the extent that its language calls attention to itself.

There are degrees of language calling attention to itself, as there are degrees in just about everything. The language of a poem can "call attention to itself" to the point of being so opaque that you cannot read beyond it or through it to anything else.  Think gibberish or hermetic poetry or otherwise extremely experimental writing in which writers push and pull the language to its acceptable limits (as communication). At the opposite end of this spectrum is language that virtually disappears, that is so transparently deployed as to be invisible, completely unobtrusive in your experience of a poem. Reportage and expository writing usually seek this level of transparency of language. These types of writing want to make words disappear. Poetry wants to make them visible to you, the reader.

How to put this perspective into practice when we talk about a poem? I'll be writing some follow-on blog posts exploring some of the tools that poets use to emphasize the language of their poems. Reminding yourself of these tools from time to time will not only help you write more poetically, but also equip you with better ways to read poems . . . and to talk about them.