Bad poetry (3.28.18)

Bad! (Or Is That Actually Good?)

What is a bad poem?  What does it look like on the page or sound like in the ear?  Maybe we should ask whether there's really such a thing as a “bad” poem at all, or are so-called “bad poems” just poems that are out of step with fashion or convention or the times?  This is the project we set for ourselves at Wednesdays@One.  Let's be honest, W@1 deals in bad poetry, often.  That's part of its reason for being, to provide a forum for writers of poetry to write better poetry today than they wrote yesterday.  In this context, I thought it would be helpful to have a conversation about poetic value, to explore what we mean by "bad poem" or "good poem" and whether these value judgments can be generalized in any way.

Before going any farther, take my advice: forget about "good poems" and "bad poems."  Instead, work on yourself as a reader of poems (your own included).  Become a more rounded, articulate, sensitive, and knowledgeable student of the art form--and keep doing so your entire reading and writing life--and stay away from judgments about goodness or badness.

Now, on to the rest.

No doubt, poetry is a matter of personal taste, as in, “I know what I like and what I don’t like.”  And in forums like W@1, where many writers are dilettantes, hobbyists, amateurs, personal taste stands in often for critical thinking.  Of course, that taste isn't really personal at all.  It's highly conventional, shaped by high school English teachers, dead poets, and old college lit survey anthologies: poetry, in English, must be accessible to a first reading; it must be musical; and it must be clever or "inspired."

This personalization of taste means it's merely relative, that is, to a person’s experience and whatever knowledge that arises from that experience.  The narrower a person’s literary experience, for example, the less meaningful or useful or trustworthy is that person’s understanding (and, by extension, opinion) of any piece of literary art.  If you’ve read only one certain period, style or subgenre of poetry—Victorian, Elizabethan, haiku, Beat, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, confessional, ancient, “MFA,” feminist, black, New Yorker, American Poetry Review, little mag, ‘zine, prose poem, French Surrealist, narrative, lyric, dead, living, Instagram, blank verse, formal, free verse, imagistic, conceptual, experimental, sentimental, limerick, light, rhymed —perhaps because you know what you like and what you don’t like, then your poetry reading experience is inevitably impoverished.  Your ability to recognize—to value—a poem as either “good” or “bad” is necessarily impaired.  You wear aesthetic blinders. 

What might be called “reading savvy” might produce a deeper understanding of the value of any particular poem.  Technical knowledge about poems and the conventions out of which they are written AND READ (consciously or not), influences your understanding of the value terms “good,” “bad.”  Do you know a dactyl when you see one on the page?  An Alexandrine line?  A fully enjambed line?  A caesura?  A tercet?  A stressed vs. an unstressed syllable?  A metaphor?  A symbol?  Have you in your reading encountered poems without punctuation, or poems that deliberately misuse punctuation?  What about syntax (word order)?  Use of synonym, homonym, synecdoche, metonymy?  Are you able to hear and to recognize labials, dentals, gutturals, aspirants, epiglottals, alveolar, nasal/oral sounds?  Reading savvy also tells you whether a poem is written in an older or a more contemporary style, a colloquial or formal style, a discursive or rhetorical style.  But savvy technical reading gets you only so far in sizing up a poem as good or bad. You still may not distinguish the difference between a bad poem and a good one, or a good one and a great one. It takes a broader literary experience—see above—to tell you whether a style in any poem you're reading is dated, passé, hip, classic, derivative, innovative . . .

Determining the goodness or badness of a poem also involves authenticity and believability.  "Authentic voice" has become cliché in most poetry circles.  Somebody used the phrase somewhere in a critical review, I suppose in the 1960s or 1970s, and it became a litmus for goodness and badness.  No one ever really explained what is meant by "authentic"--does it mean "real" or "personal" or "honest" or the true poet speaking in his or her own voice?  Of course, no poem really is authentic in this way.  Poets don't speak literary when they're complaining to their grocer about tired produce.  Authenticity in a poem should mean you somehow get the sense (only experience reading the poet's work will tell you) that the poet is bullshitting herself, posing, playing a role too self-consciously, being The Poet.  The poet doesn't really believe what he's writing, nor should you.

Then, there is the commitment thing.  I don’t mean just the commitment to read widely among subgenres and periods and cultures and themes and styles—though this kind of commitment is decidedly valuable—but the commitment to read a poem through twice, three times, a half-dozen times, that is, to engage a poem right at the level of its language, and especially to do so when a poem seems at first simple and straightforward or, conversely, impenetrable, even nonsensical.  To see it on the page and then to hear it by reading it aloud not once but several times using different rhythms, “voices,” pitches, speeds, and so on.  And by the way, you can always tell the commitment of the writer of a poem to have read widely and repeatedly and carefully and patiently.  Sometimes it's glaringly not there.

A poem, as I’ve argued before, is a record of choices made by its writer.  Some of those choices are based on the writer’s reason, ear, eye, intent, and sense of audience; some are based on the writer’s knowledge—conscious or not—of literary convention and history.  And some are more or less unconscious choices, editorial or creative decisions made inadvertently, by “mistake,” by luck.  And some “choices” go unnoticed by the writer; they are so under the writer’s radar that only a reader—you, maybe—can detect them. 

So what’s a bad or a good poem and what does it look like?  Here’s a (latent) definition (actually, a set of value statements)[1] by, of all people, David Foster Wallace:

• “so totally beautiful and merciless that you can’t forget them even if you want to
• “good/alive/powerful/interesting enough to persist in [a] reader’s mind more than 60 seconds after completion”
• “tightly controlled”
• “possess both metrical and narrative logic”
• “what meter and alliteration there is [sic] is [sic] unheavyC
• “realistic imagery is concrete . . . descriptions compact and associations tautly drawn”
• “surreal imagery/associations never seem gratuitously weird; i.e., they end up making psychological or emotional sense given what the [poem’s] about”
• “Any puns, double entendres, metapoetic allusions, or other forms of jeu d’esprit come off as relevant/serious and never seem like their main purpose is to make the writer appear clever.”
• “If there’s an argument, the argument is tight, comprehensible, and if not persuasive then at least interesting.”
• “moving”

These rules of thumb work as well as any, I guess.

So, good or bad?  You decide . . .

I loom over you for one long moment, before I fall to play and plunge and pillage.  Could I have been a pirate in some other life?  If the heart had been at prayer I think I heard it speak a word so softly it must have meant amen.  --- The houses are haunted By white night-gowns. None are green, Or purple with green rings, Or green with yellow rings, Or yellow with blue rings. None of them are strange, With socks of lace And beaded ceintures. People are not going To dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather.

Some days up ahead will come down empty and some years fuller  than the fullest ones we’ve known before.  Today has been the best day yet.                 I thought you ought to know that.  And I thought it time that I said thank you  for whatever might have passed between us that in your mind you might have felt missed my attention.  It didn’t and it doesn’t and it won’t.  Thank you for the everydays that you make                 into holidays.  I close up more often now, not just to you but even to myself,                       within myself. I know I should be always open. At least I ought to make                    a better try.  I will.

  

how could you think you are weak. when everytime you break, you come back stronger  than before.  ---  i hear you sleeping and i am reminded that love doesn’t stop, it simply beats.  ---  We are  meant to be, once we find each other.  ---  Then a thousand kisses To make a kind of Florida of us  Where the sun will shine And oranges grow in the yard  And if a hurricane blows through, A thousand more to rebuild.

it’s ok, darlin’. learning eyes sometimes leak.  ---  children of immigrants know the struggle of being a book opened to a random page and told to understand  ---  and if you are to love, love as the moon loves;  it does not steal the night— it only unveils the beauty of the dark.  ---  I know my worth. I’ve paid dearly for every ounce of it.  ---  so much depends upon  a red wheel barrow  glazed with rain water  beside the white chickens

---

[1] In a review of an anthology of prose poems, but I have culled those statements that seem to me to apply to poetry in general.

Allusion (3.14.18)

Allusion is one of those practices that makes poetry impossible to understand.  And snobbish.  And boring.  And useless.  

These are some of the arguments people have made to me about (against) poetry.  Usually, these folks are lit survey students (or were, when I taught survey courses eons ago), or people who've come to the reading and writing of poetry relatively late in life.  

Usually, the opinion comes out more like this: I don't read poetry; it's too hard to understand.  Once in a while somebody will say, Why don't they just say what they mean, without all the difficult stuff?

I suppose we have poets like Ezra Pound to thank for this.   

Fact is, I argued to my fellow W@1 writers, most of us who write poetry work in allusive material all the time.  Bennett works his Southern small town culture into almost every poem, much of which revolves around the kitchen.  Doug and Janet insert political references pretty regularly, most from current events, most in fact from the day's headlines.  June drops lines and images into her poems from her beloved New Jersey--place names, famous people.  Delaney loves to reference middle earth and Tolkein-flavored material as well as recognizably Goth content.  Curt includes references to the American songbook and theater (he's a stage devotee).  It goes on and it's fairly predictable.

Anyway, we set out at Wednesdays@One to challenge this view that allusion makes poetry too hard to read and write by writing consciously allusive poems ourselves.  I shared some definitions and examples with the group to help them get underway . . .

“. . . poetry [that] uses a powerful word, phrase or cultural reference that readers should understand in order to simply portray a complex concept.” www.wisegeek.com 

“Allusion is a figure of speech in which one refers covertly or indirectly to an object or circumstance from an external context.  It is left to the audience to make the connection; where the connection is directly and explicitly stated [the figure] is instead usually termed a reference.” Wikipedia

“Allusion in a work of literature is a brief reference, explicit or indirect, to a person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage.  In Thomas Nashe’s ‘Litany in Time of Plague,’

Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair,

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye,

there is an explicit allusion to Helen of Troy.  Most allusions serve to enlarge upon or enhance a subject, but some are used in order ironically to undercut it by the discrepancy between the subject and the allusion.  In lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, describing a modern woman at her dressing table,

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble,

the ironic allusion, by the indirect mode of echoing Shakespeare’s words, is to Antony and Cleopatra (II . ii. 196 ff.):

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne

Burn’d on the water.

. . . a number of modern authors . . . often employ allusions that are highly specialized, or else are based on the author’s private reading and experience, in the knowledge that very few readers will recognize them without the help of scholarly annotation."

                                             ─M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 3^rd. Ed.

Abrams wrote the statement above as a kind of warning to the uninitiated (that would have been me, in my Freshman or Sophomore year of college and taking a first lit survey course--the teacher wisely included this helpful little book in his course text requirements) that the poems by Pound and Eliot and MacLeish and Auden and Allen Tate and H.D. and Marianne Moore and others that the professor (probably a graduate teaching assistant) was likely to make us read for the semester were going to sail right over our heads.

I argued to my fellow writers at W@1 that a poem's allusions do not have to be recognizable to everybody who reads the poem, nor immediately recognizable to anybody except the writer.  But a poem whose allusions are impossible to ferret out at all is really just obscure.  A poem whose references only an initiated few are meant to grasp is just a cult piece.  It's all right to make your reader work a little bit, even a lot, I urged my fellow writers.  But the more private a poem's allusions, the more likely a reader will be turned off.

Part of the reward of writing allusively is finding that balance of personal or specialized reference, that lends a poem a heightened or exotic or learned quality, and a more general cultural reference that a reader might recognize.  And part of the reward from achieving that balance is making your reader work just enough to "get" the allusion to feel rewarded herself for getting it, without alienating her or sending her off to somebody else's poem.

Ekphrasis (3.6.18)

This week's project was ekphrasis, poems addressing, describing, alluding to, or in some other way engaging with a painting. Instead of sending the writers off to find their own painting to work on through a poem, I pointed them to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (to several audible groans). I wanted to see what would happen if everybody riffed on the same piece, where the poems would differ in approach, structure, specificity, tone, subject, style, etc. I wanted everyone to be able to compare his or her engagement to the others'.

Nighthawks was a good piece, I thought, for several reasons. For one thing, it's hardly an unknown artifact; in fact, it's pretty much a cultural meme (cliché?), as any web search will reveal pretty quickly. I knew the W@1 writers would be familiar with it. For another thing, the painting has been interpreted, parodied, copied, made fun of, you name it, countless times, not treated ekphrastically by any poets so far as I know (certainly not as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus has been). Maybe one of us would write the next great "Musee des Beaux Arts"! And for a third thing, the painting is so glumly atmospheric--and ripe for parody for all that--that I thought the W@1 writers couldn't possibly come back with mere description, or worse, art-sentiment.

A little more background. Ekphrasis once was a fairly rules-bound rhetorical exercise. To the Greeks, it meant making a close description of a thing, usually an artful thing. Homer describes in fine detail the shield of Achilles made by Hephaestus (and describes the manufacture process as well). If you want to read it, you'll find that piece in the Iliad, XVIII. A note on ekphrasis at poets.org adds that the form also covered descriptions of buildings, fine furnishings, clothing--virtually any carefully designed and built artifact.

So ekphrasis originally was a form of appreciation, an attempt to capture the beautiful in words. (The word means "recount.") In our time, ekphrasis has been more narrowly applied to painting, sometimes photography, while at the same time has adopted a much wider thematic scope. Modern poets writing in English at least, "engage" with paintings, as if in conversation with them or, as poets.org tells it, in confrontation with them. The modern ekphrasitc poem interprets its subject (the painting), or attempts to re-depict a painting's content in words, or "speaks" to the painting and its perspective or meaning, and so on. In other words, in modern ekphrastic writing, the painting is a jumping off point or a tool for making another autonomous work of art, in this case, a new poem.

In our case within Wednesdays@One, an ekphrastic poem could be simply an attempt to describe the painting Nighthawks, qua painting, though as I say, I hoped that engaging with this particular piece of art might propel the writers to something more than description. If the writer opted for the descriptive, I suggested a look at the painting from a certain perspective: objectively (e.g., its painterly qualities) or thematically (its subject matter) or historically (its provenance). 

And if the first of these, I suggested a plan of attack, such as top to bottom, border to center, or, using perspective, front to back (or perhaps even more literally, painting surface to canvas)--an approach that would have to account for color, light, shadow, darkness, brightness, line, and certain techniques like foreshortening. If the second, the writer might need to study the figures, the surrounding architectural forms, the potential meaning of the positioning of the figures, the time of day, and so on. And if the third, then the date of the painting would have to be considered (or at least guessed), the styles of the figures' clothing described and situated, and maybe even the cultural nostalgias of "counter service" or "night out," or "corner café" or "nightcap."

Alternatively, the writers' ekphrastic poems might try to get at the mood of the painting, the ethos or feeling it projects, its atmospherics, the feeling it instills in the viewer. Or the poem might take the subject, characters, style or mood of the painting as jumping-off points, departures into some narrative or lyric that is generated through an attention to the painting, but that might result in a poem with little of the painting actually in it.

I provided references to some poems in the (loosely) ekphrastic form:

“Musee des Beaux Arts” (W.H. Auden). This one’s an example of thematic ekphrastic, where Auden takes Brueghel’s theme of the fall of Icarus and works it into his poem. The poem is based on the painting hanging in the Musee des Beaux Arts in Brussels, so, given the choice of title, it's about the experience of standing before the painting as much as it's about the painting or its subject.

“Pictures from Breughel” (William Carlos Williams). This one is a series of studies of some well-known Brueghel paintings and a good example of descriptive ekphrastic—that is, the poet merely trying to describe the painting (and its effect) through poetry.

“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (John Ashbery). This rather famous contemporary poem—not so contemporary anymore—begins as descriptive ekphrastic . . . 

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand

Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. . . .

. . . but then veers way off into other images, ideas, leaps of imagination, all more or less precipitated by Ashbery’s contemplation of the famous self-portrait painted from the artist’s image in a convex mirror. The resulting poem can't really be described as a faithful rendering of the Parmigianino painting, except to say that Ashbery's poem is a verbal recreation of the artistic statement, art distorts.

Let us escape to the unreal (2.20.18)

For all its supposed authenticity, poetry is unreal, or surreal. Who talks like this? Who thinks this way? In a way, I guess, the authenticity of the poem is its distance from the real and the mundane and the necessary. Ah! But Billy Collins! Mary Oliver! Ginsberg! Frost! Plath! Bishop! Surreal, surreal, surreal, surreal, surreal, and surreal. Because they express themselves poetically, in rhythm and figure. Maybe I'm making too much of the obvious, but that is poetry, heightened language, feeling, thought. Above the real. Meta-speak.

So when it comes time to write a surreal poem, to whom do we turn? Cocteau. Baudelaire. Rimbaud. Maybe Cassidy or Kerouac. Charles Simic. James Tate. The usual suspects. Yet that image of pressure the apple picker feels in the soles of his feet in the Frost poem is beyond the real, is it not?

The surreal, the hermetic, the gnomic, the fabulous and the absurd.  There is a long tradition of poetry that flies in the face of common sense, the ordinary, the linear kind of logic we get in, say, . . . I almost wrote Milton.  But if Paradise Lost isn’t of the absurd, then . . . 

Generally we associate this kind of poetry with children’s tales. Alice in Wonderland.  Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  But The Iliad is a form of the fabulous and the surreal and absurd.  So is A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  In the realm of lyric poetry, occasional poetry, even the so-called "public" poetry (the stuff they read at presidential inaugurations), there is considerable room for the fabulous: Marlowe? John Clare, Jorge Luis Borges, Laurie Anderson? Anne Carson? Take a look at Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" and tell me those fish swimming in a meadow are not the Surreal Image of the Era!

Not to be confused with the nonsensical, or “nonsense” poetry. The absurd, the surreal, the fabulous, make perfect sense, wonderful sense, but only within their own constructs of sense and logic. In these poems, a potato has eyes and a man can walk a bee on a leash and a whale can conceive of the world as nothing more than the tank of seawater in which it swims. A barber can unscrew his hand to wash it in a rice-paper bowl. 

Such poems, when you read them, make complete grammatical and story-telling sense. They have plots and characters and even lessons to teach. But they do so in NOT NORMAL ways . . . and this surprises us. Sometimes it can unsettle us.  Via arresting image, anachronism, leap of language, a mental violence. The surreal opens us up to the absurd landscapes in which we live but to which we have become blindly accustomed. A shopping mall? A courtroom? A suburb? A hardcover book? A telephone conversation? A sacrament? Not to mention your nightly dreamscape.

The poetry of the surreal, the absurd, helps us to access the old, radical, charmed worlds deep inside of us.  Here are some poems that fit the model, more or less, either in total in one or two arresting images/juxtapositions. Which is our project for the next Wednesdays@One . . . to get to that strange place by means of an arresting image or two, a juxtaposition of ordinaries into a new extraordinary. Following are some examples to get you started. 

Examples

(from) The Field of Rooms and Halls

─Richard Siken (2015)

1

A man found a door and hung it on the wall.

I think he thought in rectangles, each day’s bright panel pushed against the next, a calendar of light. He would paint them, all these days, and hang them out of order: an unreliable hotel where no one ever knew which rooms were his, which rooms he had actually been inside of. There were gaps, of course, and sometimes overlaps: days too small to fill their slots, days too large for the day to hold them. And days, no matter what their size, that leaked into the next. A leaky day is a dangerous thing. January and her thirty-two rooms.

2

I put my sadness in a box. The box went soft and wet and weak at the bottom. I called it Thursday. Today is Sunday. The town is empty.

I stood in the road looking forward and back, to see if it would change something. After awhile, I went back inside and tripped over the box.

Driving Around

─Charles Simic (2015)

And then there is our Main Street

That looks like

An abandoned movie set

Whose director

Ran out of money and ideas,

Firing at a moment’s notice

His entire filming crew,

And the pretty young actress

Dressed for the part

Standing with a pinched smile

In the dusty window

Of Miss Emma’s bridal shop.

Used Clothing Store

─Charles Simic (2005)

A large stock of past lives

To rummage through

For the one that fits you

Cleaned and newly pressed,

Yet frayed at the collar.

A dummy dressed in black

Is at the door to serve you.

His eyes won’t let you go.

His mustache looks drawn

With a tip of a dead cigar.

Towers of pants are tilting,

As you turn to flee,

Dean men’s hats are rolling

On the floor, hurrying

To escort you out the door.

Photo Veritable

─David Shapiro (1977)

Clouds cover the earth

Passengers leave but the

clouds remain. The passengers

would like to nestle and ride

in the cancerous breasts

of the sky. But the clouds

are willful and shout as 

they fly: “Dirigent, dirigent

dirigent and wealthy.” You will live

like a god and like it, too.

(from) Mozart in Prague: Thirteen Rondels

─Jaroslav Seifert (1985)

1.

I’d like to play a singing flute,

while these poems are rimed in place!

She wants nothing but a dance,

for her the words are brutal,

and the cold wind rants at the hooded

windows, the dark season’s forgotten face.

I’d like to play a singing flute,

while these poems are rimed in place!

I look for a grave. Fog covers the route.

Gates close behind me, a hand of grace.

No, not yet! Here I stay, my boots

halt as the dead whisper, white and chaste.

I’d like to play a singing flute!

My Felisberto

─James Tate (1997)

My felisberto is handsomer that your mergotroid,

although, admittedly, your mergotroid may be the wiser of the two.

Whereas your mergotroid never winces or quails,

My felisberto is a titan of inconsistencies.

For a night of wit and danger and temptation

my felisberto would be the obvious choice.

However, at dawn or dusk when serenity is desired

your mergotroid cannot be ignored.

Merely to sit near it in the garden

and watch the fabrications of the world swirl by,

the deep-sea’s bathymetry wash your eyes,

not to mention the little fawns of the forest

and their flip-flopping gymnastics, ah, for this

and so much more your mergotroid is infinitely perferable.

But there is a place for darkness and obscurity

without which life can sometimes seem too much,

too frivolous and too profound simultaneously,

and that is when my felisberto is needed,

is longed for and loved, and then the sun can rise again.

The bee and the hummingbird drink of the world,

and your mergotroid elaborates the silent concert

that is always and always about to begin.

A Button

─Zbigniew Herbert (1999)

              The best fairy tales of all are about us, how once we were small. I like most the one about how I swallowed an ivory button. My mother was crying.

From the End

─Zbigniew Herbert (1999)

              And then they set a huge table, and a magnificent wedding feast took place. That day the princess was even more beautiful than usual. Music played. Girls as lovely as moons danced below.

              Well, fine, but what happened before? Oh, let’s not even think about it. A black fortune-teller beats against the windows like a moth. Forty thieves lost their long knives and beards as they were fleeing, and the dragon—changed into a beetle—peacefully sleeps on an almond leaf.

The chaos of a question (2.14.18)

I’ve been thinking about Janet’s request (plea?) for examples of poems built from, or upon one or more questions.  We may be tilling fresh soil here, or at least a rarely tilled field.  Many contemporary poems—and I believe this is a legacy of Modernism—are declarative, assertive to the extreme that asking a question in a poem seems like it has gone the way of the exclamation point: out of fashion.  No self-respecting poet writing today asks too many questions. The poet's job is to provide answers!

Just leafing through a few books taken at random from my own shelves . . . Mark Strand, in his short, elegant book, Man and Camel, asks only five questions among the twenty-three poems incorporated there, one of which is a quote from the Cross in the poem "Poem after the Last Seven Words."  Brad Leithauser puts eleven questions somewhere in the twenty-three poems and seventy-one pages of The Mail From Anywhere, a few of which are tossed off, rhetorical.  John Ashbery is comparatively interrogative-crazy in Where Shall I Wander, asking four dozen questions (many of which are atmospheric, tonal, rhetorical, prosy, and experienced as if you're overhearing a conversation at the next table or someone mumbling into the hearth).  That's 48 discounting the un-punctuated title of the book.

In An Almost Pure Empty Walking, Tryfon Tolides (Penguin Books, 2006) posits fewer than a dozen questions, several of them toss-offs in dialog, until the poem "Questions for My Dead Aunt in the Village," which is a thorough-going Question Poem:

Is there a ring around the moon? Has the weather spoiled?

Have the trains begun? Did you stop gathering wood

as the mountains became dark and the sky opened up?

Have chimneys begun to breathe? Is the church quieter?

Is it cold there Sundays? Do the windows fog?

When it snows, will you still go? Will you sit by the fire?

Have you lifted and secured the latch? Do you hear

the dogs in the dark, as you lie under think wool blankets?

What of the yards, the houses, when spring comes?

Are the neighborhoods alive? Does anyone tell stories late

into the night? Were there mushrooms this year? Who went?

When a poem is made entirely of questions, all answers must be provisional, imagined, and provided by anyone who happens across them because there is no one to answer them for us. “The Tyger,” of course, is a famous example of questions asked but no answers provided.  In the case above, the aunt is not available in multiple ways: she is dead literally, and she is dead textually and therefore our desire for answers goes unfulfilled.  Which is the point of the poem, right?  We must accept that there can be no other answers than the ones we supply.  Meaning what? That the asking of a series of unanswerable questions in a poem is a supremely rhetorical move. How current that feels!  

The Tradition: ask and answer.

The Modern: don't ask.

Post-Modern: ask, don't expect (reliable) answers.

Examples

And when I dug deeper into my shelves, further back in time, for this project I found more poems that are built upon one or two or more crucial questions.  But more often, they are built on a rhetorical frame of question and answer: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" It's a good (if not entirely true) world in which to live where every question is given its answer.

The Girl I Call Alma

─ Linda Gregg (1975)

The girl I call Alma who is so white

is good, isn’t she? Even though she does not speak

you can tell by her distress that she is

just like the beach and the sea, isn’t she?

And she is disappearing, isn’t that good?

And the white curtains and the secret smile

Are just her way with lies, aren’t they?

And that we are not alone, ever.

And that everything is backward,

otherwise.

And that inside the no is the yes. Isn’t it?

Isn’t it? And that she is the god who perishes:

the food we eat, the body we fuck,

the looseness we throw out that gathers her.

Fish! Fish! White sun! Tell me that we are one

and that it’s the others who scar me

not you.

Sonnet 18

─ William Shakespeare (ca. 1595-8?)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely, and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime, too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed.

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d.

But they eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair though owest.

Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade

When, in eternal lines to time, thou growest.

So long as men do breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43)

─ Elizabeth Barret Browning (ca. 1850)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

What Inn Is This (# 19)

─ Emily Dickinson (ca. 1859)

What Inn is this

Where for the night

Peculiar Traveller comes?

Who is the Landlord?

Where the maids?

Behold, what curious rooms!

No ruddy fires on the hearth ─

No brimming Tankards flow ─

Necromancer! Landlord!

Who are these below?

The poem as list (2.12.18)

One of the most approachable methods for practicing poetry is to make a list. If nothing else, a list encourages another line of language, or image, or other figure, so a writer can propel a poem down the page. The trick is knowing when to stop. Poets have practiced this trick since the beginning of figured language.

"Listing" is an ancient poetic strategy. Open a bible to just about any page and you will find a list of some sort. It's an essential component of the great oral epics. The Illiad is packed with lists, often of warrior lineage, and, in the form of litotes, of war-bragging.  The great sagas (Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied) certainly come to mind. In an oral poetry culture, listing is an aid to memory. More radically, it's one way the ancient mind works. Stylistically, listing emphasizes lyric and incantatory qualities you're not likely to find in more academic, literate composition (that is, in print culture). You won't find it so much among the Scholiasts, and not among the MFA Programs, where it's likely considered a sign of laziness.

Many nursery poems and songs depend on the lulling quality of a list or set of repetitions. "This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb . . ."

Listing, to be sure, can get monotonous. Tonally, a list can sound like pounding sand, or worse, the gavel. Making lists is something everybody does, but not every poet in a poem. Thus, our project for this week at Wednesdays@One, which was to write a "list poem."

The group didn't set out to create a modern saga, of course. Nor did we mean to rewrite the family pedigrees of the Bible.  Our goal wasn't necessarily to tap the spiritual or the mystical or the far-away-and-long-ago. Rather, it was to get some practice establishing rhythm in a poem through repetition . . . WITHOUT REDUCING THE POEM TO TEDIUM OR THE SUPERFICIAL (stuff to pick up at Whole Foods Market).

Everyone found out pretty quickly that making a poem out of a list isn't so easy after all. Doing so involves a delicate balancing of repeated sounds, beats and breaths. Everybody discovered that a good deal of restraint is called for, for a poem that is only a list isn't much of a poem.  But a list strategically inserted into a poem, or a poem strategically organized like a list, when done well, can be a very good poem.

Here are some of the examples we used as entry points to the project . . .

For Every Nail in the Bomb There Was an Act of Kindness

─Martin Ott, 2 River View, Winter 2018 issue

For every song rising above the gathered crowd

there was an edict of night.
For every house missing a door
there was a stranger who held the villains at bay.
For every banned book hidden from the rabble
there was a pyre extinguished by voices.           
For every drone zipping toward its foe
there was a message left for a loved one.
For every outburst of anger billowing to rend
there was a congregation holding on.

from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

─ Galway Kinnell,  1990

When one has lived a long time alone,

one refrains from swatting the fly

and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike

the mosquito, though more than willing to slap

the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad

from the pit too deep for him to hop out of

and carries him to the grass, without minding

the toxic urine he slicks his body with,

and one envelops, in a towel, the swift

who fell down the chimney and knocks herself

against the window glass and releases her outside

and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,

when one has lived a long time alone.

Song of Myself (Section 42)

─ Walt Whitman, 1855

Ever the hard unsunk ground,

Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides,

Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,

Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn’d thumb, that breath of itches and thirsts,

Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth,

Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,

Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.

from Ash-Wednesday 

─ T.S. Eliot, 1930

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign.

. . . .

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken

Word is unspoken, unheard;

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,

The Word without a word, the Word within

The world and for the world;

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.