In my first poetry class, I remember being terrified by the things we read. Each week, we'd receive a generic assignment: write a place poem; write a haiku; write a sonnet. Then, we'd read example poems that the professor thought "captured appropriately the ephemeral heart of the assignment." In plain terms, this meant that we were reading staggeringly beautiful poems, then were turned loose to create our own little awkward masterpieces. And when I was finished, no matter how good I thought my efforts were, it always felt like I was plunking down a 20 year old lawn chair with several of the nylon seat strips missing next to an ornately carved chair made of one piece of wood: my poems were just white trash versions of the greats I had read as examples.
It seems to me that this was a backwards way to teach. Of course, I think it's important to read, be inspired by, and then attempt to match the stunning poems that made you love the art in the first place. And identifying what makes a poem work is a worthwhile endeavor. But if a poem is really incredible, I think there's always going to be an element of magic to it, something that you won't be able to identify and that is very hard to replicate without years of practice and hard work.
I always thought that if I taught a poetry class, the first thing I’d have my students do would be to bring in the worst poem they could find. We’d read poems culled from college literary magazines, Jewel’s book of poems, the worst poems of some of the best poets. And then we’d talk about why they were bad. Because it’s a lot easier to see how a poem is bad than to explain why it’s good. Maybe we’d even write bad poems and get the awkwardness of trashing each others’ poems out of the way before it became embarrassing. Maybe if we pointed out what exactly was shitty about shitty poems, people would write fewer of them.
Some of my favorite literature and poetry was created by people who made a very simple decision about what their work would not be. Simply removing practices that were taken for granted helped certain writers become giants of their time. Removing what was already there didn’t inhibit them, but it showed them what else they could do. They were required to imagine, an act that I think has disappeared from much of the contemporary poetry I read.
The following poem is by David Wright, a Midwestern poet who I saw read a few years ago. This poem stuck out to me, and I think it fits in well with the whole theory that we should establish what a poem should not be before we make major decisions on what it should be. I think it’s a relevant poem in a time when poetry seems to be primarily for greeting cards or academic publication, and when most other poetry being produced seems all to be the same: pseudo-Bohemian, yet completely confused about its sincerity.
I’m not sure what poetry should look like or what it should say, but I think this poem pretty much captures what it a lot of it does look like today.
Poems Should Not Be
About protest marches,
about newspaper photographs,
(even if the man shielding his son from bullets has a name,
and looks eternal, even if the blood dipped hands, spread wide
at the window, look eternal)
about elections, about television screens,
about fathers, especially, dead ones,
about domestic tasks, about vices,
about children, about God, about paintings,
mucked onto canvas, enough with epiphanies in museums
or churches, on roads and old barstools)
about drinking hard, about getting hard,
about getting lucky, about waking up unexpectedly calm,
(already seen that man’s round, unwieldy stomach, this woman’s
delicate breast, already known the sweat and wine scent of
bodies in the morning)
about worry, about worry, about worry,
about flowers, about, especially, roses,
about what will be missed by the living,
about what will be missed by the dead,
(too many anecdotes, devoid of music, devoid of rhythm,
devoid, too many parables, disguised as music, disguised as
rhythm, disguised)
about poetry, about language,
about reading, about poetry.
Poems should not be about.
________________________
(This is the part where you guys tell me what you think.)
2 comments:
Defining poetry by what it is not doesn't sit well with me. Mostly because I think people should define themselves by who they are, not what they're not.
I know this is kinda bitchy, but defining poetry by what it is not seems lazy. Just because an author can't figure out what should be in a poem, I don't want him to waste my time as a reader telling me what shouldn't.
Does that poem resonate with you as a person or as a writer?
Megan, I can understand why by your logic defining poetry by what it's not seems lazy and misguided. And I completely agree that one shouldn't completely define themselves by who they are, not what they are not. But, I think it's also unrealistic and perhaps naive to assume that's not how things work.
To take your view of life and self as an example, when I began to think about choosing a career (even as a child), I certainly thought about things that would be fun: cheerleader, president, etc. But I also rejected certain jobs as well. I do not want to be a garbage man. I do not want to be a doctor. I do not want to be a writer for a scientific magazine. These choices didn't limit me; they just made other things more clear, and allowed me to focus more fully on better-fitting opportunities. Even as I've gained more experience, I've found out that learning what I don't want out of a job, or a lover, or a friendship is extraordinarily valuable, and often a little easier to determine. It's not that I'm advocating walking around and saying "No" to everything I see; it's just that I believe realistically assessing my surroundings and eliminating what I don't find to be what I want.
In terms of poetry and writing, yes, I think this practice could result in shitty poems if it is undertaken without much thought. But that's any method.
I think that the creative impulse to step away from a norm by deciding to restrict oneself or say no to a very obvious convention could result in some incredible art, if considered well. Not only in terms of devices, but also in terms of content.
The idea that comes to mind is of someone tinkering with a machine, taking away a part to see if the machine still works, if it functions better, worse, more beautifully, more noisily, or what. The final machine would be different for each tinkerer...it just depends on whether you like efficiency, beauty, or noise best.
In my opinion, the craft of poetry involves working with a fininte set of parts. The talent comes in shaping those parts, in adding and reducing, and I think it's unfair to say that reducing is not as valid an approach as adding. To set out and say, "For this piece, I will take away this element," is no less wrong than deciding to add one.
As for the poem itself, it appeals to me as a writer, not as a person (this whole project is about my writing life, not my personal one). To me, the idea of taking all those subjects off the table as a possibility for a poem makes sense. They are overused and can be trite.
But they're easy. My point is that taking away those ideas might just force me to think of a strange new topic that I might not have come up with if I hadn't restricted myself. It isn't lazy, because it actually requires more thought. And it's original.
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