Some people don’t like poetry. That’s fine, and more power to them. I (on the other hand) am someone who likes poetry. I read a fair bit of it, and I try to be catholic in my sampling. Yet when I read modern poetry I often end up angry or unsatisfied. (Angry is one of my default emotions when reading, so don’t get too worried.) I got a bunch of recommendations from friends (you guys!) a while ago on modern poets I would like, and I read several books and some individual poems. Tony Hoagland was surprisingly good. Terence Hayes was half good and half terrible. Suzanne Gardinier was pretty mediocre. But I’m trying. I’m not just a troll, is what I’m saying; I may sound trollish, but really I’m more like a disappointed fan, angry about a Star Trek reboot. What I realized while reading these newer poets was that even when I liked them, they were not hitting me where I thought poetry should hit me. Hoagland can turn a phrase with great skill, but only one of his poems really worked for me, on the whole, as a poem. I will admit that I am a bit of a philistine in many ways. I like A.E. Housman and Rudyard Kipling. But I’m not a TOTAL philistine,. I mean, when I see modern art or free verse I don’t immediately throw it out the window. I USUALLY throw it out the window, but I take some time to contemplate it and weigh the stress first. I know every moron and his mother has complained about free verse already, and that this complaint is the literary equivalent of saying, “My five-year old could have painted that”; so I hope that I can say something slightly more thoughtful than “free verse is not poetry”; while at the same time asserting that we may wish to reconsider whether free verse is poetry. Poetry is old as the hills and if not universal across cultures then at least pretty common in lots of places. One thing to note (and I’m generalizing here) is that old poetry is not generally, in the oldest versions we have of it, broken up into lines. The ancient Greeks had poetry that could be divided into lines based on meter, but they wrote it out like prose. Same for Old English verse: based on meter and alliteration we can tell where the line breaks should be, but Cynewulf never put them in himself. This makes sense: poetry starts out as oral tradition, and printing it is an afterthought; an afterthought that was just written out with no thought for breaking the lines. After print became dominant, writing poems with line breaks becomes convention. But it’s important to remember that the line break is an afterthought, an epiphenomenon. The essence of poetry, if you will, has nothing to do with line breaks. When people started writing free verse, however, they fastened upon the wrong thing. Jeremy Bentham may have been joking when he said, “Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it”; but a road is made by walking on it, and enough people believed Bentham that his joke came true. The situation had become so dire by the time I was a kid that in school, during curricula on poetry, we would be encouraged to do something like write our name vertically on a piece of paper and supply self-descriptive adjectives starting acrostically with the letters. Humorous Alienated Lethargic It must be a poem, because there are line breaks! The teacher scratched her head, vaguely aware that something was wrong, but unable to go against the idiotic teacher’s manual. We sometimes pretend that there are other criteria that distinguish a poem, but they’re mainly lies. Coleridge says prose is “words in their best order” and poetry is “the best words in their best order,” but this is a value judgment and not a definition (it is also unjust to the prose of Nabokov or Bellow). Poetry means line breaks. Since I am largely a descriptivist in my semantics, I cannot contest this. The problem is that by elevating a historical accident to the central feature of poetry, we made for a lot of wretched poetry. (By the way, I am aware that I am somewhat hypocritically arguing both sides against the middle in that I’m myself insisting that poetry is one way by definition but another way by essence, but I think my meaning is clear even if by formal rules of rhetoric I’m talking jive.) Usually when I read a free verse poem, even when it’s a good one, it’s made worse by the line breaks. This is because the line breaks are largely arbitrary, and, when they’re not arbitrary, they’re decided on by an esthetic that is precious and usually redundant and dull. Basically, what could have been a great piece of poetic (read: gorgeous) prose is broken up into lines, and the only thing that’s added is pretentiousness. I know we don’t have much precedent or venue in English for a short paragraph of lyric prose but we have SOME– but since there are only sixteen or seventeen poetry readers left in America, shouldn’t it be possible for us to get together and say: “Hey, let’s drop the sham. Let’s not add a bunch of goofy line breaks and weird spacing to our writing, like a child playing with the tab key. Let’s try to learn a kind of diction from poetry and write it out in prose form, and not like a pretentious prat”? Also by the way, it’s possible for free verse on occasion to “work” as poetry, line breaks and all, and when it does it’s totally mysterious to me. (Larkin’s “High Windows” is just one example among several.) But the problem is that free verse is both harder and easier to write than almost anything else in the world. It’s got to be hard to write, or there would have been more than a handful or examples of free verse poems that work AS POEMS written in the last 150 years. But it’s also obviously really easy to write or Jimmy Carter and Jewel wouldn’t have hacked out a book each over the course of an afternoon. Jewel’s book (I assume everybody here has read A Night without Armor) is instructive because her free verse is not that bad. I mean, compared to the median free verse poem, hers are just low-average. Try it out, try taking her name off one, photocopying it, and pretending it’s by someone serious, like John Ahsbery. See who calls you out on it. Then choose one of her formal poems (she wrote a few.) Pass that around. It’s utter dreck, isn’t it? It’s obvious how bad it is. (This would be a fun little test, so I hope someone tries it who isn’t me.) There’s a real danger for an art form when it becomes simultaneously too easy and too hard. It totally killed visual art, so that it’s now practiced only by hipsters and stuff. It killed poetry, too, which is a shame, because I really liked poetry. You’ll notice that music as an art form isn’t dead yet, because if you take a kazoo and noodle something out in three minutes, people are loathe to pretend it’s music: I know this because I’ve tried (see Halifax Slasher’s bandcamp page). In WWI soldiers wrote poems in the trenches and sent them home to be published in their local newspapers, and of course many of them were bad, but some of them were (famously) really really good. By WWII the idea of writing a poem home from the war was a dirty secret. If anyone found out you would have been executed by your own side (probably not literally). What kind of human being would write a poem today hoping it would appear in the local newspaper? If you guessed a twelve-year old, you are right. So poetry, as a form of mass communication, died after a pretty good multi-millennium run. Maybe we should all admit it and stop dancing on its grave. My hope is that we (as poets or prospective poets) can elect to write in prose, even if it’s lyrical, “poetic” prose, and not throw precious line breaks into our prose like emo tweens. Limericks are excepted. Please tell me if I’m insane, P. Scott, Mike, Agnieszka, Leah, Stefan, Anna, Emily, etc.!
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 15:12:04 +0000
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