R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #64

     If poetry came back to life today it would find itself declared "missing and presumed dead" in 1973, its spouse long remarried, its possessions gone, its photo gathering dust in the attic, and its children contemplating retirement.

     Christopher Ingraham's "Poetry is going extinct, government data show" cites the latest Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) in detailing poetry readership's decline.

     Before we get to that, though, we need to do a little housecleaning.  Poetry being alive or dead is determined by the demand (tind) for unaccompanied contemporary¹ English language poetry.  We are acutely aware of its gross oversupply and verse's success in other cultures and media (i.e. song lyrics).  If we cannot cite a single iconic poem written in the last half century the matter is settled.

     The first chart shows a steady decline from 17% to 6.7% over the last twenty years.  The problem is that the survey asks about poetry, not just contemporary poetry.  Most, if not all, of the decline is in classical works (if only because interest in contemporary poetry couldn't get much lower).  My guess is that the verse of William Shakespeare, the Brownings, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Frost will always outsell the texts of Charles Bukowski, Maya Angelou, Carol Ann Duffy, and Billy Collins by a factor of sixty to one but let's go with a ridiculously conservative estimate.  Let's say it's only six to one.  That means that less than 1% of the population reads contemporary poetry, a figure about equal to the number of those producing it.

     Funny, that.

     Stranger still, the number of contemporary readers could, for all we know, have bottomed out with the advent of the world wide web in the early 1990s.  Since then, readership might have risen from one insignificant fraction of 1% to a higher insignificant fraction of 1%.  If so, that's progress!

     The problem with this second chart is that categories are being compared to subcategories.  For example, why are jazz and classical concerts separate categories?  Leaving aside the fact that we're switching eras, cultures and languages, comparing a superset like poetry to a subset of sung storylines like opera is as ridiculous as comparing movies or novels to glosas.  Even if we only include rock operas (e.g. "Tommy", "The Wall"), forgetting musicals (why?), opera is viewed by many times more anglophones than poetry.

     As the article says, the "decline in poetry readership is unique among the arts."

     I would have said "unique in human history" but "among the arts" will do.

     Fluctuations in the third chart "follow the contours of the academic year", which "suggests that much of the online interest in poetry is driven by students looking for help with their coursework, rather than adults reading it for pleasure."

     This is crucial because students are, essentially, a captive audience.  To argue that poetry is alive (or that a volume of it is well received) because 10,000 students are obliged to purchase the same textbook is ludicrous.  By this "reasoning" the world's most popular pastime would be paying taxes.

     When applied to poetry, such web searches will become less relevant.  Those few who read poetry are unlikely to Google it;  they will click on links in social media, emails, referrals or bookmarks.

     These charts tell us that today's poetry is dead and earlier verse is fading at an astonishing rate.  Of course, some will ignore what has been proven and blithely continue pumping artless dreck into the void, causing us to find some relief in the fact that Nobody Reads Poetry.  Deniers will go on writing and publishing disingenuous nonsense like Robert Peake's "US Poetry Readership in Tens of Millions?²".

     As for the rest of us, rather than show contempt for contemporary poetry by stonewalling its demise, we will work to reincarnate it.  Otherwise, we might well see all English language poetry go the way of whist³.

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Footnotes:

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #115

¹ - We are interested in earlier poetry as an extension of our primary concern.  One particularly silly blogger (who cut off comments for lack of supporting argument) actually wrote:  "if you have to keep declaring, over and over, that poetry is dead, it can’t actually be dead."  Substitute the name "Elvis" for "poetry" there.  As long as there are climate deniers there will be scientists, armed with indisputable evidence, here to tell us the truth.

     Speaking of veracity, when confronted with the demonstrable and obvious why do so many otherwise intelligent poets react like Fox News truthers? 

² - Where to start?

1. Poetry's decline is hardly slow.  What charts was Peake reading?



2. Yes, there were only 26.7 million Americans in 1855 but, even in raw numbers, there were still more poetry readers than today, including many more then-contemporary poetry fans.



3. The 20% of Americans in 1855 who were illiterate didn't read poetry (duh!) but they heard and could recite more of it than the average MFA graduate today.



4. Did going from per capita percentages to raw numbers fool anyone?



5. Plummeting from 17% down to 6.7% in 20 short years is described as "may not be keeping pace"?  Really?  And might the bubonic plague have been "stalled population growth"?



6. Do those millions of poetry readers memorize, quote or recite any of this verse, as we see in all other cultures and periods?



7. Is there any practical chance of two of those millions meeting as strangers and being able to discuss a contemporary poem they both recognize?  As they might a movie, book, television show, or sports event?



8. As for post-apocalyptic scenarios, not one of the characters in "Mad Max" was shown reading poetry.  Perhaps the latest installment in that series, "Fury Road", due out this month, will feature verse.  I'm not betting on it, though.



9. What does being "able to be deeply moved, provoked, and excited by words alone" have to do with poetry as opposed to rhetoric or prose?  Exactly how bad are the speakers and novelists on Peake's planet?

³ - A pastime replaced by contract bridge at the same time music on the radio replaced poetry.

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Earl the Squirrel's Rule #24

    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below.  Failing that, please mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

    If you would like to follow us, contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please befriend us, "Earl Gray", on Facebook.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel

---

Rule #1

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #1

      Normally, when Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" and Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are compared it is because of their meters¹, which some seem to find challenging.  As illustrated in "Scansion for Intermediates", "Prufrock" is a nobrainer:  perfect iambic trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter and heptameter after some extra syllables ("anacrusis") at the beginning of some lines.  "Musée des Beaux Arts" is the mirror opposite;  its curginated accentual meter (think "Beowulf" or "The Red Wheelbarrow" here) is far less clear and attempts to scan it as accentual-syllabic meter result in a lot of extra syllables at ("hypercatalexis") or near (late anapestic substitutions) the ends of the lines.

      Instead, let's examine the voices through the prism of Rule #1:  "Never say anything in a poem that you wouldn't say in a bar."

      The issue is how relaxed or tipsy we would have to be to use that language at that pace to focus on that subject among friends in a lounge.

     We aren't talking about the dreaded "verse voice":  headbanging cadences, often with unusual "promotions" and long endstops, committed by performance newcomers whenever they discern meter.  We aren't talking about niche verse written strictly for those with a narrow interest (e.g. football fans, interpreters, other poets, et cetera).  Nor are we referring to the outliers:  soporific poetry readings¹ that sound like a pot party in an opium den; or, frenetic slams that seem like an Ecstacy bash at a meth lab.

Musée des Beaux Arts

      The moderate tempo and plain language in "Beaux Arts" (Appendix A, below) implies recent arrival at the bar.  Aside from some overmodification by later modernistic standards, the only phrase that raises eyebrows is the initial inversion:

About suffering they were never wrong,

      We bear in mind that a poem may be a part of a conversation at that bar.  Imagine if a friend were to say something like "What did those old masters know about suffering?"  Now imagine a speaker who raises and wags a correcting finger before saying "Suffering?  About suffering they were never wrong."

      The rest of the poem is merely one person trying to make a an impression on a bunch of friends.  As such, we'd consider "Musée des Beaux Arts" a one beer poem, reflecting comradeship² more than inebriation.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

      T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"  is the prototypical hypermodern poem.  "Beaux Arts" (Appendix B, below) could be seen as the best of many attempts to recapture T.S. Eliot's success but the two works are antipodal opposites in speed and egocentricity, if not diction.

      The language is slightly more elevated in "Prufrock", the overmodification not quite so salient.  The main differences, though, are continuity and focus;  "Prufrock" comes in fits and starts of utter self-absorption.  That level of self-centeredness, so common among today's aspirants, suggests the speaker has been at that watering hole for longer than booze has been distilled.

      Unlike any successful poem since, "Prufrock" is a 12-pack poem in the United States, a 6-packer anywhere else.  Were it less coherent, as so much of today's cryptocrap is, the bartender would cut the speaker off and signal for the designated driver.

Conclusion

      Together, these two pieces define the endpoints for successful verse.  Between them, the Suds Spectrum concerns itself with issues of language, tension and focus.  Among the the great poems of our time, verbage ranges from the plainspoken DPK's "Beans" to E.A. Stallings' luscious "Antiblurb".  Tension builds in Maz's "Studying Savonarola", appears suddenly in "Beans", and is released in "Antiblurb".  Not surprisingly, all of the triumphs [before and] after Prufrock have been fancentric.  Millions have tried, but it took the greatest poet of the 20th century to raise navel-gazing to the level of art, shattering the previous 5 Beer Barrier in the process.

     Speaking of the Suds Spectrum and the best poetry of our time:

1. "Beans" by D. P. Kristalo needs its context, perhaps requiring a viewing of the Film "No" beforehand.  Its narrative tone caused one contest judge³ to miss the fact that it was an acrostic in iambic pentameter.  The sudden rise in passion in the second half may require some alertness (read:  sobriety) on the part of a listener.

      In any case, this is a straightforward single steiner.

2. "Studying Savonarola" by Margaret A. Griffiths does not require, nor does it necessarily benefit from, understanding its context.  Some may not know what the term "fasces" means but the vocabulary elsewhere is simple enough.  The use of the second person singular draws the listener in as a participant.  The rising level of excitement and emotion may be enhanced by having a slight buzz on, though.  It's an engaging two beer effort.

3. "Du" by Janet Kenny uses some startling modifiers but what will require at least three mugs of spiritual fortification is its ghost story spookiness.  Oh, sure, you could listen to it sober, as you could eat hot dogs without condiments, but why would you want to?  Some may say a poem like this is too "deep" for a bar but they miss the point:  those nagging questions that survive the hangover may be the whole purpose of the exercise.

4. "Hookers" by Marco Morales employs simple vocabulary and constructs.  Its emotion is not explicit.  The issue is its subject matter.  No one needs to connect the dots between drinking and seeking companionship, including prostitution.  Still, a few stiff drinks may help reduce inhibitions when talking about the oldest profession.

5. "Antiblurb" by Alicia E. Stallings uses slightly more formal language and involves more philosophy than reporting.  More "tell", less "show" than our audience may be used to.  As such, we'd likely save this one for later in the evening, after we've had about five drinks under our belts.  Indeed, this may be about as far as the envelope can be pushed before we encounter resistance from latecomers who are a few drinks behind us.

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Footnotes:

¹ - Given that poetry predated literacy by millennia and is designed to be memorized and performed, "poetry reading" is an oxymoron.

² - This was not meant as a reference to Auden's politics but the philosophical differences between the two poems and their creators may be interesting to some.

³ - Whom we with discuss in a forthcoming entry.

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Appendix A

Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden


About suffering they were never wrong, |
The Old Masters; how well they understood |
Its human position; how it takes place |
While someone else is eating or opening | a window or just walking dully along; |
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting |
For the miraculous birth, there always must be |
Children who did not specially want it to happen, | skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood: |
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must | run its course.
Anyhow in a corner, | some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their | doggy life and the torturer's horse |
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. |
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns | away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may |
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, |
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone |
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green |
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that | must have seen
Something amazing, | a boy falling out of the sky, |
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.


Appendix B

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

    S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
    A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
    Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
    Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
    Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
    Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

 Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .                    
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

  In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

  The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,                     
And seeing that it was a soft October night
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

  And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;                    
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

  In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

  And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--                      
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  For I have known them all already, known them all;
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,                  
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
  So how should I presume?

  And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?              
  And how should I presume?

  And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
  And should I then presume?
  And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets         
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?            
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

  And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,                                         
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
  Should say, "That is not what I meant at all.
  That is not it, at all."

  And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,                                         
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
  "That is not it at all,
  That is not what I meant, at all."                                     

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

  I grow old . . . I grow old . . .                                           
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

  Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

  I do not think they will sing to me.

  I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown             
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

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12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XII

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #17

     What things do the majority of new poets get exactly wrong?  I can think of at least twelve.  Let us consider them in ascending order of importance. 

     We begin by examining the nature and value of originality.  This may be the least significant of the twelve aspects of poetry we'll examine but, as anyone falling from great height can attest, gravity dramatically affects all of our lives despite being among the weakest forces in physics.

     There are three conceivable approaches to novelty:

 1.  NNUTS - The Nothing New Under The Sun school punts the issue.  These prosodists trace the influences of poets and poems, apparently hoping to prove that no one has had an original thought since cave dwellers moved into huts.  For example, Tony French and others have shown that so many lines of John Gillespie Magee's "High Flight" were lifted from other sources that it could be considered a cento.  That doesn't change the fact that it is one of the two best known and best loved poems of the 20th century.  The cliché collage is the most visible product of the NNUTS view.

    You want your words to survive their telling.  Given that recognition is the goal why should incorporating the familiar into the process be such a crime?

    In short, these people don't sweat originality or content at all.  The hypothesis is that if you write well you'll be different enough.  To NNUTS advocates, a poem is "a little machine for remembering itself", as Don Paterson said.  This makes them good critics, critiquers and teachers but, because they insist that aspiring poets should take time to learn the elements of the craft, NNUTS proponents do not exert much influence within the lazy majority.

    For what it's worth, their patron saint is Algernon Charles Swinburne.

2.  MIN - At the opposite end of the spectrum is the "Make It New" crowd, a group of anti-aesthetics who face the originality issue head on, even as they exaggerate its importance.  In essence, they argue that we should abandon what has succeeded for millennia in favor of what has failed for almost a century.  Some call themselves "experimentalists" but ignore the results of their own tests.  Others refer to themselves as "avant garde", presuming to know the tastes of future generations despite a zero percent record of success in the past.  (What failed artists don't consider themselves ahead of their time?)  The rest identify themselves using wide-ranging [usually content-driven] nomenclature:  "conceptualists", "ideationalists", other euphemisms for "Convenient Poetics", etc.  What unifies these commentators, aside from a complete disregard/disdain for broader audiences, is their attempt to repackage the prehistoric.  Modernism began, more or less, with T.S. Eliot's hetrometrical "Prufrock" (1915) and then "The Waste Land" (1922) and "The Hollow Men" (1925).  It has since deteriorated into the artless prose with linebreaks we see today.  As such, we have retraced in reverse the steps of ancient prosodists who went from grunts with pauses to the dawn of meter.  An entire industry has been built around performing cosmetic surgery on prose qua poetry, the original failed aesthetic.

     As an aside, let me say that it is difficult to find anything weighty or fascinating to say on a regular basis.  If you doubt this, try blogging for a year or so.  We have to regard Edgar Guest with at least grudging admiration;  he wrote and published verse every day for thirty years!  Granted, it was insipid dreck, but in being metrically sound it showed familiarity with at least one more aspect of the art form than most of today's MIN "poets" can demonstrate.

     By definition, a cliché is trite, something everyone understands because they've seen it many times before.  The polar opposite of the clichéd/trite is not the new but the incoherent (i.e. that which no one comprehends).  Thus, we have postmodernism.

     It is difficult to imagine a role for MIN types.  In practice, they dominate "theoretical" discussions among Content Regents who think WCW's "The Red Wheelbarrow" is free verse.

3.  Good Stories Well Told ("GoStWeTo") - Is it really too much to ask that poets have something interesting¹ to say and know the difference between trochees and iambs?

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Footnotes

¹ - "Interesting" does not necessarily imply "profound".  It can mean, among many other possibilities, "informative", "funny", "entertaining" or "moving".  That I feel the need to explain the term speaks volumes.

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Links:

1. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part I



2. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part II



3. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part III



4. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IV



5. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part V



6. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VI



7. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VII



8. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VIII



9. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IX



10. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part X



11. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XI



12. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XII

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Signed,

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Hypermodernism

From Albert Einstein:

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

From John Stewart's "Runaway Train":

Blind boys and gamblers
They invented the blues
Will pay up in blood
When this marker comes due
To try and get off now
It's about as insane
As those who wave lanterns
At runaway trains

From "Surviving the Death of Poetry":

"Whether tomorrow's breakthrough verses are retro or hypermodern is for audiences to decide on a piece-by-piece basis."

From Savielly Tartakower:

"Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do."

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     When you take on the task of reviving a dead or dying pursuit there are three possible approaches:

Ram On!

     Most editors and, therefore, most poets will continue to participate in the Zombie Apocolypse, producing the same "poetry" that has "succeeded" [only in getting published] recently.  The editors are committed to the status quo, even-handedly supporting everything that calls itself an aesthetic (with or without an audience) while catering strictly to subscribing poets.  The more "new voices" they publish the more subscribers they gain.  Brilliant!  Later, though, they complain--sometimes even publicly--about the tedious uniformity, often in the same breath used to remind submitters to read the periodical beforehand so they'll know what the editors want.  This being the very definition of insanity, let's call it "Einsteinophasia".  Don't get me wrong;  I can empathize because I've been there myself. 

     We see what these people are reduced to publishing and can only cringe at the thought of what they must be rejecting.  Nevertheless, a publisher who boards this runaway train rarely chooses to leave it.  Viewers encounter the same stubborn mindset on Gordon Ramsey's "Kitchen Nightmares" reruns, where failing restaurateurs resist serving fresh food, claiming that their existing clientele will prefer the same prepackaged dinners they've enjoyed in the past.  Mr. Ramsay looks around the empty diner and asks:  "What 'existing clientele'?"  The answer amounts to "My buddies, Bob and Jim.  They show up every Thursday for the earlybird special."

     Just to be clear:  this purely experimental approach is entirely logical, but only if it collects feedback, draws conclusions from it and bases subsequent action on it.  The problem is that these "experimenters" ignore their data, learning nothing from generations of abject failure.  As Adrian Mitchell observed, "Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."

Retro

     Another sensible tack is to go "Old School", emulating what worked when the pursuit was still vital.  In the case of poetry this means verse, often in language that is sophisticated, formal and/or, in some cases, downright anachronistic (e.g. people outside religious colonies had stopped saying "thee" and "thou" more than a century before Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnet 43" in 1850).  "Antiblurb" by A. E. Stallings serves as a breath-taking example: 


Antiblurb.


     A critic might say:  "Add in a little more performance value and modernized themes and you might have something with broad appeal."

Hypermodernism¹

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #102

     A third option is a mixture of the above two:  adding markedly new slants (e.g. High Modernism), structures (e.g. curginas), techniques (e.g. bracketing) and/or technologies (e.g. YouTube) to older paradigms. 

     In 1924 master Savielly Tartakower's chess manual, "Die hypermoderne Schachpartie" ("The Hypermodern Chess Game"), coined the phrase "hypermodern" to describe what he, Richard Réti's "Die neuen Ideen im Schachspiel" ("Modern Ideas in Chess", 1922) and Aaron Nimzowitsch's blockbuster "Mein System" ("My System", 1925-1927) advocated.  Years later the expression was borrowed by artists, writers, sociologists and architects to describe similar movements in other fields.  I have a few quibbles with the first half of the Wikipedia explanation but this part is noteworthy:

"Hypermodernism...has come to have some aspects of modernism filtered through the latest technological materials and approaches to design or composition. References to magic and an underlying flexible self-identity often coupled with a strong irony of statement categorize the movement. Some theorists view hypermodernism as a form of resistance to standard modernism; others see it as late romanticism in modernist trappings."

     Whether we are talking about chess or poetry, aspects associated with hypermodernism include:

• Subtlety, as opposed to rant or, at the other extreme, obscurity.



• Tension and restraint, including but not limited to self-restraint.



• Distance, as opposed to occupying² something directly.



• Innovation, as opposed to invention [from scratch].³



• Heracleitian time-sensitivity.

    If the hypermodernism of 2020 is identical to that of 2025 then at least one of them is not hypermodernism.

    Of course, the quintessential hypermodern poem is T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":





    Are there any contemporary examples?  Only one that I can think of:


Beans (by D.P. Kristalo).


      For convenience, here are the elements in question again:

•   Subtlety, as opposed to rant or, at the other extreme, obscurity.
  
      The video makes the context clear.  On the page, this is accomplished by the acrostic.  For other delicate touches click here.



• Tension and restraint, including but not limited to self-restraint.
  
       The entire poem is a speaker straining to conceal her anger and its target.  She succeeds in the latter struggle, at least.



• Distance, as opposed to occupying² something directly.
  
       Compare the dispassionate tone [before the untargeted venom in the ending] to the stridency you might find at a slam.  While the concern may be distant it is hardly absent.



• Innovation, as opposed to invention [from scratch].³
  
       This poem didn't invent diaeresis, the curgina or the acrostic.  It blended them to create a masterpiece.



• Heracleitian time-sensitivity.
  
       To fully appreciate the references one requires an understanding of the politics of that country and era.

    The magic is in the technique and poignancy.  If I should meet you in twenty years I might say "Your face was always saddest..." and expect you to finish the line.

    As we saw with High Modernism, Hypermodernism requires mastery of what preceded it.  It is preordained that it will be followed by imitators who don't even understand that, by definition, it cannot be imitated.

    Some will shrug and say:  "Ç'est la vie."

    I say:  "Let the fun begin!"

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Addendum: 

     Missing from Savielly Tartakower's biography is his other occupation;  he was a professional poet from a place where and a time when that wasn't an oxymoron.

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Footnotes:

¹ - In "Surviving the Death of Poetry" we encountered the hipster muggle, an artless dodger often barnacled to publishers and editors, contributing nothing of value to the conversation beyond the obscure verbification of the word "gadfly".  (As an aside, I usually avoid "-isms".  In theory, they are convenient baskets.  In practice, they are the esperanto of the hipster muggle¹ with nothing to say and all day to say it. I mentioned Hypermodernism only because, at the time of this writing, pseudointellectuals haven't rendered the term completely meaningless.  Yet.)

² - If it helps and for better or worse, think drones, not armies.

³ - Think "We stand on the shoulders of giants" more than "Make it new."

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Practical Poetry: Critique: Workshopping with knowledgeable peers

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #18

    There are two major differences between the online and academic approaches.  The first is that high end Internet forums involve critique after one has learned the craft.  The typical MFA class practices critique either before or instead of technical study.

   The second distinction involves Content Regency.  Because most business card poets don't study the elements of craft there is nothing other than content (e.g. plot, theme, genre, moral, allusions, et cetera) on which they can base their criticisms. If you have a point to make or a story to tell and you can operate a spell checker then--presto!--you're a poet!  This is the essence of Convenient Poetics.

    With apologies for singling her out--this attitude is universal in the PoBiz but, if we think about it, all negative examples are cruel--here is a Question and Answer exchange from an interview with PRISM Poetry Contest Judge Rhea Tregebov:


Question:  "What makes a good poem for you?"

Answer:  "One that engages the reader on all levels: intellectual, ethical, sensual, emotional."

Contest Judge Rhea Tregebov

    Well, this excludes just about every classical or contemporary poem worth reading.  Whole genres, beginning with comedy, are removed from consideration.  No "Miller's Tale" here!  Romantic poems and elegies need not apply.  Most troubling is the bookburner's favorite expression, "ethical".  WTF?  Whose ethics?  Does this mean that poems reflecting the sexism or racism of an era aren't "good"?  So Shakespeare was...a hack?  Speaking of bookburners, I assume that an unapologetic declaration of love for a repressive, murderous theocratic tyrant wouldn't qualify as "good".  Nor, I assume, would a politically and morally ambiguous requiem for a controversial leader (unless the judge shares the deceased's politics?).

    What happened to the quaint notion that poetry writing contests (and editors and critics) should honor excellent poetry writing?  With no mention (or knowledge?) of technical aspects, couldn't someone just cut up their "intellectual, ethical, sensual, emotional" prose with linebreaks and submit it?  In short, which of Ms. Tregebov's requirements has anything whatsoever to do with poetry?

    Obviously, our "Squirriculum" would follow the online critical forum's example of informed critique.  The focus should be on technique, including two elements that other approaches ignore:  performance and presentation. 

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #20

     Ideally, all of the students would have Internet access, allowing them to record their performances, upload them to YouTube "privately" (i.e. such that only those with the URL can locate it), and then email the text and YouTube URL to the other students beforehand.  In any case, they'll be doing it live in front of the class, with the text displayed on a monitor or projected onto a screen.  The first lesson the students will learn is the value of preparation--of memorizing their words so that they can perform them.  There is no substitute for "looking the bastards in the eye" to gauge their reactions.  Failing that, the students can learn how to avoid staring at their prompters, the key being big fonts and peripheral vision.  This is something they can practice, the audience yelling "Eyes!" whenever the speaker loses visual contact with them.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #27

     At this juncture we need to discuss an integral aspect of art, that being value added.  Your words should add to the significant value of silence.  Writers understand that performance enhances text but the opposite is equally true.  An opera singer can make a telephone book sound lovely.  They can even make the names sound rhythmic, simply by timing the stresses.  However, they cannot make the text interesting.  The more coherent and meaningful the writing the more attractive the performance.  If a medium does not add to the final product it can be deleted or modified;  we can all think of silly music videos that add nothing to the songs or book-based films that should have been shot with guns, not cameras.

Models:

    The bad news is that, beyond productions of Shakespeare, there are very few acceptable performances of poetry to be found.  Most are either dull readings or OTT slam bluster.  The good news is that any fine performance--theatre, movies, television (yes, I said television), standup or storytelling--can serve as an exemplar, its features including:

1. Credibility - The sounds, gestures and facial expressions make it seem like the person is making the words up as they go along as opposed to reciting them.



2. Voice - The speaker sounds consistently like the person who would be telling the story.



3. Clarity - The words should be clear and not rushed like a slammer trying to cram as many words as possible under a time limit.  Establish the difference between shouting and projecting.



4. Modulation - The volume, pace, tone and urgency of the performer follow the plot--buildup, climax and anticlimax--rather than the usual soporific drone of the typical reader or the constant shouting of the typical slammer.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #1

    The need to "own an audience" is what distinguishes poetry from what careerists produce.  As important as the ability to recognize good from mediocre or bad is to an editor or contest judge, it is that much more integral to a poet.

    Suppose a person were able to predict that more than 90% of people, including more than 90% of poets and every other significant demographic, would prefer Poem A to any other published poem listed.  What would this prove?

1. That great poems exhibit certain shared traits;  or,



2. That "it's all just a matter of taste!"

     Students who reply #2 need to be studying Statistics, not poetry.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #15

     Attendees can begin their critical approach to poetry by studying the "Laws of Poetry".  At the very least, they should understand that even the most profound or inspirational prose doesn't become poetry by inserting linebreaks.  At the moment, the fact that this proviso (i.e. that poetry should actually contain poetry) excludes more than 99% of the "free verse" and "prose poetry" being written and published today is not our concern.

     In an educational workshop environment it may seem natural to conclude that the purpose of critique is to improve the poet or poetry in general.  Not so.  Those are merely welcome byproducts.  The purpose of critique begins and ends with improving the poem. 

     Here are some guidelines for workshop participants, largely based on the online workshop ethos developed on Usenet and, later, web fora such as the Poetry Free-For-All, the Alsop Review (Gazebo) and Eratosphere:

1. The critiquer's job is to improve the poem where warranted and possible
   
        Critics should not be asked to turn a laundry list into a Sonnet LXXIII, nor should they be expected to improve on a Sonnet LXXIII.  If a poem is perfect or not ready for anyone's attention, starting with the critic's and the poet's, then critics should say that and nothing more.


2. Avoid the Megalomaniacal Troll
   
         Students are bound to encounter "MTs" (aka "Empties") who subscribe to [the satirical] "The Dennis Hammes Rules of Poetry" and believe that every molecule of ink that flows from their pen is ambrosia.  There's at least one in every workshop.  If you can't spot your workshop's Empty then it's probably you.  (Just kidding!)
   
        Those beyond criticism are beyond hope.  Others must recognize that the critiquer is your friend, one who is doing you a favor...and other favors may ensue (see below).
   
   
3. Do not defend or explain your poem

     We're lucky when our poem gets one chance to make its case.  It won't get two.  Footnote any terms or conventions the audience might not recognize.


4. Try to have your writing make sense

     Even if your work is going to say nothing it should do so clearly.  For example, under repressive regimes poets often won't [seem to] be making their point because they are not permitted to do so.  Their lines are borders, barely containing what lies between them.  Such samizdat poets use code words, symbols, metaphors and references understood by their supportive audience members.  Without these conventional meanings in place the writers would be producing cryptocrap, their audience soon siphoned off by the lure of crossword puzzles and sudokus.  Oh, and that old bullshit-baffles-brains trick of swallowing a thesaurus in order to fool people into thinking you're saying something profound has been done to death.


5. As a critic or, especially, as a poet, be succinct.
   
        Enough said.


6. Do not blow smoke up anyone's ass
   
        Next to plagiarism, the fastest and surest way to ruin your credibility is to engage in blurbing.  An editor who will cross a street to avoid such a sycophant will often seek out skilled critics, hoping they may have recently encountered a blockbuster unpublished poem, often in a workshop.  Such experts, though rare, can help a new poet far more than vapid praise will.


7. Do not "crit[ique] the crit[ique]"
   
        Don't highlight the fact that your perspective conflicts with that of a previous commenter.  Just state your case and move on.


8. Thank your critics
   
        All honest perspectives are a useful gift.  Do not whine or whinge.  Do not attack or cross-examine your critics.  Do not list which of their suggestions you will be ignoring.  Beyond honest requests for clarification, just say "Thanks."


9. Avoid Content Regency
   
        Concentrate on the writing, not the subject matter.  Poems about Subject A are not inherently better or worse than those on Subject B.  Profound ones are not inherently better than funny or evocative ones.  At most, one might comment about a trend (e.g. "Yet another free verse confessional effort, I see!"), the implication being that if everyone uses the same form, genre and theme the search for originality gets more intense.  Above all, avoid political or personal arguments.  Accept that you may be called on to help someone say something with which you vehemently disagree.


10. Critique is not interpretation
    
         Critics should point out where there is a lack of clarity.  This includes unfamiliarity with terms (e.g. don't be afraid to admit that you didn't know that "bone-house" meant "body") or customs (e.g. "Why are the people wearing black to a wedding?").  If explanations are required it will be the poet's/presenter's/annotator's responsibility to detail them.


11. Critique is not test marketing
    
         The point of the exercise isn't whether or not the critics like the poem;  we need to hear the critics' best guess as to whether or not the intended audience will like it.

     Participants in these particular workshops will be encouraged to comment on the elements of performance mentioned earlier:  credibility, voice, clarity and modulation.  This is a reflection of the fact that more people will see contemporary poems on YouTube than will read them in books or literary magazines.  Avoid clapping during the performance;  the slam tradition is to show your approval by snapping your fingers instead.

Bird-dogging:

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #12

     While it is hardly their main one, critiquers can serve another vital function.  In the case of Erin Hopson's Great Poems of Our Time: "How Aimée remembers Jaguar", critics encountered a poem that couldn't be improved.  It may seem that great writing makes critics irrelevant.  Not so fast!  Whereas 1,000 blurbers won't help anyone find an audience (if only because the same 1,000 blurbers will each praise ten other friends and fellow alumni in the same breath), one word from a respected, objective critic can rescue a brilliant poem from oblivion.

     Almost a century ago an impatient, surly critic helped an obscure young man work on some verse that had appeared in a church bulletin--this despite considerable differences in theology between the two men.  Theirs was no "touchy-feely" collaboration;  the critic would throw more than just tantrums when he felt the heterometer included too much pentameter.  His role did not end there, though.  The finished verse was about to be rejected by a prominent poetry magazine--at that time "prominent poetry magazine" wasn't an oxymoron--when the critic championed the poem by scanning it for the editor.  The rest, as they say, is history.

 

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      Don't forget to repeat that survey from Lesson #1:

     "Find two mediocre contest-winning and/or published poems that have been blurbed.  Add this poem and this verse into the mix.  Ask your students which two of these poems are better than the other two.  Record your results but do not discuss them yet."

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Practical Poetry: Subjects and objects

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #21

    Find someone or some thing more interesting than yourself.  The value of your life will not be halved by the relative inattention.  It will be doubled.  This is the mitotic paradox of art, of love and of life.

    Aside from encouraging the writer to find engaging topics there is not much to be said about content.  Nothing that follows will help students become good poets.  It might help them avoid becoming bad ones, though.  Bear in mind our ultimate goal:  to write something that people, including but not exclusively poets, might enjoy.

Busting the Onion Myth

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #9

    The Onion Effect is the notion that poems must come in layers.  Every performance is a Dance of the Seven Veils, the verses revealing more details with each exposure.  Yes, excellent poems do bear revisiting but so do films (how many times have you watched "Miracle on 34th Street"?), plays, television sitcoms and, especially, songs.  Fans may want to recapture the pleasure of earlier viewings.  Many are hoping for the same elements in a subsequent view as they sought in the first one:  the intellectual is looking for more philosophical points;  the drama regent seeks poignant details that escaped previous notice; and, the humor-lover watches for punch lines and sight gags overlooked earlier.

     The same person will apply different analogies according to mood and age.  This is true even if the piece is not ambiguous by design.  In such cases it isn't the poem losing layers;  the viewer is adding them.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #2

     If the idea were to glean more information with each pass poetry would be easy to write:  just pile up more imagery and references than anyone can absorb in one pass.  Like Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues", most of Walter Bargen's book, "Remedies for Vertigo", does precisely that.  It's an effective approach until someone points out that such efforts are to poetry what a nautical encyclopedia is to "Moby Dick".

     Insisting that poetry must reveal greater truths with each visit isn't just the typical confusion between the tiny vatic/didactic subset and the much greater whole.  It is a fundamental misapprehension of what some poetry does with what
all poetry is.  To appreciate this distinction let's review how poetry came into being:

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #15

     Cave-dwellers standing around a fire would tell stories.  Their material would be as limited as their experience:  no Internet, no television, no writing, no Tim Tebow.  No matter.  Eventually, one of the brutes would "nail it", relating a narrative so well that it would be memorized and preserved as poetry.  Thus, while prose is about the message poetry is about the words.  What made words poetry wasn't the speaker saying so (as Leonard Cohen says, "Art is a verdict, not a claim.") but the audience's willingness to hear it again and again, verbatim, until many could recite all or most of it in real time.  In this way, when people derive pleasure by watching "It's a Wonderful Life" or listening to "Dust in the Wind" over and over again they are treating it as poetry.  Re-reading something for its truths is the defining purpose of an instruction manual, not poetry.

     At a party we ask others to stop us if they've heard this misadventure before.  No one wants to encounter the same schtick twice, right?  Well, people will watch the same standup routine or comedic play/movie/sitcom episodes over and over again, such that it seems people do want to encounter the same joke twice.  What gives?  Why the difference?

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #6

     The distinction is between form (e.g. inventive storytelling, performance, compositional technique, original expression, everything except the content) and substance.  If our communication amounts to no more than information there is little sense in repeating it.  Message sent.  Message received.  How many times do you want to watch today's weather report?

     The more form it includes the more repetitions the communiqué can sustain.  As long as it doesn't require technical knowledge, watching anyone do anything well can be entertaining for a while.  As banal as they are, unicycling, juggling and wrestling can hold the casual observer's attention longer than the average contemporary poem.  At the other end of the complexity scale, bridge and chess may fascinate their afficionados but those passing by?  Not so much.  Everyone who stops to watch chessplayers in the park knows what the word "fianchetto" means;  those who don't will walk past. 

     So what is the learning curve for a poetry audience?  For poetry to survive a viewer needs no more technical knowledge of what is transpiring than a patient etherized upon a table requires.  Shakespeare made as much from the pits as the balcony.  For verse to thrive might require familiarity with some of the fundamentals we're discussing here, rudiments that should be taught in grade school, as they were before poetry's demise.

Interpretations, Applications, and Allusions

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #12

    Ideally, your work should be self-contained.  Toward this end, avoid asynchronous explications.  That is, do not preface your performance with why you wrote this stuff or what it signifies.  Worse yet, do not write cryptocrap and rely on friends to write annotative "criticisms" or "reviews" later.  If no one is going to have any understanding--it needn't be the correct understanding--of what you're saying then either change your words or use another medium (e.g. video with captions, hypertext, et cetera).

    If T.S. Eliot wrote the heavily allusive "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" today he would use hypertext links rather than footnotes.  These don't help performers, though.  The challenge is to write pieces that, like Prufrock, succeed on their own, allowing supportive annotation to add the dimension of breadth later. 

    Above all, avoid the trap of requiring multiple exposures or "close reads" before initial appreciation.  A sargeant instructs his troops that, if their bayonet gets stuck they can dislodge it by firing off a round.  One soldier responds:  "Sarge, if there's a bullet in my gun there ain't gonna be no bayonettin'!" 

    If viewers don't enjoy the initial encounter there ain't gonna be a second one.

Authorial Intent and the Intentional Fallacy

    Many new writers assume that their meaning, "authorial intent", is the final word on interpretation.  Actually, that is not true in poetry, in law, or in life.  What matters is how the average observer will understand the text.  The median is the message.




     Some critics, including this one, consider this the finest sentence written in the 21st century:

"You wrote your verses
with your veins,
cold against the wall."

     The author intended this to be literal:  a prisoner using his blood (and urine, according to the poet) to write poetry on the wall of his cell.  Any disinterested, middle-of-the-road party would take it as a metaphor.   
 
Originality

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #17

     Few, if any, revered poems say anything that hasn't been said before.  The originality is in the language and the tropes, not the message.  When Homer spoke of the "wine dark sea" he captured more than the water's color.  He helped landlubbers everywhere understand the intoxicating lure of the ocean.  Unfortunately, this message is lost on most poets, who translate "original" as "different to the point of being weird" rather than as "insightful".  As for being different, if you can write competent verse it will be sufficiently distinguished from most of the "poetry" we encounter today.

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