12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part I

     This series is meant to be a countdown from 12 to 1.  If you have stumbled onto this page thinking it begins the series please click here to jump to Part XII.

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     There are thousands of reasons to write poetry, among them wanting to impress prospective partners, wanting to appear clever, a burning desire to prove one's nerdiness, et cetera.  Of these, the worst is that you have a message for the world.  If that is the case, you're in the wrong place, switch over to prose, Ace.  

     Only two goals will bring you here and sustain you going forward:  fortune and fame.  Your underlying motivation is irrelevant.  You might want money to help the homeless or feed your greed.  You might want fame to bring comfort to wounded souls or because you are a Self-Propelled Attention Seeking Megalomaniac ("SPASM").  No matter.

     It's not that we don't judge.  It's just that we really don't give a damn.

     Because poetry is a dead art form on the demand side (where it counts) we need to drastically scale down our expectations.  To wit, "fortune" involves getting a job teaching poetry, not writing it, while "fame" involves writing something that more than a few dozen strangers might actually want to read.

     If you are writing poetry in order to gain publication credits for your resumé it makes sense to compose the kind of poems that are discussed in classrooms.  Since those discussions will be almost entirely interpretive, it follows that you should write poems that require explanation.  For their part, magazines understand the influence that teachers will have and will facilitate publication by eliminating the need for technical (if not artistic) merit and innovative form or content.  The writing is obscure in both the intrinsic (i.e. the currency is vagueness) and commercial (i.e. readership is limited to friends, relatives and other careerists) senses.  Publishing in poetry 'zines is, at best, the literary equivalent of films going straight to DVD.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #2

     Clearly, if your only interest in poetry is getting a job teaching it, our Rule #2 should be your mantra:  "If you can't be profound, be vague."

     Technique?  Remember episode 110 in M*A*S*H where an outraged Corporal Maxwell Q. Klinger, played by Jamie Farr, threatening suicide by dousing himself with a faux flammable, shouts "Who put gasoline in my gasoline?"  That is how these poets and editors regard technique.

     Not surprisingly, these publishers are often funded through educational institutions:  mostly universities, but also groups with broader scopes such as the Poetry Foundation.  Elsewhere, the ethos and aesthetics can be quite different.  What is standard operating procedure in one can be scandalous in the other.  For example, in contests, selecting poems to help a person's career caused a new rule to be named after the offending judge and her resolving to never assume that responsibility again.  Because the poems we see in these award-winning publications are not designed with immediate audience appeal in mind, few would survive the early screening processes of a large contest.  There is simply no time for "close reads" or academic discussions that might bring light or life to such writing.

Merle's Motto

    "The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place." - George Bernard Shaw

     There are dozens of things wrong with the current, purely interpretive approach to criticizing and teaching poetry (aside from the exclusion of technique), but among the worst is Merle's¹  Motto.  It may be counterintuitive but having hordes of students and critics deciphering² verses amounts to nothing more than compounding the confounding.  In addition to comprehension, it undermines trust.  Because we can't be sure our audience will catch our drift, we can't quote many modern, let alone contemporary, poems.  In what conversation could we quote, say, "The Red Wheelbarrow" or "In the Station of the Metro" without looking like idiots?

Unearned Interest:

     Today, only a tiny subset--less than .01%-- of poets (mostly aspiring teachers and students) will read any given contemporary poem.  What if you want to appeal to those beyond such a miniscule peer or captive audience?  Come to think of it, what is it that enrollees in contemporary poetry classses are examining?  Failure as a cautionary tale?  Certainly not success, given poetry's disappearance from our common culture.  Certainly not technical merit (a subject conspicuous by its absence in classrooms and literary criticisms).

     Lest we think textual poets are the only problem, let's take stock of both ends of the spectrum:

Poetry Type  Focus  Material Technique    Performance

Academic     Author Dull     Non-existent Portentious Hush
Performance  Author Sporatic Non-existent Over the top

     It doesn't take a genius to see how a poet can stand out from these two extremes.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #12

     There is an old joke about a sargeant explaining bayonetting to his recruits:  "If your blade gets stuck in your opponent's body fire off a round to dislodge it."

     "Sarge," counters a buck private, "if there's a bullet in my rifle there ain't gonna be no bayonettin'!"

     If readers don't enjoy their first encounter with your poem there ain't gonna be a second one.  No "close read".  No nothing.  What is more, if you can't capture their attention early many people won't stay for the finale.  This 1,000-channel-changing generation isn't known for its attention span.

     If you never take anything else away from this blog take Rule #12:  "Try to be understood too quickly."

     Write interesting stories.  Write them well.  If they pass muster with a serious critical audience make videos out of them and post them on YouTube.  If ambitious, find an authority willing to sift through such presentations and feature the best ones in a press release.  Give your contest a catchy, highfalutin name.  Repeat as necessary.

     If you're feeling generous while writing a poem throw the teachers and critics a bone:  add in some allusion or derivative phrase so that they can trace its source, argue that you were influenced by its author and are a member of such-and-such a School.  Leave a gap or two so they won't consider your work facile.  Don't sweat depth.  If people can discern meaning in red wheelbarrows, rain water, white chickens, Star Wars movies, misshapen potatoes and Beatles' songs played backwards, they can overinterpret³ your verse and make you a prophet.  Maybe even a profit!

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Footnotes:

¹ - Merle the Squirrel is our Shakespeare.

² - The difference between annotation and interpretations is the difference between singular and plural, between fact and opinions.

³ - If you teach poetry, I implore to stop asking "What does this mean?"  Instead, ask "Will your remember this?"  If so, why?  If not, what does it matter?

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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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Directions - Part I: Up Versus Out

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"Make it new." - Ezra Pound

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Before the age of skyscrapers, settlements grew into cities by expanding outwards until they ran out of room, then inwards, crowding buildings and people closer together. Modern cities grow upwards and sometimes, where the ground permits it, downwards.

This trend is universal. For example, crude predators like cats look for new ground to despoil while we more sophisticated squirrels expand our population upwards into trees.

In the search for new things to say a writer stretches our borders laterally, bucking against the "nothing new under the sun" brick wall.

It's horizontal.

Even if the author succeeds, someone else could come along and produce a superior work on the same theme. We don't remember the first, we remember the best. Expressed in clichés, then, the search for excellence is a "rise for the prize" as we "stand on the shoulders of giants".

It's vertical.

Barring a few obscurities, poetry added new forms until free verse, which had been around for more than half a century, established itself in the 1920s and 1930s. Having expanded as far out as it could, poetry moved inward thematically, as with confessionalism, and structurally, with a marked reduction in the variety of forms used. As universities crank out so many new poets things are getting crowded. It's time to move upwards.

Thanks to YouTube, we have the site. We even have a Foundation. Now we need to develop a new architecture.

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Next: Directions - Part II: Architecture.

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Poetry Genres: Part II - The Essence of Free Verse

Got 60 seconds that may change your view of poetry forever? Take this test.

If you failed that test or wish to confirm your understanding of meter consider investing another 20 minutes in learning the rudiments of meter.

How might this "change your view of poetry forever"?

• It allows you to appreciate the objective, quantifiable certainties that do exist in poetry.
  
  An iamb is an iamb. Period.
  
  
• It increases the chances of your contributions being of interest to those who do understand verse.
  
  To informed readers our ignorance of the basics is immediately apparent in our commentary, criticism and poetry.
  
  
• It facilitates your participation in serious workshopping.
  
  If we don't understand meter we almost certainly don't understand rhythm as it applies to speech. Of what use are we to a workshop if we don't comprehend rhythm, the lengua franca of verse and free verse?
  
  
• It expands our conversations beyond lifestyles and subject matter.
  
  Without a technical grounding we'll have little choice but to remain as Content Regents and gadflies whose contributions amount to little more than celebrity gossip.
  
  
• It immunizes you against nonsensical "theories" about, among other things, the rhythms of speech paralleling those of music.
  
  "Vanessa Place is taking legal briefs that she writes during the day in the law field. And she doesn't do anything to them, she just represents those as poetry."
  - Kenneth Goldsmith
  
  Shenanigans like this would be far less likely if more of us understood rhythm and its defining role in free verse.
  
  
• You will understand why certain poets have gained popularity since the study of scansion disappeared from curriculae in the 1940s and 1950s.
  
  For example, you won't need to wonder why, unlike a number of his contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe couldn't make a living as a poet.
  
  
• It will dramatically increase the number of forms you can use or appreciate.
  
  Does having one form utterly dominate a milieu benefit an art form? P.K. Page's "Hologram: A Book of Glosas" is a fascinating effort but would you want 80+% of English poems to be gloses? Or sonnets? Or rondeaux? Or free verse? Or prose poems? Or prose with linebreaks?
  
  
• It makes you more conscious of educational standards.
  
  How do you feel about public monies being spent on teachers who don't know the elements of the craft?
  
  
• It is essential to understanding the differences that separate verse, free verse, prose poetry and prose (with or without linebreaks).
  
  In particular, it is vital to an understanding of free verse.
  

Insofar as English language poetry is concerned, the only difference between verse and free verse is that the latter's rhythmic units--iambs, trochees, dactyls, amphibrachs or anapests--are not quantified into stichs. Take Ezra Pound's monorhythmic "In a Station of the Metro", for example:

The ap|parit|ion of | these fac|es in | the crowd;
[x] Pet|als on | a wet, | black bough.

These are simple iambs with a missing ("[x]" marks the spot) syllable ("acephaly" or a "lame foot") after the semicolon. Why isn't this considered metrical? The poem is too short; we would normally want to see a pattern of stichs of identical length. To wit, change the linebreak and we'd have iambic pentameter:

The ap|parit|ion of | these fac|es in
the crowd; | [x] Pet|als on | a wet, | black bough.

Were the poem longer, though, the paucity of substitutions would grate. This is an example of a free verse poem that would be too rhythmic for meter! Believe it or not, that is the rule, not the exception, for well-written free verse. Yes, you read that right: free verse is more rhythmic than metered poetry.

For starters, meter as a whole doesn't necessarily involve rhythm at all. Beats ("accentual") and feet ("accentual-syllabic") are only two of the things that meter can quantify. We could create meter simply by putting the same number of words ("lexometric") or syllables ("syllabic meter") in each line. The 5-7-5 "syllable" structure of many a haiku often won't sound rhythmic to English ears. W. C. Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" is rhythmic, but not solely because of the 3-and-1-word line lengths or the fact that the poem is, in fact, accentual heterometer (i.e. alternating between dimeter and monometer).

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Rather, its rhythm comes from the fact that the first half is [hypercatalectic] iambic pentameter:

So much | depends | upon | a red | wheel bar|[row]

...and the second is [hypercatalectic] trochaic pentameter:

Glazed with | rain wat|er, be|side the | white chick|[ens.]

Note how these polyrhythms are buttressed by words that embody that cadence. To wit, the first two disyllabic words in the first half, "depends upon", are iambic while the first and last disyllabic words in the second half, "water" and "chickens", are trochaic. Metrical poems tend to reserve such words for the end of a phrase, sentence or stanza. This illustrates the opposing goals of the verser and free verser: the latter is trying to establish an easily discernible rhythm immediately while the metrist, having done so, spends most of the poem trying to avoid overwhelming the listener with rhythm. Thus, a rhythm string is likely to contain far fewer substitutions than a stich will.

By using both binary rhythms, iambs and trochees, in the same small poem WCW anticipated the polyrhythmic poetry of the 1930s. Indeed, the 21st century DATIA (i.e. verse that changes meter and rhythm between stanzas) can trace its origins to this poem.

Would we be able to spot and appreciate these facets without a firm grounding in meter and rhythm? Color me skeptical.

The essence of free verse, then, is the rhythm string which, unlike the stich, can be of differing cadences (e.g. "The Red Wheelbarrow" had iambs and trochees) and can be unique in length (e.g. "In a Station of the Metro"). Of course, the string has to be long enough to establish itself rhythmically but that length may vary from one authority to another and even from one poem to another. As a rule of thumb, seven syllables seems a reasonable minimum.

Here is an experiment you may enjoy: Take a moment to write down your favorite lines from as many canonical free verse poems as you can bring to mind. Once you're done, please scroll down.

Scan the lines you've remembered. Note how rhythmic--usually iambic--they are as compared to other lines, often including those in that same poem. This illustrates the fact that when writers or speakers succeed at implanting words in our minds they usually do so via rhythm.

Prose poetry (with or without linebreaks) and prose posing as poetry replaced free verse in the middle of the 20th century. Less than 5% of the poetry published today is free verse.

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Next: "Poetry Genres: Part III - The Essence of Prose Poetry"

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