Commercial Poetry: Red Wheelbarrow

Showing posts with label Red Wheelbarrow. Show all posts

Saturday, January 18, 2014

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.

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!

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?

Links:

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part I

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part II

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part III

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IV

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part V

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VI

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VII

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VIII

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IX

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part X

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XI

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XII

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Friday, December 27, 2013

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?

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.

Links: