Commercial Poetry

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VI

As we cross the halfway mark some might speculate about what is the most obvious, common and egregious thing that poets get exactly wrong. For now, we can cross Earl Gray's Law of Poetry #1 off our list.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #1

    In the adult world, bars continue to host more poetry performances than all other types of venues combined. For the most part, we're talking about open mics and slams here.

    Libraries are the dominant venue for poetry readings but those tend to honor poets more than poems.

    Consider for a moment the things people do and do not discuss in bars. Of course, we can pick almost any topic but certain approaches will result in us talking to ourselves. For example, lectures¹, sermons¹, condescension and obscurities will soon empty the chairs at our table. Gibberish may have its place after everyone is thoroughly soused but only in tiny doses. Thus we may have "Jabberwocky" and "Epigraph: The Pismire Oration"² but not much else.

     Politics¹ and religion¹ are borderline. Because preaching to the choir is pointless and boring, most such conversations will concentrate on differences. Debates are more interesting than most diatribes but there is the chance that someone is a mean drunk. While polemics and faith may be reflected in all communication--especially before the Modern era--they were usually more visible in art forms other than poetry: sculpting, painting, theatre, and song (with the possible exception of opera).

     Tavern conversations are not always upbeat. The death of a close friend or relative might inspire an impromptu eulogy (in poetry, an elegy). As with a toast, the language won't always be informal. Similarly, poets might write occasional poems, praise poems and, yes, even toasts.

A Toast posted by Earl Gray on Vimeo.
     People can address serious issues or profound thoughts in bars [or poems³]. As Stephen Hawkings demonstrates in "A Brief History of Time", the most complex and significant concepts can be illustrated through analogy and narrative without alienating readers. Unfortunately, poets today prefer to use figurative language to complicate rather than simplify life's mysteries. The other key difference is that, having been left alone at a table, the drinker is far more aware of being ignored than someone publishing poems that few will read. The imbiber understands something few poets do: entertainment is the vehicle, if not the path or destination.

     Obviously, sex and romance will be vital themes in bar life, as they are in poetry. Without question, though, humor is the key. I'm not talking about the glib, all-too-clever dessicated "light verse" and clever allusions that bring wry smiles to stony faces. I'm talking about knee-slapping, gut-busting, piss-your-pants standup comedy.

The Evolution of Buffalo Wings

Worst Date

     If poetry is revived in this century comedy will lead the way--as it always has.

     Before I shuffle off to [eat some] Buffalo [wings], let me tie up a few loose ends. The language in Shakespeare's plays was not what one would find in bars, even during his day. It was frequently a lower class individual trying to guess how a lord or lady would speak, often with hilarious results. Of course, we bear in mind that these groups didn't frequent the same drinking establishments in the first place.

     Naturally, we avoid anachronistic language unless we have a good and obvious reason (e.g. we are writing a period piece, parody or for humorous affect/effect) for using it. What about Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnet 43", though? Outside religious colonies, hadn't people given up on "thees" and "thous" centuries earlier? Yes, but, among many other considerations, EBB's persona was speaking in the voice of an Elizabethan because, as prudish as they were, Ms. Browning's Victorian contemporaries were even more likely to raise an eyebrow at mention of "quiet needs", loving "freely" and "with passion". Think "plausible deniability" here.

Footnotes:

¹ = Rants and debates? Sure. Lectures and sermons? Not so much.

² = As far as I know, this is the only recording of Margaret A. Griffith's voice.

³ = Here we mean successful poems, which, in the absence of an audience today, must refer to verse of the past or, we hope, the future.

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

    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, 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 contact us confidentially or blog here as "Gray for a Day" please use the box below, marking your post as "Private" and including your email address; the moderator will bring your post to our attention and prevent it from appearing publicly.

    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel

Sunday, January 5, 2014

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VII

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #71

     In a thread on Eratosphere regarding the Boston Review's 20 Top Poems of 2013 it took all of three sentences and a URL before the topic was switched from poems to poets:

"Do you know these poets...?"

     By "Top Poems" the article means the most read; they are not making an aesthetic judgement. Perish the thought! They didn't include hit counts but the paucity of responses is telling. A few over-the-top cheerleaders breathlessly blurbed the first few, after which the poems were politely ignored. In essence, "Top Poems" was determined by whichever poet was able to guilt the greatest number of friends and family into viewing the fare.

     Beyond that? Even the NSA won't read this stuff.

     Regarded objectively, the poems exhibit little or no technique, are not in crowd-pleasing genres (e.g. romance, humor, drama), and are almost all the same form (i.e. text, since it is too dull to publish as prose [with or without linebreaks]).

     How would such typewriting fare in a critical environment? Here are some sample reactions from Eratosphereans:

"...didn't like any poem (about ten) I looked at..."

"...I just don't think this Boston Review material is even defensible for the most part."

   "I've seen Anne Carson's work elsewhere and have a vague recognition that most of it is not as laughable as her entry here."

    Were this posted to such a forum, these might be among the more charitable critiques. Eventually, a sympathetic senior member or moderator would suggest that, because the posters are beyond their depth, moving to a less critical/expert venue might be in order.

Peter John Ross

Let us not make light of the authors' accomplishment. It is difficult for any verser to randomize sounds and stresses to this extent, even when creating prose. We are reminded of Peter John Ross attempting to write as badly as Billy Collins, only to give up after 20 minutes, having produced a villanelle that was decidedly better than anything BC has ever authored. To this day PJR ranks this among his greatest artistic failures.

Submission guidelines perpetuate a uniformity of text, mostly self-amusing musing ("SAM"). There is a tremendous practicality and convenience in establishing this as an industry standard at both the microcosmic (i.e. all poems in all issues from the same publication) and macrocosmic (i.e. across all publications) levels. The editors are happy because they don't have to get involved in aesthetic arguments and can hope to benefit from the gratitude of the nation's professors. The job-seeking authors are happy because, with little talent or effort, they get a publication credit for their resumé. Readers? What readers? If anything, a following might actually hurt a teacher's chances of being hired. In today's topsy-turvy ethos, it is deemed admirable to pander to editors and poets but not audiences.

      Certainly, no one will be accused of editorial inconsistency. If nothing else, this conformity is a simple and elegant solution to the Watermelon problem: publish only what is plentiful. It explains why, of the five best poems of this century, only three have been published (one of them posthumously), none by a major print magazine. Notice how these publications feature poets but rarely poems. Taken together, this is a subculture that values poets, not poems.

     So why is it "backwards" to accept this reality and follow along?

      Because, as the site preamble says, our concern here is poetry that people would want to encounter.

      Apples.

      Oranges.

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

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VIII

     "'What does this poem mean?' (In my perfect world posing this question would, itself, be a fireable offense.)"

    - from "Why Your Poetry Fails - Part IV"

"But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it."

    - from "Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins

Skill - Noun; the ability, coming from one's knowledge, practice, aptitude, etc., to do something well: Carpentry was one of his many skills.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #59

One of the axioms among authorities in any skilled endeavor is that we need to practice if we hope to improve and, eventually, attract an audience. All authorities outside poetry understand that we should learn the fundamentals first; otherwise, we will have to unlearn a lot of bad habits later.

Why do so many aspiring poets disagree? There's really only one answer that makes sense: They must not recognize poetry as a skill. Let's see how this works out for them:

People who don't see the need to learn the elements of the craft often begin by writing for themselves as therapy. When they remember that their problem is a lack of attention they foist their "work" on unsuspecting, innocent friends and relatives who report that the writing is "mahvelous". Encouraged by false praise, the aspiring poet joins a vanity venue: open mic, showcase site, petting zoo workshop, whatever. Tired of canned compliments or being ignored, some may enroll in an academic echo chamber. This amounts to replacing their heart farts with Self-Amusing Musings ("SAMs"). If they stick with it they'll graduate with a six-digit debt and a degree that qualifies them to work in fast food. If they win the labor lottery they might become teachers, spending decades asking the wrong question (i.e. "What does this mean?" rather than "Will you remember this?") to students even more bored than they are. In this milieu, poems are judged solely by the amount of time classes can waste misinterpreting them. Attendance dwindles. Courses and staff are dropped. Books are published by univanity presses. No one cares.

Sound depressing? Hey, that was a best case scenario!

How does this compare to the fate enjoyed by those who do learn the basics first? At the very least, when the next "Prufrock", "Beans", "Musée des Beaux Arts" or "Studying Savonarola" pops up in half a century they will recognize it, sit back and say:

"This makes it all worthwhile."

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

Happy New Year from Earl and Pearl!

Monday, December 30, 2013

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IX

"You're crying with a loaf of bread under your arm." - old Yiddish saying.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #81

      A buddy of mine was whining at length about writer's block.

     "Wait a minute," I interjected, "don't you keep a pocket notebook or file of bon mots you're thought up on your own or have adopted or adapted from your reading?"

     "Sure," he said. "Doesn't everyone?"

   "And now you're complaining about a lack of motivating thoughts, right?"

     My friend is normally quick-witted and perceptive but, on this occasion, I needed to reiterate and rephrase my two questions eight times before he clued in and exclaimed: "Ah, I see what you're saying. I have a whole book of ideas!"

     Duh.

Tip #1:

Most poets record their brilliancies for future use in this manner and then move on with their lives. Consider another approach: Before you run out of steam and leave it, make a complete poem, using that phrase and whatever other relevant ones you find in your Quips Booklet. Overall quality isn't the issue yet. It's okay if the rest of the piece is mere outline or filler. Give it a separate file or page.

How does this help? There may be many times when you will have sufficient energy to edit a poem but not enough to finish and then edit an as-yet-incomplete work. At worst, you will be giving posthumous anthologists more to work with.

Tip #2:

     Most literature courses concentrate on the interpretive. Creative writing courses and seminars tend to overemphasis the importance of inspiration. It seems that almost no one is teaching or learning the elements of the art form. Apparently, these cart-before-the-horse individuals and institutions believe there is a dire shortage of bad poetry in the world.

     If you think WCW's "The Red Wheelbarrow" is free verse, that AnaCrusis is a Mexican Country and Western singer or that this poem:

Today,
Time has stopped.
A minute is still a minute.
An hour is still an hour.
And yet,
The past and the future
Hang in perfect balance.
All focused on the present.
A sweet flow of excitement
Warms me.
You are near.

    ...and this one:

Beyond this arid pit is life, lived
incognito. Dreams resist
our beckoning. Just coax the one
that's closest: I can see
my wife. A rose
corsage adorns her wrist; her iris
catches the voyeur sun.

I see her neckline, hem and slit
unfurl then gather like geese
in flight. At dusk we dance and turn
to tell the termagant wind
to end its fit. Two shadows
move at the speed of night
along the shadeless halls
of hell.

...are close in quality, let me suggest that the only inspiration you should seek is that which leads to assimilation of the basics of versification. Understanding them can, itself, help you avoid dry spells.

How so? The curgination and enjambment in the latter poem might inspire variations on these themes among observant poets but, of course, only if they know what curginas and enjambments are.

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

Saturday, December 28, 2013

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part X

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #18

      I don't know where people get the notion that poetry is all "Kumbaya", with everyone getting equal opportunities and time to speak. Perhaps it comes from open mics, slams, offline workshops or university presses. No matter. In real life all speech and all art competes for attention, frequently from a paltry, dwindling audience. What is more, the competition is often not fair, open or evident. It is a competition but artistic merit may be only one of the factors in play.

      For example, we have the infamous "New Yorker poem", so named because of TNY's notorious practice of publishing bad poems by celebrity poets. Such work might bump yours out of contention, only to lose out to something written by a bigger celebrity. Ç'est la vie.

      (Personally, I can understand¹ this in an insecure publication that is trying to get established. They may need that name on their masthead. For an established magazine to do this strikes me as abdicating their primary responsibility as a filter; it is elitist and, at the same time, pathetic. But I digress...)

      "My poem was published in a prominent poetry magazine, beating out thousands of others for this honor. I won the competition, right?"

      Hardly.

In fact, it wouldn't even be right to say that "the game is afoot". The real struggle hasn't begun. To be read, that poem and publication still have to be sold to an indifferent audience. Even then, readers might be more interested in the interviews and articles than the verse.

     "Okay, so the publisher and I find a way to get the lion's share of poetry readers. We even beat out the hit counts for Pixel and Stage poets. Now I'm a winner, right?"

You've won a preseason game. The championship is a long way off.

Unless we like being ignored, it's time to consider our goal and the opposition.

      Imagine two strangers on a bus, train or plane. Bored with avoiding each other's gaze or discussing the weather, sports or politics, one of them might ask:

     "What do you think of the latest James Bond flick?" Or last week's episode of "The Big Bang Theory"?²

      In the last half century you would not hear³: "What did you think of the poem in yesterday's paper?" Or of a poetry book like "Songs of a Sourdough" (as we might in 1907)? Obviously, today's poetry is outside our society's mainstream.

      Even with Internet and social media, the conversation rarely, if ever, presumes that the listener will be familiar with any given contemporary poem. Conversations about such verse, when they occur, almost invariably include a URL to bring the message recipient(s) up to speed. There are no icons. No common ground or points of reference. Thus, there is nothing of preexisting mutual interest to discuss.

      As poets, our goal is for our words to be heard and remembered as part of the culture at large.

      The bad news is that our competition is not simply every other poet vying for our publisher's favor, or even every other piece in every other publication. It is every poem, song, movie, novel, play, television or radio show, if not every pastime available to consumers today. Until everyone understands this neither your poem nor anyone else's has any practical chance of success.

      The good news is that, frankly, most of our competitors suck.

Footnotes

¹ - I don't necessarily agree with or condone it but I do understand it.

² - Perhaps we should take a tip from Shakespeare--he knew a thing or two about succeeding with poetry--and write scripts? Or from Bernie Taupin and write song lyrics?

³ - Is it worth noting that, in addition to the "It's a Bundyful Life (Part 1)" ("Married with Children", Season 4, Episode 11, airing on December 17th, 1989), we saw nothing but rhyming couplets on "Bedtime Stories" ("How I Met Your Mother", Season 9, Episode 11, airing on November 25, 2013)?

I think not.

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

Friday, December 27, 2013

12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XI

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #20

    What is poetry? More to the point, why do so many try to write it?

     Because it seems to form one gigantic paradox, this is the easiest of the twelve issues to get ass-backwards.

     Suppose you want to send a vital, private message to some friends. You dictate it to a courier, who writes it down. Fearing detection along the way, she burns the note but is successful in delivering the gist of your missive. Your information saves the day.

     Are you happy?

     If entirely so, you may be the hero of the hour, a dear friend and perhaps even a great writer but you aren't a poet and you never will be as long as you have to ask:

    "Why not?"

     Answer: Because you didn't cringe when you read about the burning and subsequent paraphrasing of your words. Because poetry is verbatim, its producers are sticklers about exact wording. They might say something like: "We are delighted that everything worked out well..." while thinking to themselves "...but we'd have been happier still had the message arrived intact."

   Poets are funny that way.

     Many students come to poetry in order to draw attention to themselves or their issues. Verse appears to be the perfect vehicle since, not only can people receive the info, they might even memorize it for future reference. Thus, poetry makes sense both theoretically and historically.

     The problem is that it makes no sense in practice or at present. First, as an art form poetry is better suited to the timeless rather than the timely. Second, there is no audience for poetry; one has to be earned each and every generation, not just by you but by poets in general. That hasn't happened.

     Insofar as selecting poetry as the medium for your message is concerned, the only thing worse than your choice is your timing.

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

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: