I've put all the prior Airy Poetics posts in chronological order and linked to them on the right side of the blog, up top, under "About the Scoplaw Blog."
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Where we are in this Ramble:
While I’ve been constructing this poetics on the fly, and without recourse to a planned outline, I think I’ve been pretty clear about my vision of how the CAP environment is currently populated:
Limiting our discussion to poets which crest over a “threshold” level of individual skill and general poetics knowledge, we’re faced with many overlapping sets of competing poetics (schools) vying for limited resources in terms of a) traditional publication and b) “literary/educational” employment which allows for the production or promotion of one’s own work and school.
School-based analysis has a number of drawbacks, including the fact that individual poets can write specific poems which embrace different poetics. Also poets can “cross” schools in the production/promotion sphere by championing the work of poets outside their own school, but this is becoming rarer.
I used my own story as an example, and spent a bit of time on the primary contemporary device for poets acquiring skills/poetics (the workshop) and it’s shortcomings (which influence poetics).
Poetics and politics are to a degree linked and both are inescapable when considering a) any specific poem, b) the main thrust of a poet’s work (or any discrete subsection of the poet’s overall work). All kinds of poetry *via their form* say something (to an extent) about the nature of language, the expected audience, the poet’s political stance, and the nature of art/aesthetics/communication. The poem’s form interacts with to undercut (rarely) or reinforce (often) the overt subject of the poem, which, in much the same way, is *always* political/social.
Further, I believe that a “false-consciousness” permeates the way many people think about society and politics in America, and that this false consciousness is embodied in poems of all types and forms. However, I think that some poetry manages an arresting strangeness/familiarity which results in a personal/emotional/moral/intellectual/spiritual/psychological exchange between the reader and the poem that resonates across their shared humanity. The poetry that does this draws from a number of different schools and techniques – it is not predicated on any one narrow poetics, but I will argue that such affecting poetry could loosely be labeled as its own poetics and thus precludes certain strategies and devices.
So – onward to Additional Points/Examples/Thoughts:
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“Spectrum” of Poetics and the "Center-Point"
While we could construct a “centerpoint” for poetry in terms of a median point for published poetry (again, over a certain threshold level).
Another way to look at our half-mythical “centerpoint” is to imagine it as the center of a ven diagram of overlapping poetics. Or, if we were to draw ven diagrams for the majority of “issues” that poetics address, weighing those poetics for their relative popularity, we would select the combination of characteristics that capture the centerpoint in a variety of issues.
Caveats: Please note, as with politics above, I don’t think this centerpoint represents a balanced or rational or irrational approach to poetics – it’s just a handy tool for what we'll be talking about. It’s important to understand that this centerpoint (as poetry generally lacks the approbation of society at large) has no rock solid claim on being the best or only way to write, but poets who write closer to the center may well enjoy a greater number of venues for traditional publication and literary/educational employment, hence there’s a kind of self-validation/reinforcement to any given point on the spectrum. It’s entirely possible that this “centerpoint” often produces poetry written to a kind of “false-consciousness.” It’s also entirely possible that the “vanguard” is moving in the wrong direction, and/or that the traditionalists are outdated and out of touch. More on this later, but I just wanted to note that we’re not dealing with any inevitable conclusions based on relative structure of poems or where schools (often self-consciously) locate themselves on the spectrum. I also don’t want to suggest that this centerpoint is in any way prescriptively normative.
To indulge in a quick analogy, consider one of the problems in discussing the overlapping poetry/politics problem as being rather like accents; there is no such thing as “Unaccented English.” One always speaks with an accent, and what we think of as “unaccented” (Midwestern/radio/TV) English is just one accent among many that many of us have overtly or implicitly agreed to view as “unaccented” or “base” English. (Yet to a Kiwi, it’s obviously an American accent.) The accent one chooses/uses says something about where you come from and mobalizes many cultural assumptions about how things are (both incorrect stereotypical values attributed to the speaker and more-often-than-not-correct “factual” values, such as country/culture of origin (which in itself might not be useful as a predictor of any one thing about the individual.) Think of meeting someone with a deep Southern accent, a Boston accent, an Australian accent, an Oxfordshire accent, a BSE “accent,” and Irish accent. (Let’s leave aside the accent/dialect debate for the moment.) ))
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Telling the Reader What to Think
In contemporary workshops, didactic poetry is often, and for good reason, frowned on. As readers, as people, we generally like to make up our own minds about things. Thus, the injunction is that it’s often better to “show” and not “tell” – meaning you present the reader with a poem that invites them, based on the “evidence” the poem puts forward, to come to conclusions on their own, conclusions which will hopefully resonate with what the poet thinks ought to be. The poet’s job, in some sense, is to convince the reader of “what is” in such a profound way that the reader does not abandon that understanding on the second or third read of the poem. (Coleridge articulated this idea when he wrote that that “not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.”) There’s another argument for showing rather than telling – namely that to show something effectively you must first understand it in a nuanced way – for example, nuanced enough to use emblematic detail in an organic way. Thus the injunction to show is an injunction to know.
Sometimes, regardless of the level of understanding, it’s easy to approach established topics and subjects via established forms and tropes, which add structural power to the poem’s “argument” due to their familiarity. To reach the broadest audience, we could write about non-alarming things, in a non-alarming manner, in a way that gently leads the reader to understand something they more or less always understood? (but have not overtly thought on?) You could switch “alarming” with “challenging” to make a slightly different argument, both of which are fairly common.
Depending on one’s poetical/political views, this traditionally leads in two different directions: Poets may try to do the above in an effort to win readers, regardless if this reinforces a false consciousness or not. Poets may also choose radical ideas and forms in an effort to promote a consciousness that is more “true” to what they think society is and ought to be.
This is an almost impossible area to survey for sheer volume. But via a quick list, one can see how various combinations of form/subject might work:
- Accepted/Understood Subject in an Accepted/Understood Mode
- Challenging Subject in an Accepted/Understood Mode
- Accepted/Understood subject in a Challenging Mode
- Challenging Subject in a Challenging Mode
I think the above, top to bottom, *generally* represent literary acceptance at the “centerpoint.” Or you could switch 2 and 3. Keep in mind these are *relative* things – it may be that a mildly challenging poem is in fact “accepted/understood” as giving some small pleasure in stretching our boundries, but that “mildly challenging subject” might categorically exclude serious examinations of race, class, gender, or, often worst of all, human love and motivations. On the bottom of the scale – something that’s technically challenging to read/parse and employs subtle distinctions on esoteric topics might well not enjoy breadth of readership.
This kind of scale can be plugged into my “writing for publication” argument above – to enjoy the broadest chance of periodic publication, one ought to locate one’s poetics closely to the poetics evidenced by those publications. As I pointed out, this often results in not writing toward the bottom of the scale.
We can also particularize that scale and apply it *within* a shared or individual poetics, meaning that an individual can write “easier” or “harder.” Formalists looking for acclaim by other formalists might then want to break some but not too many rules. Avant writers might want to include certain “hooks” that makes their writing attractive to their peers – attractive enough to warrant it being referred to other poets.
The scale, of course, depends on one’s conception of audience – if you’re writing for an educated academic white middle-and-upper class leftist audience, you’re going to produce a certain valence of poem, regardless of poetics.
So, with the conception of multiple audiences, it does not always follow that politically and socially conservative writers will hew to trite subjects in established forms, or that liberal activist writers will attempt to challenge society by producing consciousness-shifting works, *although* that may seem to be the case from the centerpoint.
But let’s step back to the centerpoint and assume that general truism for a moment; the question (for me) then becomes what’s the difference between “Accepted/Challenging” and “Boring/Just way out there?” At a certain point I think you can fall off a communicative map into a solipsistic void. At the other end of the scale, I think you can end up with Hallmark Verse. Lots of writers have talked about this kind of scale. In the reading list I threw out above, Mary Karr, in her essay, Against Decoration, argues in part that there’s a genteel poetry, like that written by the late James Merrill, located toward the conservative end of my scale. Brendan Galvin takes mushy neo-surrealism to task in Mumblings of a Young Werther. Steve Kowit does something a bit different, going after “the difficult” poem of obscurist modernism and its heirs; he argues in part that there’s a “mystique” to reading “difficult” poetry. I’d locate that kind of poetry toward the end of the spectrum Galvin does such a good job of flogging, but distinguish it in its technical mastery and actual (though impossibly dense) encoding of sophisticated ideas; but the point is that people often confuse “good” poetry with “difficult” poetry.
I think it’s crucial to return to the reader here.
Consider the different kinds of readerships – the poet, friends of the poet, students of the poet, other poets, people who read X kind of poetry on-line, people who read all kinds of poetry, etc. and consider that these readers, whatever their structural relationship to the poet’s work (in the sense that they encounter it somewhere), have their *own poetic preferences.* (Few read “poetry” as few read “the novel” – in all its varied forms.)
Lets assume that you want to write what I call “Mandala Poetry” – this would be poetry that sets up a field of loosely connected images and thoughts, which the reader is free to negotiate and muse on (and often write out of themselves). Presuming readers of Mandala poetry exist (they do), then one can write easy or challenging Mandala poetry. No harm, no foul, no fuss? Similarly, if you’re writing for rich socialites who want to have their view of the world largely confirmed, you can pen pretty little sonnets about how spring follows winter, with no hint of social reprobation whatsoever. No harm, foul, fuss?
Perhaps. The answer depends on what you think is going on with society. Personally, as I said, I think it’s pretty clear that we have a false-consciousness regarding a number of things, or, at least, a public dialogue which employs terms and positions that have very little ability to accurate show “how things are.” Thus, writing poetry that reinforces this dialogue, is, in many ways, deeply problematic for me. Similarly, writing poetry that falls off the map for it’s esoteric or abstruse nature is ineffectual, and similarly reinforces that false consciousness by relegating what might be plausible or better alternatives to the a select few who most likely already understand those ideas.
If you think readers are going to group to schools, then you might have an argument that you’re simply choosing your side in things and slogging forward, whipping up the converted.
But there are at least two problems with this view: first new readers come to poetry every day as they grow (up?) into it through the educational system. Creating a new “school” to entice new readers is possible. Second, readers can cross poetry camps – I’ve done it as a poet. I’d also propose a kind of readership out there which I’ll dub Potential Readership; these are people of ordinary intelligence, average (finished) education, and some normal level of curiosity about the world. I’d like to think they can read (types) poetry.
Skill in the Service of?
So if I was going to propose a socially/politically responsible poetry which could pull in new readers, cross readers, I’d characterize it as a poetry that’s complex (and offers the solaces of that complexity), but is easy to understand/parse, and shows the world from a more accurate understanding of “how things are.” I’m not saying this proposed poetry must be polemic; the poems can be from my third category of “everyday” political poems.
As far as the form goes, we’d want something that does not rely on formal devices that are not easy for new readers to pick up. It seems to me that the best bet is straight-up free verse sonics – which create patterns discernable to readers without being off putting and without drawing on the socializing and legitimizing force of inherited forms. However, this would not preclude some inherited forms.
As far as Subject goes, well, there’s a whole can of worms distinguishing between subject, topic, theme, etc. Suffice to say that the subject probably shouldn’t be “the form” (as one can write meaningless but gorgeous runs of sound, formal and free.) Subject should honestly articulate that “humanistic” understanding I spoke about and strive for that personal connection to a reader. That one can never reach all humans on the planet shouldn’t preclude this from being a goal of socially/politically responsible poetry.
In other words, you'd want to avoid writing poems that:
- Are too difficult to understand/parse through esotericness or obtuseness (subject)
- Positively reinforce false-consciousness (subject)
- Are too formally esoteric (aesthetic appreciation requires specialized knowledge )
- Are too aesthetically flaccid (i.e., may as well be an essay)
In favor of poems that:
- Are easy to understand/parse (subject)
- Positively work to reinforce true consciousness
- Are easy to appreciate and give the consolation of a well made thing
I’m not going to work them all out, but you can put together several combinations of these that seem useful. Please keep in mind that there are other categories we could use, and that we’re looking at this from a kind of fictional centralist Contemporary American perspective:
Difficult Parse, False Consciousness, Formally Esoteric/Flacid –Pound, Milton, Ted Hughes, Yeats, Black Mountain School
Difficult Parse, False Consciousness, Easy Aesthetics – Eliot, Spencer, Maya Angelou, Muldoon, Surrealism, Ashbery, Stevens
Difficult Parse, True Consciousness, Formally Esoteric/Flacid – Langpo, Lowell, Shakespeare, Metaphysicals, Jorie Graham, Dickinson, Hopkins.
Difficult Parse, True Consciousness, Easy Aesthetics – Crane, Lorde, H.D., Gilbert, Levis
Easy Parse, False Consciousness, Formally Esoteric/Flacid – Plath, most NeoFormalism, Amy Lowell, Pope
Easy Parse, False Consciousness, Easy Aesthetics – Merrill, P. Larkin, New Sincerity (tough), Bukowski, W Matthews, Some Identity Writing, Bly, Sexton, O’Hara, Kooser, Olds, Kippling
Easy Parse, True Consciousness, Formally Esoteric/Flacid – Hayden, Langston Hughes, Ginsberg, Basho, Owen, Seamus Heaney, Auden, Bishop, Sandberg (flaccid)
Easy Parse, True Consciousness, Easy Aesthetics – Doty, Dobyns, Lux, Collins, Nelson, Van Jordan, Li Po, Some Identity Writing, Szymborska, ee cummings, Bishop, Basho, Clifton, Creeley, Whitman, Levine, Paz, WCW, Wright (late)
This is **a toy** and you can make easy arguments both for and against “true and false consciousness” for many of these poets based on certain poems. For example, Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” is moderately hard to parse, but is what I’d call true consciousness, and easy aesthetics. Lowell’s sonnets get a strike on all three. It’s not like we’re dealing with Enlightened Beings v. Demons here. (This exercise runs afoul of my argument about the shortcomings of looking at Poets instead of Poems, but we’ll succumb for a bit and use it ass a quick shorthand.) It’s fun to see where some of these come out. Where the hell would you put Neruda?
This is basically a kind of semi-refined "school" analysis, but, again, it suffers from all the structural limitations of school analysis as shown above. It also fails to adopt cultural relativity.
I’ll look at dealing with necessarily “difficult” poetry in bit and “dumbing down” poetry.
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I think we have a number of poems that meet this criteria – and what’s not odd at all is that many of them appear in the “best loved” poetry projects that are out there.
I think I’d like to look at these ideas in the field of individual poems. So that’s what I’ll do next.
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