Poems

In my experience, poetry more than any other art form offers a plethora of aesthetics, a multitudinous array of ways to react to it, many that are at direct odds with each other as far as criteria for what makes a poem within that aesthetic "successful" or not.

Poetry as a whole is very inclusive, and takes moves from both visual art (image, composition, use of white space) and music (rhythm, permutations of rhyme, assonance and alliteration, collaboration, diction, etc). There are many ways to read a poem. There are as many if not more ways to write them.

Personally, I think a reader should not have to think very hard to determine if a piece of art is moving or not. Art should grab us by the throat at the very beginning and pummel us with meaningful surprises all the way through.

But this is not always the case, not for art in general, nor for many poetic aesthetics out there (I'm looking at you, language poetry, New York school, etc). I get really annoyed when the artist has to explain zir art, or they hide some secret knowledge that the reader cannot glean from the piece that is the key to its interpretation. Art should not champion inaccessibility--this is a route to a swift death, perhaps of the whole medium, and some say poetry is already there--a dead art. Of course, poetry is not dead. As long as people speak, there will be poetry.

But people still fear poetry. It has a scary rep in American culture, probably because so many people are exposed to it at such an age (adolescence) where they have not yet been challenged to think outside of black versus white, good versus bad, all those binaries and fallacies and clever aphorisms they've internalized from a culture that seeks to dumb things down and oversimplify. I'm not trying to say that poetry is complicated--rather, I'm arguing that poetry allows for a truth that is tied to the observer and the moment of observation. In successful poetry, there is no right answer, there is only an impression, communicated with urgency, via intentional language that grinds against the rest of the world. In this way do people think they do not "get" poetry. The challenge is not in figuring out what the poem means, or what happens in the poem. For me, the challenge arises from allowing the poem to let you feel like the poem does, and readers can achieve this by paying attention to the language in the poem.

"Paying attention to the language" sounds vague, and it is. Language = every idea that could ever be constructed; therefore paying attention to language asks for a greater level of attention paid than, say, paying attention to traffic, or to a parental lecture, or to a job training video, to a cooking timer. I find it productive to look for strangenesses, places where a thing is described or phrased in an un-usual manner, or in a way that calls attention to itself. It's usually being described that way for a reason.

For me, the best poetry asks you to do none of this. It is a romp from the first word to the last, and the poem is fun and exciting to inhabit, pulls you through with a type of anticipation magnet and finishes with a muted bang. Authors like Dean Young and Marc McKee work like this for me especially. Reading them is very different from reading someone like Louise Gluck or Robert Hass, or Larry Levis even. Some authors speed up the world, others tend to slow it down (not as exciting, but sometimes we aren't looking to be excited), while others try to represent it accurately (journalists).

Poetry can do a ton of work in a very small space, charge words that would usually never see a spark, find meaning where we never thought it could exist (my favorite). Granted, there is a lot of bad poetry out there. A LOT. I blame this on high school. I also blame this on rock n roll, rap, pop music, the consumer culture sort of environments where language exists primarily (though not always!) to make clever rhymes and sell a cheap idea of sex to the broadest audience possible and nothing more.

Poetry may start from an experience (but it does't have to!), but it has to go beyond the experience. If you want to tell me about your experience, please write me an essay. If you want to show me how your experience has implications for people besides you, we're on the right track. If your experience throws into question something that has been commonly accepted to be true, then great. If your experience was such a trip that normal language, grammar, syntax, or vocabulary cannot accurately convey it, that's the stuff.

I don't want to turn people off to the writing of poetry by giving these proscriptions and limitations. We all have to stumble around for a long time before we learn how to walk. Give yourself license to fail, and eventually, with effort and a little guidance, you'll have given yourself more opportunities to succeed than most people ever have.

Continued in next post!

-J