I've been reading Mean Boy by Lynn Coady and absolutely fucking loving it. It's been bringing up some questions so I'm gonna be doing the next few blogs about some of those questions.
The first one is about poetry. I don't get poetry. That doesn't mean I don't like it, it just means my mind doesn't seem to be able to comprehend something about it, its forms or how to analyze it. I like quite a bit of poetry actually, check out Inconsequential's blog for some of my favourite stuff. Reading that blog is like reading Terry Pratchett - it makes you wonder at how someone can be so prolific with their art and have so much of it be good. Quantity and quality.
Mean Boy has a bunch of students at a grad program in Creative Writing in Atlantic Canada. They are all poets and have gone to study at this university because it has a new trailblazing canadian poet as the head of that creative writing program. They are reviewing a student's poem:
The first one is about poetry. I don't get poetry. That doesn't mean I don't like it, it just means my mind doesn't seem to be able to comprehend something about it, its forms or how to analyze it. I like quite a bit of poetry actually, check out Inconsequential's blog for some of my favourite stuff. Reading that blog is like reading Terry Pratchett - it makes you wonder at how someone can be so prolific with their art and have so much of it be good. Quantity and quality.
Mean Boy has a bunch of students at a grad program in Creative Writing in Atlantic Canada. They are all poets and have gone to study at this university because it has a new trailblazing canadian poet as the head of that creative writing program. They are reviewing a student's poem:
west
we wind
on
the
endless trek
a
way
in hopes of
harvest
And the main character (who is a student) responds with "Okay, come on now, if you write it all out as a sentence it's completely - banal." ..."Like," I say, "if you just scatter words around on the page, is this supposed to imbue them with some kind of supplementary depth? Does just sprinkling them around like that make a sentence poetry?"
And this is pretty much the crux of my non-understanding of poetry, especially free verse. I am firmly in the camp that believes that writing
My
we wind
on
the
endless trek
a
way
in hopes of
harvest
And the main character (who is a student) responds with "Okay, come on now, if you write it all out as a sentence it's completely - banal." ..."Like," I say, "if you just scatter words around on the page, is this supposed to imbue them with some kind of supplementary depth? Does just sprinkling them around like that make a sentence poetry?"
And this is pretty much the crux of my non-understanding of poetry, especially free verse. I am firmly in the camp that believes that writing
My
name
is
is
Tania
Does not make the sentence "my name is tania" a poem. And it pisses me off when I see statements like that written as poetry (almost as much as not being able to properly format poem spaces on blogger). But at the same time, the sprinkling around of words on a page is what makes a poem poetry. In my limited understanding, the way you sprinkle those words around indicates the breaths, the pauses, the intonation of these phrases and those things are part of what breathe life into a poem, they make a statement into poetry. Those pauses etc add meaning to a statement. And the sprinkling also creates a visual creation of the words on the page, they create a picture both with the image created in your mind and with the image of the words on the page. So in a sense, yes, scattering words on a page does imbue them with meaning. I mean, the humour in this poem from Gay Haiku just doesn't come across if you don't scatter the words in this way.
I don't understand.
You love it when I do that--
Wait, no. That's Stephen.
So in free verse, how the hell can you tell if a statement should have remained a statement or if it is, in fact, a poem? Do you have to go around turning all free verse poems into sentences to compare and see if the scattering served any purpose? It's all so vague, and I generally like vagueness, but in art it can tend to allow the freedom for genius or the freedom of total laziness, where someone can think they are a poet if they write their name on two lines instead of one. But it's not just the laziness, it's the fact that I often see long free verse poems and think they would be better as prose, and don't quite understand why the author has chosen to sprinkle the words - I guess because I either don't get it (fully possible) or because the poet has not used the spacing to good effect. To use Inconsequential as an example, I never read those poems and think "what would that sound like as just a sentence?" because the poems work so perfectly as they are.
Anyway, if someone can shed some light on poetry, I'm always interested as despite ridiculous amounts of education in literature, I still just don't get free verse poetry. And perhaps that's the whole point, let it be vague, let it be grey.
Does not make the sentence "my name is tania" a poem. And it pisses me off when I see statements like that written as poetry (almost as much as not being able to properly format poem spaces on blogger). But at the same time, the sprinkling around of words on a page is what makes a poem poetry. In my limited understanding, the way you sprinkle those words around indicates the breaths, the pauses, the intonation of these phrases and those things are part of what breathe life into a poem, they make a statement into poetry. Those pauses etc add meaning to a statement. And the sprinkling also creates a visual creation of the words on the page, they create a picture both with the image created in your mind and with the image of the words on the page. So in a sense, yes, scattering words on a page does imbue them with meaning. I mean, the humour in this poem from Gay Haiku just doesn't come across if you don't scatter the words in this way.
I don't understand.
You love it when I do that--
Wait, no. That's Stephen.
So in free verse, how the hell can you tell if a statement should have remained a statement or if it is, in fact, a poem? Do you have to go around turning all free verse poems into sentences to compare and see if the scattering served any purpose? It's all so vague, and I generally like vagueness, but in art it can tend to allow the freedom for genius or the freedom of total laziness, where someone can think they are a poet if they write their name on two lines instead of one. But it's not just the laziness, it's the fact that I often see long free verse poems and think they would be better as prose, and don't quite understand why the author has chosen to sprinkle the words - I guess because I either don't get it (fully possible) or because the poet has not used the spacing to good effect. To use Inconsequential as an example, I never read those poems and think "what would that sound like as just a sentence?" because the poems work so perfectly as they are.
Anyway, if someone can shed some light on poetry, I'm always interested as despite ridiculous amounts of education in literature, I still just don't get free verse poetry. And perhaps that's the whole point, let it be vague, let it be grey.
5 Comments:
Inconsequential is very good! I think. But I too do not swim easily in poetry. Never fear drowning but rather stubbing body parts in shallow waters.
But I do like Dylan Thomas esp Under Milk Wood which is also classified as a play. And why and how? The same element I find in his best short stories are that you cannot ignore the words.
In some fiction there is a wonderful transparency that allows you to soar through the narrative without thought to how you are staying aloft but I have rarely seen poetry quite like that.
In the stuff I am talking about, you almost don't care what the content is (you really do but word choices are so breathtaking that you can't ignore them).
Example (Opening para of Under Milk Wood): "It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the
cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courter's-and-rabbits' wood limping
invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing
sea. The houses are are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the
snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by
the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows'
weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now."
Some might argue this is not poetry but I think it is. You cannot sidestep the words. In fact, it is hard for me to read this without starting to actually form the words, something that doesn't happen all that often with most prose.
The gay haiku was perfect - we were at a drunken gathering last night where S was convinced by work mates to come to your party. He has to work that night and they were dumbfounded by the idea that this wasn't an important enough reason to take the night off.
Stephen King writes some joyously cutting comments about students writing poetry and how wanky they often are. As though they hope to hide the lack of skill/meaning/depth behind leaving words in odd places about the page. And I agree with what you and he say about that sort of poetry. But I do like haiku and some sonnets because in order to write one you have to conform to a pattern and leave out the extranious shit that clutters too much of writing.
I don't think free verse should be allowed to hide emptyness behind laziness, but I don't think the good stuff does.
From Ezra Pound:
O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.
Now, that isn't wanky, is free verse and says something. TS Elliot is also in this camp. They broke away from what was being done and made something good. And just as there are a tonne of bad actors, there are a tonne of bad poets who don't know enough about what foundational skills they need. But then - for me at least - part of the problem is that poetry is not really taught well (lack of understanding on teacher's part) and a lot of it is based on historical and political situations/elements leaving those of us who don't know about what was going on at the time bored silly.
This is shit (or it needs more to make it not shit):
west
we wind
on
the
endless trek
a
way
in hopes of
harvest
This is one of my favourite poems:
This Is Just To Say (William Carlos Williams)
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
I'm not sure why one is shit and the other is beautiful. But there you are.
i suppose one is just sprinkling for sprinklings'sake and the other has a judicious use of sprinkles?
i seriously have no idea. it makes it seem all quite arbitrary.
i think something about what paul said is right, that the words somehow matter more in poetry. that they have to be the exact right ones in order to induce the "feeling" of the poem in so few lines.
needless to say, i'm still wandering around like Amelie's father from the French movie muttering "je ne comprends pas"
thanks for the new poems guys, all quite lovely.
Wee Yin,
Free verse poetry
Fucking
Sucks ass.
I was going to make a more substantive point, but your friend Devon pretty much expressed my feelings, including (spookily) a reference to TS Eliot. For what it's worth, my thoughts are that the skill inherent in poetry centre around either the application of rhythm and/or rhyme or the weaving of interesting and sometimes cryptic referencing of works one should be familiar with (insert fawning reference to Eliot here). Anything else is lazy and vapid.
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