Internet poetry fills a need
So-called “internet poetry” is a phenomenon I knew nothing about till I saw this critique of it by Rebecca Watts. Although the author finds the genre completely abominable, nevertheless her piece contains within itself some answers to the question of why people are drawn to internet poetry.
Poetry used to be rhythmic, mostly rhyming although not always, with a music within its words. In all eras, most poetry that was written was either bad or mediocre, because genius is rare. But in the past, the great poets of the last few centuries wrote works that were neither meaningless nor obscure in meaning. They had a lot to say, and it was written in a tremendously skillful manner that was nevertheless accessible to most people with only a little effort. Even mediocre poetry of the time had some of those characteristics.
But go to almost any literary magazine these days and the vast majority of what you read will be unintelligible, perhaps offensive, and/or on a subject about which the vast majority of people simply do not care. Today’s poetry is also often prose made to scan in “poetic”-looking lines rather than being actual poetry (according to traditional definitions). Many of these newer poems could just as easily have been written as a prose paragraph—and that, oddly enough, is a characteristic of the schlocky internet poetry that Rebecca Watts criticizes so very harshly.
(As an aside, I’ll add that Watts cannot resist what I call Trump Tourette’s, the need to mention him in an essay that has zero to do with him. In fact, she is so afflicted that she mentions him three times).
I actually agree that the internet poetry Watts cites is pretty terrible. But a great many people are probably relieved to find it at all, because it satisfies a need for poetry that isn’t being filled by academic “literary” poetry. The only need most academic literary poetry of today fills is the need for professors of poetry to have something to do, and for their students to also have something to do. The need filled by internet poetry is both linguistic—to read something “poetic” rather than prosaic—and emotional—to read something that touches the heart. Literary poetry used to do both, but now very rarely does either.
I decided to look up Watts’ own work, and found four poems of hers here. They are actually quite accessible, which makes her poetry a bit unusual these days in that respect. But they are examples of what I mean when I say that many modern poems might just as well be written as prose. Who on earth would ever want to memorize these poems, and who (other than Watts herself) would feel any deep emotional connection to them?
Not me. And she is definitely one of the better poets of today in the sense that at least the meaning of her poems is not obscure.
For a contrast, take a look (for example) at the periodical Granta, a literary magazine that’s not especially pedantic but is rather typical. I defy anyone not in poetic academia to like the poems there or to care about them (as examples, see this, this, this, and this).
I originally had wanted to read all the poems on this list from Granta, but I just couldn’t get through it; my boredom with them was too profound. And I am a poetry lover and a poetry writer, and have been my entire life.
Read Kipling.
When my wife and I were together the first time (40 years ago)_ I used to read poetry to her. A favorite was “The Snake” by DH Lawrence
Another is “My Last Duchess,” by Robert Browning.
Wow, those Watts poems are really bad. The map poem in particular reads like parody. Depressing to read in a different way than the Granta work; I think Watts is more painful for me because she sounds like she thinks she is saying something, but it really doesn’t come across. The Granta people sound like they are just messing around, experimenting with words, which is boring but doesn’t make me cringe (maybe just because it’s impossible to read, I can’t imagine trying to plow through that sort of material). I really like poetry, too, and write a little, and don’t understand why so much terrible poetry gets published.
Mary Oliver has a nice book about poetry that would be great to give to a young person trying to write it (or any age person who wants to write poetry and/or learn more about it), Rules of the Dance: A Handbook for Reading and Writing Metrical Verse. She makes the case that you have to master metrical verse before you can move past it. That helps explain why (much, not all, of) Oliver’s free verse is so much better than most of what’s out there.
A poet I’m revisiting right now, one of my favorites but I hadn’t read all her work so I finally purchased the collected poems, is May Swenson. Very unusual work, it is not traditional at all, in fact some of it is quite experimental, but Swenson is a great poet, her use of language is gorgeous and the content is always interesting and often deep.
I dip into current poetry occasionally and noticed Rupi Kaur’s “Milk and Honey” some months back. My reaction was basically neo’s:
But a great many people are probably relieved to find it at all, because it satisfies a need for poetry that isn’t being filled by academic “literary” poetry.
Once upon a time, as a poet among poets, I would defend earlier poets such as Lois Wyse and Rod McKuen who wrote for a similar audience as Kaur, though McKuen certainly and Wyse somewhat had more meat on the bones than Kaur.
However, most poets preferred to focus on their own creative expression — the audience be damned. They rather resented my point that maybe they might express themselves in a way to connect with an audience beyond editors and other poets.
Sarah Rolph: May Swenson is a great example of a poet who hits the sweet spot between art and accessibility. I am always overcome when I read this one:
_________________________________
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?
–May Swenson
huxley:
That one gives me the chills, which is always a good sign with poetry.
The chaff-to-wheat ratio in poetry has always been high, but until quite recently the audiences have been limited to personal friends, lovers, and editors of small magazines. Which group oddly enough could be described by a Venn diagram of concentric circles.
There is a vast population which is moved by, for example, the poems of Kipling, which is why I gave a copy of the collected poems to my son when he went off the Marine Boot Camp. I owe the affections of an old girl friend (note space, alas) to giving her a copy of the Sonnets of William Shakespeare.
But they occupy an important part of the common culture. Not ‘common’, in the sense of lowest common denominator. but shared. When I say ‘I have heard the mermaids singing each to each / I do not thing that they will sing to me”, I get blank looks. I zap a copy to their smart phone, and say ‘Read it!’ Blank looks. Wazzat? Okay, let me read it TO you. ‘Wow! That’s different!’ Here, use my hanky.
The Watts’ poetry is truly execrable, utterly awful. I do recommend a good bit of the work of Frank Bidart, the real deal. And thank you, Huxley, for that wonderful May Swenson poem.
The modern tendency is for poets to write about themselves. Boring. There was a time when poetry was a craft and craftsmen like Tennyson could write beautifully about other things.
Read some of the four linked samples, couldn’t finish the stream of consciousness–I guess these supposed “poets” are actually conscious when they write this crap–word salad, or whatever the hell these dreadful things were.
I can compete.
Might as well just hook up the old random word generator, and churn out reams of such “poetry.”
Or, perhaps, the old cage full of monkeys banging on keyboards approach would do.
Browning: “Duchess” is good, but my favorite is the “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.”
Stevens: “Sunday Morning”. Then, Peter Quince.
Yeats: “Sailing to Byzantium”. Then, “The Second Coming”.
Eliot: The first of the “Preludes”.
But there is so very much wonderful poetry in English….
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale….
Some years ago, in the same time frame when I subscribed briefly to Granta, I came across a “poetry” quarterly. No only was it unreadable, but in their advice to people who though they might like to submit a poem for consideration they even explained they would reject any poem with rhyme or meter. Huh? Why not just write some prose with weird and offbeat indentation? That’s all this was.
And then You write this post, Neo. Spot on! But still I ask, do these people publish this stuff because they cannot write poetry, or is there something I fail to grasp about the new poetry? I’m going with the first option.
Thanks for this post.
The thing I like about “Duchess” is the undercurrent of malice and evil.
She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ‘t was all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, ‘Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark’—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
—E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.
Edit for one and not the other.
The only need most academic literary poetry of today fills is the need for professors of poetry to have something to do, and for their students to also have something to do.
Took the words right out of my mouth Neo.
In addition, the way poetry was taught in my high school and college English classes eliminated for decades my liking of poetry. The Junior Literary Critic model of teaching composition compelled me to look for some alleged symbolism metaphor simile- what have you -in poetry. This meant that I was not writing about what I knew, but about some BS conjectures the teacher wanted me to write about.
There is a rhythm – and usually rhyme- about poetry that attracts listeners. For decades after 8th grade, I remembered these lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
No high school or college English class I had ever mentioned the rhyme and rhythm of poetry.
I once substituted in a 5th grade class where the teacher had had success- as judged by improved achievement and behavior- in having problem students memorize poetry. Being able to recite poetry in front of the class gave students what they all crave- undivided attention of the whole class. Similarly, in order to get that undivided attention, they had to reciprocate and also give their undivided attention when listening to others recite poetry. Win-win.
When I was a 5th grade student, we were assigned Casey at the Bat to memorize and recite. I hammed up my recitation- had fun doing it. There was, however, an unanticipated consequence. I had to recite the poem in an all-school assembly. I wasn’t ready for that! Reciting in front of my own class was fine, but to recite on stage to all 8 grades wasn’t my cup of tea.
Popular songs have helped fill the poetry void- at least the void of poetry that the vox populi can identify with. Tens of millions know many song lyrics by heart.
Mike K:
Edit is a fickle mistress.
Without a classical education (the kind the handed out pre-WW1) reading and writing real poetry is an oddity. If there’s any justice in the universe, when the culture wars are over, Progressives will sit in re-education camps and transcribe Kipling in their copybooks until they understand where they went wrong.
And though I lack sufficient Latin to really read Lucretius, it’s possible De Rerum Natura is the greatest poem of all time. Despite a thousand year campaign to destroy it, people kept making copies. And then, because the universe may indeed have a sense of humor, a copy turned up in Pompeii.
Malice and evil? I’ll give you malice and evil !!! ;>)
Soliloquy on a Spanish Cloister
Gr-r-r–there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims–
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!
At the meal we sit together;
Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt;
What’s the Latin name for “parsley”?
What’s the Greek name for “swine’s snout”?
Whew! We’ll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere ‘tis fit to touch our chaps–
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)
Saint, forsooth! While Brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
–Can’t I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as ‘twere a Barbary corsair’s?
(That is, if he’d let it show!)
When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu’s praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange pulp–
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
While he drains his at one gulp!
Oh, those melons! if he’s able
We’re to have a feast; so nice!
One goes to the Abbot’s table,
All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double?
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange!–And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!
There’s a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine district damnations,
One sure, if another fails;
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?
Or, my scrofulous French novel
On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe;
If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in’t?
Or, there’s Satan!–one might venture
Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he’d miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine…
‘St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratia
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r–you swine!
[“Over the top?” Oh, surely not!]
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/soliloquy-spanish-cloister
It is accursed and foul –
This beast we call free verse
Makes all true poets howl,
Beg the writer – pray turn terse!-
Or better yet, be thorough silent,
Lose your tongue from out your head,
Drop your pen from hand corrupted,
Sit you down wi’th’ honored dead
Where maybe yet you’ll learn
What power true verse can bear
Alas! the world may well burn
Ere truth for such laid bare.
Eh… it’s first-draft, so sue me….
What is a sandwich
Other than an excuse to eat mayonnaise?
There is no vantage
There is only those left behind.
That which is simple
Can only be complicated
By intellectuals
Divorced for the reality of the ages.
Dear Alice, first born
Holding you in my arms straight from the womb,
Changed my life forever.
Yours truly. And I am not a poet.
From not for.
Philip:
That is excellent! Well done, milad! Are you sure you’re not R. Browning wearing a Philip suit?
Save a slight scansion problem near the end, very, very good. Thank you!
parker,
This:
Still, one might suspect you of having been at the Orwell again…. *grin*
Thanks, Julie. I’m glad you liked it. I see you’re right about the meter. Well, maybe I’ll work on it a bit.
I am not R. Browning in any way. But back when I used to write poems more regularly, Frost was an influence. I’d welcome some Browning in my life. That one you put up was quite something.
Well, Philip, Mr. Browning’s meter is not quite 100% impeccable either, but his poem is maliciously delicious just the same.
Carry on! ;>))
Just let me react for one moment to the materials to which you, Neo, pointed:
That poem “Visitor” by Ms. Watts has this line: “radio components awaiting reincarnation”. I want to reject that line as absolutely hideous, truly vomit-worthy, and yet there’s still a fumbling attempt to reach for something useful in it that I can’t help but respect. Trying so very, very hard to make some kind of profundity out of a mere still-life. Maybe that’s the problem of the modern “poet”? – seeing him/herself left with nothing more than these scraps of life from which to glean some kind of insight? What a desolation.
The Watts poems fall weirdly between the stools of serious poetry and the mild sentiments Kaur provides. I would like to like Watts’ poems because they are accessible yet more ambitious than Kaur, but find myself preferring Kaur because she lacks Watts’ pretensions.
Watts may be a lackluster disciple of Billy Collins, who was the US Poet Laureate for a couple years back in the 2000s. Collins writes a prosy poetry with decent images and original thought I find adequately charming. I suspect he was elevated to Laureate status in a belated effort to attract a larger audience for American poets. God knows they need it.
__________________________________
Flames
Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.
His ranger’s hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.
His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher’s mitts,
crackle into the distance.
He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.
He is going to show them
how a professional does it.
–Billy Collins
Second the Kipling recommendation.
Great when he’s not doing topical, and when he is–see Birkenhead Drill–it’s worth following.
Back in 1991 Dana Gioia wrote a provocative essay, “Can Poetry Matter?”, addressing these issues and a firefight ensued. However, it was his ticket into the big leagues — the National Endowment for the Arts and teaching positions. Soon enough he backed down and was celebrating American poetry with the rest of the choir.
Earlier F asked:
But still I ask, do these people publish this stuff because they cannot write poetry, or is there something I fail to grasp about the new poetry?
Poetry has become a surprisingly fat little art industry — what poet Bill Knott called the Po’ Biz. If you’ve got a spot on the gravy train, why rock the boat — to mix metaphors.
_______________________________________________
American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.
What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.
–Dana Gioa “Can Poetry Matter”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1991/05/can-poetry-matter/305062/
Here is my contribution to this thread:
https://youtu.be/ldMLM966rxQ
Ok, not as deliberately philistine as I’m certain this looks, and I won’t even ask “What is poetry?” but
1. So why poetry? Why write it? And very much, why listen to it? What would possess you to tolerate or allow some annoying, emotional type of guy, to spout non-information in your face? I have experienced a couple off occasions in life where someone got the odd notion that it would be a good idea to recite a few verses from a poem in front of, or to, me, as a kind of audience I guess, and frankly the presumption of it pi&&ed me off. That cannot be an unusual reaction I think. “Don’t share. I don’t want to hear it.” is I think, a more or less normal reaction. What makes someone want to hear it?
2. Are song lyrics necessarily categorized as poetry? When we enjoy a song with lyrics [ Say for example, that you enjoyed hearing a recording of Sinatra singing “In the Still of the Night” as you and your friends were drinking on the patio ] is it simply a matter of not recognizing it is poetry?
3. If heroic age poems were always accompanied by some sort of music [and I don’t know for sure that they were] would we not have the “essence” of poetry as presently understood, historically backwards?
DNW:
I’m on my cell phone right now and therefore it’s hard to do links, but search on my blog for a post called something like “Twanging: from Homer to Cohen”. It’s about music and poetry.
I don’t especially care for most poetry readings, and I like poetry very much. I’ve never had anyone just suddenly start to recite poetry to me apropos of nothing, however.
Poetry itself is something some people are just drawn to. It can be incredibly moving and beautiful to those who love it.
DNW: Defining poetry, or any art, is tricky. However, I’ve long found the Britannica definition more than decent:
poetry, literature that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through its meaning, sound and rhythm.
— Encyclopedia Britannica
Long ago poets recited their work to lyre music or such (hence the term, “lyrics”), but the forms diverged many centuries ago. Poets write poems and songwriters write songs. There is no confusion when you go to Barnes and Noble which section you go to for which.
Contemporary poets often want to take credit for songs as a form of poetry but this strikes me as compensation for their inconsequential presence in modern society.
When interviewed, Bob Dylan and Bono are clear they write songs but poetry is something else. The only songwriter I know of who wants credit as a poet is Joni Mitchell, but she also believes she deserves as much credit as Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Good luck with that. Furthermore, she believes she has a rare, debilitating disease (Morgellon’s Syndrome) which causes her skin to extrude plastic threads. We wish her well.
Leonard Cohen wss a master of both forms but one notices he titled his anthologies as “Poems and Songs.”
1. So why poetry? Why write it? And very much, why listen to it?
DNW: Why soccer? Why play it? And very much, why watch it? Those are my questions.
Eh, if you’ve got the bug, you’ve got the bug.
Poetry is one of the primal art forms, along with storytelling and cave painting. I don’t think even modern poets and the National Endowment for the Arts can kill poetry, though they are giving it a good shot.
Poetry was the first version of the written word. The “Illiad” was first, for probably four centuries, spoken and recited aloud in lord’s halls until the Peisistratids got it written down about 400 BC. Even after that time, most classic stories were chanted and were a form of poetry. Prose is pretty recent, maybe the 17th century.
Prose is obviously the main form of written communication but writing is degenerating as abortions like email and Twitter debase it. Many public school students are not taught cursive writing and therefore older texts, like the US Constitution, will be unreadable in the original.
“Poetry was the first version of the written word.”
Hi. Well, maybe. I’ve been under the impression that inventories and other lists, prayers, and imprecations were among the first.
“Poetry is one of the primal art forms, along with storytelling and cave painting.”
Well, possibly. If we agree that heroic poetry was song – even if not accompanied by any very melodic music – and that not all story-telling is art, then we have song and painting. And while decorative geometric painting on early ceramics and stucco was certainly “art”, I don’t know that I have any clear idea of the purpose of cave painting. There’s a lot of archeology going on in Turkey and the Balkans that are causing people to rethink some of these other timelines or the progression of benchmarks.
And you are right, not all song is poetry; not even not-poetry merely by failure because the lyrics happen to be imbecilic, badly metered, and don’t rhyme front, middle or back.
A modern classic:
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
Manju
too deep for you
who knew
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know we don’t know.
–Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of
Donald H. Rumsfeld, edited by Hart Seely
Seely took various Rumsfeld utterances, chopped them into short lines with a ragged right margin and presented them as a book of poetry. Yawn. I browsed the book at the time.
Seely’s intent was clearly subversive–to make Rumsfeld sound peculiar, funny, and unintelligible. As such I can imagine this small volume pleased many critics of the war. And yet, even as someone who supported the Iraq war, I enjoyed the poems.
Rumsfeld has an interesting mind and manner of speaking. Seely did an admirable job of converting public discourse into found poetry.
Liberals made great fun of the above passage. However, it’s obvious stuff to any thoughtful person who has to make important decisions in situations where there are sizeable unknowns. Ridiculing Rumsfeld to task on this account was a stupid, partisan reaction — par for the course for liberals during the Iraq War and today.
Actually the passage made me wonder if Rumsfeld was a closet graduate of the Landmark Forum. It’s straight out of Landmark’s introductory pitch.
‘the great poets of the last few centuries wrote works that were neither meaningless nor obscure in meaning’
Some of Shakespeare’s passages are just as opaque as the most difficult modern poetry. Blake is often obscure. Milton can be torturous. And Donne and the Metaphysical Poets were notorious for their complicated arguments. Poetry naturally tends towards complexity of meaning, because it involves what Anthony Burgess called the maximum exploitation of words: poets play on the different meanings and etymologies of the words they use, and connote as well as denote. It’s not surprising that, in an era obsessed with the speedy communication of information, poetry, both old and modern, often befuddles.
Several commenters here also advance the notion that poetry, England before the modern era, was characterised by rhyme. This would surprise Shakespeare and Milton, as well as Middle English poets like Langland. English is, compared to many other languages, quite poor in rhymes, and there are many other formal devices, like alliteration, assonance, parataxis, and so on, that are perhaps more useful.
I think that many of the most beautiful and rhythmically complex lines of English poetry are the work of modernists and postmodernists.
In the dark, the gold gathers the light against it (Pound)
Hidden in the blood, jewels & miracles (Olson)
Gold-grimy shafts and pillars of the sun (Hill)
I like Billy Collins. He has done a lot to make accessible poetry respectable again. This one is fun. I like very much, but it does fit Neo’s characterization of a poem that’s extremely similar to prose. If you formatted it as a paragraph it would work fine. (I actually tried formatting the Watts map poem as a paragraph to see how it would read, and it’s even worse, oddly enough.)
(By the way, there is such a thing as a prose poem, which is sort of the opposite of this, a work that is formatted as prose, but is lyrical and so full or images and/or metaphor that you have to call it a poem. As you would imagine, it doesn’t usually work, but I have seen some that do. Some of Rilke’s work is like that, as I recall. Of course one can also find prose that is prose that rivals poetry for its lyricism and metaphor. The first chapter of A Passage to India is like that.)
Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive –
‘Nonsense.’ ‘Please! ‘ ‘HA! ! ‘ –
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote ‘Don’t be a ninny’
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls ‘Metaphor’ next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of ‘Irony’
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
‘Absolutely,’ they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
‘Yes.’ ‘Bull’s-eye.’ ‘My man! ‘
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written ‘Man vs. Nature’
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
‘Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.’
— Billy Collins
Here’s another Billy Collins poem I like even though it’s not very poetic.
Passengers
At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats
with the possible company of my death,
this sprawling miscellany of people—
carry-on bags and paperbacks—
that could be gathered in a flash
into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.
Not that I think
if our plane crumpled into a mountain
we would all ascend together,
holding hands like a ring of skydivers,
into a sudden gasp of brightness,
or that there would be some common place
for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,
some spaceless, pillarless Greece
where we could, at the count of three,
toss our ashes into the sunny air.
It’s just that the way that man has his briefcase
so carefully arranged,
the way that girl is cooling her tea,
and the flow of the comb that woman
passes through her daughter’s hair …
and when you consider the altitude,
the secret parts of the engines,
and all the hard water and the deep canyons below …
well, I just think it would be good if one of us
maybe stood up and said a few words,
or, so as not to involve the police,
at least quietly wrote something down.
— Billy Collins
No expert am I on matters of poetry. I agree with your assessment of those current things the authors call ‘poems’. What makes them poor compositions for me is that they are unmoving, and boring. I really like the Britannica definition, it describes quite well the poetry I appreciate and enjoy.
One of my favorites is “Easter, 1916” by Yeats. I came upon it by way of a Clancy Brothers concert in which a bit of it is spoken. This part moved me in the way good poetry always does:
“Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.”
It conveys a visceral understanding of the time. The rest is pretty great too.
I like what I like and I know what I like when I see it. If a piece doesn’t engage me early then I’m not going to spend much time on it.
Exposed to poetry in high school i.e. In English class we were heavy on Shakespeare, and we skipped through a selection of a few of classic Western poems, and made what I now realize were very minimal attempts to understand them. (It appears that they don’t even do that nowadays.)
Some poems were beautiful, many, I could see, intuit, were pregnant with meaning but, taken as a whole, they just seemed difficult and very formidable, hard to plow through; not my cup of tea.
I believe it was an English teacher who introduced us to Japanese Haiku, and I found the spare and elegant Haiku every appealing. So I started to collect and read a few books of Haiku.
No further exposure to any kind of Western poetry in either College or graduate school, but undergraduate Chinese classes did very briefly explore some very elementary and short Chinese classics.
Chinese poetry, which is traditionally chanted, I discovered, had additional levels of meaning, when you added in the visual impact and multiple levels of meanings—the resonance—of the characters, their particular choice and placement in the poems, plus how they were written, the calligraphy involved adding more levels of meaning—each particular character playing off the others; it was the whole complex gestalt.
Unfortunately this tantalizing glimpse was as far as I progressed, my couple of years of Chinese insufficient to really explore this incredibly broad field, with thousands of years of poems to explore and understand, and I moved on to more practical pursuits.
P.S.—Quite often the Chinese language and its figures of speech make heavy reference to particular events and people in the broad and ancient sweep of Chinese history.
Thus, to have the best chance of really understanding what is being said, you need to have a very broad, deep, and detailed knowledge of events and figures—both major and minor—in Chinese history, and this seems to apply particularly in the case of Chinese poetry.
“Today’s poetry is also often prose made to scan in “poetic”-looking lines rather than being actual poetry (according to traditional definitions). Many of these newer poems could just as easily have been written as a prose paragraph—and that, oddly enough, is a characteristic of the schlocky internet poetry that Rebecca Watts criticizes so very harshly.” – Neo
Reading through the comments, it is fairly clear why this is a “community” — we seem to have similar literary tastes as well as political positions, with enough differences to flavor the soup.
Give me rhymes and meter anytime, but I do like some modern poets.
Robert Graves is excellent (maybe he doesn’t count as modern anymore).
Some of the best real poetry is in children’s works (Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein).
If English had more rhyming words, Dr. Seuss & Lewis Carroll would not have needed to fabricate so many.
For working within strict parameters, the Welsh bards have few competitiors.
“Singing in Chains” is what one author titled her book of analysis and commentary.
Blurring of lyrics and poetry: we already discussed Bob Dylan’s Nobel here.
Neo: how did you get through this post without mentioning Robert Frost???
‘I started to collect and read a few books of Haiku…Chinese poetry, which is traditionally chanted, I discovered, had additional levels of meaning’
The clarity & resonance of Chinese & Japanese poetry is what inspired Ezra Pound and his comrades to create the Imagist movement, which many people would see as the beginning of modernism in English poetry. They were in revolt against the long-winded nature of late 19th century English poet, and the way poets like Browning and Swinburne would use more words than were necessary, and garnish images with unnecessary commentary. Pound’s idea was to use images like ideograms, and to leave the gaps between them as places for the reader to cogitate. Hence his famous short poem In The Station of the Metropole:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough
We get two very vivid images, without commentary. Pound himself translated many Chinese poems. It would be simplistic, and beside the point, to label a poem like this either obscure or accessible. Pound himself used the word ‘presentationism’ to explain his method. Once a reader grasps what he is doing, a whole new aesthetic experience awaits.
But Pound’s is only one of scores of approaches modern and postmodern poets have developed. Some of these poets are inscrutable; others are radically accessible. Some use loose rhythms; others produce tightly orchestrated work. English poetry has thrived and diversified as never before over the last century, and there’s something, really, for everyone.
The late Geoffrey Hill, who was considered one of the greatest and learned British poets of his generation, was known for the dense, difficult nature of his carefully constructed texts. But Hill argued that, far from communicating contempt, the difficulty of his poems expressed a respect for the reader. Difficult art is, Hill said, democratic, because it respects both the capacities of its audience and the complexity of the world. Hill explained himself in his interview near the end of his life:
“To say that a poet is to be condemned because she refers to the Diet of Worms and we don’t know what the Diet of Worms is – is it something on MasterChef? – or is inaccessible because she invokes some field of vision which we have difficulty in grasping: this seems to me a kind of crass bullying…’https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/geoffrey-hill-poetry-should-be-shocking-and-surprising/
P.P.S.—The above used to apply to traditional Chinese language and culture.
How much complete knowledge of that rich history exists today in China—and what portions of it are off limits, and in contemporary China no longer referred to for political reasons—I do not know.
It doesn’t take much to get you into trouble—sounds increasingly like today here in the U.S.
In one notable instance, former Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping found his position precarious for quite some time after his pragmatic remark that “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat.” i.e. in the realm of economic policy, as between “planned” and “market economies” whatever leads to progress is what should be adopted; rigid Communist ideology secondary to competence and results.
Re: Chinese poetry — I love Su Tung-p’o. There is something so generous and optimistic about his writing. Although he wrote in the 11th century, I can hear a voice that sounds contemporary. He worked as a bureaucrat in a treacherously political climate. Twice he was exiled, yet he did not become bitter. A beautiful, admirable man. Here’s a poem about returning from prison for his second exile:
A HUNDRED DAYS FREE TO GO (1080)
12th month, 28th day. I receive the favor of being appointed special
supernumerary of the Water Bureau and second officer in the home guard
at Huang-chou.
A hundred days, free to go, and it’s almost spring;
For the years left, pleasure will be my chief concern.
Out the gate, I do a dance, wind blows my face;
Our galloping horses race along as magpies cheer.
I face the wine cup and it’s all a dream,
Pick up a poem brush, already inspired.
Why try to fix blame for trouble past?
Years now I have stolen posts I never should have had.
–Su Tung-p’o, translated by Burton Watson
One of my supposed goals of taking Chinese again at this point is to get a little closer to ability to read Chinese poetry. Snow on Pine, you dishearten me with your comments on its difficulty!! waah!! Oh, well, I’ll keep working on it from time to time, maybe.
I wish I could see some of the originals of the texts mentioned here by huxley. Casual internet search for these is unsuccessful. Frustrating.
Philip–If you search around the Internet and then on Amazon and Ebey for used copies, there are several books of Chinese poetry that feature both the original Chinese character text and and an English translation.
Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
Yale University, Far Eastern Publications, “Fifty-Five T’ang Poems: A Text in the Reading and Understanding of T’ang Poetry,” look for copies of this 1976 textbook on Amazon and Ebey.
Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse
How to Read Chinese Poetry A Guided Anthology by Zong-Qi Cai 2007 Paperback?
The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Mandarin Chinese and English Edition)
Cold Mountain (Han Shan)
Thanks for that, Snow!
Happy New Year, gang.
My final reaction to the source material that Neo posted from Granta: I attempted her challenge to read that stuff, trying out that first poem about tennis or whatever it was – from the very first phrase in it, “Tryptamine skies,” I knew it was going to be a slog (I work in chemistry and have a degree in it, and why the H am I reading about tryptamine in a poem?!). Had to stop after about 40 seconds of reading – otherwise my brain might have liquefied and run out my ears onto the floor by the time I got to the end of that piece of trash.
But Jono, your snippet of Pound’s couplet there is intriguing.
Philip: Su Tung-p’o is also known as Su Shi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Shi
Re: Granta — Writing publishable poems like neo’s examples takes a surprising amount of skill, though why anyone would like the poems or care about them, as she points out, are good questions.
I once had a friend getting her MFA in creative writing who said that none of the writers/poets she knew would read the little magazines in which they were published. They would just check to see their works were printed as they wrote them.
I used to challenge poets to ask themselves about their latest and greatest, is this a poem you would want to read if you hadn’t written it? I rarely got an answer, which I suppose was the answer.
huxley, that’s helpful. Thanks! I’m debating whether to stick with this Chinese class for the next term. Chinese is not really a language that I’m deeply invested in emotionally, so I’m not sure. I’d rather do Russian or something like that, or maybe finally learn Greek properly – been putting it off long enough. But if I could get into some of this Chinese poetry, that might change my mind. Have you been able to compare Chinese and Japanese as languages generally? I take it you can read Chinese already.
Philip: No, I don’t read Chinese or Japanese. I’m saving those for another life…
I do wonder about Chinese translations. As I understand it, Chinese poems are just words without grammar or tenses, partly because they are intended to be understood in other dialects. So translators to English end up adding a certain amount of filler for flow.
Turns out a lot of English translations are “versions” or “co-translations.” A version is when a poet reads a literal translations then writes a version based on what she has read, then filtered through her own sensibility. A co-translation is when a poet works with a native speaker to recreate the poem in English.
There are obvious reasons not to trust such translations. But then all translations are suspect anyway. Thus the motto, “To translate is to betray.”
huxley on January 1, 2019 at 2:04 pm at 2:04 pm said:
…
I once had a friend getting her MFA in creative writing who said that none of the writers/poets she knew would read the little magazines in which they were published. They would just check to see their works were printed as they wrote them.
I used to challenge poets to ask themselves about their latest and greatest, is this a poem you would want to read if you hadn’t written it? I rarely got an answer, which I suppose was the answer.
* * *
I was going to link some of Gerard’s recent posts for the poetry in them, but I will start with this one, as it speaks to the Me-Me Generation as exemplified here.
Go up or down on Gerard’s blog, and you will find some great verses.
http://americandigest.org/wp/on-the-return-of-history/
“With the end of the Soviet Union in a whimper and not a bang brighter than the sun on earth, history was officially over. The moment even got its own book, “The End of History,” which stimulated an argument that even more than the book emphasized that history was over.
Most sensible people liked it that way. In fact, a lot of people really liked it that way. Because if history for the world was over, these people could get on making the history that really mattered to them: The History of Me.
More and more throughout the 90s “History” was “out,” and “Me” was in.”
“Ridiculing Rumsfeld to task on this account was a stupid, partisan reaction”
And who is better at stupid partisanship than manju?
FOAF: Geez, I wished I had edited that line:
“Ridiculing Rumsfeld on this account was a stupid, partisan reaction”
I wasn’t ridiculing Rumsfeld. I was simply posting a poem I liked.
A very tardy comment, but I have to do it – it came to me at last what that one poem in Granta reminded me of! That one lunatic speech in Waiting for Godot, just a whole torrent of word salad. Kit Harington brought it up in an interview that I just saw, and I suddenly realized that was what I’d been thinking of.