Apr '03 [Home]
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Apr '03 [Home] Essays The Accomplished and the Insufficient:
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April has been christened National Poetry Month by the high priests of American verse. Chain and independent bookstores feature splashy displays highlighting new collections of poetry. Bookstores, libraries and colleges are hosting readings by hundreds of poets, both distinguished and emerging. This is the month, as T. S. Eliot wrote, "breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land" and "mixing/ Memory and desire," the poet's euphemisms for the past and future. But when we read or listen to a poem, it becomes an immediate experience that speaks to both our heart and mind. The accomplished poem effortlessly transfers the working and playings of its language, ideas and music. Such transference can illuminate, instruct or comfort, provide surprise and pleasure, and, sometimes, even wisdom. After all, the word 'poem' comes from the Greek word poiein, "to make or create," and those makings ought to help us negotiate our lives. Yet, in truth, many adults put aside reading poetry once they've left high school. For them, contemporary verse seems cryptic and vague, some sort of elitist-language labyrinth. Others might pick up a magazine or literary journal, read a poem and feel completely shut out from the experience the poem is trying to deliver. These readers are not dense or obtuse. No, sadly, they've just encountered an insufficient poem, one that failed to complete the necessary language transference from writer to reader. Over the last decade, I've scribbled many ideas about poetry and poetics in my writing journals. Why do some poems move through us like warm gusts of wind? Why do others fall flat? Here are some possible answers. The accomplished poem thinks and sings, sings and thinks. If it finds itself offering large, complicated ideas, it does so most effectively with small, crisp words. Moreover, the accomplished poem compels us to speak its syllables aloud, to metabolize the collision of consonant and vowel, glottal and phoneme, to share in the various modulations of voice, pitch and timbre. Listen to how the orchestrated vowel sounds—various a's and o's— along with the pattern of l's and k's pull us into the sound-cage Ellen Doré Watson creates at the end of her poem, "The Sounds Between What's On My Mind": Blazing in the dark, The poem's treatment of subject matter is carried through the sound-bounce of assonance and alliteration, the various patterns of rhythm and rhyme, its jazz and blues. As such, psychological and philosophical urgencies amplify and resonate. Conversely, the insufficient poem is not mindful of the kinetic force behind each syllable and stress, doesn't flex the muscle of rhythm. Its language is flabby. Without music or invention, the poem relies on easy sentiment and contrived answers, is clever for the sake of cleverness. Insufficient poems, to quote MacBeth's lament, lapse into "sound and fury, Signifying nothing." Poetry lives in its words and beyond them. Simply put, those ideas not linked to language may comprise the largest presences in the poem. Silence is one of the most potent elements in an accomplished poem. The porous, generous spaces between words and stanzas become those moments in the poem's drama where the reader—through the alchemy of this art—is pitched onto center stage and given a compelling role to play. Two small but apt examples: "Tomorrow the dentist./ Today the thought." (from a ten-year-old poet, no less). We enter the poem through the chasm of silence between the two declarations. Come to the garden, love What Jelaluddin Rumi leaves unoccupied, we happily fill in. Is the speaker's plea directed at a lover or a god? Perhaps both, as it's left open-ended. Talk about memory and desire. Steamrolling the reader with too much language, the insufficient poem doesn't allow silences, big and small, to contribute to the poem's dreamscape. The language is deprived of opportunities to leap and shift, to nudge up against potential subjects and themes, to back off, then go, if need be, mute. In his collection of essays, Music at Night, Aldous Huxley argues that, Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven's or Mozart's, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner's music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It "says" less because it is always speaking. In similar fashion, the issues a poem alludes to, without directly stating them, may, ironically, be the very stuff that enables the reader to advance his dialogue with the ideas, metaphors and images that are presented in language. Fresh combinations of ideas, metaphors and images that provide flashes of insight punctuate the accomplished poem. It upends the reader's preconceptions, persuades him into believing its versions of various episodes, fictions and facts. It questions, probes and challenges its own assertions. Showing and telling, the accomplished poem makes the abstract concrete. When Pablo Neruda calls the watermelon, "the green whale of summer," the reader recognizes the appropriateness of this connection, yields to its force and beauty. Driven by surprise and verbal acrobatics, the accomplished poem magnifies human experience. Birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, marriage, parenting, aging and death become more immediate. Donald Justice's celebrated poem, "Men at Forty," begins: "Men at forty/ Learn to close softly/ The doors to rooms they will not be/ Coming back to." The poet's heart-intelligence plugs into voltage coursing through so-called 'ordinary' things. The insufficient poem confuses motion with action. It shuns improvisation, those colors and textures that Miles, Bird and Satchmo find between the notes. The reader never feels as if time and space have been intensified or obliterated. The ambiguities and ambivalences unique to human beings are not revisited, reshaped, re-imagined. Locked into something like Calvinistic predestination, the insufficient poem fails to explore the unlikely, the implausible. We're better off with popcorn and the remote. But it is a completely different activity to walk about in the architecture of an accomplished poem. Its sound-cage, idea-chains and linguistic configurations suggest possibilities of being and knowing, stir us up a bit. As we read, we discover what we didn't know about x, q and k, what we thought we knew, what we had forgotten, what we had not apprehended. Subconscious vocabularies are awakened. Deeper presences are felt. Sometime during 1874, Emily Dickinson pinned two fragments of stationery together. On that stationery was scribbled the following: The Infinite a sudden Guest Every time it's revisited, the accomplished poem communicates something new, transports us to where art encounters latent metaphysical questions and concerns. In sum, the accomplished poem delivers a shock to our souls. It's one thing to ruminate about poetry and another to write it. Ultimately, any ideas we might advance about an accomplished poem remain secondary to the poem itself. (Another reason it's accomplished!) And so, I'd like to finish with a poem from Love Song with Motor Vehicles, a new collection by BOA poet Alan Michael Parker. Parker's poem illustrates many, if not all, of the aforementioned satisfactions of accomplished poems. Sharp and intelligent, spiked with humor and levity, it's also deadly serious. We give ourselves over to its activities and metaphors. For instance, we ride, of all things, a piece of bacon and a slice of Wonder Bread toward matters metaphysical. Go figure. And even if we haven't participated in the poem's specific imaginative urgencies (I don't know about you, but I have never been a god of draperies), these urgencies, through the poem's workings and playings, become ours. Read. Listen. Feel. Think. But most importantly, enjoy. The God of Draperies Cannot decide the difference Between in and out. A patio is out though in a yard, he thinks, Nursing his ignorance And a mostly gone Tom Collins, The sunshine and the cicadas and the loveliness Competing for his rage. But a car is out? So what about a swizzle stick? Out of the box but in the drink, Then out of the drink and in the mouth. A little bit in and out, he thinks, the vinyl slats Of the ancient chaise lounge Stuck to him Like bacon to a slice of Wonder Bread. And the soul is in? And heaven is out? But when the soul is Out, is it then In heaven? Time for another Drink, a tall one, but only half. Which is the way it is, he thinks, With gods and worshippers and revelation; No one is ever sure Exactly who Has been revealed to whom. (A poet, essayist, and creative writing teacher in Rochester, NY, Thom Ward is also Editor and Development Director for BOA Editions, Ltd. His latest poetry collection,Various Orbits, will be released by Carnegie Mellon University Press this summer.) [This essay is being published simultaneously in the "MUSEings" feature of the 4/9 issue of the Rochester newspaper, City.—Eds.] |