As
you may know, April has been christened National
Poetry Month by the high priests of American verse. Splashy displays
highlighting new collections of poetry can be found in chain and independent
bookstores. Libraries and colleges are hosting readings by hundreds of poets,
both distinguished and emerging.
           When we read or listen to a poem it
becomes an immediate experience that speaks to both our heart and mind. The
successful poem effortlessly conveys the workings and playings of its language,
ideas, and music. It 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 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, /
my resolve seems so loud, but I haven’t learned / how to coax it to daylight,
where it’s sullen / and only smolders. The way smoke above the house / lofts
upward, then floats down like a dirty cloak.”
           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. It 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 a 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 10-year-old
poet, no less). We enter the poem through the chasm of silence between the two
declarations. “Come to the garden, love / where the flowers / have starred
the pomegranates. / If you do not come, / they will not matter. / If you do
come / they will not matter.” What Jelaluddin Rumi leaves unoccupied, we
happily fill in. Is the speaker’s plea directed at a lover or a god? Perhaps
both. Talk about memory and desire.
           The insufficient poem deprives the
language of opportunities to leap and shift, to nudge 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.” The issues a poem only alludes to may, ironically, be the very
stuff that enables you to advance your dialogue with its ideas, metaphors, and
imagery.
           Showing and telling, the accomplished
poem makes the abstract concrete. When Pablo Neruda calls the watermelon
“the green whale of summer,” you recognize the appropriateness of
this connection, yield 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 us into the
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. We never
feel as if time and space have been intensified or obliterated. The ambiguities
and ambivalences unique to human beings are not revisited, reshaped,
re-imagined. 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 she
scribbled the following: “The Infinite a sudden Guest / Has been assumed
to be — / But how can that stupendous come / Which new went away?” Every
time it’s revisited, the accomplished poem communicates something new,
transports us where art encounters latent metaphysical questions and concerns.
It 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 MotorVehicles,
a new collection by BOA poet Alan Michael Parker.
           Parker’s poem illustrates many, if
not all, of the aforementioned satisfactions. Sharp and intelligent, spiked
with humor and levity, it’s also deadly serious. We give ourselves over to its
activities and metaphors. We ride, of all things, a piece of bacon and a slice of
Wonder Bread toward the metaphysical. Go figure. And even if we can’t relate to
the poem’s subject matter, (I don’t know about you, but I have never been a god
of draperies), it can, through the poem’s workings and playings, become ours.
The God of
Draperies
When
revelation comes, 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 local poet,
essayist, and creative writing teacher, 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 article appears in Apr 9-15, 2003.
