World Class Poetry Blog

There’s something quite indiscernible about Bill Knott’s outrageous tirade against Ron Silliman’s selection for the William Carlos Williams award. But I agree with him. At least in part.

Third paragraph:

and I assume (I hope) that many of those same poets are now feeling insulted and outraged by the choice of this year’s winner,

Well, I didn’t enter the contest and I’m insulted, though not quite outraged. As judge, Silliman had every right to choose whomever he felt was the best poet or who wrote the best book of poems among those that were submitted. But I understand Knott’s outrage despite the awkwardness of his delivery.

Two paragraphs later:

As for you fools at the PSA, all I can say is, what the fuck did you expect when you appointed him to be the judge? You got just what you asked for, schmucks. The joke’s on you.

Well, good question. I mean, it’s Ron “Langpo” Silliman. Avant garde of avant garde. Or post avant. Or whatever the hell they are calling themselves these days.

I’ve said before that I’m not a big fan of the avant garde. I’ve never understood the point behind making something deliberately convoluted in order to prove its sublimity. To me, that’s like masturbating to prove your manhood. OK, I’ve got the picture. You can play with yourself. But the rest of us would rather not watch, please.

So, back to Silliman and his selection for the award. It turns out that he chose Aram “Complete Super-Duper-Hyper-Over-The-Edge-Beyond-The-Universe Minimalist” Saroyan. Except that even Saroyan has outgrown his annoying adolescent fascination with flatulence. Too bad Silliman hasn’t.

I’ve got no ill feelings toward Ron Silliman as it seems that Bill Knott has. Both men made it through the ’60s alive (though I don’t think anyone made it through undamaged). I was born in 1966 so I don’t remember those years and that may be for the best. But I have often felt like I’d have enjoyed being a part of that generation. I might have even enjoyed minimalism in its hey-day (I’d have definitely enjoyed Woodstock and watching Hendrix pick a guitar with his teeth), when folks of Knott’s and Silliman’s generation sat around stoned listening to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin on vinyl while banging the bongos, snapping their fingers, and navel gazing to John Gage’s 4-minutes-and-some-odd-seconds of silence while looking at Saroyan’s goofy looking m on an otherwise blank page. But we are not in the 1960s any more, and this isn’t Kansas, Toto.

I have been amused, during certain times in my life, to have met people who came through the 1960s and hearing them reminisce of the beautiful times they had. I thought most of them were full of shit. The old white guy born of wealthy parents schmoozing the assholes of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk while worshiping the Beat God Allen Ginsberg as if he had risen from some tomb and pushed the sepulcher off a cliff (I don’t know, maybe he did). There was always something fake about these old men trying to sell us young’uns on the glory days of Vietnam protests and Peace, Love, and The White Album. A new era deserves a new aesthetic, don’t you think?

Well, you would think, except that Ron Silliman’s eloquent defense of Saroyan actually makes it almost believable that he should have won:

Reading Complete Minimal Poems, we are struck by just how sturdy these poems have proven to be and just how brightly Saroyan’s sense of humor shines through these pages. These poems are works of great optimism, and are as radical and strong in 2008 as the day they were written.

Yeah, right. It’s not like he’s Homer or Shelley (Percy or Mary, take your pick). I mean, he isn’t even dead yet. What will the world think of him 200 years from now? Will they even know who he is? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

But my beef isn’t with Saroyan. I don’t care that he comes from the upper class. I don’t care that Silliman makes so much money in marketing that he turns down offers to teach and perhaps his income level clouds his thinking on poetics (or maybe he just has preferences with which I don’t agree). I don’t care one bit about Bill Knott’s chip, or the shoulder upon which it balances. What I do care about is moving with the times. As Knott said, paraphrased, there had to have been other poets who had more recently published poetry worthy of notice that could have been the winner of the award. And it should not go unmentioned that had anyone else been the sole judge of the William Carlos Williams Award, that likely would have happened.

Howard Junker sums up my view of Silliman-Saroyan with perfect clarity:

IMHO, it was misguided to give an award for work done 40 years ago by someone who hasn’t been in the poetry mix for decades.

On Silliman’s blog, Junker commented thus:

sure, these poem deserve to be in print, but they are ancient. and saroyan is no longer a practicing poet.

i wish you would have chosen a book by a poet who is still in action.

Yeah, you know, the fact that these poems were probably written and published long before many of the entrants to the contest were born might have been a clue that Saroyan’s book should have been placed aside along with Silliman’s own (he recused himself from winning when he noticed his own book was submitted for the contest). But who am I to judge? The PSA didn’t invite me to cast a vote.

This whole brouhaha is a testament to the prejudices and preferences of judges. If you submit to contests, it is always a good idea to find out who the judge is going to be before you enter and to submit poems, or books, or what-have-you, that appeal to that judge’s preferences. If I knew that Silliman was going to be the judge of a contest that I was thinking of entering, I wouldn’t send a submission because any judge that would chose Aram Saroyan, who hasn’t written a poem in ages, as the winner of a contest is not going to fall in love with my poetry. He may like it. He may praise it. He may even say sweet things about it as Silliman does the beautiful losers. But he wouldn’t pick me as the winner.

It all boils down to preferences. Judges tend to pick winners who are most like themselves. If for any reason because it’s human nature. It’s called affinity. You feel a certain sense of love for those whose aesthetic is most like your own. The problem is when those preferences become prejudices. And you can tell the difference between a prejudice and a preference. A preference is when you say beautiful things about other people’s children but you save your acts of love for your own. A prejudice is when you have nothing nice to say about the neighbor’s kids because they are different. I might not want Silliman to be a judge of a contest that I had entered, but I wouldn’t trust Knott as one. His prejudice comes in loud and clear.

I have written about these matters before with regard to my own philosophy of poetics. Preferences are nearly impossible to shed, but prejudices aren’t. One must make a conscious decision to shed them, but one can do it. I believe that there is something to learn from everyone. Even Aram Saroyan. To be sure, minimalism can teach us brevity. But too much brevity is excessive and this is the difficulty that I have with extreme minimalism. I mean, the next logical step is to serve up a blank page and call it a poem. I’m surprised this hasn’t been done yet. If it had, people like Silliman wouldn’t argue; they’d simply heap up an unhealthy level of praise and justify the blank page through some convoluted form of aesthetic rationalization. And it would likely win an NEA grant, much to the chagrin of the convalescing Jesse Helms.

Visual poetry can teach us things too. But what we should not learn is to imitate it too much. We don’t want a bunch of mini-Saroyans running around putting single letters on a page and calling it poetry. Or placing back-to-back r’s on a page and oogling it like a bouncing baby boy. There comes a time when intelligent people must say, “OK, that’s enough. We’ve heard the sound of your Mustang’s overly loud muffler long enough. Turn the key off, young man, and go to bed.” Then we can have a glass of wine and enjoy the next advancement for 15 minutes while someone else prepares for fame.

A note to the PSA: Next year, instead of just picking one person to be the judge of the William Carlos Williams Award, if you are so tempted, just go ahead and cut out the middleman and give the award to which ever entrant most resembles the preferences of your judge. Don’t waste our time with anticipation. It’s disrespectful.

I have been meaning to purchase a copy of Mark Jarman’s new book of prose poems titled Epistles. It was my desire to bloviate, I think, but I put it off. I was hoping to share one of the poems on this blog this month in honor of religious poetry, but I have still not purchased the book. So I instead sought poems of his already published that might appear online. Lo and behold, I was successful. Found them (where else?) at the Poetry Foundation.

There I found four sonnets from his collection Unholy Sonnets.

Perfect, I thought. I’ll use one of those.

I’ve never bought a Mark Jarman book so I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never read any of his sonnets. It was a new experience for me. Quite frankly, I’m not impressed and I’ll tell you why.

A sonnet should rhyme. Enjambment is fine; each line need not end with a complete thought. I’m OK with near-rhyme even and rhyme that doesn’t look like rhyme or that forces the reader to move over the words from one line to the next so quickly that the rhyme isn’t noticeable until you stop to examine the poem word for word. All of that is fine. It’s what poetry is made of. But a sonnet, after all, is a sonnet. It is defined by two things: rhyme and meter. Leave one out and you no longer have a sonnet. Well, wouldn’t you know it: This New Formalist, a school of poetics that believes the old forms are still valid, writes a doggone sonnet that doesn’t rhyme. I don’t like it.

No. 1 wasn’t the first one I read. It wasn’t the last either. I read all four sonnets, and I’ll likely never read another poem from Mark Jarman. I won’t be buying Epistles. But it isn’t because of that one poem I didn’t like. I’m not fond of any of his sonnets.

“Unholy Sonnet No. 4″ rhymes. And I almost like it. My favorite lines are the first two - especially the first one - of the second stanza:

Not Dante’s rings, not the Zen zero’s mouth,
Out of which comes and into which light goes,

The allusion to Dante and alliteration with Zen zero’s mouth was impressive, but not elegiac, as one would expect of a religious poem. No. 4 isn’t his best of the four that I did read.

I found “Unholy Sonnet No. 13″ rather intriguing, but I’m ambivalent. I was put off at first by the repetition of the word drunk. Simply put, I found it unnecessary. Then he referenced Americans. I nearly puked. It seems out of place.

Nevertheless, No. 13 nearly succeeds. I do not like the repetition. I do like the near rhyme of some of the end words: bread, breed; stars, stirs. I do not like another/forever. I like the time and wine, and even the off-rhyme of moon. But the repetition of end words in place of rhyme is unnerving to me. It seems like a cop out.

Then there’s the juxtaposition of the divine with the mundane. I actually appreciate Mark Jarman’s attempt to employ this device. It’s one that I’m rather fond of in my own poetry and hope that I succeed at to some degree. The use of the word “Umbrian” in the first line sets me up for an expectation of something extraordinary, but I am let down by “two young Americans”. Why so parochial? It took me out of the poem despite some beautiful imagery in the pink cloud and marble smile. As I said, it almost succeeds.

I think the best of the four poems that I read was No. 1. It’s the one that I think is best crafted and it’s surprising because I wasn’t sure that I liked it when I first read it. I’m still not sure, but I do appreciate the craftiness of the poem. It was the first one I read. Reprinted below, analysis follows:

Dear God, Our Heavenly Father, Gracious Lord,
Mother Love and Maker, Light Divine,
Atomic Fingertip, Cosmic Design,
First Letter of the Alphabet, Last Word,
Mutual Satisfaction, Cash Award,
Auditor Who Approves Our Bottom Line,
Examiner Who Says That We Are Fine,
Oasis That All Sands Are Running Toward.

I can say almost anything about you,
O Big Idea, and with each epithet,
Create new reasons to believe or doubt you,
Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet.
But what’s the anything I must leave out? You
Solve nothing but the problems that I set.

I like this poem best of all because it carries a simple idea from beginning to end. It starts out and finishes with that idea and is easy to follow. No. 1 reads like a prayer. It should. For that is essentially what it is. You know right away that the speaker is talking to God. He uses words that one would expect a person praying to God to use: “Dear God”, “Heavenly Father”, “Gracious Lord”. That’s a wonderful first line. It sets me up for the rest of the poem perfectly.

“Unholy Sonnet No. 1″ reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins in so many ways. The meter is a little bit uncommon. Unlike many sonnets, the iambic pentameter isn’t a sing-song twittering of musical simplicity. Each expression of divinity is capitalized - very reverent. Each is set apart as a clause, broken up by commas. Appropriate. And as you get further into the poem, the speaker begins to use names for God that are very uncommon and almost irreverent except that you know they are expressions of contemporary sanctity.

• Atomic Fingertip
• First Letter Of The Alphabet (Alpha - I like this one)
• Cash Award
• Auditor Who Approves Our Bottom Line
• Examiner Who Says That We Are Fine
• Oasis That All Sands Are Running Toward

Like traditional sonnets, the first stanza sets up the situation that the second stanza answers. It is sometimes defined as problem/solution, or question/answer. In this case, I think the proper characterization should be dilemma/cure.

The problem can be stated thus: What do we call God? Answer: Anything; it doesn’t really matter. What really matters is that He is there and we can call on Him. Cool.

The second stanza moves. I love how it starts:

I can say almost anything about you,
O Big Idea, and with each epithet,
Create new reasons to believe or doubt you,

The word “epithet” is perfect, and unexpected, because until now all we have heard from the speaker is words used to describe God in rather uncanny ways. They are really offensive. If I were God, I’d be offended. “Mutual Satisfaction”? I think not. But the names are not totally offensive. They just are not wholly reverent, and that’s the problem. It’s what makes the poem so believable.

The rhyme scheme of No. 1 stays true to the form. Thanks Mark! But there is something about that fourth line in the second stanza that bugs me. Why “Presidential Jet”? Of all the names for God, that is perhaps the most obtrusive. Still, he follows that rather awkward line up with “But what’s the anything I must leave out?” and I know it’s the perfect follow up line. It’s a good question, for one thing, but it also points to the dilemma: Who is God? Why is He there? And that last line is the zinger, the whopper, the big squeeze. No matter what you call Him, he’s the Divine Problem Solver, The Eternal Cure For All Things, The Answer To The Questions I Didn’t Know I Should Have Asked.

I love the feminine rhyme in that second stanza - about/you, doubt/you, out? You. It shows Mark Jarman’s playfulness and attentiveness to language. But it also makes me wonder why we don’t see more of that. If he can do that in one poem, why can’t he do that in the others? I’m not prepared to say versatility for that would imply skill, and I don’t see that. What I see is sloppiness, a criticism he has lobbied against others. It’s odd, but that’s probably what he seeks most to avoid for I know that his poetic philosophy is defined by attentiveness to language, to words, and to craft. To some degree, he has it. So why aren’t I impressed?

I had projected that I would get 10,000 unique visitors to World Class Poetry in the month of March. I was right. Setting a new record, I ended the month with 10,600 unique visitors, my first month over 10 grand. Those are uniques. My total visitor count was 14,970. I also set a new daily record for visits on March 12 with 683 and a new record for unique visitors in one day on March 31 with 636, but I shattered that yesterday with a whopping 818 visits and 752 unique visitors. April looks to be a not-so-cruel month for WCP. Since it is National Poetry Month, I fully expect April to be another banner month.

The blog is doing equally well. I saw 3,491 visits in March and 3,112 of those were uniques. Not bad for a blog that was started only six months ago. My biggest day to date was March 20 with 376 visits.

It’s equally interesting to look at the content and see which posts have been the most popular. How To Market Your Poetry Online is my most popular post to date. That’s very interesting since it was posted just 20 days ago. Since then it has seen more than 700 page views.

Other popular posts have been:

• Hyperbole: A Necessary Evil … In Poetry Or Politics (one of my earliest posts)
• In Poetry, No Subject Is Taboo
• Poetics: The 7 Essential Elements Of Poetry
• My Favorite Poetry Blogs (Thanks Ron Silliman)
• Get Paid For Your Poetry
• Blog Critique: Poetry By Stacey

Interestingly, if I include yesterday in my analytics, An Ode To Alexander Hamilton, which was posted yesterday morning, comes in as the fourth most popular blog post since I started this blog last September.

And that’s the state of World Class Poetry today.

The State Of Religious Poetry Today
Speaking of yesterday, a commentator had this to say about religious poetry:

My own speculation is that most religious poetry today, like much of the contemporary “church” music, has a lack of depth (unlike many of the religious writers of the Renaissance). There seems to be, pardon the cliche, not much meat on the bone. There seems to be a lack of basic biblical/religious literacy that seems to pervade our society and spill over into the literature realm so that we end up with poetry fluff.

I empathize with this reader because this has been my own thought as well for several years. Why don’t religious writers of poetry write with more depth? For one thing, I think that most religious poets do not keep up with the latest trends in poetics. Many of them are still writing trite phrases in iambic pentameter as if mimicking John Donne or William Shakespeare. There is nothing wrong with iambic pentameter, of course, but if you’re going to write that kind of verse, whether religious or not, you need to bring something new to the park bench, which most poets don’t do. Your meter may be traditional, but your subject matter or the way that you present your subjects must be new and unique, and that’s where many religious poets fall short. They’re stuck on “Jesus loves me” and have forgotten that there may be other ways to say it, or to show it, than simply using Biblical language that one can read by picking up a leatherbound KJV.

I hate to commit to a month-long project on this blog because I never know when my full-time job will require more and I have to break a commitment, which I hate to do. I’m one who doesn’t like to commit unless I am sure that I can fulfill the commitment. Funny quirk I have.

But I would like to post a religious poem every day for the month of April. Especially since I got at least one reader to acknowledge me on that last post. There are some religious poets I admire. Donne, of course, is at the top of the list. And my favorite is Gerard Manley Hopkins. I will try to find quality religious poems that I can share throughout April. Some of them may be my own, but others will not (likely, most of them will not be). If I falter at this, please forgive me. I am only human, but I will do my level best.

The first poem I’d like to share is this one by Denise Levertov:

The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velasquez)

She listens, listens, holding
her breath. Surely that voice
is his - the one
who had looked at her, once, across the crowd,
as no one ever had looked?
Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her?

Surely those hands were his,
taking the platter of bread from hers just now?
Hands he'd laid on the dying and made them well?

Surely that face - ?

The man they'd crucified for sedition and blasphemy.
The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.
The man it was rumored now some women had seen this morning, alive?

Those who had brought this stranger home to their table
don't recognize yet with whom they sit.
But she in the kitchen, absently touching
                                     the winejug she's to take in,
a young Black servant intently listening,

swings round and sees
the light around him
and is sure.

Notice how very different this poem is than your typical Jesus freak verse. How well laid out it is from the very beginning. Not in traditional verse at all, rather written like the postmodern free verse that it is. Yet, we know immediately what the poem is about, a certain man from a moment in history nearly 2,000 years ago.

If it weren’t for the title, we might not know in the first stanza who the man is. There is a mystery to it. The subject is a woman. The repetitive “listens” in the first line set up for what follows perfectly. Then the enjambment is in itself spellbinding. Words like “holding”, “touching”, and “listening” ending lines that lead to greater mystery. And the indented line toward the end of the poem - how jarring that the winejug gives the impression that there is an indenture in the air of the place of this setting, though the poem never tells us in so many words.

Again, without the title of the poem, by the end of the second stanza, when we know that the man has laid his hands on “the dying”, we are intrigued. Who is this man? This mysterious stranger. Is this a love poem? It is, but not the type of love poem we might imagine.

The mystery continues, and well.

The single line about his face, broken with a dash and a question mark. So simple a technique, but not common. Brevity in beautiful measure. And the perfect lead-in to the next three lines …

The man they’d crucified for sedition and blasphemy.
The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.
The man it was rumored now some women had seen this morning, alive?

There is no question who those lines can be about. If we did not know by now, we know for certain now. This man is the crucified Lord, Jesus of Nazareth, God in the flesh. His crucifixion so appealingly alluded to, his disappearance from the tomb, the rumors of his appearance to the women on the road … clues, yet no mention of his name. There is no “Jesus” in this poem, but we know who it is about. We know because of the subtle and crafty way that the poetess has lead us to discovery. And that’s what makes this poem a success. It appeals to our knowledge of the past while not spelling anything out. It leaves just enough to the imagination that all we need are the subtle hints, then the spirit (of the poem) does the rest.

One of my favorite poems of all time is Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”. The Best American Poetry blog had a great commentary on Marvell today.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) has been called “the greatest minor poet in the English language.”

That’s a wonderful compliment. I would not mind being called a minor poet if I produced only one poem as worthy of multiple readings as his one crowning achievement. While Marvell’s opus is not as good as Robert Herrick’s “To The Virgins, To Make Much Of Time” (”Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” will always be one of my favorite lines), it still is something that can teach us about writing poetry, even in the 21st century.

BAP captures the spirit of Coy Mistress beautifully with this terrific segment of its miniature oeuvre:

Never was a declaration of lust more logical. Carpe diem: We won’t be young forever, so let us make merry while we can. But Marvell develops the argument as one would a syllogism. He begins with wild hyperbole. If we had “world enough and time,” he would woo the maiden “ten years before the flood” and not mind if she should turn him down until the second coming.

The question then is, what can Marvell teach us about poetics? What does he have to say to the third millennium poet about craft? I’d say “To His Coy Mistress” can show us two things; two very simple things.

First, the couplet is still a valid poetic device today. It has not gone out of fashion and I don’t believe it ever will. You don’t have to be a New Formalist to appreciate a beautifully worded and musical couplet. The wonderful thing about a couplet is you can use it anywhere, even in free verse. I like the way that T.S. Eliot employed the couplet in “The Lovesong Of J. Alfred Prufrock”, another of my all-time favorites:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo

Eliot’s poem is not free verse, but it isn’t written in a traditional form, either. The rhyme is odd and the meter is non-standard. But the verse is tight. The above couplet almost seems out of place, but it’s used twice in the poem. And it’s set apart by itself both times. Rare significance of such lines.

But Eliot is a digression. I mention Eliot only to point out that a couplet can break into a poem with a different pattern at any time. It need not, like “To His Coy Mistress”, be the only metrical pattern within a single poem.

Coy Mistress, unlike Prufrock, is written entirely in couplets. That was common for Marvell’s era. Nevertheless, the couplet is still alive and it can be used. Thanks to Andrew Marvell, this poetic device will likely never die.

Again, from BAP:

Possibly no one, not even Pope, wrote couplets more complex and witty than those of Andrew Marvell.

The second thing that Marvell can teach us is to write lines that do not have single meanings. For instance, these lines capture more than the obvious meaning in his poem about youthful lust:

The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

While Marvell is reminding us, and his coy mistress, that one cannot embrace in small plots in the afterlife, the underlying meaning that isn’t so obvious is that no one dares to desire that private place. The double meaning of the word “embrace” suggests that Marvell’s lust for his young mistress, coy though she may be, is the antithesis to a lust for death. It is, rather, a lust for life. The acquisition of sex, that wonderful proof that one is alive, is as much irreversible as death. After crossing over, one cannot go back to life any more than one can go back to virginity. Carpe diem.

To set us up for that double entendre, Andrew Marvell presents us with several preceding couplets and dangles them like a carrot before an ass. Here, let us see:

Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.

He is telling her, I paraphrase, “Do not go into your sepulcher with everything in tact because, my darling, there is no turning back.”

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we all must die, even our lust. When we go, we take it all with us - chastity and sinful opposite. Is there any question which one the minor poet prefers?

And so these two things: The value of a couplet and the skill in using double meanings to create multiple understandings; these two things Andrew Marvell teaches us. Do we employ the same poetic license? Must we write in the same rigid metrical style? No. But we can take the poetic devices of the past and make them our own. And, like Andrew Marvell, we should.

It’s Friday. Time for a video. I love this interview with Nuyorican poet Keith Roach. “Say what the hell you mean to say.”

(Sorry, video deleted due to an unknown technical difficulty.)

John Hewitt wrote a fabulous blog post on how to write a pretentious poem in seven steps. It’s a rather fitting topic because the catch-phrase for poetry these days is “accessible”. Everyone wans to write poetry that is “accessible,” presumably because people who don’t ordinarily read poetry will flock to their poem and praise them for their accessibility. One problem with that: It seldom happens.

Instead, people who don’t read poetry don’t discover accessible poems. Imagine that. But then, they don’t read pretentious poems either. So I guess they’re at a total loss.

Hewitt takes a very ordinary, accessible poem - Roses are red, / Violets are blue, / Sugar is sweet, And so are you. - and turns it into a pretentious poem simply by changing the poem in some way through seven steps. How does he say to do it? Funny you should ask. Here are Hewitt’s steps to a more pretentious poem:

• Add old time words nobody uses in real life
• Add complex terms for simple words
• Add some foreign words and italicize them
• Add something technological so people realize you’re living in a new age
• Add some other modern stuff such as abbreviations and slang
• Mix up the line endings
• Take out the punctuation

I like this list and Hewitt is correct. All of these things can make for a more pretentious poem, but simply having them doesn’t make a poem pretentious. If you use old time words like doth and art simply to make an impression then you are obviously trying too hard to sound poetic. Stop it. But that isn’t to say that you couldn’t write a narrative poem that plays on Elizabethan English. The key is propriety. If it is right for the poem then it’s right to do it, not pretentious.

Generally speaking, simple words are best. Why use a million dollar word when you can use one that is more easily understood by the majority of your readers? Well, the obvious reason is that because a more complex word might actually be the right word to use for the context. It’s an editorial decision you’ll have to make. Just don’t make the decision based on your desire to sound poetic or more intelligent. That’s pretentious.

Foreign words are generally not necessary. I’ve seldom seen an instance when a foreign phrase in a poem made the poem any better. All it tells me is that a poet is bilingual, or in today’s technological world it may mean that they’re a decent researcher.

Contemporary poets love to use technological jargon in their poems. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If you think techno-jargon will improve your poem because the 21st century has arrived, think again. Future generations will just think you’re pretentious.

I’ve never liked to see acronyms in poetry. I’ve tried writing poems with acronyms and just thought it looked stupid. It’s pretentious. And the people who don’t understand the acronyms won’t get the poem. So why bother?

Line endings are important. Yes, you can take a poem like “roses are red … yada yada yada” and move around the line endings and that would be pretty pretentious, but if you are writing a poem from scratch, well, you have to put line endings somewhere. Just put some thought into them and don’t be pretentious.

Worse than taking out punctuation is trying to outdo E.E. Cummings and using odd punctuations like parenthetical clauses sandwiched between hyphens and capitalized letters in the middle of words. I’ve always thought that was pretentious, even when Cummings did it.

But if you really are going for the pretentious effect in your poems then I can suggest a way to do it in one simple step. Just make a real strong effort to be accessible. And make sure everyone knows it.

The final principle of Millennial Poetics, that conventions should be shunned, is almost identical to Principle No. 2, that there is no room for prejudice in poetry. The difference is one of angle of perception. Whereas prejudice refers to an internal reality within the poet, convention refers to an external force upon the poet. It can be stated “Let no one enforce their own prejudices upon you,” or “Rules made by others are not applicable to oneself.” It is time to set the poet free from external conventions that make no sense.

These conventions arise from various fronts. One poet does not like long poems. Well, that’s fine, but does that mean Paterson, The Iliad, Paradise Lost, Inferno, The Aeneid, and other long poems, particularly epic poems, are wrong? Every poet is welcome to his own prejudices, though I don’t see why a poet should limit herself by them, but no poet should be allowed to foist those prejudices upon others. The poet who prefers short poems to long poems has no right to require that all poets write short poems. Nor does the poet who prefers epics have a right to require that all poets write epics.

In my short life I’ve encountered the following prejudices, all of which I consider irrational, that other poets have tried to impose upon others:

• No rhymes - Early on as a poet, in the 1980s, I encountered this prejudice, which was widely held among my generation (and still is). Someone decided that rhymes were out. Period. It was also during this time that New Formalism began to take off as a school. Obviously, it was a backlash against the irrational prejudice of the anti-rhyme crowd. The New Formalists insisted that poetry should adhere to the established forms, including rhyme. I take issue with both sides. Poetry is a broader matter than the inclusion or exclusion of one element. Whether or not a poem includes the element of rhyme should depend on the poet, the form chosen, subject matter, and the rules set forth by the poem itself.
• All lines should begin with a lower case letter unless it begins a sentence - Why? For hundreds of years poets began each line with a capital letter. Why, all of a sudden, should that change? Admittedly, some poems are hard to read because capital letters at the beginning of the lines make them so. But that does not apply across the board. Again, this is an irrational prejudice that has to go. Whether or not a letter is capitalized should depend on the poet, his preferences, form, subject matter, and other elements of craft.
• Poems should fit on one page - I don’t get this one. A poem should be as long as necessary to be complete, but no longer than it needs to be to say what it has to say. If that means a poem must be 5,000 lines in length then that is the length of the poem. If it means a poem is only three lines long then that’s how long the poem should be.
• No soul - I once met a publisher who ran a poetry journal and refused to publish any poem that used the word “soul.” That’s his right, of course. He can do whatever he wants with his journal, but why would a publisher, or a poet, limit himself? Furthermore, why impose an irrational poetic upon everyone you encounter? Yes, there are other words to use for soul, but they may not be the right word. The word “soul” means a particular thing and it bears significant meaning to American culture, so why refuse the word its natural power? Soul or no soul, it should be the choice of each individual poet and his poem.

There are other prejudices, of course. I’m sure there are some that I’ve never heard of. I do not subscribe to them. There are no rules in poetry. If there are, they should be broken. And not only should be broken, but they should be broken with a long middle finger extended.

Poets are the most unconventional people I’ve ever known. Why then should we disgrace our profession by inventing conventions that should not be? All conventions should be shunned; prejudice has no place in poetics. Preferences, yes; prejudices, no. All convention must go.

Millennial Poetics Review
Let’s review the 9 principles of poetics:

1. Craft is of utmost importance - Poets cannot, and must not, forget craft. This is the crown of the principles. Without craft, there is no poetry. It is the beginning of all things poetic. Craft should never be ignored. It should be pursued relentlessly.
2. There is no room for prejudice - Poets must end all prejudice with regard to craft. The elements are all equal. Which one applies to a particular poem or a particular sentence or line depends on the poet’s knowledge of craft and skill in employing that knowledge.
3. Form is just another element of craft - Form is not the most important thing, nor is it so unimportant that it should be ignored altogether. Form is simply one more element of craft. No more. It should be considered along with the other elements. In some ways, form determines the other elements, but in other ways, it does not. A sonnet, for instance, is not a sonnet if it does not adhere to the 14-line rule or rhyme scheme. A haiku is not a haiku if it does not follow the 5-7-5 syllabic pattern. Apart from the necessary enforcements, form should be considered as equal with all the other elements of craft.
4. Creativity and craft go hand in hand - A poet must exercise creativity. Don’t just write poems that follow a rigid form and do not tap into imagination. Make them unique in some way. Employ new elements never thought of. Create new forms, modify old forms, establish a new rubric. A poet cannot be a poet without imagination. Creativity and craft go hand in hand.
5. No subject is taboo - Every poem has a subject and all subjects are good for poetry. Nothing is taboo.
6. There is no such thing as language that is too archaic - This could fall under the shunning of convention, but I separate it from convention because it deals with poetic language and language is an inherent art of poetry. Poets should use the language that is most appropriate for the poem. If a poem requires the use of words or language that is out of use due to subject matter, form, and other elemental considerations then archaic language can be appropriate. It is a poetic choice of the author.
7. All poems are individuals - All poems are individuals and as such should be judged by their individual merits.
8. There is no acceptable method to writing poetry - There are no formulas for writing poetry. Poetics is an art, not a science. The craft of poetry requires a thought process, not formulaic assertions. Methods do not work. Poets who are looking for a method are forgetting the craft.
9. All convention should be shunned - Unless poets take craft seriously and shun convention of all sorts, we will keep seeing the same things over and over again. Poetry will lose its meaning if poets get too complacent, forget about craft, put method over creativity, and choose prejudice and convention over the study of craft. All poetics should be placed under the crown of craft and convention should be shunned at all cost.

In this series on Millennial Poetics, we’ve covered a broad range of topics. So far we’ve discussed:

1. Craft is of utmost importance
2. There is no room for prejudice
3. Form is just another element of craft
4. Creativity and craft go hand in hand
5. No subject is taboo
6. There is no such thing as language that is too archaic
7. All poems are individuals
8. There is no acceptable method to writing poetry
9. All convention should be shunned

No Single Method Will Do
There is no acceptable method to writing poetry. One can’t design a mathematical formula, there is no algorithm that will generate the perfect form, and one can’t follow a recipe to arrive at the best poem for your genre. Writing poetry is an art, not a science. There is no metaphor-to-idea ratio or a certain number of verbs to nouns formula. Such things tend to take away rather than add to a poet’s creativity.

But that doesn’t mean that one can’t generate excellent poems by following a routine or adding ritual to your writing time. There is nothing wrong with having a favorite location or time to write. Many writers wake up early and compose their poems before work. Others write just before going to bed. Some poets write at lunch break while at work. Whatever works for you is acceptable.

Writing poetry is a skill. Like any skill, it can be developed. That development takes place in practice, through exercises, in discussions with other poets about technique, and through workshops where a poet can receive valuable feedback from other poets who will read your poem as both a writer and a reader. Non-poets are incapable of that. They can read a poem and tell you whether they like it or not, but most non-poets are not able to pick your poem apart and read it as a writer in order to tell you whether your structure is effective or whether your metaphors fall on their faces. It takes a certain amount of training to be able to see nuances in word and phrase interaction and to be able to discern the music of a poem and identify whether a stress is on the wrong foot or syllable. These are special skills that are developed over time. They do not happen naturally.

Since writing poetry is a skill and since every poem is an individual, there cannot be a method to doing it. There can only be craft, an ability to discern nuances in language and rhythm.

When a poet approaches his craft from the standpoint that his skill in being a poet is contingent on how hard he works at improving his skills, his knowledge of the techniques and devices available to him, and his ability to employ those techniques and devices then he will begin to write poetry that is worthy of publication and acknowledgment. The poet who attempts to write according to some method will only churn out mediocre verse at best.

A method presupposes that you can simply plug in an element and your poem is ready for consumption. That can never be the case. Poetry is not some mad lib game where you fill in the blank and all is well. It is a skill, a craft, a profession. There is no other way to see it if one wants to be a respected poet.

Just as all poets are individuals, so too are all poems individuals and should be judged on their own merits. Just because a certain poet has written 500 great poems doesn’t mean that she won’t pen the occasional bad one. Just because a bad poet has written and published over 1,000 lousy excuses for poetry doesn’t mean that he can’t finally produce a masterpiece. Every poem is an individual and must be judged on its own merits.

Millennial Poetics Review
Let’s review the 9 principles of Millennial Poetics one more time:

1. Craft is of utmost importance
2. There is no room for prejudice
3. Form is just another element of craft
4. Creativity and craft go hand in hand
5. No subject is taboo
6. There is no such thing as language that is too archaic
7. All poems are individuals
8. There is no acceptable method to writing poetry
9. All convention should be shunned

Today, we’re discussing the individuality of poems. If you haven’t read the earlier posts in this series then I encourage you to back up and read them all and return here when you are done.

All Poems Are Individuals
There is no sense in treating a body of work as a whole unless you are willing to look at each individual poem in the group to see how it fits in with the whole. This is true whether we are talking about a chapbook, a set of poems within a specific time period within a single poet’s life, an entire collection of poems from a poet’s life, a school or movement, or a set of poems surrounding a specific theme. There is value in analyzing poetry as a group and how that group is structured could depend on any number of variables, but no matter how the grouping is accomplished, every poem within the group is still an individual and should be analyzed on its own merits.

This may seem like it should go without saying and, for the most part, it does. But there is a tendency in poetics to see the whole and forget the singular. Poetic analysis can center around a single poet and so analysts discuss the poet’s contribution to literature, but then fail to discuss each individual poem. At the bottom of every group of poems is the whole set of individual poems within the group. Without the individual poems, there is no group.

This speaks to the liberty of poetics. The freedom of poetry analysts to judge poems on their own merits as individuals as opposed to complete bodies or groups of poems. Instead of judging the Beats as good or bad, or “homosexual misogynists”, we should judge each individual poet on his own then each poem by each poet on its own before arriving at a general conclusion regarding the entire school of Beats. There is a long range and variety of personalities to discuss with regard to that movement and many poets still living consider themselves Beats, or at least influenced by the Beats.

This principle is true and applies to all schools and movements and groups of poets. There are no exceptions. Instead of discussing the Nuyorican poets, why not discuss individual poets within the Nuyorican movement and read each poem by those poets as a single unit? The movement itself certainly has an identity, but that identity is wrapped up in the aggregation of the individual poets who identify with the group. Those poets in turn have individual poems that serve to define, or defy, or add to the aggregate definition of the group itself. It is possible for a poet to break with his or her poetic tradition and identify singularly with another group at a different point in his life, or with no group at all. This has been the case with Amiri Baraka, former poet laureate of New Jersey.

Why Is This Important?
Why should we concern ourselves with whether individual poems, or poets, are a unique identity unto themselves? I believe this is important because it speaks to the nature of poetics as well as the nature of the human condition. Poetry is an individual exercise, although some poets have joined together for collaborative projects. Even when poets collaborate, poetry is still handled at the individual level. There may be dialog, interaction, to be sure; but the internal reaction to what a poet writes and reads is an individual experience. That is true of the audience as well.

Because life is experienced as individuals living within community, and poetry is intrinsically about life, it is necessary to discuss poetry in the way in which it is experienced: As individuals within community. Community is not necessarily the closed community of poets. It is all of humanity. It is one’s identity group, one’s race, one’s local community, one’s nation or state, and one’s poetic school or movement. Community is all of those things, individually and collectively. The test for any poet is to write a poem that reflects the frame of reference with which he identifies. Does he do that well or does he fail? All poetics is centered around that question, but the question applies differently to each individual poem as it pertains to what it sets out to be as a poem.

A group of poems, and consequently a group of poets, cannot succeed in that endeavor. This can only be accomplished on a poem-by-poem basis. T.S. Eliot may have captured the zeitgeist of his era in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Wasteland,” but did he do so in “Four Quartets”? The same poet who succeeds today can fail tomorrow. Just as a man in business may build a successful enterprise in one decade and fail to do so in another, so too can poets succeed in producing poems that attract an audience one day and fail in the same endeavor in another. This is the reason why the individuality of poems is a necessary component in Millennial Poetics. It could be said to be a central tenet. All poems must be analyzed on their own merits. Accept nothing less.

There’s no such thing as language too archaic for poetry. I know there will be some disagreement on this point, primarily from people who don’t understand the point I’m going to make any way. But if you’ve ever been in a poetry critique group or workshop and someone has said, “That word seems too archaic,” or “Modern poets don’t write like that,” then you’ll know where I’m coming from.

What people usually mean when they say a word is too archaic is that they don’t know what it means so you shouldn’t use it. You could use a brand new word and someone could just as well say, “That word is too intellectual; I don’t think you should use it.” Can you imagine that? “I don’t think you should use anthropomorphic. It’s too big a word.”

Whine, whine, whine.

Here’s a clue: Pick up a dictionary. Poets use words. Sometimes we use big words. Sometimes we use words that aren’t in use much longer. Archaic to a non-poet means something like “bobby socks.” Since people don’t wear bobby socks any more, it’s too archaic. It shouldn’t be used.

Any word in the English language, past, present, or future is fair game. The only issue is whether a particular word is the right word choice for a particular poem based on tone, voice, style, subject matter, etc. That said, there are two poetry terms that every poet needs to be familiar with.

• Onomatopoeia - Onomatopoeia should not be confused with archaic, or ancient, usage. This poetry term signifies a word that poets use to illustrate a sound. The word itself sounds like the sound it’s supposed to signify. For instance, squish is a word that sounds like squish, the sound your boots make when they step in a mud puddle. It has nothing to do with archaic language, but it is a poetic technique that uses odd words to make a point. Language, or word play, is the fairground of poets. The cool thing about onomatopoeia is that you can make up words, and if people don’t understand what the words that you make up mean then you were either ineffective in portraying the effect you were going for or they just don’t understand the poetic technique you are employing. You can fix the first problem, but the second problem isn’t yours to fix.
• Anachronism - An anachronism may actually have something to do with archaic usage of words. It could also be anything that is misplaced in time. For instance, a medieval knight that whips out a cigarette lighter to light the fuse of an artillery gun is anachronistic. That could be a useful effect in a poem, but to employ it successfully, it has to make sense. A serious love poem that involves a medieval knight in the 21st century may not make much sense, but that doesn’t mean that some poet couldn’t pull it off successfully. Maybe it’s satire and the knight is there for comic effect. Poetic techniques that involve archaic uses of language are permissible if they make sense for the poem based on tone, style, voice, subject matter, form, and other poetic elements.

Other poetic techniques may be useful as well. Suppose a poet were to use a metaphor comparing a 21st century idea that people are familiar with with a historic artifact or piece of equipment that is no longer in use. The Internet is like Gutenberg’s press would be an example of that. Of course, Gutenberg’s press is an ancient piece of equipment. Does it belong in a poem? Maybe; maybe not. If it doesn’t, it isn’t because it’s ancient and no longer in use, but it would be because it just doesn’t fit in the poem that the poet is trying to place it in. That’s really the most important thing.

I’ve met poets who say they don’t like it when people use the word “O” or “Oh” at the beginning of their lines and stanzas. That’s not the way people write any more. Shakespeare used the word effectively, as did many of his contemporaries. At one time, that was the way everyone wrote. People don’t write that way any more. The poetry is more conversational and consistent with the way that most people in our society think and use language. That doesn’t mean that these expressions do not have their place in poetry. I’d be judicious in putting an “O” or an “Oh” in a poem, but I wouldn’t necessarily rule it out completely because of some modern prejudice. I would take special pains to make sure that if I did use it that it wasn’t done in the same way that people today are familiar with. I wouldn’t want to remind anyone of John Donne in a negative way. I’d want people to think I was doing something original, and if a poet can’t do that, no matter what technique he uses, then he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing.

Archaic language should not be ruled out. But it should be done in a manner that makes sense for a particular poem, a particular voice, a particular style. Perhaps you want to write a lyric ballad about a French troubadour being wooed by a dominant chain-mail wearing courtesan/warrior in the court of Marie Antoinette. Let’s say you want your poem to be a sestina. Well, you might very well use language of that era because it is appropriate for the subject matter. You must also consider voice. Whose voice will that poem be told in? The troubadour’s? The courtesan’s? Marie Antoinette’s? A court jester’s? A friend of the courtesan’s commanding officer, who thinks she is a man in the French army? All kinds of things can take place in a poem. You have to work out the details and use language that is appropriate for your narrative.

To summarize, there is no such thing as language that is too archaic, too futuristic, too (fill in the blank). It is either effective or ineffective, appropriate or inappropriate to your poem. Think along those lines and your language should speak like the song of angels.