Getting a late start tonight. Was at a critique group I hadn’t been to in a while. We went a little later than usual. It was a good night.

I found myself in the unusual position of defending a piece written by a young college-bound woman who was new to the group. It’s not unusual that I was defending a young woman, but that I was defending her Cubist aesthetic. As you know, I’m not preferential to the avant-garde schools, and particularly Cubism, but I’m a firm believer in critiquing a poem toward a poet’s intent and not toward my own preferences.

The regulars of the group are a rather diverse crowd. We met in Michael Hoover’s home. Mike is the current poet laureate of Hanover, Pa. He is a poet’s poet, a sort of John Donne among a cast and crew of rather colorful characters. My friend Gary is the Beat poet, protege of Jack Kerouac. Anna is an older woman, a traditionalist who is rather rigid in her poetics. Janet is another older woman who is quiet most of the time, but who writes strictly in form and meter, almost always. Tonight she presented a sonnet, complete with the obligatory and obvious end rhymes. Katie is much more contemporary and Millennial-thinking in her approach than the others, tipping toward the postmodern without falling into it. Then there is me and I’m all over the poetic map. Some of the other regulars weren’t there.

At any rate, the young college-bound lady is a former student of Mike’s. Her poem was firmly entrenched in the avant garde. Her poem consisted of several hyphenated adjectives, a handful of colons followed by short bouts of terse pith, imagery that would make Ezra Pound stand up and sing “Holy Moses”, uncanny indentations, and an all-around creative visual and thought-provoking piece. It was quite imaginative and I was blessed to have read the poem. At her age, to have pulled that kind of poem off without the use of the most overused word in any language – the confabulated “I” – was incredible. I think it may have been the best, and certainly was the most creative, poem of the evening.

I defended her because everyone else in the group seemed to want to change the strophe in the poem that I thought was the heart and soul. In the midst of all this imagery surrounding that verse, the poet committed the cardinal sin of “author intrusion”, only it wasn’t so much an author intrusion as it was an addition of “self” in a family portrait. The poem’s title, you see, was “Cubism Family Portrait.”

What Is Cubism?
Anyone who has seen a Cubist painting will have one of two reactions. They’ll either love it or hate. I hate them. Pablo Picasso, heralded a genius by many art lovers in the 20th century, was a crazed, maniacal canvas abuser. I don’t like his Cubist art and I much less like his Blue Period paintings. But a thing is what it is.

When a poet presents a poem that is titled “Cubism Family Portrait”, it is pretty obvious what she is attempting. As a critique group participant, it is my duty to help her achieve her goal in creating the poem that is true to her aesthetic and reaches the point of perfection according to the principles of that aesthetic and not to infuse her poetry with my own aesthetic preferences or attempt to turn her into a miniature me. But that, unfortunately, is the approach of many critique group participants.

The Cubists attempted to present their subjects as geometric lines and shapes rather than the way we would normally see them. Cubist paintings are like stick figures on steroids. They are, in a certain sense, simplistic, but then they are also quite complex in other senses. The idea is to turn reality into an abstraction and the Cubists did that quite well.

I thought the young lady’s poem captured that sense of abstraction that can be found in Cubist art quite well. There was no mention of “I” in the poem, which I thought was a marvelous absence, yet the poet, or narrator, was definitely present. The poem attempted to describe the family in a very imagistic sense, including the dog, and even included two thoughts, spelled out explicitly, of the narrator regarding two imaginary events based on the movement of a chair in the scene. I thought the scene was spelled out quite well. Others didn’t think so. I didn’t have a problem with their inability to visualize it so much as I did with their attempt to fix the problem.

The suggestions had more to do with changing the way the poem was presented rather than improving it in the direction that it was moving. Group members didn’t like that she numbered her thoughts; well, it was unconventional, sure, but I thought it worked for her poem. The “author intrusion” as it was called was a necessary component to the poem because how can you have a family portrait without the painter, who is also a part of the family? The painter has to draw herself in too, doesn’t she?

So what we had was a poem that was primarily based on images, but which took a short excursion in two ways:

1. The painter, who was also a member of the family, entered the poem with thoughts and feelings (well, she is human, isn’t she?)
2. And the form of the poem changed, including a numbered sequence of the intruding author’s thoughts along with double indentions and italics

I thought the author intrusion was appropriate, but I was in the minority.

That’s not to say I thought the poem was perfect. I had my issues with parts of it, but I thought the one verse that everyone seemed to fixate on and wanted to fix was the part that needed the least work. Michael was the only one who saw my point, though I could see that Katie also agreed with me in at least one sense. While Michael could see my point, he still insisted the verse needed to be fixed.

I never try to fix someone else’s aesthetic while in a critique group. I don’t think it’s appropriate. I may not like their approach to writing, but it’s not my place to say it there in that setting. The best influence I can be is to help them improve their poem in the direction that they want it to go. If the aesthetic they have chosen doesn’t work for their poem, I think they’ll discover that on their own in due time. If they don’t then it will just have to be a bad poem. I’m not there to put a clay roof on a steel building.