Last night, after the festivities in my house died down, I decided to write a blog post. I came across a copy of Dana Gioia’s excellent essay titled “Can Poetry Matter?” and started to read it (for the umpteenth time). It was 11:30 p.m when I started. I finished my blog post, an essay of my own in response, at 1:30 a.m. Tonight’s post won’t be that long.
We just finished another Christmas festivity, and I’m pooped. I don’t know how poetic that is, but I feel like the back end of a trope.
Frankly, I’m glad Christmas is over and I’m looking forward to a new year. This season always wears my butt out.
At any rate, the kids are asleep and the mice are beginning to stir. I’m anxious to see what the rest of the poetry blogging world has to say about the conversation. Does poetry matter? Can it matter again? How?
Poetry can only matter if it is relevant. That relevance can be to an individual or a whole community. I’m not saying that no one else in the world could get something out of the poem I wrote my wife for our anniversary but she completely understood it.
Writing for a wider audience requires an appreciation of what they are likely to get out of it. Most poets write for themselves and if anyone out there happens to get something out of it then that’s gravy. Making people who don’t get it feel bad about it is where poets have done us the disservice.
I’m not saying that Beckett should never have written ‘Whoroscope’ but he should’ve been less niggardly when he produced his footnotes. What’s the point in writing something that only a few scholars are going to get unless it’s to set poetry at a distance from the common man? Okay, that was the young and arrogant Beckett still heavily under the influence of Joyce but that is the problem with so many poets – I know, I was one of them – we think we’re superior, a Poet with a capital P.
Esoteric poetry will never find much of a readership and, as long as the poet accepts that, that’s fine. My wife wrote a poem once about constellations which managed to find its way in front of an audience of astronomers who loved the piece but how often is that going to happen?
To my mind poets need to be more willing to explain their poetry. My wife used to run a poetry magazine where she imposed a strict rule on all the poets: No poem will be published without commentary. Very few had anything to say about the construction of the poems because I suspect most of them had no great techniques bar chopping up the lines and bunging in a few similes and metaphors. They were happier talking about the circumstances that resulted in the poem but that is also of some help to new readers trying to get their heads around poetry. That’s why, on my own site, I pointed people to the Best Scottish Poems of 2007 site because there the poets and editors talked about the poems and I think that is so important.
Relevance is a peculiar animal. Reading a poem is just one of many things that will go on in a person’s day and it has to rub up against all these other experiences, thoughts and emotions in our heads. It’s like the single by The Cars that was played during Live Aid. The original meaning has been subsumed by the images that people saw whilst they were listening to the song. The song matters more than it ever did but does it matter that no one hardly knows what it was originally about?
Jim, I think it does matter. When U2 recorded “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” that was about a particular event in history. There may have been some personal undertones at work as well, but those are only significant to the people involved, yet the obvious historical event is significant in the broader context. Not to understand that is to miss the point of the song and while a listener might appreciate the music, it would be a stretch to claim they really get it.
The same goes for poetry. What is the poem “Ozymandias” about? If one wasn’t aware that Ozymandias is a metaphorical king, not a real one, one might go on a long goose chase trying to find out which ancient king was named Ozymandias and seek to recall why his statue was destroyed. One would be missing the point.
A love poem to your wife might contain images and allusions that are known to the two of you (and maybe you’d like to keep it that way). Sharing it with the rest of the world might give us all something to consider in ourselves. Is our love that strong, that passionate? Are we missing something because it isn’t? Or are we merely voyeurs peeking into a window that we should be nowhere close to?
Poetry, like music and other art forms, is a means of communication. If one is merely writing poetry for one’s own enjoyment then none of this matters. The tinkerer who creates a new home appliance for his own use in his own home likely won’t care about applying for a patent, but the inventor who is looking to discover a new way to wash the dishes that will be an improvement on the old way will. And this is the dilemma for we poets. If we are out to write the best sonnet since “Ozymandias,” how will “best” be judged, and by whom? What will be the criteria? What should be the criteria?