Over dinner, a friend once asked me a shocking question. What is
poetry anyway? Then, even worse, What makes a poem great? He thought
I should know, since I presumed to introduce poetry programs on
radio.
Mentally I reached for my favourite quotations; Robert Frost's
‘poetry is what is left out in translation’, Louis Zukovsky's
‘poetry is a function whose lower limit is speech and whose
upper limit is song’, and a recent addition to the stockpile,
Veronique Tadjo's ‘poetry is the shortest road between us’.
But with that last one we're already employing metaphor — getting
poetic to say what poetry is.
I had the same problem with my own off-the-cuff attempt; ‘if
prose is the three-course meal we're eating, then poetry is the
glass of wine.’ No. No good. He didn't want more metaphors.
The best answer I have seen a poet give to the question ‘What
is poetry’ was simply to read another poem. Perhaps I should
have followed that example, but my friend had stung me into attempting
a non-poetic definition of poetry.
Poetry may be many things. It might be a highly musical form of
language, metrical, playing with sound in various ways — ie, some
form of verse. But this is only sufficient (not necessary) to calling
it poetry. It may be ideas based, without too much attention to
metrics or sound, a type of compressed or supercharged prose. Metaphor,
image, surprising conjunctions, paradoxes, these are the common
tools of this kind of poem. Its main aim is to say something about
the world in a surprising way, in the unique voice of the composing
mind. It likes to subvert received notions of the world.
Another sort of poetry may be language based, focused on language
itself, trying to expand what is possible in its native tongue.
It may reject connections with the outside world, looking inwards
on its own constructed universe of words.
Poetry may be performance based, where the delivery of the words
by the poet is as important as the writing of them. It may be visually
based (concrete poetry) where the look of the words and letters
and their arrangement in space is the main part of the art. It may
depart from conventional semantics altogether and head toward pure
music — sound poetry. It may be some combination of all of the above.
Just as there is no DNA test for poetry, there is none for deciding
what is ‘great’. Good is easier. Good poetry is like anything
good; it's moving, exciting, funny, memorable, intriguing, shocking,
persistent in its effect on the mind. It seems new, even if it's
ancient, doesn't repeat the obvious, makes us want more, opens us
up to another way of understanding the world or confirms (in a way
we hadn't exactly thought of) something we've known for a long time.
It's simultaneously familiar and strange. It gives courage. It dares
to find truths, obliquely or head on.
There's plenty of good poetry, but ‘great’, what is great?
I think this is only decided by poetry lovers over time — perhaps
decades or centuries. It's what the world community of poetry lovers
treasures and wants to preserve and sometimes (just sometimes) this
filters into a national popular consciousness. This, for what it's
worth, is ‘greatness’, and it's somewhat out of the hands
of the poet.
Robert Frost said ‘poetry is when an emotion has found its
thought and thought has found words’ and I would add ‘and
the words have found their best form.’ To me, feeling is first.
This is not an anti-intellectual concept. I'm not talking about
gushing or trance utterances — though they can be productive too.
I don't perceive such a big division between feeling and intellect
— ‘intelligent feeling’ for me, is close to the source
of poetry. The problems come only when there is a too-conscious
division of feeling and intellect. Cutting out feeling from intellect
produces a lot of empty chicanery; poetry that leaves me with a
sense of being malnourished. On the other hand, a wallow in a trough
of emotion (particularly if it seems trumped-up emotion, or what
we ‘ought’ to feel, or if the emotion comes garnished
with platitudes) produces a nausea akin to overeating.
W'ei T'ai, a much-quoted 11th century poet, put it well:
Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It
should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling,
for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the
feeling shows in the words.
This is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents
directly feelings which overwhelm him and keeps nothing back to
linger as an aftertaste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot
start the hands and feet involuntarily waving and tapping in time,
far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and
earth in motion and call up the spirits.
'Feeling the idea' is almost a definition of the way poetry works.
Not spelling things out — creating the space for what is unsaid,
but is understood. Letting silences gather. Half the art of poetry
is knowing what to leave, or take out. Feeling and idea are present
in the even the most imagistic of poems. Consider Basho's
Not my human
sadness, cuckoo,
but your solitary cry.
We see the poet on his trek, we hear the bird call, we feel the
idea of aloneness as the bird speaks for the man. But it's in a
flash, not at the end of an elaborate argument. A novelist plants
a forest, tree by tree. The poet, not liking this sort of labour,
gets us to shut our eyes and breathe in the leaf smell. Poetry is
a demanding shortcut; it requires us to climb fences and jump creeks.
It may have a message, but the message is read through an experience
other than the message itself.
Contained in poetic imagery is the thing observed but also the
point of view of the observer. We know it's the voice of the poet
we're hearing, no matter what the subject. We feel the poet's mind
at work as editor even in ‘found’ poems or ‘appropriated
texts’. It's the interaction of that unique viewpoint and the
subject matter that interests me. It's the ‘how’ as much
as the ‘what’ of the poem that I want. So I'm expecting
the poem to be personal, but a personal view of a world I live in
or could (with some imagination) live in.
I'm looking for a poetry that seeks an audience beyond its own author
or immediate clique. That speaks of big things, personally. Being
personal does not mean being self-absorbed or trivially domestic.
I've heard it said that what's wrong with much contemporary poetry
is that it's too fond of its own navel and too domestic. That's
true if the poems just detail the minutiae of the memorabilia relevant
to the author only. But important ideas can be found on the kitchen
shelf. Domesticity isn't the core of the problem — lack of development
of the poem beyond self-absorbed or nostalgic detail, is.
Perhaps a majority of poems begin as an act of self-absorption.
After all, you have to take your mind out of the barrage of the
world's noise, just to think your words into some kind of shape.
Even if your aim is to include the world's noise, you have to take
it in and then let it out of your self. But that act of self-absorption
is just a beginning. A good poem moves beyond this beginning to
create something like a shared memory.
Poetry occurs in a border zone that lies between the poet controlling
the language and the language controlling the poet. A poem that
doesn't hold back for the sake of decorum can be an exhilarating
experience, then again it can be an embarrassing immersion in purple
prose. The skill of the poet, the ability to write from within the
feeling, is everything. Despite the work of the de-constructors,
there is still a place for the lyric that says ‘feel what I
feel, see what I see.’ Readers and listeners must decide for
themselves if they wish to accept the bargain.
From feeling and idea to language and form. The poem is not just
a description of the world, but an embodiment of it in language.
The embodiment is (as that word suggests) complex, unique, stimulating
to the senses. It is not only the music of the words, but their
colour, feel, look, and association, the patterns they form, the
structures of line, stanza, and book. Poetry says something by being
that thing in words.
How about ruled or traditional forms? Do we give the mountaineer's
response to why climb a mountain — because it's there? Do we write
a sonnet just to show we can? There is something in the claim that
requiring a rhyme or stress at a certain place causes the poet to
go in directions that they wouldn't have if the form was open. Of
course, satisfying the rule doesn't guarantee a satisfying poem,
even if you've pushed yourself into new territories to do so.
The best formal verse makes the rules seem natural; the forms appear
to be created by their subject matter, not randomly imposed. To
me, the most interesting formal verse occurs when poets invent their
own forms. They apply rules, but rules of their own devising. This
is not the same as ‘no rules’, and is, in fact, doubly
inventive.
