Much as what passes for poetry today is not what I could call poetry. Here is a fictitious example of the contemporary, post-modern poem:
The jar lay on the floor
It looked good to me,
So I kicked it across the hardwood and listened to it
Clink and clank like a train on worn out tracks.
Um, actually, that's not half bad. I just spit that out. Let me try again at post-modern emptiness:
Cindy lay on the bed, naked.
We had just made love.
I smoked a cigarette and thought about a show
I had seen on TV the night before.
This is some life, I thought.
And it was.
Okay, that's more like it - vacuous. Devoid of subtly and almost totally lacking in meaning.
Most of what I read from contemporary poets lacks rhythm, lacks music, lacks the layers of onion skin that make delving into a truly well-worked poem so satisfy.
I read Bukowski not because he is a poet to study the way I once studied Eliot or Crane; I read Bukowski because I love his voice. I breeze through his poems enjoying the milieu of his life, picking up bits of observed detail and insight into human behavior. But, with a few exceptions, Bukowski lacks the compressed punch of a Keats or a Donne.
Poet and reviewer Edward Hirsch touches on the snobbery many current poetry critics have about what constitutes good poetry in his review of Richard Howard's new volume, "Talking Cures."
Howard is the most unabashedly literary — the most Wildean — of contemporary American poets. His massive learning, a full cultural arsenal, has often made him seem suspect to poetry readers who distrust great fanciness and mistakenly equate a plain style and a supposedly unmediated personal voice with "sincerity," which is a little like saying that vanilla ice cream is more "sincere" than peach gelato. But if it's true, as Ezra Pound said, that technique is the test of a poet's sincerity, then Howard certainly qualifies as one of our sincerest makers, since he has been elaborating his structures — deliberately making something of himself — for more than 40 years now. (emphasis added)To me, a plain style is perfectly suited to prose, but not to poetry. The point of poetry is to escape the drabness of our plain and ponderous lives; poetry should compact our experiences and excite our senses, not numb us with a sense of sameness and predictability. From poetry, we should gain a new way of seeing old things, not the same old way of seeing everything.
The samples of Howard's poetry in Hirsch's review make me think that he is my kind of poet.
... Everyone knows my history,
complete with goddesses, islands, all those hoary lies!
I have no tales to tell, I have only
echoes. The real Ulysses puts in his appearance
between other men's lines, the true Odysseus
shows up in unspeakable pauses, the gaps and blanks
where life hasn't already been turned into
"my" wanderings, "my" homecoming, even "my" dog!This from a poem about Ulysses taking a post-modern view of his legend, but it is written with a modern cadence that lifts it above post-modern boredom.
I think I'll buy this book.…
Article comments
26 - Doug A.
Before discovering this blog, I had spent a couple of hours at Duotrope links, reading poetry from several journals. Poet after poet sounded the same- that "plain style" and "ummediated voice" to which reviewer Edward Hirsh compaired vanilla ice cream. I agree that a plain style is more suited to prose. When a poet writes about ordinary themes, plain style is insufficient. I want beuaty, style, or cleverness- maybe all three. And since nothing is new under the sun, all themes are ordinary. And beauty, style, and/or cleverness is always essential, but usually missing from the contemporary poetry I find in the journals I read.
Mike Finley tells us that there are hundreds of thousands of poets writing today. Make that millions, Mike. Poetry.com (no, that's not where I read poetry!) claims over 6 million subscribers. If, in Elizabethan England, 10% of the the population were high school or college educated and most of them wrote poetry, today most of our enormous population is high school eduated (perhaps half having spent 2 years or more in college). Possibly 5% of those write poetry. My numbers are just guesses, but the total number of poetry witers is probably 100 times that of Elaizbethan England. Do we have 100 times the number of "Shakespeares?" I seriously doubt that an unpublished authentic Shakespeare sonnet, equal to his best, and found in some dusty Avon attic and submitted to contemporary poetry journals would be published. What do you think?
Doug A.
27 - Doug A.
Dan Tessitore asks about Billy Collins. He is one of our contemporary poets that I love to read. Yes, his work is uneven- who would expect otherwise- but IMHO poems like FISHING ON THE SUSQUEHANNA will be read 100 years from now. I remember the first time I read it, I immediately thought of ARS POETICA, one of my favorite poems. It's very difficult to write a good poem about the art of writing poetry, and both succeed. Collins' best poetry, though written in a deceptively plain style, does have elements of beauty and cleverness- no, not the in-your-face cleverness of a Dorothy Parker- a poet I love to read, but that subtle cleverness of levels of meaning that much great poetry exhibits. Besides cleverness, Collins also writes with humour. I like ON TURNING 10 less well and agree that the ending is too predictable and almost a cliche.
Doug A.
28 - Kim G Randell
Poetry - A Declining Art?
"One of the reasons for the decline in the popularity of poetry today may be the prevalence of writing in freer forms of the art.
No more rigid structure of line and verse, no rhyming couplets and quatrains.
Odes, sonnets and ballads no longer seem to have expected forms.
The very texture of the thoughts behind the words has apparently become the poems in some of these new evolutions and such forms of expressive language and thought totally lose the general public.
We have all been brought up and educated with “classical” metered and rhymed structures, from preschool to University ( nursery rhymes to Shakespeare), from television “jingles” to popular music, and anything without the repeating and organized patterns that we’ve all learned to recognize as poetry, will tend to be dismissed as prose, albeit written and laid out in an unfamiliar non-prosaic manner.
Our bodies and lives run to many rhythms from heartbeat to circadian to celestial.
Our songs whether Bach, Handel, Abba or Puff Daddy are rhythmic and their lyrics rhyme, so to my mind it is not surprising that the modern and experimental poets are given short shrift by the general public if their work is not to expected shapes.
Shakespearean Iambic Pentameter, for example, is a copy of the rhythm of the human heartbeat. John Masefield’s use of rhythm and rhyme in poems such as “Cargoes” enhances the word pictures of the various vessels in the poem.
One could define classic poetry as a “song without music” which suggests the requirement of recurrent themes of sound and structure. Take these rhythms away and the free-flowing shape of modern poetic writing is rejected by the majority of our peers as directionless, shapeless and untenable (the Universe is full of finite and recognizable shapes and thus shall be our poetry).
Today’s poetry scene has become asymmetrically bi-polar.
On the one hand a small group of modern poets and supporters with their new definitions of poetry, and on the other hand a massive public which is still being fed and educated with rhyme and rhythm, and whose expectation is more of the same.
Modern poetry, if thought about at all, is being perceived by ordinary folk as an exclusive domain for the erudite few, a past-time for unkempt and bearded introverts, or in its worst form, absolute rubbish. We all know where the money is, and so professional promotion also supports the expectations of the greater public.
What is most ironic is that the classical poet is not always recognized now by his modern peers and thus is denied their encouragement and support, which, in turn, denies the paying public the poetry they expect.
Poetry to the man in the street has now become a dying and irrelevant art form restricted to dusty halls of learning and old libraries.
Renaissance for the art form rests, in my opinion, with the classical styles the greater public expects. A collection of contemporary classical poetry could contain a few introductory modern poems as a means of educating the public to the newer forms of poetry, and so everyone would benefit from this inclusive, non-partisan approach.
My oldest son, when he was just thirteen, told me that he was discouraged by his English teacher from writing in rhyme that year, as he and his peers had not developed sufficient language skills in her opinion. How will he and others develop those skills and disciplines without encouragement at an earlier age by their teachers?
Free form styles rule in school!
So, as very few people in educational institutions appear today to be promoting the necessary English language skills and dedicated craftsmanship needed for production of classical poetry styles, the situation for poetry in general is going to continue to deteriorate.
For those of you who say, “But look at the recent increase in the numbers of our poets,” I will say, “But look at the even greater increase in our general population!” The ironic twist mentioned above will continue screwing contemporary poetry as a whole into the ground whilst the craft and skills of classical poetry writing are being allowed to dissipate."
© Kim Randell 2006
29 - Kim G Randell
As a brief follow-on from my article above please find below a classically styled modern poem lovingly crafted and aged in old oak barrels (I'm joking....about the barrels, of course).
The point being made that this is what Joe Public calls poetry - rhyme, rhythm, metaphor that is recognizable and an empathic message. It takes a bit of patience and practice, but the real crafting of a poem is its own reward once the work is complete. Liken it to the carving of a fine statue. You get out only what you put in. Enjoy!
MERE MORTAL MAN
The tasks I must perform as routine every day
Just rob me of another brightly shining act.
My time on this poor planet surely melts away
The more I battle with the darkly morbid fact
That bitter tastes the irony in all our dreams,
The kernel of a nut no mortal man has cracked;
Too short our bodies’ lives to us it seems,
Our mind spans truly crippled by a time span sacked.
When youth had clothed my waking dreams an aeon back,
The Universe I owned, as well as hoary Time itself.
Vast glowing projects plotted for a grand attack,
And many more bright goals just waiting on the shelf.
It seemed Forever’s boundary lines could not be tracked,
Nor did that word Infinity have meaning in itself.
My grand achievements lying more in fiction than in fact,
The world my oyster, gleaming pearl all set in glistening gilt.
As I meandered on along Life’s winding coil,
A chunk of time would dissipate each sleepy night.
Plans and projects moving softly off the boil,
One by one they’d quietly vanish from my sight,
Replaced by daily deeds that paid me for my toil,
Necessities of bread and shelter, holding back my flight.
Bright beacons of my dreams and projects without oil
That only time can brew slipped slowly into night.
© Kim Randell