Please excuse the odd formatting, which I seem powerless to amend.
...Nothing I say tonight has doctrinal value. I
try never to make the
claim That’s not
poetry, simply because there have likely always been almost as many
different notions of what poetry is as there are poets.
I want to speak of narrative values in lyric
poetry not merely because I employ them but simply because I think they can
help us avoid the sort of density, even impenetrability, of many a contemporary poem
read, say, in The New Yorker– the sort of writing, as I see it, that can give poetry a really bad name
even among people who read a lot, who come to libraries and good bookstores
like this one.....
My friend, the brilliant Garret Keizer, tells me that when the 1973 Arab-Israeli
war broke out, Israeli conscripts rushed home to get their rifles, which they
were obliged to own, and copies of poetry collections by the great Yehuda
Amichai. That is an extreme example, of course, but perhaps illustrative: I
find it impossible to imagine anyone’s running home for copies of the cleverness and self-indulgent word-play that marks so much of current fare.
Before I proceed further, I should tell you
that many younger editors are all but militantly anti-narrative. At 72, then, I’m doubtless quaint, and becoming
more so in ways that I don’t even recognize, but that those younger people will.
So be it. I’m old enough not to care what the smart and hip people think.
As the title of my presentation suggests, I
want poems that invite readers in, rather than ones that exclude them, and this
is what in my opinion narrative values can help us with.
Narrative values, the values of conventional short fiction, ones that my generation
learned about in grammar school: character, plot, and setting– I think they come in as a way of inviting the reader into your creation.
For me, in any case, there are a few basic questions I
pose to any draft I produce, and they are much related to character, setting,
and plot. Who’s talking? To whom is
he or she talking? Where is the
speaker on delivering the words we read? Answers to these questions in the trombone
poem are impossible for me to find. The speaker, whatever strange beast he is,
could be anywhere as he waits for a
letter containing the word “trombone,” though why he should desire such a
letter is mysterious in the first place; so I lack a sense of setting. Who the speaker is remains totally unclear; I have no sense of character. I want that sense, and if I
write or read a poem in the first person, I want the character named I to show some characterological
qualities too– I am not interested in the thoughts or feelings of a mere
pronoun. In this case, if the poem were unattributed, just for trivial example,
we could equally imagine its speaker to be female as male. If I can’t even know
be sure of something so apparently trivial as that, how may I be expected to
know what my students have always called “deeper meanings”?
Who, way, what, where? If my poem can’t answer
at least some of these questions, I feel I need to work on it further.
As the saying goes, I want to know, in my poem
or someone else’s, what’s the story
here? Not knowing that, not knowing, as my generation used to say, where the
speaker is coming from, I feel not invited in but– almost intentionally it seems– excluded. I feel a need to know some
encoded language, or some other secret, in order to enter the poem. Lacking the
knowledge of who-what-where-why, etc., I turn away– and that, for me, is about the
last effect I want to have on my reader.
Again, as writer, and in fact as reader too, I
ask those basic questions of the unit of language before me: who’s talking, to whom, where, and why?
Who is the character or characters? Where do they find themselves? I don’t need
a plotted story per se, but I want
those seemingly factual issues to be
as clear as possible.
Does this mean that as writers we need to
“dumb down” our poems? Scarcely. Poetry by its nature is engaged with complex
feelings and thoughts. But there is a vast difference between complexity and mere complication. ...That's the difference, to my taste, between Robert Frost, one of the most complex
minds in our literary history, and Ezra Pound, one of the most complicated.
If as poets we present complex material, we
are already challenging our readers to pay very close attention. There is no
speed-reading of poetry, no scanning for story. Why would we want to expand
that challenge to include what I have called simple facts: who, what, where
why? Again, the presentation of such facts is what I call the invitation to the
reader. To use a famous example, that reader may say, “This is tough stuff to sort
out, but at least this much I can
know”:
Two roads diverged in a
yellow wood,
And
sorry I could not travel both
And
be one traveler, long I stood
And
looked down one as far as I could
To
where it bent in the undergrowth.
We have a starting point for the famous
instance I use here. A sort of door has been held open to us as we move into a
poem that, though often reduced to a mere pep talk
about self-reliance, is in fact profoundly ambiguous and finally even
mysterious, perhaps like all good lyric.
And so on.....
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Here is a recent poem dealing with an unusual physical (and, it seems, psychological) condition.
Anosmia
A student told me this
story,
because the one she’d
written
used the word, anosmia,
which I’d never heard and
which
the one on the page did not
define or refer to again.
It just said the
protagonist
had such a condition and
then
went along without pause
about race-cars,
machines that traveled much
faster
than anything should. The girl
had fallen for one of the
drivers
and ended up in a trap.
He was clearly a son of a
bitch.
All that NASCAR lore, I
confess,
was stuff I’d always dismissed
as pure yahoo, but it had
its appeal.
The love plot didn’t– way
too familiar, the kind of
thing
that any young person will say
in writing, or if so inclined,
face-to-face. I’m afraid
that old tale
couldn’t hold me for long. I’m
jaded,
I guess. But anosmia... well,
I’ve always been crazy for
words,
and I wanted that one for
me.
It kicked off the more
gripping story:
her dad was an EMT,
and as a small girl she’d
peeked
inside his vinyl bag
and found the smelling
salts.
What are these for? she begged,
and although he didn’t want
to,
she insisted, he gave in,
she took a sniff and –poof!–
she’d never smell again.
That as I say made a better
tale than what she wrote,
which was
same-old-same-old-same old.
I waited her out while she
spoke,
then asked her about her
sense
of taste. She said all she
cared for
was Mexican cooking or Thai,
and only the spiciest
flavors.
She’d soon enough gotten
used
to mouth-searing pepper and
sauce.
They never bothered her
now.
My mind strayed off,
because
I was close to her father’s
age,
and what I mostly conjured
was how that man must have
tried
his hardest not to surrender
but did, and then– too late.
He’d likely meant to do
good.
Don’t most of us strive for
that?
Driving home, I looked out
on a late March moon, and
directly
beside it, Aldebaran,
brightest star in Taurus.
And if you have any faith
in
this sort of thing (I don’t),
the Bull always craves
reward.
Born in that sign, you’re a
sucker
for wet kisses, fine wine
and food.
What can it possibly feel
like,
if you have a decent heart,
to have made so small a
mistake
and deprived your child of
all that,
anosmia hanging on
in the life of a daughter you
love?
Fo you go on replaying that
moment?
I don’t know, but my guess
is you must.
I remembered a woodsman
named Don.
He and two wives had a slew
of kids. His manner was
terse,
but he had a nose for truth.
(That moon looked sharp as
an axe-blade.)
I got thinking of something
he said,
and not about children
only:
Some damned strange traps is set.
Admittedly, I'm behind on my reading. Coincidentally, I happened to read the "trombone poem" in the March 5 issue of The New Yorker just before I read this April 2nd blog - yesterday. I'm not sure of the protocol of commenting on blog 3 weeks hence, but.... Firstly you were much better at articulating why the poem in question didn't resonate with me (and I must admit, I'm glad it wasn't just me.) My reaction was more like "what the ...?" As usual, your take was informative. Perhaps it's just a matter of taste, for which we've all been advised numerous times, there is no accounting. Then again, Mr. Eaves has been published in the New Yorker and I likely never will be. I prefer narrative pieces and particularly those that border on prose, especially when artfully conceived. Why some writers prefer the esoteric is a mystery to me. BTW, in that same issue of TNY was a poem by Phil Levine, an absolute beauty of two pages, written in first person plural and what a story it tells! Thanks for listening.
ReplyDeleteEd W.
Yes, Ed, had I had time, I'd have used Phil Levine's poem as the perfect foil for the trombonist. It seems Phil had to be U.S. poet laureate to get one poem published, then die for another. Meanwhile, there has been crap, e.g. like that more recent one with the damned trademark sign in it at various points, and quite a while back, an embarrassment called "Snow," a shape poem. I thought of marshaling a bunch of poets to co-sign an open letter about the harm Muldoon is doing to poetry, but figured it would sound like sour grapes from a guy who once published 20-some poems in the mag and now can't even get a report on submissions. I also figured too many would balk at that sort of frontal attack, fear for their careers in mind. In some respects, it's good to be old and not give a damn about that sort of thing.
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