After reading the latest book by a noted neo-formalist, I became aware of a few disturbing things. First, if he had taken all the good lines out of all the poems in the book, he might have ended up with one good poem. The second observation is related. While all the work in the volume is certainly well crafted and fairly well thought out (though this writer has a few pet words that show up in almost all his poems like Alfred Hitchcock cameos–“stone” being the most obvious, there being no pebbles or rocks in his poetic universe), most of the poems commit what is perhaps the most serious sin of contemporary poetry. That is to say, they are sort of boring.
Here are a few examples of what I mean:
This is a prayer to unbelief,
to candles guttering and darkness undivided,
to incense drifting into emptiness.
It is the smile of a stone Madonna.
Nicely played: some good interaction between the imagery of the candle failing as the faith does, the emptiness the sacramental incense drifts into. It’s just not terribly engaging. The first line of our sample shows promise: what could a “prayer to unbelief” be like? But that’s not followed up as such; it’s a meta comment on the poem’s imagery. Fair enough. But its mysteriousness and the troubled nature of such a declaration are followed up by some pretty hackneyed language: the “guttering candles,” the end-stopped “emptiness,” the “darkness undivided,” while cogent, dissipate the haunted agnosticism implied by the first line with cliché. And then there’s that “stone,” and the “smile.” The poem couldn’t take the risk of using “simile” instead. And the Madonnas I have seen have only been smiling in pieta arrangements, not exactly jibing with a
paean to disbelief. The poet can’t seem to decide whether he wants the ideas to work with his imagery or against it. He could do consciously do both, but does neither.
The “edgier” diction–the “darkness” and “emptiness” in particular–, while working with the ideas present, could have dropped right out of the rantings of any talented 14 year old who has listened to one too many Black Sabbath albums. We can’t necessarily fault our poet for this; I’ve listened to some Black Sabbath myself. But the use of such things at end-stops just draws attention to it. For a much better formalist treatment of the same ideas, try Frost’s “Birches.”
A page earlier, our man decides, for reasons beyond me, to tackle surrealism. This is an unlikely choice for a neo-formalist, and we see immediately why. Instead of doing the ballsy thing and try his hand at a poem that is surrealism, in the way that, say, a Russell Edson or a Charles Simic might do, we get a fairly staid poem about surrealists:
“Poetry must lead somewhere,” declared Breton.
He carried a rose inside his coat each day
to give to a beautiful stranger–“Better to die of love
than to love without regret,” and those who loved him
soon learned to regret.
I’m not sure this is poetry so much as reportage, not that I would have minded reportage so much as long as it was also poetry. One hopes that a poem will work aesthetically with or against its subject matter, or perhaps both. This poem’s aesthetic stance appears to be entirely neutral to its subject, leading me to think that it might as well be prose. With a subject that itself took such risks, this poem takes none at all, and the effect is to make an otherwise fascinating subject seem somewhat dull; the lives of the surrealists come off as annoying at best. No, it would not make me want to learn any more about them or their work. Perhaps that is our poet’s point: he wishes to deflate the surrealists, not memorialize nor even comment on them. Maybe he doesn’t really care. But if that is so, why write about them at all? Obviously, he must care somewhat, despite his poem, as he insists in his notes at the end of the book (not that these poems especially need notes) that all the things he writes about the surrealists are true. Blimey! I thought for sure he had been lying!
Actually, I hadn’t even suspected he would lie until I got to the notes that told me he wasn’t.
Not that it matters: it’s a poem, not a history. Who cares if it’s factual or not if the poem is written in such a way as to get at some truth? At best, the poet’s lack of faith in his readers’ sophistication is somewhat insulting. At worst, it makes us question his.
Throughout, our poet is afflicted with a certain timidity, all too common these days. It’s as if he is afraid of the very words themselves, that if they prove too spicy or exotic they’ll give us all heartburn:
She is moonlight, sovereign and detached.
He is a shadow flattened on the pavement,
the one whom locks and windows keep away.
A choice could have been made to use “shade” instead of the more modern but more flat
“shadow,” the former having many multiples of meaning and implications and the spectre of death to boot. Likening the woman to moonlight is sweetly romantic, but the old standard “Blue Moon” does it as well and sexier too. Ending on “detachment” is most telling, as that seems to sum up our poet’s whole program. The reverence he wishes to evoke is undercut by forms and diction that imply that the poet cares quite a bit less about his subject than we readers are supposed to.
I pick this particular poet because he is lauded as among the best the neo-formalist movement has to offer. He is famous for a book defending accessible, formalist works as being the way poetry can again “matter” (though I question that it ever did except for a small percentage of literati anyway). His work represents a point of view that a look at many respectable literary journals will back up: contemporary poetry is being written from a position of debilitating fear. We so revere the past, so worship the language, that we’re hidebound. We are doomed to repeat all the old forms and tropes, to tell and retell the same myths, to rehash without question a few bits of language deemed “poetical” by tradition and editorial taste. Contemporary poets are often so afraid of their basic medium, words, that they opt for the least meaningful, least interesting, least
confrontational verbiage possible. The first, unspoken, maxim of many creative writing workshops in this nation is “Take out all those words.”
It’s no wonder nobody reads poetry anymore. Duke Nuke’m is quite a bit more stimulating than the lace doilies that pretty up so many of our journals of fine writing.
To be fair, there are quite a few very good and innovative poets working today, but they are the exception. They tend to be established and from an era in which experimentation was less frowned upon, when one could admit to admiring the Beats in mixed company. But for a younger poet working today, it is often difficult to get recognition or even publication if one works more than two standard deviations from the mean.
In light of all this, I suggest the following rules for writing poetry:
1. Poetry is an art form that explores the aesthetic qualities of language: syntactical, semantic, sonic, phonic, visual. Because of this,
2. Poetry is both an aesthetic and an intellectual exercise. Verse that says nothing but does not also declare nothing is not art but mere craft, and therefore not poetry but simply pretty words.
3. Poetry need not challenge, but it should provoke; if it does not provoke, it should at least inspire.
4. Poetry should understand its traditions, incorporate them, accommodate them, remark upon them, reject or abandon them. It should never be bound by them.
5. Above all, poetry should never, ever, be boring.