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WHAT MAKES A POEM?
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
Life doesn’t rhyme, which is why poetry often will—or
at least, did. Life doesn’t run on metric principles,
which is why poetry often will—or at least, did. Poetic
order in its own small way is an antidote to the muddle and
disarray of ordinary human experience. It satisfies the need
for clarity, beauty, symmetry and meaning, gifts which the world
does not readily provide.
One of the major mantras of the modern poetic climate is that
poetry should reflect actual life—or as the feminists
like to say, “lived experience”—which is why
modern poetry often seems disordered, random, arbitrary and
lacking any sense of final purpose or eschatological closure,
as most famously in the oeuvre of John Ashbery or Charles Bernstein,
among a numberless host of inflated reputations in the modern
pantheon. This is what is loosely called “free verse,”
a term which is thought to have originated in the early 1900s
with Ezra Pound and his Imagist colleagues, although it is a
literal translation of the French vers libre popularized in
the 19th Century and has an extensive empirical history.
Robert Frost wittily adopted a sports metaphor to claim that
writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. Sport
does not reflect everyday life since it is constrained by stringent
rules, operates in a confined or clearly demarcated space, and
leads to definitive conclusions, that is, it is a tightly structured,
intentional realm within a larger free-flowing and anarchic
world. Such is an aspect of its charm, as it is of games in
general, artificial constructs defined by rules and goals. The
same is true of poetry (as it is of literature and art in general).
Poetry resembles sports events and games in its structure but
does not stop when the whistle blows or the board is put away.
Its import continues into the future, giving pleasure by reshuffling
the disparate components of experience into ordered sequences
and aiming for perfection of form. It resists erosion. It is
meant to last.
This is not to designate free verse a dull, prosaic substitute
for rule-based poetic form. Far from it. Authentic free verse
is never free. It subsumes many of the settled poetic devices,
protocols and elements in a subliminal way: internal rhyme or
half-rhyme, assonance and alliteration, and melodic cadence
that is not strictly metrical but is nonetheless clearly distinguishable
from common speech and prose rhythms. Like form poetry, a good
free verse poem incubates an acoustic resonance. Ted Berrigan
writes in Poem 160 of his Selected “The world’s
furious song flows through my costume”—but the world’s
furious song is precisely what the poem organizes, makes coherent,
melodizes, so that we can sing it.
Poetry, then,—genuine poetry—does not merely echo,
mirror or imitate life. It is neither an effigy nor a replica.
Nor, as novelty theories in the boutique of poetic practices
hold, does genuine poetry mimic its own composition, like a
postmodern snake biting its own tail. This is only the latest
freak in a misguided effort to appear cutting-edge. The compulsion
to “make it new” does not necessarily make it good.
Despite the reigning hype that some poets hold dear, serious
poetry is never “experimental,” collage-driven,
aleatory, duplicative, computer generated or Flarfist, or a
mere congeries of mechanical gimmicks assembled according to
some opaque “method” of composition. This is not
to say that it cannot be innovative, only that there are limits
established within the bounds of communication. After all, if
poetry is ever to flourish, even minimally, it should appeal
not only to the specialist or sophisticate but to the proverbial
common or educated reader.
It is worth repeating if only to counter the market conception
of current poetical thought. Poetry comments, meditates, broods
and speculates on life. It is a meta-discipline whose proper
function is not mimetic, but deliberative, memorial, playful,
celebratory or elegiac. A genuine poem is, of course, part of
life—it exists in the world—but it is also separate
from life in the sense that it is not an image of experience
or a reflection of theory but a formal object that inhabits
its own dimension above the daily flux of inchoate happening.
One notes the Greek word for a poem, (poiema), “thing
made or crafted.” It is something that stands on its own,
yet remains accessible, as something to be used in the conduct
of everyday life. It is both interesting sui generis
and relevant extra ipsum. As Kei Miller’s Cartographer
says, “I never get involved/with the muddy affairs of
land./Too much passion unsteadies the hand”—which
paradoxically does not prevent finding “foot by weary
foot…the measure that exists in everything.”
One might also note that the good poem, whether formal or free,
will also occasionally feature a crucial mnemonic endowment,
namely, the aphoristic line or phrase which leaps off the page
and into the mind. “Fools rush in where angels fear to
tread.” “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
“Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”
Who can forget such ringing locutions? They bring a quality
of permanence that lives on the synapse, bestowing the poem
with preceptual force.
Cadence, aphorism and essential structural elements help to
render a poem “sincere.” One thinks of a popular
etymology of the word—“without wax” from the
Latin sine cere. According to this hypothesis, sculptors and
craftsmen used hot wax to seal and conceal flaws in their work;
thus any such artifact without wax was considered whole and
honest. A sincere poem would be one in which every word, indeed
every syllable, is scrupulously vetted. There are no gaps, no
fillers, no verbal epoxy. I recall fellow-poet Peter Van Toorn
scoring nearly a hundred manuscript pages until he came up with
the right word-choice and syllable count for the line of verse
he was agonizing over.
In my own early apprenticeship, after having written haphazardly
in the Canadian way as a young wannabe, I ceased publishing
for five years in order to trace my route through the poetic
canon from the Anglo-Saxon era to the modern period, trying
my hand at every traditional poetic form until I felt sufficiently
“sincere” to allow myself the trial of free verse,
which, as noted, is never free but constrained by rule, precedent
and criteria of accomplishment. I tried to illustrate the nature
of this probationary exercise in a short lyric treating of two
representative exemplars: the austere formalism of Emily Dickinson
and the sprawling afflatus of Walt Whitman.
Apologia
I understand the times are cool
to all that discipline
men of the introspective school
were once accomplished in.
Epigrammatic Frenchmen say,
if temperate or staid,
that ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’
explains the retrograde.
I study that austerity
the profligate assault,
for I must fast with Emily
before I feast with Walt.
I also realized the
necessity of rejecting the wrong and choosing the right mentors.
I was nineteen when I received a characteristic lower-case complimentary
postcard from my hero at the time, e.e. cummings. I then attempted
to write like him and went poetically broke. It took years to
recover. I was in my twenties when I received a glowing letter
from Canadian icon Al Purdy, praising my early, callow free verse
chapbooks. Realizing that Purdy was the master of flatline poetry,
I knew then with sudden clarity that I had to stop writing and
alter my entire poetic weltanschauung. That was the moment I decided
to embark upon my novitiate.
Real poets, I began to understand, are recognizable in at least
four ways: they have something reasonably important or meaningful
to say, they can say it in pleasurable, original and lively language,
they have a thorough knowledge of the Western and often of other
traditions, and they display a distinctive prosodic itch. Thus
I steeped myself in the work of Greek poets like Constantine Cafavy,
George Seferis and Angelos Sikelianos, and in that of poets from
my own tradition such as W.B. Yeats, James Merrill and particularly
Richard Wilbur, who became a treasured correspondent and a sort
of father-figure. And although I relate to these revered preceptors
in the Bloomian mode of the anxiety of influence, they represented
in my estimation the right choice to make in a self-indulgent
and degenerate age. To paraphrase Yeats from The Municipal Gallery
Revisited, it was my good fortune that I had such mentors.
Archibald MacLeish famously wrote that a poem “should not
mean/But be.” Ars Poetica is a very beautiful poem that
violates its own didactic conclusions, since it not only is but
quite emphatically means as well. Indeed, MacLeish seems to suggest
that a poem can mean by being metaphorically refractive, by implication,
by being figuratively “equal to” rather than “true”
in the literal sense. It is “motionless in time/As the moon
climbs.” In effect a poem means by being its own lunar self,
cold and remote, while exerting a kind of tidal influence on the
world.
A poem, then, may be influential in the sphere of the quotidian
although it is a unique phenomenon abiding by its own autonomous
and self-contained rules. In other words, it is both in and out
of the world.
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