On Blasting Poetry

I deliberated a great deal about what to do with my first blog entry, and at length, I decided to provide some thoughts on poetics, a fitting subject to those who know me, I'm sure. Some time ago, perhaps several months, a friend and co-worker wrote a blog entry in which she blasted the whole of the poetical endeavor. Ironically, she had, at that time, been visiting my desk on occasion to encourage me to visit her blog and provide comments. On one such occasion, I happened to make an unwitting reference to my tremendous penchant for poetry, at which point, she emphatically stressed the importance of my frequenting the blog, given her recent electronic tirade. Like many, she sees poetry as a kind of useless, literary ego-stroking shared by academics and pseudo-intellectuals who simply don't have the sense or the gumption to say what they actually mean. I tried not to overreact to this, though I'm a little embarrassed to admit I began my response by referring to her comments as a form of blasphemy.

I have much to say on the subject of poetry, though I'll try not to be too "poetic." After all, brevity is the soul of wit, or such was the
sentiment of the Bard, who was perhaps one of the most poetic souls who ever lived. This is not to say that poetry and wit are, in some way, diametrically opposed, as I think many of the best poets are able to pack a great deal of meaning into remarkably few words. For the purpose of the argument posed by my co-worker, let us confine ourselves to the merit of only post-Renaissance poetry, specifically Romantic and modern lyric poems, and excluding epic or narrative poems, which, while still considered poetry, are admittedly not the kinds of poems to which my friend was referring in her comments. Rather, I believe, she objects to poems of the former kind, which are those most closely identified as actual poetry by most American high school graduates. I should begin by saying that there is plenty of bad poetry out there. But call a spade a spade. Bad poetry is not the quintessence of poetry. The essence of all good poetry is concrete images that convey a heightened emotional or intellectual response, in other words, images that win you over by painting a literary picture not as vivid as prose. Put another way, it offers an alternate means of resonance to an idea that could be conveyed, albeit often less resonantly, without quite so much decoration. I agree, bad poetry consists largely of the decoration without the meaning, or crux. But good poetry will make the point in a new way. It's a similar challenge in pedagogy. One task of the teacher is to "turn over" an idea until the student gets it. Likewise, the poet is charged with the task of conveying an idea without recycling images that have lost their cultural resonance. A good poet uses imagery to give new life to an idea, and some of the best poems convey ideas that really could not be expressed any other way, ideas which have their place in the human experience but are too complex or too subtle to have found repeated expression. Emily Dickinson once wrote, "Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need to know of hell." This is a good example of a truth that could be expressed using prose (perhaps several sentences), but is stated much more economically, or with greater wit, to coin my opening thought, and much more "poetically" in the work itself. Only Shakespeare came as close in Romeo & Juliet (a play I really don't like, by the way) when he wrote, "Parting is such sweet sorrow..." Here's Dickinson's "I never saw a moor..."

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.
How beautifully she expresses her faith. I think it's pretty clear what the poem is about. Christ did the same thing when he taught in parables. He would "turn over" an idea and present it to his followers in a new way to better convince them of the truth. Dickinson is doing the same thing. You can use prose to express the same idea, but it won't be "painted" in the same light. It's the use of concrete images, of course, that gives the poem its "weight" over a more direct statement. Say what you want about poetry, but so much of our human experience is based on this kind of communication, of which the poetic tradition is only a single facet. To stand stalwartly before the whole of Western culture and shout your defiance makes about as much sense, in my book, as to call poetry pointless. Even prose can be poetic at times. And to a larger extent, other art forms, particularly music, may boast characteristics resembling poetry. Poetry is simply one piece of the artistic firmament in which the human drama is viewed as either meaningful or amusing, both of which have merit, of course. I'll try not overstate the case here. To reject this universality, the common artistic rhetoric reflected in all poems in the academic canon, is not blasphemous, but it is foolish.