An Elemental Guide to Poetry and the Workshop - Max Roland Ekstrom

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1 An Elemental Guide to Poetry and the Workshop Max Roland Ekstrom Copyright Max Roland Ekstrom 2020-2021 For Chi-Hung Yim and David Barber Introduction 1 The Five Elements 2 Earth: Shape 3 Fire: Imagery 10 Air: Logos 15 Water: Intertext 21 Void: Elision 25 Alchemy of the Elements 28 The Poet and the Workshop 34 The Poet’s Journey 40 A Note on Sources 41 Further Reading 42 1 Introduction The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. --William Blake I hope you are reading this book because you want to write the next great poem. While this is something nobody can teach you, I will show you a large terrain of possibility, both in the tradition of English-language poetry, and in the ways in which you can best chart your path forward. This is the guide I wish I had when I was starting out. While I know you will not follow my path exactly, a brief survey will help you better set your expectations, plan your journey, and make the most of your time on the trail. Core to understanding the terrain are five basic poetic elements--earth, fire, air, water, and void. These correspond to the aspects of shape, imagery, logos, intertext, and elision, respectively. We will devote a chapter to each of these elements, exploring poems from half a millennium ago up to the beginning of the 20th-century. We will also make a detour to the Chinese. Of equal importance is how to build a sustainable practice as a poet to last a lifetime. We will roll up our sleeves and examine the mixing of these five elements as kind of alchemy, while also touching on critical topics such as revision, dealing with strong emotion, cliche, and how poetry can best reflect and draw from your own life and experiences. We will discuss how to get the most out of collaboration with your peers through the workshop, including how to choose poems to workshop, how to give the best feedback, and how to approach criticism from others. Most of all, I hope to offer you my companionship. The poet’s journey can often be a lonely one, but by surveying this wonderous living landscape of language, I hope you feel an invigorating sense of camaraderie. I am fortunate to have you with me. Let’s begin. 2 3 The Five Elements Numerous cultures throughout recorded history have studied the ways of nature and classified them according to irreducible elements. Nearly half a millennium before Christ, Ionian philosopher Heraclitus defined four humors of the body according to four primal forces. More or less contemporaneously, the Chinese developed a system of five elements for similar purposes. The Hindu Vedas also attest that all matter is formed of five basic elements and integral to spiritual and physical wellbeing. While today these ancient insights have been largely superseded by a scientific view of our planet and bodies, elemental wisdom still has much to teach us about the realm of the spirit, which is our concern in this guide. We will look at poetry as composed of five elements: earth, fire, air, water, and void. Earth is the element of shape that gives poems their form and governs sound. Fire is the element of imagery that sparks the imagination. Air is the element of logos used to convince readers of poetic truths. Water is the element of intertext that forms the river of tradition. And lastly, void is the element of elision, whereby poetry grows stronger by what is left unsaid. Other poets may classify poetry in different ways. But by insisting on these five basic elements, we lay a foundation for a lifetime of study and reflection. As you grow and develop, you will eventually depart from these basics into your own sphere of speciality. But these will still represent points of origin in your own journey to come, and sites of refuge to return to whenever you become wearied by the world and need again the healing power of these elements. Each element influences the other--earth contains water, water enriches air, air feeds fire, and fire consumes earth. They can be combined endlessly, but never the same way twice. While rarely is a poem strong in all five elements at the same time, every poem must employ each element to some degree. Strive to understand them to gain insight on your own strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, the realization of your greatest poem is limited only by your imagination and determination. 4 Earth: Shape Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it. --Seamus Heaney Many poets share the unfortunate misunderstanding that the the shape of a poem is dictated by its lineation, or its line breaks. Never be fooled by mere appearances. Masters of shape realize the true form of the poem is only unveiled by the ear. Eyes can be deceived. Ears are never fooled by the tricks of new lines and whitespace. Thus the ear can unlock the hidden rhythmic pattern any poem establishes when read aloud. Think about song lyrics without music or notes. They will likely establish a clear silhouette in your mind even if you aren’t hearing the music or seeing the words on a page. This is because the lyrics manipulate elements of rhyme and rhythm to create patterns. In fact, the term “lyric” harkens back to the Greek lyre, which accompanied the recitation of poetry. Lyric poetry and song lyrics are kindred spirits. Most poems written until the mid-20th century followed certain metrical conventions, such as iambic pentameter. The line breaks of a poem meant something very specific--they informed the reader of meter. Eye and ear were in this sense married. Let’s really take a moment to delve into the implications of this. The visual shape of English poetry prior to the 20th century and its sonic shape were united, like body and soul. The idea you could have one without the other was unthinkable. And in many other parts of the world, the idea was essentially the same. Poems were expected to bring order from chaos, and it was the poets who were charged with creating this order. Because of this crucial bardic pedigree, it’s not possible to understand shape-making today without learning a little about what it meant in the past. So let’s travel back in time a good 500 years and have a look. Here’s an early example of the iambic taking shape, first published in 1520, untitled, writer unknown: Westron wynd when wyll thow blow The smalle rayne downe can rayne-- Cryst, yf my love wer in my armys And I in my bed agayne! Here is the same poem, in modernized spelling, with the syllable pattern emphasized: 5 Western wind when will thou blow The small rain down can rain-- Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again! Despite its various departures, we can already see the earthly shape of iambic congealing in this poem, the de DA, de DA, de DA pattern that came to dominate English verse for several hundred years. 70 years later, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) wrote this sonnet to open his sequence, Astrophil and Stella: Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,— Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,— I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe; Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain, Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain. Allow me to mark up this poem a bit, inserting slashes to group the syllables into feet, the basic unit of traditional meter, and bolding to indicate metrical stress: Loving/ in truth/, and fain/ in verse/ my love/ to show, That she/, dear she/, might take/ some plea/sure of/ my pain,— Pleasure/ might cause/ her read/, reading/ might make/ her know, Knowledge/ might pi/ty win/, and pi/ty grace/ obtain,— I sought/ fit words/ to paint/ the black/est face/ of woe; Studying/ invent/ions fine/ her wits/ to en/tertain, Oft turn/ing oth/ers' leaves/, to see/ if thence/ would flow Some fresh/ and fruit/ful showers/ upon/ my sun/ burn'd brain. Another poet may scan these lines slightly differently than the above. But all would have to agree it’s iambic hexameter--meaning it has six feet per line, or around six stresses. While it’s important not to reduce the concept of meter to mere stress1, as rough-and-ready approximation, it allows us to illuminate poetic shape, like stars that shine down on a midnight garden. In that spirit, try finding the stresses in the remaining six lines of the sonnet: 1 Traditional meter in English is often called accentual-syllabic, because it groups syllables into feet that form a metrical pattern according to their stresses, or accent. As feet are the unit of measure, and not stresses nor syllables, the number of stresses and syllables in a line can, in practice, vary considerably. 6 But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay; Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows; And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write." As you can see, the iambic pattern is pretty sturdy, and while it varies occasionally for emphasis,2 each line holds pretty fast to the de DA, de DA iambic pattern. The poem always finishes each line with an end-stop, or the end of a grammatical unit. Nothing is enjambed--started in one line and completed on another. As subsequent generations of poets mostly opt for shorter lines of pentameter (five) or tetrameter (four) feet, enjambment becomes both more necessary and more appealing as a way to create tension between line and phrase. More than a hundred years later--Shakespeare come and gone--let’s pick up an excerpt from An Essay on Poetry by the great English wit Alexander Pope (1688–1744), written at the tender age of 23. The first line may sound familiar, but pay attention to how readily the iambic pentameter scans, and how even with the rhymes, Pope bends it to his purpose: A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fir'd3 at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts, While from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind, But more advanc'd, behold with strange surprise New, distant scenes of endless science rise! So pleas'd at first, the tow'ring Alps we try, Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky; Th' eternal snows appear already past, And the first clouds and mountains seem the last; But those attain'd, we tremble to survey 2 Variations in the iambic pattern are known as substitutions. Too few substitutions and a poem can seem monotonous. Too many, and its core iambic pattern is threatened. See Further Reading for more information. 3 Fired, except in one syllable. 7 The growing labours of the lengthen'd way, Th' increasing prospect tires our wand'ring eyes, Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise! Note how infrequent the enjambment is, and how the end-stopped lines serve to increase the assertiveness of the rhyme by making it seem to coincide with the argument. While the neat rhymes may sound a little corny to the to the modern ear, they are never forced, and the meter never strained. Yet Pope wrote in a language much the same as ours, so we can’t so easily diminish him by claiming he had it easy4. It’s a stunning effort. Peak after peak, summit after summit, Pope effortlessly reaches the next foothold. He humbles us--reminding us that at every stage of our quest to become a better poet, a new level of challenge surely awaits. Iambic isn’t always so trim and tidy. Breaking chronological order, here is John Milton (1608–1674) in a touchingly elegiac mood, from the opening of “Lycidas”: Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forc'd fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due; For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. If Pope fired his iambic couplets with the force of twin torpedoes, Milton seeks a line that shows a speaker who’s all broken up. The subtle rhyme scheme helps quiet the poem, while enjambment and caesura5 lends it an organic cadence. All told its rhythms are softer, slower, and brimming with nuance--well-suited to close observation of nature. We can feel the speaker search for something noble to make of his grief. With Pope’s warning in our mind--that learning a little is way more dangerous than knowing nothing at all--I want us to think about how we learn, not just what we learn. It’s all well and good to bone up on theory, to train ourselves to see what others can’t. But beyond seeing and even beyond listening is the work of getting our hands dirty. 4 Pope enjoys liberties with contractions that wouldn’t fly today (dang’rous, tow’ring, o’er, etc.), and one rhyme has been lost due to English vowel shifts (brain/again)--at least on this side of the pond. His era also better-tolerated syntactic inversions, such as “Short views we take” instead of “We take short views”, or “Alps we try” instead of “we try the Alps”. But by and large it’s still the same English. 5 A pause in the line, usually in the middle, and usually achieved through the end of a phrase or sentence--i.e., punctuation--coinciding with the end of a foot. 8 Reading poetry from previous eras should be like field work--or as Heaney put it at this chapter’s heading, digging in the dirt. Rolling up our sleeves brings us in contact with the stuff of poetry, the particular interplay of rain, wind, heat, and soil that’s occurred over thousands of seasons. And in the following four elemental sections, I will show more examples of poems from various places and times. Even when we’re not explicitly focused on shape, try to sense it--with your ears, with your hands, and with your heart. With all that under our belt, we can fast-forward to a more recent example of poetic form that is much closer to today’s sensibilities. Here is a deceptively simple but profound example of shape from American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), a master of lyric modes who disassembled and rebuilt the aging beauty of Victorian forms for the jazz age: Ebb I know what my heart is like Since your love died: It is like a hollow ledge Holding a little pool Left there by the tide, A little tepid pool, Drying inward from the edge. Without wading too deep into the technicalities, hopefully you can readily spot the poem’s stresses and rhymes, and allow your ear to pick up on its essentially iambic structure. Note how it’s simultaneously taut yet languid6. The short lines, paradoxically, make every word seem slower and more drawn out. The whole poem is but one syntactic unit--a single sentence in four phrases--draped unevenly over the 7 lines. The imagery is simple and clear. Yet the title allows some hope. What has ebbed may later flow. Finally it’s time for us to consider free verse. Let’s pay extra-close attention to shape and sound here. They are no less vital--perhaps even more vital--to the free-verse poem. And there is no better guide to this new frontier than William Carlos Williams (1883-1963): Complete Destruction It was an icy day. We buried the cat, then took her box 6 Millay appears to have slowed the lines by deploying trisyllables. If you’re interested in how that works, please see the Further Reading section. 9 and set fire to it in the back yard. Those fleas that escaped earth and fire died by the cold. This poem is iconoclastic for more than its abandonment of meter. Its opening line is highly unconventional7. But it also nods to what came before by offering the possibility of an iambic scan (It was an icy day) that the rest of the poem vehemently refuses. The next line--the moment the poem produces its corpse--opens up assonance8 in cat and day; icy and buried. This pattern of heavy monosyllables continues, suppressing any other sonic pattern besides the most primitive coincidence of consonant and vowel. Longer, polysyllabic words can suggest cognition, reasoning, rumination. But the speaker of this poem, struck by grief, seems reluctant to think at all. When we reach the extra syllables on line six--”Those fleas that escaped”--it suggests an extra breath, akin to exasperation or perhaps a morbid sigh the speaker releases out on the ice. In both Millay’s and Williams’ examples, we are seeing poetic shape on one end of the spectrum--tight, controlled, appalled. Yet these poems, precisely because they are short, show us the tremendous power of shape. A well-wrought piece of jewelry may outshine the gaudiest chandelier. And we’ll look more at how to attenuate a poem in the last element, “void,” as earth and void pair naturally together. But more or less automatically, when a poet focuses on the shape of a poem, choices must be made about what to leave in and what to take out. I can’t underscore enough how critically important it is to understand how the aural shape of your poem impacts its reception. A poem’s aural shape and its lineation should harmonize. A few surprising line breaks can certainly serve a poem well. But typically, apparent problems with lineation are symptomatic of a more serious condition. Simply moving around line breaks can’t solve the problem of sonic form. Form and content also complement one another unless a humorous effect is desired. No limerick can be read at a funeral. A ballad is apt at storytelling, but weak at mystical contemplation. The couplet excels at capturing a heroic or lyric instant, but becomes comic if overextended. (I’m talking to you, Pope). You’ll notice this guide returns to the 7 The use of past tense is uncommon in the lyric mode, as is the weak, passive construction of “It was…” which is usually to be avoided, especially if a more active verb can be readily be deployed. These features usually lend the impression of prose--or of trite lines written with a crayon. Why is this not so in this poem? What if we open instead with “The land frozen over, / We bury the cat”? 8 Assonance when the vowels in two words agree, like phone and comb. Consonance is when consonants do the same, like bucket and milk. If combined correctly, they create rhyme. 10 sonnet again and again. To me, it has a special place in the tradition--perhaps it’s the haiku of the West. 11 Fire: Imagery As a poet, when I want the rose to bloom, it will blossom —Yang Lian According to the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, image and imagery are “poorly understood terms in poetic theory”, and rather than attempting to define them, its editors throw up their hands. Like anthropologists observing kindergarteners freely combining Legos and Playmobil, they conclude it’s “impossible to provide any rational...account of their usage.” So much for the academic vantage. For our purposes, however, we can start with our senses, accepting any sensory impression a poem offers us as an “image.” While imperfect, this gets us close to the volcano, even if we must proceed to the summit without a marked trail. For good reason. The language used to analyze metaphoric language is complex and intricate. Since Plato and Aristotle in the West, philosophers have been concerned with the implication of representation in all the arts, but imagery in poetry has always been a chief concern. For Plato, one problem was whether poets deceive their readers through the use of fabricated imagery. The charge that poets are a nuisance to public order and to political stability is perhaps hard to fathom in 21st century America. But many living poets and many more in very recent memory have faced persecution. Diverse poets such as Wisława Szymborska, Duo Duo, and Joseph Brodsky demonstrate imagery can inflame those in power. And the battle for representation among historically marginalized communities continues right here in the U.S. Arguably, for much of late-20th century American verse, imagery was prioritized. Free verse seems to make it more convenient to focus on image, and its greatest advocate, Ezra Pound (1885-1972), was convinced that East Asian poetry showed us the model to follow. He observed that classical Chinese poetry tends to be spare and focused on surprising imagery. He also felt that Chinese text was inherently more capable of producing imagistic ideas and associations, as Chinese characters are intrinsically pictorial. While Pound’s view is slightly reductive, it is the case that most Chinese characters are composites of a couple hundred radicals, or simple representations of things like a tree, grass, the sun, a person, a roof, earth, fire, water, etc. When combined, these radicals lend their sound or meaning to thousands of different characters. 12 Here’s an example of Chinese poetry, this one from legendary Tang9 poet and Taoist sage Wang Wei (699–759; my translation): 竹里馆 zhú lǐ guǎn 独坐幽篁里 dú zuò yōu huáng lǐ 弹琴复长啸； tán qín fù cháng xiào. 深林人不知， shēn lín rén bù zhī 明月来相照。 míng yuè lái xiāng zhāo Bamboo Pavilion Perched alone amidst thick bamboo I strum my lute and whistle-- In the deep forest absent of anyone, a bright moon brings companionship. No English translation can capture the music of the poem in Chinese, owing to the vast differences in the languages10. Notably, Wang Wei wrote this poem in a traditional syllabic form--the idea of free-verse was unthinkable to him as it was to classical poets of the West. But perhaps this translation can give you an impression of what Pound--and generations of writers after him--found so astonishing about the Chinese poetic tradition. The imagery of the poem transports us instantly across space and time, allowing us to enjoy a moment of refuge from our crazed, technological world. While Pound was extolling the virtues of Tang minimalism, Chinese poets themselves were chafing at their inherited restrictions. Lu Xun (pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881-1936), one of the leaders of the New Culture movement, sought to counter the rigid formalism of Chinese writing and was galled by its inability to express any but the narrowest bourgeois sentiments. He recognized the effect the Chinese language’s arduous written conventions had on literacy rates, keenly aware that an illiterate public would have a hard time combatting traditionalism and superstition. Like the slipper used to deform the feet of growing girls, Lu felt millenia of literary restraint was doing real harm to China’s entrance into modernity. Here’s a famous effort of his to seek redress: 9 The Tang dynasty is considered a golden age of Chinese civilization. 10 I offer pinyin phonetics of the Chinese characters, but these phonetics represent modern Mandarin pronunciation. Chinese at the time would have sounded significantly different. 13 自嘲 运交华盖欲何求，未敢翻身已碰头。 破帽遮颜过闹市，漏船载酒泛中流。 横眉冷对千夫指，俯首甘为孺子牛。 躲进小楼成一统，管他冬夏与春秋 zì cháo yùn jiāo huá gài yù hé qiú, wèi gǎn fān shēn yǐ pèng tóu. Pò mào zhē yán guò nào shì, lòu chuán zài jiǔ fàn zhōng liú. Héng méi lěng duì qiān fū zhǐ, fǔ shǒu gān wèi rú zǐ niú. Duǒ jìn xiǎo lóu chéng yī tǒng, guǎn tā dōng xià yǔ chūn qiū Self-Deprecation Star-crossed and without a choice, as I dare to turn my head it’s already struck. I hide my face in a torn hat and cross teeming markets, leaking like a broken boat ferrying wine. Squinting back at the thousand pointed fingers, I bow my head as if playing a child’s loyal ox.11 Safe inside my apartment I reach detachment, indifferent to summer, winter, spring, and autumn.12 If the poem’s goal is the overthrow of traditional forms, then it is a shot across the bow, not a breach of the hull. The original Chinese of the poem features precise syllables, ornately polished literary language, and heavy allusion (more on that topic in the Water section). Lu is determined to fight with fire. Metaphors cascade line by line, introducing an entirely new visual at every turn. The approach grants each image a large independence from the one before it, allowing each line to stand in relief, like a series of painted panels. This also forces difficult choices13 for the translator. Like many poems, its “story” must be pieced together, like a puzzle. While there’s never only one right way to read a poem, I offer this gloss: an unfortunate gentleman, hit on the head (perhaps while out shopping), hides his face in his hat as he bleeds into it. He scurries away, bowed over double like a dumb ox, returning to his apartment where he reconciles 11 Duke Jing of Qi, a famous statesman from the time of Confucius, let his son ride him around like an ox. 12 The last line’s word order may be deliberate, since in Chinese, autumn and sadness are nearly homonyms in many dialects, qiu vs chou. 13 I take the liberty of placing a “like” on like 4 and and “as if” on line 6 to capture Lu’s use of classical Chinese parallelism. 14 himself to a spiritual strategy of philosophical withdrawal. Notice how the ending curiously echoes “Bamboo Shrine”--and many classical poems like it. Whether he intended it or not, Lu’s poem became a revolutionary anthem, endorsed by Mao Zedong and painted on banners paraded down thoroughfares. The poem’s idea of self-sacrifice, though, is bittersweet; its outlook on the proletariat masses is ambivalent, and the solutions it proposes are deeply personal. Wherever poetry--and society--was headed, it was going to get there only at great cost. Ezra Pound’s life is a different witness to these costs. After serving as a radio propagandist for the fascist Mussolini regime, Pound was returned to the U.S. as a prisoner and a traitor when Italy fell to the Allies. Many of the ideas proposed at the onset of the 20th century, including the fascism and antisemitism Pound espoused, contributed to the century’s death toll.14 Robert Frost (1874-1963) met Pound in London in 1913, just prior to the start of World War I. While eager for his seal of approval, Frost famously declined to join Pound’s Imagist15 movement. Instead, he developed his own style where image was important, but never at the expense of other elements. Let’s dig into a lesser-known masterpiece: Hyla Brook By June our brook’s run out of song and speed. Sought for much after that, it will be found Either to have gone groping underground (And taken with it all the Hyla breed16 That shouted in the mist a month ago, Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)— Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed, Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent Even against the way its waters went. Its bed is left a faded paper sheet Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat— A brook to none but who remember long. This as it will be seen is other far 14 Pound’s insights continue to reverberate. But his antisemitism and fascism--which at times become intertwined with his aesthetics--must be called for what they are: repugnant. 15 Pound’s literary movement first centered around American figures such as H.D., William Carlos Williams, and Harriet Monroe, founder and editor of Poetry magazine. This early, narrow phase of 20th aesthetics would give way to Modernism, considered the most significant stylistic trend in 20th century poetics. 16 Frost was an accomplished amateur naturalist. Hyla is a genus of frog. 15 Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song. We love the things we love for what they are. The poem teems with lively imagery, from the “groping” brook to the frogs to the sleigh-bells. As it gains steam, it adds to its litany, rolling up the frightening image of “dead leaves” that indicate sinister forces or dark emotions. The poem seems to evoke the speaker’s pain, despite its enigmatic obliqueness. Frost always put nature at the center of his art. This is a notion the Chinese masters surely would have approved of. All poets play with fire. Prometheus stole it from the gods, but was punished with eternal suffering. John the Baptist healed with water, but heralded one who would come to purify with fire. Let the spark inspire you, but remember it is also the most dangerous of the elements, capable of consuming nearly anything before it. Don’t become a burnout. Use your gifts wisely. 16 Air: Logos If the dull substance of my flesh were thought... --William Shakespeare While poetry today may be the last place you would expect to find logical thinking, such a view is fairly recent. The word “poet” comes from the Greek for maker, because the job of the poet was to receive the inspiration from the gods and make meaning from it. Only through them could the ancient Greeks answer questions about who they were and where they came from. In Plato’s dialogue Ion, Socrates observes that poets appear crazy, but it is only because they channel divine wisdom, attracting it like a magnet. Today, roughly half the world’s population--all those of a Judeo-Christian faith--believe that the sources of the Bible are either divine or divinely inspired. To Christians, it’s a matter of faith that Logos is synonymous with the Creator himself, as “In the beginning was the Word”. A belief in an unseen order of things is not exclusively Judeo-Christian or even Western. In approximately 600BC, Taoist texts began describing a universal, primordial force known as the Tao17, an undivided and indivisible unity that is nameless and formless. Taoists believed that during prehistory, humans began assigning names to things, dividing and subdividing the Tao into millions of smaller parts. This gave rise to perpetual confusion. These false names and false forms cloud the judgement. Thus the goal of the Taoist sage is to unify, to withdraw from the world of falsehood and seek the natural order of the Tao. How to achieve this is a difficult problem, but Taoism is not hostile to reasoning or logic. The Taoist sage Zhuangzi (approx. 300BC) famously beat logician Huizi at his own game when they debated the pleasure of fish swimming in a stream.18 This notion of a cosmic order has enduring allure. The great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) loftily called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Shelley was convinced that poets build systems just as significant as any worldly ruler, even if the resulting “laws” don’t appear logical at first blush. If a poem is going to detail the structure of a hidden universe, it will need more than just earth and fire. Exciting sounds and imagery won’t be enough. Such a poem must use all the tools of language, including the rhetorical concept of logos. The Greek word logos can mean “word” or “speech,” but also “thought, idea, reason.” The concept of logos encompasses the premise of a poem, the why behind its effort at speech. 17 Often translated as Way or The Way, it seems easier to just refer to it as the Tao, as it is popularly known. 18 See the dialogue “Autumn Flooding” in Zhuangzi. See Further Reading for more details. 17 While not everyone will agree that every poem has to be “about” something, a poem is nevertheless built of the very same stuff as any other written document, and it is free to use the very same techniques as a story, speech, article, or even an interoffice memo. In even the driest scientific prose, variations in diction, tone, and register are never completely absent. In popular essays and speeches, we rightly expect all these aspects of English to be orchestrated in service of the most persuasive possible argument. It is not so different in poetry. Through logos, poetry proposes new ways of thinking and understanding. It can employ questions, propositions, qualifications, or any other rhetorical device. While great poems resist paraphrase, and no poem wishes to be reduced to a simple summary statement, we can still explore a poem as a proposal or argument and ask how it’s advancing it. An older term for the proposal of a poem was conceit. Strictly speaking, conceit today refers to a central metaphor that governs the argument of a poem, especially a sonnet. Let’s look at The Bard himself, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), with “Sonnet 18”: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. By opening the poem with a question, the poem piques the reader’s curiosity and sets the scene for some serious flirtation. At the closing of the first quatrain (i.e. four rhymed lines), the poem seems to tease the beloved with a negative answer. The poem increases the rhetorical ribbings with “thou art more lovely and more temperate” than the summer day on line 2, and yet “all too short” by line 4. But the next quatrain raises the stakes with its “sometime too hot,” “And often...dimmed,” “By chance...untrimmed:” Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, 18 And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed; All inject risk that the beloved could be spoiled by the comparison to summer. Note the classic Shakespearean “fair from fair”--how by repeating the word, he ends up repealing it. This rhetorical construction seems to peel meaning away from the word itself, and the repetition seems to fold the text over like origami paper, right in the middle of the poem. Maybe, just maybe, the poem seems to say, comparing you to a summer’s day was a monumentally terrible idea. The teasing tone seems lost, replaced by a fear that love could be gone before the season’s out. Of course, what follows this crisis is a dramatic turn: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, The language is no longer flirty, no longer playful. The last six lines give us a man19 reformed--a very different speaker, with a very different perspective. His outlook is not of a single season but an “eternal summer” of the spirit that has lent the beloved his good qualities, the “fair though ow’st.” (See that “fair” again?) The sonnet is now showing us the realm of logos, the invisible world of faith. The speaker, touched by the immortal Word, gives “life to thee.” Traces of Shakespearean rhetoric filter down the centuries. But at times, the influence is unmistakable. Let’s return to Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), with #3 of her “Four Sonnets:” Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow! Faithless am I save to love's self alone. Were you not lovely I would leave you now: After the feet of beauty fly my own. Were you not still my hunger's rarest food, And water ever to my wildest thirst, I would desert you — think not but I would! — And seek another as I sought you first. But you are mobile as the veering air, 19 While there is no textual basis to assume the speaker of the sonnet is male, we take it on precedent. Shakespeare’s audience at the time certainly assumed it, and Shakespeare knew his audience. But it’s impossible to say whether he considered other possible readings, and in any event, we are free to imagine such alternate paths. Love poems, and sonnets in particular, offer a fascinating vehicle for gender and LGBTQ inquiries. 19 And all your charms more changeful than the tide, Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: I have but to continue at your side. So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, I am most faithless when I most am true. Bring your attention to the rhetorical devices--the frequent, repetitious negation: “think not”, “Faithless...save to”, “Were you not lovely”, “Were you not still”, “think not but I would”, “to be inconstant is no care”, “I have but to continue”. All contort the logic and flow of the poem like steam hissing through pipes. The thinking of the poem whistles and speeds at us, “mobile as the veering air”. Again, think how Millay may be showing us a hidden world, one completely contrary to appearances. Ostensibly, the poem’s speaker has no loyalty to the beloved, who is described as just the latest acquisition, easy to replace with “another,” just “as I sought you first.” The speaker avows hedonism, worshipping “at the feet of beauty” and treating the heart like a stomach that craves the “rarest” food--perhaps rarified, or perhaps rare like a steak? For the speaker, feeling good isn’t just important. It’s everything. So when the poem pivots after line 8 with the “But you are mobile,” we are surprised to find the speaker’s lover even more self-absorbed than they are. The beloved’s “charms” are compared not to a summer’s day but to other elemental forces--currents of air, tides of the ocean. These irreducible forces shape all life on earth--no one can resist them for long. The speaker is in love with the spirit of the beloved, and only because of this can their faithlessness be redeemed. Let’s look at another 20th-century contribution. This poem, from American Louise Bogan, first appeared in her 1923 debut, Body of This Death. Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom Men loved wholly beyond wisdom Have the staff without the banner. Like a fire in a dry thicket Rising within women's eyes Is the love men must return. Heart, so subtle now, and trembling, What a marvel to be wise, To love never in this manner! To be quiet in the fern Like a thing gone dead and still, 20 Listening to the prisoned cricket Shake its terrible dissembling Music in the granite hill. Observe how the poem deploys the same conceit device we have seen in the examples before it. Bogan could have written: Shall I compare men loved beyond wisdom To staves without banners? The manner in which the men are loved is compared to something in either version. But Bogan’s version is the one issued with the force of statement. Imagine if the poem opened with more certainty and less symbolism: Men loved wholly beyond wisdom Have won something they never earned. This would certainly be easier to follow, but also less interesting. By introducing a metaphor on line 2, the poem stakes out more risky--and potentially more rewarding--terrain. Notice also the negation. The staff is already without its flag before we’re even underway. Similar to how Shakespeare first teases with the notion that the beloved isn’t like summer, Bogan’s poem starts barking up that same rhetorical tree from the get-go. While the poem gives us a fire simile on line 2 to describe how the women look at the men, it reverses it on line 5, by making it something the men return. Note again the rhetorical “must” that demands so much of the men. Let’s examine these three critical lines next, lines 6-8: Heart, so subtle now, and trembling, What a marvel to be wise, To love never in this manner! Line 6 cues intensifying emotions with the “now”20 and its melodramatic trembling heart. But by the time we’re done with line 8, the “What a marvel to be wise” appears ironic, as if the speaker either doesn’t believe it’s particularly wise, or particularly marvelous. The “What a marvel” combined with the “To love never” in the next line 20 I can’t help but read it as a meta “now,” since it’s not clear there is any “then” or “now” in this poem thus far. 21 underscore the rhetorical vehemence, with suggestions of of wounded, indignant cynicism, amplified by the syntactic inversion.21 All of this sets up a parallel situation to Shakespeare’s sonnet at the end of its line 8. The crisis appears total. But like Shakespeare, Bogan pivots. In the last five lines, her poem operates from a strongly elegiac stance, incorporating an eternal perspective. Yet it firmly resists resolving the issues it raised, logically or otherwise. Instead, it ends the way it began, with bold, surprising imagery. Let’s be open to poems for which much of the pleasure is in repeated readings and new avenues of understanding. In the case of Bogan’s poem, it’s made possible by the use of conceit and rhetorical strategies that hide just beneath its surface. Just as we tracked the development of the shape of poetry in the Earth chapter, we can observe the same trends with rhetoric. The stiff conventions of previous centuries sometimes soften, as trends come and go. But there is nothing truly new, even if we must endlessly attempt to make it new. 21 Discussed under the Pope poem, syntactic inversions become increasingly rare in 20th-century poetry and are often employed to advance irony by calling attention to themselves. 22 Water: Intertext [...] I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images…. --Adrienne Rich The tradition of poetry can be described as a river--one continuous body of water in which some movements, personalities, and artifacts are carried downstream, and others drown or are deposited on the banks. All poems echo, in some way or another, every other poem, as nothing is completely new from the perspective of the tradition. Most topics have been tried, many surprisingly adroitly. Poetry also naturally connects with other disciplines, such as music, dance, visual art, and philosophy. The Greeks celebrated only nine muses, but inspiration can surely be drawn from nearly any form of human endeavour, from sex to math to economics to agriculture. Poets describe a reference in one poem to another as an allusion, and allusion may be oblique (and perhaps unintentional) or quite unmistakable. The poem may contain a subtitle or epigram to make the reference explicit. Other poems may describe artworks, in which case they are often known as ekphrastic poems. More broadly, any language that takes us out of the frame of the poem’s text and makes us consider complex ideas that live completely outside its scope are intertextual. Here is a early poem by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “The Rose of the World”, first published in his 1893 collection, The Rose. Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, And Usna’s children died. We and the labouring world are passing by: Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place Like the pale waters in their wintry race, Under the passing stars, foam of the sky, Lives on this lonely face. 23 Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode: Before you were, or any hearts to beat, Weary and kind one lingered by His seat; He made the world to be a grassy road Before her wandering feet. Observe how Yeats, eager to promote and advance Irish mythology to equal footing with the Greek, follows the fall of Troy with the Celtic legend of Diedre, who in her own Helen-like way, marries a foreign man, the eldest son of Usna, ushering in war. The poem brushes past its allusions without friction, using them to set a mood before turning to conjure imagery of oceans and night stars. The resulting dreamy, wondrous, atmosphere leads us to Yeats’ metaphysical pivot. The poem works because it has a light touch and plucks its mythic women with such self-assuredness. When Yeats ends with Sophia, a gnostic aspect of divinity that figured heavily into his mystical program, the result feels not transgressive but inevitable. Not all allusion is so touch-and-go. Sometimes it’s much more immersive. Let’s return to Milton’s “Lycidas”, the poem we first took up in the Earth chapter. In this section of the poem, the speaker, lamenting the death of his friend, wonders why no one prevented his untimely drowning: Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep Clos'd o'er the head of your lov'd Lycidas? For neither were ye playing on the steep Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie, Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high, Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream. Ay me! I fondly dream Had ye bin there'—for what could that have done? What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore, The Muse herself, for her enchanting son, Whom universal nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar His gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore? The name Lycidas has a long tradition and is assigned to shepherds in both Theocritus and Virgil. But Milton’s readers could be certain he was also alluding to a personal 24 loss--the death of his Cambridge classmate Edward King, who succumbed to drowning via shipwreck22. The poem’s allusive focus in this passage, in any event, focuses not on any particular Lycidas but on the major figure of Orpheus, whose story the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC - 18 AD) retells in his Metamorphoses. Milton could trust that his readers would at least know the gist of Ovid’s Orpheus--the demigod of music and poetry who meets an untimely and gruesome end. Here, the poem calls out women23 for their collective failure to rescue Orpheus from his fate--specifically, the nymphs and the muse. While there is disappointment for the nymphs, who were “playing” on one mountain or another, he lets them off the hook with the “for what could that have done?” and aims the sharper rebuke at Calliope, Orpheus’ own mother. She receives the full moral opprobrium of the poem via repeated condemnation of “the Muse herself” and the accusative phrase “that universal nature did lament”--even if technically, the object of the lament is not Calliope, but her son. The passage ends with the image of Orpheus post-dismemberment. His “gory visage” and lyre drift downstream, continuing to sing, after the rest of his body has been thoroughly chummed by jealous Maenads. What has all this allusion accomplished? The text more or less abandons the historical reality of Edward King’s death at sea only to founder in the deep waters of myth, as its Latin predecessor, written over a millennium and a half before, threatens to completely swamp it. But isn’t that strangely appropriate? In grief, the speaker can’t bear to live in his world anymore. With no way to make sense (or more importantly, order), the poem desperately takes on the water of subtext. It picks out one dead schoolmate, who has died for no particular purpose, and drapes him in the finest borrowed robes it can find, giving him the spectacular liquefying burial the speaker feels better suits him--hands clutching the immortal lyre, head graced by the immortal laurel. Unlike the case with the other four elements, very strong poems have been written with very little explicit intertextual elements. Not every poem needs allusion, or ekphrasis. And a little bit can go a long way. The fashion for classical allusion comes and goes; today readers don’t share as much of a common frame of reference as those of Stuart England. But on the other hand, it’s never been faster or easier to check sources. Because we live in a world that is both profoundly interconnected and profoundly fragmented, allusion in and of itself is not a barrier to entry--any idiot with a smartphone can aspire to be the next Milton. Whether they will create a sense of order is 22 In 1638 Milton published Justa Edouardo King Naufrago and dedicated it to the memory of Edward King, whose ship sank off the coast of Wales. Other poems in the collection are written in Latin and Greek, underscoring the importance of the classical tradition to Milton and his audience. 23 Milton’s sexism deserves rebuke. While it’s bald enough here, it gets worse as his career develops. Paradise Lost may represent the misogyny of his era, but given the extra effort his poetry repeatedly takes to vilify women, why offer him the benefit of the doubt? 25 another matter. If allusion or ekphrasis is your yen, read and study deeply, making the sources a part of you. You may fool some readers some of the time, but you can never fool the muse. 26 Void: Elision The art of losing isn’t hard to master. --Elizebeth Bishop The last element we will discuss is the concept of negative space, the idea that what a poem leaves unsaid is its most powerful element of all. Poems must create space not just by making readers guess, but by framing the poem intelligently. Where does the poem begin? When does it end? These two poles must be carefully considered and manipulated in order for the poem to signal the void. Similarly, a poem can gain power through economy. The haymaker with a long windup is less impactful than the stiff cross that came out of nowhere. A poem can maximize its impact by becoming more taut, more spare, more athletic. Greedy, indulgent poems eager to explain everything are ponderous and disrespect the reader’s precious resource of attention. Let’s examine a free-verse poem from Marianne Moore’s 1924 collection, Observations: To a Snail If “compression is the first grace of style,” you have it. Contractility is a virtue as modesty is a virtue. It is not the acquisition of any one thing that is able to adorn, or the incidental quality that occurs as a concomitant of something well said, that we value in style, but the principle that is hid: in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”; “a knowledge of principles,” in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn. As we read the poem, we look for a firm handhold, and never quite get one. It isn’t a poem that is trying to make things easy for us. Even the title creates confusion. If the poem is addressed to a snail, why? Snails can’t hear, let alone understand poetry. This seems not to matter, as the text doesn’t appear overly concerned with the snail in particular (notice how little of it is actually described). Instead, it opens with a quote that would seem to be not about the natural world but about civilization, particularly manners and philosophy--perhaps writing and poetry itself. To a large extent it refuses 27 the snail, perhaps most adamantly in the “principle that is is hid: / in the absence of feet” that shows us only what the snail isn’t. Two more quotes bookend the first on lines 10 and 11, giving way to the poem’s only moment of direct observation in the final line’s “occipital horn.” But snails have neither horns nor anything occipital24. Even the quotes are oblique. Observations includes endnotes, which tell us the first quote comes from Democritus and the second and third from Duns Scotus. But Moore could hardly have expected her readers to know the source for either, and in fact, scholarly consensus is that both citations can’t be taken at face value.25 Usually, this poem is classified as an ars poetica.26 But it doesn’t seem to discuss the type of things we would expect if it were. Compare it to the Sir Philip Sidney sonnet discussed in the Earth chapter. Sidney specifically dramatizes the act of writing and the challenges of writer’s block, ending with the famous exhortation, “look in thy heart, and write.” “To the Snail” has no time for such nonsense. It is skeptical of flattery, of any attempt to “adorn” via “acquisition”--that is, perhaps, bribing the reader with pleasing bromides or sexing things up with superfluous verbiage. Poor Sidney and his outmoded ilk are made to play the fool. For the poem, the key to enduring value is what’s “hid”--a universe inferred through unspoken “principles.” If it weren’t for the “feet” pun on line 10, which could refer to the poem’s lack of metrical feet, or even its slippery refusal to stand its ground, it would be rather hard to make the ars poetica case at all. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say Moore comes pretty close to eliding the whole point of her poem, or any poem. Hers is a poem against the idea of the poetic. It leaves us mostly in the dark, feeling about as if by our “horns.” The pleasure the poem offers its not in spite of but directly due to its impenetrable nautilus of thought. There are endless ways to incorporate the void. Not all do so by embracing obscurity. Let’s look at an underappreciated classic in twelve lines by the great Claude McKay (1889-1948), a crucial figure of the Harlem Renaissance: Spring in New Hampshire Too green the springing April grass, Too blue the silver-speckled sky, For me to linger here, alas, While happy winds go laughing by, 24 Likely instead referring to the occipital bone of a mammalian skull. 25 Duns Scotus, the scholar, lives in eternal infamy in English as the etymological origin of “dunce”. For more exhaustive look at Moore’s preported sources, see Natalia Cecire, “Marianne Moore’s Precision,” Arizona Quarterly, Vol 67, #4 (2011) p. 89. 26 A poem about the art of poetry. The Roman poet Horace likely started the rage for them in the West with his influential dactylic hexameter epistolary essay. 28 Wasting the golden hours indoors, Washing windows and scrubbing floors. Too wonderful the April night, Too faintly sweet the first May flowers, The stars too gloriously bright, For me to spend the evening hours, When fields are fresh and streams are leaping, Wearied, exhausted, dully sleeping. What is left out of this poem is the most striking thing about it--racist white people. Even in New Hampshire, home to early Abolitionists and proud Union fighters who fought to end slavery, the speaker has been given exactly the type of job with low pay and long hours that no white would accept. But the poem elides them and their prejudice. Their carefree April and May leisure activities are more poignantly cruel when we must imagine them for ourselves, “offscreen.” The keen observation of the season aches with longing and grief at having endured another brutal New England winter thanklessly. By foregrounding the lyric sensibilities of the Romantic tradition--pushed just to the point of preciousness--the poem delivers an indictment that rings across the ages. By eliding--taking things out--you can make all the other elements of your poem pop. Imagery appears more vivid. Argument gains conviction. Attenuation heightens the shape a poem. Imagine a poem as an electric circuit: when wired correctly, the poem lights up. But when the current must pass through the obstruction of weak language, it is disrupted, and its energy dissipates. The time-honored approach to learning concision is to circle every adjective or adverb in a poem. Look carefully at what each one is doing. Can some be taken out? Most? All? Short story writers were once told, mostly tongue-in-cheek, that before submitting to the New Yorker, they should lop off the last paragraph off their story. So try the same with your poems. As Moore suggests, a poet must be humble as a snail. Keep your shell, but learn to let go of all the stuff. 29 Alchemy of the Elements I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide. [....] When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. --T.S. Eliot27 Many well-meaning poets describe the process of poetic maturation as “finding your voice.” And it does seem to describe the way a poet must distinguish themselves, in both senses of the word. But the phrasing also puts a premium on authenticity, on being truly you. So it has always made me think of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where the gathered mob yells in unison, “we are all individuals!” I think we can put too much pressure on ourselves to be different, and this can harm the development of our sensibility. Authenticity is important, sure, but how do we convey it? The ability to convince a reader that you’re candid, vulnerable, or soulful is hard work. Ballet dancers can turn and leap as well as athletes--but that’s not enough. Their art, like ours, demands it appear effortless. As contradictory as that sounds, finding your authentic style is easier to do when you’re not trying to do it. It’s good to imitate. Go ahead and fall in love with a famous poet and attempt to write like them. You’ll know the difference between plagiarism and influence. And if you have doubts, keep writing, keep making adjustments. Too many young poets develop their voice before their ear. That’s why I like the path metaphor better. Everyone needs to find their own way in the world. Joining fellow travellers doesn’t in any way cheapen your journey--quite the contrary. And sharing maps and stories can make travel safer while passing the time. Consider carefully where you’re going, because poetry is a lifelong commitment. Your poems, taken together, will all point the reader toward your newly discovered land. In the following sections, we will look at strategies and techniques you can use when trying to find your way. These “big picture” tools can complement the fundamental alchemy of the five elements. Your life is your greatest experiment. 27 From “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” first published in 1919. 30 Biography and Autobiography A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. --Yevgeny Yevlushenko Perhaps the most significant and interesting problem of writing poetry is how to use your own experiences. If you write with absolute fidelity to the details of your life, your poems will describe a lot of sleeping, eating, shitting, and commuting. But by the same token, if you don’t write about things from your own life--things that excite you and that you are passionate about--it’s likely your poems will fail to convince. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), in his Letters to a Young Poet, cautions the aspiring poet against attempting love poems. He suggests trying to capture ideas and emotions frequently over the day, to attune yourself to your inner world. He believed love poems represented a “confluence of tradition” and that by writing them too early, you would not yet have a sufficiently developed sensitivity. In other words, Rilke counseled that before you look outside yourself, look within. Today, I feel his call to self-reflection is perhaps less clarion than it was over 100 years ago. Self-expression and self-actualization have become cliche. Our culture already enables the instant sharing of sensations and reactions over social media. While a diary can enable you to create a private space to nourish ideas that want protection from the wider world, the acknowledgement of your subconscious feelings and reactions is unlikely to feel revelatory. I believe as you write and grow, you’ll likely naturally find what works for you. Trial and error is key. Empower yourself to write about absolutely anything you want to. Keep putting yourself into it. Take risks. You’ll be disappointed and even hurt at times, but it will also drive your development and raise the ceiling of your ambition. But no matter where you write from, readers expect something about you to be revealed, even if the “you” being revealed is itself a kind of construct, a persona28 who writes the poems. Harvest from your own autobiography--childhood experiences, world events, love affairs, friendships, travel, work--but look for ways to reshape experience into something that’s more broadly relatable. At first it seems like another impossible contradiction--give the reader something distinctive while also ensuring it’s universal. But with practice, you can start to pick up on the parts of your poem that are private markers, things that are waiting to carry greater resonance. Fudge them a little, invent a little, lie a little. Instead of serving a personal truth, serve the truth of the poem. 28 Latin for mask. To play a role on stage, first create a persona. 31 A Subjective Problem Poetry is a deeply subjective field. As much as many intelligent and informed minds love Shakespeare, not everyone does, and it’s easy enough to cite brilliant people who find him distasteful.29 Even among his many admirers there’s hardly some fixed consensus as to what’s good and what’s bad. While Hamlet is widely regarded a masterpiece of tragic drama, T.S. Eliot wrote an essay called “Hamlet and His Problems” arguing, in essence, that the whole play is a hot mess. As you read more and develop as a poet, however, never give yourself an easy out. Many poets are too hasty to conclude that everything is subjective, and therefore anything they write is quite possibly just as good as Shakespeare--from a certain point of view. These poets, when reading greats of the past, see only the fickle hand of fortune and the changing tides of taste. When they read the celebrated poets of today, they see only skillful networking and opportunism. Yes, fame and name are often more about who you know than what you know. Blake and Dickenson--badly neglected in their own lifetimes, but celebrated in death--are probably exceptions to the rule that anthologies, like histories, are written (and edited) by the winners. But ask yourself this--if it’s fame and glory that you seek, why choose poetry? Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are fabulously rich and famous. Louise Glück, not so much. There is absolutely no shame in seeking earthly rewards for an otherworldly art form. But be fair to yourself. Write because you want to write well--or not at all. As you read the poetry of other poets--living and dead--ask how their example can help you improve. Accept that you can find bad poetry celebrated at every level, from the high school lit mag to the most selective poetry press. But if you are humble and ready to wade into the mud of contemporary poetry, you will find pearls as well. As a poet, you must have standards. You must define for yourself what your goal is. Know what excellence means to you and hold yourself to it. Yes, it will change and evolve over time as you learn more. But without any way to assess yourself and your work, you will have no path for improvement. You will be completely at the mercy of others’ opinions, yet constantly seeking their validation. You will be like a mercenary, or as Shakespeare put it, “Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, / Seeking the bubble reputation / Even in the cannon's mouth.” 29 e.g. George Bernard Shaw: “[a] sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility.” 32 Difficult Emotion If you were paying attention to the chapters on the five elements, it likely struck you how many poems we looked at involved deeply charged subject matter. Sidney wrote on his inability to express his feelings. Pope on being humbled by the vastness of his project. Milton on the death of dear friend. Millay on heartbreak. Williams on grief. Wang Wei on solitude. Lu Xun on the brutality of modernity. McKay on racism. Bogan on longing and regret. And so on. You, too, will likely be drawn to the blank page when life has served you another shitburger. Crushed by the millstone of life, you will look to the muse for some sign of hope, like the flicker of a candle in the dark. And likely, if you approach your work earnestly, the kindling of your tired soul will once again alight. But your readers likely won’t come to your poem with the same needs. Like the other side of a mirror, their emotional desires will be more or less the opposite of yours. They won’t be looking for a chance to vent, for a vehicle to dispel their self-doubts. People read poetry--especially new poetry--when they are filled with curiosity and a thirst for discovery, even if it’s something right under their nose. They yearn for a created order, the relief and satisfaction of a sense of unity, like Wang Wei’s moon over bamboo. Sidney said the goal of poetry is “to teach and delight”. While it may sound reductionist to the modern ear, it’s an approach that’s stood the test of time. Like any sorcery, the trick is in the channeling. Some emotions may need to be let out in the manner of medieval medicine, as if with leeches. After the hard feelings are gone, you can then turn to your real work. Others won’t be so easily mastered. Let them guide you through a first draft, and then sleep on them. Wordsworth counseled “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Robert Lowell had a different angle--“Compose in mania, revise in depression.” Both recommend that you leverage your moods and emotions, knowing, with patience, you can shape them--at least on the page. And shape is the key component to confronting adversity. Let yourself play in the mud, keeping yourself grounded. Lose yourself in rich possibilities of sound, finding line lengths that can match your feeling. Create that vessel out of the earth to pour your emotion into. This may not completely satisfy or placate you. But at least it will allow you the means to store the must of your sentiment in hopes that given time, it might yield a good wine. 33 Confronting Cliche There are many terms for cliche, each crueler than the one before it. Shopworn. Commonplace. Unoriginal. Uninspired. Predictable. Superficial. Lazy. Yet it’s usually not what we say, but how we say it, that irritates the sensitive reader. Often, cliche arises when a poem fails to tap the vein of its feeling, making it the opposite problem as difficult emotion. But it’s quite possible to have a poem attempting to tackle profound sentiment that is nevertheless pat or predictable. As Oscar Wilde said, “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” If the problem is that the emotion is not yet fully confronted, then the symptom will be the poem’s taking the easy way out. It will turn to conventional wisdom or simple sentimentality. But not all dodges are cowardly, and sometimes reframing emotions can give a piece greater dignity. Look at how Milton deflected the problem of his personal grief through the fictionalized Lycidas. The water element--the art of allusion--can be a powerful strategy against cliche. You can also let your poem breathe through the use of the air element. Remember Millay’s sonnet? In the hands of a lesser poet, it might be a trite little love poem. But by complicating its rhetoric, she makes its situation on the page less predictable and its conclusions more complex. Keats called this negative capability.30 It makes it impossible for readers to to put her poem under their thumb. When looking at the logos of your poem, consider ways you can complicate or vary the text of your poem with a relatively modest amount of effort. Try employing quantities, like “much” and “few,” durations, like “long” or “quick,” or occurrences, like “seldom” or “frequent.” Consider the diction of the speech, and whether you can use the type of reasoning that may cut against poetic trend--financial, legal, bureaucratic. Don’t be afraid to borrow from worldly kingdoms. You are a legislator of the soul. Lastly, use the void to elide areas where you seek to tell readers how to feel. Let them draw their own conclusions. “To a Snail” avoids even the whiff of cliche by cultivating its elliptical mystery. The Improvable Art Think of that friend who constantly makes the same mistakes over and over in their love life. Is it because they are unlucky in love, or is it because they are not doing the hard 30 The gist of Keats’ idea is that great poetic intelligence isn’t deterred by seemingly unsolvable problems, and has the capability to operate even in domains where no definitive result can be reached. Untroubled by the lack of confirmation or positive outcome, it continues beyond the edge of doubt into the negative. 34 work of being in a relationship? Are they really completely open and honest with themselves and their latest partner? Similarly, your poems will challenge you. Don’t give up on a poem too quickly. It may have more to teach you, even if ultimately things don’t work out. The bravery you need to take your poem through multiple drafts is nothing less than the faith in your own improvability. Be tenacious. You owe it not just to yourself, but to each and every poem you put yourself into. Otherwise you will find yourself repeating the same failed poem, over and over again. Carefully preserve each draft, if only to assure yourself that if you don’t like a revision, it’s easy enough to return to what you had before. Avoid fiddling. Make substantial, good-faith changes based on your reading of your poem--the way you’d read anyone else’s. Consider all five elements when revising, but most of all, earth and void. Find the hidden shape. Like a sculptor, chip away from the rock until your poem reveals itself. Some poems do indeed emerge more or less complete in just one take. But those poems are often the reward for the work you put into revising previous ones. 35 The Poet and the Workshop Improving as a poet and gaining control of any element--let alone five of them--takes time. In medieval Ireland, apprentice bards were expected to spend “seven winters in a dark room.”31 During this time they honed their craft. Today, poets looking to improve needn’t subjugate themselves to such extremes of self-denial, though the oft-embarrassing trial of submitting your poetry to a jury of your peers may make you yearn for a dark room of your own. For better or worse, the workshop, with its opportunity to meet other poets and glean some wisdom from an experienced hand, is the closest thing we have to the ancient practice of apprenticeship. Nevertheless, whether you are scheduled to attend your first workshop or you are returning after years away, it can take its toll of psychic energy. The stakes can seem sky-high. That’s because many poets ask themselves the wrong question heading in, questions like, “am I any good?” or, “is this poem as strong as I think it is?” Such thoughts and ideas are inevitable, but they can distract you from your path. After all, you plan on walking this long road no matter what happens, and no matter what anyone else says. Strive to never compare your progress to anyone else’s. If the success of someone else causes you to feel discouraged, that’s natural, but remind yourself you’re in it for the long haul, and there will always be ups and downs. Don’t indulge in highs or lows. Instead, recommit yourself to what you knew all along--it’s not a day trip, it’s an odyssey. It’s a high standard to hold yourself to, but ultimately, it’s freeing to understand that your own opinion is the only one you must live with. Selecting the Right Workshop Poem When it’s your turn to have a piece workshopped, don’t be surprised if you have some trouble making your decision. A workshop is a little like an animal sacrifice. It demands living, breathing poems that it can tear into. Reclaiming ownership of your poem after this community ritual is easier for some poets than others. Don’t be discouraged if the process hurts at first, or hurts a little every time. That’s why it’s a good idea never to bring a poem to a workshop that can’t bear criticism. Instead, round up a handful of pieces and weigh each one carefully. If you still feel raw emotions radiating off a piece, perhaps it’s best it rests. But by the same token, if you are certain a poem is finished or does not want anything more than minor edits, choose another one. The workshop is the wrong place to seek approval--though many have tried. The ideal poem is one that frustrates you a little bit, one you’ve tried to fix on your own and nearly broken a hammer against its obstinacy. That’s the ideal poem to gift to 31 John Montague, as quoted in Poet's Choice. See Further Reading