I thought I’d attempt to answer my own question, before unleashing it on a classroom full of young folks. As ever, the dictionary is one of my best friends, and I think it’s come through this time (I do this a lot; I look up words because I don’t want to take for granted that I know what they mean):
Definition of POETRY
2: writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm
3a : something likened to poetry especially in beauty of expression b : poetic quality or aspect <the poetry of dance>
Have another look see at definition #2. I like this; to me it screams “Let the Poem be the Poem!” It calls into question a couple of things: (1) Prose masquerading itself as poem (narratives that happened to have line breaks). (2) Compositions that hurl abstraction and jargon at us; even when rhythmically arranged, abstraction does not bring us any closer to understanding, and jargon can make us feel stupid.
I know, someone out there is going to tell me I’m being prescriptive, or a fascist, or an elitist because I demand much from the poem. To clarify: I believe in cathartic journaling, free writing, remixing, eavesdropping, transcribing, translating, thieving, experimenting to get to locating the story and the speaker, as we are finding new or more effective ways of saying things (or efficient ways, in which use of language, form, and page do double duty).
One thing we discussed in my SFSU PACE/PAWA workshop was regarding political poems. If they are calls to action performed in accessible public spaces to the people (or The People), then the message must be clear. The images must be clear (the detailed and clear picture of the God-created ghettos and slums which Piñero gives us in “The Book of Genesis According to St. Miguelito”). The form, the use of poetic devices (for example, anaphora in Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary”) must do its own heavy lifting in forwarding the narrative, and in eliciting that emotional response from The People.
It’s true; poems must accomplish a lot in limited space.
This is why we come to Poetry in our sacred spaces, rites of passage, and times of need.
This is what I’ll be talking about later this evening. Come out if you can, and join the conversation. I’d love to include you.
When I was in a poetry writing class led by Olga Broumas many years ago, she talked a couple of times about having studied architecture as an undergrad. (She’d been writing poetry for several years by then, initially in Greek, her native language, then in English after she moved to the United States as a teenager.)
She commented that one of the things the study of architecture can teach you, with regard to writing poetry, is that it’s fine for the finished work to be beautiful, but it also has to work: doors have to open and close, the toilet has to flush.
When I was learning typesetting and printing (also many years ago), the teacher in the printing press class started the first day by talking for a few minutes, and he started off by saying, “There are something like 143 variables that can affect the quality of printed work. And the way to keep consistent quality of the printed work is to learn how to make the right machine adjustments for the printed result you’re looking for.”
I liked the straightforward practical way of putting that, and the analogies with writing poetry struck me immediately — learning to adjust the variables to get the end result you want in a particular poem.
In poetry, my sense is that there are more than 143 variables — probably more like a couple of thousand, give or take, at a minimum. But the principle seems similar to me.
Absolutely, Lyle, it has to “work.” One of the creative essays I taught last night was Saul Williams’s “The Future of Language.” In it, he says something about sentence structures being as complicated as pyramid structures. I also like those metaphors; they speak against the kind of “writing poetry is mystic ethereal thing,” that I don’t think is fair/accurate, or helpful to students (and to us). Anyway, we did have a very good discussion of saying what you mean to say as concisely, clearly, and thoughtfully as you can; how thought, word, action, manifestation are related – how what you say manifests certain outcomes.
Yes, on variables. I was going to say that there are ways to balance portraying reality with what we imagine, so that we’re not writing about the same ole sh*t ad infinitum, which Williams states is the problem with a lot of hip-hop: “vivid, descriptive narratives of ghetto life seem to have come at the cost of imaginative or psycho-spiritual exploration.” I think it’s safe to apply similar conditions (not nec. about “ghetto life,” but how about “po-biz life) to poetry.