(Okay, I just spent 10 minutes trying to think up a dashingly witty intro, and this sentence is about all I’ve got.) Well, we did it! You did it! Woohoo! Volume VI is finally on its way, and you mind-boggling writers gave us a mind-boggling year trying to figure out what was going to be in it. Being a contemporary poetry junkie, I (foolishly) thought I’d seen it all – but regardless of how much Simic, Strand, Ashbery, and whatever other big poetry names I read, what I realized through editing this year was that there’s so much more to poetry I’ll never experience if I keep only reading the work of people 40, 50, even 60 years older than me. I’d missed the whole point. Poetry can and should be as big, as small, as old and most definitely as young as you want it to be. It’s a freedom, it’s a necessity, it’s a desperate attempt to make sure something, anything is snatched away safely from the jaws of time and space – but whatever it is, it’s not something you can catch and stuff into a box. The poems this year showed me a rawer, braver side to poetry that I was never expecting, and there were so many great surprises: a sestina that was the best I’d ever laid eyes on, a couple of adventurous prose poems, a piece so subtle it almost didn’t exist, an artsy rant that made me love it for its bad manners. That’s not to say that everything I came across was a “good” poem, but everything I came across did show me something about how our generation yearns to express itself, and why it wants to express itself in the way it does. You guys taught me so much about how to read and understand poetry for all that it can possibly be, not just what it has been. So, to all of you, thanks for the ride!
That being said, “all that [poetry] can possibly be” doesn’t mean that any collection of words is a poem, let alone a good one. The large majority of the poems that needed more work weren’t suffering from a lack of creativity or potential at all- what they needed instead was just a better understanding of how to manipulate and communicate through poetry. Time for some tips! The three common myths I’ll be pinpointing concern misused redundancy/repetition, having description and imagery as the sole mission of a poem, and disregarding sentence structure because “poetry is art”.
Myth: Repetition of important lines helps to emphasize the direction of a free-verse poem.
Fact: Generally speaking, repeated lines are much less powerful than pushing the poem forward with new, constructive material.
I used to be an avid hater of poetry. To tell the truth I can’t really blame myself; the one poetry lesson I remember having in school consisted of the teacher showing us how chorus-like repetition is an ubiquitous, extremely useful poetical tool. Generally, in free verse it is actually far from, except in cases where the attitude of the message or narrator needs a certain listless or exasperating edge. More often than not, well, what can a conspicuously repeated line say that you haven’t already said? They’re sort of like lazy dogs. They sit around not really doing anything, and they’re always in the middle of the hallway, preventing you from getting where you want to get.
So try not to say something if you’ve already said it, especially in a genre where negative space and simplicity are prized. A key feature of poetry is that it “speaks against an essential backdrop of silence. It is almost reluctant to speak at all, knowing that it can never fully name what is at the heart of its intention”, as James Tate once wrote. Put words down sparingly, but suck out as much meaning from each word you put down, rather than putting words down generously and assuming that your general idea will be presented somewhere along the way. Before you put down any line, ask yourself the following questions: Does this line have a specific and irreplaceable role in both the immediate context and big picture? Does it contribute something that no other line contributes? Is it doing its share of the work in shaping the poem towards the final goal, or is it just along for the ride? (Of course, this advice is entirely applicable to catching redundant lines as well.) If the answers are yes, the precise direction of a poem will feel much more controlled and purposeful.
Unlike listening to a pop song with a chorus, reading literature requires that the reader actively pursue a poem, not just passively intake it. Making a reader go through chorus-like repetitions doesn’t come off as catchy; a lot of times it feels more like the writer ran out of constructive things to say. The great thing is that really short poems, e.g. less than 10 lines, are just as legitimate as really long poems, so it’s totally fine if what you have to say comes off strongest in just a handful of words. It’s a much more powerful alternative than unnecessarily tossing in repetition or redundancy to make it longer.
Myth: Detailed description and imagery are all you need for a good poem.
Fact: Detailed description and imagery are all you need for a good photographic painting. A poem should communicate something.
Description and imagery! They’re paraded as creative writing 101, and they certainly are in a sense, but they are by no means all you need to craft a poem. Of course, a great poem can be inspired by beautiful scenery or whatnot, but before even thinking about brainstorming phrases for detailed description or imagery, try nailing down exactly what inspired you about whatever it is you saw. It should be something less obvious than just the physical aesthetics of what you saw, e.g. the ideas it inspired, how it symbolizes something else, or simply the feeling that the sight gave you (and if that’s the case, try to dig beyond just “sad”, “angry”, “happy”, etc.). Make this the ultimate mission of your poem, and use imagery and description to cultivate and help push along this mission – but avoid making imagery and description the mission itself. Poetry is, at its heart, a form of communication, which is different from seeing a photo or painting. Details can be used to highlight certain sentiments, attitudes, or narrative direction, not just complete an image. An example:
The sky is white. The pallid light
hits here and there, crinkling your image
of the silver pencil canister. Your glasses
badly need cleaning, you realize. The apple slices
left on the counter have browned since you last
looked there, and it’s much too painful
to take them from their perpetual
solitude.
This is just a snippet of a poem, so we don’t know what the writer’s full mission was. However, we can sense something more complex than just the picture the writer presents. You don’t just picture the sky, the glasses, and the apple slices; through the specific wordings and phrasings of the description, the writer is actively herding the reader towards a specific feeling. However subtle they may be, the phrases “crinkling your image”, “your glasses badly need cleaning”, “the apple slices … have browned”, and “perpetual solitude” sculpt the feelings of blighted or weak vision, prolonged time, and isolation. Farther on in this poem the writer ties together these feelings into a more constructive statement, but even in these few lines there is an added dimension, an added “mission” to the description that you couldn’t just see in a photo. It’s that slippery, more complex dimension that poets should try to capture in imagery, not just the physical details of the picture itself, however stunning they are.
Myth: Poetry is about uninhibited expression, so correct syntactical, grammatical, and punctuational structures can be ignored.
Fact: Generally, ignoring syntactical, grammatical, and punctuational structures in poetry is about as communicative as ignoring them in everyday speech.
The great thing about poetry is that neither I nor anyone else can give a black and white definition of what makes a poem. So, really, if you want to write poetry and ignore SGP structures, there’s no reason why you can’t. But for poetry be accessible and communicative to others, there just can’t be distracting comma splices, missing periods, and fickle tense usage hanging around. There’s a simple analogy for this. If you’re going to have a conversation with anyone, you’re going to seem unfocused, clumsy, slightly rude and possibly even unintelligent if you purposely toss grammar down the drain. (If you want a poem to appear unfocused, clumsy, slightly rude or possibly even unintelligent, that’s of course a different matter – but in such a case the material and tone of the piece would also have to be in character.) Generally, to be able to speak honestly and coherently, a poem has to obey English conventions in the same way any other form of writing does, simply because funky or nonexistent SGP structures are distracting, and cannot convey the subtleties needed to make the tone feel human and genuine.
Of course, there are always exceptions, like the ones I mentioned above. The trick with these exceptions, as I alluded to, is that the poem in its entirety must conform its entire personality to make wacky SGP usage appear natural. Basically, the stylistic identity of a poem should not have multiple-personality disorder; if it’s aiming to create a certain attitude with unusual SGP structures, then that attitude should be present in every other aspect of the poem as well, so that the whole thing speaks as one unit. For instance, if you’re writing a solemn, haunting sort of poem, dropping periods and using sentence fragments would appear distinctly un-solemn, and probably not coherent enough to feel haunting. However, dropping periods and using sentence fragments work much better in the following poem snippet:
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing
there are adjectives up for sale
now diagram the sentence
- from “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve” by
Adrienne Rich
Part of the reason lack of punctuation works here is that the poet’s mission in these lines is to pinpoint a “sinister side” of sentence structure in a very stark way that is completely devoid of emotion or inflection. I mentioned above that the subtleties of SGP structures help create a genuine, human tone, and the poet exploits this by using the lack of SGP structures to make a distinctly raw, almost empty, “un-human” tone. So in cases where you want to create an extremely alienated or barren feeling to a poem, disregarding SGP could help you out – but in the vast majority of cases, just stick to English conventions.
Some more notes:
1) You could write the bestest poem in the world, and still have it get rejected. An editing team is just as human as you are. We have our bad days, our grumpy moods, our times when we just can’t focus on a submission as much as it deserves because there are 20 jillion projects due the next day for school. Or, maybe your poem just happened to be the fifth one in a row popping up in an editor’s docket that had to do with cats, and that poor cat-drenched editor is so darn fed up with cats that you couldn’t even pay him to accept it. Don’t pay any mind to a rejection. Well, read the comments, but then go prove us wrong.
2) We’re all teenagers. We all have way more than enough heartbroken, love-dazed pop songs on our iPods. So if you can name a mainstream pop song that accurately reflects the style and/or material of your poem, we’re probably not interested.
3) Back to 1). Those icky things called final projects and IB/AP exams are just as much a part of your life as they are of ours. The truth is that a disproportionately huge amount of submissions comes pouring in right before our deadline, and it just goes according to logic that not as much attention and opportunity can be given to each one when a) there are so many and b) it’s the Nightmare Quarter of Testing. By all means, if you finish the final draft of a totally genius submission the night of April 15th, submit it – but if you’ve got good stuff earlier in the year, don’t wait until the last minute to send it to us. You face less competition that way.
Keep writing, and keep submitting. We’re the next generation of the literary world – and that’s one big charge.
- Clara Fannjiang, Poetry Genre Editor