[Robert J. Clawson]

I presented a fierce poem about child abuse to a group of five poets recently, and four of them told me that its subject was not fit for poetry.

Last year, I was asked why I didn't write any love poems. I answered, "Because the subject's well-covered by better poets than I."

Personally, I feel that the subject of a poem is irrelevant until the poet makes art of it.

A gazillion poets jumped on September 11 as the subject of a poem. I avoided it. (I don't rush off to Pamplona.) I was surprised, at an April reading (Robert Creeley Day) that Galway Kinnell read a work-in-progress about September 11. Well, he lives in the neighborhood. And what he read reached quite beyond the scope of the event.

I have no trouble writing about a sinister sole or a sigmoidoscopy: the subjects delight me. I have a great deal of trouble writing about the standard subjects: love, death, sex, and poetry.

I'd love to hear how the subjects of your poems develop. I'm currently developing a piece about a peculiar fish I discovered in Scientific American. The poem may make the fish an emblem for greed. Then again, it may not. I'm quite sure that it won't be a poem about love, death, sex, or poetry.

Bob



[This message has been edited by Robert J. Clawson (edited July 25, 2002).]

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Bob,

Perhaps this is related to this thread:

<dir>CHARLES A. BEARD (1874-1948), asked if he could summarize the lessons of history in a short book, said he could do it in four sentences:

1. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
   
2. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.
   
3. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
   
4. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

[This is lifted from The Practical Cogitator.]</dir>

I recently read at Gaz a quote from someone--I don't remember who--who said something like, "The only dull subjects are those subjects we have failed." I think that the so-called "subjects" of our poetry can easily be broken down into a few broad areas--Beard's is an interesting possibility--and that the newness is in our treatment of those broad categories via specific metaphors and narrow arguments.

When I began "Apple Fritter Fugue" (currently posted at Free Verse), I had an altogether different "subject" in mind. For days, the title had been circling in my head, and I thought I'd write a longish semi-narrative poem about my experiences in San Francisco when I was first "coming out." I thought I'd use "applejack," "apple sauce," "apple fritter," etc., but leave out "apple pie."--It would be thoroughly "apple," an analogue to American history but without the patriotic "Apple Pie" in it, and this would correspond with the narrative. So much for that idea. I often wonder if "stick-to-it-iveness" would produce an altogether different poetry than the kind I've been producing...or if even that longish poem would have circled the same things the ultimate version circled but in a different way.

Curtis.

[Susan McLean]

The proper subjects of poetry are the ones that speak to you as a poet. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. People who want to put any subject off limits are making taste a form of censorship. Offend enough people's taste and you will have an unsuccessful poem, in the sense that no one will want to read it. But sometimes the taste of one period will differ from that of a later period, and most geniuses initially run into a lot of opposition from the tastemakers of their era. Time will tell what has succeeded and what hasn't. Your duty as a writer is not to second-guess time but to be true to your own judgment of what works for you.

I suppose this sounds a bit like a rant, but few things make me more angry than people who want to censor Shakespeare, say, for not being politically correct, or say that Plath has no right to take metaphors from the Holocaust in her writing.

Susan

[Roger Slater]

I think it's rather obvious that there can be no rules about what subjects are suitable for poetry and what subjects are not. The important thing isn't the subject but the metaphor that the subject is used to support in service of the poem's attitude or theme. From light to serious verse, the reader wants at least a momentary sense that something important is being said, even if (as in light verse) that sense ultimately dissipates and is illusory. So any raw materials will do, in theory, for the literal subject matter of a poem so long as the poet doesn't claim intrinsic interest based on those raw materials. The interest has to derive from the way the materials are manipulated.

[hector]

"Passive suffering is not a fit subject for poetry." (memory quote, so it may not be exact) was Yeats's reason for excluding Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon etc from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

[robert mezey]

Any subject you can write a good poem on is a
fit subject. No subjects are off limits, but
some are difficult, maybe impossible. Hard to
imagine a poem that does justice to the enormity
of September 11. The Holocaust---or Shoah, I
don't like it called a holocaust, a burnt sacrifice
---is an almost impossible subject. The only poem
that I know of that even begins to be adequate, and
briefly so, is Paul Celan's "Todesfuge".
There's nothing wrong per se with Plath's using
images of the Final Solution in a poem; it's just
that such images are outrageous in "Daddy"---wildly
exaggerated as well as completely dishonest. (The
only really bad thing her father ever did to her
was to die too early.) It is one of her worst poems
---more a display of her deep disorder than a poem.

[Susan McLean]

Robert,
I think that a poem needs to be judged as a poem, and not as a historical document. Whether Plath was being fair to her father or not is beside the point. For you, the allusions to the death camps are outrageous. I assume that she was trying to be outrageous, and for me the metaphors worked powerfully. I don't think that any subjects should be set aside just because one cannot do justice to them. It is in the nature of death camps that no one can do justice to them. But I think that everyone has an obligation to remember them, and if poetry, which is the most moving kind of language, does not even make the effort, all humanity is the poorer.
Susan

[robert mezey]

I wasn't thinking of the poem as "a historical
document,' I just thought it was interesting
that her dishonesty about her real-life father
is probably what helped wreck the poem. She
had great gifts and wrote some good poems, but
this is not one of them. It's a kind of bathos,
adducing images from the death camps to persuade
us that Daddy is a Nazi. A lot of the writing
is laughably bad. And as painful as her life no
doubt was, it wasn't nearly as painful as those
of millions of European Jews, and it is at the
least in very bad taste to appropriate Auschwitz
and Jewishness. ("A bit of a Jew" was 100 % Jew
as far as the Nazis were concerned.)

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by Susan McLean:

"I don't think that any subjects should be set aside just because one cannot do justice to them. It is in the nature of death camps that no one can do justice to them. But I think that everyone has an obligation to remember them, and if poetry, which is the most moving kind of language, does not even make the effort, all humanity is the poorer."

Susan, I agree with most of what you say here. I'm not sure , however, "that no one can do justice" to death camps. A survivor certainly would have the best chance, especially if the survivor were a poet. But a poet with a powerful imagination should be able to render art that captures the horror. We also have plenty of relatively current genocides for information, and we have literary examples, Conrad and Czeslaw (Robert M. mentioned Celan) for example.

Many poets have written about death or dying with nothing more than their imaginations available.

Bob






[This message has been edited by Robert J. Clawson (edited July 15, 2002).]

[graywyvern]

a distinction needs to be made between the
occasion of a poem, & the underlying
issues its occasion more or less unconsciously,
evokes. (these need not appear in the poem at all,
by name.) e.g. if i respond to a newspaper article,
it is that the human situation engages me; & this,
because in some way it parallels my own. the poet's
choice is how explicitly to render this connection.
i believe it is often a mistake, either to conceal
that there is indeed a personal angle, too completely;
or else, to react so personally that it trivializes
the actual situation (the criticism that was made
against "Daddy"). but "subject matter" only exists in
that students of poetry want poems to be paraphrasable.
the realities of poetic composition are far less linear
than that. if poetry had never become an object of
academic study, our approach to reading individual poems
would never have become so skewed away from an empathic
identification with the poet's unique vision, without
which, poem-reading is simply a waste of time.