"Moves" in contemporary poetry
 

Anyone guilty of these?

http://htmlgiant.com/craft-notes/mov...porary-poetry/

The wonderful world of the MFA! Sometimes I think I actually hate poetry, usually when I read the kind of poems that this article did a wonderful job of collecting.

Sure I am.

Ending with a question is something I just did, in fact. Polysemy, particularly in the shape of zeugma, is something I really like. I'm not persuaded that these are all sins. I suspect we would find the "blank of blank" construction in lots of excellent poems if we went looking. (Dylan Thomas's "golden in the heyday of his eyes" comes to mind).

If "poetic allusion as joke" is an offense, then I'll go to hell right along with the poet who wrote "Fried Beauty." :)

Unless, as usual, there's something I'm not getting here....

Though some of those moves are almost unavoidable in poetry, I was struck by how few of them I regularly encounter in formalist poems, which have a different set of clichés. I'll admit to finding most of the moves listed in the blog to be tedious, and I would not want to read most of the poems from which they were excerpted. The free-verse poets I most enjoy reading don't tend to resort to those moves.

Susan

I think they are just "moves" that better poets use on occasion and in combination with other moves. However, if you use any of them too often they can become affectations. Editors can grow allergic to them too - e.g. I know one who dislikes non-rhyming poems that end on a rhyme.

One test is if you blush when reading any of the items in the list.

I clicked on the link with with relish, hoping for something as amusing as Twain's FENIMORE COOPER'S LITERARY OFFENCES, with its classic, understated line "Cooper's art has some defects" ;)

Alas, the compilers seem to think of themselves as "calling out" other writers over their literary devices, a tactic which would be news to people as diverse as Pierre de la Ramée and the Venerable Bede.

The whole thing would be way more fun if the compilers were having, um, more fun... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

I never did plow through the entire thing. After a while the shtick becomes forced and obvious. Pick a poem - almost any poem - and find something in the construction which, particularly when taken entirely out of context, either calls attention to itself or can be demonstrated to adhere to a certain pattern. Then wrinkle your little nose, purse your little lips, and sneer.

The main point appears to be to give the compilers a chance to show their fellow MFA's how well read and superior they are.

What an exercise in asininity:

"the use of a forest animal" ...huh? The revelation of the century! Some poets use forest animals in their poems!!! Eureka!!! They may even use the genitive (blank of blank)! Wow!!!! Maybe even together, for example: ‘the boar of the wood.’ Those poets, they aren’t as clever as we thought! Now, we know what they’re up to.

Huh?
Fr. RP

Well, it made me laugh, and I had to cop to quite a few.

Most of them fall under the category of flat line, detached cleverness,
something I often struggle with, and don't we all ? As though irony, or negation, or even wordplay, were something superimposed, rather than uncovered, or exposed. We all do Detached well enough to dissolve any free/metered divides. These guys are just listing the overused ingredients in what make up our Post Maudern soil ...

Fear of vision.

Fear of wisdom.

Fear of foolish

revelation.

Fear of witches

and magicians.

Fear of new

and ancient system.

Fear of crow,

and altercation.

Fear of slow

mastication.


-

Bravo, Wendy! Your throwaway is far better than the article that inspired it. I would, however, suggest "divelication" instead of "mastication" in the final line.

As always, Wendy: the voice of playful reason.

Nemo

I’ve been reading Stephen Burt’s essay, “My Name is Henri,” in which he discusses devices that poets ([editing in - "Mark," not "Phi"]particularly Mark Levine) presumably cribbed from Berryman, noting: “Berryman’s ‘I am X, I am Y’ theoretical figure, in particular, has become (partly thanks to Levine’s example) an almost predictable feature of first and second books: “I am a service revolver in a swimming pool . . . I am a love letter “ [I’m* not going to give the attributions, you can look them up if you want]; “I was that season, the little ends I made” . . . “I am spring, I am not spring/ I am Voltaire he said” . . . .

Anyway, it strikes me that this might make for a good D&A contest – see how many you can cram into one [that's one, Martin] poem.

"I," am FOsen/the smithy of my angst . . . .

I suggest that we move this to D&A, with a competition for poems that use all of these "moves."

Your wish is my command, Sam, and here we are. Let's see what folks do.

Come on, Michael. Share your wisdom with us. What is divelication?

Actually, the "I am X, I am Y" business goes back to ancient Babylon.
No reason to give Berryman the credit!

John - I'm only responding because I thought I would be the last man alive to use "divelicate" or any of its variations, and now you've used it, so I must climb back to the top of the heap. And, in so doing, I discovered that I would have been particularly safe in my position, because I also misspelled the word (which explains why you couldn't google it, if you tried.) It's "divellicate/divellication".

I found it years ago in a moldering Walker's Rhyming Dictionary that was printed in Britain in, I would guess, the Thirties. The entire dictionary is in reverse alphabetical order, it provides words but no meanings, and it contains some of the most arcane language imaginable. I had no idea what that particular word meant, but found it in another of my moldering reference works - a three volume, 3000 page Webster's - it's archaic, from the French divellere, and means to pluck at, to twitch, to pull apart.

I'm with Maryann on polysemy, and noted with Susan that most of these are Free Verse examples. It's what passes for cleverness in that usually dismal world. How else can you show off when there's no net? Only by being super. Most of my early crap is loaded with this, because I thought it was what people wanted. I still send a few out, but with embarrassment. A great many seem imitative of previous successful examples, but like ancient "frigid" rhetoric, they generally leave one cold ; whereas the Dylan Thomas example mentioned is hot, hot. Most try for humor, which is OK, but Gee, humor is so often ephemeral.

Wendy's is a gem ; only a mastiff would eschew it.

Many are just feeble, yet I hear them all the time at the "better" open-mike venues like NYC's Cornelia Street Cafe. There's a whole Antarctic glacier of modern writing full of this stuff, and lots of it gets published since the editors can't.... (Sorry, editor friends.)

A real MFA or a realer grad degree in lit would show these up for what most of them usually are : warmed up left-overs from someone else's frenzy.

Thank you, Michael. Divellicate eh? Wasn't Walker's Rhyming Dictionary the one Byron used? Have you checked the provenance of your copy? Who knows... it may... and does Byron use divellicate anywhere

I made a brief attempt at using a series of these, but the idea of doing them all myself gives me brain cramp. Frank, would you settle for a collaborative effort?

Here are two lines and a bit to start. Feel free to alter meter, switch to FV, whatever:

I am wormwood, I am gall.
I am supposed to use them all,
these moves....

Do idle hands do the divell's work?

I too dislike it. . .how about the use of odd and gratuitous sexual details to shock the audience out of its stupor?

Dan, I positively defy you to (in this day adage, at this pint in time), to identify de odd (and sexual) tails that might still shock a torpid audience.

I should have said "try to shock the audience out of its stupor."

Hermetic references
 

An item that I rather liked was the one on size reversal :

The despair
of loving may lead to long plane rides with
little leg room, may lead to a penis full
of fish, a burning chicken, a room filled
with a single, pink rose. Funny, how
we think of it as a giant rose,
not a tiny room.

Apart from the prosy wording that leads to 'leg room', I like the salmon and the final size reversal that resumes with a different use of the word 'room'. That rose v. room part is to me the best, and here I depart from the compiler's scorn.

What stretches my galluses is the 'burning chicken'. Unless it's a code blue cornball sexual allusion, it's a private call to an event of no enormous relevance that's known to one or at most a few readers. BORING.

You choose : a flaming catamite or a bad meal while attention was being paid elsewhere to maybe a rose? Either way, it fails to gruntle.

Following up on Maryann's. Or leading up on it. Whatever.
I'm adding a title, and annotations. Feel free to join the party.


"Dear Half-Hour of My Life That I'll Never Get Back Again"

I am wormwood. I am gall.
I am supposed to use them all,
these "moves", clichés, etc.
But why. For what. A bet or a


Annotations:
Title: #3 (Abstract epistolary: using "Dear [abstraction or common object]" in title or first line), #18 (The very long title)
L1: (I am X, I am Y--from Stephen Burt's essay)
L2: #14 (Explicit references to poems, especially the poem in question)
L3: #28 (scare quotes), #5 (use of "etc.")
L4: #7 (ending a question with a period)

I'm not sure "guilt" is supposed to attach for the use of any of these "moves." e.g., ending a poem with a question. I find nothing wrong in Yeats conclusion of "Leda and the Swan."

WRITING MOVES

I fake to the left with an adjective,
then dribble up the field,
then pass off to Mike Metaphor
whose meaning is concealed,

then criss-cross near the goal posts
with Chiasmus -- then I score a
goal with Catachresis
as I'm cheered by Anaphora.