<dir>How often, after all, do we read the comment that if the poet had to explain what the poem “meant”, then the poem was not working – or was working in a different way from what was intended?
….
The skilful handling of such structures – through expectations set up, fulfilments delayed, or accomplished in surprising ways, and through a host of contingent constructions – can create a wide range of variation and accommodate a wide range of poetic “voices”. I often think that the power of this fundamental resource is somewhat overlooked, perhaps because the shape itself of our utterance comes to us as if in a natural and unforced manner and without the alienating or foregrounding effects of other more obviously literary devices, such as writing in lines, or alliteration, or rhyme, or elaborated conceits. [my bolding]</dir>
Dear Clive,
I’m glad you’ve raised these issues in such a well-construed (and, constructive) manner. Leaving aside questions concerning established poets/poems—which themselves tend to go far, already, because they haven’t “overlooked” these issues—I’d like to comment on your points as they relate to my personal observations of the online workshop environments I’ve frequented in the past. (And, particularly: how drafts posted for critique often show a marked lack of attention to the Five Points you’ve outlined in your essay.) I.e., rather than taking a look at successes, I’d focus on failures, or to put it more mildly: on poems-in-progress.
I can almost trace my dissatisfaction with drafts—the vast majority of drafts which I consider “unfinished”—to the issues you have raised. Perhaps this is due to my own peculiar interests in these areas; I tend to overlook the “more obviously literary devices” on my first few readings of a poem unless some jarring instance of those devices actually causes me to “lose track” as I’m experiencing the “Five Issues” you’ve raised. So I might even consider poems which have a high degree of metrical or sonic sophistication to be failures, or poems which show a fidelity to “the line” in their choices of lineation strategies, etc. Many such failures might in general be called “good” poems; or any feeling of deficiency is more difficult to trace to root causes; or in fact the peculiar handling of those “obviously literary devices” might set certain poems above others currently posted in the online workshop environment. For me, not all “failures” are equally bad, although my particular feeling of dissatisfaction, itself, might be entirely the same for every “failure.” I want to read “finished” poems; therefore any deficiency creates a feeling of failure.
Deficiencies in posted work (and, often, in published work by contemporaries) seem to fall into two broad categories, relative to the issues you have raised, but I feel a little trepidation in defining those categories since I am dealing with my own peculiar feelings concerning “deficient” work—i.e., as a subjective reader. Shall I define them in terms of how the author apparently approached his or her process of “making,” or shall I define them in terms of “the end-product”? When I, as a reader, experience a failure (concerning at least one of the Five Issues), I almost always have the concurrent impression that the author either 1) seems to have been extraordinarily unaware of the Issue, as an issue—oversight (maybe under-sight), or 2) attempted to work within the constraints of an issue but chose what is, from my point of view at least, a poor strategy—mishandling. The distinguishing factor, in this type of definition of the categories, is whether the author appears to have intended an effect, via the issue, and such a distinction might rely on what appears to be the, er, preponderance? of the poem, or where the author appears to be hanging his hat: to what degree does that issue, relative to others, influence the overall shape of the poem? Unfortunately, I as a reader must rely on a personal, perhaps sometimes private, sense of the overarching thrust of the poem to distinguish the presence or the lack of authorial intent. (Not quite so with rhyme schemes, etc.)
This distinction between oversight and mishandling is important for me in particular because I generally approach a poem expecting it to be “finished” and must rationalize, for myself, whether when I stumble within a poem I am stumbling because the author fouled or because I am striking out: Have I seen all that the poem offers, or am I possibly missing a thread or simply experiencing a purely aesthetic dislike? I am more likely to have a neutral opinion of a poem if I believe that the author intentionally shaped it as it is, rather than call it an outright failure, although I might also judge such a poem “deficient.”
Another way of addressing the distinction between the above two categories is by way of example. The most obvious cases of deficiency are probably those cases in which the author appears to have been unaware of one of the Five Issues, and this category seems to be the one most implied by your essay: for instance, an adjective or set of modifiers doesn’t fit in the overall scheme because it draws references outside the scope of the poem, or the sentence structure of a poem follows a predictable-because-uniform manner. Quite counter to the overarching thrust of a poem, and an assumed intention of the poet, some feature will seem either out-of-place or diversionary or even tedious. Such an oversight might, unbeknownst to the author, produce in the reader an altogether different poem if not merely confusion or a feeling of the poem’s being disjointed.
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You seem to not have addressed so closely (if at all?) the second category, that of “mishandling.” When I contemplate my dissatisfaction with certain poems, this is the area that most perturbs me: many poems show an obvious intention by the author to introduce areas which 1) must be “taken at face value,” or 2) are intended to imply far more than is present by being disjointed/chaotic, or 3) rely quite heavily on factors outside the poem such as preexistent knowledge of the contexts or an already formed aesthetic/modal strategy for interpretation. These three strategies often overlap.
An example of allusive or descriptive intent, involving the chaotic or disjointed, would be the introduction of what I’ll call “trigger words” to add a feeling of “depth” or “emotional tension” to the poem when juxtaposed with the ordinary—such that the ordinary is intended to be “heightened.” For instance, the sad boy doesn’t cry tears: acidic streams of urine etch his face. Such a usage is intentional; but I often turn away from purely sensationalistic ploys. If we buy into the usage because we’ve come to expect “heightened language”—that is our mode of interpretation; we expect the extraordinary as being, itself in whatever form, necessary—then the usage wouldn’t seem to be a deficiency in the poem but the contrary. And of course, over-the-top strategies work wonders for some poems while destroying others: arguing against, or critiquing negatively, such intentional ploys becomes much more difficult when a poem has "chaos" or "surface complexity, vacuous depths" as an intended motif or when the ploy as a ploy is accepted out of hand even if the poem as a whole doesn’t incorporate OTT strategies.
An opposite but related intentional ploy involves the idea of cliché similarly to the way you introduced erring-via-cliché and is related to #3 above. A pastoral poem just has to have all the usual nouns or descriptions: the moss and oaks and streams and farmhouse... I.e., when an author decides to write about the countryside or the inner city, or the cathedral, the usual descriptions of the environment are included because “That’s the way it is done.” In this case, rather than having disjointed allusions/descriptions, the allusions/descriptions all run uniformly down the list of expected allusions/descriptions, even if the exact manner of their introduction into the poem changes ever-so-slightly from poem to poem. Some manner of scene-setting seems required, and one can’t expect to read of jumbo jets taking off and landing in clearings of woods (unless one requires the extraordinary, cf. above), but the opposite trek of spending 5 stanzas telling me, the reader, that this poem involves a wood often seems like gross overkill, extra baggage. Again, when such a ploy is expected, the deficiency might seem like a successful working.
To sum up those last two paragraphs: Some balance of the ordinary and extraordinary seems required for most poems, even if no one set of requirements is required for the balance.
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I realize I’ve skimmed. (I hadn’t intended to write so much, already.) So I’ll pause at this point and try if I can catch my breath.
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