Poetry Stands Alone

Once, when asked by a TV interviewer what the difference between poetry and narrative was, I saw Maxine Kumin raise her hands like bookends and say something like when the work loses the blockiness of text it becomes poetry. 

Now I know she was speaking off the cuff, and the poet’s job is often to state the obvious, but it seems to me there are bigger differences between poetry and narrative than the way they look on the page.  Poetry stands apart – and it stands apart from virtually everything else.

Beowulf and The Fairy Queen (and others) often seem to approach narrative from the poetry side, while Thomas Wolf, John Updike (and others) seem to be approach poetry from the novel side, but neither group has gained much ground and the two camps are still pretty far apart.

Anecdote 1

When I mentioned to a well-read, southern friend of mine that the villanelle was a difficult poetry form, he sat down at his desk and scrawled out a villanelle.  His intent was to prove to me that poetry was foolishness.  What he created filled the form of a villanelle – and it made a queer stab at sense – but it was so banal that my response was, “There’s a reason you boys lost the Civil War.”   I regret challenging my friend’s view that poetry was foolishness in this manner, not because my friend died a short time later, but because poetry stands apart – and it stands apart from argument as it does all other things.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who write poetry today as well as the vast majority of people who peep through the knot holes in the fence around the poetic construction site, seem to take the technical aspect of verse very seriously.   There are rules – even for free verse – and if you don’t honor them your poem will be inferior.  The goal here seems to be to set the poet apart from readers and the readers apart from the non-readers of poetry through technical shock and awe.  Yet poetry does stand apart - while the poet or his or her fan club does not.

It is hard not to like poets because they often labor their lifetime with their eye on the prize.  Prize, what prize?  The Poet Laureate of the US makes 35 K a year!  I suspect there are managers of fast-food fry lines that make more than that.

Anecdote 2

I met Maxine Kumin once.  She lived in Warner, NH.  I lived in NH, too, but living in NH was probably the only thing we had in common at the time.  Writing poetry, I believe, is something you grow into and I didn’t write poetry then, but it is about all I write now.   

She was a US Poet Laureate twice, I think (although the first time it was called something about being manager of a fry line or I don’t know what).  This was in Vermont at a writer’s conference.   I was sitting on a rotting picnic table in back of a dormitory across the road from the Robert Frost house in Middlebury and trying to inhale a six pack of half-quart beers.  It was a beautiful late afternoon and I was getting something of a serious What-Am-I-Doing-Here buzz when Kumin and three or four nuns (swear to God) snuck up behind me and asked if I wanted to go look for mushrooms.  I politely said no thanks . . . well, who knows what I said, but I didn’t go with them.  I now think Kumin had probably hoodwinked these nuns into searching for fungi that she would later sell at some roadside stand just outside Warner where she wouldn’t be recognized.  Real men separate themselves from their audiences with money, but poets meld with their audiences in a big tureen of bland soup – at least the hungry ones do.

It is difficult to get high school people to write – anything.   One classroom strategy to get them to write is to ask them to write about their scars, their personal pain.  I’ve read many of these essays and I make no comment about their intrinsic value.  But I fear what often happens is this tasks becomes a eureka moment for the student.  Throughout life from then on, emotional content somehow becomes the yardstick for judging value.  Unfortunately, raw emotion gets mixed up with their appreciation of poetry, too.  Sometimes you hear the poet center stage just knocking out a torch song of grief and loss, but sometimes the poet imbues a pet cause with emotional value, too.  Coming out of the closet, the repression of women, race, the inestimable value of a culture other than American, and many other conceits are often vessels for transferred emotion – and such poems are welcomed by an audience that went to the same high school as the poet. If we feel the poet’s pain we are swayed to the cause, really without thinking about things like unintended consequences of adopting such causes might be.  When the public’s attention wavers or moves on from these causes, however, the poem’s power wanes (although future generations of students will be required to read the stuff).  The truth is that poetry stands alone and ultimately doesn’t care about hand holding or fist pumping.

The Thai language places vowels before, after, above, below and sometimes even omits vowels altogether.  Emotion operates much the same way in poems.  Emotion is always there, but it shows up in surprising ways - but it is rarely at the center of the poem.  

Emotion, on the other hand, is always central to music so we think it must the same with poetry.  Not so.  The difference between poetry and narrative is in the relationship between the poet and his work.  The work itself, for a poet, is the thing, the only thing.  No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader works for many art forms, but usually not for poetry.

Beauty is an ineffable quality in all art.  But because of its brevity and its back being turned to us nature (because the poet really doesn’t care about us) – and even for the strange way it looks on the page – poetry is different.  It stands apart from all things.  The truth is: Poetry is an art form best served cold.

FG  12/28/2014  (poetry bog:  Forrestgreenwood.blogspot.com)

Sadly, Maxine Kumin died in 2014.