Sometimes I feel as though there’s something insidious creeping into my aesthetics, bias influencing my reaction to poems more than reasonable evaluation. I want to resist choosing sides. If there is a compelling argument for why formalist, lyric poetry is still relevant, then I want to know what it is. I want to be convinced.
So I started off reading this review with an open mind. After a brief stroll through Starnino’s caustic introduction, and a minor remonstrance for the apparently forgivable sin of spell-check-induced typos, the reviewer sets out his criterion for a good poem: the “interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources.” Ok, I agree with that. But when the reviewer gives examples from the anthology, he starts to lose me.
It is almost painful
to touch, but you can’t help
yourself. It’s so familiar.
The dents. The twisted symmetry.
You can see how hard it has tried.
I have a lazy intellect, so I have to rely on writing workshop questions, like Why is this a poem? What do the line breaks do that the same words in a paragraph couldn’t do? Where is the prosody?
His body divorced him slowly,
like a flock of birds leaving
a wire, one set of wings at a time –
still in sight, but past retrieving.
I like this image, but why is the form so controlled? If the body is falling apart, why isn’t the language falling apart too? Why aren’t the words more birdlike, or winglike, or why don’t they sound… I don’t know, interesting?
Hovelled in darkness two nights then,
bent blindly to the sleet’s raw work,bodies muffled close for shelter,
stepping in circles like blinkered mules.
The wind jerking like a halter.
Two similes in two lines? Is an interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources? Really?
And finally, this gem:
The bony babes in Gap who lazily
Stroll with Starbucks cups at U of T,
Photoshopped or bio-engineered,
See me dreamy-eyed and think I’m weird.
Which the reviewer justifies thusly:
As with Larkin, it’s the self-deprecation, and the wit, that keep the misogyny bearable in these poems, though no doubt more for some readers than for others.
I must be one of those other readers, because I don't think misogyny is ever bearable. Dear reviewer: Replace “misogyny” with “racism” or “homophobia” and maybe you’ll understand what an asshole sounds like.
If witty formalism and self-deprecating lyricism are meant to make misogyny palatable, that's a pretty strong argument against them. And I still haven't heard a compelling argument in their favour. So, I remain unconvinced.
3 comments:
"Why is this a poem?"
I agree with you about the line breaks. Line breaks do not make a poem, no matter how badly you place them. (I don't particularily enjoy the way that the poet broke up the lines in that particular excerpt.)
Pollock did, however, mention something else about that poem that I think is important:
" the poet tells us the pepper is 'The size/ of your heart' "
So here it in not line breaks or prosody that make it a poem, but this concept. The pepper. Your heart. That is why it's a poem (though good or bad is still up in the air at this point).
That's my call, anyway. What do you think?
thank you for your comments...
like i said: i have a lazy intellect. i guess i didn't mean what makes this collection of words a poem? but rather why is this collection of words organized into lines, instead of sentences or some other formal configuration? of course, my question why is this a poem? makes the facile assumption that words arranged into lines are automatically a poem.
i don't think the language is unpoetic, but i think it could be equally poetic if it was a paragraph rather than a stanza. i think if you're going to use lines you should actually use them with some purpose, even if that purpose involves making arbitrary line breaks. i don't get any sense of purpose from the line breaks in this stanza.
as for the question of what makes language poetic, what makes a poem, i'm not sure there is an answer. certainly metaphor (the pepper is the heart) puts it in the realm of poetry. but is figurative language definitive? is form definitive?
i took a seminar on the prose poem with nicole markotic at the u of c, and we spent most of the class trying to define prose and define poem. in the end, i think it's impossible: the best i can come up with is that poetry is all instances of language that don't serve some practical or non-aesthetic purpose (such as news reports, grocery lists, book reviews). but i'm not convinced that definition is particularly workable, because i've certainly found poetry in all kinds of "unpoetic" sources.
someone, (maybe charles bernstein?) once wrote something like, this is a poem because i'm a poet and i say it's a poem. and who can argue with that?
I've often wondered what distinguishes a prose poem from beautiful prose.
As for prose vs. poetry, your last quotation there is about the best it gets. Poetry has a striking quality that can't be explained only sensed.
I agree with you about the line breaks in that stanza. It grates on my nerves when lines in poetry are broken without purpose. Though I suppose a poem could play on that.
take care,
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