WHY EXCELLENCE?
What a conceit: “excellence in poetry”. We assume excellence, don’t we? Why state such obvious criteria? Does anyone aim for mediocrity in poetry?
Hard to tell. I doubt it. But since excellence can be so subjective, publishers assume that high quality is their natural benchmark. But quality might become eschewed when another mission sits center stage. I’ve read wildly radical poetry that misses the mark but got published anyway because it fit a magazine’s criteria of bold, uncompromising and untraditional. And I’ve read poems drowning in sentimentality yet published in formalist magazines because, I assume, they fit the magazine’s basic structural criteria.
The difference between good and great is debatable. That’s fair. But similarly, because we often use subjective criteria, we find the differentiation between bad and good even more problematic. I once saw a staged reading of a very poorly written play. But because the playwright made the characters speak nonsensically most of the time, one audience member applauded the writer as poetic, stating that, “we need more poetry onstage”. Was the audience member incapable of recognizing that the “poetry” in the play was awful? How did the word “poetry” become not only an adjective but one that we instantly recognize as complimentary? Why, when someone critiques a work by saying, “it’s poetic”, do we recognize this as a compliment, without question?
I blame conceptual art—at least partially. Because of conceptual art, everyone can label themselves “artist” and their work “art” because, even when the execution is arguably weak, the subjective idea behind it is more easily defended. My favorite definition concerning the difference between good poetry and great poetry comes from the late poet Judson Jerome who said (and I'm paraphrasing) "...good poetry aims for expression; great poetry aims for communication". Not only do I think this makes for an excellent definition of great art, period, I think it can be used to separate the good from the bad in poetry.
I think most people get confused between bad and great poetry. I know I do. Great and bad poetry often mingle and dance together; so much so that it’s often nearly impossible to tell them apart. Consider their strongest similarity: both often make huge demands on the reader. But poetry that is little more than wordplay gets real dull real quick. Paintings can be abstract because they don't require deduction in order to appreciate them. But with poetry you have to decode the language first (or eventually) and if it doesn't make sense it just gets boring. But poetry is also language and good poetry gets inside language and illuminates. So the high quality stuff can also seem to not make sense. This is why I think good and bad poetry get mixed up so often: we’re used to poetry being difficult, we’ve been taught that good poetry is difficult, we therefore believe that if it’s difficult, it must be good.
But simple and straightforward reads like prose. Is that bad? Writing straightforward poetry is, of course, not bad. Shakespeare’s sonnets, once you sort through the arcane words and phrases, are astonishingly clear. But simple and straightforward might also be prose in disguise. Broken-line prose irritates me more than nonsense because it's trying to be sneaky: express some pedestrian thought but make it look all jagged on the page and - oompa! Poetry!
And the same happens in incomprehensible poetry. Trust me, I know: I’ve written plenty of it. Try an experiment. Write something incomprehensible but put a famous poet’s name to it. Then give it to someone to read. The reader might not like it but I bet they will blame themselves before they blame the poet. I know that the first time I read T.S. Eliot’s, “The Wasteland”, I blamed myself for not understanding it. I’ve been told it’s a great poem; if I don’t get it, the fault must lie with me. On the same note, I found poems in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence to be so simple and direct that they didn’t seem like the product of a master. Again, I felt that the flaw belonged to me.
Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. Sometimes you need to keep working with a poem (or get a copy with a lot of footnotes). That’s what I recommend. When you break apart a great poem, whether it’s simple or obtuse, you start to unravel wonderful mysteries. But the point is that there are plenty of poets out there who take advantage of both traditions: the incomprehensible and the straightforward. They dress their poems up enough to look like that is how they meant it to be (conceptually) and if you question its stature then that’s because you are not taking the poem on its terms but your own. And, of course, you can’t use your own criteria because the poet—and thus the poem produced by the poet—is more advanced than you can conceptualize.
This is a nasty little scam: shame the reader into believing they are the flaw and not the poem. And it’s worse than just a nasty little scam: I’m sure this has turned millions of people off from reading poetry. They sense the snobbery of the poet but still assume the fault lies with them. I’ve spent years telling friends that they might want to trust their instincts; the poem at question might just not be very good.
There's nothing wrong with being able to understand poetry just as there’s nothing wrong with poetry that’s cryptic. The late great John Dickson once told me that he has no problem with cryptic but the meaning must be in there somewhere.
It’s always been the case that poets aren’t the only people writing poetry. People posing as poets write also write poetry. Typically, they’re read by other people posing as poets. But if someone takes apart language and puts it together again in a new way—whether it’s simple or complex—then the poser becomes the poet. And that’s what I want to publish.
Daniel A. Scurek
February 15, 2010
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