Poetic Pitfalls

There are a num­ber of ways to go wrong in poetry. Unfor­tu­nately, the Poetry Estab­lish­ment is only will­ing to admit the exis­tence of a select few of them. The oth­ers are either kept under wraps, or dis­guised as accept­able options.

Let’s start with the com­mon errors—that is, the ones that all the main­stream teach­ers and work­shop jock­eys agree upon, and which are there­fore well known to pretty much every­body. These errors are lam­basted and ridiculed so often that they are tat­ter­de­malion scare­crows, uni­ver­sally famil­iar. Here goes:

1. Using too many words when fewer would suf­fice. In gen­eral, yes, this is an error. Con­ci­sion and pithi­ness are in most cases prefer­able to long-winded blather. Don’t be a Polonius.

2. Being overly depen­dent on adjec­tives. You can pull off multi-adjectival usage if you’re in the league of Fran­cis Thomp­son, but in most other poets it’s a sign of self-indulgence and showiness.

3. Edi­to­ri­al­iz­ing in an open and bla­tant man­ner. Unless you’re writ­ing hard satire, this is to be avoided. It’s com­mon sense not to be an earnest poltroon, straight­for­wardly orat­ing to one’s readers.

4. Depend­ing on abstract nouns rather than con­crete images. As a rule of thumb, there’s lit­tle to argue with here. Too many abstrac­tions swathe a poem in vague­ness, and ham­per the reader’s abil­ity to visu­al­ize your language.

5. Employ­ing extremely old-fashioned dic­tion. Again, who could dis­agree? Using eft­soons, aught, methinks, or the older hath and doth con­ju­ga­tions is prob­a­bly over the top.

The stric­tures against these errors are sort of like the rules for proper behav­ior in a play­ground. They are prac­ti­cal guide­lines, not divine decrees. Excep­tions can and do occur to every one of them. But if you con­sider the five “errors” as a whole, a very inter­est­ing pic­ture of main­stream poetic expec­ta­tions emerges. Avoid­ing them is really about main­tain­ing loy­alty to two con­tra­dic­tory things: imme­di­acy and indi­rec­tion. On the one hand they reject rhetoric, abstract lan­guage, and archaism as obsta­cles between the poet and the reader; and on the other hand they call for a ret­i­cence and a cryp­ti­cism that hes­i­tate to come right out and say some­thing. In short, they rep­re­sent the quandary of clas­sic mod­ernism: How can we have the robust earth­i­ness of Robert Brown­ing within the chaste con­fines of Hilda Doolittle?

It can’t be done, of course, but that has never stopped par­ti­sans from adher­ing to an ideal. The entire mod­ernist enter­prise in poetry has been an attempt to square the cir­cle, so to speak. Mod­ernism wanted a poetry that hits you like an endor­phin rush, but that also shrouds itself in cryp­ti­cism and mys­tery. It asks that we be might­ily moved by that which is small and obscure.

In fact, you might even boil down mod­ernist aes­thet­ics in poetry to the fol­low­ing recipe. Let’s title it “How To Write A Mod­ernist Lyric”:

Take some ordi­nary lit­tle event or per­cep­tion, and blow it up into a quiv­er­ing epiphany. Do it with­out adjec­tives if pos­si­ble, or any overt use of rhetoric. Employ only the first per­son sin­gu­lar, and the Plain Style. Make what you are say­ing sound some­how impor­tant or seri­ous or urgent, even if it is as opaque as a tar pit.

A per­fect exam­ple of this recipe is William Car­los Williams’s poem about the plums:

This is just to say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the ice­box

and which
you were prob­a­bly
sav­ing
for breakfast.

For­give me
they were deli­cious
so sweet
and so cold

Another is Ezra Pound’s “In a Sta­tion of the Metro”:

The appari­tion of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.

Both of these poems are attempts to incar­nate the mod­ernist aims of imme­di­acy and indi­rec­tion, the first by describ­ing an utterly mun­dane event and pump­ing it up with the helium of pseudoref­er­ence; the sec­ond by tak­ing a visual impres­sion and wrench­ing it into a sup­pressed metaphor. Are they good poems? Well, yes, I sup­pose so—if you like that sort of thing. It’s a mat­ter of per­sonal taste. To me they are crabbed, pinched, and min­i­mal­ist, and rep­re­sent what the poet Henry Wein­field once described to me as “Amer­i­can Puri­tanism applied to poetic expres­sion.” Such poems are like haiku—reading more than three of them at a sit­ting is men­tally enervating.

There’s some­thing else to be noted. My friend Michael Burch recently wrote to me say­ing “How can any­one take the dic­tates of mod­ernism seri­ously, when Pound and Eliot obvi­ously didn’t?” And he’s right. Take a look at Pound’s poem: there’s the abstract noun appari­tion, and the paired adjec­tives wet and black. Williams’s poem uses three: deli­cious, sweet, and cold. Besides this, you can run through Pound’s oeu­vre and find dozens of quaint uses of thee and thou, and hast and hath. As for abstrac­tions, how about Eliot’s “Super­fe­ta­tion of to en”? Or Wal­lace Stevens’s “Com­pla­cen­cies of the peignoir”? As for over-the-top archaic adjective-mongering, can any­one beat Amy Lowell’s “Fire­souled, vermilion-hearted”? It seems a safe con­clu­sion that the early mod­ernist the­o­rists thought up a lot of reg­u­la­tions that mod­ernist poets sim­ply ignored. But they’re still being imposed on the rest of us by the MFA mar­tinets who run poetry workshops.

In any case, let’s now talk about the errors that the Poetry Estab­lish­ment doesn’t want to dis­cuss, for prej­u­di­cial rea­sons of its own. These ones haven’t been trum­peted like the five above-mentioned errors. But they can be just as deadly, and they are a lot more com­mon. Here goes:

1. Writ­ing in a tone of Por­ten­tous Hush. I dis­cussed this error at length in my essay “Why Poetry Is Dying” at the Expan­sive Poetry On-Line web­site some years back. No one—not even the redoubtable Philip Hobsbaum—dared to address my argu­ment on this point.

2. Wor­ry­ing about audi­ence response. This is like wor­ry­ing about a tec­tonic plate shift. It’s utterly futile. Your only con­cern should be your poem. That’s what you can control.

3. Keep­ing the reg­is­ter of one’s dic­tion strictly col­lo­quial. The Eng­lish lan­guage is a mag­nif­i­cent trea­sure bequeathed to us by cen­turies of lit­er­ary achieve­ment. And you’re going to write all your poems using the Fourth-Grade Basal Vocab­u­lary List? Grow up.

4. Com­pos­ing poems based solely on one’s per­sonal expe­ri­ences. Unless you’ve had a life com­pa­ra­ble to Casanova’s, that’s going to be pretty bor­ing, don’t you think? Poetry is fictive—the very word poei­sis in Greek means “mak­ing things up.” The medieval Scots called poets “makars” (mak­ers) for this rea­son. If you can’t lie, you can’t be a poet.

5. Believ­ing that there are “No ideas but in things.” This is like believ­ing that there is “No wine but in bar­rels,” or “No whores but in broth­els.” It’s just a silly slo­gan invented by a pedi­a­tri­cian in New Jer­sey. Ideas are every­where, includ­ing books, your mind, daily con­ver­sa­tion, and the Pla­tonic realm beyond the cave, just to name a few places.

In the case of these five errors, main­stream poetry cir­cles are unwill­ing even to admit that they are pit­falls. Why? It’s just not good for busi­ness. Absolutely no one will say a word about the Por­ten­tous Hush prob­lem. Audi­ence response? Every­one, from lau­re­ate to State Poetry Soci­ety poet­aster, is des­per­ately anx­ious to cul­ti­vate it. Keep­ing dic­tion sim­ple and col­lo­quial is prac­ti­cally a reli­gion in the cha­t­rooms and work­shops. Shoals of worth­less poets write because they think you want to hear about their “per­sonal expe­ri­ences.” As for the cliché No ideas but in things, well… it’s one of those grotesque lies to which every­one is forced to pay pub­lic lip ser­vice, like “All men are cre­ated equal,” or “Democ­racy rests upon the con­sent of the gov­erned.” Ask­ing the Poetry Estab­lish­ment to point out and con­demn these very prof­itable errors would be like ask­ing Wall Street to speak out against easy credit. It ain’t gonna happen.

And to be per­fectly fair, these five errors (just like the ear­lier five) are sub­ject to excep­tion when­ever a poet feels that he is aes­thet­i­cally required to com­mit one of them. As I men­tioned, all stric­tures against poetic pit­falls are in the nature of rules for behav­ior in a play­ground. We tell chil­dren to wait their turn to shoot hoops, and to not take sand out of the sand­box, and not to pull Samantha’s pig­tails. All these are use­ful guide­lines, but they aren’t the basis for a full-blown sys­tem of moral­ity. In the same way, the stric­tures against the ten poetic pit­falls aren’t the basis for a full-blown sys­tem of aes­thet­ics. Like every­thing else in the arts, they are just rules of thumb.

Be aware of all ten pit­falls, and don’t skew your atten­tion solely to those ones that the mod­ernists warn you about. Are you going to avoid exces­sive use of adjec­tives? Fine—but also rec­og­nize that a relent­lessly Plain-Style col­lo­quial dic­tion will pre­vent your poems from soar­ing. Are you going to stay away from abstract nouns? Fine—but recall that human beings have brains as well as senses. Are you plan­ning to eschew any edi­to­ri­al­iz­ing? Fine—but remem­ber that if you res­olutely say noth­ing, peo­ple will won­der why the hell you picked up a pen in the first place.

The cru­cial ele­ment in poetic com­po­si­tion is the poet’s inte­rior con­vic­tion that he is free to say what he wants with­out being hob­bled by ortho­doxy or—as is more com­mon these days—a cli­mate of received opin­ion. What­ever his degree of train­ing, what­ever his level of read­ing, what­ever his native skill—if he lacks that inte­rior con­vic­tion his art will be stran­gled in the cra­dle. And that is why I say to all poets the fol­low­ing: If any­one tells you that poetic guide­lines and rules of thumb are any­thing more than mere con­ve­niences, regard that per­son, for all prac­ti­cal pur­poses, as an enemy.