Tag Archives: bad poetry

The Weirdness of Precipitation. Also Umbrellas.

8d6781cf937172027dee33d74d831c33

So a friend has pointed out that I have been veering from the straight path of poetry and investigating all kinds of apparently nonpoetic things, and she is not wrong. At first I thought this was simply a result of my writer’s block, again, and to some extent it is. Then I thought about how I started this blog in part to figure out my poetics, that is, what the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines as “a systematic theory or doctrine of poetry” (Preminger 636). What do I think counts as poetry and where do we draw the line? Is it enough to “not be prose,” i.e., to have lots of short lines, some of which may happen to rhyme? Is it likely to have more elegant language and imagery than non-literary prose generally uses? Must it be beautiful? And what do we mean by beauty?

And then I realized that some of what I have been unconsciously doing is figuring out my aesthetics, which oddly enough, Preminger does not define, although he does include aesthetic distance and aestheticism, this last of which he seems to define as art for art’s sake, although he takes several pages to do it. I think for me defining one’s aesthetics is about defining what one as an individual, artist and nonartist, find beautiful and not. What draws you, as the bagpipes drew me before my mind had realized that my legs were moving? What repels me, as the sonorous, groaning organ does, even though it has great symmetry and harmony and All The Things, and can move other folks to tears for Very Different Reasons?

And I have been fascinated by our recent popular culture projects, because they have been drawing me in a similar fashion. Some of what I like is the smart juxtaposition between apparent opposites that we often get, the mixing of deadly serious and light wit, or dark, almost Gothic environments mixed with warm companionship. Or just high school students reading 500-year-old texts in an actual library to learn about the demons they are about to face. These tinctures in the story-telling of our time fascinate me, and I hope are teaching me about how to tell a more beautiful story, whether I do it in poetry or prose or some other way.

But for those who came for the poetry, here is a poem from last Monday when I got soaking wet about three different times.

.

Suddenly the air

is awash front to back

with water, which once,

before today, used

to be ocean or cloud.

.

And walksign people

scurry and slosh across

sidewalks become rivers

for a moment or two

too long for dry shoes.

.

Only the dry ones, those

who planned ahead,

stay anywhere near dry

carrying their nylon roof

on a stick.

.

Preminger, Alex, ed. Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974.

Every Rant Deserves an Exception: Muses I Have Known and Written…

Even before I finish my title, I have to start this blog entry because I can’t choose which preposition to use: for? to? about? All of the above? Over the years, I have had several people who have inspired me to write poetry. I don’t really count the men as muses, because to my mind love poetry is a different kettle of gummy bears. Knowing that people have been writing love poetry for 4,000 years or more is a lot of pressure, and I most often handle it by being a bit self-deprecating or funny. I see a lot of humor in romance. Let’s face it, being in love is a lot like being a little insane, and as Buffy the Vampire Slayer would say, “Love makes you do the wacky.” I am not talking about poetry like that, although it is a good idea for a future post.

I am talking about normal people in my life, friends, teachers, whose way of being in the world or the way they talk just triggers either imagery or juxtaposed ideas or a desire to unpack why they are unique to me. This is more like what poet Maggie Anderson calls “important excitements”: the (usually) short-term artistic obsessions writers and artists indulge in. Think of Monet’s 250 paintings of that lily pond. Like that.

greatwave This happens to me a lot. Usually I get excited about things, rather than people. At some point I will write a post about why I so adore the ukiyo-e woodblock artists from Japan, especially Hokusai and Hiroshige. Or my obsession with writing about characters from popular culture, such as Raggedy Ann, Barbie, Xena, or Amelia Earhart. Or the two months I spent writing incredibly long poems about Jack of the Beanstalk.

Jack_700x394

Sometimes, though, I meet someone who snags my attention. Take one of my flamenco teachers, Malena. I started to study flamenco dance out of curiosity and stayed out of fascination. It should be said that at no time in those three years did any actual talent for dance on my part ever appear. I learned a lot about rhythm and can now clap in time, even when the time is complex, and I can twirl my hands elegantly (big life skill, that). I appreciate Spanish food and rough guitar music and I can still do a little of the footwork (it helps pass the time waiting in subway stations).

cotton-ruffle-tank-dress_7-hot-dresses-from-marc-jacobsBut more than anything, what I saw was a way women could be both feminine and strong. I normally always associated femininity with pink dresses, a lot of skin, some dumb chick simpering up to a man. Bleah. The women who took flamenco class weren’t like that, and Malena herself was (and is) one tough chick in command of her own body. Flamenco is a fiercely passionate kind of dance, noisy, and in some way very feminine. Empowering. So when I wrote more than a dozen poems about flamenco, whether or not Malena was the topic, she was in many ways the trigger, the inspiration. The following is an excerpt from “The Flamenco Teacher” (for Malena, who is “just a florist”):

Petal, pistil, stamen, stem and root:

beneath your hands, these blossoms toss

heads, moody, beautiful, game for anything.

When you dance, your wrists become veined stems.

Your hands,

like yellow irises,

opening,

close,

blossoming,

fall.
The key challenge was to express the visual images and the strong emotions with beautiful words, while also keeping with the kind of ropy uneven rhythm of the different dances, most of which are in 12, not 4/4.

I will leave you with a video of the legendary Carmen Amaya (1913 to 1963) dancing awesome flamenco.

What Poetry Is Not: A Short Rant

These days, going to the gym gives me indigestion. I blame the Food Network. You see, some days the only thing on the TV on the elliptical machine is food shows. So I watch Giada De Laurentis or Ina Garten or Robert Irvine making magic with food. And then there is the dreaded commercial.

I get it. It is now Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, and everybody wants to Get Into the Spirit of the Season, but why do they have to do it by sounding like a stupid Hallmark card? The ad for a new holiday dessert competition tells us about the show that will apparently give chefs only an hour to make their cookies “and dust them with flour.” (Which they say while actually showing a chef dusting a cake with sugar. But you know how it is with rhyming poetry: the only thing that really rhymes with sugar is…wait for it…booger.) At Christmas, cheesy rhymes, especially rhyming couplets (an AA rhyme), come out of the woodwork to make my blood boil.

Now it is one thing if you are under the age of consent to still believe that a rhyme makes a poem. And especially if you do not think of yourself as a poet and you are not trying to become a professional poet, you can believe whatever you want. I don’t care. But I have seen too many badly rhymed pieces of crap labeled poetry. And if that weren’t bad enough, you also get the other side of the coin: prose broken up into very short lines, usually broken right before prepositional phrases, with no rhythm at all, not even conversational or, failing that, blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). It’s like the writers aren’t even trying. And they justify it by saying anybody can write poetry.

Well, you know what? They are right. Anybody can write poetry. Sometimes it is going to be bad poetry. Ted Sturgeon, a science fiction writer, famously said that 95% of science fiction was crap, like everything else, and Ursula K. Le Guin commented, “The Quest for Perfection fails 95% of the time but the Search for Garbage never fails” (223).

So if you are going to insist on writing poems and calling it poetry, then do yourself and the rest of us a favor. Invest in some Peterson’s Guides and a really good thesaurus, so that you know the difference between a birch and a sycamore and you have lots of different words for green. And if you insist on rhyming then also get a good rhyming dictionary so that at least your rhymes will be more original…

…and less boogery.

Le Guin, Ursula. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Berkley Books, 1982.