barbaric, vast and wild

whelp, folks. final essay. i know you all must be crushed --- time to return to the good ol' days of mornings started with coffee mugs and the new york times instead of the ramblings of an awkward midwestern college student.

it's been fun.


barbaric, vast and wild: what is poetry?

Poetry, an art made for many senses, evolves just as any form of art does over time. Its purpose within certain cultural contexts and social circles may vary; its precise use of language may not own a steadiness; its creators and followers will not always agree with one another and will even argue about it; however, there are certain characteristics of poetry that have maintained somewhat of a reliably universal trueness to them. One is that poetry must have a purpose; it cannot be written for folly’s sake and live at the bottom of a desk drawer. It must have meaning, which it built upon in innumerable ways – one might sit down to write with a preconceived notion of what the poem is to be about; another may be inspired by a particular experience, sound, or word and may too sit, though with much less of a concrete idea of what will appear on the page before him. In either case, the result is no less of poetry than the other.

If written honestly, a poem contains the potential for breadth and depth that travels, rouses, hollers, shatters, whispers, sings, cries, stirs. Though it cannot be nailed down, one simple lens through which once might see poetry is this: it is the use of language that is pieced together so honestly that the nakedness of a human soul can both see it and be seen in it. As this class has spent a semester exploring the theme of “making it new,” it has been made apparent that poetry’s need for evolution and gaining of momentum has no signs of slowing. It can cradle memories, both collective and unique to the individual; it can hypnotize by means of aesthetic and intensity; it can communicate ideals and emotions amongst people, even if the ideas were foreign to begin with. It can say everything in no time at all. What poetry ultimately does (likewise what these ongoing semantics do) is serve as a reminder of our own limitations; yes, the universe is expansive and rich, but it is also cozy.

Poetry, being not only the written word but the word that is sung, read and spoken, is virtually obsolete without the eyes or ears or mouths of people (not to mention their minds). Therefore, as humankind unfolds and new generations gradually develop a set of their own characteristics, so too does the poetry of that society change. So naturally there are debates about the “true” nature of poetry --- however, the more common argument is in regards to what poetry is not rather than what it is. For example, (though a contemporary avant-garde writer may argue against this) it would pose quite a quandary to defend the idea that the nutritional facts or list of ingredients on the side of a cereal box might constitute poetry. It is obvious, however, to any common person that the work done by William Carlos Williams was poetry. Why? This question, however unfortunately so, is not to be answered. Were we ever to delineate the exact parameters of what makes a poem a poem, it would no longer be one.

In agreement with this notion is Language poet Lyn Hejinian, who made note in her introduction of The Best American Poetry 2004 that [American] poetry is never complete – that it is so full of energy and inventiveness that it is impossible to define poetry once and for all or to delimit its space (Hejinian 2004). As a thriving and widely-recognized writer, Hejinian’s estimation is about as concrete as it gets. However, as a poet who is happily lumped in with Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe and other ultra-moderns, the text of her foreword feels flighty in places, discussing her craft in puzzlingly ambiguous ways. This should come as no surprise to us; in fact, Al Filreis compares this particular brand of writing the calculus of modern poetic movements. Ambiguity, especially in art, does not inherently act as a destructive force. For example, Hejinian asserts that, “all art is about living,” (Hejinian 2004). For as broad as this statement may be, it is a perfectly reasonable notion. Art must have breath, significance, character, and works through a cyclical nature of nascence, maturity, decline and renewal. It progresses much like a human life does; existence, both of art and of people, is not static. Hejinian also claims that, as language is given meaning when structured into phrases, so poetry is given its meaning when it is linked to other poems; her argument is that poems must be written to resonate with other poems as it enables readers to consider matters of the collective human heart. Again, this is not a wholly bad idea, but it certainly negates the embrace that may exist between single poem and individual; as language poets extract the self from their writing, so too is the significance of privacy and intimacy between poem and reader extracted.

Poet Yusef Komunyakaa might agree. The famous writer, who contributed to The Best American Poetry only a year before Hejinian, has an especial fondness for refocusing on content; in fact, for Komunyakaa it, “is a part of process, which is essential to technique and form,” (Komunyakaa 2003). The notion of a “single” poem and even the argument concerning its effectiveness is no matter to him – a poem is a poem is a poem. The predominant issue, he thinks, with the new experimental poets is that they waste so much energy trying to strip the speaker from their writing that the language of the poem suffers – the experimentation, therefore, is in vain. Komunyakaa does not necessarily criticize the concept of “making it new,” and in fact encourages broadening the scope of literature, as “no topic is taboo,” but there must exist some sort of “refined principle of aesthetic,” (Komunyakaa 2003) in order for a poem to have the life and forward motion to which Hejinian alluded.

One remarkable being who could perceivably satisfy both Hejinian’s and Komunyakaa’s poetic standard is G.C. Waldrep. As a contemporary writer he senses few obligations to the laws of both grammar and Merriam Webster. However, to claim that the physical structure of his poetry is merely a testing of waters in literary rule-breaking is simply a mistake. It is made very evident to the reader that each one of Waldrep’s poems are constructed just so with a particular purpose in mind; in doing so, he makes excellent use of this component of contemporary avant-garde writing. However, he too is immensely occupied with content – Waldrep’s poems are dense and rich with meaning yet avoid dragging unnecessary aesthetic bulk. Both highly educated and attuned to word choice, he crafts poems that one must research in many cases; this often leads to the discovery that with his language, there are no such things as accidents. Waldrep is exemplary proof that one is more than capable of composing poetry that is distinctive, brilliantly worded, and intentional all at once. Similarly, and to readdress Hejinian’s notion of all poetry needing linkage, it is also just as feasible to gather up the works of enough poets like Waldrep to make an anthology. Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness is a prime example of exactly that. As in any anthology, one expects for stylistic differences, diverse focuses, even some thematic discrepancies between various writers, regions, and conflicts. And this is certainly true of Against Forgetting; for a book that features a century’s worth of writing by over 150 poets from 15 separate world conflicts, one mustn’t expect total uniformity throughout. Some are deeply personal, others politically charged. Some poets embrace the formal romantic style while others appear not to have the slightest inkling of what an iamb or quatrain might be. Still, these writers are all put together for a reason. Their fuel is what makes them cohesive; deeply-rooted, historically complex, and profoundly unjust conflict.

Poetry is inherently fluid – to be stationary is to not exist. Like a human person, a poem can only be immobilized by its surroundings; a poisonous cultural or political environment, a desk drawer, a creator that is either too self-assured or too meek, or overcritical noses that have turned up in favor of battling about the semantics of it all. However, as Yusek Komunyakaa has said, in poetry, the ego cannot ride shotgun. An honest poem is able to act as a cleansing agent and reinstate basic human truth. The poet, without abandoning his or her own idea of reality, can create what defends the value of individual minds existing in a society of interruptions. The true poet explores language fearlessly and with the understanding that no two minds will ever feel their way through a poem with exactly the same hands; and in terms of form, poems must make use of as many appropriate resources as possible --- the artist must bear in mind the gravity of all negative space; breath can be as important as the word itself. As we grow and transform as a global community, so too will our poems; we will always be attempting to “make it new.” So who knows? T.S. Eliot’s audience wasn’t immediately warm to him at the start of the last century; perhaps our great-grandchildren will see Lyn Hejinian as tame as a housecat.

works cited
Hejinian, Lyn. Introduction. Lyn Hejinian and David Lehman, eds. The Best American Poetry 2004. Scribner, 2004. 9-14. Print.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Introduction. Yusef Komunyakaa and David Lehman, eds. The Best American Poetry 2003. New York: Scribner, 2003. 11-21. Print.