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Friday, October 05, 2007
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Scathing Online Schoolmarm Anatomy of an Unworked Poem An English professor at Virginia Tech who had the killer in his class writes a weak poem about it. So I know Here's a poem that's sincere and emotional and unable to be poetic. Unable to control itself emotionally and express itself artistically. People will say a poem like this one makes artistic sense because its rush of messy lines and words, its lack of linguistic interest or beauty, adequately reflects a traumatized consciousness struck speechless -- or at least hobbled linguistically -- by atrocity. But a poet only has words, powerful words powerfully shaped to convey any number of things, including in cases like this one the failure of words under pressurized circumstances. Look more closely. The moisturizer detail is intriguing but empty. The writer finds it intriguing but does little with it metaphorically or conceptually. He himself, he says, like the killer, wants to be "soft" -- that is, to avoid the hard business of coming to grips with violence in the world? Avoid the hard words that might truly convey what has happened? What precise parallel is the writer suggesting here between his softness and the killer's? It's left unsaid -- but not interestingly, allusively, unsaid. The moisturizer, and the idea of softness, isn't explored. It's simply stated. Then the guys show up - the guys from the paper, the guys from tv. These lines - like the rest of the poem - are prose, not poetry. No lilt. No larger sense of meaning in any of the words used. Just his thoughts as he scribbles. He now calls this poem his "confession." He says he should have done "more than talk to someone / who talked to someone, a food chain of language/ leading to this language of 'no words' we have now." Food chain is a perplexing and weak metaphor. Our empty no words keep us alive? But they are empty, unsustaining. The "maybe we exist as language" and are "unworded" at death line comes across as a somewhat pretentious effort to be philosophical, mainly because it's dropped in and then dropped for good, given no context. And after all, isn't the point of the poem that we are much, much more than language, and that the poet feels guilty precisely because he's remained too comfortably within a kind of soft-language-only setting? That would seem to call for a poem of much more formal and linguistic toughness. As it stands, the poem is another softball, an instance of the fallacy of imitative form, which Ivor Winters describes as "the procedure by which the poet surrenders the form of his statement to the formlessness of his subject-matter." To convey emotional and linguistic debility, you write a debilitated poem. The poet describes a world in which "we're trying to mean," which sounds just right; but surely a poem is something which tries to mean more successfully than the rest of us do as we chat with each other. The poet's defense of his impulse to write poetry so soon after the event inspires a clunker of an image: "I have an apple for a face" when I write, instead of "no face." Yet how is apple meant? A face that's an apple is a rather comic image, and that can't be meant in this context. And an apple is an exceedingly overdetermined symbol. The poet needs to make its significance precise, or the reader's mind will go all over the place with it. Now he moves from apples to flowers, "the clocks of flowers" expressing the turn of the seasons, the way the blooming of the flowers in spring marks the forward motion of time through the seasons. Okay. But he muddies his metaphorical structure once again by throwing an autopsy at us: "these seconds are an autopsy of this world/ suddenly." Actually, in itself this final autopsy line is great, and the poet should have started the poem with it, then explored backwards, perhaps through its morbid idea that time moves in a deathly way in the aftermath of such an event, and that the difficult part of the response to such events is simply moving forward, simply convincing yourself that life goes on. As in many weak poems, it's as if the poet at the very end chances on what he really wants to say, and the right words in which to say it. UD's suggesting here that this poem is really a first draft, the poet's first gust of emotion as he takes on his subject. Perhaps he retains the poem in this inchoate form because he thinks its messiness is authentic, an authentic snapshot of his feelings at a particular moment in time. Yet good poems are worked, no matter how ambitious they may be to capture spontaneity. This poem isn't worked. And as a result, it doesn't work. Labels: SOS |