The Hatred of Poetry

Pt. 2: Mary Oliver tells us to get to work

Maybe Lerner was a bit high-concept (wait———is it low-concept? I now realize I have no idea what those terms mean) when it comes to poetry, the poet, and those who read/hear poems. He’s got that erudite circumlocution thing going for him, but the premise is this: poetry avoids the kind of appreciation other art forms seem to naturally produce within and for themselves. I won’t lie: the very title of his nifty little book made me swoon with a bit of outrage. I remember taking it out to one of the many poison oak-riddled copses by the American River and devouring his thoughts while also feeling a little dyspeptic and, it later turned out, covered in poison oak. I liked his take on the distance between poems and Poems, poets and Poets, but he remained a little too supra-earthly. And it left me itchy.

Thankfully, we have Mary Oliver to slap us upside the head. Her A Poetry Handbook is exactly what a handbook should be (at least for me—along the lines of Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage): a reference text that is at once elucidating and entertaining.

[aside: I love that these two chose (or their publishers chose) to title their work beginning with the indefinite article—it’s not The Poetry Handbook, it’s not The Dictionary of Modern English Usage, and I think that makes all the difference for a writer laying queries at the feet of other writers. The diction of humility.]

Oliver’s handbook is too delightful and thorough to give it the full and thorough treatment here. But I’ll block-quote like a motherfucker, and I’ll share with you my favorite parts (while editing her obscene comma use—my God. And I thought I had a problem with em dashes!).

It has always seemed to me curious that the instruction of poetry has followed a path different from the courses of study intended to develop talent in the field of music or the visual arts, where a step-by-step learning process is usual and accepted as necessary. In an art class, for example, every student may be told to make a drawing of a live model, or a vase of flowers, or three potatoes for that matter. Afterward, the instructor may examine and talk about the various efforts. Everyone in the class recognizes that the intention is not to accomplish a bona fide act of creation but is an example of what must necessarily come first—exercise.

Is anyone worried that creativity may be stifled as the result of such an exercise? Not at all. There is, rather, a certainty that dialogue between instructor and student will shed light on any number of questions about technique and give knowledge (power) that will open the doors of process. It is craft, after all, that carries an individual's ideas to the far edge of familiar territory.

What comforts me in this, and what makes writing poems a little less terrifying, is that poetry is a practice. You can practice, and failing is part of that. As my never-will-I-be-a-teacher-but-now-I’m-a-teacher wife said about teaching, “You either have an innate talent for it, or you are trained to how do it—I have neither of those things.” While that’s an ungenerous and unmerited critique of her skills as a school librarian (she’s great and doesn’t even know it!), that’s how I’ve always felt about poetry. I have neither of those things.

And yet, as my fear (hatred) subsides, I’m finding I have something in my blood that won’t let me leave poetry alone. I can’t say I have an innate talent for composing poems, and I also certainly can’t say that I’ve received any formal instruction in it. Point in fact, I once tried to enroll late in the enrollment season in a Modern Poetry class during my undergraduate years, but the professor was adamant that adding more students would be impossible and wouldn’t consider anyone on a waitlist. So I remained an unschooled amateur afraid of and hating poetry. When I overlapped with the Creative Writing majors in my undergrad, my stomach would tie itself into throbbing knots and my heart would dislodge itself to into my closed-up throat. I never said anything in those classes.

[aside: it’s tangentially interesting to me that this parallels my earnest but disastrous attempt to enroll in a Sociology course on Men and Masculinity. I couldn’t enroll, the class was full, only graduating Sociology majors would be added from the waitlist. In my quintessentially wounded way, I interpreted this as a failure on my part, and it remained my conviction for many years that I had no place in even studying this thing I have a bumblingly awkward relationship to. We (I) still don’t have a language to talk about it.]

I digress. Here’s Oliver on amateurism in poetry:

A poem that is composed without the sweet and correct formalities of language, which are what sets it apart from the dailiness of ordinary writing, is doomed. It will not fly. It will be raucous and sloppy—the work of an amateur.

Another digression, this time on amateurism (which flipped my head upside down on the idea). See: Natalie Wynn’s comment on her video “Satie: 3 Gymnopédies”.

I've been playing the piano again lately. It's one of the few things that I love so unironically I struggle to even talk about it. The word "amateur" originally meant "lover," a person who does something out of passion, not professionally. So despite its current sneering connotations, I think being an amateur is good, actually. You don't have to be "the best" at something for it to be worth doing.

But I do still struggle to play in front of other people, or to record myself. I'm much better at listening to music than I am at playing it, and I always hear the defects, everything that could be improved. I try to see the upside—recognizing the possibility for improvement gives you a reason get out of bed. What if one day I sat down at the piano and played perfectly? What then? What were there be left to to do? Just die I guess.

I still can’t say exactly what Oliver means by “the sweet and correct formalities of language,” for I am an unschooled degenerate, and, to quote Wynn again, “I still have to look at the music because I’m a hack and a grifter.” This lady gets me.

The Handbook goes on to explicate what I assume are those sweet and correct formalities (chapters titled “Sound”, “The Line", “Some Given Forms”, and “Diction, Tone, and Voice” point the way). Although this sets out to educate me, to help me build a practice, I certainly at this stage in my relationship to poetry ally myself with amateurism. Perhaps I even resist training and the discipline it requires (to the detriment of what I write, sure, but how am I not myself?). I likely always have and will; I have no desire to be a professional poet (I already have enough to profess as a teacher), and being published seems somehow besides the point (“Who is this even for?” Kaveh Akbar recently asked me in Pilgrim Bell). But as a lover, as a person who does something out of passion—and thereby imperfectly—well, I’m at home there. Dionysian all the way (though I recognize the necessity of the Apollonian counterbalance, which I am reminded of not just when I see Nietzsche’s mustache staring back at me from the bookshelf but which is the idea behind one of my favorite hipster writing-implement makers, Baron Fig).

Okay. A bit more of Oliver because I love her voice and no-nonsense approach. Here’s what she has to say about reading poetry, of the contemporary moment but also of the near and distant past, which is an essential path for poetic edification:

To write well, it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to say that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read.

In looking for poems and poets, don’t dwell on the boundaries of style, or time, or even countries and cultures. Think of yourself rather as one member of a single, recognizable tribe. Expect to understand poems of other eras and other cultures. Expect to feel intimate with the distant voice. The differences you will find between then and now are interesting. They are not profound.

Remember also that there is more poetry being written and published these days than anyone could possibly keep up with. Students who consider it necessary to keep abreast of current publications will never have time to become acquainted with the voices of the past. Believe me, and don’t try. Or, at least, don’t give up the time that you need to get acquainted with Christopher Smart, or Li Po, or Machado.

But perhaps you would argue that, since you want to be a contemporary poet, you do not want to be too much under the influence of what is old, attaching to the term the idea that old is old hat—out of date. You imagine you should surround yourself with the modern only. It is an error. The truly contemporary creative force is something that is built out of the past, but with a difference.

She goes on in “Sound” and “More Devices of Sound” to cover the ground one would expect a brilliant 10th grade Poetics teacher to introduce students to (I know a few of those, in fact, both my teachers and my colleagues, and much thanks I owe to them for pushing me along). Alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia (which is still just so much fun to say, the American and the British way). Yada yada yada.

From “Lines”: “Rhythm underlies everything.” Which I hear at work just enough to make me sick, but the fact remains.

Alter the line length or the established rhythm when you want to, or need to, or choose to, to change the very physiological mood of the reader. Change the line length or rhythm arbitrarily, or casually, and you have puzzled and sensually irritated the reader—thrown [them] from [their] trance of interest and pleasure. And if pleasure is not an important function of the poem, why, I ask, did Wordsworth mention the word “pleasure” forty-two times in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads?

She also offers the best explanation of Keats’ negative capability: “The poet should be a kind of negative force—that only by remaining [themself] negative, or in some way empty, is the poet able to fill [themself] with an understanding of, or sympathy for, or empathy with the subject of [their] poem.

On the use of cliché: “The cliché works in poems as it works in any kind of writing—badly. Do not use the cliché in a poem unless, perhaps, you are writing a poem about the cliché.” On syntax (my new favorite word, which my students must hate by now): “Proper syntax never hurt anyone. Correct grammar and forceful, graceful syntax give the poem a vigor that it has to have.”

I’ll draw this meandering love letter to a close by quoting the entirety of her “Revision” chapter. It’s there where I think I have the most work to do. And she agrees. And while I humbly disagree with some of her assertions, there’s plenty of cud for me to keep masticating.

What you are first able to write on the page, whether the writing comes easily or with difficulty, is not likely to be close to a finished poem. If it has arrived without much effort, so much the better; if it was written with great toil, that does not matter either. What matters is that you consider what you have on the page as an unfinished piece of work that now requires your best conscious and patient appraisal.

One of the difficult tasks of rewriting is to separate yourself sufficiently from the origins of the poem—your own personal connections to it. Without this separation, it is hard for the writer to judge whether the written piece has all the information it needs—the details, after all, are so vivid in your own mind. On the other hand, because of this very sense of ownership, the poem is often burdened with a variety of “true” but unhelpful details.

Poems begin in experience, but poems are not in fact experience, nor even a necessarily exact reportage of an experience. They are imaginative constructs, and they do not exist to tell us about the poet or the poet’s actual experience—they exist in order to be poems. John Cheever says somewhere in his journals, “I lie, in order to tell a more significant truth.” [I’m pretty sure Mary Karr also quoted Cheever in The Art of Memoir] Loyalty to the actual experience—whatever got the poem started—is not necessarily helpful; often it is a hindrance.

I like to say that I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now. This is a useful notion, especially during revision. It reminds me, forcefully, that everything necessary must be on the page. I must make a complete poem—a river-swimming poem, a mountain-climbing poem. Not my poem, if it’s well done, but a deeply breathing, bounding, self-sufficient poem. Like a traveler in an uncertain land, it needs to carry with it all that it must have to sustain its own life—and not a lot of extra weight, either.

[aside: backpacking rules apply to writing poetry]

A caution: there are poems that are packed full of interesting and beautiful lines—metaphors on top of metaphors—details depending from details. Such poems slide this way and that way, they never say something but they say it twice, or thrice. Clearly they are very clever poems. Forsaken however in such writing is the pace—the energy between the start and the finish, the sense of flow, movement, and integrity. Finally the great weight of its glittering pulls it down. How much wiser to keep a little of the metaphoric glitter in one’s pocket and let the poem maintain, without excessive interruption, its forward flow. Cutting is an important part of revision.

In truth, revision is an almost endless task. But it is endlessly fascinating, too, and especially in the early years[,] it is a process in which much is learned.

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it. Other poets take longer. Have some lines come to you, a few times, nearly perfect, as easily as a dream arranges itself during sleep? That’s luck. That’s grace. But this is the usual way: hard work, hard work. This is the way it is done.

It is good to remember how many sweet and fine poems there are in the world—I mean, it is a help to remember that out of writing, and the rewriting, beauty is born.

It is good to also remember that, now and again, it is simply best to throw a poem away. Some things are unfixable.

Called out. Thanks, mother Mary.