1 month ago
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Confessing to liking poetry these days is like professing a desire to become a sex criminal despite lacking the courage to really get out there and sex crime it up.
When an English degree is judged with prejudice, one is imagined to have spent their formative years drinking cheap wine and reading poetry. And the former isn't even considered a waste of time.
When secondary school exam horrors are recounted, it is always the drudgery of learning off poems that is recalled most quickly. Having to write paragraph after paragraph about Sylvia Plath's miserable marriage and WB Yeats' half-hearted efforts to fuck Maud Gonne's daughter.
Why did they make us do that? Is the refrain. We could've learned something that wasn't a complete waste of time!
I remember, too, coming to English class early, as it was the first class after lunch on Thursdays, and sitting browsing through the poetry anthology to pass the time and avoid making smalltalk with the teacher, and coming across Philip Larkin's aspirations toward his work in conversation with his publisher—
I'd like to think, Jean, that people in pubs would talk about my poems.
Even I, then, who loved and love Larkin's poetry, thought the idea far-fetched. A bit of a joke. Somewhat embarrassing.
I'm not sure people will still have tombstones in the conventional sense by the time I die (an ambitious bit of cynicism). I imagine the austere stone carvings might well be replaced by those thick advertising screens all over footpaths now. In between the advertising necessary to sustain the monument, they could play the best hits of my social media career, and include well-wishes from the mourners too busy to get down to the graveyard.
Sorry to hear u died x o from Barry and Maura
This way, rather than be remembered by the oh-so-conventional Father. Husband. Friend. I could prepare for the exhibit of my death with a heady mixture of the self-pitying, deprecating and aggrandizing.
Nobody could say he wasn't a snob.
And now, since there is no better defence of snobbery than getting ahead of the story, let's turn to Rupi Kaur. She really has a poem for every situation:
i do not need the kind of love
that is draining
i want someone
who energizes me
(on the relationship between woman and dog.)
there are far too many mouths here
but not enough of them are worth
what you're offering
give yourself to a few
and to those few
give heavily
invest in the right people
(on the homeless)
our backs
tell stories
no books have
the spine to
carry
women of color
(on—wait, I'm not allowed to joke about this one, sorry, I'm really sorry)
And my all-time favourite:
she was music
but he had his ears cut off
A stunning rebuke against the toxic cult of van Gogh.
Lookit, I won't spend much more time on these poems, I promise. Kaur might be Canada's second-greatest affliction on the written word after Alice Munro, but I'm not here to bemoan the lack of standards of contemporary life, where American college students are proudly illiterate and don't even pretend to have read Gravity's Rainbow—I don't even hate these poems, not really. The more I read, the more I'd rather my 12 year old daughter read these poems than waste her summer as I did at that age, reading Buffy the Vampire Slayer spoilers on tvtropes.
(I've never seen the show.)
Now, I've never heard of anyone in person professing fondness for Kaur's poetry, or reciting a lyric, and this is not because I don't believe it is possible to do so, and not entirely because I hang out with people my own age. I don't think her poetry is successful in that sense. Aesthetic sensibilities are not shared by quoting poetry, when they are shared at all.
Poetry is, or perhaps it has become, something private above all else. For solitary aesthetes and bowtied English coroners in crime procedurals, and for funerals.1 (Leave a comment if you've already, in your most morbid daydreams, decided on what poem to read at your father's funeral. It's Do not go gentle, isn't it?) You can admit to reading it, but only in a very detached, conversation killing, middle class way. Admit to writing it, and well, like I said. Chemical castration leaps to mind.
Why is Poetry Marianne Moore's most famous poem? Why did she revise it so many times? Here are two versions, the inferior, poetical poem summoned by Google, and the superior, honest work:
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.2
I too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
So, if Marianne Moore, too, dislikes it, what hope is there for the rest of us? She hadn't even read Rupi Kaur, on account of having died in 1972. When Moore said she disliked poetry, she wasn't talking about the weakest, laziest kind of mumbled lower case aphorism. (The kind of poem snobs like me hate so much because we aspire to write something similarly popular.) I believe she was talking about what pissbaby students talk about.
Stodgy old poems about going outside and discovering how gay a daffodil might be. At least those ones rhyme, so you understand the intended effect, even if it's lost on you on Thursday afternoon, coming in from lunch. Then there are these modern poets, using words that require dictionaries, and that don't rhyme properly, if at all, bitching and moaning about growing old and needing new trousers or something.
What do you do with a poem, anyway? What happens when you read it through the first time and you don't get it? Even when the writing is simple, like Larkin's Days—
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
What happens— when you read this and anagnorsis does not come? In a classroom, you'd wait for the teacher to explain it, and of course, any explanation is unsatisfying. If you are reading alone, you can either read it again, or turn the page. Far more, even among those who pick up books of poems, do the latter. I include myself in that category. Maybe I include everyone—who doesn't, really? Everybody knows T.S. Eliot and Prufrock—in enlightened company, we can discuss this. Who's going to talk about A Cooking Egg? Not volunteering—read it, it's shite.
Look at Marianne Moore again. Her version of 'Poetry' as produced in her final poetry collection published while she was alive, in 1967, is a footnote in the most recent edition edited by Heather Cass White in 2017. She gives prime of place to the first version, published in 1924. Why is the longer version given pride of place? Could it be because it is a very 'poetic', 'for poetry readers' way of critiquing the form, with all the baggy imagery that is expected? The first version is a poem for poetry readers, and the final version is a poem for everyone. And that, I believe may be the problem with poetry. As much as it goes unread, as much as we don't talk about it, it doesn't exactly give the greatest arguments as to why it should be given greater respect.
Name your favourite poet. I'll find a poem of theirs worse than she was music / but he had his ears cut off.
Novels don't need to be masterpieces to be worth reading. Karl Ove Knausgaard put a shopping list into his novel about being literally Hitler, and you might think he is a genius.
Plays don't need to be masterpieces to be worth watching. Edward Albee's The Goat or Who is Sylvia is about a man who fucks a goat, and most of the play is about his family screaming at him for fucking a goat, and it's great, because you can get really immersed in what it'd be like to scream at your dad or husband if he fucked a goat.
Poems need to be masterpieces or they are not worth reading.
Faulkner knew that when he said
"Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing."
Faulkner's poetry is very bad, and a lot of his short stories are mediocre, but he got a Nobel Prize anyway.
The question is—are our standards in poetry too high, or not? If the former, then perhaps apologies are due to Rupi Kaur.
If the latter, who will make the time to trudge through poetry collections of even the most canonical figures to find what is perfect among what is merely well-crafted?
Who will reread what doesn't immediately dazzle?
Who will read a poem that has more than one part without shuddering?
Who will read narrative poetry?
And who will talk about it?
Where will we talk about it?
Who will listen?
1 Leave a comment if you've already, in your most morbid daydreams, decided on what poem to read at your father's funeral. It's Do not go gentle, isn't it?)
2 I couldn't figure out how to replicate Moore's formatting on reddit due to being computer illiterate, so I suggest looking it up yourself.
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