Author: mary

Guest Post: Pat Valdata

What Is a Poem?

Multiple choice:

    a) The answer to one of the hardest questions in literature.
    b) An ancient art form, older than cuneiform.
    c) That thing we compare other art forms to.
    d) If we’re getting really sloppy, it’s what some people call a natural event with no art to it whatsoever: waves crashing onshore in the winter, blowing frozen spume.
    e) I know it when I see it.

What is a poem?

A trick question. You’d think we’d have a decent definition for it by now.

Until the 20th century, everyone knew what a poem was: that form of speaking, and then writing, with rhymed words and a regular rhythm. Whether it took the form of a chant, a psalm, or a rondeau, we had no trouble identifying a poem. We even had field guides to its various forms, helping us to distinguish among types of sonnets the way birders recognize Willow, Alder, and Acadian Flycatchers (or try to, anyway).
Then came Modernism, and we ripped away poetic conventions the way flappers ripped off their corsets. After a wave of wild experimentation, poetry settled into a free-verse, lyrical groove that has lasted for decades. Every few years or so, some movement comes along to expand the boundaries again: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Oulipo, New Formalism (which has been around for more than 30 years, so maybe we should stop referring to it as “new”), Spoken Word.

What is a poem?

A magnanimous form of writing, as short as a haiku, as long as a blank verse novel. It treads the treacherous marsh between prosaic and singsong.

What isn’t a poem?

It isn’t a paragraph, unless it’s a prose poem. It isn’t simply a paragraph broken into irregular lines, either. That’s a rookie mistake.

What is a poem?

Don’t ask me. I write poetry, but I’ll be darned if I can define it.

Pat Valdata is adjunct associate professor at the University of Maryland University College with an MFA in writing from Goddard College. Her publications include Where No Man Can Touch, winner of the 2015 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. For more information, please visit her website.

Guest Post: Joannie Stangeland

What is a poem?

I’ve been thinking about what makes a poem in terms of what is a poem and what is prose. I’ve been pondering this a lot—that line breaks on their own don’t make a poem, and that a prose poem is more than a block of text.

A while back, I said that a poem is music—that prose can be musical but in a poem, music is more important than narrative.

Now I want to add to my earlier response: Just as music includes the rests, the poem rests in the space on the page—always asking, “What’s next?” For me, a poem is what’s here and what’s left out—what can’t be seen or heard but only felt, a shift, a haunting. The not-said lingers in the space, engages me as the reader to go between the lines.

This is not about confusion but an intention and a respect. The poem intends to go its way and respects me as the reader to keep up with it. If the writing tells me everything, I become a bystander. I’ll still enjoy its music—a sensual turn of phrase, a run of alliteration, refrain, end or internal rhyme, all the poetry things. But does it invite me back?

What’s being said and not said sets up a tension and a desire to uncover what’s next. In this way, every poem is some kind of mystery. For me, the poem doesn’t need to answer the question (it might, but I don’t think that’s mandatory). The poem must ask a question.

As an example, I come back to music. In Western music, we want the songs we hear to resolve in their own key—on the tonic or the tonic chord (a melody in C ends on C). For me, a poem resists that resolution until the very last minute, or it doesn’t resolve at all, leaves me listening for it, singing it in my head.

Or a poem is like the composition of a painting, which isn’t flat but is guiding the eye—there is movement on the canvas and awareness of what isn’t in the frame. I especially like to think of post-modern lyric poems as abstract art, where the landscape is not painted for me but I as the reader am creating my own world, my own narrative or backstory.

We have image, metaphor, and music. We have what’s missing, and we have that moment, the turn that pivots our awareness. If the poem asks me to work with it a little, if it leaps and gives me a ledge to land on, but just enough of a ledge, then I become a part of the poem and it becomes a part of me.

Earlier, Mary posted about nourishment. This is what nourishes me, and this is where I want my poems to lead me.

Joannie Stangeland is the author of In Both Hands and Into the Rumored Spring, both published by Ravenna Press, plus two chapbooks, and a pamphlet of prose poems. Joannie’s poems have also appeared in Front Porch Journal, Off the Coast, Hubbub, Santa Fe Literary Review, and other journals. For more information, please visit her website.

No Joke: What’s a Poem?

This month, to celebrate National Poetry Writing Month, we’re going to host a number of poets and writers and thinkers who will be sharing their response to that dreaded question: what is a poem?

Please check back periodically to see whose words are up and let us know what you think of them.

Stats

When I started reading the collection of 100 poems previously published in Poetry, put together by Don Share and Christian Wiman—called The Open Door—I didn’t intend to wonder about the publishing choices of the magazine, just read some poems.

However, the amount of rhyme really surprised me. I began to wonder how it varied with time, because the poems included in the collection were published between 1913 and 2011. Was there some pattern? I would have assumed more rhyme earlier in the history of the magazine. I mean, didn’t free verse smash formal poetry, or why did we have that renaissance of Formalism?

I am assuming here that the “best of” choices made by Share and Wiman reflect both the best poems of the time in which they were published, as well as posterity’s take, in some way. I am also assuming that the form of the poem chosen was in some way representative of what was popular at the time it was published, which is also a bit iffy.

So here’s the breakdown, with rhyming poems indicated in blue and non-rhyming poems in orange. Some years from 1913-2011 had no published poems chosen for the collection; some years had more than one.

There were 39 rhyming poems, by which I mean poems which used end-rhyme in any way; the remainder didn’t use end-rhyme.


bar chart showing rhyming and non-rhyming poems from best-of Poetry magazine

(Click graphic for larger version.)

I think what I expected to see was a pattern.

I think I expected the first half of the 20th century to be full of rhyme and see that change as time progressed. That does happen a bit, but there’s also a surprising increase in rhyming (blue) poems near the end of the timeline.

While the number of rhyming poems does decrease as time passes in the plot, the non-rhyming poems are there pretty much from the beginning. This also surprised me. I guess I had thought that free verse got popular later than it actually did. Just my ignorance.

And something the graphic doesn’t show, but which I noticed with my eyes currently working to understand the ordering of manuscripts: the front of the collection included a number of rhyming poems, including the first one, while the ending began to pull in more rhyming poems as the final page approached, and the final two poems of the collection rhyme. Which says to me that Share and Wiman believe that a rhyme is a wonderful choice to provide closure.

Nourishment

I flipped open Annie Finch‘s A Poet’s Craft with another purpose in mind but I was stung by the title of chapter 2: “Poetry as Nourishment”.

In a way, it explains why I rail so against not finding what I want in poems. I need that nourishment.

As analogy, it also encourages me: try to enjoy new types of food.

Which brings me to Diane Ackerman’s “At Belingshausen, the Russian Base, Antarctica”.

Building materials, blue ice, even bulk paper: not edible.

And yet, in the end, it was edible, it was poetry that nourished me, half for what it was and half because I let myself like the brussel sprouts. [Note: I actually do like brussel sprouts; their choice just felt iconic.]

I could wish Ackerman’s poem was really a sonnet, instead of a fourteen-line piece. I could wish that the middle six lines rhymed in some, even slant, way. But it was tastier to decide that “oak” and “echoes” had rhyme possibility. And to let the need for rhyme go because I knew it was coming back at the ending. At the end, I was full of multiple interpretations of the conceit. At the end, the cherry on top was an oft-used sentiment presented fresh and crisp and full of music.

Appreciate

I read more poetry last month than I think I did in all of 2015.

I didn’t enjoy much of it.

I want to like most poetry more than I do, and I’m trying to unpack my assumptions and standards and guilt. I have a goal: appreciation.

I feel guilty for not liking contemporary poetry as much as other people do. That makes picking up new books rather fraught. And I have no idea why I’m able to put down prose or walk away from a painting without feeling like less of a human being—but not a poem other people are raving about.

There are things I want in a poem in order to enjoy it or to want to continue reading it: music. Reach out to me with assonance, consonance, alliteration, meter and I’ll listen. I’m not saying that’s the only way to make a poem but that is what I enjoy and that is what makes me get into the space of a poem, what makes me want to rail against it and revel with it. Music plus intelligent observation is the fun in poetry.

Certainly there are things I like in prose and things I don’t, but those are less about format and more about content. I would be content to read about most anything in a poem if there were music.

So I come round to my goal: how does one learn to appreciate a piece of art?

Sandy Longhorn writes of “the value of sticking with readings that don’t particularly set one’s hair on fire” and I’m curious what that is and how it works. And why you would want to study something which brings you no pleasure. How is it that prolonged exposure teaches appreciation?

When I read Jane Hirshfield’s The Beauty last month, I was surprised at my own enjoyment. Hirshfield’s poems are beautiful for their surprisingly metaphors—which I found only worked once or twice per poem for me—not any sonic texture. How was I able to appreciate them? Or does perhaps surprise rate as high as music in my standards?

And is that the trick to appreciation? To let my standards go? And if I do, how do I evaluate or experience the art itself?

The Words You Need

A few months ago I purchased an issue of Sou’wester because they were celebrating poems by women and I really wanted to read that.

The issue opens with a poem by Alison Pelegrin, whose work I admire, and I read it through very excited by it, enjoying it, and thinking, just wow am I going to enjoy the rest of the issue if it’s like this.

It was not like this. And I skimmed the remainder of the issue.

Months later, I re-read Pelegrin’s poem and I wonder, what gave me such a rush last time? Definitely the use of anaphora/refrain, I love that, and it still sings. I think there was something about the particular words themselves, “may you find the words you need”, that resonated with me.

What are the words you need? Once my sister complained that I sent her too many cheerful mix tapes. I’ve thought about that for years and only now—the words I need?—do I realize that I made and sent all those tapes because I needed cheering, I need someone to make that effort to help me stay upbeat. I can’t fault her for not noticing; I didn’t, until this year. But it’s made me look at my own actions differently. Isn’t that what poetry is supposed to do?

While Pelegrin’s titular phrase still eats at me, I find myself less interested in my insults stinging, or being fluent in birdsong, or surrendering to cherry blossoms, no matter how beautiful those images from the poem are. I need the words I need. These aren’t them. They might be them were they divorced from their current company in the poem, I can’t say.

But the longer I stare at the poem, the longer I am certain there are words I need, badly, and I do not have them. I do not know if they are words I am meant to share or if they are words I am meant to hoard. But I am looking now. I am examining dictionaries side-eyed. I am interrogating nonfiction, breaking it into chunks to see what the phrases do distended and distorted and alone. My every breath may be a prayer, as Pelegrin adjures me, but I am too fired up, too dedicated, too much on a quest to appreciate her “silence in the shadows of flowering trees”.

Favorites Fade

This week I’ve had the honor to share some poems with an online community (other than this one). Given the proximity of my birthday, I thought, I shall share favorite poems and promptly went to my bookshelf and took down the stack of books I had specifically put together a few years ago to have when I wanted to read poems that sang to me.

The first one was easy. I pull that one out all the time. It struck me how much of it was free verse, honestly, but the repetition was still there, barely, and the closing couplet was as strong as ever.

I was dismayed to flip through some of the others and be confronted by more free verse than music, though. So I grabbed a poem whose whole purpose was music. And sighed in relief because it is still singing.

I had wanted to use Carrie Jerrell’s “The Poet Prays to the 9mm under the Driver’s Seat” because that, too, still sings, but it’s a song I couldn’t figure out how to preface with a trigger warning, because it seemed like the sort of thing, because of its excellence in embodying its subject, to need one. So I put Jerrell’s book back on the shelf.

This morning I picked up half a dozen books, flipped through, following the dog-eared pages that signified past pleasure, and nearly lost it. Because I had lost it: these poems no longer sang. There was still wit, and some of them, even the beloved one that has been a touchstone for a decade, still resounded in a line or two, but the emotion that had made me bend the page was no longer there.

No longer there in the poem? No longer there in me?

 

New & Selected (Eleanor Wilner)

I take my direction from the “new and selected” subtitle of Eleanor Wilner’s Reversing the Spell to discuss two of her poems, now both selected, neither new as time adds ring after ring even to the tree of a page printed in 1998.

“Never Apologize for Poetry” was originally published in Sarah’s Choice in 1989. It may appear to be an easy poem to open with, a poem for poets—and in one sense it is, for Wilner writes early on:

gives tongue. And when we say, “I, too, hate
poetry,” it is not modesty forbids
the brag of art, but this abundant
wily earth our words must fail.

But that choice of line break separating “hate” and its direct object comes out of the earlier lines, the opening lines that do not begin in a workshop, a poetry reading, anything limp and academic, but the “cunning spiral of a snail” and the falling water whose beauty “beggars speech”. It is a line break that makes you pause even as you rush over the falls with it, headlong into the direct object, wondering about the inclusivity of hate, extending far beyond poet vs non-poet to the whole human world. That whole line taken as one (while simultaneously three bits—end to the previous sentence, preface to quotation, beginning of quotation—) works as one, a meditation on speech from three different angles.

But it is not simply that we hate, it is that we hate poetry, a sitting duck waiting to bite a bullet no matter the metaphor used. And Wilner turns that twice: first, giving our hatred the benefit of the doubt, we might do it because no poem is ever as good as we might like. But that second turn opens out the issue into the universe: we hate poetry because our words will never be good enough. Standing before the Hallmark cards, even the non-poet has felt that, searching for someone else to have gilded the words we wish we could come up with to express the maelstrom inside.

The poem does take a side step into literary device:

here the trope must fail before
the fox, who suddenly gets up, swerves out
of our conceit…

but how is it then we end the poem “joyful and assured of our defeat”? That is why you read Wilner.

“Sunflowers, Repossessed” emphasizes how you never know where a Wilner poem will end. And that is the most basic reason to read Wilner’s poems: adventure into the unexpected.

The title gives you many possibilities for a starting place but I doubt anyone actually is thinking Indian mythology before reading the opening lines:

Dreaming, we turn the gods into such shapes
as lead us on, as in the Ramayana
the warrior Mareech turned himself
into a golden deer to lure the lovely Sita

We do come to the sunflowers by the end of the first verse-paragraph but before we get to the end of the poem we have stopped with Van Gogh, the Rijksmuseum, Tokyo, earthquakes, and young girls counting off their love on flower petals. (I’ll save the final few lines as incentive for reading the poem itself.) Could you have known that when you started? Even an admirer of Wilner’s poetry has little chance of predicting a poem’s trajectory.

It is the strength of the poem that you willingly go all these places, that the resulting trajectory is coherent if unpredictable, that while you transfer from one shade of gray to the next you cannot quite feel yourself do so. The wonder doesn’t diminish on re-reading.

Wilner’s more recent work is also excellent—I highly recommend The Girl with Bees in Her Hair—but “Sunflowers, Repossessed” has a magic that encapsulates the rewards of reading Wilner’s work.

Eleanor Wilner was born in 1937 and has been publishing poetry since [at least] 1979. She speaks about her poems and her writing process in an interview with Rebecca Seiferle in Drunken Boat.