Eccentric Flower:201007/Again On Poetry

I have elaborated elsewhere that I believe interplay on this site is a rigged game that no one else but me can possibly win (see my last comment posts on "Consider the Lobster,") and thus must be stopped - but I will also admit that I will miss the ability to receive comments like

I love this comment because I have something to take issue with in every single part of it, except the very last clause in the parentheses.

I'll dissect it, because it's fun and because Sean is all wool and a yard wide, and he can handle my slings and arrows, and also my mixed metaphors. But mostly this is going to be about poetry. Since that's the big part, we'll have a little fun with these preliminaries and get to that last.

Working from the bottom up: It's quite true that Lewis Carroll, when parodying the poems of his day, invariably improved upon the originals. The test of this is that (with one exception) we don't remember the originals at all today, only his parodies. But it also must be said that Carroll had a barrel full of fish to shoot at. The 1860s were a period of Moral Lessons and Improvement of Character, and the sort of inspirational and uplifting verses and essays created by this mindset were Carroll's treacle-well - ripe for puncturing. This does not in any way diminish Carroll's style in puncturing them; I'm just pointing out that often he was going for what we would, today, consider low-hanging fruit.

The verse that Alice misremembers as "How doth the little crocodile," for example, is a parody of a poem by the theologian Isaac Watts. Watts' original is called "Against Idleness and Mischief," so you can immediately see where this is going to end up. It begins

This is exactly the sort of thing a child of Alice's age in that era would be called upon to memorize and repeat, in the name of Improvement of Character.

The only Carroll parody that any of us remember the original of anymore is "The Star," by Jane Taylor, and that's only because we still sing the first verse of it to our children. But it's worth noting that we only sing the first verse! (Pardon my compressing couplets for page length.)

[N.B. I am always seized by an overwhelming urge to read that couplet, in particular, in my Bullwinkle voice.]

Insulin shots are available in the lobby.

I have lingered too long on Carroll, as I tend to do, so I will sum up by saying that doggerel written in parody, however brilliant, is still doggerel. Moving right along:

I can understand when people say they don't like fantasy. There is an awful lot of really atrocious fantasy. I don't think Tolkien is to blame, but I do think some of his readers are.

I learned some years ago that I was too young for Tolkien when I first read it; and the more times I go back to it, as I get older, the more I realize that I'm still reclaiming and rescuing various bits that I wouldn't have given the time of day for before. JRRT wrote The Lord of the Rings from 1937 to 1949, sez Professor Wikipedia, and was born in 1892, so when he began writing that epic he was already three years older than I am now. I expect that by the time I hit fifty I will be old enough to appreciate it in its entirety. (If I make it to sixty I may finally be able to enjoy "King Lear." I needed to be over thirty to appreciate Moby-Dick. Some media do have minimum entry requirements.)

If you read Tolkien too young, as I did, you lose the political subtleties and focus on the shiny objects - the elves and the dragons and the stunt work. You then go off and become a fantasy writer and all you preserve of what you gained from Tolkien is the surfaces, the trappings of a fantasy world without ever really doing due diligence on the underpinnings. Tolkien got away with putting a lot of alien languages in his books first off because he was a linguist and he worked very hard at it, and second because under those languages and trappings were genuine differences in ways of thought and political motivations. Elves don't think like dwarves, and don't pursue always-identical goals; if you leave this out, you end up with a universe that has a bunch of cookie-cutter-identical exotic characters, whose only differences are the shapes of their ears and eyes and their word for "horse."

I think a lot of fantasy writers read Tolkien too young.

The problem is, all this crappy sword-and-dragon stuff floating around muddies the field for the people who are writing genuinely interesting fantasy - new variations on old folktales and mythos, or completely original universes which don't have any of the usual fantasy cliches but also cannot legitimately be classified as science fiction.

And, frankly, as a writer of fantasy (when I write any fiction at all), this bothers me. When I write a story of a completely normal present-day universe that also happens to have Something Unusual going on in it - and this is my favorite kind of story to write - where else are you going to drop that but fantasy? And who is going to find it and pluck it from the pile amid all the dragons?

Douglas Adams' two Dirk Gently books, especially the brilliant Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul - which is one of the best stories ever written on the theme of "what happens to gods when they are forgotten by their worshippers" - are outright urban fantasy. They are not SF by any stretch of the imagination; they contain nothing SFnal. Yet they were read by a whole lot of SF fans, who came to Adams because of his Hitchhiker's Guide books (which I like but have reservations about, but that's a topic for another day). So what do the SF fans do? They classify the Dirk Gently books, by executive fiat, as SF - where they patently do not belong - just so they don't have to admit they read and enjoyed any work of fantasy. I can't tell you how much this annoys me.

So, in short, try not to say you hate all fantasy. If you want to hate all fantasy of a particular overused, all-but-ruined type, that's another story. In a just universe, "fantasy" would be an extremely broad label indeed - nearly as broad, in fact, as the word "fiction."

Whoosh - and we haven't even gotten to poetry yet. Better hurry along. Two more quibbles in brief:

1. Dickens was a hack, but he was an effective hack. One has to respect an emotional manipulator who is good at the job, even if at the same time you are annoyed with them for being an emotional manipulator. Dickens knew how to pull the strings, and was shameless about doing so. Anyone who could write books about a society and setting that is now almost totally meaningless to present-day readers, and yet still make many of those readers cry and laugh on command, cannot be entirely condemned.

2. The same things which gave SF an appeal to Sean that other genres did not have were what, as a teenager, began to sour me on SF. About the time I hit fifteen or sixteen, I began to question the assumption, very common among my peer group, that The March of Technology and Science was A Good Thing. That's when my idea of The Shiny Future first began crumbling around the edges and began its slow decay into what I have now which is Technology Makes Things Worse As Often As It Makes Them Better. Nowadays if I read basically optimistic ONWARD INTO THE FUTURE Golden Age SF I do it because I am fond of the cardboard clarity of its writing and because it reminds me of happier days when I was a kid and the world was still shiny and full of potential. I reread Heinlein juveniles because in them, a Boy Scout really can do great things, and do them without irony and without cynicism. I love them and I don't believe a word of it.

On the other hand, there is no dystopia like an SF dystopia, and I can't bear to read the really nasty stuff either because it is just too damaging to my already fragile mood. I have never understood why people voluntarily read Philip K. Dick for pleasure, for example. I read a Mick Farren book called The Feelies which has such a rocks-fall-everyone-dies ending that it left me wondering if the publisher had accidentally omitted fifty pages. I don't have that book anymore because it was obvious it had utterly no replay value for me, so I'll have to paraphrase, but as I recall, the brief author's note was something like: "Mick Farren realized the entire world was going to hell thirty years ago, and he has seen nothing since then to change his opinion."

Well. If I want an attitude like that, I can get it much closer to home. (Much, much closer to home.)

Granted some of it is my personal preferences - I like to read the same things I like to write, which is stories of a basically real-world universe where some Unusual Things happen, and how people react to those. I have to scour across various genres to find the odd things I like, and SF is certainly one of the places I still hunt for this stuff. But I won't go out of my way to read new SF, or new fantasy, or new mysteries, or new anything, really. I look for clues in reviews and recommendations that it will be a particular kind of fantasy or SF or mystery or what-have-you that I like; which is the same way, incidentally, that I shop for music, except that these days it's easier to sample music than a book to see if you're going to like it enough to buy it.

(Imagine that genres are vertical stripes of paint on a wall, broad swaths of color. Now take an ice pick or a scriber or some other sharp pointy tool and scrape a set of not-quite parallel horizontal lines across this paint, making sure each line you scrape crosses all the bands of color in full, at whatever random intervals up and down the wall you like. Those horizontal lines are my tastes. Shopping for them has been a tribulation to me for a very long time now. And I digress. And this hasn't been nearly brief enough.)

Poetry at last. OK. Here we go. You might want to stop and get a beverage or take a bathroom break.

In 2009, poet Robert Pinsky wrote in Slate how many of Marianne Moore's fans and fellow poets reacted badly when, in 1967, she "edited" her famous poem "Poetry" down to only its first three lines. Pinsky, who apparently was poet laureate of the United States at some point and therefore can be assumed to have written a few good poems in his time, wisely does not state a position on the matter himself, but I will: Having read both versions many times, I think Moore was right to cut. The first three lines of the poem are the essential ones; and poetry, at its best, is about the essentials.

Many of us were, as Sean notes, scarred by classrooms where interpretation of poetry was forced down our throats. I escaped this fate simply because literature/English/poetry classes were the one place in school where I was confident enough of myself and my skills to say, even at a tender age, "No- my bullshit detector is already in working order on this topic and I refuse to play your games." Not many of us have the liberty to do that in adolescence, unfortunately, and when we do try we are often punished for it. I got lucky; because, again, that was my one area of confidence and I happened to get teachers who tolerated my insubordination as long as I was prepared to defend it well and eloquently.

Let me suggest an alternate approach. Do not try to interpret poetry. Do not try to love it. Do not go out of your way to embrace it. If you try to force yourself to have some sort of "understanding" of poetry, it will simply slip from your grasp and frustrate you. It will rebuff your affections. You can't pursue poetry. You have to wait for a chance meeting, a moment of eye contact with perfect understanding in a train station, a moment of epiphany, followed by each of you getting onto your different trains and speeding off in opposite directions, never to see one another again.

Except, of course, you can always re-read a poem.

I propose approaching poetry with the "perfect contempt" that Moore describes, and seeing what rewards come your way from this approach. The problem is, you must have the stamina to do a great deal of sifting; and you must have the strength to say "No, I don't care for that or that or that" without fearing the brickbats from people who will try to tell you what you Should Like (there are more of these in poetry than any other form of written word in the universe); and you must have the patience not to give up on the entire genre. I suspect the last will be the hardest.

Even I don't necessarily hold that all these years of reading poems and being affected by one in a hundred has been a very good use of my time. However, the best poems - those one in a hundred, or fragments of one in a hundred that do connect with me - hit me like a strong, cold, very-well-constructed drink. They leave an impact crater in my brain that I like. And that sensation, to me, is worth continuing to hunt for.

There are two kinds of poems that can have this effect on me. In the first case it is what they say. In the second it is how they say it.

My favorite kind of poem says something so effectively and succinctly that no amount of prose flung at the same topic could possibly have the same impact. The poem need not say what it says tersely - it need not be minimalist. It just needs to be better. It needs to take a concept that you could wash five thousand words about over someone without them feeling much of a sensation, and instead slap them in the face with it.

Sometimes the slap is instead a tickle. It is hard to do better on the conflation of food and sex and the comfortable waking the morning after and the satisfying of the drives and the stomach - you see, this already gets messy, and yet you understand what I'm talking about, don't you? - than this bit from Basil Bunting's "Briggflatts":

You could write an essay on the feelings of young soldiers in war, the exhaustion and adrenaline and ultimately despair, or you could let Lincoln Kirstein do it in four lines:

And these three lines from Roethke are from everyone who has ever woken up abruptly from a disturbing dream:

The other kind of poem may not have much of anything to say. Maybe what it says is oblique, cryptic. Maybe it's impossible for anyone but the poet to understand. But in this kind of poem, none of that is important, because what the poet is saying is far, far less important than how they say it. This is usually the kind of poem a rigid, unimaginative high school teacher insists we "interpret," to watch the poem die on the dissection table. Don't interpret. Just let the words flow around you, taste them, read them aloud, listen to the way they ring, enjoy them for the sensation and not the meaning.

I personally have come up with five or six different interpretations of Laura Riding's "The Map of Places" over the years and I don't especially care if all of them are wrong; they aren't the point. The point is the way the words fall:

The beauty of this sort of poem is that sometimes you can find them in places where the author presumably had no intention of committing poetry. The next two examples were actually found (not by me) in mathematics textbooks. The only thing the finder, Elaine Romaine, did was add some line breaks:

Here are two more. In each of these two cases, the author can be suspected of possibly harboring poetic tendencies, so these are judgement calls; nonetheless, both poems occurred in a non-poetic context.

Once in a great while, a poet comes along who is capable of combining both forms - of saying something in the most effective way possible and also doing it in such a way that the words feel good as they wash over your feet. These poets are rare, and even the ones who can do it can't always do it consistently.

Here is your last poem for the day. It is a sonnet. Some of you will have heard it before. It doesn't matter.

Eccentric Flower talk:201007/Again On Poetry