Left In Lowell

I headed to jackiedoherty.org as I am wont to do most days, and read a post by Margaret in poem form referencing a Dan Phelps column, also in poem form (well, the form, maybe, but you can’t call it a poem) ridiculing the idea of poetry without rhymes. He doesn’t get it, he says.

But you know what is easy? Writing a poem that doesn’t rhyme. You just write an essay, then break it up in the middle of the lines so it’s hard to follow. There’s no flow, no meter, no sense.

What happened to poems that rhyme?
[…]
Modern poetry is kind of like verse. Only worse.

Lowell recently hosted the annual Massachusetts Poetry Festival. I didn’t want to say anything beforehand — heaven forbid anybody poke fun at an upcoming event in the city lest they be looked on as Lowell bashers. I don’t want to seem uncouth (though it’s probably the truth).

But now that the festival is in the past, I gotta tell you, the “poems” from which The Sun published snippets in a special section promoting the festival — I didn’t get ‘em. To be honest, they just sounded pretentious to me.

If you’ll excuse my indulgence, for a moment. Mr. Phelps, if there is something about which you know very little, please, refrain from writing about it at all. You’ll only hurt yourself.

“But you know what is easy? Writing a poem that doesn’t rhyme.” That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Ever. So blatantly untrue for anyone who actually knows anything about literature, or writing, I don’t know where to start.

Having taken intense poetry writing courses with very excellent, established poets like Charles Simic, I can tell you first hand it’s not “the easiest thing in the world” to write a poem, just because it doesn’t rhyme. The line breaks, the rhythm, word choice, everything is a part of the writing, rhymes or not. You spend a lot time time working over the same ten lines, and might create ten seperate revisions. Most poets write about very intimate subjects, getting a breath’s away from a flower petal or a heartbreak…the only other art in the world which scrapes so close to the artists’ soul is acting, where the actor must pull emotions from his own experience and serve them up to an audience. Poetry writing is raw, often painful, work. Unlike ranting incoherently in a column…

And there are rules to free verse poetry. Yes, you forgo iambic pentameter and rhymes, but actually, that makes things harder. Working within restrictions means it either works, or it doesn’t, and you know that instantly. A looser set of rules makes deciding on what sort of line breaks you want, what needs to be cut or added to (most often, cut!) much harder, and much easier to critique. Shorter lines in a poem are energetic, and longer ones more languid. The word at the end of a line gains emphasis, by virtue of the mental or physical pause evoked by going on to the next line.

By the way, it didn’t take much education for me to learn that. We’re talking middle school English.

He refers to one of Robert Pinsky’s works as a “poem” with all the condescension and derision that “quotes” can portray. He then takes this one small excerpt as evidence of why modern poetry is stupid. Because he doesn’t understand the four lines. Well, duh. It’s an excerpt from one poem from one poet, out of context. Beyond that, there are thousands of modern poets in the world…there are cerebral poets and there are imagery-driven poets and those that write long epics and those that prefer short. There are poets that write about their own experiences and poets that write about others’ experiences and poets that write using big, big words. And some writing with little words. No one says you have to like them all. It is largely an aesthetic choice and often one of just how hard you want to work for your reading enjoyment. I myself, even as a mature poetry reader, enjoy the more visceral, lyric, imagery-laden poems of the late Jane Kenyon, to those of her husband, Donald Hall, which are sprinkled with lots of literary references.

By the way, modern poetry written with rhymes often comes across as archaic and self-conscious. Anyone who writes in rhyme has to be careful. Rhymes can be babyish (like the ones in Phelp’s column) too easily. If art needs to change with the times, meter and rhyme in the strict historic sense shifted to free verse, and to do anything else is a sign of an inexperienced poet, or else one of a brave poet. There are good poets who can pull of rhyme and strict meter in this day and age. They are exceptionally rare. But that’s not because free verse is easy so most poets just stick to that.

But one thing is clear to anyone with half a brain for literature: poetry, “even” free verse, isn’t easy.

Now, writing a column in the Lowell Sun, apparently, is like a cakewalk. Anyone seems to be able to do it. All you have to do is have some outrage, a computer, and a lack of understanding of your subject.

My advice to Mr. Phelps: stay away from writing about poetry. In fact, I think you should entirely stay away from writing about writing at all. Given your history with it, I mean.