Hang On

John Ford: The Searchers.

For me, the purpose of criticism is to understand how something functions or falls apart, and then to apply this understanding to my own work as well as I can. "And then" is the hard part.

I mention this because I see people on Youtube who love to criticize bad movies, but I can't see the appeal of criticizing only bad movies. I have no doubt that for any film maker, taking apart a bad film can teach a lot, but I've also read that both Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa studied the films of John Ford. Anyone who sat down with a stopwatch, a pen, sheets of paper, and a keen eye, could learn by watching Ford, or by watching any number of technically good directors. Not everything in a good film can be analyzed, but many things can be, and anyone who takes the time will gain something valuable.

The same is true of short stories, plays, essays, poems. Anyone who needs to learn will find an education right there on paper.

Sometimes, when I watch these people on Youtube, I question their motives. Do they want to learn, or do they want to feel superior to the films they review? I have no idea. I can only say that when I read a bad story, a bad poem, I feel, not superiority, but a sense of hanging by my fingertips from a teetering ledge. I could fall. I could easily fall.

Please let me hang on.

To Recapitulate: What is "Poetic"?

How we define a word like "poetic" will depend on what we expect a poem to do, and this, in turn, will depend on a number of our personal factors beyond any control of the poet: psychological resonance, life experience, aesthetic preferences.

It could also depend on a willingness to live without any full definition of what "poetic" might imply:

"Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously -- I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."

[John Keats: Letter to George and Tom Keats, 22 December 1818.]

At least within my own limited perspective, I can say this much: verse is not always poetic.

This, for me, is prosaic:

PURPLE,
by Glenn Ward Dresbach.

Purple grapes hung in the purpling gloom.
Frail purple flowers swayed in the musky grass.
I caught a breath of passionate perfume,
And saw you pass
(A shadow in motion, a drifting purple hue)
And I reached out my arms and called to you --
Only to lose you in purpling shadows that between us came.
Nothing I heard but the autumn winds whispering your name.
Maddened I rushed to find you, to hold you in my caress,
But my open arms closed only on purple emptiness.
I called... No answer came.
Nothing I heard but the autumn winds whispering your name.

[From In The Paths of the Wind. The Four Seas Company, Boston, 1917.]

This is poetic:

CLAUDIO:
Death is a fearful thing.

ISABELLA:
And shamèd life a hateful.

CLAUDIO:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world, or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

[Measure For Measure, Act 3, Scene 1.]

The Dresbach offers nothing I have not felt or thought before. It never shocks me with a sense of recognition, with a sudden awareness that I have always known such things but have never been able to think about them. Neither verbs nor adjectives nor images catch me off guard, and the one fantastic device, "Nothing I heard but the autumn winds whispering your name," is nonsense unless the woman's name is OOooOOooOOoo, or perhaps Whooooosh; this might be a trope for lazy poets, but it has nothing to do with poetry.

The lines from Shakespeare take up hardly more space than the Dresbach, but they are concentrated. They say more, by combining concrete verbs with abstractions ("to lie in cold obstruction, and to rot"), by tumbling images together with concepts like the coloured shapes in kaleidoscopes. If one image does nothing for you, the next three might hit you in the bones.

I suspect that for many readers, "poetic" means a cloudy jumble of imprecise imagery, or a loose, windy tone. I see "poetic" as intensity, as a sudden bringing into view of what was felt but not yet specified. And so, when Dickinson talks about "Zero at the bone," when Herrick praises "that liquefaction" of Julia's clothes, when Keats describes "warmed jewels," when Sterling calls a friend "sun-sincere," I feel a jolt of surprise along with a conviction of just how right these words have been.

Online Diplomacy

Nowadays, all too often, I begin my replies to website comments by saying, "Listen, you troglodytic imbecile, you shambling prebiotic pool of nadir filth, you've completely missed a point that would have been obvious to a badly-programmed cellphone app...."

I've learned to control this impoliteness by deleting the first nine or ten sentences of anything I say online. Makes me look reasonable.

Doorways Into Worlds

A Facebook discussion with Langdon Jones has allowed me to clarify certain ideas I've had in mind for a while, now....

Sometimes, I dislike the work of a poet or a story writer because I see glaring lapses in technique, but more often, I can't find doorways into their worlds: I can't find experiences, or metaphors, or concerns that resonate with mine. It's not a lack of quality that I miss, but a lack of commonality.

Edwin Muir, for example, returns constantly to certain ideas, certain images and metaphors, that are clearly important to him, clearly essential to his being. I can acknowledge the skill he applies in expressing them. But his concerns are not mine, and his metaphors, drawn clearly from his own experience, don't connect with mine. In a sense, we speak different languages.

This leads to other implications. One likely reason for Shakespeare's broad appeal (broader than, say, the appeal of an otherwise drop-dead brilliant playwright like John Webster), is that he draws from a wide range of experiences, metaphors, images, and character types -- certainly more so in the plays than in the more limited sonnets. In a Shakespeare play, there's often something for everyone, and if one metaphor goes right through you, the next five or six that follow in kaleidoscopic fashion might connect with a personal impact.

Tunes Above the Bass Line

With the exception of Clark Ashton Smith's, the verse in Weird Tales often rivaled the worst of the fiction in banality and clumsiness, to the point where even a decent poem seemed like a gift.

This one, for example. It's not a great poem, but it has a lightness, a confidence, a sense of personality, hard to find in the pits of Weird Tales. I'd be happy to read more by this poet, but this appears to be the one thing she had in the magazine, or anywhere.

What do I find in this poem?

The initial stanza feels "neutral" to me: impersonal, a bit stiff, with a plodding use of iambic pentameter.

But the second stanza comes to life. Even if I can't forgive the awkward sounds of "depression in" and "call all" (Revise aloud!), I'm always pleased by fresh images or metaphors like "the wind's white songs."

Notice, too, how she plays against the established rhythm, and then returns to it:

"And to the WIND'S WHITE SONGS, the DRIP of DEW."

This is why free verse has never appealed to me. Once you have set up a rhythm in the reader's bones, you can play with it as a composer might play with a tune above a bass line. This break between what the reader expects to hear (in this case, an iamb) and what the reader actually hears (a pyrrhic, and then a spondee) can bring a lightness, a liveliness, to standard metres.

This musical approach halts the metre of the last line, and turns lightness into sadness:

"NO // but for THESE // I'll NOT come BACK to YOU."

One of the many things I like about the poem is the way it emphasizes joy to build up a sense of grief. A happy, generous woman is gone, and her dismissal of loss, of mourning, makes her all the more likely to be missed and mourned. The last line reflects the shift in mood, and that shift is created through technique.