Would you read the poem if it looked like prose?

So I asked in that Codrescu AMA if he saw a distinction between verse and prose. It's an important question if we're not all spitting in the wind.

So I thought, as Jill Essbaum once related, that poems are "skinny and on the left" and thought, well--let's look at them that way.

Here's a poem from A.E. Stallings' excellent Olives, delined:

Jigsaw Puzzle

      First the four corners, then the flat edges. Assemble the lost borders, walk the dizzy ledges, hoard one color—try to make it all connected—the water and the deep sky and the sky reflected. Absences align and lock shapes into place, and random shapes combine to make a tree, a face. Slowly you restore the fractured world and start to re-create an afternoon before it fell apart: Here is summer, here is blue, here two lovers kissing, and here the nothingness shows through where one piece is missing.

Here's a Plath poem delined:

Mirror

     I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. What ever you see I swallow immediately just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful--the eye of a little god, four-cornered. Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers. Faces and darkness separate us over and over. Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, searching my reaches for what she really is. Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. I am important to her. She comes and goes. Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

And a Shakespearean sonnet:

38

     How can my muse want subject to invent, while thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse thine own sweet argument, too excellent for every vulgar paper to rehearse? O! give thy self the thanks, if aught in me worthy perusal stand against thy sight; for who's so dumb that cannot write to thee, when thou thy self dost give invention light? Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth than those old nine which rhymers invocate; and he that calls on thee, let him bring forth eternal numbers to outlive long date. If my slight muse do please these curious days, the pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise. 

And one of mine:

Poseidon & Medusa

     On this wet rock you come, my hair around your waist in streams like ocean foam; the pressured salty taste rests upon my tongue. As we swallow the night the morning rises stung and stained with our delight. Here in this temple crows are swelling from the altar screaming the holy vows I promised I would keep. I have done much more than falter and vengeance never sleeps.

Well apart from my missing a comma (sorry, Annie!) and paling in comparison to the other three poets, I don't know that any "damage" is done to these poems by delining them. Of course, you get a lot of extra meaning possible with enjambment, etc. but is that at the cost of people who are terrified by work that is "skinny and on the left"?

So are we caught in a trap of convention that limits our impact as writers?

Andrei Codrescu AMA on reddit

Not really sure what else to say.

Happening right now.

Read it on reddit!

Literature is about the past

Here's the money shot from an interesting article by a fellow named Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It appears in full on Salon which is dreadfully cluttered with advertisements. Go there at your own aesthetic peril.

Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically-minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past — properly handled — is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need techno-autistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

Since our friend NNT is pretty good at discussing the importance of unlikely outcomes, I wonder what specifically he would say about our American poverty of poetry.

NNT does give us (in Antifragile) about the best definition of mythology there is:

Mythology is "the expression of historical intelligence through potent metaphors."

Reddit post about The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Come join the discussion! Reddit user StevenStevenson says:

After numerous re-readings of the poem, there are still some aspects of its literal content that I'm not sure I understand.

Is he (perhaps hypothetically) in bed with the woman who says, "That is not what I meant, all" (97, 109)? In line 96, she's "settling a pillow by her head".

I initially imagined the speaker as an old man in a stale sexless marriage, trying to be bold and bring their sex-lives back from the dead. But he's single (alone), right?

Also, I have no idea what to make of the final stanza; It seems to come out of nowhere.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

My impression is that he's imagining these beautiful mythical women, and is interrupted by someone, a human, a woman, maybe. But why do "we drown"?

I apologize; I feel pretty lame asking someone to explain this to me, but I think It's such a wonderful poem and it bothers me that I'm unsure about these critical points.

This is the sort of thing I live for! Come participate!

Literary magazines--who reads 'em?

Apart from assuming that the folks at Tin House and Poetry aren't terribly pleased with me or at least my work, I'm rather intrigued by the idea of literary journals.

Here's a lovely list of "The Top 50"

from "Every Writer's Resource" which totally sounds legit, right?

Anyway, it's not a bad list of the big, bad boys in literary magazineing.

But

Who reads that stuff? I mean, a lot of folks read The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly but do they read the poems? The short stories?

How many of the 80,000 people with a subscription to Poetry AREN'T poets? I tried to read and review it cover to cover for a few months but it was terribly tedious.

Which probably says more about me than the magazine but as a critic I shouldn't admit that, right?

Do you read literary mags? I do--at least the four that are on the links bar.

But what's the purpose? There's a real question to be asked about what the presentation of and access to literature is doing here in these United States. I suppose the ideal situation would be to convince Disney/Pixar that there should be poems at the start of each film. Anyone have John Lasseter's email handy?

James Franco is supposed to be the modern savior of poetry, right? USC student? Actor-Poet-Heartthrob? Do more people read poetry because of him?

Where are people reading these days? Maybe we can stick poems at the beginning of Fifty Shades of Grey or buy them as Amazon's "Special Offers" for the Kindle. That, of course, would take money--where's the money in poetry?

Was it ever there?

Anyway, the idea of Litmags is/ought (Hume, please) to be to shepherd poetry (and prose) to a wider than the average coffee house audience. If that's true, why don't we call them "reading mags"?

Why isn't poetry better than a movie?

I mean really that's an unfair question.

A movie is a "total work" in all that Wagnerian sense (especially, I would guess a musical specifically but isn't that what a soundtrack does without subjecting us to singing actors?) and a poem isn't.

But do poets even try? Who is writing poetry and who is writing Poetry?

Who is writing because they want to write and who is writing because they want to change the world?

Which is better?

Moreover, what motivated, say, Tennyson?

Here's a fellow that was so damaged by reaction to his second book of poetry that he didn't publish anything for nearly a decade.

I don't think I'll say we should haggle over the "is there a problem with poetry" question. There is. Teaching for 13 years now, I can say for an absolute certainty that there is a problem, in America, with poetry.

Hardly anyone teaches it and children simply fear it--they're not interested in engaging with it at all because they believe it's either some secret language they're not privy to or it's a meaningless drivel of "I think it means XYZ and who are you to tell me my opinion is wrong?"

At any rate they don't read poetry in the main. There are a precious handful of them who do--but most of their appreciation for verse has been withdrawn to lyrics.

I don't doubt that in the 18th century students wrote down the lyrics to hymns and drinking songs and other popular tunes--why wouldn't they? But did they not also commit the lyrics of poems to their memory and graffitos?

So why the stop? What's the problem?

I've explained before that it's twofold: one, we don't teach it and two, poets don't write it.

Now, there *are* poets who are thinking about writing the sort of poetry that would get people interested again in poetry in a general way.

There's work by Rebecca Lindenberg, Jill Alexander Essbaum, A.E. Stallings, Ernest Hilbert, Kelli Anne Noftle, and myself that *point* in that direction--the idea of an openness and accessibility. Hell, the glossary in the back of With Rough Gods is there explicitly because people no longer know their mythology.

But

That ain't it. Rebecca waxed on her facebook the other day about the Victorians having an idea that we as moderns find quaint but is, indeed, of a power. I've discussed this in short with Annie Finch but we've not gotten the chance to sit down and work out an idea.

But I think I'm beginning to see the light as it were. One criticism (?) of my work, especially WRG, is that I'm writing for a very specific audience of intelligent people who love both poetry and mythology and, for those people, WRG is an indispensable work.

Color me shocked but I thought I'd written it for everyone. 9 months into its publication life, however, with a hundred or so books sold and two dozen ebooks ordered, I think my critic was on to something--she is a brand specialist after all. Perhaps I wasn't as accessible as I thought.

I think, maybe, that even us poets who are writing (or think we might be writing or who I think might be thinking they're writing--there's only so much conversation I can start about why folks write poetry and what they intend to do before the other half of the discussion walks away for a different drink--sorry for being such a nerd, guys) for the common man don't have any idea what the hell we're doing.

Which is, in part, why I'm tinkering with children's literature. I think if you can't write a good poem for kids, maybe you're not doing it right. I've written (and written about?) a couple of fairy tales in my beloved Blues-Beowulf meter (4 beat caesura American) but I don't know if that cuts the mustard. Narrative with meter and rhyme might be the order of the day. If it's good enough for Poe and Tennyson why isn't it good enough for us?

Which leads to the next question--at who should we be aiming? Like Jesus says, your measures measure you--who is the paragon we must either Newtonianly stand upon or Bloomianly kick down? It's worth noting that the scientist says we build upon the past and the lit crit guy says we kill it. Who is doing better these days?

So I started this blog with a call to narrative. I keep up the call. But I add: make it for kids and make it rhyme. Let's hook them while they're young.

What's in a blog?

Back when I started Strong Verse (the blog), as a response to a need for a more "soapboxy" forum from Strong Verse (the poetry magazine) I worked on defining and describing poetry worth reading and writing.

Then I started writing some reviews about that, which got me into some pretty lovely places with regards to houses for my work.

It also has been a good exercise in reading.

Several times I've fallen off the wagon into politics and social commentary.

I think I'd like now to try posting daily. If anyone's still reading (folks are on RSS, yes?) then perhaps we'll get a lively conversation going.

Perhaps not.