Poetry Rules

I like reading poetry, though I realize that such an activity, and my liking of it, places me in a group of people who could be listed on a Post-It note, with room left for The Aeneid. Perhaps that is because, as Adrian Mitchell says, “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” I do not like reading all poetry, however; I only like poetry that follows two rules, both of which insure that poetry does not ignore me.

Rule 1: A poem must be comprehensible on its first reading.

Making meaning of the poem will come later, interpretation being a second order process, but first I must understand the poem as it is on the page, what it expresses, its saying. After all, unless one lights votive candles and burns incense to the art-god Poetry, why compose a poem that stiffarms a reader? Why the deliberative murk, the churn of obscure allusion, the black hole verse that compacts clarity of expression into an unintelligible pinpoint? Why write a poem that pistol-whips its reader? No, a poem’s lucidity must be robust, efflorescent. A poem must be as clear and inviting as summer water. It must solicit me, not bypass me in service to some mediating theory or other. It must not depend for its intelligibility on something independent of my immediate experience of it. A poem must like me for me to like it. A poem should seduce me.
Here are the first few lines a poem that does not like me, that has the seduction of a soggy saltine:

Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%]: 47%): 53.7%. 100S Type Alkyd used as a binder (Reaction product of linseed oil: 50.7%. Isophthalic acid [C8H6O4]: 9.5%. Trimethylolpropane [CH3CH2C(CH2OH)3]: 4.7%.

The remainder of the poem, called “Fact,” goes on like this for a full page. It is a listing of the ingredients of which paper is composed. It is cold and cerebral, a poem smitten with itself as an instrument of theory, in thrall to postmodernism, and intent, as near as I can tell, on disenchanting the act of writing, and reading, poetry. “Fact” in fact subjects the reader to the poem’s animating theory and, thus, practices a kind of coercion, a politics of control.

“Fact” is an example of conceptual poetry, the philosophy which, according to Kenneth Goldsmith, one of its foremost practitioners, intentionally employs
uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; . . . and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language . . . as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, . . . illegibility, unreadability.

Such poetry is wantonly arrogant; it willfully disdains its reader. It provides no perch upon which understanding can land. It stages a fixed cage match between the reader and the poem in which the reader, finally, inevitably, suffers a smackdown. It is poetic Calvinism, spurred to a self-flagellating purity of purpose from the conviction that language, like all things human, is irredeemably fallen. It glamorizes negativity. It disorients and ruptures without the prospect of a payoff—poetry as a perpetual gesture of skepticism.

Here’s another small sample, a stanza from Charles Wright’s “Tattoos”:

Liplap of Zuan’s canal, blear/ Footfalls of Tintoretto; the rest/ Is brilliance: Turner at 3 a.m.; moth lamps/ Along the casements. O blue/ Feathers, this clear cathedral . . .
Why the arcane allusiveness? Why am I banished from the act of reading and sent off to discover that Zuan’s canal is in Venice, where Wright was stationed while in the army; that Tintoretto is a Venetian painter; that Turner refers to Joseph Mallord William Turner, a British painter whose Venetian watercolors make striking use of light and color? Why should the footnotes to the stanza take up more space than the stanza? This stanza positions me as a dunce, more Homer Simpson than Homo Sapiens. It isn’t an insult to my intelligence; it’s a felonious assault.

In contrast, here’s a poem that likes me, Billy Collins’ aptly titled “Introduction to Poetry.” It contrasts his and his students’ attitude toward reading poetry. I side with Billy.

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterskiacross the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

A good poem invites us in. It welcomes us, allows us to examine, listen, explore. It respects us enough to value our meaning making. And it initiates this process by being penetrable, straightforward, uncluttered—by summoning us “to waterski across the surface.” To riff on Robert Frost, like ice on a stove, we ride on the poem’s melting. We do not need to pummel it into submission. It will unfold to us, but first we must be granted entrance.



Rule 2: A poem must provide what T. S. Eliot called a “shudder;” that is, it must provoke a visceral response.

Somehow, in whole or in part, a poem must embody itself in me, must stimulate shock or surprise, must conjure a sense of dread or reverence, must enchant me with its charm, must leverage a mood, must engage me in the density of a half-glimpsed perception. It must provide a form of feeling, heightened, boldfaced; a texture of experience to attend to, to regard, to make me examine my first-person connection to human being. Emily Dickenson declared that “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” An overstatement, no doubt, but a poem must contain within it that which is volatile. For the moment of reading, and often for inarticulate reasons, the poem must elicit my subjective response, must provoke or evoke or invoke, must trigger an irruptive physical reaction that lets me take the measure of my subjectivity and that leads me, finally, to think about that reaction.

Here is a small inventory from American poetry of such moments, with brief explanations for their transfixing power. What I cannot explain, however, and what remains for my further exploration, is precisely why I find them powerful.

· The crushing sense of contingency and mutability contained in the concluding stanza of Frost’s “The Hill Wife,” a lonely farmer’s wife who one day slips into the woods never to return. Her husband discovers that “Sudden and swift and light as that/ The ties gave,/ And he learned of finalities/ Besides the grave.”

· More Frost: The stark loneliness in “Desert Places” of a twilit field filling with snow described as “A blanker whiteness of benighted snow/ With no expression, nothing to express.” Or the tragic vulnerability at the end of “Reluctance:” “Ah, when to the heart of man/ Was it ever less than a treason/ To go with the drift of things/ To yield with a grace to reason,/ To bow and accept the end/ Of a love or a season”

· The unnerving “somewhat” in Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” responding to an English teacher’s assignment by arguing for the mutual entailment of black and white Americans: “As I learn from you,/ I guess you learn from me--/ although you’re older—and white--/ and somewhat more free.”

· The exuberant humanism of Whitman claiming “The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer” and how “The narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery.”

· The stunning heresy prompted by the indifferent violence of nature in Emily Dickenson’s figuring of an autumn frost as a “blonde Assassin” that “beheads” a “happy Flower,” while “The Sun proceeds unmoved/ To measure off another Day/ For an Approving God.”

· In Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “The Lake,” an ecology of nature and human nature glimpsed in the closely observed intricate beauty of a sunfish she has caught:


I knew the place it came from

was deeper than I could ever see or dive to
that beauty could come up from a dark and cold place
and mercy was a skill my hands would have to learn.

· The frightening ease with which violence and maternal love can intersect and, more horrifying yet, the self-revelation in her daughter’s knowing look that Sharon Olds describes in “The Clasp.” Grasping her four-year-old daughter’s wrist as she is about to turn her sleeping one-year-old brother face down, Olds says

I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple
of seconds, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,
the expression, into her, of my anger,. . .

she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me-yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeplyopen eyes took me in, she knew me,
in the shock of the moment
she learned me.

· The artlessness, sweet and deep, of Li-Young Lee’s reaction in “The Gift” to the gentleness with which his father removed a splinter, a gentleness the poet carried into his adult life: “I did what a child does/ when he’s given something to keep./ I kissed my father.” And while of the subject of fathers and sons, the felt need of a father for his father in Simon Ortiz’s opening lines of “My Father’s Song:” “Wanting to say things,/ I miss my father tonight.”

Each of these poems is a small world built of language, its plainspoken explicitness as well as its gestures, suggestions, and insinuations. Each lets us be, in event of its reading, a citizen of elsewhere, no passport required, no bureaucratic snarl at the border crossing. Each beckons us to enter and experience ourselves. It lets us make it our own, lets us, finally, be its subject.