i have been told that poetry is concentrated language
well i say that life is concentrated poetry
--s.d.
Wordsworth said in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion. He set a precedent for many succeeding generations, letting them revel in the freedom of language, liberated from the straitjackets of formal poetic forms: the sonnet, the ballad, the couplet, the ode. This is a wild conjecture from an amateur English student, but I suspect his influence holds sway even now. Today poetry is pared down, stripped of extraneous rhyme and gratuitous rhythm; we've entered a period of poetic realism, with a few retrospective tributes to absurdism and da-da thrown in here and there. (Or maybe they consider it some form of neo-absurdism, but I'm not going to split hairs about something I am ill-qualified to comment on.)
I must admit that I like it. The emphasis in poetry is not so much the decorative variations of language as it was with the older generations, but the task of refining language so that it describes perfectly the subject matter. Language now plays second fiddle to the subject of the art; it is a tool, a means to an end. But it is unfair and inaccurate to say that language itself today is disregarded--on the contrary, I think it becomes all the more vital. Without language to communicate, the subject means nothing. Poetry is an avenue for truth to the masses; if there is no avenue, there is no truth, at least not a known one.
I love how subjects and words have become nearly inseparable. Flannery O'Connor once said that the moral of a story should never be separated from the story itself; the two should be so intertwined that without the story the meaning would hardly make sense. "A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way." I think the same should be true of poetry. Take Dylan Thomas, for example. His short phrase green fuse takes two separate concepts and melds them, weaves them together into a mental picture that almost literally becomes a new idea, an original concept. Breaking the two ideas down into their exclusive parts is helpful to an extent for getting at the new, melded meaning, but the two must be put back together again. The words belong together; isolated, they carry nothing of what the author was trying to get at.
The preliminary and tentative conclusion of these thoughts is that, for me, good poetry is a form of language in which words belong. Words arranged in such a way that they describe the subject the only way it could be described. The words weave a tapestry. They belong.
May my heart always be open to little...
by e.e. cummings
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
3 comments:
Hi Crystal; just found out about your site yesterday...it's great stuff. Just a passing comment on your latest post. I just started reading a book of art criticism by Arthur C. Danto, and he has some interesting insights into the present art world, which I think largely could explain the current state of poetry, as well. That is, anything goes. During the '60s and '70s, art was increasingly being stripped down to it's barest elements - indeed, in extreme cases, a text "about" the art replaced the object completely. Examples include minimalism, and high-conceptualism. In 1984, Danto proclaimed the "end of art". He's been disclaimed a lot because of this statement, but I think most misunderstand him...what he really meant, as a philosopher, was the end of Art, not art. That is, Art ceased to be a lauded practice for the trained or the genius; on a separate plane of sublimity, or what have you...it was now open territory for anyone, and didn't have to be difficult anymore; if you were alive, you could do art. So, thus the "end of art" did not mean art was not going to continue...it merely meant it had become an entirely new thing to the human experience, and burst back on to the scene, so to speak, as "post-modern" and extremely diverse. No longer - and they still aren't - were movements or defined styles holding sway over the art world...artists can be historically referential, or not; they can be realists, abstractionists, pure-conceptualists, etc. (Art now moves towards fads, since its connected to money and capitalism, but that's fundamentally different than a movement like, say, Dynamism in the 1920's, surrealism, or de Stijl...where adherents were called to sign manifestos!)
All that said, I think a similar thing happened to poetry. Around the same time (and you'd know more about this than me) that art was being deconstructed, so was writing, and it too was being reduced to its bare elements...letters; sounds; even silence; space as writing. I don't know names, but I have seen some of it. Thus we can see that what you said about Wordsworth makes sense...he put into play a small machine of change that kept snowballing, until language was almost gone, it became all form...and then it imploded into a bunch of little pieces: what we have now. Any type of poetry written is considered. There are currents; but there are no higher ideals or patterns, really, like there was in the 18th or 17th cs.
All of this is of course, closely connected with social upheavals. I'd be curious to know what you think...let's talk about it over Christmas time. Bring some of your poetry along if you want; I'd love to read it. I've been dabbling in poetry for years...some of it is on my blog:
www.gierschickwork.blogspot.com
By the way, GIERSCHICK is Timmy, in case you didn't figure it out :-) Also, I agree completely with your statement: "The emphasis in poetry is not so much the decorative variations of language as it was with the older generations, but the task of refining language so that it describes perfectly the subject matter."
Thanks very much for your comments, Timmy. I'm not as well-read on movements in art and writing as I would like to be, and my English classes have focused more on individual literary movements than on a linear stream of literary history, so most of my poetic knowledge comes from what bits and pieces I've managed to put together. Being more of a conceptual thinker, I'm bent toward considering art for individual art's sake, but I really want to expand my perceptions with further study. Only when you've been through most of college do you start to realize how introductory most of the courses are; I feel like I've brushed the surfaces of a thousand worlds that I need to really discover on my own. I'm not sure how much I can talk intelligently about these subjects, but your blog and comments really help in that area. Thanks!
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