Poem Post-Mortem

Here’s a tendency: poet hears notable things said in daily life. Records them, writes them down. Later, throws them together, unedited, calls it a poem. The fact that the quotes are taken out of context is essential to the poem’s form.

I hate it! This trend of obfuscation, of decoherence. Poems are made of references. To deny its provenance, to sever the link that leads from reality to fiction is to cut away poetic essence.

It’s not that you need to know the process of a thing’s creation to like it. I don’t need to know literally what each line of the poem references. I don’t need a plaque explaining it. But hiding behind decontextualized alluring lines? Poetic advantage is in getting straight to the truth, with sleight of hand. Is it difficult? Yes, incredibly. To make incoherence cohere is the responsibility of the writer, the editor, the critic, even the journalist. It doesn’t have to sound like it makes sense. But it has to make sense. It’s a very rare but notable case when nonsense is accidentally great.

So why is it done? Why do poets cower behind decoherence? In the tendency I described first (recording all, then slapping it down and calling it poetry), self-justification goes like: there’s a hidden oneness in all, a grand theme waiting to reveal itself the moment you put all the recent notable moments in one place, find the places they fit together. There is some truth to this; what we choose to record often betrays some hidden emotional pattern, even if that pattern only really exists post facto when looking at the raw material laid out. But it’s very lazy. That’s bad because it’s passive. I don’t enjoy looking at art replete with passivity.

Presuming the oneness in disparate things is so obvious. Actively seeking the oneness is a different story. That’s the purview of mathematics: taking two different things and prove they are really the same—or at least neatly categorizing different things until they can all fit into one nice hierarchy. Poetry, typically, is the opposite impulse: the art of taking one thing and extracting many conflicting meanings from it. Indeed, it is the subtle differences between things, the boundaries separating one idea (or person) from another, that lend individuality and cause friction and that friction is what reminds us there is something really substantial there. A genuinely new idea can only be seen in the places where it rubs roughly against that which exists but does not easily make it cohere. You find the humanity in another person where you bristle and frustrate each other, and only then can you relate to each other as full people, rather than the uniform universal presumptive perception. Every individual a different species.

So passive poetry—journalistically recording and repeating what you hear, assuming the unified theme will be revealed because all is one—and following the trend of the times… these are ways to deny your individuality. Which is another way of telling your reader you don’t think of them as a real person.

The point: seek unity for all I care, but don’t assume it. Find it, create it. Rote representation is not enough to reveal anything true or interesting or new about the world and our lives in it. We killed representative art in 1910. Now we must invent new patterns, and be active in doing so.

Apologies; I tend to write out of frustration. My poems are all philippics.