Except for the proverb, the poem is the writer’s most concise medium by which to convey a memorable message. When words are carefully chosen and perfectly framed, the hallmarks of elegance and poignancy appear, and the result is a poem, not of a passing moment, but even for posterity to praise. A poem reveals much more than the message that it is drafted to communicate. A poem reflects the spiritual condition of its author. This becomes increasingly evident as poetry decreases in purpose and becomes less and less meaningful than poetry was once wont to be. The poet’s condition will be more obvious in one poem than in another, and most obvious in his work as a whole. While reading some postmodern poems, my understanding of all of this coalesced; and out of this confluence, the following article developed.
When a fashionable author describes the process involved in composing his work, we are virtually guaranteed to hear the same spiel that we have heard dozens of other authors give. How does he produce his novel, his story, or his poem? He makes a lot of it up as he goes; his characters take on lives of their own; the end of his effort is unlike the finale that he had in mind when he started; and he likes it that way because writing is a learning experience. Then, when asked about the suddenness of his popularity, he responds by saying how ‘crazy’ it all has been. This process is partly the reason why what is written these days is so wretched and weak. No plan is prepared; or if there is a plan, it has not received enough attention through meditation; and therefore the work is destined to be injured in the womb before the project comes to term. Edgar Allan Poe did not produce his classics, apparently, except by composing them based on a blueprint. His theory on the composition of tales includes the following rule: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design” (Edgar Allan Poe, Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.) Novels and short stories have become, since the dawn of the 20th century, as poor as paupers; every reader of 19th century classics knows it; and one reason for the downgrade is because the idea of composing according to plan has been discarded. But if novels and stories are paupers, poems must be to paupers what maids are to millionaires. Poetry is now the skid row of literature when it should be sipping Chateau Margaux from the balcony of a chalet in the Alps. In his own words, here is how Poe wrote his famous poem, The Raven: “It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition.) If this approach is too inflexible, it is still far better than today’s unpremeditated doodling.
Songs, too, are weak and wretched today. Often they have no more than ten lines of text, with two or three of them repeating for most of the song’s length. But they still bond together and they still have borders. Songs, more than poems, are still holding together because songs must have rhyme or rhythm in order to be sung and sold to an audience. To be successful, a song must convey a message that is not wholly vague. Current poetry is not hedged in by these requirements. No one buys poetry; so the poets don’t care. Today’s lauded poet (lauded by snobs, not the rest of us) is the one who writes poems without rhyme, rhythm, or reason. The songwriter reveals his spiritual condition in the message of his song; the poet reveals his by the scramble of words that his poems are made of—poems lacking sense and the essential elements of poetry. The successful poet, to a much greater degree than the successful songwriter, is successful because he is celebrated by connected persons in upper crust coteries and clubs. If he has a cult following, it is not because of his craft. It can’t be, because there is no craft. Without mainstream media props, there can be no success for the postmodern poet because people give even less time to postmodern poetry than they give to the sensible kind from the Victorian era.
Writing thoughts down as they come is not entirely a bad idea as long as these thoughts are passed through a moral sieve, and as long as the words are made to associate with one another to convey a message that can be gotten to the bottom of. But the poet of our day does not sift his thoughts in a meaningful, much less moral, way; this is why his poem fails to transmit a certain meaning. He writes this way on purpose, though, and with a healthy brain, which is a scarier fact than if he wrote chaotically because of a pathological disease. He is a step down, even, from writing thoughts down as they come. He imagines weird word combinations, then takes these wild compounds and places them on paper in such a way as will block meaning from coming through to the reader. How do I know that our poets write in this way? How do I know what’s in the head of a poet? One has only to read their poems in order to know it. No Muse, except Satan on LSD, maybe, would seduce these poets to write as they do. It is on purpose that they write meaninglessly. It is not necessarily easy to do what they do. It involves some degree of mental effort. It takes more work to stitch a line or two of discrepant thoughts together than to write a line or two that comes naturally through one’s mind. It is easier to write, for example, ‘cow on green grass/west side of fence’ than something like ‘Himalayan anxiety/yellow cow, drink.’ Because this last example is made up of words that are knit together to bewilder, it takes more time and effort to write it than it takes to write a couple of natural lines of sense. But because it doesn’t need to associate with the rest of the poem like the lines of sense do, the rest of the poem is easier to write than it is to complete the sensible poem. If I were a second cousin to Margaret Atwood, and if I were audacious enough to solicit her and other cocktail-sipping snobs to consider some poems containing bewildering verse (supposing I had written some), and if I were at the same time dishonest enough to pretend to be an admirer of Sylvia Plath, Marcel Proust, and Susan Sontag, there is a chance, however slim, that I would be chosen to join the literary overlords in an ivory tower for a cocktail and a book deal; but if, during the meeting, I wasn’t careful enough to conceal my true self, and my conservative cows came home, I’d be tumbled out of the tower and my connections would be terminated. As long as a person claiming to be a poet is not a conservative, he could be praised as a lion of poetry for composing crazy verses. Whether he is accepted or not depends on his connections. As long as a person isn’t writing normal, fathomable poetry; and as long as the meaning of his riddles cannot be unraveled, he has a chance. His determination to write the opaque word could be noted as the mark of a prodigy come of age: if he is accepted. Today’s poet is in a desperate condition, no matter how popular he is made out to be. The deadness of his word is the proof of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment