What is missing from Two Ghazals by John Thompson? Answering this question, even partially, must yield more light about the poems than what the content can tell us, for something so near to absolute disorder is not subject to point-by-point analysis, nor does it deserve to be treated so deservingly. No one can tell what the poems mean because the poems reach no conclusion. The author does not make his poems make sense. “He raves; his words are loose as heaps of sand, and scattered wide from sense” (John Dryden.) Poems without aim are not meant to be meaningful. Lane quotes Thompson, the author of the poems, “My interest in the form lies in the freedom it allows—the escape from brief lyric unity.” Lane comments further down, “So many people say they don’t read poetry because they don’t understand it, or say that ‘modern’ poetry lacks something (meaning rhyme and meter.) What they really struggle with is the unpredictability of the modern poem.” Our struggle is not with unpredictability, though, but with unattractive aimlessness. Mr. Lane, moreover, is being overly generous when he says that people ‘struggle’ with poetry like Two Ghazals. They do not bother to stick around long enough to struggle with it, nor should they. When metrical beat and brief lyric unity are absent, there is no rhythm. If there is one essential element to poetry, it is rhythm. Without rhythm, poetry is in a death throe if it is not already dead. Provide symmetry and reason, which together, form cohesion, and the poet might draw some readers. He might get more attention, then, than occasional pretended notice.
What is missing when brief lyric unity, rhyme, meter, and therefore, euphony, are absent? These elements are not only missing from Two Ghazals, but from present-day poetry generally. Without concision, or brevity; metrical beat, or meter; similarity of sound, or rhyme; songlike expression, or melody; congruous thought, or unity, there is not much left to be desired in a poem, nothing left to please the ear or inform the mind—nothing left, moreover, to be desired in literature. There is nothing left, then, but disconnected phrases that mean whatever the reader wants them to mean. Why do poets even bother to write abortions like Two Ghazals? They do it because it is the next natural regression in the downfall of literature. Why was cubism followed by surrealism and abstract expressionism instead of something easier to fathom? It is simply because the Western world was still going downhill; therefore distorted reality was followed by unreal art. Now that quality is no longer the criterion for success, a man bereft of talent can be called a great painter. Mark Rothko’s paintings can be bested by any toddler worth his salt; but his meritless canvases sell for millions. The impressionists would think us mad to like the paintings of Rothko; Victorian poets would think us mad to like Thompson’s Two Ghazals. If we like paintings that are just horizontal lines of paint on a canvas, or if we like pell-mell confusion palmed off as poetry, we might not be insane; but our saner forefathers might recommend, at least, the artists that we like to an asylum.
In a book that I do not have, called Stilt Jack, Mr. Thompson explains what a Ghazal is. I don’t care what it is. I don’t expect it to mean anything because the poems underneath it don’t mean anything. The word does not exist in either Webster’s or Oxford’s. I’m not looking anywhere else. It may be a form of poetic expression; and Thompson’s Two Ghazals may be faithful examples of that expression. I don’t want to know any more about a Ghazal than that. To me, a Ghazal is just a word used as a title for something someone stupidly calls poetry. The title of that book, Stilt Jack, is telling, though not much. The postmodern poet often puts one word beside another to say something unique but unfathomable—something that is very likely to have never been said before. He likes to produce confusion through fusion. Meaning is not a criterion for him. This oddball practice is a postmodern poetry distinction. The words ‘Stilt’ and ‘Jack’ might never have been placed side by side before the right ‘poet’ came along. It might be true, now, until forever, that Mr. Thompson was the first person to put those two words beside each other. In his poems, one phrase is put behind another with no detectable concern for meaning. This is the postmodern poet revealing his spiritual condition to us. Since, to him, truth is relative, abstract verses preponderate. His glory is to acquire a distinctive voice through abstraction. To supply the same meaning to everyone would be old-fashioned. He would rather tell everyone something, no matter what it is, by saying nothing specific. Traditional elements of poetry are not needed for writing this kind of verse. Sense and beauty are hindrances to it. When Depeche is put before Mode to make the name of a band, it doesn’t matter so much that it is difficult to imagine a mode hurrying up. We know that the name signifies the members of a band, as well as the repertoire produced by that band, and this is definition enough. But the new poetry is not defined by anything. What’s more, Depeche Mode may be a pretty way of saying ‘hurried fashion.’ In any case, it’s poetic. Two Ghazals is not.
