Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Density and intensity
The arresting poem
Short-form genres

Now for what should read to you as a warning section. Some people try to define poetry based on analysis of the text, often using unquantifiable terms like density and intensity, or elaborate forms as opposed to spare, energetic types. Sound is frequently mentioned as a quality of difference: a mouthful as opposed to only a few heavily emphasized words. This approach faces several problems.

Such definitions tend to exclude accepted poetic genres—for example, light verse, shaped poetry (poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow”), or language poetry. The definitions also tend to stray into discussing quality rather than category issues, describing what a good poem should have rather than what a poem requires of a writer. Borderline types of poetry (found poetry, prose, narrative poetry, etc.) are difficult to handle.

In addition, readers have certain expectations when told a piece of writing is a poem, and their reading strategy is different for poetry than for prose. There also will be variation among readers, and some readers may change their reading strategy according to the poem’s subgenre or form.

Here’s a list of some common expectations and assumptions with which readers come to poetry:

Expectations:

·  The work is textual.

·  The work is a unified whole, with a title.

·  The work has a message.

·  The work is nonutilitarian.

·  The work has an author.

Assumptions:

·  Attention to surface structures.

·  Freedom to associate, speculate, and consider emotional implications.

·  Tolerance of difficulty.

·  Readiness to make sense of everything.

Some of these expectations are shared by viewers of works of art in general. None of them, however, is essential.

Some people adopt these strategies readily and in many contexts. More often, something needs to trigger such a response. Most poems are clearly signposted as such (they’re in a poetry book, or they have line breaks, for example), so readers generally know when a poetic strategy is being suggested.

A found poem is a piece of text whose context is changed so that readers are encouraged to adopt poetic reading strategies. When, for example, W. B. Yeats added some of Pater’s prose to a poetry anthology, he needn’t have added a title and line breaks, but doing so reduced the chance of rejection by readers.

Although, watch out. I don’t think the preceding description should be deemed controversial. For me, it merely describes how readers behave. After all, readers of math textbooks, detective novels, cookbooks, etc. also have certain expectations and strategies. They, too, will need to contribute to the text, but they’ll be faced with fewer borderline cases than what they encounter in poetry.

Furthermore, this idea of reader-centeredness raises some fundamental questions for the writer.

What’s to stop people from reading far more into a poem than is really there? Not much. Some poets encourage readers to get more from a poem than the poet consciously put in. Others suppress unintended interpretations. When people discuss their responses to a poem (or when they reread the poem), there may be some consolidation of views.

How (and how much) should a poet foster poetic reader-strategies? This depends on the readership. If it’s important that the poem succeeds as a poem, and if the audience doesn’t read much poetry, it’s a good idea for the text to fulfill the previous expectations and provide rewards for all the listed strategies.

If a reader claims a text isn’t a poem despite its claims to be so, how can he or she be convinced otherwise? You can point out some features that a poetic reader strategy might reveal, but the disappointed reader might claim that any text reveals extra features if read with sufficient poetic generosity. The reader still needs to trust the author.

To increase the poetic effect of a text, poets can make the text more “poetic,” or they can make the reader adopt a more poetic approach. Context and the author’s name are important factors in the reader’s choice of strategy and shouldn’t be disregarded. It’s not so much that rhyme, line breaks, and other conventions identify a text as a poem, but that making a piece of text look like a poem encourages readers to treat it like a poem.

For poetry to exist, there needs to be a text, a reader, and a suitable poetic reading strategy/setting. It’s not a stretch to say the once unique poetry habitat is a threatened one, and this metaphor can be extended. When a species’ habitat shrinks, a few things are likely to happen:

Populations become isolated: The performance poets, the academics, and the comedians overlap less and less and develop independently.

Evolutionary pressures change: Species survival depends increasingly on its ability to cope with marginal situations and isolation; growth is from the borders rather than the centers. Poets, and artists in general, usually inhabit margins and borders.

Artificial habitats are created: zoos (residencies, grants) help species survive, but also lead to cannibalism (political and personal attacks), incest (political and nepotic alliances), loss of parental skills (bad mentoring and advice), etc. Poetry magazines can suffer side effects, too, and also often contribute to the overall dysfunction.