"Unwritten" Poetry Rules

Mary Biddinger asks whether we have any "unwritten" poetry rules we either always adhere to or think very carefully about before transgressing. Greg Rappeleye has an interesting list. I guess it was late in the evening: I included not just some personal rules but ideals and priorities regarding poetry. It became a bit of a manifesto. Anyway, here it is:

1. Poetry must engage and stimulate as much of the being of the writer and reader as possible – emotions, intuition, the senses, intellect, bodily rhythm and feeling. Emotion is primary: Poetry that fails to move fails as poetry. The most reliable gateway for such powerful, multi-leveled expression is through the image.

2. Many strategies are possible, but it’s most effective to put your poem in a three dimensional context – either deftly indicated or vividly described. Otherwise, what you’re likely to end up with are abstract ravings (OK, mumblings, musings) of a disembodied mind. Today’s world is definitely overpopulated – but it is even more overrun by disembodied minds.

3. Commentary distracts. Don’t just say how you feel, evoke it through imagery, metaphor, or your treatment of the subject – a variation on the old chestnut “show, don’t tell”. Poetry, like all forms of verbal expression, is a “coming to terms” – so those dear, clever abstract expressions that may have even brought on the poem serve as scaffolding that can be knocked away when the building is strong enough to stand on its own. (Here's a case in point from my own writing.)

There are masters, however, for whom commentary is essential to their aesthetic. Rilke and Wordsworth wrote whole stretches of “philosophic song” that make for fine reading. This is because those passages are original, profoundly thought out, stand up to intellectual scrutiny, and (of course) superbly expressed. But those passages are also sustained by others that pack powerful images and sensation.

4. Whatever you write, may it be “soundful.” ( Poetry “soundfulness” is a coinage, I believe, of my friend Mick Burrs… although a quick Google search reveals that Osho (aka Rajneesh) and others use the term in the context of meditation.) Rhythmic free-verse with slant or internal rhymes are current reliable mainstays. I firmly believe, though, that any poet worth his salt ought to be an absolute master of fixed forms, especially if he lives in the eighteenth century. End-stopped rhymes are the cat’s meow, again, if you live in the eighteenth century. In regard to fixed forms, I feel like the proverbial child playing with one or two pebbles on a vast beach.

5. More about fixed forms (clearly, I’m thinking about them more than doing them): they shouldn’t be too fixed (or they’ll fix you, like the vet fixed my cat). They’re a flexible framework – a skeleton of a moving body, as someone else put it -- not a pidgeonhole.

6. If you find yourself piling on two or three metaphors to describe/evoke one thing, it’s because you are still “coming to terms” – haven’t settled on the right metaphor. Beware too of adjectives, connectives, prepositional phrases, and other stuff like that. ;) More about that here.

7. Like Mary Biddinger, I don’t like poetry about poetry, writing about writing – although I’ve done it. Even though as she points out there are great ars poetica, writing about your writing as you write – however cleverly you do it – indicates you are running dry.

8. I don't like to use the word "love". The word has been so over- and insincerely used that it smacks of triteness and manipulation. I follow Rule #3 with this one. (Same goes in my personal life: sometimes my partner, Jocelyne, has problems with that!)

9. I'm really sparing with exclamation marks, using them, if ever, with great reluctance. Funny, I don't usually mind it when poets from other eras -- i.e. Shelley or Coleridge -- use them. Sometimes I even find myself applauding those guys for their emotional directness. For me, though, in this day and age, it's practically always trite and silly. Same for other noise-makers like caps and emphatic italics. Some day I'll write a poem where every word is capitalized and followed by an (!) just to get over my hangup.

10. First person present simple has been called the person/tense default of contemporary poetry, and for good reasons: immediacy, authenticity (although of course first person has its own subterfuges.) Speaking of persons: 2nd person – particularly the impersonal you – is perhaps the weakest person, hard to sustain over a long period: the reader is likely to say, “Hey, that’s not me you’re talking about!” 2nd person plural can be quite obnoxious, spreading the blame, as it were – and how many of us are we, pray tell? See for instance this Timothy Steele poem. 3rd person singular is evasive: although there was a period where I exclusively wrote clever poems featuring what I called a 3rd-person “characterette”, I was also studiously avoiding some personal issues at the time. 3rd person plural, well, they can have it. I have yet to write in the 4th person. If and when I do, I’ll share the results immediately: I’m sure they will be spectacular beyond belief.

11. If you’ve heard an expression or phrase once, beware. If twice, it’s probably a cliché. What you do with that cliché will show the kind of poet you are.

12. Most revision is deletion. The most likely candidates for striking out, even though they may "appear" necessary: those lines at the end of a draft that purport to sum things up, or return to beginnings. Sometimes those summary statements begin a poem. Robert Bly calls them false heads and false tails.

The editor at Salt has an amusing list of fifty do's and don'ts for submission. Here's one of my favourites:

Poems on the wonderful nature of God’s creation aren’t.

So: what are yours?

POLISHING: SOME CRAFT SECRETS

Today I dipped into Jon Franklin’s Writing for Story, one of the most brilliant books on writing craft I’ve ever come across. Of course, the main focus of this book – how to plan and structure a novel or short story (or Franklin’s specialty, the dramatic non-fiction piece) – is only indirectly relevant to yrs. truly: I just don’t seem to be genetically structured to write extended fiction, however much I enjoy reading it. (The closest I've come are dramatic monologues, prose poems and little "storyettes" now fashionably called "postcard stories".) But what Franklin writes about word choice, under a section on polishing the story, any poet could take cues from. I’ve arrived at pretty well the same conclusions my own way. But refreshing it was to read this. Frankly, I’ve never seen it said better. (To know precisely what Franklin means by “active images” or “complication”, you’ll have to read his book.)

SPECIFICITY AND UNIVERSALITY

The key to word choice, as well as to the inherent power of active images, is specificity.

Specificity is a concept that applies exquisitely to the level of polish. On the conceptual level, stories benefit from sweeping summarizations and even from clichés: “Man seeks love” is a powerful complication.

But at the polish level, the story must be told in terms of unique individuals and their specific actions and thoughts. As in poetry, the universal is finally achieved by focusing down, tightly, even microscopically, on specific events and the details that surround them.

Clichés, precisely because they are so widely applicable (and not, in my opinion, because they are “tired” – whatever that means), destroy the writer’s effort to be specific and therefore universal.

SIMPLICITY INTO ELEGANCE

Simplicity, or the quality of straightforwardness, is a key concept of polish. Clarity of image is as sensitive to complexity as structure is to woodwork. If you have any doubts, read Huckleberry Finn and then follow it, without pause, with Faulkner’s The Hamlet. Or try to. The sensation is something like running full-tilt into that familiar brick wall.

This is not a total criticism of Faulkner. Faulkner, like Joyce before him, was an experimenter and inventor. To criticize him for lack of clarity is much like criticizing the Wright brothers because their airplanes couldn’t carry troops. Still, the example makes my point.

The quest for simplicity is complicated by two great dangers. The first is that the image will not be simple enough; the second is that it will be too simple.

Simplicity ultimately boils down to the use of as few words as possible. If you need very many words to create your active image, and particularly if very many of the words are modifiers or if the image is bracketed by prepositions, you probably aren’t using the right words. This is the reason that virtually all polish experts issue frequent dire warnings against the use of modifiers (adjectives and adverbs), prepositions, and words that end with “ing”.

Modifiers, prepositions and so forth are not in and of themselves evil. The problem is that the writer tends to need them only if he is trying to make do with an almost-right word. If you need a modifier to alter the meaning of a word, then the chances are very good that you don’t have the right word. If you did, it wouldn’t need modification.

If this is the case, simply cutting out the modifiers and prepositional constructions may simplify the thought, but it will also make it inaccurate. The situation calls to mind Albert Einstein’s observation that he liked things to be as simple as they could be…but not any simpler than they really were.

At the same time, lest the apprentice hide behind Albert’s baggy trousers, it should be pointed out that Einstein was the same fellow who summed up the entire physical universe in a single mathematical image.

The writer’s pursuit, like the physicist’s, is a combination of simplicity and accuracy. A master craftsman by choosing exactly the right words, can sum up great segments of the psychological universe. What he achieves in the process is not mere simplicity but elegance.

For a poet polishing his or her poems (oh, that hardest thing to do – that’s why hundreds of writing programs are full), I'd say the advice is similar: regard your modifiers, prepositional phrases, and the like, with suspicion; see if your lines can do better without them.

Many poets, myself included, are voluptuaries of words… oh how we love the sound of them! The struggle between sound and sense: maybe I could write my first novel about that. Any
parallelism (these often disguise excess), any use of two or three images to express a feeling or idea where one would do, beware! And those dear, cherished phrases – especially the clever, abstract ones – most especially those that may have inspired a poetic flight – interrogate them! Even if they’re your dearest children, be prepared to kill them off. Or, to use another metaphor (here’s me using two where one will do – but I think this one’s illustrative) those phrases may have served as scaffolding you needed to build your poem. Try taking them down: if the house still stands solidly on its own, be ruthless, clear ’em away.

Of course, the nutshell from the workshops is, write loose, edit tight. You really can’t allow editorial consideration to interfere with creative flow. But for any poet in the process of editing his or her work, I’d say absorb the above and then read Creeley, Creeley, Creeley – the epitome of poetic concision. Even -- especially -- if your style is quite different. Then examine your work with the same acid eye.

GARY SHORT COMES UP SHORT (or long, depending on how you look at it...)

Perseid Shower

Meteors break
through the late-summer night,

white blossoms scattering, furiously.
They don’t make a noise,

at least none
that we can hear.

They disappear in all directions
signifying desire

and its difficulty.
There. The half-moon floats

thin and translucent
as an insect’s wing. We say the moon is

half-full,
even as it wanes.

So much longing. . .
to witness the unfolding

across distance. How we must look
to anyone watching.

Here is the star cage.
Here the still life with black clock.


Gary Short
from 10 Moons and 13 Horses

This one was cited last month by Joshua Robbins. Not bad; the poem has some good lines in it, and sustains a definite mood. Now without the blah blah: the distracting commentary, pathetic fallacy, unnecessary conjunctions, etc.:

Perseid Shower

Meteors break
through late summer night,

White blossoms scattering,
furiously.

The half-moon floats
thin, translucent

as an insect's wing.

Here, the star cage:
Still life with black clock.

Better? Seems to me it is. I always appreciate it when others do the same for my verbal excesses...but it was the first version, apparently, that made it into print, or at least onto the Great Basin Poetry site.

P.S. there's an interesting discussion in the comments below. The upshot is, I think I may have gone too far with my exactor knife.