Let the goddamn workshop begin! (We love ya, Ron, but you’re a faker.)
How does one tell the fake poems from the real ones?
It’s really quite simple.
Poetry is that which contains its own stamp of legitimacy and does NOT require further reading in order to make it legitimate.
One would never excerpt part of a joke, and then protest, “you have to read the whole thing or it won’t be funny!”
Ideally, the entirety of any literary effort is perused, but this should not distract us from a distinct fact of poetry: its impact as poetry is immediate.
Poetry creates its own context.
We don’t need to ‘keep reading’ to determine whether the poem has done its job; a couple of lines will do.
The poem is that very thing which does not need additional things.
Judge a poem by its first line, or two.
Otherwise, you’re not reading poetry; you’re reading something else.
This is not to say that a poem cannot have a “pay off,” or cannot increase the reader’s pleasure as the reader continues to read, or that a poem cannot fail at the end—a poem is a temporal art form, after all.
But a poem is a temporal art form that, by its very nature, excels in its parts—even as those parts, as we might expect, combine to form a whole.
We always hear people say how it took them a long time to “get into” a novel—readers are patient with novels because there’s an expectation of a “pay off” if they “stick with it,” Why so many people spend so much of their valuable time struggling with a text they so obviously do not enjoy is a mystery, but it’s a telling anecdote: this is what the public generally perceives the novel to be: it doesn’t have to give pleasure immediately, or even in the beginning, and perhaps there’s an analogy to be made regarding a first date, which might be agony at first, and yet could lead to something very significant.
We doubt people give a poem the same chance.
Given that it’s a poem, they are correct to do so.
For a poem—and here it is different from the novel—must be a pleasure to read right away, for the poet is expected to please with effects that register immediately: if the novel is the hard-to-know person, the poem is that person’s pretty face, or that person’s pleasant voice, or any thing at all which favors the subject immediately.
Only a superficial person, of course, would then conclude that poetry is the more superficial art form. The fact of a pretty face is anything but superficial.
There are many pretenders in poetry who, with great scholarly elaboration, attempt to stamp a poem with legitimacy using that which has nothing to do with poetry’s legitimacy at all.
Everyone, even if they are not conscious of it, knows who these pretenders are.
Their rhetoric typically sounds like this (from a Ron Silliman course syllabus):
Post-Everything Poetics: A Workshop
This is not a “writing workshop” per se, but rather a look at some recent developments in writing & how they relate to (are driven by) the world we share, with an eye to looking at how we can use our own poetry to encourage, reflect, & engage change that is more than mere fashion. Topics of discussion will include Modernism and the poetics of capitalism, world-system analysis, gender capital, writing beyond capitalism, and poetry as a post-capital (or even post-everything) venture. Participants will come to the workshop having read a variety of material and will be prepared to participate in a discussion of this material and share their own work in relation to the readings.
Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with whatever fun little thing this course happens to think it is.
We are only interested in the definition of poetry.
The phrase that gives the game away is “the poetics of capitalism” and “poetry as a post-capital (or even post-everything) venture.” Note the nebulous attempt to expand the definition of “poetry” and “poetics” into a realm of exceeding topical significance and self-importance. This puffed-up shell-game trick works the following way: attach “poetry” to “the world we share” and “change” in a dramatic fashion, so it becomes impossible to define what “poetry” is, except that expansiveness in every sense is encouraged, so that “poetry,” as traditionally defined, a composition by Shelley, for instance, will seem small and petty. The trick is to veer away from political philosophy that looks too much like political philosophy, or poetry that looks too much like poetry—the idea is to be both vague and topical, so that whatever hip idea makes its way to the surface can be accepted as legitimate; “poetics” is the polishing rag for whatever piece of junk comes into view, and the immediate presence of students reading the latest texts provides the necessary topicality of the “poetics.”
Poetry hasn’t a chance in the face of this onslaught: the moonlit night surrenders to the thousand spotlights of “the world we share.”
We like how Silliman’s course is called a “workshop” and yet at the same time Silliman runs from the marker: “This is not a workshop, per se.”
The Creative Writing Workshop model has been in place for 50 years and in the last 20 years has become a successful academic business model: as a “Post-Everything Poetics” (whatever that is) course, we can’t expect Silliman to embrace the term, “Workshop,”which implies, at least to some degree, “a confined space in which work is done on a poem,” or “craft,” or “actual poem.”
“Poetics” does not.
Silliman must have hunted about for a term to define the course, and yet could not find anything satisfactory, and therefore he had to call his course a “workshop,” adding the caveat. The rhetorical flourish of “world we share” is key: the poem is blown up from the inside: the poem loses all identity as it expands to include “the world.” The poem is no longer an object to be looked at and experienced as something with its own independent existence; the gaze is no longer directed at the poem, but to what is too big to see: “the world we share,” and the notion that it is “the world” we share is a hopeless gesture towards some kind of focus.
Again, whatever haunted, post-everything, political poetics Silliman is after might turn up something interesting, but our concern is with how we are defining, or not defining, poetry.
We don’t see any purpose of watering down, to the point of non-existence, poetry, in the name of “poetics.”
Shelley, in his expansive tract, defended “poetry,” not “poetics.” Shelley, as wildly expansive as any poetic commentator there was, in that famous essay kept his sights on tangible, historical, poetry. It is one thing to say, “Plato was a poet.” It is quite another to introduce a “post-everything poetics.”
One thing must be understood. The confidence of a Shelley in defending poetry is based on what we said at the top of our brief essay here: Poetry is its own Verifying Agent.
Poetry very much is something, and is so immediately, more so than the novel, and much more so than the political, post-modern essay.
1) And after many a summer dies the swan.
2) So much depends.
The first above is poetry—and we know it right away.
The second is…well, you’ll have to spend good money on a “Poetics” workshop to find out whether it’s poetry—or not.
