Picking up, at random, the 2023 February issue of Poetry, I perused coldly its self-conscious verses.
The iconic Poetry! Founded in the beginning of the previous century by a female poet with funds raised in the Chicago business community, it was immediately a target of Pound, who got his work into it right away.
The little magazine has not only lasted, it has turned into the Poetry Foundation, having been gifted with millions by the Lilly pharmaceutical company a generation ago.
Poetry lost its editor recently to the “cancel culture.”
Despite its fortune and the zeitgeist, it has the same look it had when Miss Harriet Monroe was accepting poems written by those born in the 19th century.
It looks like a community college literary magazine.
Unfortunately—and this might be some kind of ironic joke—it often reads like one, as well.
In the middle of the 19th century, America had about a 50/50 chance of surviving as a nation before the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. Victoria, granddaughter of the king who lost America, George III, was Queen of India. America had big problems, which Lincoln had partially solved, dying in the process; Victoria must have dreamed (perish the thought!) the United States could one day be hers.
To American patriots living in Chicago in the early 20th century, like the young, ambitious, Miss Monroe, there must have been something a bit troubling about English poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ringing verses. When she put together her new magazine, she must have been aware of the need to give it a modern, American stamp. This was the natural, if not the practical, thing to do, if her project was going to be taken seriously at all. It had nothing to do with Modernist “theory.” It must have occurred to her as a simple necessity.
Chicago in 1912 wasn’t India. It wasn’t even New England, the South, or 19th century Britain. There was no “Waste Land” yet. Poets like Tennyson (Tagore, Goethe) and poets interested in that kind of music, were not the enemy, of course, but the more provincial a poet like Tennyson’s music seemed, the greater the chance a woman from the great heartland of the United States could join the earnest chorus: “We may be full of imitators, but the United States is its own country! And worldly! With its own serious literature and poetry!”
Here we are in 2023 and Poetry is still Harriet Monroe’s child. Plain. Modern. Yes, somewhat worldly. Somewhat avant-garde. In a self-conscious, newsy, American textbook sort of way. Prosaic and true!
The 2023 February issue—
apparently has no craft—it is about as musical as someone sitting very still at the piano. The poems within contain very little which the souls of earth have, since the beginning of time, associated with song, verse, poetry.
Metrical, rhyming stanzas are not only particularly suited to poetry—they are how poetry became known as poetry. But it’s nowhere to be seen here.
In fact, the use of repetition, playful, or otherwise, is hard to find in the latest Poetry.
Poetry has no hint of traditional poetry. It runs from it.
I think it is partly because American poetry in general takes itself very seriously.
American secular intellectuals implicitly know that traditional, King James Bible, religious language in English has a dignity which eschews the playfulness of rhyme.
Since poetry is religion for the moderns, their poetry needs to be serious.
Rhyme is not serious.
For instance, one would never say “Papa, who art in Heaven…”
To English ears this sounds ridiculous.
It is due to the chime of pa-pa.
“Father, who art in Heaven…” meets the non-rhymey standard of the typical modern American poet.
The academic poets today are careful to not indulge in the excesses of sound-repetition or sound-playfulness. It’s too undignified, like pop music poets or 19th century poets—poets who often wrote against religion, but who implicitly allowed religion its top place in the dignity pecking-order. Father over Papa.
Sumana Roy recently published a lovely essay in Lithub (“Crow, Donkey, Poet,” December 2022) which demonstrates how India’s most famous poet Rabindranath Tagore—and the Bangla language in general—is full of rhyming “nicknames,” as it were (sho sho, chupi chupi, etc)—pa-pa, as opposed to fa-ther, is everywhere. In affectionate family spaces, Roy “relaxes” with her native tongue, even as she uses English to earn her living as an academic. Bangla is not as serious. As a language, Bangla is closer to poetry. And she confesses this self-consciously and almost guiltily. “I write in English and cannot write in any other language to my satisfaction, but I cannot live in it. It seems a kind of betrayal to say this, like gossiping about a grandparent.”
The Moderns are more serious, because they don’t feel comfortable playing second fiddle to religion’s more august music. The Moderns, only half in love with the rhyming Wordsworth, seek a natural religion to replace the King James religion. Any hint of rhyming—Papa—won’t do.
It’s not that modern poets have rejected craft; they have rejected the relaxed and repetitive tone of “papa” language as opposed to “father” language, finding, unfortunately, that poetry, in an act of childish revenge, has given them all the rope they need to hang themselves with earnest and alliterative prose—for a tiny, academic, audience.
Metaphor is a way of talking about something—it helps to explain—or mystify—and is not poetic, per se, since prose can make use of it exactly in the same way poetry can. Metaphor has a sub-importance when it comes to poetry, not a primary importance. (Aristotle would disagree, but then he was wrong about the fixed stars.)
Alliteration and other more subtle sound effects, such as line-break pauses, do far more work in academic poetry than rhyme and meter will probably ever do again. Perhaps one day, humanity’s ear will develop a subtlety so fine poetry will triumph in sound, alliteratively only.
But let’s move on to what is really important to modern poetry.
Suspense.
Edgar Poe made a host of interesting remarks on poetry in his published “Marginalia,” which have largely escaped notice. Here’s a gem, which helps illustrate exactly what I am trying to say:
“A friend of mine once read me a long poem on the planet Saturn. He was a man of genius, but his lines were a failure of course, since the realities of the planet, detailed in the most prosaic language, put to shame and quite overwhelm all the accessory fancies of the poet.”
The planet Saturn—it’s vast size, its tremendous velocity through space, its moons, the perfection of its rings—is pure sublime reality—which makes a serious poem on it silly and redundant. I like this example, because a poet today, as well as Poe in the 19th century, can detect a certain absurdity in “a long poem on the planet Saturn.”
Facts (of Saturn) speak for themselves. Sublimity is up to the poem, not its facts.
The poem is allowed, or expected, to talk about what is not special, interesting, or extraordinary.
The poem is expected to rise to the extraordinary in subtle and limitless ways.
Here’s why I used the word suspense. The suspense may be small in a poem—but it is the suspense of how the poem will manage to be interesting, when it is only describing a rainy day, for instance. Suspense is at the center of all poetry which forgoes what Poe calls the “accessory fancies” of the poet, whether this is alliteration, rhyme, meter, or stanza.
Suspense is more important in the modern poem than in any other literary form—because it is not suspense super-imposed as plot; it is suspense which makes or breaks the poem itself.
The unfolding of the humble poem qua poem—using limitless, free-ranging rhetorical and fictional strategies—is what is, in itself, suspenseful.
Nothing is really cast aside—neither the sublimity of “the planet Saturn” nor even the beauty of lines like this:
“I see the summer rooms open and dark.”
This is also from Poe’s “Marginalia,” —Poe selected the above line for praise by an anonymous author— as Poe observed, “Some richly imaginative thoughts, skillfully expressed, might be culled from this poem—which as a whole is nothing worth.”
This, too, is something Poe, the so-called 19th century “jingle man” (Emerson’s crude insult) and the modern poet can agree on, the simple and homely beauty of “I see the summer rooms open and dark.”
The first poem in the most recent volume of Poetry is by Joanna Klink.
Five published books, born in Iowa City, befriended Jorie Graham to advance her career (hello, Alan Cordle!) when the latter taught at Iowa.
The strategy of Joanna Klink’s poem is the modern one—it takes the ordinary and uses every rhetorical device it can to succeed as a good poem (what we all want, even in the 21st century).
To quote her poem from the beginning:
Rain falls across the avenues.
What can I say anymore that might be
equal to this sound, some hushed
drumming that stays past the gravelly
surge of the bus. In the apartment complex
a songbird strikes a high glass note above those
rushing to work, uneasy under umbrellas.
It is they who are meant,
is it me who is meant, my listening,
my constant struggle to live on my terms,
unexemplary, trying always to refuse
anything but the field, the wooden rowboat,
veils of wind in the pine.
Films of gold in my throat as I say out loud
the ancient words that overlay
isolation. And yet I miss stillness
when it opens, like a lamp in full sunlight.
This is the first half of the poem—17 lines of 34.
It is the poet talking—about talking—about what they see. (“What can I say…”)
There is no ostentatious repetition.
Notice the multiple alliteration, (“uneasy under umbrellas”) which gets as close to rhyme as possible without crossing into forbidden territory, especially in “gold…throat…out loud…”
Alliteration remains a dignified enterprise.
No one protests, “how do you know they are uneasy under their umbrellas?”
Or, “gold? throat? Can June/moon be far behind?”
We trust our academic poets to resist the off ramp as they ride the steady, alliterative highway. The route rhyme in 5 miles sign never tempts.
It is obvious what the new religion of today’s poets is. But we’ll say it anyway.
Nature.
Does anyone else find it ironic that nature is the “new religion” for today’s academic poets across the world?
One more share from Sumana Roy’s essay.
Asking her students on the first day of creative writing class what they feel is “poetic,” Roy begins her essay by offering her own definition.
A crow, she says, flies, into the class picture at the end of the term, the photographer keeps the crow, and of all the class pictures hanging in the hall twenty years later—only one is unique and “poetic,” the one which contains the “surprise” and the “surplus” of the “crow.”
All in all, a pretty good definition of what many find nearly impossible to pin down—the “poetic.” But I find it telling that the photo bomb is by a bird, not a human being—even as Roy doesn’t mention “the natural” as having anything to do with the “poetic”—it’s just an unconscious feeling in more and more modern poets.
Back to the first half of Klink’s poem. What the poet in the poem sees is ordinary, without drama—an urban landscape—where the poet lives—invaded in the poem by a landscape wished for—one more bucolic—(“field, rowboat, wind in the pine”) even as the poet struggles to express the worship for what is plain and natural (“What can I say…equal to this sound [the rain]”).
This is pure Wordsworth, pure “I think that I will never see a poem lovely as a tree.” But embarrassing for the 21st century academic poet to see this, I know. I feel ashamed for pointing it out (though Harriet Monroe might smile).
There follows a piece of rhetoric which sounds self-consciously “poetic:”
“Films of gold in my throat as I say out loud/the ancient words that overlay/isolation.”
It is almost as if the poet wants to break free of mundane Wordsworth and hint that she can pull off the sublime if she wants: “films of gold…ancient words….”
But, alas, no. “Stillness” is more important. And the poet’s inability to notice it: “And yet I miss stillness/when it opens, like a lamp in full sunlight.” A fine metaphor.
The fast-paced use of strategy after strategy—almost as if the self-conscious use of various poetic strategies is what counts the most.
Joanna Klink self-consciously writing a failing poem because the modern poet isn’t allowed to be sublime—so what’s to be done now?
This is the attitude, the challenge, the existential dilemma, the suspense of the modern poem.
By “modern,” I mean, whatever has come after Romanticism. The modern poem is everywhere pretty much the same: to various degrees, the modern poem sheds overt ‘sound’ strategies for more subtle ones—but still belongs to the 19th century.
Joanna Klink is aiming for the beauty of “I see the summer rooms open and dark.”
A line Poe loved in the 1840s.
And of course we love now.
Amen.
Or, if you were speaking Bangla?
Amen-amen.
Or, Ah-Ah.
Or, men-men.
Do we need to see the second half of Klink’s poem? As we might expect, its philosophical naturalism makes an effort at repetition, echo, and closure, but only broadly within its theme, which might be loosely stated: I think I will never attain a poem lovely as the rain.
The prosaic services of the modern poems serve old poetic themes.
There is craft—but it’s all focused on alliteration. The poem’s “rain” (which is “hazy“) travels in sound-sense alliteration to “water” to “river” to “partial” to “blur” to “dark” and then back to “rain,” the final and the first word of the poem.
As we pick up Klink’s poem at line 18:
I’m ready to sense the storm before the trees
reveal it, their leaves shuffling
in thick waves of air. I have said to myself
This too is no shelter but perhaps the pitch of quiet
is just a loose respite from heat and loss,
where despite ourselves the rain makes hazy
shapes of our bones. Despite ourselves
we fall silent—each needle of rain hits the ground.
Whoever stops to listen might hear water
folded in the disk of a spine, a river
barely move. A bird ticking on a wire.
I no longer believe in a singing that keeps
anything intact. But in the silence
after the raincall that restores, for a moment
at least, me to my most partial
self. The one content to blur
into the dark smoke of rain.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*****
Salem, MA
2/25/23