Dear SunWinkers:

You had [indigenous American] cultures on the Plains where each person discovered, through a vision quest, his or her own inner voice, and then came back after a week of isolation and told the rest of the tribe “who I am.” And nobody could argue with that because it came from within.

Michael Dorris

Poetry must come from within, or else it is superficial, dry, and remote. Paradoxically, it must come from emptiness, a place of nothingness, because if the poet doesn’t get herself out of the way, her poetry cannot be universal. Put the other way around, as the reader, the audience, if I am listening to you talk about what you think about yourself, then I become an observer, not a participant. It becomes a second-hand experience, like watching TV. If, however, you speak of what is, without judging, without inserting yourself, without nailing things down, then I can be drawn in, I can be involved in your vision and experience the universal, the resonant, in what you have to say.

The poet John Keats calls this “negative capability,” the ability to be quiet and observe, to immerse oneself in what is. To be content with mystery, with partial knowledge, instead of injecting one’s ego, making interpretations and drawing conclusions. “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence,” he says, “because he has no Identity…”

What is doesn’t have to be outside oneself; on the contrary, it can be deep inside, soul-searching—searingly so. It can be so without being self-indulgent if one gets oneself out of the way, if one experiences one’s deepest self as an observer. The confessional poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell have paved the way for us.

Modern poetry is a rebellion against the exalted, remote, formalistic style of Tennyson and Milton, and a striving for a voice that is honest, intimate, and informal. We see the germination of this intimacy in Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Whitman [see examples]. The modern poet has come down from the ivory tower and become our friend and neighbor instead of our professor. The poet of the latter half of the twentieth century, not always, of course, but more often than not, uses the language and rhythms of plain speech, striving to write clearly and accessibly. The artifices of meter, rhyme, and “poetic” language have been rejected in favor of organic rhythms and natural diction that don’t call attention to themselves.

“This kind of contemporary poem,” writes Mary Oliver, “has been shaped and reshaped in particular ways by many poets. And the finest of these poems brim from the particular, the regional, the personal, and become—as all successful poems must—“parables” that say something finally about our own lives, as well as the lives of their authors.” [A Poetry Handbook. NY: Harcourt, Inc. 1994]

Since becoming a student and practitioner of poetry, I have believed strongly that one ought to write in complete, natural sentences. Much of my poetry doesn’t sound like “poetry”; it could be rendered without line breaks and make sense as prose. You could read it out loud in a plain speaking style and sound normal. Much of modern poetry looks quite fragmentary on the page but if you read carefully, you’ll find it is written in grammatically correct sentences, even if punctuation is not used. This is even true of many of e.e. cummings’ and Ferlinghetti’s granular open-field poems.

Returning to Mary Oliver:

“Proper syntax never hurt anyone. Correct grammar and forceful, graceful syntax give the poem a vigor that it has to have. Just as the ellipsis, which is trying to imply a weighty “something” that has not been said but that the poet wants felt, is a construct of weakness, so too is the dangling phrase. The phrase with no verb—no action and no placement—is more apt to sink the ship than to float it.

“Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.” [op. cit.]

I have mentioned more than once that a poem and the process of writing it are not complete unless they include reading it out loud. Poetry is an oral medium, and has been since before the invention of writing. Earlier this year, I started going to poetry open mikes and reading my poems. It’s extremely instructive not just to get a reaction but to hear what my poem sounds like when I read it. On one of those occasions, I was moved after hearing it to replace the word meretricum (Latin for “whore”) with the word “harlot.” Come to find out, I was using the wrong form of meretrix anyway.

Here are some examples of what some theorists call “conversational” poetry, in chronological order. I particularly recommend the work of Ted Kooser, which is wonderfully lucid and never opaque.

William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey

Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

Theodore Roethke, Elegy For Jane [My student, thrown by a horse]

Charles Bukowski, streetcars  (Click “cover” on the left, then click “streetcars”. Despite the tantalizing presence of the interactive table of contents, most of the rest of the poems are not available for preview.)

Ted Kooser, The Necktie

–, Father

–, Praying Hands

 

The Prompt

Write a short to medium-length poem. Write in complete sentences. Write in the first person, but don’t use any judgments, assessments, abstractions, generalizations, or opinions. Read it out loud to check the sound of it and the grammatical sense. Read it out loud to a friend or relative and look them in the eye as you do, as though you were merely talking to them about something. See what this does to your writing.

Love,

Doug

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