I’ve been reading a lot of poetry for quite a few years and maybe this is just me, as in some quirky bias I suffer, or misapprehension about poetry, but much of what I read doesn’t feel much like poetry at all. Now, one can rightfully argue that poetry can be anything, and that’s okay because if we take a look at poetry’s history what we see is a continuum of thesis and antithesis, flagging us who read the stuff that anything goes. So where does that leave us? I might argue that since there are so many distinct kinds of poems that a definition alludes us all together and when we hear the noun p o e t r y, we can only assign the familiar poetic shape as its definitive territory, meaning a few words in a line that are stacked up on each other, which we generally think of as verse with multiplied stacks fulfilling our expectation of poem. I’m thinking if we want to go with that poetry digresses to a linguistic charmless flat land characteristic of prose, relative to at least some of the poetic writing that is highly lyrical, sonically potent, novel, intonated, linguistically muscular, and dynamically connective to the reader. Poetry can take creative liberties that prose customarily does not or cannot take. Poetry may have different linguistic needs like different kinds of English. For example, articles may be absent towards a more concentrated synthesis for phrasing, a lyrical lilt, stream of consciousness boarding on the abstract et al.
Being a poet is born of a feeling that a face may be a liquid surface. That time is malleable, and that there is always something going on in-between the lines gleaned from inexplicable moments of inner disjuncture or a hesitating breath.
Poetry may facilitate that mind may emerge from the concrete objective into the mirrors of the marvelous or uncanny like a burped half avocado and fish head at 2 am in the morning transmuting into a torrent of dormice and angels in delirious avenues of falling stars and looking glasses.
Poetry may address intersectional dimensionality populated by visions and voices of primordial undercurrents, that stories may not lend themselves to. Poetry may be metalinguistic and a fragment of the inner life both collective and individuated. Poetry may work from the inside out without referencing the temporal, locational, and name it and claim it nouns and pronouns typical of prose. So, here’s the poetry problem. Why is it that 99% of the poetry I read here and places like it remain basically written just like prose, linguistically and sonically vacuous, largely bereft of similes, metaphors and all the other strategic devices that can make poetry progressive, inventive and deeply resonate, except of course that they are stacked and columned giving the appearance of poems?
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EXAMPLES OF POEMS THAT CAN BE CALLED POETRY
Ballad in A
BY CATHY PARK HONG
A Kansan plays cards, calls Marshall
a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap;
that Kansan ******* scats,
camps back at caballada ranch.
Hangs kack, ax, and camp hat.
Kansan’s nag mad and rants can’t bask,
can’t bacchanal and garland a lass,
can’t at last brag can crack Law’s *****,
Kansan’s cantata rang at that ramada ranch,
Mañana, Kansan snarls, I’ll have an armada
and thwart Law’s brawn,
slam Law a **** mass war path.
Marshall’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track,
calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk,
Says: That dastard Kansan’s had
and gnaws lamb fatback.
At dawn, Marshall stalks that ranch,
packs a gat and blasts Kansan’s ***
and Kansan gasps, blasts back.
A flag ***** at half-mast.~~~~~
Ocean of Earth
BY GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
TRANSLATED BY RON PADGETT
To G. de Chirico
I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean
Its windows are the rivers flowing from my eyes
Octopi are crawling all over where the walls are
Hear their triple hearts beat and their beaks peck against the windowpanes
House of dampness
House of burning
Season’s fastness
Season singing
The airplanes are laying eggs
Watch out for the dropping of the anchor
Watch out for the shooting black ichor
It would be good if you were to come from the sky
The sky’s honeysuckle is climbing
The earthly octopi are throbbing
And so very many of us have become our own gravediggers
Pale octopi of the chalky waves O octopi with pale beaks
Around the house is this ocean that you know well
And is never still
Translated from the French
Source: Poetry (October 2015)~~~~~
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
BY OCEAN VUONG
i
Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows
it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand
to your chest.
i
You, drowning
between my arms —
stay.
You, pushing your body
into the river
only to be left
with yourself —
stay.
i
I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after
backhanding
mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel
in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.
And so I learned that a man, in ******, was the closest thing
to surrender.
i
Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.
Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you’d **** for it. Unbreakable dawn
mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
like a sparrow stunned
with falling.
i
Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.
i
I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once.
i
Say amen. Say amend.
Say yes. Say yes
anyway.
i
In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed.
i
In the life before this one, you could tell
two people were in love
because when they drove the pickup
over the bridge, their wings
would grow back just in time.
Some days I am still inside the pickup.
Some days I keep waiting.
i
It’s not too late. Our heads haloed
with gnats & summer too early
to leave any marks.
Your hand under my shirt as static
intensifies on the radio.
Your other hand pointing
your daddy’s revolver
to the sky. Stars falling one
by one in the cross hairs.
This means I won’t be
afraid if we’re already
here. Already more
than skin can hold. That a body
beside a body
must make a field
full of ticking. That your name
is only the sound of clocks
being set back another hour
& morning
finds our clothes
on your mother’s front porch, shed
like week-old lilies.
Source: Poetry (December 2014)
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SOMETIMES WE’VE GOT TO READ IT TO KNOW WHAT IT IS.
