A few months ago, someone writing in the name of an RSS feed mill emailed me and asked for a description of this blog in the form of some "Author's Words." I sent a preliminary version of the following text, and a week later checked the feed mill. The text had not been posted(?). I have checked several times since then, and still--nothing. So I am posting it here, amplified, as an explanation of my poems.
A Euro-American in his seventh decade, I grew up in an environment of reading, and by the time I began to learn to read and write I was convinced that words work magic. And I was determined to learn to produce this magic. Nothing in my subsequent experience has vitiated this vision.
A good poem—potent words in a powerful order—is enchantment, wonder-working, magic. Like music, it moves and transports us; it is a psychic journey without drugs; it expands consciousness and perceptions and the capacity for feeling. Like a movie, it takes us on a mental roller-coaster ride; unlike a movie, it does not depend on graphics and sound effects, but on the verbal equivalents of these things.
Like all art, it provides a specialized pleasure, which we call "esthetic," meaning the satisfaction of a complex of desires--desires for perceptions of order, proportion, and coherence; for pleasurable sensations including (among other things) the pleasurable expenditure of energy and the surprise caused by the unexpected ingenious use of language; and for some degree of correspondence to the world we inhabit. It does this while it invites us to contemplation, all by means of words.
Therefore, the poet must know words and be skilled in choosing and ordering them, and in using all the elements and components of language: ALL the elements: rhythm, intonation, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, connotation as well as denotation, grammar, syntax, figurative and rhetorical language, and allusions... because the greater the number of resources well employed, the more powerful the effect--the more intense the esthetic pleasure; and because resources clumsily or ill employed weaken or destroy the desired effect, or create an undesired effect. (You, Dear Reader, should recognize here the long shadow of Edgar Poe.)
And, because he lives among others, the poet must use his power ethically and prudently. The power of words to move people to force social change has been amply documented in our time--very noticeably, in fact, ever since the Renaissance and the Reformation. The power of words to cause serious social--and in individuals, psychological--damage has also been documented. Evidence of this can be found in the history, psychology, and self-help sections of any library or bookstore. It is the reason that the Roman Catholic Church promulgated the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and the indices that led up to it. (It was not formally abolished until 1966.)
At the time that I began to study English-language literature (I have an advanced degree in the field), the dominant critical philosophy was the New Criticism; its principal method was the analysis and explication of the text. But by the end of the 1960s it was considered old-fashioned by those who had the most access to the media, both academic and anti-academic. These were the writers, creative and otherwise, who were inspired by the anti-academic wing of American modernism--especially William Carlos Williams and his followers in the Beat Generation, and their followers.
With the passage of time, the tendency to depreciate the values of the New Criticism has grown worse, producing a corresponding deterioration in the quality of the reader's experience (the metaphorical roller-coaster ride), to the point that many English-language poems published today by the small presses and little magazines, and enshrined in the popular teaching anthologies, sound and look like translations made by unskillful translators. Or like messages smuggled out of a psychiatric ward.
One either ends up confused, wondering what the point of the piece was, or goes away with the impression that, for the writer and the publisher, any piece of writing deserves to be called a poem if only it expresses what came to be called "politically correct" (that is, fashionable) sentiments in the current jargon and in lines that break off mid-phrase before reaching the right margin of the page. This is glaringly evident in the United States.
But the New-Critical approach is still the most rewarding mode of study for a poet, and is the best guide in the construction of poetic texts on the foundation of whatever the world or the unconscious psyche offers one. Why? Because poems are, first of all, texts.* And because nothing lacking a minimum of coherence can hold the attention of a person of at least average intelligence. A person who takes poems seriously wants to explore the coherence, the internal resonances and correspondences, as well as the verbal magic of effective poems, whether simply as a reader or as a writer in search of models of structure and verbal skill.
Since a poem is a linguistic construct, a work of verbal art, the vehicle of an esthetic experience, it follows that a piece of writing which is primarily the vehicle of an ideology or an exercise for letting off steam will not be a poem, or at least not a very good one. These kinds of writing are psychotherapy or politics, more or less disguised. Of course, we all need some kind and some degree of therapy at times throughout our lives, and political participation is a vital concern of everyone, but these things are not poetry and they only adulterate the poems in which they are substitutes for the poet’s art.
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* Even the performers who populate the poetry-slam and rapper circuits declaim words that were first written texts--unless they have created and memorized their performances in an exclusively oral fashion. Performers in pre-literate {e. g., Homeric} societies did this, but I doubt that contemporary performers can. Close to 40 years' experience as a teacher has convinced me that the typical Americans who began school after 1960 have very little capacity for, or interest in, remembering anything except their social lives and entertainment preferences. Evidence for this is found in the growing crisis in education, with increasing numbers of school drop-outs and steadily decreasing scores on the standardized exit and entrance examinations across the country--while "reality TV" and celebrity/entertainment websites and blogs proliferate.
Given this situation, it seems reasonable to infer that even such performers as those mentioned above must have recourse to the aid of the written word. So, as long as there are poems, there must be texts of poems. And as long as there are texts of poems, the norms of the New Criticism will be the most effective standards for evaluating poems.
