Tag Archives: Arthur Rimbaud

Complaints, critiques

This sort of critique has been around forever: https://themagialipoetryshow.substack.com/p/peeing-in-the-pool-of-poetic-mediocrity. I recall such chat when I was 20 years old and all poetry was print; there was much to-do about whether being a poet associated with a university was the only way to be taken seriously or at any rate recognized at all. There were complaints that celebrities got books published while excellent un-famous writers struggled, waiting for rejections by SASE*. Poets often complained of cliques, of infighting and pettiness. There was a certain railing against mediocre free verse and “overly-confessional” poetry; writers threw barbs at those deemed too political or not political enough, or too feminist or not feminist enough, or writing that was deemed too formal for contemporary times. Recognition was a term I heard often in the 1980s. It was what mattered, apparently. Needless to say, I did not attain it. I think, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t.

Author Ali Whitelock’s points are not all off the mark, in fact; who has not suffered through listening to some embarrassingly bad (well, we have to learn somehow) or, worse yet, egotistical/narcissistic readers at open mikes? All I can say for myself is that when I was starting out I recognized my work was not brilliant–but I needed the practice and tried not to overstay my welcome on stage. Even as a featured reader, I tended not to fill the time allotted. Granted, it helps that I don’t write epics! But I’ve heard these criticisms of open mike readings and about gate-keeping literary magazine editors for decades, and also the charge that poets are aiming more for recognition (today read: “likes”) than for highly-crafted work. And also the claim that there’s a sudden proliferation of “half-arsed poetry” in the world. Nope. Not sudden or new.

Whitelock’s essay is likely meant to be a bit provocative. Otherwise why use such freighted language, or make sarcastic remarks like “Poetry, as we all know, is competitive…”? And her bullet points about how to know when you’ve achieved a poem worth publishing–Eh. Not objective or even particularly actionable, and what if the writer really feels that her mediocre poem meets those points, even if few others agree? Taste, after all, is personal. However, I do like what she says about writing poems: “The poem itself – and the process whereby it is achieved – is the reward. Not the likes, not the prizes, not the comments – true, false or otherwise.” I’m definitely into the process. “Likes” on social media are nice, I suppose, but they tend not to mean much.

Rimbaud as a teen

Sometimes, literary people behave as though poetry exists under a tiny pup tent, when in fact poetry’s tent is the cosmos, as Whitman could have told us, or at any rate the big blue heaven over Earth. It’s true that I myself am more aligned with poets who read and study other poets, poets who revise diligently and work on rhythm and craft. But that’s just me, and I don’t count for much on the artistic stage. Besides, I’ve sometimes heard or read remarkable work by people who seem fortunately gifted with the ability to surprise and delight with language. Example: Rimbaud, though of course he’s an outlier. (Read A. Majmudar’s brief essay on Rimbaud in Kenyon Review, here!) And how well was his work received by the French literati of the period? They found him obscene and ragged, disliked him personally, felt his poems did not follow the prosody required for excellent poetry; and they weren’t far off the mark in any of that. Only people such as Verlaine wanted to publish him.

Most of us, those who are not preternaturally endowed with a gift for expressive language, need time and space and mentorship of one kind or another even to become mediocre poets, let alone fabulous ones. Yes, we should work at it if we find the writing process fascinating and worthwhile; but the outcome we may want is never assured, a little ambiguity and uncertainty and surprise are part of the package. I think there’s room in life for all kinds of poetry, even the proudly untutored “I write from my soul and never read anyone else’s work” or “My poetry is my therapy” kinds of poetry. If you don’t care for the work you can ignore it, but there’s no reason to feel jealous just because someone who writes like that gets recognition you think you deserve.

We don’t write poems because we believe we deserve anything–except, maybe, to be heard…and no one can promise us that, either.

~

* The term SASE means stamped, self-addressed envelope (for return of the submitted poems, or notice of their acceptance for publication, by postal mail, a process that often took 8 months to a year)

Photo by Aliaksei Semirski on Pexels.com

Back to metaphor

I recently read James Geary’s entertaining book I Is an Other–The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. Geary takes his title from one of Rimbaud‘s letters, calling this phrase metaphor’s “principal equation”:

Metaphor systematically disorganizes the common sense of things–jumbling together the abstract with the concrete, the physical with the psychological, the like with the unlike–and reorganizes it into uncommon combinations.

I like this definition because it feels more complete than the typical definition of metaphor as a comparison without the use of the adverbial comparative (i.e., no “like” or “as”). Indeed, metaphor probably forms the basis of language itself; while that conclusion’s much debated in semiotics, linguistics, and other scholarly disciplines, common sense and common usage strongly suggest that even thought itself–in terms of how we think internally about the world–employs metaphor as an underpinning.

Maybe I believe so because I’m a poet. Geary, as it turns out, has written some poetry, though he’s best known for his books about words, word origins, wordplay, aphorisms, witticisms, and the like. (He’s also got a TED talk…everybody’s got a TED talk…)

As to poetry, and how metaphor behaves in the poem’s context, I like what Geary says here (although in this excerpt it’s not actually poetry he’s discussing, but rhetoric):

Readers actively retrieve a metaphor’s meaning, just as a punch line requires listeners to resolve a joke’s incongruities for themselves…though the speaker may make the metaphor, the hearer makes its meaning. Hearer and speaker are accomplices; the one unpacks what the other presents. In terms of creativity, producing a metaphor and penetrating one are almost the same act.

I think the above lines go far to explaining why I love to read poetry and also provide implications as to why poems can be so damned difficult to compose. The poet endeavors to create a context and container for an often-unknown audience who will nonetheless need to invest, one hopes willingly, in the process of reorganizing the surprising (metaphor) into the recognizable.

And what a fine task that is!

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