Jonathan Mayhew has a sensible short post on craft in poetry. He's more reluctant than I to attribute the goodness of a poem to craft, but I think it's really a matter of emphasis: I'd say craft cannot explain goodness, but I'd insist that it's useful to talk about the craft of a good poem, and that there are damned few (perhaps exactly zero) good poems which do not exhibit good craft. Frank O'Hara and Emily Dickinson both wrote some wonderful poems, and both wrote a lot of crap. The crap is mostly the result of carelessness — though in Dickinson's case we have little idea which poems she thought of as finished. That doesn't mean that I always understand the craft of the poems I like, and like Jonathan, I'm most interested in the good poems whose craft I don't understand. Of course, we often disagree on which poems of the last half-century are in fact good poems, and neither of us is immortal, so even if we were both to find the same pair of very different poems technically interesting, we'd probably not choose the same one to worry at till we "got it." You pick your battles.
And craft can certainly become a tic.
This excerpt from Reginald Gibbons's "Hour" (which appeared in the December 2004 Poetry and which we looked at in the workshop at West Chester) displays an interesting effect created mostly by typography and line breaks:
… An ache
of be-
ing. An ache of
being,
over love. An
ache of
being over
love. …
In this particular poem I think this works very well, and it's worth trying in other contexts. But not too often — like Sharon Olds ending lines with the definite article, it would get old quick — and remember Eliot's admonition to steal rather than to imitate.
It might seem that this effect would be hard to manage in metrical verse, but let me steal some examples from the first chapter of Tim Steele's wonderful All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing of how moving a monosyllabic word in and out of stressed positions in a line can do very similar things. (repeated words are in italics, metrical stresses are bold, but please don't think all metrical stresses are the same — some stressed syllables get less speech stress than some unstressed syllables):
True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up
Robert Browning
All men think all men mortal, but themselves
Edward Young
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honor'd, self-secure
Matthew Arnold
9:39:10 PM
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