Is it really that baffling?

[sheenaghpugh]

I've been thinking for a while about an email I got last year. I'd judged a poetry competition, the winners of which, with my comments on them, are online here. Soon afterwards, I got an email enquiry from a gentleman who was clearly well-read and highly educated, a retired medical specialist fluent in two languages (English was not his first language, but I don't think that actually made any odds in the context). He was fond of traditional, especially rhymed, poetry but said he had difficulty in understanding contemporary poems, and my comments hadn't helped him. He was hoping I could give him "short conclusions about the context of each poem and the message they wish to send to the public".

This, as I explained, I couldn't do, firstly because having judged them all anonymously I had no idea who had written them, or under what circumstances; nor did the context affect the quality of the poem. As for the message, again that wasn't for me to say, or rather it was for every different reader to decide what they said to him. I tried instead to outline the criteria I had used in judging: which poems seemed to me to be the best constructed, and to use language and the other tools of poetry - rhythm, imagery etc - most effectively to achieve an effect on the reader. But I suspect he'll have found this unhelpful too.

What worries me is that here is an intellectual, erudite person who thinks he needs guidance (from someone no more intelligent than himself and probably rather less highly educated) on how to read contemporary poems, and doesn't trust his own judgment to come to a conclusion even on what they're trying to do, let alone how well they succeed. The poems in question are by no means abstruse either, as you'll see if you read them on the linked site; we're not talking J H Prynne here and we never would be, because I wouldn't have chosen anything I couldn't understand. It looks more like the sort of automatic switch-off my mind performs when faced with mathematical or financial matters, which I simply assume I won't understand. That again would be understandable in a man of science whose mind had no holding place for the imaginative intelligence of poetry, but that's not the case; it is purely contemporary poetry that does this to him. And if that's the reaction of a person who would seem in many ways to be poetry's natural audience, it's hardly surprising most collections sell in dozens.

At a guess, I would wonder if it has to do with there being no obvious rules. I suppose when reading a sonnet, even if you are nervous as a critic, you can count to 14 and figure out if something has gone amiss with the rhyme scheme. In the same way, with a representative painting you can tell if the perspective's wonky or the horse's walk doesn't convince, whereas with a Jackson Pollock you have no such clear means of telling if it's any good or not and will be hesitant to express an opinion. Since that's exactly the position I am in with art, I can understand it in that context, but in poetry, rules or no rules, it still seems to me clear enough when imagery is fresh and surprising as opposed to stale and over-familiar, or when rhythms flow rather than halt, or language takes off and flies instead of plodding across the page. It just isn't as specialised as art; few of us can paint a convincing horse but we all hear and use language all the time. That doesn't mean we can all employ it as poets do, but I'd have thought it did mean we could all form a fairly confident opinion on what they were trying to do and how well they succeeded. Am I being, here, the poetic equivalent of my old maths master, standing baffled at the blackboard saying "But it's so easy! Why can't you all see it?"

Comments

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised at the response to these particular poems, as they seem pretty accessible to me. I wonder if he just didn't like them and wished to understand why you did?

[sheenaghpugh]

I think he'd have said so. But I do agree that he was looking for me to explain why I thought they were successful of their kind. I did say in my reply that I didn't claim any kind of omniscience for my judgment and that someone else might well have chosen differently, though in fact, as it turned out, nearly all had been winners or runners-up before, which does suggest some consensus at least among the sort of folk who get to judge these things. But I suspect that won't help either, because he wanted a sort of gold standard by which to judge poems, not a mutable one.

[julesjones]

Hmm. The first one I wouldn't have understood you picking without your brief summary underneath of why you picked it, at which I went and re-read it and went "Aha." But the other two seem reasonably accessible to me.

One thing which does seem pertinent to me -- some of us have difficulty with contemporary poetry because what we were exposed to at school was the highly structured poetry of the classics, and it can be difficult to see some forms of free verse as anything other than prose chopped into random line lengths. I finally got my head around some of it from, of all things, listening to Gareth Thomas reading some of Shakespeare's speeches at cons. That gave me the connection between seeing it on the page and hearing it.

(And yes, I *am* the fanfic writer who cheerfully dumped a load of allusions to The Lady of Shallot into one story without ever overtly referring to what I was doing once I was past the title...)

[sheenaghpugh]

Yes, I'm sure you are right; furthermore of course free verse really can be just that if it's badly done (as form poetry can be empty and form-led). But while it's easy to see the latter, I actually think it's also pretty easy to see when line breaks are doing a job and when they aren't. But it clearly isn't for many, including, I suspect, a lot of English teachers.

[julesjones]

Thinking about it some more -- what you get exposed to at school is pre-selected to have some merit. You may not like it personally (hello, Wordsworth...), but it's highly unlikely to be objectively rubbish. And then you start getting exposed to other stuff in an uncontrolled environment, and what you're looking at can be anything from selected for quality to unfiltered slush, depending on where you're getting your exposure from. So of course you're going to come away thinking that free verse is pants if you got Tennyson and Wilfred Owen in school, and your first serious exposure to free verse is, for example, fan poetry on the likes of fanfic.net.