Nothing So Bad It’s Not Poetry

Poeta nascitur, orator fit. So sings classic not to say classical wisdom: Got to be born a poet for the privilege of poking your hand up the Muse’s skirt… to take a metaphoric not to say metaphorical tack on this business.

Somewhere around 1963, Karl Shapiro, the noted poet, visits the small college where I’m studying, to “read,” as we say, from his “poetry.” And so he does. “Love,” he tells us, “is a fucking skull.”

Not so long after that, perhaps 1966, Allen Ginsberg, the noted poet, visits the university where I’m doing graduate work, to “read,” as we say, from his “poetry.” And so he does. “I am able,” he tells us, “at will and alone to achieve sphincter orgasm.” To his credit—and to the immense relief of many of us that day—when invited by a wag in the audience to “achieve” one then and there, the bard politely declines.

I’ve been peddling my clunky insight on poetry to drowsing adolescents for thirty-some years now. And ill enough disposed they are to embrace it. The sturdiest of them will memorize it, attach to it assorted themes, tendencies, modes evidently dear to the professor; the feeblest of them simply pronounce it unfathomable, spend their days sulking in darkness and anger; the boldest of them will now and again ask what makes it good… when they really mean to ask why it’s not bad.

“A poem” says Wallace Stevens (or one of them), “should resist almost successfully the intellect,” from which premise, it has seemed to me for some time now the… contrapositive is it? …has asserted itself rather at the expense of the original. That is: Anything not resisting the intellect must, and for that very reason, not be a poem. And… dire corollary: Anything resisting the intellect must be a poem. Direr yet: anything resisting the intellect is worthy of a poem. The notion inherent in the Greek origin (poiein) of our word “poetry,” that is language “made” or “made up,” that is unnatural and contrived for special, perhaps hieratic purposes, and that inherent in the Latin original (versus) that gives us “verse,” that is language “other” and evoking “otherness”… these notions seem to authorize incomprehensibility, incoherence, disjuncture, discombobulation. “A complete disorder is an order,” says the above Wallace Stevens (or one of them).

“Seasoned language,” says Aristotle, is the mechanism of poetry. “Words,” says Goethe, “are like coins: there are golden and silver and, yes… copper.” No rules, then. And all words legit. That, good people, leaves a whale of a lotta room for us bozos to maneuver in.

As I look back at my favorite war poems, poems I’ve learnt in school, I find that—to the extent they meant anything to me—they do so for reasons mostly of form, of structure, of rhyme, of rhythm, of image… of craft in short. And of craft… I ‘m short. Poeta nascitur, remember?

I study examples of what is called Vietvet or Namvet poetry. Woof. It turns out that writing formless, rhymeless, pointless verse is a kind of therapy, to which troubled veterans are invited by counselors, advisors, psychiatrists, and other do-gooders ready to lend an ear when a middle-aged burnout decides to blame the shipwreck of his life on the twelve months he spent in Cam Ranh Bay draining crank cases. And here they come: the endless scenettes of dying comrades cradled in the survivor’s arms; tousle-head kids laid low in life’s prime; druggie interludes beneath the very noses of soulless lifers; sensitive Viets our counterparts, our foes yet brothers; pastoral nha quê who happily chopchop rice and boomboom mamasan till us dumb gringos clomp into paradise… and on and on. That’s my medium? Incomprehensible gibberish?

“Incomprehensible,” of course, reads “hermetic” in the classroom. And students unable to sort out what the hell a Browning or a Mallarmé is talking about have little difficulty in believing that Jewell is likewise recondite and… eventually that your Vietvet poet is endowed with the same gift. The incomprehension—worse yet—gets compounded when details of military culture or equipment or lore from Vietnam combat surface in poems, leaving academic listeners mostly nonplussed…yet oddly persuaded they’re in the presence of authenticity.

One time a young prof, reading, with all due seriousness, a “Namvet” poem, comes to mention of the city Quang Ngai. He stumbles. I feed him the pronunciation: “Quang Ngai.” He comes then to Qui Nhon. “Quang Ngai,” I tell him soberly. Then “Tuy Hoa.” “Quang Ngai,” I say. Another academic reads a “Vietvet” poem relating a fratricidal encounter between Viets and armed GI’s. “I pop an AG round into my grenade launcher,” the narrator says. “AG round”? There’s no “AG round” for that thing. “AG”? There’s a flechette round, a smoke round, a white phosphorous round (WP), an anti-personnel round (AP)… and a high explosive round (HE)… “HE”? “AG”? The “narrator” of the poem, the combatant, is illiterate; the “poet,” though likely not, has only heard the term in barracks chatter… the reader, in the same innocence, simply repeats it, satisfied it’s some arcane article of sermo militaris… and on and on.

Small potatoes? Maybe. But if the arcana of combat and soldiering gets lost in the confusion of poetic flight and the disconnect between two professions, how much more likely that language mutually misunderstood fails to retrieve other subtleties of insight, of aspiration, of emotion, though the words themselves seem recognizable?

Not many theorists of war poetry, it turns out. And lucky for us. One of them, though is Herbert Read (spelled differently and no relation to Henry), who peddles what the age calls “Imagism.” Its tenets? “The language of common speech… new rhythms as the expression of new moods…absolute freedom in choice of subject…” In a 1918 essay, Read makes claims you’ll recognize in the application: “…form determined by the emotion…not an unchanging mould into which any emotion can be poured…the quality of the vision, granted that the expression is adequate. Corollary: Rhyme, meter, cadence, alliteration, are various decorative devices to be used as the vision demands and are not formal qualities pre-ordained…” “Lineation is governed by an image or idea… or breaks the syntax at the line-ending for some deliberate effect.” Worse yet, Read—and a whole school along with him—oppose the notion of “’character’…built through ‘limitation’” to “’personality’…[where]…the mind surrenders to its environment.’” Character, he goes on “offers little likelihood of growth,” it’s “formation being ‘moral’…its ‘taste’ rational rather than aesthetic.” Woof. He calls this new order “immediacy” or “lability,” “the capacity to change without loss of integrity” and opposes it to “education” or “limitation.”

Now, none of my Vietvet buds has read this stuff, but they are aware that lines can be broken off, that rhyme can be dispensed with, that meter is no requirement, that words can be chosen at apparent random, that limit is to be sniffed at. They can see that everywhere in what passes for poetry. And they’ve been told that putting the words down, spitting the words out, chewing the words over eases the pain… cleanses the guilt… purges the memory. Hey… I can do that.

Alan Farrell

Lexington, Virginia

February 2006

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