On Poetry
Sonnets 29 and 66 are favourites of mine. I keep running into them, which sometimes makes me wonder whether I like them because they’re genuinely good or because I’ve seen them so often. Familiarity isn’t merit, but it helps.
I like Shakespeare’s sonnets, full stop, actually. There’s lots to get into, but they’re often pretty great just on the surface – clear, memorable, mellifluous. I’m also partial to Catullus, the OG of OGs and a real iconoclast. He lands for me across two millennia in a way contemporary work rarely does.
When it comes to recent poets, I like spoken word, though mostly in performance, which may be unfair to the idea of “pure” poetry on the page. Performance carries rhythm, emphasis, facial cues, and the crowd’s self-witnessing. Performance supplies a context that books can’t.
On the page, a lot of contemporary poetry feels to me like modern art once did. It’s like going to a comedy club in a very foreign culture: I can’t follow what’s going on and, while I get the feeling it’s funny, even the rhythm of laughter is a surprise.
I guess part of this is exposure to form and recognition; as much about swimming in the culture as about knowledge. Consider Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and Ondaatje’s “The Cinnamon Peeler.” Arguably both are, in their ways, equally (im)penetrable. Yet the former feels straightforwardly poetic and more obviously valueladen than the latter, which seems self-indulgent, perhaps overly so. Perhaps that’s the point; perhaps I’m the wrong audience. But perception persists.
Maybe I want the wrong things from poetry. I want for poetry to be clearly entertaining — witty and terse — or to be revelatory, as if from beyond and from below. In that case, it ought to share an impression with the world that’s more real than the world, that is a conduit for a moment or an idea, and its particular texture.
And it often feels that contemporary poetry is a series of elaborate in-jokes and private metaphors, each too specific to be participatory. I’m being talked at, not talked to.
This is an argument for hospitality, not simplicity.1 Yeats is difficult, but he provides handholds; he performs alchemy with common reference – ‘revelation’, ‘a second coming’, a sphinx, beasts and Bethlehem. Through the implied meaning of lineation, rhythm, rhyme, and refrain, Yeats meets his audience where they are and transforms familiarity into something suitably strange. He pulls something from beyond and below. He is equal parts master and mentor, and he talks to his audience without belittlement or self-indulgence.
I’m aware this all sounds a bit curmudgeonly. It isn’t meant to be. I like loving poems. I want more of them. I’m just a little fed up of being asked to appreciate what I have not been invited to see. If a poem requires reams of insider knowledge and pays you back only in the pleasure of deciphering it, it is a crossword.
Sorry.