Testosterpoetry
How I, as a Man, Can Look You in the Eye and Admit I Write Poems
Sing, O Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles Peleides!
—Iliad, opening line.
When people ask me about poems that I have published, I face two major obstacles in their perception:
- folks believe poetry is just about the least masculine discipline imaginable, and
- folks believe poetry is, well, just plain stupid, basically. There is little respect for the craft of verse—the engineering of verse.
I was at a reading event in Laramie, WY, last year and another contributor had his work introduced as “poetry.” He stood up and said, “Well, I prefer to think of it as a rap, you know, ‘cause dudes don’t write poems, right?” This, to me, speaks volumes about how people perceive poetry. I wanted to answer the guy who was standing up to read: “That’s why I call mine ‘testosterpoetry.’”
In regards to the second part, that poetry is just dumb, there are roughly three reasons why I believe verse-writing can’t get any respect:
- most of the public tends to believe that “Roses and red, violets are blue” is still an accurate template for what poetry is;
- popular poetry produced by amateurs is believed to be comprised of emotional or sentimental rants interspersed with arbitrary line breaks; and
- poetry produced by literary professionals tends to be the unintelligible artsy collage of subjectively-selected words that lack any meaning, structure, or aesthetic value perceptible to the average reader.
So, when it comes out that I am guilty of crime of poetry, I inevitably risk becoming pinned to one of these unfortunate preconceptions.
For three years, out of key with time,
he strove to resuscitate the dead art
of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
in the old sense. Wrong from the start…
—Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly
Not included in the these contemporary views on poetry is the historical fact of its origins. Why were meter and rhyme ever applied to the common speech at all? It seems unnecessary, right? The pop lyric that gets stuck in your head for days at a time illustrates just why: meter, rhyme, alliteration, and the whole gamut of classical poetic features make phrases memorable, almost irresistible. But somehow this aspect became lost. Only a few generations ago, poetry memorization bees were nearly as common in schools as spelling bees! Common folks would recite poems for entertainment around the fireplace in the evening! Why no longer? Well, literary poets have distanced themselves from the features that “belong to mere popular song lyrics”—namely, A) sounding good and B) making any sense.
Exhibit A: Who today can recite the work of our nation’s venerable poet laureate? Who the hell can even name our nation’s poet laureate?
There is no reason for people to read the bulk of literary poetry as it stands now, consisting as it does of undecipherable abstractions encoded without rhyme or reason or anything catchy. In addition, the typical reader has a limited expectation of what topics are appropriate for poetry.
Someone who expects poetry to be an emotional cry for help or a meditation on flowers does not know that the ancients invented the poetic art to recite tales of war, the glory of kings, and the praise of now-forgotten gods. Meter and wordplay made the cultural histories of Sumeria and Greece memorizable before writing was invented. Before the ancient composers could store this knowledge on tablets or in codices, they only had a good phonetic hook to ensure the survival of their work. Imagine: the Iliad was once transmitted only by word of mouth by skilled poets who trained in their art for life! The Iliad is 15,693 lines long!
In pre-modern Ireland as well as India and many former cultures, poetry was one of the most skilled vocations a person could take on, requiring years of study and practice. The task of encoding the knowledge and morals of your society in an immortal form was not given lightly or to just anyone. You had to know when to use the iamb and when the trochee; you had to know why “gown” alliterates with “begin” but not “gesundheit.” You might think this is uselessly pedantic, but these distinctions weren’t arbitrary: the point of it was to employ structures that, based on generations of experiential evidence, made phrases memorable, pleasant, and potentially immortal.
How can I, a man, look someone in the eye and come level: “I wrote a poem”? Because I know what I have done, what I am doing, and I stand by my work. I know the secret history of the art and the high standards I am striving to meet in form and function. I know that I am not obligated to sing of red roses and blades of grass, but being secure in who I am I naturally write, as a man, about what I think are acceptably manly themes: rocks and beasts, adventure and travel, will and strength, and I would do so much as grant these subjects the relative immortality of literature, if I can only be skilled enough.
hoc dicens ferrum aduerso sub pectore condit
feruidus; ast illi soluuntur frigore membra
uitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras.
—Virgil, Aeneid, last lines.
Thus saying, raging, he founds the steel
in enemy breast, whose cold limbs loosened then,
and his life, with a groan, fled indignant to the shades below.
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