Poetry as Style
An essay on degrees of literary intensity
Poetry as Style
An essay on degrees of literary intensity
First, there’s a general idiom to the language of poetry — whether written, spoken, or both — and by “idiom” I mean a mode of expression or a distinctive character and excellence of language.
Second, there’s within the general idiom a more specific idiom to each era or phase.
Third, there’s the idiom of each individual person and her or his specific methods and modes — her modes of thought, his methods or ways.
The writer who does not learn the first of these three goes without good navigation and may be headed for a shipwreck on the hidden rocks of rime and prose.
In a mathematical sense, I see poetry as a kind of exponent or power. I see it as prose raised to an exponential degree — 2 or even 3, depending on the state of the language at any given time, during any given age or phase, and also the intent and linguistic emphasis or stress, and depending also upon the bent of any one particular poet or poetess.
Poetic language, then, in the metaphorical-mathematical sense I use it here, may be described as a degree of literary intensity: poetry as an atomic element of speech and prose — the cytoplasm of tongue scorched into the nucleus of mind, the only organic substance strong enough to outlive the matter it creates. Words are as living things, and sometimes these living things mutate, sometimes die, and the writer learns through the search for life the biochemistry of poetic language — also known as poetry — its elemental structure and its atomic weights.
Gnostically, poetry is the spirit of language, and prose the flesh.
Poetry, like philosophy, is noetic — sprung from the eternal matter of mind — sometimes prophetic.
Poetry and prose can biologically enmesh.
Did you know that style once referred to the actual implements of craftsmanship — whether writing or painting or sculpting or making music or weaving carpets or other tapestries of decorative art: the architect and her blueprints, her T-bar and her truss? Even today we have the more technological device we call the stylus.
Style was from the beginning the instrument or tool of all artistic craftsmanship and penmanship, the thing the human-being held in hand to craft a calligraphy — the thing by means of which one would transform an abstract notion of mind into a concreted entity. “Idea” is synonymous with “abstract notion.” These instruments of style were once looked upon with reverence and devotion.
In a more specific sense now, style may be defined as the repetition of characteristic habits and, more broadly, the actual impress of the character: style is technique — style is personality; because beginning at conception, there develops and then emerges from gradual to absolute, in every individual mind, the mute cells of uniqueness and difference, the very stuff of self and individuality, down to small erratic glitches which once formed may emerge full-blown in any individuated human-being — lightning flashes of artistic insight or philosophic or musical; nuances of diction, peculiarities of punctuation, syntax, and grammar which spring from some aching neural itch: the hammer-and-chisel blows of Camille Claudel with her thunderous Thor-like swings and wild drive of will, carving terrible beautiful passionate shapes from marble as black as pitch; or the bloom and beat of grief that hammered hugely through Gerard Hopkins’s God-obsessed sweet-meated heart, driving him, all the while, to pen such strange linguistic-musical art, which has touched my mind so deeply, and my heart.
Truly these things are cast in style.
Truly a completed edition of the poetry of any one person — of every one person, were it written down by each and all — would confront us with an entire life: because style is ever the infallible clue to personality — a complicated synthesis which, key-like, unlocks the vault of our private thoughts and character, our individuality.
When I’m asked by children how I think it’s best to go about the business of writing poems and poetry, my answer is this:
First pick a concrete subject — a manhole cover, for instance, or the metal medallions struck by some savage kahn or the citizens of his aboriginal sect or the axes these ancient citizens used to hack and chop, or a night-time kitchen when your refrigerator shudders to a stop in the deepest hours of the night, leaving you suddenly tranquil yet alone, or a flower or exultant sculpture standing untouched in a demolition zone against empty space, or a river with a lead sky angled cracked across that river’s face, or something else specific, definite, non-abstract — and then seek to describe the subject you’ve selected, whatever it is, in as vivid a linguistic style as you can find, avoiding the trite, the overwritten, the platitudinous at every turn as much as you can inside your mind, while at the same time never losing sight of the concreted thing you’ve picked — the thing you seek to capture and depict, in a language, an idiom, the suits your style.
As in any art we must strive not to let the symbolic meaning take precedence over the literal part, so, too, with poetry we mustn’t let lineation or form take precedence over what the poem is at its heart — by which I mean and am here to shout: don’t let form overshadow what at its basis your poem is all about.
This is why I suggest that initially children not get too caught up in figuring out formal structures, neither trouble too deeply, at first, over the stanza’s typographical shape, the syllable count, epigrams, anapests, Alcaics, Sapphics, dactyls, choriambs (my predilection), nor worry over-much about developing a perfect pentameter and rhyme selection — no: not even superficially. Not at first. Even more than song and metrical stress, which I regard as hierarchically less, let the poet or poetess instead thirst first for clarity and sense. Yes, I say: thirst.
Later, after the heart of the poem is fleshed, after the meat is conditioned and roughly shaped, the main chambers of it basically built, even if it’s only a prototypical shape and form, the line can then be reshaped, restructured, mended, its form and meaning blended. Remove the scaffolding then. Remove the stilts.
I suggest to children, to whom I sometimes have the honor of teaching the subject of literature as an art, that first they focus each and only on writing down their descriptions in sentences as clear as water; that they strive first for precision and clarity while moving like an otter across the whole page or screen, as when they’re writing a letter or an essay or a blog-post or a phone message via text, making every effort, at all times, to fishlike bring their selected subject alive and off the page, not primarily with rhymes, not at first, say I, but with the explosive power of their words, syntax, and word-choices — in short, their brilliant writing voices. They’re encouraged to ask me why.
“Astound me,” say I, “with your boundless imaginations channeled into your writing voices. Stupefy me with the richness of your language and your phrasing. Make it head-shaking, eye-popping, jaw-dropping, hair-raising. Stun me, as with an electrical charge of monster-truck force, by means of your vocabulary — however small or however large your vocabulary isn’t the point since it doesn’t matter in the least. Use the words that you — you, as individuals — grasp and know: ‘the vocabulary cut to the measure of your own mind,’ as Petrarch perfectly put it. Duncan, with your unforgettable sinking sun when seen through passing rain clouds, your ‘sunset sun like an over-ripened esculent raspberry’ — that, my fellow humans, is what I want you to first present. Blind me with your lumens. Forget, for now, the particulars of form, and show me foremost what you meant.”
Because all poems, no matter the age of the poet or poetess, her race or gender or all the blah-blah rest, must pass the following test: the test of being able to stand on its own, whether wobbly or strong, muscular or tender, as both a written and a spoken thing (the one without reference to the other at all), if not quite identically from one form to the next, still essentially the same, whether spoken or in text, whether heard or read, and all by means of the words you have flowing like currents through the circuitry of your head.
Both the written and spoken form must recreate and capture, for the listening audience and the reading audience alike, whatever subject you’ve selected to depict, and not only that — not only what you’ve picked: it must do so intelligibly, in a way the listener or reader can, without too much difficulty, get — and get, furthermore, and perhaps most important of all, with enjoyment and pleasure, both for the reader and also the listening set.
After intelligibility, which is clarity, then metric, meter, measure, song, form — the poem’s other body parts and lovely features, which, unified, make the poem into a complete and living being — should then be integrated. These other things, these other parts and features, are important too, though in a descending hierarchical sort of way, and so it’s vital they be developed and cultivated. Yet the brain comes first. Intelligibility and comprehensibility simply cannot, in my view, be overstated or overrated. I believe that this is true.
As the symbolic meaning must never supersede the literal meaning but always hang there in a kind of ghostly background way, like something glimpsed behind a thinly veiled screen, like a large and hovering cloud-shaped dome, unquestionably there but never quite fully seen, so, too, the form of your poem must not take full precedence over the content of your piece, the meaning at its delicate living heart.
The arrangement and rearrangement of lines, which, to be sure, is itself an art, the unspoken methods of style, the restructuring, the reshuffling of form and rhyme, the logic for why your lines are broken — and broken in the places that they are — yes, this should always be secondary. I’m suggesting it be visible and distinct, yet neither too near nor too far away, a step removed, let us say, but still always there, always near, though as something seen through a silken Chinese fog.
Lineation and rhyme should not become the tail that wags the dog, as I have made it here.
