Obviously in-process, last updated 5/11/07 (place, particularly in a poem by Plath). The more I write, the more I think my thoughts say more about myself as reader/editor than about artistry; the poems that I've published (and quoted) say more about artistry--a term that seems to me to fuse "art" and "craft" in more of an action sense, fusing the inspiration, imagination, passion, attention, serendipity of the creative process with the critical deliberateness, devices and techniques in the sculpting of the poem. But at the same time, the more I write the more I think it's futile to ask an editor what he's (in this case) "looking for." It's somewhat like asking a poet "where that poem came from." But unfortunately I sometimes enjoy thinking about artistry, so I'll continue. I'll try to keep in mind my main purpose of maybe suggesting something of my editorial biases, e.g. in my choice of examples, and maybe furthermore I'll say something that is helpful in some way to someone.E-mail comments welcomed: Tom. There's no reason to think that everything I say below is accurate; and of course more can be said. If I receive a comment that I think readers would like to see, I'll post it.
And I have, myself, struggled with these things, sometmes painfully and not always successfully. "But you gotta try," as the poet said.
But these are just a few, fairly simple-minded, thoughts about where I'm coming from, regarding artistry (and the role of art).
[Note: this was becoming too long for scroll-down, so I've turned some of the topics into links to their own pages.]
What makes a poem important might be subject matter, or other discursive or emotive content--a topic that could not formerly be written about, or has not been written about, a well observed nuance, a new idea or insight into an old matter. I think that such content is important to the art as a whole, because the art of poetry must be engaged with what is happening to humanity at the moment; but it is not, in itself, crucial to the making of an effective poem. It seems to me that because our experience of a poem is imaginative, and aesthetically verbal, the essential feature of an effective poem is verbal artistry that enlivens a reader's imagination.
One way of talking about it is to say that poetic artistry produces, to borrow from Pound, an apparition. We begin to read--we open a door--and something appears, like Stevens's "necessary angel" in the doorway. Something comes to us, that we had not "seen" before, would not have seen had we never read the poem, but see again each time we read the poem (well). [[What is it? I don't know. It is the poem. Can it be something separate from the poem? I guess I'm inclined to think not, just as I'm inclined to think that nothing is separate from "matter." Ugh, as Creely says, in a poem. But thoughts like these make part of what I am, as an editor--part of my imagination, aesthetics, taste.]] It appears to our imagination. It is an intense imagination (of some part, large or small) of life.
So whatever its topic or its emotive or discursive content, our poem must cause an intense, aesthetic imagination to happen in our willing reader. We accomplish this through our making with words (and doing to words) by means of (most of the time--there are effective exceptions) structure, metaphor, image, rhythm, and/or other devices. Of course there are thousands of fine examples, and everybody has their own favorites, but by way of illustration the following are a few of my favorites, which I hope will concretely explain what's going on in my editorial mind.
physicality
I'm afraid that, even for our 13-33-year-olds, the body is still severely underrated in our culture. But the word "aesthetic" is rooted in classsical Greek physicality, and the body is still a prime actor in the artistic imagination and creative process--for both artist and audience. A painting is created by (not just by means of) the skeleton, muscles, and accompanying nerve fibres, electrified; and that act is re-created in the body of a good, tuned-in turned-on viewer. The same is true in dance, more obviously, and in poetry, less obviously (see e.g. Burnshaw, The Seamless Web). An effective poem engages, activates, the reader's body.
Emily Dickinson [my most favorite poet] was a World Class religious writer, and at the same time one of the most physical of writers (along with Whitman and Hopkins, for instance). For the physical without the religious: "I started early, took my dog" [if we don't have a strong bodily imaginative experience of the rising of the water--D (as speaker) feels/dreams water to the point of becoming water, a dewdrop--we're not reading well, and we'll miss both the rising tension and the releaf when the tide recedes] or "A narrow fellow in the grass" etc etc. To read Dickinson without one's body's participation is even worse than drinking chocolate milk with no taste buds.
voice
Listen in any situation in which emotion is strong and it is easy to hear the importance of the human voice. And yet the voices that I hear in many poems that are submitted can, at most, be characterized as "flat affect" (a subcategory of which is "cliched literary").
One way to energize the voice of a poem is to have an identifiable person, character, speaking--to another person in the poem, as in a dramatic monologue (e.g. Browning's "My Last Duchess") or, similarly, to an unknown listener (e.g. Robinson's "Cliff Klingenhagen", in which the listener is essentially the reader but seems as though it's some fellow townsman; or Frost's "Two Tramps in Mudtime", someone who could be a fellow farmer but seems more conventionally "the reader"--or literally the listener when Frost was "saying" a poem to an audience. Frost, of course, illustrates the way a poet can be re-created into a "persona," an imaginatively recognizeable character whose voice is heard strongly and enjoyably in many poems. Another was Whitman before him. Storytelling in a poem such as "Two Tramps" can produce the energizing characteristics of a speaking voice.
We might think of the beginnings of the "literary" voice in today's poetry in the English language with, for instance, the voice of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder that his friends at court heard (I imagine) when they read the first stanza of the poem that he had penned:
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.It was a good voice [see also below, line] and it caught on, until we can hear it in poems written at the computer by poets who are not courtiers and don't entertain in chambers. But the traditional literary voice need not go flat, if it is saying something interesting, heart-felt, in an interesting way (e.g. Robinson, "For a Dead Lady", which fuses musicality and discursive content, in a 1910 take on the mutability theme). E. E. Cummings's variations on this Elizabethan voice are an ingredient in the charming musicality of his poems, and help set off his experimentation in his sonnets; but I do think that this voice is now much less likely to make for a effective poem.
pattern no commentary yet
musicality, rhythm, rhyme and other echoes
I'm an editor who thinks that musicality is important (though not sine qua non for every poem) and who thinks that a lot of poems being written these days suffer from lack of attention to it. Free verse, for instance, is no excuse for flat-affect-in-music.
simile and metaphor
Pound called poetry “language charged with energy.” A major source of the energy is the emotions, and the charging can get done by means of effective perception of likeness, given us in a simile or metaphor.
Try living in a world in which nothing is in any way like anything else—i.e. obviously our world is not that way. In our world, including conversations and poems, things are “like” other things. Thus our world can be patterned. And thus, especially given our symbolic kind of language, likenesses, presented in the form of simile or metaphor, can stimulate and express a third content, not present in either thing alone—sometimes in ways that are especially meaningful, useful in perceiving and communicating meaning in addition to the facts of the things and their similar traits. I’ve read in one of the books about Zen, that in rational perspective we can see that A is not B; and knowledge of this fact is useful. But we cannot fully understand the meaning of A is not B until we know that A is B, also useful. But we cannot fully know the meaning of A is B until we know that A both is and is not B. I take it that metaphor is one of the demonstrations of, and uses of, that last fact. But there’s no cause for alarm. We’re just imagining. Or as David Bowie put it, “Don’t get me wrong, I’m only dancing.” I take it that the human brain grooves on the perception of simultaneous likeness and unlikeness. That’s one perspective on the poet’s “negative capability” that Keats told us the supreme value of.
Simile and metaphor are two ways of using words to invite the reader to join the dance.
[I’m going to make some observations, with a few examples, about how similes and metaphors work. You probably already know about that, in which case, skip, if you wish, the next many paragraphs—although they do give some idea of what I’m “looking for” as an editor.]
word choice, and pleasure e.g.,
"Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his paws" instead of "claws" (Stevens)
"Petals on a wet, black twig" (limb, stick) instead of "bough" (Pound)Creeley's "Ugh"--but is there another successful use of that word? (Not a big deal, but interesting.)
interplay of arts