Be Brave, Write Clearly

There’s a lot of space within the word “clarity.”  I’m thinking about how poets work for or work against clarity as they write. There’s a certain kind of clarity that seems imperative to me. Here’s something from an article by Matthew Zapruder in The Poet. He’s writing in praise of W.S.Merwin’s The Vixen: “without clarity, it is not possible to have true mystery. By clarity, I mean a sense in the reader that what is being said on the surface of the poem is not a scrim or a veil deliberately hiding some other hidden inaccessible certainty. Clarity for me in poetry is a kind of generosity, a willingness to be together with the reader in the same place of uncertainty, striving for understanding. To give the impression that something important is happening but that the mere reader cannot, without some kind of special, esoteric knowledge, have access to it strikes me as deeply ungenerous, even cruel.”Zapruder says exactly what I would like to have tattooed on young poets’ foreheads, or, rather, on the backs of their hands so they can’t miss it as they type. We can’t have mystery unless we first have clarity. I just finished reading P. D. James’ new mystery, Death Comes to Pymberley, based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. (It’s set in 1803, six years after that novel ends.) I am not a mystery reader, but my husband, who is, introduced me to P. D. James, an elegant writer in any genre. She writes this novel entirely in the spirit, the voice, and the tone of Jane Austen. Now her kind of mystery, of course, isn’t what’s meant by mystery in poetry, but the same principle applies. How could we care, unless we were involved in every move, carefully delineated, the letter flung into the fire, the drunken Wickham being carried in, flailing and staggering, the strange shape of the battered spot on the victim’s skull?I’ve read so many poems by young poets who mistake obfuscation for mystery. (They may, alas, be abetted in this by their teachers). They’re afraid if they just tell it as they see it, they’ll expose their bare, uninteresting, un-poetic selves. They’re afraid. So they leave crucial parts out. To make mystery, so they think. But the result is that there’s no way to care. This is all basic, what I say here, but I feel moved to say it anyway.So, how to talk to students about this? Not all are writing narrative poems. If they were, it might be easier to talk about what’s missing. It seems to be, with all poems, a matter of the poem’s touching base enough to remind us of the world we’re in. If I’m crossing a stream, I have a good time jumping from rock to rock. I feel I’m a vital part of the construction of a route. But if the rocks are too far apart, I fall in.I’m thinking of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” which is lyric, but depends on its narrative thread to hold us to itself. Actually, most poems have a narrative thread of some sort, or our brains invent one for them. We are meaning-making creatures. If I’m thwarted in my attempt to make some sort of meaning, i.e., I can’t figure how to relate to what I’m reading, I turn away. I don’t mind being jolted, jostled, made to gasp, quake, struggle with my confusion, if my effort is rewarded by some insight, some new way to make meaning, something that enriches my understanding.Another metaphor: Invite me in. Leave the door open a crack. I’ll work like hell to get in.Here is a wee poem I wrote that has no narrative. Is it clear? I suppose the poem depends on your following the images—even though most of them are not “real,” but my intent is that you see them in light of an argument-making voice. It’s the argument that’s meant to be clear. Clarity is not just about narrative, and may not involve narrative at all:SkyNot everything is fish-hookedand broken and stabbing, althoughit often seems that way.There’s also a squooshingand sprawling alongthe spine of every daya little likethe small ballyou roll between your back and wall,the breath of air held there,the pure open sky of your own naturesays the Tibetan book.Full disclosure:  I am writing this blog entry because I just finished judging a group of student poems for a national contest. NO! I was crying out, at my desk, no, no, no! I’m tired of this. Just say the truth as you see it.  If a poem begins to come out of that, it’s because you’ve honed your sensibility on your ancestors’ poems, and/or on wonderful contemporary poems, and you’ve absorbed the feeling of how music and meaning can be made. If a poem doesn’t come out of that, then write prose. Write a story, or write your life, or go roller skating. Be brave. Do something genuine. Or go ahead and fail at the poem. We all do.  But fail by laying it all out there, not by hiding everything that really matters to you and asking me to guess what it might be, in the name of poetry.