I was looking through blogs/Instagram posts about poetry/writing poetry, to make a list for my upcoming writing retreat participants. The Instagram poems--some aren’t so bad! Or you can get AI to write you a poem. Or you can “generate” a poem using all sorts of step-by-step prompts. “Generate”? I have a vision of huge huffing machine, Oompa Loompas turning a crank, spitting out poems at the top.
So, the poem spits out the top. I ask you, what’s the point? What are you after? Something that looks like a poem on the page? That’s easy enough. Put a bunch of words down and shorten the margin. Isn’t that simply performance, isn’t it inauthentic? We writers, when we were young, probably started this way, performing, (“Look teacher/mother, I wrote a poem!”) but one hopes we got past it.
I’d say way down at the root of the poem is intention. And how can I know the intention of the writer? All I can do is read the poem, see what sort of real life it has in it, what earnestness.
What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
--Wiliam Blake
I have always taken Blake to mean we don’t have to see all of what we desire (in a poem, in a person). The outline will do, the lineaments of it. Words can only go so far toward saying what we mean, anyway.
Judging poems! I’m kind of done with that. Every day I read the few I’ve asked to show up in my inbox. Some I admire, some not. So what?
I am done with judgment. Admire is one thing; judge is another.
I’m reading the biography of the first celebrated Black woman poet in America, Phyllis Wheatley. When she was seven, she was brought from Africa a slave, but managed, via her intelligence and her benevolent owners, to learn to read and write. Her poems are of the eighteenth century—stiff, formal, always praising someone, including God, but you can see her increasing dexterity of language over the years.
When I say her poems are of the eighteenth century, I mean they’re stiff, contained in form and rhyme, very public—praising George Washington, the evangelist George Whitefield, the Earl of Dartmouth, and others. I don’t “like” them, because they don’t speak to my generation, my sensibilities, but I admire them because they show dexterity of language, inventiveness, and sincerity.
If you want to see the great pumpkin, says Charlie Brown, you have to be sincere. You may be laughed at out there in the pumpkin patch all night, wrapped up in your blanket, waiting, but that’s what it takes.
I’ve read a lot of insincere poems. And prose. By that I mean the work has an imitative quality. It’s trying to Be something. It doesn’t come from the heart. How do I know? I don’t. It’s a feeling I have. Just like with people. You can sense insincerity. Fake people. Fake language. Fake emotions.
Fake language doesn’t necessarily mean lying language, although it might mean that. By fake language, I mean the words are somehow removed from the true heart of the speaker. All about ego. Look how compassionate I am, how smart, how poetic I am that I can say these things.
We can sense the fake if we’ve read a lot and practiced a lot. In the real, birds fly out of the poem’s mouth, unbidden.
I’m rambling. My sinuses are miserable, I’m living today on DayQuil, the weather stays dank. The only possible reason I can think that you’d want to read this blog is just to see how someone else’s mind works, how it dips and swerves, how it’s alternately dull and smart. It should be an inspiration to you—the alternative to Facebook, where everyone has just won an award or published a book or a poem. In this blog, I am stumbling along, never knowing what to say next. Doesn’t that make you feel better? At least it’s authentic.