As I consider graduate schools, and whether I have what it takes to make it in or not, I return to a consideration that has been bugging me lately. What has become of poetry? Is it enough nowadays to have some kind of experience and exalt that experience through word placement in verse? A lot of poems read like prose and have the feel of narrative. Because the nature of popular poetry has moved into a realm of self-revelation, there are more and more poems being published that lack any formal use of poetic convention, like simile, metaphor, conceit, personification, metonymy, synechdoche...you get the picture. Now, it's okay to see a sunrise and talk about how many colors there were on that cold winter morning while you pine over lost love and the emptiness that seems to capture the sky. Okay, maybe there is a bit of convention involved in some places, but it seems like the craft of poetry has become more concerned with eliminating the use of articles and stumping the speech with jerky lines of sudden images than with developing a sense of poetic interaction with an object. Maybe it is because our emotions are so limited and shared that poetry has burned out. Maybe it is because there are only so many ways to approach the big themes, and the smaller ones don't seem to have much weight.
The various poetic movements that have arisen through history had a sense of intentional cohesion. If you go postmodern, you are accused of attempting to undermine the establishment. If you mimic other forms, you are accused of being unoriginal. It is a fine line between breathing and spitting. Haiku has a simplicity that transcends the simple. Long modern poetry has a complexity that challenges the ways our minds work. Too many times I have attended poetry readings where we are offered a slight glimpse into a new world, only to find by the end, that it's the same exact world we've been lumbering through already. It's not a matter of seeing anything new as much as it is about establishing relationships. Relationship has replaced technique. I'd prefer to read a rhyming poem set in iambic pentameter about a snail on a stump than I would to read about another person's failed attempt to make things right in a love affair, only to find it never could have been because it wasn't. I understand the necessity of capturing a spontaneous moment, and revising it through a process of subtle contemplation and craft. And if you must reveal your disappointment, please consider something fresh, like conjuring metaphors from stacks of aluminum cans, or how advertising drowns out your voice every time you said "i love you."
I am student of poetry. I embrace the spirit. I see the value of the verse form and how effective it can be when exploring the vastness of life. Yet, the world has filled with self-congratulatory expositions of the creative process. You get into the right circle, then you're guaranteed an audience that will gush over your witticisms and honesty. It's so challenging to get out of our own heads that it seems like it may never occur again. We need a new poetic movement that embraces the passion of the Romantics and slams it into the pastiche of postmodernism. It is not necessary to create something so abstract that you need an inside tip to decipher the riddle. Rather it is a necessity that poetry pushes through its current stagnation. Some people are better teachers of what poetry should be than writers of anything. Some people are so straight-forward that it's impossible to figure out why a work is a poem and not a broken up paragraph.
Maybe I am bitter because I see young poets giving it their all, seeking recognition and being denied because all the journals are filled by fame. Once you have a voice in the world of poetry, you can write about dog food drying on a board, and stop right there. There should be an acknowledgement of something beyond that connects us to other things below. There should be a recognition that transcends the mundane relationship of "oh yeah I've been there too." I want poetry to reveal the mystery, and show me so many different aspects of it. I want poetry to excite me and lead me to an awareness where even the most insignificant event achieves relevance. I want poetry to lead me into the heart of love without pulling me through sentimental sludge.
We've all imagined another way of life other than our own. We've all seen something that has startled us and has taken us out of our own sphere of understanding, even if for a brief moment. We are surrounded by an abundance of potential, and until the voice of mainstream poetry changes, we are going to be stuck with the same old thing about the same old thing.
