Yuck

This is awful. And the methodology is even worse when considering how the list and the accompanying article are framed. No offense to the author, who, I think, may be attending that "top" school.

I've met poets from several of the top fifty schools listed, and the training they received varies widely. Not a good list at all to be publishing.

The ugly of poetry starts somewhere in the fact that this list exists from Poets and Writers and the fact that I've just linked to it.

Judging Poetry

Some time ago, trying to sharpen why I did or did not like a poem, I came up with a list of criteria for judging poems:

• linguistic diversity
• development of a theme/idea
• denseness of idea
• denseness of imagery
• abstraction handling
• narrative arc
• importance to my life at the moment
• importance to my study as a poet
• difficulty of reading/understanding the literalness
• presence/adherence to any rhyme scheme
• presence/adherence to stanza forms
• presence/adherence to meter
• presence of outstanding sonic devices
• richness of language suggestion
• surprise at direction of thought
• line break use (as opposed to feeling like the line breaks simply fall where they may)
• attention to inherently interesting ideas
• use of regular or twisted syntax
• impressionistic versus deliberation
• metaphor extension or cleverness
• allusion

There must be more criteria, surely. Or fewer? I know most editors and poets I know take the stance of Justice Stewart's description of pornography, "I know it when I see it," when judging what is fantastic.

Or do I? Perhaps this list will engage some commentary at some time. And perhaps someone will use it and see if it helps them articulate a a particular poem's value.

If I could predict what I want, I would want a discussion as to what criteria seem more important than others, what criteria are missing, and what these criteria mean. Is such a list a good thing or should we stumble blind and happy?

Absence and Mystery

Turchi block quotes Gluck:

All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.

This passage in the context of blank spaces on maps, of writers choosing some moments to deliver in a story over others, of poets maintaining a constant relationship with that blank space.

Is writing companion poems, or poems that, as I've heard from time to time, "speak to each other," one way of attempting to make something unified in the face of blank space that we all must negotiate on the page? I wonder, too, if information about a writer that is extracurricular to a poem fills in so much blank space for poets in this highly connected, avatar-loving internet virtuosity we've got going here. Does a book of poems attempt this negotiation better or in a different way from a poem found in a journal or online?

Absences and Presences

More Peter Turchi. Oh, so tricky:

. . . a return to practical mapping . . . eventually led Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville to take a radical stance, renouncing decorations [in maps], and leaving blanks in their stead: "To destroy false notions, without even going any further, is one of the ways to advance knowledge." (36)

And then, a little later:

Thanks to Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville and his colleagues, a blank on a map became a symbol of rigorous standards; the presence of absences lent authority to all on the map that was unblank. (37)

Reminds me of heady discussions in a Derrida seminar I once imbibed. There's also something to be said regarding poetry aesthetics here, but I'm just not sure. Perhaps the line break or an ability to spread words, to create stanza spaces or push words to different spaces separated by more space, lends an authority to the words themselves, as if, perhaps, the remaining "unblanks" carry more consideration than if the page were full (as in prose?).

Even the offset of a block quote gains authority, yes? Rigorous standards and all.

Catch it in the air

Been a long time between last post and this one. I always go back and forth about posting/not posting/what to include/what is simply silly. So the blog was paralyzed.

Been poking around in a book called Maps of the Imagination: the Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi. Interesting moment from it:

Having 'the technique' -- the means, or the ability, to get from here to there -- is always, and has always been, the issue. The need to find methods of expression led to speech, to drawing, to maps ("Here's how you get there"), and to writing. (18)

Although it seems that technique is so one-way in the statement there, i.e., vision precedes the technique or "I have something I see" precedes bending the technique to manifest that vision, don't worry. He acknowledges that the vision of the artist can emerge from the exploration, too. But it's perhaps a useful statement of what craft, maybe, is, in terms of poetry?

More importantly, what would "craft" entail with poetry? Being able to type? Being able to make associational leaps that still manage to be logical? To mind the gap on the right side of the page? To create a context around a given work for others to enjoy? To create a metaphor, a map, a journey?