The first time I read Frank O’Hara’s poetry, I felt all the old “rules” I had learned in school dissipate and blow away. In “Lines for Fortune Cookies,” I read again, “In the beginning there was YOU—there will always be YOU, I guess.” That casual, sardonic “I guess” at the end of O’Hara’s line reminds me of Billy Collins’ work today. Collins has become somewhat (another one of those casual, sardonic words) the people’s poet in the sense that his work is accessible, humorous, and nearly universally relatable.
I receive a great number of literary magazines in the mail, a fault of subscribing to and buying poetry, as well as attending events where they get your address. Invariably, I open one of the books arriving through the mails and don’t recognize the words across the page as poetry on first reading. Sometimes, the words appear exactly like prose except the lines are divided and not presented in paragraph form. Dialogue, transgressive words and phrases, strange alignments of strings of seemingly indifferent words across two pages, subject matter that is nothing if not low art—all of it pointing to the fact that poetry is in the eye of the beholder, or not. I read a poem in a respected poet’s new book that consisted of just one word repeated all over the page in various formations and no formation at all. It did give me pause.
I can’t help but appreciate the freedom for writers, for poets to create in any way they wish. I should be worried that all this dispensing with any kind of training, any appreciation of the past or form becomes reductive, but I’m not. I like the democracy of the idea that anyone can be a poet. Maybe not a “good poet,” (whatever that means) but a poet, nevertheless, playing with words, with our language and other languages, too.
I still approach a poem hoping it to “mean,” however. I want to come away with something, a thought or just an agitation to stir the mind if not the heart, but I remember, this configuration of words on the page may stir another mind, may bring ideation to that other reader.
I know that young students quickly tire of the poems they are assigned in school, many never to return to the genre because of its apparent restrictions. I continue to love the Oulipo-style of Italo Calvino prose/poetry that moved within these strange constraints, but I also love the muscular defiance of Morgan Parker’s poetry. I am moved by the righteous anger behind the beat in Hanif Abdurraqib’s “The Prestige.” But experimentation in American poetry and poetry world-wide is nothing new. Aram Saroyan caused quite a stir in the 1960s and a huge debate over funding for poets from the National Endowment for the Arts with his one-word poem “lighght.” It won all kinds of awards.
When lyric poetry divorced itself from its ancient and classical roots, its myth-building and dramatic forms, it was as if poetry finally found a way out of a confining marriage. Moving on a few hundred years, early Twitter poems became a temporary sensation back when Twitter was a medium for instant communication and not a political agenda under X.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” was radical for its time, erudite and difficult for most casual readers of poetry, but Hope Mirrlees’ “Paris: A Poem” makes even “The Wasteland” look too formal as she shed her outer garments. Most people have at least a passing familiarity with E.E. Cummings dispensing with capital letters.
All that freedom to create, however, comes with a downside: how to create something that still feels new? Best not to worry about innovation and just write. See where it goes, where the words take you.
Take one word and follow it through its liberation
from you—not to its conclusion but to its release.
Oh, the timing of this! I was just asked by a fellow substacker about the rhythms of my most recent poem and the honest answer was that I am too undisciplined a writer, and that I feel my way through a poem - rather than contain it to a classical structure. Then I read this and it felt like PERMISSION for just that! Very cool synchronicity, Nancy. Thank you!