Toward a disunified untheory of poetry
I think it was in second grade that I was first formally taught about poetry. Poetry, I learned was something that was written in lines that rhymed at the end. That was the major part of it. If it didn’t rhyme, it wasn’t poetry. Imagine my suspicion when I learned later that same school year that this wasn’t at all true: poetry could also be haiku, and that had nothing to do with rhyming.
Okay, so, rhymes or particular syllable counts. Got it. Except, of course, no. Sometimes you need both, as in a sonnet. Sometimes you need a particular pattern of end words or repeating lines or sometimes you need none of that at all. Poetry is a lot wider than these easy, narrow definitions suggested.
So you would have thought that I would have learned my lesson and not been tempted the other day to assert that I tended to like short poems better than longer poems, and that the reason for that was that short poems tended to be more precise in their use of language, which is a characteristic that I prize in poetry.
Almost no sooner than I had proclaimed this ridiculousness, I began offering caveats. I didn’t mean that I didn’t like epic poetry, of course. Or that I disliked long poetry generally (“Kat, The Waste Land is one of your favorite poems, have you completely lost your brain?” the unfortunate recipient of this half-baked nonsense kindly did not say.) And maybe, I wondered, my theory had more to do with the recently read sample, as this reckless theorizing had been prompted by a string of disliked poems sent to me by one of the Poem-a-Day emails that I subscribe to. Maybe I just have different taste than that editor. It’s also true that length has nothing to do with precision in language (that, I do still feel confident asserting my fondness for) - short poems can be lazy and unfocused and long poems can be rigorously edited.
Somewhere in the growing cascade of caveats as I unpicked my own theory, I I began to feel like the teacher who comes in at the end of Dead Poets Society and attempts to return to the calculation of poetic greatness by plotting on a graph. Narrow-mindedly ridiculous, and not like someone who loves poetry for its surprises and strangeness as much as she loves it for its linguistic sharpness.
I think it is normal to want categories – here is a thing I will like, here is a thing I will not. Or definitions: here is what this thing is. This other thing is not it. I also think (there she goes, theorizing again) that it is easy to become ridiculous in our ways of categorizing and defining.
I’ve noticed in prose a tendency to create increasing categories and subgenres, and it’s a trend I firmly dislike. I understand the bookstore issue of where to shelve things, but after a while, I think the narrowing specificity of categories risks turning us all into people plotting the elements of literature on a graph. Too much of a checklist means we miss the exceptions, we miss the surprises, we miss the things that might well have delighted us had we only kept the door open wide enough to allow them in. And I’m pretty sure that’s unpoetic.