Poetitudes cont.

So what makes a poem "good?" Well, first it's important to understand what a poem is. Poetry does not communicate. Poetry does not transmit ideas or feelings about the world. Poetry is the very stuff of reality itself. Suggesting that poetry communicates feelings or ideas or experiences is like suggesting that I communicate Devon.

How does understanding this affect a poet and the process of writing? First, it (hopefully) releases the poem from the obligation of "telling" and allows it to "be." Therefore, the poet is freed from the preconceptions of what the poem is about or what it is for, and they can exercise their artistic skill in many more various directions.

Secondly, it is instructive about how to craft a poem. Poetry doesn't transmit ideas or feelings. If there are to be feelings or ideas aroused in the reader, the poem cannot serve as a device to pass them from the poet to the reader. The poem must create these feelings and ideas inside the reader, organically. There are a number of ways to do this, but the simplest, often the most effective, and also (I contend) the most fun, is through imagery.

A poem should explode in your mind when you read it. It should burst with colors and sounds and temperature and heartache. This turns the reader from someone reading about an experience to someone living it. Remember – there is no meaningful distinction between reality and poetry. How can it do this? It's important to avoid what I call "grey words" or "blank words." These are words and phrases that fail to light up the mind. They're only words, things like "confused" or "feeling whole" or "good music." These are telling words – they come from the poet, telling the reader about something, but giving them nothing to hold on to.

Images serve as hooks for the mind, making it pause and linger over a passage to savor it and see it. I know when I read a piece with a lot of blank words my eyes sort of slide down the poem and when I pause I realize I can't remember anything about it. It ends up being a real effort to read – and you don't want people to have to really try just to read your stuff. Maybe to analyze it, pick it apart, but they should be able to read it and feel it in their mind with relative ease.

"Put in more images." Almost every time someone asks me to read their stuff this is my advice. "Dump your ideas and put in images." Don't describe your feeling – search around in your mind or heart or wherever poetry comes from and find something that is your feeling. Something that will make you have that feeling every time you read it. Most of the time a poem can't be great on just images alone. But if it's chock full of them – good ones, of course – it can't possibly be terrible.

There are times to scale back and do other things, but whenever someone starts to feel dissatisfied with their work, or that they feel like it's not ringing true, or what have you, the first thing they should do is think, "Where do I have ideas without images? Why? Can I change that?" When they edit they need to be ready for their poem to change – the point is not for your ideas to be communicated, the point is for the poem to approach perfection.

There's plenty more I could talk about re: writing poetry and crafting poems, but that starts to get more particular and less accessible (sometimes). I'll probably end up writing more about it, but this is the big stuff.

On the Overcast Nights

On the overcast nights—
orange fog above the Bay,
sodium glow from streets
bent under the clouds
like a broken compass rose;
on the overcast nights—
when street people toss
and turn on their concrete or grass,
murmuring half-dreams
in the ruddy twilight;
on the overcast nights I
stare out on the cities
staining the sky with their
electrical fire, and I wonder
at the darkness that I
managed to clutch
with you, when we sat beneath our own
chemical glimmer,
and the yellowish mist
was burning.