More often than not I defend the "well made" poem if said poem
has some things going for it , like a solid construction, an ability
focus imagery in a fresh and sparing way that gets across experience and
a sense of the irresolution of one conflicting responses to
situations written about, either past or current, in an execution that
takes one by surprise, leaves you breathless, if only for a second. Like
it or not, those poems, scorned by large sections of the post-avant
gard who write more "difficult" work ( a worthy endeavor provided the
writer has a command of the diffuse material they are trying to deal
with, uh,
diffusely), are themselves not easy to write; one may
speak of technique all they wish, but there is an innate sense, I
believe, of knowing how start, what to build with and, most importantly ,
when too quit, lest one kill a good idea for a poem with the
lack of confidence overwriting suggests. Billy Collins has come in for
his share of jabs and jibes because of the middlebrow accessibility of
his work, he is a poet who has a certain mastery of the everyman voice
who writes poetry "for the rest of us" ; his is a poetry is a body of
work that forces the reader to think about the world they're already
familiar with in new ways.
His is the world of the banal, the small, the incidental, the
vocabulary of twitches and tics , but this remains a realm that needs to
be written about. Collins is the man to equal the challenge in
inspiring a reader to interrogate routines and schedules that guide
their journeys from desk to mailbox and back again. Billy Collins, in
fact, is the perfect "gateway poet"; when I worked at an independent
bookstore for some years in San Diego, several customers over several
years expressed a desire to read something more daring, challenging,
"edgier" than what the former U.S. Poet Laureate was offering. I
navigated them to Thomas Lux, comparable to Collins for clarity and
readability, but darker, more ironic, a poet who explores the unintended
results of one's best efforts to assert their will on the world.
There
are those "well made poems" , however, that strive to hit all the marks
that only make you feel that someone is trying too hard for the lead
role in play they're not suited for; they dance too fast, they sing too
loud, they deliver the monologue without suggesting that they're talking
to another person
."For D" by
Roseanna Warren reads like it were a dull long poem that had been
work shopped down to a dull short one; the striking language is all
that's left, and there is nothing between the odd phrasings to make this
prissy string of worry beads intrigue you. The poem is a dieter who has
lost weight too quickly who finds that absence of flab doesn't mean one
will find a prince or princess emerging from the flab and stretch
marks.
This is one of those poems where you read each line
expecting something to happen at the end of each line, and nothing does.
It's a fussy poem, full of odd and unnatural words placed in positions
where attention becomes focused on the odd sounds the words make rather
than the meaning they may suggest or the unresolved feelings being
sussed through. Euphony is fine, everyone enjoys rich words and
intriguing slang, but there is an expectation that the person writing
the poem should have his or her feet on the ground and have a diction
roughly like ours (slightly heightened, of course, since this is poetry
after all).
The plane whumps down through rainclouds, streaks
of creamy light through cumulus, and, below,
a ruffled scattering, a mattress' innards ripped—
No one talks like this, and no one should be writing poems with
this word choices this precious. Whumps is a word suggesting body
surfing as a lone man or woman braves the water and rides the momentum
of waves coming to crash on a burly shore line, and it also sounds like
the sound a drunk uncle might make against a newborn baby's bare
stomach; Warren wants to suggest a plane's bumpy passage through some
"creamy" clouds , but she makes us think of desert instead of a slow
unnerving as she nears her destination. "Innards" is the kind of word
one actually speaks, but ironically, in an affected voice to soften the
use of a dated colloquialism. The image of seeing a slashed mattress on
the landing approach could have been a dramatic one, a choice
foreshadowing, but "innards" undermines that.
For the rest, the
poem is over arranged, and it occurs to you finally that this reads like
someone preparing their responses and constructing a constipated poetics in advance of the
facts; Tilda Swinton's ruthless character in
Michael Clayton comes
to mind, a nervous corporate crook rehearsing her prepared statements
in the mirror with different tones of voice, eye movements, and
differing tilts of the head. Her character, like this poem, ends badly.
When in doubt, find an unnamed person to talk to and address them as "you" through out your poem, taking care to make sure that this person is deceased . Emphasise the ritual and the props of a funereal send off, imply in tone that you think the prayers being said aloud sound pro forma, unfelt, lifeless as a voice mail entreaty.
