Against Self-Expression

If you search for images of "self-expression" on Google, you'll get a collage of photos that are going to look like this. I could think of no better way of showing exactly what I mean when I talk about--and criticize--self-expression. 

The irony here is that in all of this so-called self-expression, the results are almost universally identical. It's all a miss-mash, with lots of color. What this suggests is that everyone's self-expression is like everyone else's self-expression. And what does that mean for either the self or it's expression? It means you're just like everyone else if this is what self-expression looks like. And that's precisely the problem with self-expression as art. It isn't art. It isn't even, as one of the pictures suggests, self-love. Love is always of a particular thing or person, and if there's anything this example of self-expression is not, it's particular. 

 With that kind of introduction, it's probably not surprising that I would say that perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to poetry was the emergence of the cult of self-expression. Although one can find this cult at play in the other arts, it seems to have hit poetry the hardest, and ruined several generations of poets. 

Of course, the opposite end of this is the kind of academic poetry that is only produced in university English departments, only read by other academic poets, and only commented upon by academics trying to get scholarly papers published--a task made easier when one is dealing with "difficult" poetry. 

Karl Popper once defined true artists as those who are attempting to work out artistic ideas and problems--which is to say, those related to myth, structures, traditions, etc., in light of changing social conditions in which the artists are working. It is an evolutionary process, and it always is in touch with what came before it. 

Certainly, one could argue that contemporary academic poetry is doing precisely that. However, the avant-garde, as the academic poets fancy themselves to be, pride themselves in making radical breaks with the past. This is, of course, unlikely to be literally true, in much the same way that the surrealists never really allowed their "automatic writing" to go unaltered (a simple example: what are "automatic" line-breaks?). 

The real problem with what I'm calling academic poetry is that it, much like academic art in general, is created after the "artist's statement" is created--even if it's created only in the artist's head. This is in part the fault of most of our artists having become academic artists because they first passed through university classes. 

The funny thing, though, is that the undergrad poetry writing classes all tend to encourage "self-expression." The professors don't want you to stifle your self-expression by using form or any kind of constraint. In the meantime, many of them are writing poetry most of their students wouldn't understand. As the creative writers move into grad school, those who are writing more academic poetry tend to get more encouragement while the self-expression poets get left by the wayside. 

One of the main problems with self-expression poetry--and the reason it gets left by the wayside, and why most such poets eventually stop writing--is that there is really only so much self to express. Most people are like most other people. And really, almost nobody has anything particularly interesting to say--and if you do have something interesting to say, it's likely going to be said in a few poems, a few short stories. And then, you'll be done. 

While the academic poets do seemingly at least try to work out some kind of artistic problem, the problem they have is that they don't produce anything anyone wants to read. Not even the academics writing scholarly papers on today's academic art aren't interested in it. They just need to publish, and it's easier to publish something on a work that is contemporary and difficult and, therefore, hasn't been touched by anyone else, than it is to try to say something new about Shakespeare's sonnets, for example. 

This would seem to put us in a quandary. If self-expression doesn't create lasting art or artists, and academic poetry isn't going to be read by anyone, when where does that leave us? 

Fortunately, these are not the only options.

Another way forward is to first abandon self-expression as self-centered, narcissistic, and indulgent; then, we need to familiarize ourselves with the global traditions, become global classicists, and familiarize ourselves with the world's myths, poetic structures, and forms. We must keep in mind, though, that postmodern academic art is now part of that tradition. It was at least participating in the art of poetry in the Popperian sense, even if it sent itself into abject unpopularity due to the direction the poets went with it. However, to move forward, we have to bring things back to foundations, writing works that people would actually want to read, because they tap into the brain's love or rhythms, sounds/music, and archetypal imagery. Challenge, yes--but do so from a place of familiarity. 

None of this is to say that you will no longer appear in your poetry. How is that even possible? Your poetry is necessarily going to reflect your world view, your attitudes, your fundamental beliefs, your passions, and so on. How can they not? Just don't make the mistake of either thinking that your art is all about you, and do not think your poetry is going to change the world because you're undermining capitalism by subverting grammar or some such nonsense. You're not. That's not how poetry works. Its power is elsewhere. 

Remember, the Muses are the daughters of memory and inspiration, of what your brain retained of external knowledge, and the way your brain unconsciously processed that knowledge through your emotions. The "you," the "self" that is being expressed is in that unconscious processing leading to inspiration. It's not vomiting your emotions onto the page. Indeed, self-expression is the subversion of poetry to your emotions, ideas, and thoughts rather than entering into a dialogue with the world's other poets, and your audience. You have  to love the art enough that you want to serve it rather than make it serve you. And that means entering into the global history of poetry, bringing not just yourself, but your contemporary society, culture, and knowledge with you.

Cacophony and Beauty

 Cacophony in poetry is the unpleasant combination of pleasant and unpleasant sounds (1). Dissonance--unpleasant sounds--is typically created when you use a lot of hard consonants. Euphony is created when you have combinations of soft consonants and vowels, making pleasant sounds. 

For example, if we take a stanza from my poem "Barren Desert Cliffs," we will see a degree of cacophony:

Go swing, swallows--sudden arcs up in the sky,

Away, cliffs with nests they hid from wind--They fly,

They dip, fly up, eating insects in the dry,

Barren desert cliffs.

Euphonic words: swing, swallows, sudden, away, with, they, nests, hid, from, wind, fly, in, the

Dissonant words: Go, arcs, up, sky, cliffs, dip, eating, insects, dry, barren, desert, cliffs

Note that the final five-syllable line is all dissonance. My intention here was to create the starkness of the desert's barrenness and the sharpness of the cliffs. In the rest of the poem, there's a violence in the eating, there's a crunchiness in insects (not just in the eating, but in their exterior hardness); arcs and dips are sudden, and suddenness is, metaphorically, sharp. There's a lot of unpleasantness and surprises going on. 

However, this is all contrasted with the softness of the swallows, which swing and have nests hidden from the wind. The swallows are beautiful and pleasant, the nests are delicate, the wind--though dangerous to the nests--is nevertheless a relief in the desert and a way for the swallows to fly and feed. 

This stanza (and the poem as a whole) never settles on either dissonance or euphony, though any given stanza may be more euphonious or more dissonant than the others. 

Does this in fact make the stanza--or the entire poem--a cacophony? Perhaps, to a certain degree. If your purpose is to create a sense of chaos, then cacophony is a way to create that sense.

This effect of sounds--hard dissonance and soft euphony--is an example of embodied metaphors (a topic discussed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By*). Hard consonants are obviously not literally "hard" or "sharp," but we certainly seem to understand what is meant by using those terms. Yet, "hard sounds" or "hard consonants" seem to have a "pointedness" to them; they seem less "giving." Equally, and oppositely, the "soft consonants" and the vowels seem much more "giving," in the same way that a pillow is giving. 

We use the same metaphors in the visual arts. There are "hard colors" and "soft colors," "hard lines" (straight lines and corners) and "soft lines" (curves). If I were to say that Monet's paintings were "soft" and that Picasso's cubist paintings were "hard," you would understand exactly what I'm talking about. 

But surely not everything with a combination of hard and soft sounds (or colors/shapes) create cacophony. We typically think of a cacophony as equivalent to dissonance, but we're trying to come to an understanding of its use in poetry, and are thus using it in a more specialized form. We can rather think of cacophony as the opposite of beauty. But it's an opposite that uses the same tools. The question is really whether you are creating increased tension with your contrast between hard and soft sounds or if you are trying to create something beautiful through the creation and release of those same kinds of tensions. 

Beauty, then is something akin to having a piece with resolution, to the raising of tension and resolving it through a catharsis (as Aristotle said tragedy is to do). Whether one is simply raising tensions or raising and resolving tensions is what makes the difference between cacophony and beauty (think of the end of "A Day in the Life" by The Beatles, with and without the final piano chord--without it, the song ends on cacophony; with it, the piece ends as beautiful). 

Both beauty and cacophony can be used in your poetry, though obviously with different effects. What may be surprising, though, is the relationship between the two, that the two are not entirely unrelated. Indeed, sometimes what appears to be cacophony one time may sound harmonious another--as sometimes happens when someone hears "foreign" music for the first time, but then grows used to it over time. Remember that sometimes, your audience has to grow to appreciate new sounds in poetry. 

Footnotes:

1. Here, I am using the definition used by Lewis Turco in The Book of Forms*, rather than how it's used here, in an article by Robert Longley--I, following Turco, am using "dissonance" where Longley uses "cacophony." 

Defining the Undefined We Know

 

We forget that poetry had its origin in song. The Iliad and The Odyssey were sung (can you imagine memorizing those songs?). The Greek tragedies were sung. So rock music, blues, etc. are much more originary in their poetry than what we now consider to be poetry is. 

Unless you understand what poetry is and its history, nobody should take you seriously as a poet -- least of all yourself. In the same way that if you can't draw a picture of something someone could clearly and obviously recognize, you're not an artist no matter how much paint you fling around, if you can't write a sonnet or some Sapphic verse, you're not a poet. Artists have to know the history of their art if they're ever going to be worth anything. Even such Modern poets like Ezra Pound, who famously said, "make it new," understood that. So has any poet that has ever lasted. Walt Whitman didn't write free verse because he couldn't write a sonnet (which seems to be the case with too many poets these days), but rather he wrote in free verse because, having mastered the forms, he wanted to push poetry into new territory. As an artist, if you don't know where you came from, you are lost. The fact that poetry has its origin in song is vital to understanding poetry at all and thus to making poetry worth reading. In the same way, it's important to understand that your egg came from a chicken if your plan is to make more chickens. But it doesn't matter what animal an egg comes from if you're going to mess it up, break it down, and chew it up -- the end result is crap. I still prefer chicken eggs, though.

So, what is poetry? How can we identify it? Can we talk about its essence? You should at least have read a sufficient amount of what has been identified as poetry -- both past and present -- to have created some sort of concept, even if you can't create a scientifically acceptable definition of poetry. How else will you be able to tell the difference between poetry and prose? I've read poetic prose and read prose broken up into lines. If you can't sing it or dance to it, it's probably not poetry. A lot of prose has been mistakenly called poetry -- but if we call everything poetry, then poetry indeed has no meaning or definition.

The issue of definitions goes back to Socrates (and likely before). Remember that Socrates was always asking experts to define the thing they were expert in. Every time he would do so, he would find them giving him examples of, say, justice or piety or love, but they could never define the thing itself, which Plato developed into a theory that such Ideas or Forms were external to the world, which was just a poor set of shadows of the real. Nietzsche observed that we create ideas or concepts by looking at a set of unidentical similar objects and subtracting away the dissimilarities. Wittgenstein observed that this results in objects being able to be conceived and reconceived due to "family resemblances." A shoe is not a hammer, but it can be used as a hammer, so when you reconceive of a shoe as a hammer, you are saying it has a family resemblance to hammers.

All of this is to say that if we are trying to come up with the Platonic Form of poetry, we will never succeed, since such a form does not exist. However, we should be able to look at a sufficient number of poems and be able to work out their family resemblances. Along those lines, whatever your definition of poetry is is going to be a good start. Can we add to it? Subtract from it? The use of tradition as a criteria (I think one should have that as a criteria in the arts) suggests that we should put quite a bit of weight on past "verbal happenings." If we look at poetry around the world, such works have repeated structures (whether rhythm, rhymes, parallelism, etc.) and are broken up into lines that take optimally 3 seconds to speak -- not coincidentally, our short term memory works best in 3 second chunks. These are typical, but are they necessary?

Let's also return to the issue of song and poetry. There is no question that poetry began as song -- but there is equally no question that there was a bifurcation, resulting in the two traveling down somewhat different (though periodically intersecting) paths. Where does one draw the line? Many poems can be sung -- does that make them songs? I have sung my daughter's Dr. Seuss books to her (had to throw some variety in, since I read her the same books every single day), but I don't think Dr. Seuss intended his books to be sung. I suppose we could look at songs as "low art" vs. the "high art" of poetry -- especially modernist and postmodernist poetry, which is read (and sometimes enjoyed) almost exclusively by overeducated people like me -- but I don't like such distinctions, as it creates an unnecessary bifurcation in the art. A great work of art is one where anyone can enjoy it, but the more you know, the more you appreciate the work, one where repeated readings/viewings/listenings result in your coming to understand the work more and more. Perhaps by reconsidering song as poetry and consciously including it in the tradition, we will come to a better understanding of what poetry is, and become better poets ourselves.

Alienation and Hating Poetry

*

In The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner, a poet himself, makes the argument that people hate poetry because 1) they think that just because they are a language-using human, they ought to be poets themselves, and 2) actual poetry fails to live up to our ideal of Poetry. 

My gut reaction was that this was utter nonsense. However, I came to realize that there are a few other fields in which this is true. Take economics. Everyone thinks they ought to be able to make pronouncements about economist just because they are human beings, we buy and sell in the marketplace, we work, and so on. We make value judgments about people's behaviors, often envy those who are better off than us, and typically believe actual economies fail to live up to our ideal Economy. As a result, most people hate economics and economists. 

I would add to this psychology, sociology, and political science. 

At the same time, there are a number of areas where people don't make this same mistake: math, physics, chemistry, biology, and even many of the other arts, including sculpture and painting (though some Modernist and postmodern works have people saying, "I could have done that" or "My three year old could have done that"), music and acting are typically things we don't think we can do without some degree of expertise.

Why is it that people who don't read poetry and don't like poetry feel a need to express an opinion about poetry when those same people wouldn't do the same thing about recent publications in mathematics? It seems there are a set of things people do that others seem to hold in contempt because they fancy themselves able to do them, while there is another set of things people seem to admire (or at least not hold in contempt) simply because they know they couldn't possibly do them.

The reason people don't like poetry may have something to do with the fact that everyone thinks they can do it, and that bumps up against what actual poets are doing. Much like economists--everyone thinks they understand the economy, and they get mad when an economist comes along and tells them they're wrong about how they think the economy works. There is a disconnect between what the person thinks they can do and what the experts in fact do, between what the experts understand and what the average person understands. 

Why, then, do people who hate poetry love songs? After all, isn't a song really just a poem? Of course. But songs are more directly tied into music, and only rarely are songs constructed such that they are as complex as many poems often are. More, they are heard rather than read, and reading is a difficult cognitive process which we can only do because the brain itself reconstructs itself--certain parts of itself are already designed for other things--in order to be able to read. Then, what is read has to be passed through this section of the brain before it is sent to the language portions of the brain. The musical element poetry (when present) is suppressed relative to songs, so poems are neither really read nor sung while, at the same time, both read and sung. 

We can look at this in another way, by comparing Shakespeare read and Shakespeare viewed/heard. The same people who find Shakespeare "boring" when they read him are excited watching a play (or film). The same things that bore them when they read Shakespeare move them to fear or laughter or tears when they watch the play performed and hear the words spoken. Why is it boring when read and not boring when viewed (ignoring those who still find it boring when viewed, since other issues may be at play there--I am only interested in the disconnect between the attitudes of reading vs. hearing/viewing). This would point to my suggestion that, in the case of poetry, part of the disconnect comes about from the fact that poems are read, which makes them, in many ways, more complicated. 

The fact that poems are read rather than heard also invites contemplation and analysis. One can look at the words and think about their varied meanings. This further complicates one's relationship with poems. The more you interact with a poem, the less likely it seems you are able to write one. Yet, you are still convinced that you ought to be able to write a poem. It's all just language, after all, and you are a member of a language-using species. 

When we take literature classes, it's not uncommon to hear that poetry is a "higher" form of language. The problem is, if poetry is a "higher" form of language, and language makes us human, then poets are logically, it would seem, a "higher" form of human. Who wants to believe there are higher forms of human than themselves? Who doesn't want to be a higher form of human? Thus, many likely feel the poets are looking down on them more than a bit, and this breeds contempt, as all (perceived) elitist behavior breeds contempt for those exhibiting it. It probably doesn't help that many contemporary poets are in fact elites who love to flaunt their elitism in the creation of works that only fellow-poets are capable of understanding (or at least who claim to understand). This, perhaps, is one major source of hatred for (contemporary) poetry.

The same belief doesn't necessarily apply to painters. We may be impressed with the work of a painter, but we don't think the person is a "higher" form of human. We consider them to just be an artist expressing themselves. It's something we can't do, true, but for some reason we just chalk it up to practice or a skill we simply weren't born with. The fact is that, like artists, poets are just artists expressing themselves. Poetry writing is simply a skill honed through practice. There may be something in us that drives us to express ourselves--in our case, in language--but that again makes us no different from any other kind of artist. Language is our medium, but that fact doesn't necessarily make us a higher form of human. 

Lerner suggests that these attitudes many people feel toward poetry are a consequence of Plato's attitude toward poets. The Greeks considered poets to be inspired by the Muses, meaning they were conduits for the gods. They were chosen by the gods. Meaning they were special. This is another way in which people think poets are some kid of elite. While we in the West seem to still have that attitude, even if not quite expressed as God/the gods favoring the poets, the question is if other cultures hold this same view and thus think the same way about poets. Or, are their attitudes toward poets more like our attitudes toward painters and mathematicians? 

I would argue, then, that people tend to express contempt toward those things which they think ought to be easy, but which "experts" in the field keep demonstrating to be complex. They have respect for difficult things they think are difficult, and they likely don't think much at all about those things that they think are easy that are in fact easy (for pretty much everyone), or at least easy to understand. You might not be able to play the guitar, but rock music seems easy to understand. Jazz, on the other hand, is more difficult to understand, and as a result many people don't seem to much care for it (part of this may also be simple familiarity--as we learn to hear something, we grow to like it). 

Overall, I don't think that having or lacking interest in any of these particular things is what's at play here. There are sets of knowledge/skills we seem to respect and others which we do not. A person may not be able to do math, and may not personally like doing math, but still hold a great mathematician in high esteem. They're not going to engage in the math nor make the mistake of having an opinion about the math being done that they cannot do. As a result, they simply respect the mathematicians who can do those things. But when you have a person who is not an economist and is generally ignorant of economics, that doesn't mean they won't have an opinion about economics. The same person who lacks interest in learning math and economics will refrain from having an opinion about math and give their opinion about economics. 

So it seems that interest isn't really what's at play. Again, I think it's precisely the disconnect between apparent simplicity and the real complexity that creates this contempt toward poetry, economics, sociology, and psychology, among other things. I know I don't know anything about how to repair a car, so I respect auto mechanics. For the longest time I thought I could write and understand poems when I really couldn't. Thus, I started out with a hatred of poetry and a degree of contempt for poets--which has changed as I have slowly learned to understand poems and how to write them. I suppose I lost my hatred of poetry because I never really bought into the idea that there was this unattainable ideal of Poetry which can never be realized by any real poem. 

The less disconnect, the less alienation one feels, the less hatred one feels. That's probably something to consider in regards to things well beyond poetry. 

What do you think? Is there anything we contemporary poets can do to reduce the hatred of poetry, short of ostensibly "dumbing down" our poetry? Is the problem the way people write poetry, as esoteric texts? Is the real problem that contemporary poetry, like much contemporary art, is simply not perceived as beautiful? Is it because we only read and rarely ever listen to poetry? (Poetry slams are quite popular, and draw in non-poets, while poetry journals almost never draw in non-poets.) What can we do so readers are no longer alienated from our art?

Parrot Literary Corner - EP08 - Poetry and the World of Troy Camplin

 Here I am interviewed by Parrot Literary Corner, where you can get a bit of my philosophy of poetry.