Last week I published a more-or-less rambling screed about the current state of modern poetry. I’ve been pondering the topic for a while, mostly prompted by the incredibly talented poets writing, adjacent to me, here on Substack. Although I would much rather see the conversation about poetic formalism break out of the Substack ecosystem—which can sometimes seem like either an echo chamber or one of those good-old-boys clubs where the members can do no wrong—still I feel like what I wrote was, for its time and place, not entirely a distortion of the issue. If you haven’t read it yet, here is a link to it.
The reception garnered by this piece was quite positive; I’m very grateful for all the encouragement, likes, shares, hearts, and other tokens of appreciation which the piece received. I would be content to leave the whole matter as it stands and move on to other topics but perhaps I ought to, as Hephaestus said once, “Strike while the iron is hot!” There are a few other points of a similar nature which ought to be addressed. So here we go!
1: THE PACHYDERM IN THE PARLOUR
As I said, the commentary on the piece was mostly positive; this seems on the surface a good thing, but as a writer I would much rather someone disagree with me; my thinking can be sharpened in no other way. Two people did exactly that. One made this observation on Substack’s social media site:
It’s true that I did not talk about how poetry fits into the economic ecosystem as a whole or even the small subset of that ecosystem known as the literary world. My hunch is that poetry, like a deplorable number of the fine arts, has been swallowed alive by the academy, digested, and spat out in an unrecognizable form, like how an owl, after having finished eating a mouse, pukes out the bones and fur in a compact pellet. (Except that the poems of the academy aren’t compact—they sprawl all over the page with wild and crazy typographic layouts.) I touched on this a little in my essay from earlier. Perhaps the formalist poetry can’t get a foothold because the academy, and not the market, is hostile to anything filled with structure, meter, rhyme, or philosophical import.
If the market for poetry is the small academic journals, all of this makes sense—especially if poetry is “a kind of promotion mill.” But it hasn’t always been this way, and it could go back. I’m convinced that if poets were to give the average reader something along the lines of the big hits of Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc., it would be wildly successful.
The more interesting question to me, though—the Indricotherium in the room which discussion of the elephant serves to distract us from, is this: why are the works of Rupi Kaur and her ilk so popular? What does the average reader see in her poems that they find valuable enough to keep reading them? Hey Substack poets: can you answer that? (I have my own answer, which I’ll get to in a moment.)
The other person who disagreed with me did so in a private message:
This is, to me, quite a serious objection; it goes straight to the heart of the entire purpose of art, something which I’ve broached on this blog on numerous occasions and which I personally have been wrestling with for years. What is the purpose of art? Why do we do it? Why do we care about it so much? More specifically, ought art to serve a purpose at all? Asking “what is the purpose” is begging the question—right? Isn’t Oscar Wilde on the right track when, in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey, he says that “All art is quite useless”?
For context, let me talk about the April 5, 1993, issue of The New Yorker, which contained within its pages a very long profile of Ricky Jay—actor, antiquarian, and quite possibly the absolute best practitioner of close-up magic who has ever lived.
Ricky Jay’s exploits were legendary. He was able to do things with playing cards that go far, far beyond what most people expect in a card trick; what he was able to do verges on the diabolical—or maybe the miraculous, if we want to be charitable. I’ve heard stories of things he did (many of them are recounted in the New Yorker article) which send tingles up my neck. He was a humble man, a servant of his art; he never married, had no children that I am aware of, and devoted himself to the study of his craft with an admirable focus.
The thing about magic is this: it is, indeed, quite useless. It is pure entertainment, solves no societal problem, accomplishes no work, doesn’t instruct or educate or inform, and, most of the time, is utterly incomprehensible; it is quite useless. But it’s still piles of fun! I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t like getting fooled by a good magician, and Ricky Jay is the top of the crop.
If you go and read that New Yorker profile, though, you’ll notice something: the article doesn’t spend nearly as much time on Ricky Jay’s card trick skills as it does on his devotion to the craft of magic. Jay amassed possibly the largest collection of rare books, prints, and manuscripts dealing with the magical arts that any one person has ever accumulated. He was a showman, to be sure, but he was a steward of his art in a way that the flashier, more noticeable magicians rarely are. As a steward, he was very selective regarding where, how, and for whom he would perform: he wasn’t going to cheapen the prestige of his craft by showing it to people who wouldn’t understand or appreciate it.
The practice of poetry is similar to that. Like parlor magic, poetry is a frivolity. Also like parlor magic, it can be studied; perfected; done with craft and skill. Remember, from last week, how I said that poetry ought to delight and instruct: instruction, on its own and without the magic of poetic form, is just prose—but without the magic of the poetic form, poetry itself is bland and unsatisfying, like the modernist / Instagram poetry I excoriated at the end of my earlier article.
Remember how I said earlier that there are crowds of people out there who actually like Rupi Kaur’s little snippets of free verse? This would be equivalent to someone doing cute magic tricks at a little kids’ birthday party. The tricks may be simple; they may be rather easy to figure out; but they’re still magic and the kids love it. Even the simplest magic trick has an air of mystery about it, something that makes it fun to watch at least the first time; this is the same with Rupi Kaur. She is still writing poetry, even if it’s rather boring to the more sophisticated lovers of the craft.
But imagine if the kids at the birthday party saw the magician pull a handkerchief out of a cane and now they want to learn about some serious magic. They start learning everything they can; they get their own deck of magician’s cards and other stage props; they watch videos, read tutorials, maybe even study under a master. Eventually, perhaps, they reach the rarefied heights of a magus like Ricky Jay. During this whole process, they’ve been studying magic, but the magic they saw at the birthday party is nothing like the magic they are able to create at the peak of their powers.
That’s the same as it is with poetry. Rupi Kaur’s little particles of verse are poetry sensu lato just like Paradise Lost or any other epic; but there is a very, very long road between them . . . and I would hope that any poet who considers themselves a steward of the art would want to travel down that road and seek the ending.
2: THE WAY OF THE CHIASM
No one noticed that my article from last week was structured like a chiasm.
If you aren’t familiar with chiastic structures, I would recommend you read this Wikipedia article. It summarizes the concept very nicely and includes several examples from world literature. If that article piques your interest—especially if you are intrigued by the chiastic structures evident in the Bible—you’ll want to read this essay by Cormac Jones which goes into great detail about the symbolic and typological possibilities of chiastic structure. It’s a heavy read and ought to be approached carefully, but it’s well worth the time.
Jones prefers a chiasm with five parts, but that is only one of several modes possible. Really, a chiasm could go on for as many parts and subparts as the poet wishes to deploy; part of the beauty of chiastic structure is that it is endlessly variable within its basic framework. Chiasms are, to my mind, the way forward for formal poetry, and the form deserves to be discussed and analyzed in particular detail.
For the purposes of poetic analysis, I’d like to propose some terminology; what I offer is rather bland but I do so in the hopes that someone more skilled will propose something better.
A weak chiasm is one in which the end of the poem mirrors, in some fashion, the beginning.
A strong chiasm is one in which the traditional A-B-C-D-C’-B’-A’ structure is observed, and where the central part of the chiasm contains the most important point, the poem’s thesis statement.
An adamantine chiasm is one where, in addition to the above, each section of the chiasm contains imagery, rhymes, metrical structures, or vocabulary uniting it to its mirror section; possibly, each section is itself structured chiastically in a nested, fractal manner.
As an example here is a weak chiasm I wrote recently.
O lover, sing to me in Chiasms!
For no more do I wish to hear your tepid sonnets or quatrains;
Encountering them, ennui o’erwhelms.
Give me something at once formalist and fresh,
Avant-garde and old as Hebrew psalms;
Enraptured awe will fill my heart if I were giv’n the chance to hear
A song or lyric structured in the way
Of the Chiasm, O my love.
Notice how each line has a counterpart: the first and the last make a pair, the second and the seventh, the third and the sixth, the fourth and the fifth—the terms and concepts in each line’s argument are balanced in the mirror line by similar or identical terms and concepts. It’s a weak chiasm because there isn’t any reason why the concepts are presented in this particular order; also, the central pair of lines doesn’t encapsulate some sort of important moral, argumentative thrust, or anything like that.
Here’s another one.
The river rises.
As the downtown parks are closed
we see a different face of nature:
swift, powerful, frightening,
unlikely to be tamed by human craft,
following its own dictates and whims;
not docile as formerly,
now unapproachably furious,
this rising river.
This one is stronger because the poem’s central argument is stated in the central line, and the first half of the poem is mirrored by the second as a parable is mirrored by its explanation: there is a heightening of the poem’s message—an interpretation of its imagery—in the second half.
Chiastic structures can be extremely small. At their smallest they need only conform to a pattern of A-B-B’-A’; Shakespeare was fond of using these tiny chiasms in his dialogue passages, coloring his vocabulary with nuances.
Here’s another one about an owl. This one has the added feature (of dubious value to be sure) of actually being shaped like an owl:
Again I will repeat: the Way of the Chiasm is a way which can unite all of poetry, the formalist and the free; it is capable of being as strict and complex a formal challenge as any poet would ever want, and it is at the same time able to accommodate the most daring and experimental systems of rhythm, meter, rhyme, or lack thereof. The Way of the Chiasm is completely open to free verse without constraint of meter or line length. The different parts of a chiasm can be as large or as small as the poet wants and they can still balance each other; the form is capable of nested, fractal arrangements which only deepen both the poet’s ability to develop an argument and the reader’s enjoyment at having discovered the form; the chiasm is also able to indicate a simple metaphor or simile with ease and directness. The Way of the Chiasm, in my opinion, satisfies any standard that any poet or reader would want. So what are we waiting for! Why are we still talking! Gotta run, everyone—thanks for reading, but I’m going to write some chiasms now, OK?
It looks like our uncertain disagreement on the purpose of poetry may have to wait for another day (i.e., essay). To be honest, I'll admit that these intra-poetry-school debates dispirit me the instant I consider jumping into them beyond a friendly comment.
Your "Way of the Chiasm" definitely holds promise, as an inherited poetic structure that spurs invention, pleases the reader, and remains flexible for experimentation. This last component is what I find most important in the end, and it's something of a bone I can pick with formal poetry as an assumption: poems need to seek and enact vision. I might call this genius; I know you wouldn't. It's a foggy standard, which is why a shared form can be a helpful starting place. But analyzing structure by technical means can't always depict this kind of poetic skill accurately without reducing it. Again -- a friendly comment in need of flushing out, if I can steel myself to jump in.
"Perhaps the formalist poetry can’t get a foothold because the academy, and not the market, is hostile to anything filled with structure, meter, rhyme, or philosophical import."
I've always believed that it's been a fault of academic and publishing industries, and never society. In the several-thousand-year-old history of poetry, only in the past hundred or so did anyone object to formalism. And even today, though so few read it, it's still very much respected. You don't find formalist poetry in people's hands on the subway, maybe, but you hear it at commencement speeches, eulogies, weddings and retirement parties. We still use it to commemorate our most important occasions.
I think it'd be a bit silly to say academic publications have somehow increased public exposure to poetry. By and large, we've given the keys over to groups who aren't responsible enough to be good custodians. And so yes, poetry has become an echo chamber—only poets read poetry.
That's why I'm not looking to the academic or publishing communities for poetry's future. I think whatever future it might have will lie outside of formal organizations.