At best it may bump and knock loose something else in someone else that dislodges a hidden brick of meaning. Then their chimney falls in and there’s a house fire. Then you get on like a house on fire. No, that’s not it.
A poem is a synthesis of all that’s come before. Copy, combine, transform. It’s remixing and perpetuation of some part of something. It’s the outcome of perceptions.
I like the idea of poem as by-product, like paper scraps cut off after the real product of text is printed. It isn’t useful as by-product, if not used. Unless it existing is a use. Which it is. Is it sufficient leveraging of the gift of living? Poetry is a thankfulness, a paying back, the gift of being alive.
Once used for this other purpose, it becomes something else, not the earlier processing, not the initial by-product. That puts different constraints on how it looks. It brings in place, time, person, impact.
To be writing is to make ideas which is the mental food, to use the sun and soil and other food sources make something for to feed at least self. It is nourishment. Poems may have vitamins, like well-formed thoughts, or calorie-rich junk which people may enjoy and survive on but may not be optimal for health. Poems are fodder for maintenance of life. Do they need to improve self and others or be part of the process of disintegration?
Must a poem map what is, only the transformation to be a useful process or an ideally useful product? The latter assumes change the only thing of value, not collecting constant meaningless pieces? Is poetry then, just meaning?
It’s effective for form and content to reinforce each other, for a poem about disorder to be not in cutesy couplet rhymes, unless to the nth degree of satire. A poem about waves could get the undulating sound in meter or line length or consonance shifts. The challenge in a poem wastes reader energy when it makes the getting to the point complicated. It’s like a really convoluted shaggy dog story for one little pun. A let down. Not enough payoff for effort.
What should a poem be doing?
John Barton has said that one should risk in content not form.
What would constitute a reveal for myself? I’ve only ever written a couple poems that scared me, that I felt driven to destroy the computer and any evidence that they were ever coming into being. They were terrible poems, probably entirely indistinguishable from any other of my terrible poems in the end, but the needing to be admitted into words, words being what governs perception and gatekeeper to real. Once you give a word to something, it acknowledges in that naming its presence. To risk saying any subject in poetry, despite what it may do to the writer or the reader or the family who seem to commonly say to a writer write whatever you like once we’re all dead.
A risk in form or content is a wobble instead of an affirming reinforcement of status quo. Except I suppose, if one were a confirmed anarchist in which case a radical act might be orderly.
To take a risk follows the notion that poetry should transform the poet that Dempster was so insistent on and I that I reject(ed?) out of hand. Part of that is because an eye to the end is like having sex for the orgasm instead of for the whatever comes connections or journey, if you will. If you want the first end, you miss stuff and skip stuff that would make the end better. It makes unnecessary strains.
An aha at each composition seems to cultivate the external look of satori as a cliché, much as the razor cut ending to profound. It can feel like reading the last page of a book and skipping the rest. The journey without realization can make for boring reading.
The living a life in order to fast forward to emotional impacts instead of faking ones on the page also seems wrong-headed, an extensively circuitous route way to get to a good poem. What comic strip had someone skydiving and declaring this will make an excellent blog post? You can’t think of the product while doing the process of living or else you won’t be fully in the process, distorting with observer effect and skew the perceiving. It might have the effect of someone who networks to meet important people he can use instead of networking to meet interesting people to keep life interesting.
Perhaps this is what people mean when they say a poetry feels “genuine”. It isn’t smarmy towards getting something back. It is poetry that is comfortable in its own skin of letter shapes. And it happens to line up with another to cause a reaction from someone else who can feel or think something in response.
That’s not the sole domain of poetry, or art, or communication, but it is a sweet spot when poetry hits it.