I’m still befuddled by/resistant to the idea of a novel, short story or poem having a set structure.
I don’t know why I should be. How many times have I bent myself into a knot declaring, that’s not a poem, that’s not a story, that’s not even an idea!
Any form of storytelling, whether photographic or verbal, is catered to the human mind. There’s a hook, there’s a body of story, there’s a surprise or lesson. That may be a reveal or what accumulates in understanding in the mind of viewers.
Poetry can use language. At the same time poetry is not literacy test. To be distracted by spelling and grammar, punctuation and line breaks are to get derailed by surface level. People can do what they must by habit do for poems towards me but when I see in workshops someone taken down a few pegs for spelling mistakes, inner mama bear tends to roar. Someone reproaching another about the need to “get literate” before they write a poem because they muss up “it’s” and “its” or that usual set? Seriously? Is that not saying: Bzzt. You haven’t qualified as someone I will listen to is the message of. It’s like throwing out resumes for typeface to get thru the slush pile faster. Expedient but looking at the wrong factors. It’s as relevant as being distracted by someone’s hair in a reading. Writing is also communication. Would one interrupt someone who says um, er, with a catty get back to me once you’ve learned how to talk? Point of human interaction missed the last train out.
To have sentence structure or essay structure or list structure is not sufficient to make it a poem or a communication. It can be ideas rendered in image and text, and be a poem. A visual concept, an ad can be poetry but someone mumbling to themselves without interest in what they are saying, not even paying attention to themselves…no.
Poetry signifies something. Signals something. What about something that isn’t cosmic, isn’t crisis, isn’t emotion, isn’t new rational outcome, isn’t music?
What constitutes it? I’m not saying there is no inherent nature.
Good stand-up has a feel. A joke has an arc of set up and reveal. A piece of inspirational oratory, a sermon, a radio show all have structures. Roman Mars said at Design Matters about public radio for his 4-5 minute segment, he breaks down hours of footage to show: 1 big idea, 2 anecdotes, 1 take-away fact, and something funny.
Should it have internal coherency and a point? If its not without a refinement to a point, what would be the point? If its just sampling without reduction from the general mass of conflicting information, or if it is just a news summary, what role or advantage does it give to the reader?
The in-between bits matter too. In The Smooth Yarrow (Signal, 2012), Susan Glickman has a poem “On Finding a Copy of Pigeon at the Hospital Bookstore” and speaks in the poem of the “bulky bestsellers” on the shelf,
the omni-present present tense, that fake cinematic contrivance
meant to create a sense of “being in the moment” with the hero
as if life were one constant rush of adrenaline
with no possible mood but surprise.
Formula novels bother me for that. As do movies, tv shows, ads, conversations. It’s claustraphobic the containment in a narrow maze of orders of reveal, everything for purpose, nothing extraneous. I like extraneous. I like all timeframes allowed to be present. I like the access to all the tenses.
Like Zach Wells pointed out in Baffle,
Not every sensation
can be sensational if we wish to remain
whole and sane.
It can’t all be important, nor all dismissed. Variation allows perception.
There’s room for a lot of range in communication. It makes me tense to be reprimanded in a poem to stick to the cardinal rule of immediacy of present tense, cutting out automatically all -ed, -ing and present perfect as if it were a controlled vocabulary for adult literacy programs. And the rule of thumb that one must prune out all species names, to dumb down in case a reader doesn’t know a word and it “takes the person out of the poem”. Is the goal of a poem to cast a spell like that dull slack-faced gaze one gets when facing a tv? If you want a mindless ride, there’s pop culture for that. Poetry can do other work.
Part of that editing impulse is useful. It drives me to include words I know from other languages, to avoid ballad spells, to signal that reading is not a mentally sedentary activity.
Still, the sweet spot is a dilemma. How to present something compelling, without preselecting content that is too reactive or too inert/flat? Too just-talking, or too trying too hard to be a poem?
That surface issue is a serious one. Yes, we should not be distracted by “um”s or bad hair or the occasional comma fault, but it still happens. We, as writers, must accept most of the responsibility for this human frailty. That said, I will still use bad grammar when I have a good reason for it – when it is part of the message I am trying to make. Most intelligent readers can see when I’m doing it on purpose, and often what that purpose is.
I trip on “intelligent reader”. I’d rather someone be sloppy in typing, syntax, spelling, and use non-dominant pattern of grammar, unconsciously than someone be sloppy in thinking or sloppy in emotions or argument. People indulge people being hyperbolic and conflating nonsense with no sense of perspective, without any comedic intent, while they won’t less pass a comma splice. This seems an odd place to draw a line.