Why I Hate Poetry

Back in the early ’90s I met Jack Grapes, a wonderful writing teacher, who taught me a lot about how to write as well as I possibly could.  He emphasized three rules:

1. Use your deep voice.  In other words, go deep inside yourself.  Let popular magazines cover the surface.
2. Write like you talk.  If you wouldn’t use a word in conversation, then eschew it when you write.  (See what happens when you break this rule?  I’ve never said “eschew” out loud in my life.)
3. The good is the enemy of the great.  If you are careful and aim for good writing you may succeed, but you will never write anything remarkable.  When you take chances, shed your fears and inhibitions, and aim for wonderful, you just might achieve it.  Or you may write something awful.  But at least you will have given yourself a chance to shine.

Jack asked a volunteer to put together a chapbook of poems which our class had written.  I thought, “What the heck.  I have an assistant.  She can do it.”  So I offered to take on the project, and so it was that Rattle was born, more than eighteen years ago.  While I still personally approve each poem, I am totally indebted to Tim Green who does most of the work and is an amazing and caring editor.

But I’ll be blunt.  I hate more than 90% of the poetry I read, and you should too.  Why?  Because it isn’t very good.  I’m not talking about the more than 70,000 poems submitted to Rattle each year, many of which are quite good and eventually find a home in another journal, if not in Rattle.  I’m not talking about poetry books by Billy Collins or Mary Oliver, who write consistently excellent poems.  I am talking about those 35 or 40 poems which you will find in a normal poetry book which merely take up space, with only three or four which I find worth reading once, let alone reading again.

Do you finish every novel you start?  Have you ever walked out of a movie?  Do you share every blog, even mine, with all of your friends?  Of course not.  Then why do we think we have to like every single poem we read?

My wife and I recently enjoyed dinner at the Hollywood Bowl with Carl and Susan.  Carl is an extremely successful businessman, but said that while he likes Rattle he doesn’t think he knows how to evaluate a poem.

“Carl,” I said.  “When you like a poem, you like it.  When you don’t, you don’t.  Just like a sculpture or a painting.  Maybe you first learned about poetry from a teacher who assumed that he or she was the priest holding the keys to the poetry tablets, and that students were ignorant and always needed an expert to explain it to them.  But this simply isn’t true.”

Carl smiled.  “I do like some of the poems in Rattle.  Not all of them.”

Let’s test my theory.  Here is “Life List,” one of my all-time favorite poems published in Rattle.  You don’t have to explain it to anyone, including yourself.  As Archibald MacLeish wrote, “a poem should not mean/but be.”

LIFE LIST, by Janet McCann

My friend the scholar-birdwatcher
is dying, after a quiet regular life
of Milton and birds, and if I could

imagine him a farewell, it would be this:
to look out into the small yard
he tended for forty years, to where

he placed the bird houses, the martin
house and the hummingbird feeder,
just in time to see a sweep of air

curve in and take form, the great arctic gyrfalcon
not on his life list, there on the sill,
beak, feathers and pinions

and final knowledge, Adam’s homecoming
after the story’s end, better than Eden.
May he leave in his hand a feather, that his wife

might know where he has gone.

You do not have to be an expert to enjoy a book, a movie, or a work of art.  You do not have to be an expert to like a poem.  And you can hate 90% of the poems out there and still very much enjoy the rest.  I’ve been a poetry editor for more than eighteen years, and that’s what I do.

NEXT TUESDAY:  “Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are.”  How to say, “I love you,” or “I appreciate you.”

Alan