Poetry is . . .

By Randy Koch

"All good poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings."
William Wordsworth

The German and Scandinavian people I grew up around in Minnesota are not the type to make a show of their emotions. If tears were shed, they were shed in private. If anger welled up, it was held and swallowed. If romance existed, I rarely saw it. My brothers and I often laughed at people on television who greeted one another with a kiss because we didn't think anyone actually did that. Hugging was out of the question, and public kissing among adults (except at midnight on New Year's Eve or if alcohol was involved) seemed almost unthinkable. Even shaking hands wasn't common except as the confirmation of a business transaction. It's not that they and I were or are not affectionate but that whatever "powerful feelings" we have do not "overflow" spontaneously. That may be at least part of the reason I disagree with Wordsworth on this point.

The larger reason, however, is that good poetry usually isn't "spontaneous" but only appears that way as a result of careful revision. The source of good poetry is usually some strong feeling or the realization of feeling in the course of writing, but "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" suggests to me an unthinking exhibition in which one bares all that one feels. Good poetry is generally much more subtle than that and is often emotion concealed or tempered. Sentiment is absolutely necessary in good poetry, but Wordsworth's definition smacks of sentimentality, something that is embarrassing and sickening to most people, not just thick-skinned Germans and Scandinavians.

"Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. If you look straight at it you can't see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there."
William Stafford

The second star from the end of the handle of the Big Dipper is a double star consisting of Mizar, the brighter of the two, and Alcor, which is about six times dimmer than its companion. They're generally considered a good test of one's visual acuity; if you can distinguish both stars, you probably have 20-20 vision. However, as most people know, if you're looking in the night sky, it's often easier to see a faint object by looking away from it or beside it. If you can't see Alcor, don't look at it -- look beside it. You may discover that your vision is better than you thought. Good advice, too, for someone trying to write a poem.

According to some Native American tribes, the Big Dipper is part of the Bear and the stars of the handle are three hunters pursuing it. Alcor was the pot carried by one of the hunters and would be used to cook the bear. The Housatonic Indians of New England said that the hunt took place in the summer and that the bear was wounded in autumn, its blood falling and coloring the autumn leaves. If hunting -- or poetry -- doesn't draw at least a little blood, whether the hunters' or the bear's, it's been worn down too much by incompetence, fear, or dishonesty.

"If I feel as if the top of my head
were taken off, I know that is poetry."
Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson lived only 55 years, but during her lifetime she produced nearly 2,000 poems, 366 of which she wrote in a single year. Imagine a year like that -- writing a poem every day and each one capable of making her "feel as if the top of [her] head were taken off." I wonder if this is what made it possible for her to live without marrying, to travel rarely beyond Amherst, and to gradually become a recluse in her father's house -- particularly from 1870 until her death in 1886. She could not have felt a sense of connection to the world through publication since only seven of her poems were published while she lived and all of those anonymously. She was not part of a community of writers in Amherst who could stimulate her intellectually and artistically. But while she knelt, dressed all in white, before the lilies and heliotropes in the plot outside her house, it seems likely that she saw herself in them and her poems in the frost:

Apparently with no surprise
To any happy Flower
The Frost beheads it at its play --
In accidental power --
The blonde Assassin passes on --
The Sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another Day
For an Approving God.
(c. 1884)

Poetry is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound

There's nothing poetic about George Bush choking on a pretzel. Comedic maybe, as David Letterman demonstrated, but not poetic. The lesson here is simple: Comedy is poetry's strange third cousin. Gossip and rumor, too, are related by blood, as are fiction and myth. News, however, is simply an annoying, excessively gabby in-law.

"A poem without internal
contradiction is not a poem."
Donald Hall

If Hall had said "external contradiction," he would have meant that the outside of the poem -- its form or appearance -- works against what the poem says, which good poems will not do. He claims, however, that the contradiction (contra = against, diction = words) must be "internal," that is, the words in some way must work against one another or the tension which results from the contradiction must arise inside between the meaning or imagery and the emotion generated by the poem. For example, in Hall's poem "Couplet" (from The Happy Man), "the tall puffy / figure wearing number / nine" "barely catches" a flyball at an old-timers' baseball game at Fenway Park, and the persona describes the crowd's reaction: "we rise / and applaud weeping." The "internal contradiction" here occurs between the applause, the expected reaction of the crowd to an outfielder tracking down a ball hit over his head, and the "weeping," which comes not from the fans' emotional involvement in the game but out of mourning for the player. Hall implies that the sight of the player's changed physical condition and abilities makes the crowd think of their own eventual demise and death. When we consider the crowd's reaction, we find it strange but believable, and the contradiction draws our attention to the significance beyond that of a flyball at an old-timers' game.

"Poetry is a mirror which makes
beautiful that which is distorted."
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley apparently means that reversing the distorted image, which is all that a flat mirror will do, makes it "beautiful." Unlikely. Bad metaphor. How about this -- poetry could be a lens and could, therefore, refract light, which would change the image, not just reverse it? Let me show you what I mean. Consider Snell's Law, named for the Dutch mathematician Willebrod Von Roijen Snell: "The product of the refractive index (RI_) and the sine of the angle of incidence (Sin ?i) of a ray in one medium [the world of the distorted image] is equal to the product of the refractive index (RI_) and the sine of the angle of refraction (Sin ?r) in a successive medium [the poem]." In simpler terms, he means that

(RI_) o (Sin ?i) = (RI_) o (Sin ?r)

Perfectly logical, right? A much better metaphor, no? All right, the math probably doesn't apply here, but I still say that a lens is a much better metaphor than a mirror. Fortunately, Shelley's knowledge of poetry was far better than was his knowledge of optics.

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."
Robert Frost

Because I live in Laredo and I am not bilingual, I rely on translation to understand the poetry of the border, of Mexico, and of lands further south. Four years ago when I first heard poems in Spanish at open-mike readings in El Cenizo and at El Café del Barrio, I listened but found that I couldn't tell where one word ended and another began. Since meaning was obviously lost to me, I listened for the sounds of the poems, the music that comes from rhyme and rhythm, from the vibrating r's and the slippery ñ's, from the flocks of vowels that gather in Spanish words and lines in ways they do not in English. And when Frost defines poetry as "what gets lost in translation," I feel that after nearly five years on the border I finally understand a little of what he means. Some things cannot be accurately translated. Images that are symbolic in one language may not symbolize the same thing in another. Layers of meaning are lost, as are connotations of words and figures of speech. I cannot identify the loss of these things in Spanish-to-English translations, but friends -- like Raquel Valle Sentíes, with whom I've worked on translations of poems from her book Soy Como Soy y Qué -- have tried to explain to me what I'm missing. As a result, I appreciate at least some of the problems and continue to remind myself how important it is that someday I make a concerted effort to learn Spanish.
I think I can, however, identify some tangible losses of translation and, therefore, by Frost's method identify part of what makes something poetry. Here are the last four lines of Pablo Neruda's poem "El miedo" and of Alastair Reid's translation titled "Fear":

Tengo miedo de todo el mundo,
de agua fría, de la muerte.
Soy como todos los mortales,
inaplazable.

I am afraid of the whole world,
afraid of cold water, afraid of death.
I am as all mortals are,
unable to be patient.

The main differences between the Spanish original and the English translation are in pace and sound. Though Neruda's first line contains eleven syllables compared to eight in the translation, it moves more quickly because four of Neruda's six words contain two or more syllables, many of which are unstressed. The translation, however, consists of six slower, more heavily stressed single-syllable words and only one word of two syllables. In addition, the original contains echoes of sound -- four words that end on long o-which holds the line together, but the translation contains nothing approaching this auditory thread. In the second line, Reid repeats "afraid," something that doesn't occur in the original, an obvious attempt to mimic, at least in syllabics, Neruda's form. The repetition also works against the sense of the situation since someone afraid is unlikely to want to reinforce the feeling by repeating the word "afraid." The third line contains the most similarities: nine syllables in Spanish compared to seven in translation (although again Reid's diction is simpler) and the repetition of sound in both -- at least six long o's in Spanish and five short a's in English. However, the last line contains the most obvious and substantial differences. Neruda's one-word line lacks patience; it's sudden and abrupt so that its meaning is reflected in the form, something good poetry often does. Reid's translation, however, consists of four words made up of seven syllables and contains none of the sudden impatience of Neruda's original. We cannot grieve that which we do not miss; we can, however, value in the original that which is lost through translation.

"If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem."
William Carlos Williams

I suspect you may have the same question I have -- why "ain't"? Dr. Williams (1883-1963) was well educated, a pediatrician, and author of about 20 books of poems, plays, and essays. Why, then, does he use the vernacular rather than standard English when he phrases a question on a subject obviously so important to him? The answer, I think, is revealed by what he considers the "pleasure" of poetry and his role as poet. Like Walt Whitman (1819-1892), whose life overlapped Williams' by nine years, he strove to write in the language and rhythms of the common American people, a style reflecting a very different attitude from that of contemporaries like T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) in The Waste Land and Ezra Pound (1885-1972) in the Cantos. When he says, "If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem," he seems to be speaking in the language of the people for whom he intended his poetry. It is as if he's repeating a reminder he heard or felt all those years he lived and doctored and wrote in Rutherford, New Jersey. He was certainly aware that "pleasure" takes many forms, but the form of his statement suggests his awareness of whose pleasure he was most concerned with. This is the attitude that keeps poetry alive and vibrant outside the walls of the academy and beyond New York, L.A., and Dallas. And it's the attitude that keeps poets and poetry alive and well here in Laredo.

"The belief in poetry is a
magnificent fury, or it is nothing."
Wallace Stevens

Dive in. Be passionate about at least one thing in your life. Develop "a magnificent fury" for poetry, and watch what happens to you and your world.

(Randy Koch teaches creative writing and English composition at Laredo Community College, and is editor of LCC's La Frontera arts journal.)