by
I spent a fair bit of my free time over the past few months working on new material for a house show I performed at last night, which went pretty well. Now that the show is done, and I’ve had time to reflect on all these years I’ve been performing, I finally have a moment to share some thoughts about poetry that have become fulminant after years of bubbling under the surface.
Poetry is awesome. But the concept of "being a poet" and all the cultural associations with it among English language speakers is ridiculous and anachronistic, and I realize I've been running from it since I was a kid. A poet is someone who writes poetry, full stop. Maybe at some point in history poetry was a profession, a career, a role in society, perhaps even a mindset, that could fit neatly into a bohemian class stereotype upon which you could level some kind of social commentary, but at no point in my lifetime has it ever been any of these things in the United States.
For the English language, it is not even an actual vocation (beyond a teacher of poetry, which is a different beast) for anyone but an extremely obscure, extremely small, and extremely blue-blooded group of people within the academy, who are functionally a vestigial wing of the British aristocracy nonsensically translated into American society, who have exactly zero cultural relevance to anyone but each other. Everyone else is a part-timer, a professional freelancer at best, who does it for the sake of fulfilling the universal human need to create and consume art, not to participate in some kind of consequentially meaningful social institution outside the bounds of their hobby. You might as well identify as a crossbowman.
And yet, the stereotypes, motivations, incentives, pretensions, and goals of poetry all persist in our cultural imaginations, pristine as they were the day they were lifted from nineteenth century England, just a scant few decades after the birth of the United States as a nation centuries ago.
The poet is a romantic, an idealist, our pedagogy says. The poet is a revolutionary. Women and gay men swoon over male poets (there are no female poets in this mindset, save a begrudging acknowledgement of Emily Dickinson), for the expressiveness of their feelings, and male pretenders fancy themselves poets precisely for this reason; true appreciators of poetry may through rigorous education and study separate the false poets from the true. Poets fight wars. Poets end wars. Poets represent the enviable part of our nature that does not listen to reason, and obeys only the heart. Poets are all W.B. Yeats. Poets are all Lord Byron. Poets are all Tennyson, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, or their spiritual descendants, and they are defined by the words of Henry James. Poets, if they must be American--there are few Americans who deserve to be called poets--are Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, or Robert Frost, and the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Joyce Carol Oates only have legitimacy as poets through lines of succession to those three men. Poets in the English language are exemplars of English culture, the Englishest of Englishmen; aspirants to English high society or its worthiest Irish or Scots usurpers, defenders of the canon, provers of the highest forms of expressiveness of the English language to those snobby Frenchmen and Spaniards and even the Roman-descended Italians, and so on and so forth.
This isn't just chest-thumping redcoat nationalist bullshit, it's centuries-old white supremacist propaganda. It's the cultural framework of a long-ago ascendant British empire with dreams of world conquest and everything to prove, seeking cultural legitimacy in Europe through a continuity with its ancient conquerers, the Roman Empire--a continuity we soundly rejected in the Revolutionary War in favor of a more egalitarian society. (Well, outside Washington D.C., at least, where civic religion bizarrely metastasized into the kind of imperial Roman neopaganism that keeps this sort of thing going.) And yet, it represents how poetry is taught at pretty much any elite university in America with an English major, reflecting the poorly hidden aspirations of Yale and Harvard to replace with an aristocracy of elite cultural knowledge what we lost when we ostensibly abolished the aristocracy of blood.
The caricature of the nineteenth century British poet survives far beyond the academy in dozens of ways, many generations after it long ceased to be relevant. Remember when Millennials and Gen-X in the early naughts savaged "goth poetry" written by their peers, reacting with grossly exaggerated disgust at what they perceived as a horde of fakers in black leather jackets and eyeliner with pretensions of becoming the successor to nineteenth century sexpot Lord Byron? (Instead of the obvious, which was that sensitive kids were practicing how to express themselves through language?) Remember the long online rants about fake poets, poets writing poetry only to get laid, poets writing poetry only because they wanted to be thought as poets? Sellout poets writing to satisfy Reader's Digest (which didn't publish poetry)? Poets churning out dozens of dialed-in poems for a quick buck? Precious Moments poets? Therapy poets? (Good grief, no one refers to pop ballads as "therapy music".) Mom and grandma poets, bless their hearts, who no one had the heart to tell them were terrible? Remember the standup routines and sitcom bits where the punchline was that an aspiring poet only knew how to make the most cringeworthy imaginable rhyming couplets?
All these complainers--if you asked them to name a single living poet, a single example of good contemporary poetry, a single extant poetry journal that they actually read, they would not be able to answer. (I was writing poetry at a young age and I would not have been able to answer.) And yet, everyone had an opinion on "bad poets", because of what posh private school English teachers taught the most judgmental children in the world what Henry James wrote about Shakespeare and what people hated about fucking Lord Byron of Byron hundreds of years ago across the sea, in the hopes that someone in their class might go to Yale.
(And because I actually have the upbringing to answer the implied question: Is modern Chinese poetry treated like this? No. No, it is not. The relationship between ancient and modern Chinese poetry is fucked up for entirely different reasons, but nobody accuses someone of writing wuyuan jueju for the sake of cluelessly pretending to be a sophisticated brooding romantic from another time. This is in part because classical-style Chinese poetry is so hard and takes so much education to do well that someone might actually be impressed by the mere act of writing a poem in proper form, but I digress.)
The reputation of poetry in the English language had been so sullied by the crumbling pedestal the academy had placed it on that the first collection of handwritten poems I ever wrote and compiled explicitly for someone else to read was titled “antipoetry”. It was a project I did at age fifteen where I wrote a different silly blank verse every day for two weeks to entertain a female friend, asking her to prom in the last one. (This was the most stereotypical possible motivation for writing poetry, and I was still embarrassed enough to distance myself from what I was actually doing--kicking off a period of decades where I vehemently denied being a poet. No, fifteen year old Taiwanese girl, please don’t think of me as one of those brooding pretentious douchebags who thinks he’s so deep and sensitive, subtly pleads the quiet sullen fifteen year old boy who only smiles when he’s around a girl he likes and spends two weeks involving her in an elaborate creative project to express the complexity of his extremely simple feelings to her.)
She really enjoyed the poems, but was romantically unimpressed; instead she showed them to our English teacher Ms. Ivy, who was puzzled by why I had titled the collection "antipoetry." I explained to Ms. Ivy that, no offense to Longfellow and Frost and Joyce and Wordsworth or whoever, but I wasn't interested in poetry and these weren't love poems; I didn't want to show off how well I could fit rhyming schemes or count iambs or make some timeless statement about humanity to be etched on a plaque somewhere, I just wanted to do the stupidest things possible with words and make a cute girl laugh. Ms. Ivy looked at me with a blank expression and deadpanned, "Congratulations. You just discovered poetry, the way every lovelorn teenaged boy has since the dawn of the English language."
Long story short: More than two decades have passed since then and nobody accuses a thirtysomething poet with no academic connections of ulterior motives. Frankly, that's the simplest explanation for the phenomenon my other English teachers used to marvel at, that most canonical English poets peaked in their thirties. It also explains why the best poets of my generation so far are gay or trans or women or some combination of the above, because every biphobic stereotype originating from Lord Byron immediately falls on the head of any straight man who rhymes two sentences together.
And with this tenure comes a startling revelation: For all the years I studied and practiced meter, and all the work I did mastering it to the best of my ability for that expensive creative writing major at Oberlin, I no longer have any incentive to write anything but free verse.
The reason why is simple. Think of all the snobbishness about free verse, summed up by Robert Frost's quip that poetry without rhyme or meter is “like playing tennis without a net". (This quote stuck with me for so long, and eventually so soured on me, that I wrote and performed an entire epic poem framed around it at an episode of SalON! at The Brick last year--half in free verse, half in the most respected of all meters, Shakespearean iambic pentameter.) The reasoning behind Frost's statement is that free verse is too easy. Constraints inspire creativity! The absence of constraints promotes laziness! Real poets count their iambs, their troches, their spondees; they force the poet to choose every word carefully and be intentional about their work.
This is disingenous bullshit and Frost knew it. Is there intentionality to cutting a word and using a shorter one from a thesaurus, just because the syllables don't fit? Is that word better, more expressive of the poet's intent, more profound or interesting or funny to the reader, because the poet did the extra work to fit the rules? It certainly is more difficult to write a poem that way. But what does that extra difficulty bring to the poem? Who, outside the academy and a handful of obsessive experimentalists, actually cares more about the structure of the poem than what the poem is intended to say, to the point where such a tradeoff makes any sense--where adherence to the form is expressive rather than merely clever? Who has ever been moved by counting syllables for the sake of scansion?
You could argue that meter and rhyme create expectations for the audience, which can be playfully subverted--the Bard himself broke meter all the time, usually to crack jokes, and he did it precisely because it stuck out like a sore thumb whenever he did. I'm not saying that meter and rhyme never serve creative purposes well, for things like that. A former professor of mine once wrote a beautiful poem about a railroad that followed the cadence of a locomotive passing over railroad tracks, and the effect was powerful.
But--and I will die on this hill--there is no natural purpose for meter and rhyme, especially for spoken poetry, that benefits from a fixed meter and rhyme scheme being the default. I don't buy the argument that it lets the audience keep track of where they are in the poem for spoken word (why would they care?). I don't buy that the enunciation of the words is the poem, though it certainly can be done to great effect--at the expense of being a song rather than a poem. You might as well argue that the shape of the typeface is the poem when it is printed. (No, I will not argue this point with a typographer.)
And I have never been convinced by the argument that iambic pentameter resembles the cadence of natural English speech. Maybe in Elizabethan English, but the challenge of writing iambic pentameter in modern English is that speech is actually much closer to trochaic tetrameter, forcing a poet to always be at least one stress and one syllable off from what a reader is used to. But even trochaic tetrameter feels off, sometimes distractingly so. Oftentimes you can barely hear the poem under the beat of DA-duh DA-duh DA-duh DA-duh, no better than iambic pentameter’s hypnotic da-dum, da-dum, da diddly diddly dum.
The true purpose of complex, rigid meter and rhyme is one, and one alone--it is to show off. It's to prove you can. You wrote the hard poem, instead of the easy poem. You did a sonnet instead of a pop song, a sestina instead of, well, anything else. Every poet in the audience waited with bated breath to see how you would possibly follow that rhyme, got chills down their spines seeing how those iambs matched, laughed when they didn't. You wrote a poem for other poets. You wrote a puzzle. The rubes wouldn't get it. That style of verse is a class marker, a way to appeal to other people who spent years studying scansion. It's a warm blanket for people whose life experience involved, at some point, a bespectacled middle aged man slowly reciting Yeats in the most soothing imaginable tone, to hear a poem that could be read in exactly the same voice.
That some of those poems we were trained on just happen to contain profound observations about the universality of lived experience, or speak grand truths about personal agency or human history or the relationship between humanity and the divine, or simply describe an indescribable feeling, is secondary to the reason they were written that way. Yeats wrote that way because he wanted to fuck Maud Gonne. Gonne herself wrote that way because she needed an ascendant Irish insurgency to have legitimacy as equals in aristocratic bearing to their English oppressors. Byron wrote that way because he wanted to fuck everybody. Joyce wrote that way because he believed himself the greatest writer in the English language and wanted to prove it.
Meter is for poets who have something to prove to other poets.
I am a Taiwanese-American man in his thirties, living in Brooklyn in 2023, who has incinerated nearly all his connections to the literary elite. I am writing poetry to be read aloud to crust punks and theater adults who could not give a shit whether my syllables fit together symmetrically. No one has ever been convinced to have sex with someone because of a poem since the 1950s. The last person who made enough money as a poet to live, solely from writing poetry, is a citation at the bottom of a Wikipedia page. There is no one left to impress.
As for rhyme, and for the structure it represents: I respect the traditions of the spoken word artists, mostly African-Americans outside of that aristocratic English heritage, who rely on rhyme and alliteration to structure their words. I understand how this introduces rhythm, and rhythm becomes a means to deliver emphasis. I appreciate how verbal indicators for the beginnings and ends of lines through rhyme allow for the flourishes of emphasis necessary to make sure bursts of profound insight or political impact do not get buried, and offer the crowd the opportunity to cheer. I know rhyme is the bridge between spoken word and hip-hop, and is a key element of the explosive revolutionary power of both mediums, beautiful and moving in itself.
But it's just not what I want to do. I want my words to be nearly subliminal, to echo the feeling of the audience's own private internal monologue, to mock and destroy their own intrusive thoughts. I want to follow the rhythm of natural speech--actual speech, not pentameter--and bludgeon listeners when they don't expect it, taking cues from standup comedy instead of spoken word. I want people to laugh. I want people to be shocked out of zoning out into the cadence of the words the way people usually do at highbrow poetry readings. I want people to think, and to feel off guard and unsafe in what words will come, and to immerse themselves in the ineffable in the way that only poetry can. I want people to question what they believe, to doubt what they are hearing. I want people to have no idea where the fuck the poem is going.
I do not want people to be impressed by how clever I am at words. The point of a poem is not and never should have been convincing the audience that the poet is good at poetry.
For the things I do, rhyme and meter are not only unnecessary, they are actively getting in the way. It's time to throw them out.
And if I shed rhyme and meter, everything else falls apart too. The entire institution of modern poetry and why people should write poems, everything I studied for years, is now completely irrelevant to what I do.
"You'll never be published in a journal with that attitude." Why would I even want this? Everyone talks about being published in journals, no one I know talks about reading them. I don't read them myself, anymore, I've forced myself to admit I don't enjoy them--and I know very few people, even poets, who subscribe to them. This set of circumstances is ridiculous. What is the point of a journal that exists only for the validation of people who submit to it? What audience would this reach, what doors would this open? There are no more magazines, no more newspaper sections that would care about whether a poet is published, they stopped long before I was born--and I have zero interest in starting a new career as a teacher of writing. Besides, journals are poetry as text; journal poems are not written to be read aloud. I've submitted to them before, ages ago, but nothing I've written in the past ten years is suitable--it took me long enough to appreciate the differences enough to transition away from the written word.
What would anyone gain from me getting published, least of all me? Who would read it? (I wouldn't.)
"This is unprofessional. You know the standards of the poetry reading--your performance style violates every rule. It's crass showmanship, not poetry." What is the point of the traditional poetry reading, and why is it so hostile to reading aloud? (FFS, Robert Frost infamously did all his readings in a shouted monotone, so as not to influence how they are interpreted--it was absurd.) Why would you read a poem meant to be read as text aloud, to promote a book? Would it not make more sense to hand out copies of individual poems on sheets of paper for the audience to read quietly, or for publications of short poems, frame them on the walls like paintings, to be read and mused over with the poet over wine and little cubes of cheese?
I am standing in front of a phone yelling at an audience--sometimes a big one from a stage, sometimes just a handful of people in an apartment. The text I have labored over for months is just a guide, my voice is what carries the performance. If my body language and my delivery affect the interpretation of the poem, they don't distract from the poem, they are the poem.
"Poetry is dying. It's a shame that you trained in this for twenty years, just to throw it away." Poetry will never die as long as there are at least two people who can startle each other with the order in which they put their words. The way we used to do poetry, why we used to do poetry, what we thought a poet was, and what we valued poems for are all dying. Good riddance.
