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Anyone who has taught an undergraduate poetry workshop in recent years recognizes the strangeness of approaching this art form. Among the most irritating experiences for a teacher is the confidence with which students say “poetry today is only meaningful to the writer” or “anything is acceptable in a poem if it’s what the writer wants” or “there’s no such thing as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ poem.” Why can’t they all be acceptable and added to the edifice of poetry? Poetry might then become a form of literary blogging, with each poet’s monologue standing parallel to the others, written for and read by the poet’s “friends.” This isn’t far from the way Lord Rochester wrote his humorous lyrics, circulating them in pamphlets to his friends. Only today’s young poets are throwing their fish into in a much bigger pond.
As a teacher I found myself setting possible boundaries for the poem— i.e., forms and boundaries the writers could choose to apply to their work or eschew if they wished. I discussed the many ways poetry has been judged—by its lyricism; its coherence; its mastery of line, meter, and sound; its seriousness or the universality of its content; and an indefinable quality which one of my students called its “mad-awesomeness.” I placed these criteria on the table to help structure the conversation about students’ work, but I realized on some level that my students were right. A poem in 2007, as we open a small literary magazine called Amaranth to confront it, must establish all of its norms as discourse in fairly short order. Is it an address to a specific person, like a letter? Or is it a hortatory address, a sermon on something important to the world in general? Or is it a work which puts the focus on the language, eschewing obvious syntactic meaning? What is the world of the poem—a specifically poetic world such as those called into being by Yeats, Shelley, and Robert Duncan, populated by mythic figures and literary echoes? Or a daily, quotidian world out of Paul Blackburn or Frank O’Hara, relating trivial experiences, not spots of time but blotches or smears? What is the language of the poem? Etcetera.
Surely this is part of what puts so many readers off poetry. One approaches it cold, like a college student knocking on doors for Greenpeace. Some resentment inevitably results. And this is partly because a poem lacks any obvious structure.