The Poetry Hierarchy

 I just began to read a poem by Alice Notley called PUT SOME OBSCENELY CONCRETE NOUNS BACK IN YOUR POEMS.  The first section of the poem is this:

the house is full of 

garbage is on fire,

a new house made 

of blonde wood. The 

father our teacher is sleeping.

Wake him up and tell him,

get a bucket, I 

say to small children. 

I was trying 

to clean up the pizza boxes 

and crumpled pages of typing when

the outside corner of the house

caught on fire again.

Everyone knows a lot of obscenely concrete nouns, so it should be easy to write with them. That just makes the poem automatically have something the reader can visualize. That being said, people fail to do this, or deliberately don't, for some very good reason, I suppose. You don't have to even do very much with this concrete language, you don't even need a large or very elaborate vocabulary. Here there are only a few surprising turns of phrase, like "blonde wood."  

Most people can't do much with the sound of words; this is very difficult. You either try too hard to make something happen, or not hard enough. It takes a musical intelligence not many people have. 

What not as many people have is a distinctive attitude toward everything, a distinctive reason why this is being told to us. I take this to be a narrative of a dream (considering most of the poems in the book do this). The relationships of the characters is hazy. The male figure is the father, "our teacher" (who is us?) and the children might be his children. She doesn't ruin the effect by putting quotation marks around the dialogue. The two things wrong, the garbage and fire, seem to compete for her attention, even though the fire is more urgent. The tense of the narration changes to past at the end... 

So, the poetry hierarchy is: concrete language ought to be easy (but isn't); prosody ought to be hard (and it is), a distinctive attitude is why we even care about it in the first place. And the other elements of the poem have to be in harmony with that attitude. We don't need a lot of word play, unless it is a poet who goes in that direction. 

This short poem (or section of a poem) is perfect in its own way, but without seeming gemlike in the way a lyric from another century would. Think of how many ways it could have been ruined.