Why emjambement is the worst

Leslie reminded me of something in a comment on a previous post.

Bad enjambement is the curse of bad poetry because it is the sign of verse itself: division into lines. But it is verse misunderstood: the bad poet writes in prose and then divides it into lines without quite understanding that this is not the way you do it. Or line break are exploited by sentimental value, making a key line very short.

Even non-enjambed lines can be badly lineated, but bad enjambement is the worst. Don't do it.

Or do do it, if you are going after that bad poetry effect.

Oliver vs. Baudelaire

Mary Oliver, who died recently, has a certain following. Even friends of mine, smart academics, like her work. Usually they say something like, "I'm not a poetry expert, but... "

The main feature of her work is a what we could call the aspirational subject position.  In other words, the speaker of the poem is a version of one's "best self," complete with the requisite moral earnestness. People have written that those of us who look down on her do so because her poetry is too easy to understand, or that she writes about "old-fashioned" subjects like God and nature. There is a New Yorker piece about "what Mary Oliver's critics don't get" that say this. (This article says that she writes in "blank verse," when what is meant is free verse.)  But, really, this writers doesn't get the objection to Mary Oliver at the most fundamental level.

Speaking for myself, the reason I don't like her work is because it embodies more facile elements of that sort of self-improvement culture in a very sentimental way. Of course, the reader (or a certain type of reader) wants to identify with this aspirational model of selfhood. That's the whole satisfaction of her work. Even her famous poem with the lines "You do not have to be good..." is an example of this. The speaker says we don't have to be good, but is essentially congratulating herself on her moral strenuousness.  In this culture you rhetorically embrace the fact that you are imperfect, but you never actually paint yourself in a bad or ridiculous light. There are no chinks in the armor.

An exaggeratedly non-ideal self, like that appearing in Baudelaire's spleen poems, is the other extreme. I'm thinking of one in which he compares himself to a cruel prince in a rainy country. Now it might be interesting to think that both Oliver and and Baudelaire suffered from depression. Rhetorically, you can embrace the way depression makes you feel bad about yourself; or you can cover it up with a veneer of sentimentality and prettiness. Both are rhetorical strategies; neither is honest or genuine, really, but I object more to the dishonesty of Oliver's poetry. I've known people who have moral objections to Baudelaire, but he is not trying to paint himself in a good light.  You have to object to his subjectivity, because it is being presented to you already in a way that you might will to object to.  Baudelaire is also saying "you do not have to be good," but he accepts that there are consequences.

Bathos

My favorite trope is bathos

Instead of ending the poem resonantly, with a satisfying conclusion

Or epiphany

The poet pulls the rug out from under you

With an idea that's low, ridiculous, worthy of scorn

In my poems the bathos ends the poem before it's supposed to

As if in a fit of impatience

As though something more significant were waiting for me

Outside of the four walls of the poem

Really, though, I like living in here much better

I should stay put and make the poem last as long as possible

Tongues

I stuck my tongue in a woman's mouth

Surprisingly, she stuck hers in mine



We lived like that for several years

I learned how a woman tastes chocolate and salt

She tasted of whisky

And the mouths of other women



Neither of us could tell the truth

With a tongue that was not our own



Now we have our tongues back

They stay put

MK

Doing some de-cluttering.  It's something I have been wanting to do for a while, so the Marie Kondo craze is just a good pretext.  I've found about 70 books to unload, so far, between home and office. I found some dated queer theory books from the 90s and early 2000s.  Mostly I'm keeping primary texts and parts of collections or sets, getting rid of old textbooks and even some reference books, and some books I picked up on tables when other colleagues were giving them away as they left the university.

I went through most of my clothes too.  I had old navy polos I hadn't worn in seven years.

 I can do CDs after that. Then musical instruments.  

Please spare me the criticism. There are silly elements to the Marie Kondo tv show and I could only stand to watch a few episodes. I just like the basic concept of de-cluttering by categories.  That makes it more manageable than the idea of "cleaning the office," when the office itself contains books, cds, papers, instruments, and misc. Cleaning the two offices (home and campus) is not going to happen, but going through these categories will.  

Bones

I have to present this film "Bones of Contention" at the Lawrence Art Center on Saturday. I guess because it has Lorca at the center of it and I am the Lorca guy and it is presented by my own department. Not my idea.

Unfortunately, I hate the film because it is not about Lorca at all, but uses him as its fulcrum to talk about everything else. To me it comes off as an incoherent mishmash. A cringe-worthy moment came when someone says Lorca is the first LGBT victim of Franco.  

But, of course, I am the worst person to ask. My opinion is not all that relevant here.

Ropes

I was walking across campus with my colleague, Stuart. My movement were guided by my consciousness of a set of invisible ropes, of varying thicknesses and tensions, stretching from my limbs diagonally to the sky. Being conscious of them made my movements fluid and unhurried. Some thinner one could break off with no adverse consequences. I thought of the word guys, as it appears in Robert Frost's poem "The Silken Tent." There was no constraint or limitation implied: the ropes did not control me. It was I who could guide my own movements gracefully according to my heightened consciousness of them.