I made some comments on overdone poetic techniques in an article a
few years ago in Chapman. Since this topic is generating interest here,
I give an excerpt of my main points below. The whole article is
archived on line at:
http://www.eurozine.com/online/articles/19990421-ep-corelis.html
===== begin quoted text =====
[The type of poetry I call] Suburbanite verse tends to be
aggressively quotidian in its content, which is typically marked by
familiar references to driving the family car, watching TV, putting the
kids to bed, divorcing and taking a lover, looking at old snapshots and
remembering one's grandmother. This poetry seems to be aimed at a
comfortable, upper-middle-class suburban audience, to whom it offers the
same sort of pleasure of recognition as do the "lifestyle" articles one
finds in the feature section of the newspapers, on topics such as
"Problems with a Step-daughter" or "Encountering an Ex-Lover" or Are We
Numb to Violence on the News?" One, at least if one is a certain kind
of a one, reads these things with narcissistic delight: why, that's
just what my friends and I talk about. All in all, I would say that the
implicit preface of this school's poems is, "Darling, guess what's
happened!" The Suburbanites, if I understand them (which I admit I may
not), conceive poetry as a vehicle for transforming muted personal
anxieties into thoughtful exercises in literary craftsmanship, and I
have come to think of their way of writing as the Well-Crafted style.
Much of this sort of poetry follows the same, predictable rhetorical
strategy. It begins with a teaser, a rhetorical tugging at your sleeve
to get you interested in what's about to happen. Many of these teasers
aim at arousing a puzzled interest by employing the Pronoun Mysterious
in the first line: "Driving to meet you...", or "She had always hated
orange". Alternatively it can present an unexplained portrait, on the
assumption that we'll respond by wanting it explained: "Roses litter
the frosty alley ...", or "The women are singing in the patisserie".
And there are other techniques. Then comes the pitch, the substance of
the poem as a satisfaction of the sense of incompleteness which the
teaser has deliberately aroused. And finally, in the last line or two,
the fillip: a brief, striking, pithy sentence or phrase which uses wit,
irony, or humour to reinforce, undercut or give a new perspective on the
pitch: "But chocolate never tasted right again", or "'I knew he'd let us
down,' said Sandra." Three of the preceding six examples I have made up
in the spirit of parody; the remaining three are actual quotes from
Suburbanite poets. It will no doubt be obvious to the reader which are
which. [...]
In addition to a standardised rhetorical structure, the Well-Crafted
style is characterised by a predilection for a few particular types of
ornamentation. One popular trope is the Brief Catalogue, a series of
three or four related words or phrases, such as "walls, clock, kettle",
or "eyes, brows and chins", or "chat, chips and baked beans".
Apparently the rule is that you may do this once, and only once, per
poem. A related and even more common device is the "deep, blue sea"
construction, consisting of a sensitively chosen adjective followed by
an even more sensitively chosen adjective, after which, to great
fanfare, enter the noun: "soft, uneasy huffs", "babbling, silvered
sky", "cool, surgical music", "immense, empty prairie", or "dark,
impossible bridge". (The foregoing are all real examples.) Another
quality which particularly marks this group is that a remarkably high
percentage of their poems occupy between two thirds of, and exactly one,
page, as if their authors had in mind maximising their output's
marketability by providing editors with conveniently page-sized blocks
of verse."
[...] perhaps the most purely Suburbanite poets whom I have
encountered are Julia Copus, Katherine Frost, Carol Satyamurti, and
Penelope Shuttle, with Suburbanite influence also perceptible in Maura
Dooley and Moniza Alvi, though these latter two succeed in some of their
poems in escaping it.
===== end quoted text =====
[Postscript: the above when published generated a certain amount of
heat north of the Solway. If anyone having read it on this list feels
moved to ask me just who I think I am, here's your chance.]
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
http://profiles.msn.com.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|