Musings on poetry and criticism in four parts

Part I, a poem. Part II, a short story. Part III, a non-fiction narrative. Part IV, an analytic essay. Since this is meant as one piece and the topic throughout is poetry, I’m putting it on the poetry page.


PART I:

The great gardener paints a landscape
blending size and shape,
color and fragrance,
sun and shade,
dale and hill
to charm the visitor.
No matter the splendor of the daffodils’ splash of sunshine
nor the tulips’ crimson and yellow dazzle,
if their vernal beauty is not soon followed
by successive waves of color and fragrance until the frost.
And the magnificence of the maple is compromised
if its shade stunts the marigolds and the morning glories.

The great chef blends just the right tastes and textures,
colors and forms, proteins and carbs
so each dish delights the diner,
so each dish prepares the palate for the next.
The great meal is the like a symphony of dishes
building from salad to dessert with seamless perfection.

And so the great poet weaves a poem
with just the right sounds and images, meter and rhyme,
each following a different path into my heart and mind,
yet each supporting the same unifying theme,
bringing my feeling and thinking selves into harmony.
A sparkling phrase that lightens my heart,
but floats in uneven meters and random images,
is but a piece of lonely driftwood,
only hinting at the magnificence of the great tree from which it broke.




PART II

Three a.m. I can hear myself breathing. No droning NPR announcers, no wrong numbers, no motorcycles invading my thinkspace. No one else is up. Just me and the hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the clock, the purring of the cat.. My thoughts can play, undisturbed. At first my images sluggishly flow from my brain, down my arms, out my fingers and magically onto the screen. Faster now. I cut. I paste. I replace “sometime” with “tomorrow.” I delete the ‘woman overwhelmed by worries” and she reappears as “the worry weary woman.” And eventually I abandon her altogether. Slowly the words aggregate, milling around on the screen, always aware of the wandering cursor and the delete key. Some quietly settle into the line. Some insist on sitting together. Some mock me. Some plead. Others stomp off never to be seen again. A raven’s raucous call suddenly draws me back into the world. I notice the dayshift has arrived and turned off the night. The magic is gone. I look at the words on the screen. I attend to the spellchecker’s red warnings, heeding some, ignoring others. As I read, words become lines become a poem. I think of all the words that didn’t get a part, of the rearranging, the pushing and shoving. Of the short lived moments of joy, replaced by more persistent frustration. But now the words, the commas, the colons, and the lines, have all found their proper places. They sing out eloquently to the world what was earlier locked in my heart.

I log on to Hungry Writer’s poetry. I paste my poem into the post box. I pause. Maybe I’ve been up too long. Maybe it sucks. I look up and see the raven laughing at me through the window. No, this one is perfect. I click on publish and surrender to the tugging of the common world.


Stepping through the doorway that evening is like walking out of the surf onto the sand. I’m out of that world, but still dripping, still salty. The cat rubs against my leg and loudly demands to be fed. Then the kids and their father all demand their piece of me, but eventually I get to log back on. “Why did you use ‘developed’ instead of ‘evolved’?” “You introduced a horse in stanza three, but then later we don’t hear about the horse any more. What was that supposed to mean?” “The phrase, ‘washing the bloodstains from my heart’ really spoke to me.”

Oh dear, I knew I shouldn’t have posted it. It does suck. And LazyPoet had to work too hard to find one line to praise – and such an awful line at that. Why do I even pretend to be a poet?

But then the tide turns. Who are these creeps? What do they know about poetry? They really needed to read it more carefully. You can’t just skim through this and comment. I spent hours making it perfect.

And finally a new wind blows. Well, maybe LJ has a point. ‘Evolved’ does work better.
And it’s true, I totally forgot to bring the horse back. But no matter what LazyPoet thinks, I need to wash those bloodstains right out of the poem.

Then I type in: “Thanks everyone for your comments. I’m going to rework this and post it again later, but you’ve all helped me see things I missed myself.”



PART III

The best class I had in college was 17th Century English Literature. It was also the hardest and the one in which I learned the most. Professor Clayton was probably in his 30s. His gaunt body moved constantly, his eyes darted around lighting first on one victim, then on another. “What did Donne mean in this poem?” he’d challenge. If your answer didn’t meet expectations you might be ignored, or worse, your response was dismissed as, “Rubbish!” If your reply was more than routine, he might lavish you with, “Point.” And if your answer showed actual insight, he might even say, “Point well taken.” Needless to say, people quickly stopped raising their hands unless they were certain they knew the answer. Being rubbished was far more likely than being praised. But if there were no volunteers, he would select a sacrificial lamb. To avoid humiliation I began to study ferociously. On the midterm, I got a D. The essay part was fine.. But the exam also included a huge table with columns titled: Poet, birth date, death date, meter, rhyme scheme, imagery, line from a poem. Some of the boxes were filled in. Most were empty. And there was a long list, from a – zz, of the names, dates, and other words, that belonged in those empty boxes. We had to put the letters of each answer in the right boxes. That part of the test was unexpected and disastrous.

All the students who got D’s or F’s had to meet with Professor Clayton privately in his office. Much to my surprise, the cold and merciless professor in class, was warm and friendly in his office. This had been a rough semester for me altogether. My midterm grades were two D’s and two F’s. I launched a new study regimen. Class was from 8-11 every day. I worked from noon to five. I was in the library at six till midnight.

We read Paradise Lost in the second half of that semester and I had more notes than there was text. I noted the meter. I noted the rhyme scheme. I noted each character, the images used for each character, and everything he did. I also noted Milton’s birth and death dates. I did this with every poet and every poem we had to read. I loved Paradise Lost. With this level of effort, I was starting to see patterns. This character was always surrounded by black, that one by fire. I began to anticipate things before they appeared on the page. Suddenly I was part of the poem and felt its complexity, saw the details I had missed the first half of the semester. I began raising my hand in class, and getting ‘Points’ and occasional “Points well taken.”
What I remember of the Final Exam was the mystery poem. The assignment was to identify the poet. I began to check the rhyme scheme and the meter. I found historical references and could eliminate those poets who had died before these events took place. Eventually, I had eliminated most of the poets. The color green was pervasive in this poem and so I chose Andrew Marvell as my likely poet.

I got a B in the class. My A on the final wasn’t enough to make up for the midterm. But that grade gave me more satisfaction than any A I got. Marvell was the mystery poet and I’d figured it out. In hindsight, I realize that this class taught me how to not only read poetry, but anything, to a depth that allowed me to find its heart, It also taught me that by memorizing what seemed like insignificant details, I could know enough to recognize pieces that fit together and ones that were out of place. I could logically figure out the mystery poet in any situation.

Professor Clayton taught me the value of concentrated work and discipline. He taught me that being prepared with in-depth knowledge, enabled me to take full advantage of the clues. While I decided that I would rather apply these skills to what I perceived as more useful areas than the works of long dead poets, this class on 17th Century English Literature was the class that taught me the most useful lessons of all my college courses.

Until I joined HW, I had not thought about poetry in the way I had back then. Yet even now, when I read a poem and make a comment, I feel Professor Clayton's eyes on my back. But I know that more students would have learned what I learned if they had encountered his office persona more than his classroom persona. .


PART IV

Originally I began this essay with the question, “What makes a poem good?” This is no idle question. I’m part of a writers’ group that shares fiction, poems, and non-fiction on the web. Poems appear and I feel I ought to comment on them – that’s the whole point of the group. But how should I judge a poem? After wrestling with that a while and looking at poetry evaluation rubrics on the net, I think there are some reasonable guidelines from which to start. There aren’t any fixed rules that are good for all poems – what makes some poems great is that they create something new by not following the rules – but at least there’s some useful vocabulary with which to discuss poetry. I’ll attach a rubric to this post that we can all discuss.

The real question for me in this group is about how to give useful feedback. The problems arise for several reasons. First, I don’t really know the other writers, except for our web exchanges. Second, an evaluation requires an understanding of the goal of the writer, but each poet writes for different reasons. The first issue will resolve itself as we all reveal more and more of ourselves on the site. The second one, I’ll start thinking about out loud here. Why do we write poetry?

(These are not necessarily mutually exclusive)
1. To capture in words a moment in time (a sunset, an instant of shared love)
2. To capture in words an emotion, a feeling (pick any emotion)
3. To come to understand something better by trying to articulate it in poetry
4. To solve personal issues through introspection instead of therapy
5. To communicate any of the above to another person
6. To solve the puzzle of finding the right words and arranging them so they ‘fit’ (poetry as a Suduko)
7. To get published
8. To worship a deity
9. To complete an educational assignment

Now, in some cases, 1-9 are ends in themselves. But the finished poem may be merely a means to another end. For example:
1. To persuade someone
a. to give one’s heart
b. to buy a product (hey, advertising jingles are a form of poetry)
c. to proselytize
d. to rally people to a cause (certainly the Gettysburg Address is poetry)
2. To aid in learning and remembering
a. epic poems that story tellers pass on from generation to generation
b. mnemonic rhymes like the A,B,C song
3. To gain praise for one’s skill with words
4. To gain fame
5. To earn money (yes, I know that ‘poets’ don’t earn money. But people who sell their poetry as something else (lyrics, advertising, etc.) can make a lot of money


Then, the next question is, what does one do with a finished poem?
1. Throw it away
2. Display it at home
3. Give it to someone
4. Recite it
a. privately
b. to intimates
c. publicly
5. Put it on the web
6. Publish it

There are different ways to evaluate poems based on their purposes. With those that have clear objectives, such as persuasion, the response of the recipients of the poem can be the best evaluation. If consumers don’t buy the product your jingle promotes, that’s a sign. If many people begin to repeat your poem, that’s a sign. If your love laughs in your face and says, “I never want to see you again,” that is a form of evaluation. (Though as one grows older one realizes that in human relationships what one says is not always what one means, so whether this is an ultimately positive or negative evaluation may not be clear.) If a poem is published, that is a sign of success too. But is it published in a vanity press or by a respected publisher of poetry?

For poems written solely to express oneself, then the poet is the ultimate judge.

But for other poems, such as the ones posted at Hungry Writers by poets who, at least implicitly are asking for comments, how do we evaluate their poems? The most common form of feedback I see is a gut level response. “I like that phrase.” “The line doesn’t work for me, what if you changed this word to that one?” This is useful at the micro, line by line level. I don’t see a lot of evaluation that looks at the whole poem and how the words and structure and use of imagery all work together.

For the poets in our group who are simply writing as puzzle solving or as form of introspection, then they are the most important judges of their poetry. But for the poets who are striving for poems that are ‘good’ in terms of some external set of standards, it would be useful for the group to agree on at least guidelines of good poems as a starting point for discussion. So I offer the following matrix from: www.


Perhaps we can improve the quality of our poetry by improving the quality of our criticism .


[The formatting of the rubric totally fell apart when I posted it, so here is the link instead:
http://web.rbe.sk.ca/assessment/Rubrics/languagearts/Rubric%20for%20Evaluation%20of%20Poetry.doc. If that one doesn't work, try this one]