Pesky Poetry Packets

Poetry, for me, has always been about painting pretty pictures with words.  Not.  Actually, the despairing and darker themes has always attracted me more than the "life is full of pretty rainbows" kind of stuff.

But still, the ability to describe something as elaborate and impossible as an emotion using words was always something I admired.  You can imagine my shock when Professor Darling told me to look at the use of language rather than meaning.  "Woah, wait... what am I supposed to do?" could probably best describe the thought process that I was going through.  It was like taking the girl out of a wonderful walk on the beach and the picnic afterwards.  All the elements of a date were there, except the driving force behind them.

So I took to the poetry packets with a purposefully blind eye, annotating dual meanings of certain words and underlining interesting word choices.  The poems were, remarkably, without bias.  When we discussed them in class, various groups shouted their separate interpretations across the room (I'm speaking in hyperbole of course) and I noticed something strange.  Each individual interpretation was only voiced by one member of a certain group.  Does that mean that there was a consensus on the meaning behind the poem?  Had all of them deduced a meaning prior to?  Or was it just that there was one really persuasive speaker in every group?  I would like to believe that my classmates were in the same position that I was, but that assumption would be both egocentric and unfounded.  It's a sort of double-edged optimism.

My group believed that "Where It Passes, Untouchable" talked about a person outside of the writer's self.  We believed that the "mirror's tain" represented an aspect about that "other" that was completely unyielding.  Then another group completely ripped the heart out of my theory and fed on the dripping flesh that was still trying to beat, quoting the same lines and using them as a foundation for the belief that the writer was talking about an aspect about him/herself that he/she hated.  I found myself agreeing with that group, rather than my own.  I felt unqualified to argue, and that my own position was built upon sand.  My lack of dissection and hunting for the meaning made me feel as though I was inexperienced.  I am no stranger to poetry, but I felt strange nonetheless.

What did I mean when I said that the poems were without bias?  When we see ourselves in a work of art, through suffering or objectivity in an abstract or even concrete way, that is bias.  Artistic bias, I would call it.  Naturally, this is something that I do in poetry (hence the attraction to the macabre).  Depression was what got me into writing poetry, and poetry got me out of it.  But when I remove the "artistic bias" of a good ol' fashioned poetry reading, it becomes a pile of nonsense.  Poetry without purpose becomes pointless.  Perhaps it's the cynicism coursing in my veins, but I find myself asking, "What did I really get out of this poem?"  The answer is simply: nothing.

The meaning behind the assignment, however, I find myself scrutinizing very much like a poem.  In the great words of Anton Chekhov, "Remove everything that has no relevance to the story.  If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.  If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."  Perhaps it's the writer in me, but I almost see myself as part of a story.  This assignment wasn't given with no purpose.  Something is supposed to "be fired."  If anything, this assignment illustrates the need for something beyond words to be placed into poetry.  That's what separates it from prose.  You don't just read about the hero going to this place to kill this guy, you feel it.

And that may be why not everyone can write poetry.  There needs to be some super-charged emotion feeding into the words like a sieve.  The raw energy waters the piece, leaving out the pollutants of reason and logic.  Sometimes we hold onto those pollutants like crutches, others don't even recover from their injury.

This assignment taught me that poetry's ammunition is emotion and meaning.  We like it because we can put ourselves in the writer's shoes.  We shut up and take time out of our day to listen to and read it because it tells us that there is something at work beyond the boring world of one plus one equals two.  If half of the class feels the way that I do, then this class is a loaded pistol just waiting to go off.  Damn, do I want that gun to fire.