On Poetry in Full Color

A new Johns Hopkins book, That Swing: Poems 2008-2016, takes its title from Duke Ellington's song "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing."  That statement seems to fit a collection of verse almost entirely written in meter---regular rhythms----and might be taken as an objection to free verse.  To write in meter and rhyme, I know, is to risk being branded as old-fangled.  But then, nearly all the tremendous body of poetry in English prior to our century is old-fangled too.   The rise of free verse, said Stanley Kunitz, has made poetry easier to write, but harder to remember.    Poetry that doesn't bother to rhyme and scan often strikes me as pallid, like black-and-white television.  Poetry needs all the music it can get,  T.S. Eliot once told a poet he’d rejected for The Criterion that he had “found it advantageous in correcting [his] lines to read them aloud to the beat of a small drum.”

Some think a poem has to be a memory of actual experience, a faithful diary entry.  But if indeed the poem derives from memory, I believe in letting it lie flagrantly, as much as it likes. As Frank Lloyd Wright remarked, “The truth is more important than the facts.” 

I’d also side with Scottish poet George Mackay Brown, who declared that writing poetry is a craft like plumbing or baking. “There is a tendency,” he said, “to look upon artists as the new priesthood of some esoteric religion. Nonsense — and dangerous nonsense moreover — we are all hewers of wood and drawers of water; only let us do it as thoroughly and joyously as we can.”  W.. H. Auden would have agreed: “A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table.”  True enough, although poetry is a sloppier and less deliberate process than carpentry. You set down on paper a lot of crap, then play around with it until it discovers its shape and starts making sense. This isn’t “self-expression,” but a process of finding out what the poem has to say. From this point of view, rhyme and meter aren’t shackles, preventing the poet from voicing his or her own precious thoughts, but powerful forces sustaining the poem, driving it forward, and probably taking the poet by surprise.

I'll have to admit that, as a believer in rhyme and meter in this age when free verse predominates, I sometimes feel I'm one of a small minority.  This feeling struck me on meeting a famous land tortoise during a trip to the Galapagos, and I recalled it in this poem,  the first one in That Swing. 

   Lonesome George      

                               Giant tortoise kept penned

   at the Darwin Research Station,

  Puerto Ayora, Galapagos

No mate for him exists.

    Last one of his sub-species,

he solemnly persists

    in turning into feces

eelgrass brown and dry,

     spine-sprinkled cactus leaves.

Straining to gulp a fly

     dejectedly retrieves

blunt head.  Dead-ending male,

     lone emblem of despair,

he slumps on his kneecaps, tail

     antennaing the air.

For a long moment we bind

       sympathetic looks,

we holdouts of our kind,

       like rhymed lines, printed books.

That poem happens to remember an actual experience.  Some think a poem has to be nothing but a memory, a faithful diary entry.  But if indeed the poem derives from an experience, still I believe in letting it lie flagrantly, as much as it likes. Art is not precisely the same thing as life.  As Frank Lloyd Wright remarked, “The truth is more important than the facts.”  I’d also side with Scottish poet George Mackay Brown, who shocked some people when he  declared that writing poetry is a craft like plumbing or baking. “There is a tendency,” he said, “to look upon artists as the new priesthood of some esoteric religion. Nonsense — and dangerous nonsense moreover — we are all hewers of wood and drawers of water; only let us do it as thoroughly and joyously as we can.”

W. H. Auden would have agreed: “A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table.”  True enough, although poetry is a sloppier and less deliberate process than carpentry. You set down on paper a lot of crap, then play around with it until it discovers its shape and starts making sense. This isn’t “self-expression,” but a process of finding out what the poem has to say. From this point of view, rhyme and meter aren’t shackles, preventing the poet from voicing his or her own precious thoughts, but powerful forces sustaining the poem, driving it forward, and with any luck taking the poet by surprise.

X. J. Kennedy has written nine collections of poetry, among them In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955 – 2007 and Fits of Concision: Collected Poems of Six or Fewer Lines. The coeditor, with Dana Gioia, of An Introduction to Poetry, he has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Poets’ Prize, the Robert Frost Medal, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Aiken-Taylor Award, and the Jackson Poetry Prize. His latest book, That Swing: Poems, 2008 – 2016, is available now.