What Makes A Poem?

I’ve been working on my comments on the poems we’ll be going over in my first MFA workshop at the end of this month. The poems are from nine different poets with widely different styles, all at various levels in the program. I’m eager to begin the workshop but what I’m musing over this morning is what makes a poem work, which really means of course: What makes a poem work for me, what are my expectations of a poem?

Really there’s only one expectation that I have for poems that I don’t have for prose writing. I expect a poem to be profound in either its message or language, preferably both. In prose, sometimes it’s okay just to be entertained but in poetry I always want more than mere entertainment. Not that entertainment is necessarily “mere,” but poems are in an elevated position for me, somewhere over prose, not terribly elevated, but certainly I don’t read poems just for an escape or, dear god, a story. I except a poem to transcend.

When I encounter a poem that does nothing but tell a story, a poem that doesn’t move into something deeper, I don’t think there’s a real poem in it. There’s simply a narrative with images, often beautiful images, but loveliness of things in no way makes up for a lack of something more. What is this something more? A movement into something universal, something with teeth, something that takes me where real poems take me. Dickinson said that the top of her head blew off and I can’t say it better than that. If my head isn’t blown off, then it’s just not a poem. If it’s a story, then please just write a story. Sometimes a situation, a memory, a moment, a difficult week, a hard row to hoe, needs a story, needs prose, and trying to make a poem from a story just doesn’t work. I feel as though such “poems” are contrived; I can feel the poet working for every word and that sort of meticulous crawling over/through language/images to construct a story doesn’t work for poems. Poems deserve more.

When I look at prose, I expect it to work, to have all the elements that prose needs to move forward and through, to get to where it needs to be. Likewise, I expect a poem to work, often to have many of the same elements as prose: attention to grammar, story, tone, cohesion, focus, plot, attention to detail, clear information, fulfillment of promise. In commenting on the workshop poems, I’ve pointed out places where the poems don’t follow through, where the story breaks down, where needed information has been left out, where language has been misused, where tone shifts abruptly, etc., and I hope such information is helpful to the poets. But I want a poem to blow me away and how do I say that? Your poem doesn’t blow me away, hell it doesn’t even move me so what’s the point of it? Does a poem have to have a point?

Before I answer that, I’ve got to go back and talk a bit about profound language, language that transcends itself. Sometimes language is enough, sometimes it will take the most ordinary, mundane chore of something like teeth brushing or towel folding and turn it into an amazement, into something that is, somehow, beyond language and there’s certainly poetry in that. I can’t argue with it. And I ain’t talking about L-A-N-A-G-U-A-G-E poetry. (Hell, I ain’t even sure I know what that is.) But such language is rare, such poems are rare. When it’s the language that moves a poem into something more, into that elusive stuff of true poems where the head blows off, where the breath is taken, then it’s the language that fulfills the poem, that makes it true.

So, does a poem have to have a point? For me it does. Yes. It must do something more than it is, it must move, it must touch, it must open, it must pummel, pound, shake, roll, fold up, and flatten out. It must do something to ME, the reader. If it doesn’t, it just ain’t a poem. I expect to be moved, if only gently, but what I really want is the air knocked out of me. I want to tingle with a poem’s power and verve, I want to remember the poem forever, the feel of it, its essence. I want a poem to complete the moment of me and the poem, that circle of me and the words and the poet and the finding of a true poem. If I don’t get some of that, some hint of what it means to be alive, then it’s not a poem I’m reading. It’s just words and words are not what make a poem.

~r.