Notes on the contributors to the MassPoetry blog
Blog from Cape Cod
In deciding whether the first line of a poem warrants any further interest, I think we use a decision-making template containing both academic and emotional criteria. At its upper level, we might be looking at craft features such as cliché vs surprise, image vs rhetoric, mystery vs clarity, syntactical strategy. Underneath, there are criteria driven by things like our age or stage in life, temperament, unfinished emotional business, what kinds of experience fills us up and what kind depletes us. I believe a two-level template is used in every situation where we’re deciding whether we want more of someone, or whether we’re ready to move on. Deciding about a poem based on its first line / deciding about a person in the first few seconds after meeting them at a speed-dating table or in a bar or at a party probably involves the same process.
Here’s an example from my own experience: Edward Hirsch’s poem Special Orders begins with: Give me back my father walking the halls/ of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company. For some, the diction might be “too plain,” too prose-like. Not imaginative or surprising or experimental enough. They’re ready to stop and go on to the next poem. But I’m drawn in by the line’s emotional quality, energy, and authority. This is a writer who wants to talk directly with his reader- and about something real. This isn’t a poem written with a journal editor, contest judge, or an academic community in mind. This is a poem that wants to communicate. And the first line suggests he will get into something I’ll find meaningful in terms of where I am in my life and some of the emotional business I’m processing. That promise is fulfilled– and it overtly deepens with the following line placed in the physical center of the poem: I don’t understand this uncontainable grief.
He satisfies some other important criteria in my template: there’s no pretension in the first line, no trying to impress, no working too hard to sound like a poem. And he’s willing to take the risk of beginning in a clear and straightforward way. I agree with Mark Halliday’s comment in a review praising Tony Hoagland’s poetry: “American poetry is overpopulated with poets who seem to sense that they don’t possess a strikingly fresh perspective on human problems, so they’d better weave bundles of oddities and feints and ironic gestures.” He notes that Hoagland will never be able to please those readers who are infected by ICFU ( Instant Contempt For The Understandable), which he defines as a condescending disdain toward a poem immediately upon realizing it makes sense, coheres, and can be paraphrased.
[...] In deciding whether the first line of a poem warrants any further interest, I think we use a decision-making template containing both academic and emotional criteria. At its upper level, we might be looking at craft features such as cliché vs surprise, image vs rhetoric, mystery vs clarity, syntactical strategy. Underneath, there are criteria driven by things like our age or stage in life, temperament, unfinished emotional business, what kinds of experience fills us up and what kind depletes us. I believe a two-level template is used in every situation where we’re deciding whether we want more of someone, or whether we’re ready to move on. Deciding about a poem based on its first line / deciding about a person in the first few seconds after meeting them at a speed-dating table or in a bar or at a party probably involves the same process. More… [...]