Your Didactic Post of the Moment: Three (and a half) Things Poets Should Never Write About
(1) The moon
A lot of poets are insomniacs, or up late drinking, or busy sobbing into their green tea as they draft encomium after encomium about the autumn leaves’ brave last bursts of color against winter and impending death. In any event, we’re often awake at night, and unless you’re in some horribly cloudy place like London or Seattle or something, there’s a pretty good chance of seeing the moon on a given night.
As the old saw goes, one writes about what one knows, and we poets know only about sadness, loneliness, and the wide gulf between what one wants and what one has, all of which are encapsulated by everyone’s favorite natural satellite, the moon. (Personally, I think the moon is just a pockmarked teenager who is stalking his would-be girlfriend, the Earth.)
Anyway, there aren’t many other things to write about at night and contrary to popular belief, poets do not have imaginations. None whatsoever. So absent the moon, there are only three other nighttime-related subjects: bats, city lights, and owls. Not great options. Clearly we don’t want to write about bats, as we’d be typecast as Poe-wannabes. City lights aren’t exactly exciting (especially here outside my rural hometown of 1,500) and all poems about city lights are probably copyrighted by Lawrence Ferlinghetti anyway. And owls, as everyone knows, are jerks.
So the moon’s the only good option, and let me tell you, in the poems I read from the slush pile, the moon is everywhere. It seems to be the default simile. This is probably because it’s so adaptable. In one poem, the crescent moon looks like a scythe, in another the full moon is like a plate, in another poem the moon is like a Frisbee that someone’s mom accidentally bleached and threw 240,000 miles away into orbit around the earth.
(2) Really Specific Political References
Amiri Baraka once said that when one is writing political poetry, one wants to end up with “a mess of pottage, not a pot of message.” As one of my old English professors noted, he didn’t do very well when living up to his own maxim. (I dig his fiction a lot, though.)
Political poems, like love poems, are notoriously hard to pull off. They’re probably the two most difficult types of poems to write (though if you’re setting out to write a specific type of a poem, you’re probably in trouble anyway). Political poems often fall victim to overheated rhetoric/diction, a self-righteous tone, and temporally specific references that quickly become dated. (Oddly enough, many love poems suffer from flowery rhetoric, a self-sure/romantic tone, and personally specific references that are too personal for anyone else to understand.)
Rather specific political references really bother me. No one is going to have a clue who Scooter Libby is ten years from now. Hell, most average folks probably don’t know now. Similarly, I know someone is out there writing a poem about Shirley Sherrod right now, but that poem probably won’t mean much to anyone in five minutes, let alone five years. So what’s the point?
#3 Poems About Poetry
There is nothing more boring in the world than poems about poetry. And nothing more cringe-inducing. There are so many opportunities for wry self-reference, so many worthless conceits just waiting to be conjured. And perhaps worst of all, in writing about writing, there are endless opportunities to sound important. Put all of those together and you get absolutely nothing.
As Marvin Bell writes, “I too wrote words about words, which is a specialty so empty / of humanity that it should have its own academic division.”
Really, I would rather memorize tax returns for a month than read such poetry. I’d rather eat an electrified jellyfish. I’d rather housetrain a walrus that lives on a diet full of diuretics. Every time I pick up a submission full of poetry-poems (as I call them), I almost immediately think: No. One. Cares.
#3.5 Metaphors that Involve Math
Poems about poetry are almost as bad as picking up a submission that features a math term used as metaphor (the geometry of sadness, the algebra of anger, etc.) I’ve encountered this a number of times—and it apparently wasn’t a joke in any of the instances. If that’s not a death-knell, I don’t know what is.
Ha! I once wrote a poem about the moon. But wait! It was an assignment back in high school Sophomore English. Oh boy, was it filled with teenage garbage. Imagine a poem the girl in the Twilight movies would write.
I’m not sure I agree about the specific political references, though. I think it just has to be done right. Sometime during the past year a discussion took place on how much we should generalize. I think it was a Doritos reference that we were discussing–should we leave it and assume the people of the future will still know what Doritos are, or should we write something like “those fake cheese dusted tortilla chips.” Certainly a specific political reference could be confusing. But it could cause discussion, too, about where the author was coming from with those specific rants or observations or thoughts. I guess I’m thinking specifically of Jayne Cortez here, and specifically her poem “Rape,” which concerns two women in the 70s, Inez Garcia and Joanne Little, who killed their rapists. I loved the poem before I knew the specifics, but after I looked it up, I felt an even stronger bond with the poem. And I think that’s true of many specific references in poetry and prose.
Yeah, some way-specific allusions are cool; I’m just thinking of really particular references to rather topical–and thus forgettable–events. (I wouldn’t put the Jayne Cortez example in there, so good on you for calling me out on it.)
And in the spirit of diaboli advocatus, I’m going to try to write a poem with all three of the things I mentioned. I’m almost certain it will be terrible, but that’s half the fun of it.
Heck yeah it is! Let us know how it works out. Great post!
Will do, and thanks!
I had to laugh at the pockmarked teenager metaphor, and admit to curiosity about the bleached Frisbee accidentally thrown into orbit.
I want you to write a poem made up of the things you’d do rather than read poems about poems. Funny stuff there Herr Brett.