The Poem-as-Person, Or: I Hope I Don't Turn Budding Creative Writers Into Judgmental Bastards

I have a recurring fantasy where I walk into a new creative writing class one minute late—or, maybe I’m guest speaking at a friend’s so I don’t have to deal with any repercussions if my experiment horribly fails—and I pick out a student in the room, and without saying a word I begin jotting down details I notice about the student on the blackboard. Tall. Scruffy. Wears a scarf. There are no judgments, only observations. The class is enraptured. This is what they came to college for—to be surprised, to be kept on their toes, to be engaged—could this be such an experience? After a moment, with all eyes on me, I ask the student a few questions. How old is he? He says, after a moment’s hesitation, 20. I write 20 on the board. Where is he from? Cleveland. I write Cleveland on the board. What writers first inspired him? After a moment’s thought, he answers, and I start a new category—Influences—and beneath it I write Kerouac, Bukowski, Hemingway, and out of left field, Jane Austen, because this student will not be fit into a box. But, after a moment, I start a new category, once again ignoring my subject. I write Cautious. Wary. Wry sense of humor. Curious. After a moment, while the class struggles to connect the list of observations, to see the point of the exercise, I turn to them and say, “This is another way of talking about poetry.” And I bring up a copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Arrival at Santos” on the document camera, or Kim Addonizio’s “Tell Me,” or William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just To Say”—any poem with a remarkable voice—and we start talking about the poem.

All that to say, I’ve been thinking about a new paradigm for discussing specific poems, and more importantly, a poet’s body of work, called (for lack of something more clever) poem-as-person. In part, this stems from my experience with students (and by that I mean anyone who studies poetry, not simply those enrolled in a class) who seem to have scant idea how to approach a poem or talk about a poem, let alone a body of work, and also because I think there’s a dominant paradigm at large in the poetry world—poem-as-riddle, or poem-as-message—that needs to be replaced. Several teachers I know personally or through their essays and blogs spend a significant amount of time attempting to overwhelm the paradigm of poem-as-riddle by encouraging students to talk about what they notice in a poem, what formal work the poem is doing (poem-as-machine is a metaphor that is sometimes used towards this end, which has its own dangers but is not as antithetical to poem-as-person as one might think) and by explaining that finding the “point” of a poem isn’t the goal of reading poetry. Often, I get the feeling that the message is received but rarely embraced to the extent that the student believes, instinctively and without thought, that there doesn’t need to be a point, or holy ultimate message to a poem, something we take for granted with songs—no one I know ever says, “What’s the point of that song,” or “What message is that song trying to send?” We like songs because they bring us pleasure. That’s the foundation, and everything after is scholarship and introspection. But part of the reason poem-as-riddle continues to linger is because all these strategies I just mentioned—talking about the poem as a machine, how the formal aspects of the poem contribute to our understanding and reception of the poem—only blur the edges of the metaphor of poem-as-riddle, when it needs to be erased, or superseded. Unless the poem is a riddle, I suppose.

I am aware that there are major pitfalls with the idea I’m tentatively espousing, dangers every bit as relevant as the possible benefits, but let me explain a bit more before I address them. Poem-as-person works just how it sounds. Talk about the poem like it's a person, and since most people are natural gossips, this should not be difficult. What kind of speech does the person/poem use? Are they formal? Colloquial? Perhaps their speech is antiquated? What effect does this have? Do they use a lot of obscenities? Why? Is it natural or forced, are they showing off, making a point? Perhaps they seem self-conscious? Mystical? Oblique? Melodramatic? When we’re talking to someone, or eavesdropping, we unconsciously understand that the way people represent themselves through speech means something—signifies something—about them, whether it’s what they want to represent or not, or whether it means what we think or not. It’s something that no one needs to be taught. There are dangers to this metaphor—nasty ones—and I’ll address the easy one here. In order to study a poem in this manner, it’s important to understand that—as with people—the sum of the observer’s judgments is not the gestalt of the poem. People, like poems, are bottomless wells. That’s exciting to a curious mind.

It’s important to note that the metaphor of poem-as-person is not limited simply to speech, because a poem is more than simply a collection of words, and this too is a concept that is often new to students. A poem has a body. It’s an object. The shape of the poem on the page, the length of the lines, where the lines are broken, the font—these things are just as important as what particular words are being used. The shape of a poem on the page is primarily what makes the first impression, not the words. I’m often immensely attracted to poems before I’ve read a single word. I like uniform stanzas, poems full of dropped lines, italics, lines that still begin with capital letters regardless of punctuation, lines that refuse to end in commas, and lots and lots of other things. Likewise, if I see bolded words, or a word spelled vertically, it's enough to make me gag. (Kidding. But I would never bold a word.) The language of the poem might be the most banal, energy sucking piece of doggerel in any language, but if the shape is beautiful, then I’ll give it a chance. This is why we sometimes hate attractive people—they can get away with more.

Here’s what I think of this metaphor when I’m being optimistic: it’s infinitely expandable, in the sense that any correlation drawn between person and poem should expand knowledge (or at least perspective) of the poem, and I also think it has the potential to help students understand not only disparate poems, but entire bodies of work. Lessons learned about Elizabeth Bishop in “Arrival at Santos” will ring true through much—though not all—of her poetry. And the same for Chelsey Minnis, And Adam Zagajewski. And John Ashbery. Learning to identify not themes, but traits, and characteristics, and putting together the personality of a poet—their “voice”—will allow students to intimately understand poets in a way they did not have the ability to before. Poets (usually) want people to get to know them, but they’re dealing with a readership that has a learned social disorder. New readers of poetry ignore facial queues. They don’t distinguish voice intonations. And they forget everything they’ve learned about the poet the next time they read them, a complex that I think stems from an education that rarely requires students to read more than one poem by an author, unless it’s Shakespeare. Few educators, if any, are assigning Ariel, or Spring and All, or The Panther and the Lash, and while I’m not saying that’s a problem with the educational system—I think its job is exposure rather than specialization—it’s obviously shaping the way people approach poetry. There’s no continuity, or accumulation of knowledge.

So how can the risks be minimized? While discussing this metaphor, I would ask students if it’s possible to know everything about a person from one conversation. Maybe I would pick on my tall, Bukowski loving friend again, who I suppose at this point I’ll assign the name Warren. Is it possible to know everything about Warren from one conversation? Is there some end-all of Warren, some platonic version of him to know? Of course, the idea is ridiculous. Even after years of conversations with Warren, I still wouldn’t know everything about him. Warren doesn’t know everything about himself, and look, I just stretched the metaphor—poems don’t know everything about themselves either. All kinds of unconscious jettison leaks into them. But as I talked with Warren more (listened more?)—e.g., as I read more of a poet—my sense of who he was, and what drove him, his loves and his fears, his obsessions—these things would rise to the surface. Yes, when I’m being optimistic, I think this metaphor might help inspire students to get to know poets they like better, to actively engage a poet’s body of writing.

The fat, obvious problem—my fear—is that I’m transferring the problems of stereotyping and racism and bigotry from the world of people to poems. (Okay, I'm flattering myself--it's there already. But I don't want to add to it.) How would my exercise look, for instance, if I walked into that class and wrote down: Hispanic, or Fat, or Nervous Tic? Why would I do that? What assumptions would I be making based on those observations? Is the Hispanic student going to be writing love poems? Is a white student going to be writing about growing up disillusioned in suburban America? Maybe, maybe not. No way of knowing. So the trick is knowing what information is relevant, as well as knowing when to take information into account but not make assumptions about it. Because—and this is ridiculous to write, but I’ve gone this far, so why not—being male or female does shape us as writers. I’m not sure how, but it does. Maybe sometimes it doesn’t. It’s interesting that the university naturally groups people together by nationality or gender or any number of other commonalities in literature courses—African American Lit, The Jewish Diaspora, Chicano Lit. While those classes don’t make assumptions, they do draw correlations between commonalities. This, though, is more a commentary on age (as in 19th Century, or 20th, etc) or society/social forces, not inherent proclivities of a person from a certain region.

Some of this is obvious information, but I think it’s important to spell out and discuss, especially with students, and especially if I’m thinking about pulling my little teaching tool out in class. (That sounds strangely perverted, but I’m going to leave it.) I also realize there’s a lot of overlap with ideas already in use. Poem-as-person is similar to talking about “voice,” which I think is more commonly used with fiction, but only talking about voice leaves so much unexplored, especially in poetry when the body of the poem is so incredibly important.