Poetry by Trial, Error and Experiment
If there is meaning in life, then there must also be poetry. Whether you like it or not.
Some of us like it more than others. Many of us were brought up to think of poetry as an inaccessible creature, something belonging to smug self-involved intellectuals who dressed badly and had even poorer social skills than the average computer geek. (Completely unrelated question: Do computer security geeks – like me – count as being more or less geeky than regular computer geeks?)
High school has a way of making people think that way. It turns out that a large part of this may be the result of the way poetry is taught, rather than the poetry itself. It’s just a fact of life that many of us, particularly males (and, according to a survey I read once, political conservatives) are more likely to enjoy Rudyard Kipling than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet English teachers are far more likely to use the second as examples of great poetry than the first. Such is life.
So we learn that poetry is for the elite. Those of us who don’t belong to the elite probably won’t understand the stuff anyway, so why bother?
That sort of disconnect from literary poetry was the subject of a terrific blog post I found the other day at the Poetry and Culture blog about Dashiell Hammett and poetry (here). Since I’m a poet (these days) and Hammett is one of my favorite authors, I had to read it. The post gave several examples of Hammett’s main character expressing less than positive feelings about not just written poetry but the entire idea that there is anything poetic in life.
Well, a hard boiled detective might find life’s poetry to be a bit rough around the edges, wouldn’t he?
By complete coincidence, I began experimenting recently with noir poetry – poetry from the point of view of a hard boiled detective in the midst of a murder investigation. I found this hard to write and so far impossible to sell, though it’s too soon to declare a verdict on that. A search of Google turned up a couple of instances of it in the past, though always referring to the movies, not the books or stories. Noir does not yet seem to be an established genre like science fiction poetry, or even cowboy poetry. Maybe it’s too narrow a field to be worth it. I’ve had fun trying so far.
Incidentally, I found the Poetry and Popular Culture blog because someone posted a link to a nice article there about science fiction poetry (here). When I discovered a few years ago that science fiction poetry was an established (albeit small) genre and that people might even pay me for it, my attitude towards all poetry changed, almost instantly. You mean there’s poetry even for someone like me? Why didn’t my English professors ever mention? I might have started writing the stuff decades earlier if those esteemed experts hadn’t worked so hard (admittedly unintentionally) to discourage me from liking poetry.
Oh well. Let that be a lesson to me: There’s poetry out there for everybody, even people who don’t think much of poetry and who don’t like the stuff that wins awards. (not including the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling award. I often like the winner of that one).
Meanwhile, I tried an experiment last week. I made a Google Wave and put a couple of stanzas from an unfinished fantasy poem in it. Wave is an interesting technology, part email, part instant messenger, part something that runs applications (but not really an operating system). It is decidedly cutting edge on the web today. Like anything brand new, it has not yet found it’s place. It is still by invitation only (I think). A lot of people still haven’t heard of it and, even among those who have accounts, most people are unsure what to do with it.
I thought it would be interesting to find out if it would be useful for poetry collaborations. It seems like it should be but who knows? So I sent an email to a poetry mailing list inviting all members to collaborate with me on the poem I started in the wave. I told them that I would share the wave with anyone who had an account and some interest in collaborating. And anyone who wanted to collaborate but didn’t have a wave account, I would send them an invitation (note: Anyone reading this post is invited to take advantage of the same offer).
No takers, so far. This might mean that even science fiction poets are, in general, not very up on technology. It could also mean they’ve read my poetry and would rather not get involved. Wave sounds to me like a fine platform for exactly this kind of collaboration. But what do I know about poetry?
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