Multiple friends on separate occasions mentioned the news that a collection of William McGonagal’s poems had been auctioned for £6,600. He was, apparently, to poetry what Florence Foster Jenkins was to classical song: an unintentional laughing-stock. Unfortunately, this is the poetry news that reaches my non-poet friends: that old bad poems get sold for lots of money.
New bad poems, unfortunately, won’t fare so well. Like classical song, nineteenth-century verse requires certain talents. Reading through samples of McGonagal’s poems, his lack of talent, particularly with regard to scansion, is evident. He hurls headlong with great effort toward each end-rhyme and, in the process, makes statements and observations so obvious and banal as to be surprising, almost childlike, in how unremarkable they are. In fact, many of his poems read like children’s attempts at formal verse. Furthermore, such “innocent” poetry stumbles in to unintentional humor.
Contemporary poetry is irrevocably different than nineteenth-century verse. This semester, Marvin Bell has been been encouraging me to attempt to write “bad” poetry, to “fall on my face” linguistically, to get myself into situations where I am “hopelessly lost but still typing.” It has been an invigorating antidote to my tendency to write neat, short poems. But it is precisely because contemporary poetry seeks to break rules (and thereby discover more interesting territory) that we will never again see a single, definitive “worst poet” in our time. In the absence of a centralized governing aesthetic, we no longer have a stick by which to measure “worst.”
Believe me, I am not saying there aren’t a lot of bad poems out there–genuinely bad poems, written by poets equally lacking in self-awareness as McGonagal. People are still writing awkward verse. Others are trying to pass off prose as poetry. Still others will try to convince you that their cerebral and wholly unmoving twelve-line exercise in linguistics can be justified by a several-hundred-page dissertation. But audiences no longer feel sufficient confidence to hurl rotten eggs or fruit. They hesitate. This may be due to a certain mystique in which contemporary poetry has managed to defensively enshroud itself. But also, the line between “bad” and “great” (not good, but great) seems thinner than ever in this iconoclast medium.
Even, for example, in Flarf, the deliberate attempt to write indisputably bad poetry, interesting nuggets often emerge which, taken up in the hands of a talented writer, can lead to remarkable poems. As Marvin says in this video, “sometimes the worst part of a poem contains the seeds of something that will be terrific if the person would just push it further.” In this sense, the creative, generative act of writing a contemporary poem is one in which “best” and “worst” must cease to exist for awhile, in service to a kind of exploration I call spelunking in consciousness.
In order to write, we must be willing to explore, and we must be willing to fail. We must be willing to write our McGonagal lines–what Ellen Bass calls “platforms”–because without the McGonagals in our creative process, we end up settling for good instead of great or, worse, being gagged by the inner critic and ceasing to write at all. In this sense, while there may never be another McGonagal per se in post-postmodern literature, there is, perhaps now more than ever, a little McGonagal in us all.
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You have put your finger on one of the reasons I don’t write poetry. I am reading some poetry Jack recommended this term, and it’s reminding me that I have no real idea of what’s good or not. The only judgment I can make is whether it moves me at the moment I read it — and I often find that if I mark a poem in a litmag or book and come back six months later, it might not move me anymore, or that something I liked on the page sounds horrible read out loud. That’s without getting into the questions of bias, and the reader’s complicity in being moved, which surely affect the experience of reading.
Among other reasons, this is why I can’t really write poetry: I have no idea whether I’m doing well or not, and the process of revision, which is one of my favorite parts of writing, is suddenly a joyless confusion as I struggle to determine what to cut and what to expand. My lack of conviction in judging poetry makes me sadly dependent on others’ opinions, which is only contemptible in reading, but which is surely no way to write.
I think that, in your candor, you touch on something that may be fairly universal in contemporary poetry. As fate would have it, the latest issue of Rattle just arrived, bearing an interview with Marvin Bell, wherein he seemed to speak directly to the uncertainty and discovery of writing contemporary poetry, which he calls “dogpaddling like mad.” He also goes on to point out that metrical verse can often be “fixed,” whereas free verse requires a certain energy to sustain it, making revision more than just a tactical matter. And, of course, he talks about writing “bad” poems as a way of breaking down the misconception that we have to write something on par with a finished work right out of the gate — and even calls in to question how a lot of poets describe their process, implying they might spin in additional mystique when, in fact, it all comes down to writing: good, bad, and otherwise. I highly recommend it (Rattle Volume 29, Summer 2008).
In considering why I am drawn to dogpaddling (instead of, say, the breast stroke that is fiction, which surely gets you further, faster), I think of the concept of “groundlessness,” which the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön speaks about. It reminds me, in many ways, of Keats’ “negative capability” — the ability to hold in the face of contradictory realities without reaching immediately for the security of conclusion. I feel “groundless” so often in my life, that in some strange way, it seems that poetry is a kind of necessary expression of this complexity and uncertainty. Having exteriorized it on the page, all the messy strange imprints of being human, is somehow profoundly therapeutic. And when it really comes out with its own intrinsic power, others (though surely not all) seem to gravitate toward it as well. In this way, as much as poetry is a matter of taste, and one man’s great poem is another’s source of ridicule — there is something else to this medium where bad can turn good, and where the only rule is to break them, and the only form the one you invent — that does, in fact, have, if not a universality, at least a ring of the universal, an echo of something that seems whole and true. That’s what I keep chasing. It’s crazy, and futile, and I love it.
There seems to be a streak of fatalism in you poet-types. Jeannine told me once she enjoyed the story “Isis in Darkness” best in Atwood’s _Wilderness Tips_ “Because it’s about poetry, and being a poet killing you, and I can relate to that.”
I suppose fiction, usually both more linear and more concrete, could be seen as a way of creating stability rather than embracing and expressing fluidity. In some ways, I am attracted to the analogy of music: I’m an oboist and a classical soprano (I use the present tense here somewhat rashly), and in some ways it seems that poetry is more like singing, prose more like instrumental music. Both can be lovely, moving, and can betray your expectations. But it is easier to cerebrate instrumental music, to judge it on its merits according to its constraints, whereas much more of our opinion of a given vocalist is on the level of the heart alone.
I have found writing fiction less a form of release or therapeutic expression than a journey — both in the sense of exploration and of escape. The set of problems, confusions and struggles in my own life are replaced with new problems, confusions and struggles: those of the character and those of the text itself. Thus it offers no direct transformation of the writer’s human experience and perhaps no direct transfer of it to the reader; but perhaps it offers distance and perspective on experience to reader and writer alike.
I have definitely also experienced poetry as exploration, escape, a replaced set of struggles, and a means to perspective. I suppose I was just examining what drew me to poetry specifically over some other medium, and I think it is the capacity for poetry to demonstrate the multi-faceted nature of human consciousness, both in the act of writing and in the act of reading, that so fascinates me. It may also be what causes me to resist the process — because it requires that I embrace the unknown, and remain in that at once uncomfortable and exhilarating place of nescience and possibility.
Just like human consciousness, there are no perfect rules or taxonomies for poetry, and yet the validation we experience when, say, we fall in love with another consciousness, is powerful and “true” in ways that poems can be “true.” Poems are something more than “true stories” or even stories at all. Sure, we can explain why we fell in love with that person or poem, we can even narrate the events, but it does not mean the same set of circumstances would necessarily produce the same result. It seems alchemical.
And yet there is this rightness, which only points back to the complex, multifarious nature of who we are. For me it captures that sense that I could have been anybody, anything, all of it. When I write a poem, I am a poem. In some sense, it doesn’t seem like a very “sane” thing to do. Yet in another, larger sense, it seems more natural than anything else I might ever identify as “me.”
p.s. to say I hope I did not, in my previous comment, inadvertently fall into the poet’s favorite pastime: encircling poetry with an air of mystery. I am sure in fiction one can get equally wrapped up in human concerns, lose oneself to the story. It is just a different angle on approaching the human, with different considerations.
I believe I was the first to introduce the recently deceased W. D. Snodgrass to the bad poetry of William McGonagal.
De was my best friend for several years, and after he moved to the University of Delaware, he called me (I was a professional Reference Librarian in that Department at the Norfolk Pulbic Library–later fired)to ask me to find him some bad poetry for a mock poetry performance he was giving at the University up there. I got him our copy of The Stuffed Owl, a collection of bad verse, and a friend Carol Jones, had told me about a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly about William McGonagal, the horrible poet.
So I sent him those by mail, checking the book out under my name.
He got back with me and said it was a rousing success. He wore a cape and the audience threw tomatoes. He must have repeated this in his winter home at San Allende in Mexico, from what I have read.
Thanks for sharing this wonderful story, Myreen. Mr. Snodgrass will indeed be missed.