This being a ramble across several subjects: Poetics, Communication, Poetry, Reading/ Readership, Patterns in Poems, Choice in Poems, Tone, Ethical Criticism, Back to Tone, Coyness, Avoidance and the via negetiva.

Poetics

ll discussions of poetry have a poetics floating about in the background. A poetics is a theory of poetry, i.e. what poetry is, how poetry works, etc. Most of us have one (or several) poetics. Shoring up a poetics is a more general theory of how people communicate: what is understood, why people read, what that experience of reading is like, etc. and it's here where most disagreements and misunderstandings over poetic criticism begin. I thought I'd give you all a rough thumbnail of my poetics to ground my following comments on tone, coyness, and writing.

Communication

I'm one of those poets who believes that human communication is possible, that meaningful exchanges about ourselves and our place in the cosmos occur every day. I further believe that people communicate both factual information (I am 5'5" tall) and emotional (contextualizing) information (I feel short). Other writers believe communication is not possible (which is pretty ignorant on the face of it) and thus, their theories of what a poem is and how it operates will be quite different than mine (assuming, of course, they could communicate it to you).

Poetry

Poetry continually defies a watertight explanation. For the purpose of this ramble, it might be best to simply think of poetry as more "intense" prose. It is normal language, honed and tightened to produce different effects. The majority of poetry orders its statements to produce musical effects- we labor towards meter, rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration, or, to paraphrase Ezra Pound, language "composed as a musical phrase".

In general, I prefer poems with substantive empirical content grounded in solid emotion or feeling; also, poems of solid emotion anchored by particular detail. Further, I prefer poems that deploy this content and feeling with attention to musical elements- or I could say "I like heartfelt poems about real stuff that also sound good."

When reading poems that do not have all these elements, I'd rather read a poem that skimped on the musical side (i.e. use less strict meter, rhyme, alliteration, etc) while favoring heartfelt meaning. However, I can also enjoy musical poems which allow meaning to slide into obscurity, (provided the music is great- as in the Thomas poem below).

What I value least in poems is obscurity, convolution, and triteness.

I'm pretty tight with Emerson's take on poetry, so I'll include a small excerpt here:

I took part in a conversation the other day concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill, and command of language, we could not sufficiently praise. But when the question arose, whether he was not only a lyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. . .(his) argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary. For it is not meters, but a meter-making argument, that makes a poem-a thought so passionate and alive that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. . .The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune.
—Emerson (excerpts from his essay "The Poet")

I'd append this by saying it's not "formal elements" that make a poem. . .but more on that below.

Reading/Readership

Of course, this entire discussion devolves to the concept of Readership. I.e. Who is the reader? What characterizes a reader? How do we orient our poetry to compensate for whom we perceive those readers to be? Since the goal of poetry given to the populace-at-large is to communicate to that community, we are bound to write better poems if we spend some time considering the people whom they're written for.

Each reader's experience is unique, as each individual's conception of the world is unique. We each read poem through our own veils of perception and experience. For example- here is a poem by Thomas Lux that illustrates how someone might read.

The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently
is not silent, it is speaking-
out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken,
a voice is saying it
as you read. It's the writer's words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her voice, but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice
saying, for example, the word barn
that the wrier wrote
but the barn you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally - some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirr of oats from a split sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows. . . .
And barn is only a noun - no verb
or subject has entered the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you. 

Despite the unique connotations each individual brings to reading, there will be overlapping factors that touch several readers, not the least of which would be the readers' process of absorption, contextualization and judgment. You could also map out this process as: "see, comprehend, understand". Regardless of individual biases that may carry or sink your poem for some readers (Man- that poem mentioned head-cheese, and I hate head-cheese; what an awful poem), the one thing that nearly any reader will notice is,

Patterns in Poems

Most poetry has a pattern that the readers interact with. Humans are pretty good at memorizing and picking out patterns - indeed one theory of poetry claims that bardic poems (like Homer's Iliad) adopted their particular formal poetic devices (such as the list, refrain, and heroic challenge) to assist a oral storyteller remember a very long poem. When readers begin a poem they have certain expectations that are set up by the poem itself. For example, if we see the first lines are:

The big-time wrestler Baron von Claw
fought normal the first couple rounds
and should have lost. He was older, and his belly showed
under his tights. He had to be fifty, a little, fat guy

(from "Claw", by Aaron Anstett) 

We can expect the poem will not have a regular meter or rhyme scheme, that it takes place in "our time", and will have something to do with wrestling. If the poem breaks into regular iambic beats and rhymed couplets, we'd notice a change in the pattern and wonder "why?" Also, we have a colloquial American tone established by "big-time" as an adjective, and the verb/adverb construction of "fought normal", again, were this tone to change later in the poem to a more stilted cadence, the reader would pick up on it. Conversely, if the poem begins:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

(from "Kubla Khan", by S.T. Coleridge)

We can expect the poem to have a fairly regular iambic beat, 3 or 4 feet per line, a/b/a/a/b rhyme pattern. It's not "our time", and will have something to do with Ghengis' grandson. Here, the syntax is complicated, ornate; we have a modifier/split verb/subject/object/split verb/modifier construction. If the location shifts to a Chuck E Cheese, and the style suddenly becomes long free verse lines, readers will founder, wondering why the poem changed.

Choice in Poems

OK- time to start tying this puppy together. When we poets write- we presuppose an audience and write to them. (Which is not to say some of us have a conscious formulation of this audience). Now, since we're writing poetry, we manipulate words, draft, revise and cull our initial scribblings into poems- expressions that favor some form of identifiable structure or musical compression. Along the way, we hit areas where we must choose between words that fulfill structural elements (rhyme/meter/sound) and words that might more accurately convey the information the poem contains. For example- If I wrote a poem that ended with the lines "expressing discontent/Joe died". I could choose to intensify the music by selecting "saying fuck it/Joe kicked the bucket". In the second couplet, I've added full end rhyme. I could further modify the rhythm by selecting "Joe said, 'fuck it'/Kicked the bucket"- which is far more regular (i.e. "kicked the bucket" continues the pattern established by "Joe said, 'fuck it'). However in laboring toward effects on the level of the line, we should also be aware of how each line interacts with the poem at large, how each word's connotations flavor a poem. Suppose my couplet example sums up a long, humorous poem about a hamster named Joe getting lost in the baseboards of an old house- the humorous connotations of "kicked the bucket", the vernacular "fuck it" would work well in the odd situation of the poem, making it funnier. However, if my couplet is meant to conclude a 400 line poem, a realistic eulogy of the final moments of Joseph Ballencourt (a Hartford area SWAT officer who had been shot through the stomach with a 9mm round) it becomes grossly inappropriate. Which is not to say that the statement becomes inappropriate because it crosses a proprietal line of social respect for those who die in the service of their fellows (though the poem would surely do that), rather the statement is inappropriate in the sense that it does not fulfill or conform to the poetic conventions that poem has established, nor would the statement effectively transform, undercut or "spin" the existing poem's weight. The connotations of the individual phrases and the overall tone of the statement would render the shooting situation as a mockery. Doubtless, some could argue that the lines, "saying fuck it/Joe kicked the bucket" are more "poetic" then the flat and abstract "expressing discontent/Joe died". Certainly, they do have a higher degree of music to them, but we also have to consider howthey affect the poem as a whole.

Since form and subject go hand in hand to make a poem, we have to be careful in which formal elements we select to "tell" the poem. For example, we should realize that rhyme produces a particular effect- and hence, when we do rhyme, we should be aware of how the rhyme impacts that particular poem. Sometimes we privilege or favor the form of the poem over the substance of the poem. Another way of approaching this idea would be to say we favor the way the message is given over the accuracy of the message. An historical example would be the Cavalier poets of the English court. We must remember that for each of the vast number of words, metaphor, allusion and whatnot, that a poet writing in English could use as a rough synonym for any situation, has it's own musical integrity and it's own relation to "literal" or exact sense.

Tone

Tone is something that exists in the context of a statement. For example, the phrase "Fuck it" is tonally neutral- but given the placement of the phrase in a context, it could convey disgust, awe, surprise, horror, humor, or irony (to name a few possibilities.)

Ethical Criticism

Questions of the tone's applicability to the subject is an issue that falls under the loose umbrella of "ethical criticism". (If anyone is interested in ethical criticism for literature, I'd recommend Booth's "The Company We Keep" as an excellent introduction to the subject).

Ethical criticism rests on the idea that people are influenced by arguments, ideas, and stories contained in the body of literature.

While this statement may seem to be exceedingly obvious, I've met some who'd disagree with it. Examples of persons being influenced by narratives are numerous- we could use the Bible as an example of a text that impacts human ethical conduct. On a lesser scale, a contemporary poem can likewise influence people by either introducing an examples of "good" or "bad" conduct, or/and by presenting a philosophy, image, event, etc. that readers can Respond to.

Back to Tone

Tone supposes two things: that the tonal utterance (Fuck it!) exists in a context for which there is a recognizable expectation of behavior and etiquette, and that the inflection or utterance responds to that context in a certain way (respectfully, sarcastically, angrily, etc.) Consider applying "Fuck it" as a response to the following:

"What should I do with this cat?"
"Jim, the dog's loose again" 

The ethical application comes in when the reader evaluates the tone of the speaker and forms a judgment as to the speaker's attitude.

Coyness

Coyness is a tone that's achieved by an inappropriate suppression of information.

I suppose the classic example from amateur poetry is the unknown subject; we've all read (and written) that poem wherein we are completely sure the audience will "get" that the poet is speaking to their father. However when we show the poem to a reader, that reader simply dosen't have enough clues from the poem to understand who the poet is speaking to. Now this type of failure in the poem can be caused by simple inexperience- and we can usually spot that: overly simple syntax, unneeded repetition, fuzzy imagery, lots of loose unstressed syllables, etc.

When a poem is more polished - and we tend to assume that the poet has enough command over the process of writing to deliberately produce effects - then the suppressed information is usually seen being part of the architecture of the poem. (This hearkens back to what I was saying before about expectation.) If you read a poem that deliberately and subtly begins in the voice of a woman, and the speaker is revealed to be a man by the end of the poem, (I'm talking about narrative voice, here) then the deception must have a poetic point or purpose that is discernable to the reader. The reader will naturally look for something of the sort.

Avoidance

Sometimes a poem's whole purpose revolves around it's ability to dance around a thing without touching it.

Take this Gaelic riddle:

Droichead ar loch,              A bridge over a lake,
Gan adhmad gan cloch.    Without wood or stone.
Cad ?                                    What is it? 

If we were told the riddle's answer in the first line, we wouldn't experience the full joy of the poem.

However, (leaping all the way back to the concept of communication), when a longer narrative/lyric poem sets out to describe or render a thing/event/emotion/concept/process it Seldom benefits that poem to avoid it's subject, or skirt it.

However, there is a history of addressing a subject by turning away from it; this is called the "via negetiva" , the negative way. A famous example of this is Dylan Thomas'

A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire,
Of A Child In London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
the mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

The poem does mourn the death of the child, despite it's repeated insistence that it can and will not do so.

© RJ McCaffery