Last Friday, my wife and I went to a modern dance concert and then, on an airplane enroute to Denver, I read through a poetry magazine that I had received as a thank you for a speaking engagement.
The modern dance concert was actually a fiftieth year retrospective by an established and respected mountain states company that presented a cross-section of dances previously offered over the years and concluded with a new piece that presented a “prospective” dance just choreographed by the company’s new director/choreographer. After the concert, we compared notes, and we both agreed – the older the work, in general, the better we liked it, and since my wife the opera singer and director has worked with music and dancers for more than forty years, she does have some expertise. The newest “piece,” while theoretically presenting windows into life, seemed almost aimless, themeless, and without much truly musical accompaniment, not to mention the fact that much of the “dancing” seemed to occur with the entire body either on the floor, or extremely close to it.
The poetry magazine, from my professional viewpoint, was even worse, although it was a slick, well-designed, and well laid out effort, bound like a small trade paperback. The magazine has been published semi-annually for over five years. The issue I read included 82 poems by 49 authors. The first thing that struck me was that there didn’t seem to be any poetry in the “poems.” Further scrutiny supported that impression, as I could discover neither end-rhymes, internal rhyme, alliteration, nor any discernable meter, merely an attempt at innovative typography… and that was true for every single “verse.” After reading the short biographies of the contributors, I was even more astounded. Most had published widely, and several had won prizes for their work.
Now… I will admit to having been skeptical of most “modern” verse for years, and I have wondered, not infrequently, whether the verse [I hesitate to call it poetry] I have read in the pages of publications such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker was really representative of the state of American poetry today. It appears so, unfortunately. Well over a half-century ago, and perhaps longer, one of the last great American poets – Robert Frost – made a statement to the effect that writing free verse was akin to playing tennis with the net down. From what I’ve seen, all too many would-be poets not only don’t know the rules of the game, they don’t even know that there are rules as to what poetry is., or at least, what the rules historically have been. And, well, if the lack of rules constitutes the “new rules,” then it ought to be called prosedy or something similar.
In both the instances I’ve mentioned here, the “creators” don’t seem to have the faintest idea that greatness or excellence doesn’t come from ignoring the rules, but from knowing them, using them, and transcending them [which occasionally means breaking them, but doing so effectively requires knowing what the rules are, how they should be broken and why… and what the exact effect one is attempting to achieve by doing so]. The point underlying both these examples is that excellence in anything requires structure, not just scaffolding. Yet this loss of structure seems to occurring everywhere in the U.S., from the decline in courtesy to our crumbling infrastructure, and everywhere rules are being broken, “just because.”
There’s a line from an old Janis Joplin song that says, “Freedom’s just another word for having nothing left to lose.” And when structure goes, you don’t indeed have much left.