The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry

Now and again I’m requested, with bewilderment or derision, if this or that poem isn’t simply “prose chopped into traces.” This concept of the free verse poem as “chopped” prose comes from Ezra Pound through Marjorie Perloff, who quotes Pound in her influential essay “The Linear Fallacy,” printed in 1981. The essay encourages an oddly suspicious, even paranoid studying of most free verse as phony poetry, as prose in costume. The road, in Perloff’s view, in these ersatz poems, is a “floor system,” a “gimmick.” She removes all of the breaks from a C.Okay. Williams poem to make the case {that a} stanza with out the intentional carriage returns is merely a paragraph.

I discover this baffling — as if chopping up prose has no impact. It does have an impact, the best way placing extra panes in a window modifications the view. The architect Christopher Alexander thought huge plate glass home windows had been a mistake, as a result of “they alienate us from the view”: “The smaller the home windows are, and the smaller the panes are, the extra intensely home windows assist join us with what’s on the opposite facet. This is a crucial paradox.” To state the Forsterian apparent once more, including breaks to a paragraph is just not all the time going to make an attention-grabbing poem — however most poets don’t write that means. They write within the line, within the firm of the void. That modifications the way you write — and extra profoundly, the way you suppose, and even how you might be, your mode of being. While you write within the line, there may be all the time an consciousness of the thriller, of what’s ignored. Because of this, I suppose, poems could be so confounding. Empty house on the web page, that absence of language, gives no clues. Nevertheless it doesn’t talk nothing — moderately, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs thriller.

By “thriller” I don’t imply metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or shouldn’t, obtain thriller solely by hiding the recognized, or translating the recognized into different, much less acquainted language. The thriller is unknowing, the unknown — as in Jennifer Huang’s “Departure”: “The issues I don’t know have stayed/On this house.” The thriller is the lacking mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:

the / Butterflies monarch butterflies big swarms they
Migrate and as they migrate south as they
Cross Lake Superior as a substitute of flying

South straight throughout they fly
South over the water then fly east
nonetheless over the water then fly south once more / And now
biologists imagine they flip to keep away from a mountain