Notes on Craft (No. I): Not Your Mother

Bursting bubbles.

I recently saw a newsletter by my friend Emmanuel Esomnofu (“Notes on Craft,” on how to write a profile). I have had thoughts of doing something like that, so I am going to do it.

I have been reading poetry submissions for a particular magazine, and I have been struck by the dearth of readable poems. I’ve always known that poems are scarce but to engage the slush of a poetry magazine and to experience it firsthand: that is a different matter.

These notes are not criticism (I am on a break from publishing criticism), they are not meant to be read as critical notes. I could reference a particular poem or poet, but only as a way to clarify a point. In such cases (as is the case with my use of Romeo Oriogun and of an excerpt from W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” here), it is not intended as a diss. Any poet who has made a work of art can be discussed with regards to his work of art—whether bad or good.

These notes could be useful in a way that a direct critical exposition won’t be. It’s meant to throw light on things to avoid, if you are interested. You can take the light, or leave it. But I hope it helps.

Before I leave you to dive into it, I hope I am able to share these types of notes regularly, although their appearance may be quite erratic.

—Avoid tricks. Be conventional (commonsensical) in a poem.

Writing “i” (instead of “I”), starting every line with a lowercase, scattering the words on the page, using mathematical formulas or symbols, using “//” instead of breaking the line properly, breaking a word into two and taking the splintered syllable to the next line, or splintering words over the page (i.e., “d a d d y  h a t e s  m e”), or writing a word in all caps (“HELL HELL HELL TO HELL WITH WHITE AFRICANS”)—these are unconventional modes in writing poetry. And I admonish you to avoid them, for your own good.

Employing “conventional” modes in a poem is better (I have not said it is the best) and safer (and safe is good when you are not a master or a genius, and—yes—you are neither), because the unconventional has become outmoded. Conventional things in poetry include: using capital letters, using punctuation correctly, keeping the poem collected on the page, writing in meter (if you can manage it).

A poem is not a trick. The fact that you are a poet does not give you the license to do away with that which is commonsensical, that which is sane. People who use tricks show that they cannot really get it going. Tricks in a poem are like the tantrums a child throws to get her mother to give her something. And the reader is not your mother—the reader, the serious reader, doesn’t care two cents about you. The reader has conceded their time to you because of what you bring. In that transaction, what matters is literature, not you.

—You don’t have anything important to say. Don’t try to say something, in a poem, about a subject you have no knowledge about.

Give up talking about yourself or who you fucked or what you think you know about Palestine or Israel (you don’t know anything at all) or about colonialism or the slave trade or how sad you are or your dog that died or what life was like for those who endured the Nigerian Civil War.

None of that matters, really, in a poem. What matters is not what you have to say—how I wish I could drive this, assuming it were a nail, with a well-wrought hammer, straight into your brain, by way of your earhole. Gbam. Gbam. Gbam. Three blows and it would stick. You know nothing at all about anything. That is my problem with Romeo Oriogun.

Oriogun knows nothing at all about anything and his poems are populated with that ignorance, and it is very obvious. The work has no weight, only tears. Uncooked emotions are mistaken for knowledge. He is a passionate man, but passion is one thing; knowledge is another. Passion is enough when it is about something you have lived (Burnt Men was a success for this reason, all passion, no need for knowledge), or something you have immersed yourself in. It is a shame if you passionately throat ignorance.

Don’t be like Romeo Oriogun, at least in this regard. His situation wouldn’t be so hard to bear if he did not think that what he says is so important. It is not, as poetry; and it is not, as thinking. Unlike Oriogun, don’t ever think you have anything “important” to say. No, you don’t. I don’t either. Your mother did not go to the university, alright, but of a truth she knows a lot more than you do.

—What the poet communicates is not “important things”; it is energy.

Anyone can say, “He was my life.” The poet—Auden—says,

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”

“He was my life” does not have the same feel, the same texture, the same resounding depth as “He was my North, my South, my East and West.” And there’s the next line: “My working week and my Sunday rest” (the sense of lived life, of matrimony-matters, in those words).

In another “Note,” I might consider how to get energy into a poem (I am learning it, too, and it cannot be taught, but one can suggest ways to stimulate energy). I recommend Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems. I recommend Atsuro Riley’s books: Romey’s Order and Heard-Hoard. Also, of course, Christian Wiman’s The Long Home and Every Riven Thing; Seamus Heaney’s books: Death of a Naturalist, District and Circle. Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lords and Commons and his newest, School of Instructions (which I haven’t read, only reviews, but which I trust). Pound’s Cantos.

—Avoid the word “Body” and co.

I have said it several times. About 90 percent of the problem with contemporary poetry has to do with that word. I am sick of it, really, and I am not the only one. If you could stay clear of that word, I am sure that it would help Nigerian poetry a little bit. (Avoid words like “body,” “grief,” “longing,” “fuck.”)

—Poetry should be difficult.

Now. This last one is a hard pill to swallow. I can hear people screaming, “O, elitist.” Well. Thank you. Poetry does not have to be difficult for it to be good. A poem can be written in plain tongue and still be rich (Donald Justice’s “Men at Forty”). That is true.

However, as William Logan says somewhere, “The best poetry has often been difficult, has often been so obscure that readers have fought passionately over it. The King James Bible comes closer to poetry than faith usually dares.”

I think that, too, is very true. Even more, I think we need to rediscover the “difficulty” of poetry in our time. I like hard-won pleasure, it’s the best thing in the world. A lot of what we write, a lot of what we publish today, is meant for babes, not for bone-eaters.

I recently began reading one of the major living American poets, a veteran, and I was struck by how immature this particular book is. (The book won a National Book Critics Circle award for poetry.) It felt depressing, because I have been getting through Pound and Homer and a poet like Robert Bringhurst.

The difficult poem has a longer lifespan, in most cases, than the overcooked one (just think about how terribly Gabriel Okara’s poems have aged, compared to Soyinka’s). We write easy poems because we care about the readers, those readers who are not readers who populate X; you want to give them something they can “Aww” about, something tweet- and retweet-able. Well, good for you. I have a few readers in mind when I write: one of them is T. S. Eliot, the other is Christian Wiman, and God. 🔷