Clarity

I have always been a predominantly narrative, predominantly biographical, poet. Polished. Reliable. If you think I'm being arrogant, here's my outside reference point: Charles Wright described my work, years ago, as "often good, always competent."

I am not suggesting he meant it as a high compliment.



A few months ago I began working toward poems that spun off the energy of a dramatic speaker and a defined motivation, without having a particular "story" to tell. The decision sprang from some of poets I was reading--Sarah Manguso is one--who navigate emotional space as if it were a metaphysical matter, and give themselves over completely to the voice, rather than a discernible setting. There's something risky about that. I wanted to give it a shot.

This has caused some consternation in my writing group, a group of a half-dozen accomplished local writers I have been working with for over a year. I took a bit of a beating last time around over a draft that was too opaque in places. I can take that--it was a draft, after all, and I've worked on it since, taking into account their comments. Some of the metaphors are unruly, outright strange. Here's an excerpt:

I took him in, and the bitch in me begs you for eviction:

Turn loose my eyes, let my jaw drop. Tongue like a leash
on the bad dog. Marble knuckles, fatty and loud.

Punch the sweat from my collarbone—
rainwater off a cheap awning. Blood untunneling.

I am stubborn with tenants that no one will miss.

I am a bathtub of dumb machine parts, sometimes mistaken for a plan.


That last line "just didn't work for me," said one poet--who also said he likes poems constructed "brick-by-brick," with a foundation and a clear rhetorical conclusion--and though it was hard to hear, I can respect it, because he expressed it as a preference based on his own writing style.

But one poet made the global observation, about my writing, that "because the language and images are so consistently strong," I was letting the voice make connections that the explicit structure and narrative of the poem "didn't support." Symbolic leaps were being taken that couldn't be rationally justified by the given story. That it was something I ought to "watch out for"--to curb against in the future. This was offered in the mode of a workshop, so I didn't rebut. And I keep trying to absorb it as just another facet of critique, and find a way to make it serve the development of my poems. But after three weeks it is still gnawing at me.

If a poet makes a move over and over, based on her strengths, isn't that...her style? What makes her poems distinct? Isn't that where we locate the tension?

Don't get me wrong. One of my day jobs is in journalism. I'm all about clarity on the sentence level. If my writing is cluttered with a dangling modifier, a sloppy word choice or a vague pronoun, I want to know. I don't want the whole poem to be derailed because I didn't make it clear who the "she" was in the opening line.

But I don't owe the reader something that goes down easy. I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of clarity as applied to the total poem. I know a lot of good poems with diamond-cut, absolutely clear meanings, systematically derived from a sequence of observations. I know a lot of truly great poems with no such thing. And though my workshop was frustrated by moments in the poem that they couldn't explicate, they were able to talk about the emotional stance of the speaker, the relationships being explored. So something fundamental was working.

I'm going to go back to Michael Dumanis and Cate Marvin, who I think made an excellent point about clarity in the introduction to Legitimate Dangers, using these lines from Joyelle McSweeney's "Persuasion":

"Others were more economical than I. but I / had my red marble."

Okay, the syntax is clear. No confusion on the sentence level. But no, there's no easy origin for the red marble. The speaker is not in a school yard, playing. She isn't a glass blower. And yet, the covetous specificity of the "red marble" is such that you grasp the contrast to the world of bland, ephemeral economy. The confidence of the voice carries the moment.

At least, for me it does. Maybe I'm being whiny; I'm sure I'm being defensive. But it's not always easy, in the workshop world, to sift out the comments that sharpen from the comments that dilute. A few years ago, a poem of mine described "the window slow-hunkering down upon itself, molecule upon jukebox molecule, toward the hungry earth." My entire MFA workshop voted to cut the word "jukebox." The setting was modern Pompeii, the speaker a lover, the other metaphors bridal in theme--the jukebox was deemed "out of place" and "random." Myra Sklarew, the professor, was the only one to defend it.

"Sometimes the inexplicable," she said, "is where the true poetry is happening."