... and Response

There's a story I like to tell when I run into another native New Yorker away from the Big Apple. Shortly after college, being still active in campus theater and known to have a car, I was giving some undergrad members of the Stevens Dramatic Society (who knew me casually as "that older guy" who did Drood") a ride to a play. When my intended path along Route 46 was, shall we say, interrupted by an aggressive driver, I responded by stating my disapproval clearly and completely using the vocabulary I'd acquired during my months of driver education in the outer boroughs. With hand gestures.

And one of my young friends in the back seat immediately said "I didn't know you were from New York!"

Aside from confirming for the specific regional flair of dialectal Brooklynese, this tells me two things: that a specific mode of communication can provide an immediate, leveling, and intimate link, and that emotion - especially negative emotion - is a great font of energy from which to fuel said communication. What it doesn't tell me is that swearing at a guy in a beat-up Cherokee is great communication.

Or, in a more artful context, consider that while a visceral response may provoke a strong sense of identification, and that may be a powerfully felt and meaningful experience, that cannot be confused with great art. This idea pokes its head out a lot at open mikes, where people will present freshly-minted poems of protest and observation and receive timely attaboys and amens. Can be valuable, community-building, reinforcing. But it's usually not art. Not any more than a good standup comedy routine, anyway.

Consider the standups. Who are the great standup comedians today? There are a few that I'll stop and watch if I catch them flipping channels - Ron White, Kathleen Madigan, and Jeff Dunham among others*. I think they're terrific at their craft. And funny. And while I'll always stop and watch them, I'm not archiving their stuff to share it with my kids when they're old enough. Now, George Carlin, on the other hand... Carlin was political, vitriolic, and at times (almost) as dirty as some of the current crop. But his craft was honed at another level, one which made it timeless. The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television have all been said on television this year (four of them on "free" TV), but the routine still rings out with humor and purpose, and doesn't rely only on the shock value of the words - which is good because they don't have much of that commodity left.

I expect out poets to give the same effort when creating works of protest or witness. Not that the act of witness is not in itself important, but recognize that shock (disgust, disappointment...) is not enough; that there is crafting and distance required to apply Wordsworth's classic definition and make the witnessing into a poem. In Fooling with Words, Mark Doty admitted that many of his poems start when they "come tumbling of him", but that this isn't the poem; it's "a cry" which is refined through the physical crafting of language. Consider that when people turned to poetry in September 2001, they turned largely to a poem written in 1939; that suggests something about the works created in the years in between.

My own work crosses into witness infrequently, but when I head that way, it's usually later, when I've decided what I want to say, and whether it's something that I can say well. That last piece is important to me.

It's the value that the poet brings.



* - I'm also partial to an old Bob Newhart Button-Down Mind bit on Sirius!

... and Purpose

I had the privilege of performing for the regulars at Noble Coffee Roasters last week. It was a fine night (not just because of a terrific piece of rum cake, though that didn't hurt), and a remarkable one for a couple of reasons.

First, I found the place when even my GPS was confused.

But seriously, folk. The thing that remained with me as I was driving away was the incredible diversity in the room, evidenced by the open mic. We had the political and the pastoral, memoirs of 1934 and remembrances from the under-30 crowd. On the (longer than it needed to be*) ride home, I had a chance to reflect on some of the work I heard during the open mic and think about the different intents the poets brought to their work, and what it means for the craft behind that work.

One of the first poets, an older gentleman, series regular and long-time writer, started with "some October poems". These nice seasonal poems were observations on the time of year, referencing "orange" and "trees" (or the like) frequently. This poet's presentation was all of (rhyming) couplets and were very short. The editor of a local magazine read a poem by an "old-feeling" under-30 poet that was filled with long, complicated sentence and peppered with internal rhyme, using a lot of repetition. The poems had little in common in vocabulary or form, but shared an acute awareness of the relationship between their intent and their form.

All writers make form decisions with every word we type. These poets reminded me of the importance of conscious selection of structure to support the purpose of their poems.

Yes, I said purpose. The truth is, all art has purpose. Even if that purpose is to capture an idea only for your own review later, there is an intent in every act of artistic creation. And the assignment of structure to its presentation is deeply integrated with intent. Some intents lend themselves to nursery rhyme verse; some to multilungual exposition. And you know when you've gotten it right, and when it's wrong.

Understanding this visceral response to the connection of form and purpose in a poem can help with other forms of communication. In my career as a technical professional, I have frequently had to prepare engineering content for consumption by audiences ranging from grammar-schoolers to experts in their field; in some ways, this is navigating the spectrum from Ogden Nash to Ezra Pound. With Nash, it's a danger not to see the craft, when what you're seeing is careful presentation with a particular audience in mind. With Pound (at least the later cantos), one unskilled in the art could easily become overwhelmed and see only chaos on the page, when what's there is thoughtful in the extreme with an expectation of similar extreme thoughtfulness on the part of the reader. Neither is better or worse - both are designed with the form they require or accompligh their task.


Einstein said that things should be as simple as they need to be, but no simpler. This elegance of design,  the idea that if something seems too complicated there's a good chance it is not suitable for its task, is something we look for routinely as engineers, and sometimes have trouble communicating. Poetry may be the vehicle to bridge this understanding gap.


Poetry has design. Design has purpose. Makes sense to me.


*Note to self: Just because you can see the Wendy's doesn't mean you can get to the Wendy's from this exit. And Bear Mountain is scary in the dark, even with the GPS