... 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