This is a great article, and a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine for the last few years. There's something about self-referential poetry that reminds me now of a vacuous essay written to appeal to the markers.
Excellent work, Steven, and in under 1200 words! I'm so glad you wrote it. This does have me thinking though: How do you imagine your argument would apply in a culture (which, to be fair, I do not think truly exists, currently, anywhere in the world) like that of, say, Tang or Song Dynasty China (and later) or Edo Period Japan, where the poets are constantly writing to and referring to each other and to the act of writing poetry as well as constantly referencing or copying the other masters' poems and expecting their readers to know this, and yet this poetry is very much so to an audience, and was largely loved by the people and still is to this day? I need to think this through for myself (especially as I am engaged in projects on those subjects), but I am also curious what you think. I guess it probably has to do with the culture in which the poetry is being received.
Great questions, Ethan, and I did think about this a bit already. Maybe the best contemporary analogue is in hip-hop, which has a lot of the features you describe. The key distinction, I think, is that hip-hop has a very large and broad audience, and the interchanges, sparring, and boasting are all very performative and intended for the audience to appreciate, not just fellow artists -- along similar lines as the historical tradition of flyting. Also, hip-hop lyrics are part of a rhythmic/musical track which can be enjoyable to listen to even if you don't understand all the specific name-dropping or lingo. Though for me personally, even in hip-hop, too large a dose of intramural battling can become tiresome.
Contemporary English poetry, in contrast, has a very small audience, so a new poem that talks about a poetry seminar or quotes a line from Charles Wright provides minimal value or interest to a potential reader who isn't already deeply engaged in poetry. The poem would need to be really great in its own right to justify that kind of inside baseball. Or it needs to be acknowledged that the poem exists only for fellow aficionados -- which is OK! but should be acknowledged. The "Best American Poetry" shouldn't be the best poems for poets, as Frank Dent's helpful comment on this post illustrates.
Steve, I love it. This has bothered me for a long time too, and I've been trying to reorient my own voice towards Reality, not simply towards Poetry. Thanks for writing this!
As someone who enjoys encountering an ars poetica poem (or two!) in any collection, I was prepared to disagree with you at the start. Having now read your article, I am now totally persuaded of your stance. I think the most important thing you’re getting at, for my money, is not necessarily that we should be writing poems for the “general reader” but that poetry ultimately exists as a response to God’s world and not as a response to itself. Well-considered thoughts. Thank you, Steven!
Thanks for sticking through to the end. I'm glad it was persuasive! I don't think there's anything wrong with ars poetica poems -- they can be great! I just think those types of self-reflective poems are much too common and tend to be exclusive or off-putting to people who aren't already highly invested in poetry as an art form.
Great essay! You've articulated something which is, I think, at the root of many of the weaknesses of contemporary poetry.
It's interesting, as you say, that this sort of thing emerges most often when the tone is direct and laid-back. I think it used to be almost the opposite. There's a more serious kind of poetic self-reference that descends from the classical invocation to the muse through the romantics to the likes of Yeats and Rilke:
“O for a muse of fire”
“So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours”
“Be through my lips to unawakened earth...”
“I write it out in a verse —
MacDonagh and MacBride...”
Here I think there's a sort of positive feedback loop where the poet simultaneously calls for and embodies inspiration, generating a very high level of intensity. Of course, if the verse isn't actually inspired then the effect is ridiculous. What happens in your examples is almost the opposite: the poets trivialise and undermine their own work by referring to it in such a flippant way.
There's also a song/ballad variety of self-reference which is, I think, legitimate:
Yes, invoking the muse or framing the poem as poetry isn't necessarily bad, as long as it is only a prelude to the real meat of the poem to come. Another example that comes to mind is “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” which is a poem about an encounter with a poem, but I think it universalizes the thrill of discovery rather than excluding those who aren’t "insiders." When I first encountered Keats’s sonnet as a teen, I had only a vague idea what was meant by “Chapman’s Homer,” yet the poem spoke powerfully to me.
Yeah he really caught the worst of it here. Ironically, despite Steven’s rules which Billy breaks often, Billy is probably the contemporary poet most widely read by audiences not made of contemporary poets.
Collins’s name is widely known, but I would think the contemporary poet most widely read by non-poets is Mary Oliver, probably by a large margin. (Even though Collins is still living, he was born only 6 years after Oliver.) I wasn’t trying to pick on Collins specifically, and I don’t think all of his work is bad, but he provided several examples of the kinds of things I wanted to highlight in the piece. The meta-poetry thing is a big part of his specific shtick, which he at least does with some humor. Still, I feel like readers most need language that is more easily shared, not the semi-self-deprecating reflections of a poet being a poet (which is probably why Oliver, despite her own shortcomings, is more beloved than Collins.)
I once went through and classified the poems in a Best American Poetry volume according to various criteria (poet’s age, gender, occupation, whether Ivy alum, poem’s form, etc.) and counted 15 poems (20%) that referenced or talked about poetry, poets, the writing of poetry, the teaching of poetry, and poetry-adjacent subjects such as faculty parties.
I love this. Poetry isn’t preaching, but I’ve found helpful reminders from my homiletics training when I write poems - it takes extra work to write for laity rather than seminarians and clergy, but it’s vital if preaching is going to be something other than an intellectual exercise in re-presenting doctrine. And at the same time, a good sermon is as satisfying to the theologically educated as it is to a newcomer.
Here's an excerpt from the excellent book "Preaching" by Fred Craddock; I think the ideas about allusion in sermons translate pretty well to the way allusions can work in poems without alienating readers who aren't in the know:
"A third means of putting listeners in contact with Scripture is the allusion. By alluding to persons, stories, events, or even lines from the Bible, the preacher assumes a knowledge on the part of the hearers, a knowledge upon which the full value of the allusion depends. Allusions are not lost on those who are unfamiliar with the Scripture because the allusion usually carries its own meaning. For example, one does not have to know Daniel 5 to understand a preacher who says, "He saw `the handwriting on the wall' and resigned from the company." However, for those who do, the allusion is not only richer in meaning, but they enjoy the compliment paid them by the preachers' assumption that they knew. A final method of nourishing a congregation on its tradition is the echo of Scripture. The echo is a mild form of allusion in which the preacher does not assume or depend on the listener's knowledge of what is being echoed. Ministers who have spent years with the Scriptures often season their sermons, almost unconsciously, with words, phrases, names, and fragments of ideas from biblical texts. These are echoes, and though faint and fragmentary, they add to the mood and tone of the occasion and to one's experience of the message."
I don't understand the "cash value" of these guidelines, especially since you say there can be "exceptions." If my MS has two poems about writing poetry, should publishers refuse to publish it? Or is your view that the MS would be better, if I removed one of them, or replaced it with a poem on a different topic, *no matter how good the first, or how bad the second, poem is*? The answer to both is surely no! Is there any special objection here to poetry about poetry, that doesn't apply equally to poetry about an abstract piece of mathematics that no one cares about?
Yes, I’m specifically warning against poetry about poetry, because this is so prevalent and proliferates in a landscape where most readers of poetry are also writers of poetry. On the other hand, poetry about a special interest or obscure topic is generally a good thing, since it expands poetry’s scope and audience. Poetry about high level math is not going to have a very large audience, but it should have an audience beyond other writers. My biggest concern is about writers writing only for other writers and not recognizing or not acknowledging that this is what they’re doing.
I agree, such self-referential poems should be few and infrequent in a poet’s output. I do confess that I love Billy Collin’s and Denise Levertov but I get your point. I think it still holds true that poems should have universal themes and significance. Your essay seems reasonable, one poem about poetry in a lifetime, and one poem about writing or teaching poetry, or about another poet’s poem in a single volume. And if I may say so, something similar holds true for excessively confessional poetry.
I think the broader issue is "universality." Poetry today is too individual, too narrow in scope and audience. The great poetry speaks to all, or at least a substantial proportion, of readers. The great poems about poetry capture something universal. From a pragmatic standpoint it's less about the language or the topic or the imagery (etc. etc.) than it is about striving to speak to something fundamental to the human experience.
Great thoughts here. One thing to add re: audience from my own experience fielding questions from many of my readers who know me personally (typically due to church connections), but in general don't read a lot of poetry otherwise: by far the largest response I receive is to poems supported by literary criticism, which I undertake as part of the distribution of the pieces (either in manuscript form as "notes" or, when publishing online, as a secondary post a week or two later that analyzes the poem).
I've been thinking a great deal about what this craving means for poetry going forward, and I suspect I am not alone. Before addressing my evaluation of this phenomenon, with respect to your comment about the self-referential variety of poems, the non-writer/poet readers I encounter typically do not respond enthusiastically to such pieces. When I ask what offends them or puts them off, it is generally some version of "I didn't get it" or "it was confusing" which may be as much an indictment of my skill than this mode, but given that I receive a lot of encouragement from this same group re: other modes, I am inclined to trust their palettes.
On the idea of providing notes or literary criticism in support, there seems to be a revival of interest in "the mind of the poet" not merely as a craving for personality or inspirational source, but as a genuine interest in form and technique. I don't think there is a parallel interest so much in the writing/poetry community (which is fine of course!). The non-poet readers like discovering an underlying chiastic structure running through the 400 line narrative poem on Jonah, and they ask me about what it was like to compose with that structure in mind. They like historical/etymological tidbits or explanations of allusions. For my audience, they especially like occasional poems that take up events in the life of the community/friendships and scriptural paraphrase, even if it is lifted up to a challenging register or deploys baroque figuration. The key feature though, is they really respond to guideposts that unpack the art.
If the "literary criticism" I am describing (which is a version of the self-referential poetics you are discussing) is to succeed (and I'm not sure it always does), it must have the following aspirations: first, I think it needs to excite a return to the poem. I want people reading the notes to have an "aha" moment and flip back to the poem to test the criticism. If it gets too tangled up in technical jargon, I think it risks an even worse version of the problem you are describing. Second, it needs to have variety, blending moral discussions a poem elicits with technical appraisals of the effects of a meter with contextualizations of history/allusion/etymology with narratives describing the moment of inspiration for a line or phrase. In this sense, I think notes in a manuscript are at their best when they are uneven - when they extend the imaginative life of the poems they are responding to not by subjecting the reader to a new, repeated structure of a formal close-reading, but by surprising them with fresh tones and insights. Finally, I think it needs to be separated out from the poems themselves; no footnotes or facing-page explanations or interlinear prompts. I think people should be able to enjoy the poems on their own, and encounter notes as a discrete part of the experience. Otherwise the whole enterprise feels like a compulsion to force "the vision" and it can be distracting.
This process has helped me refine my own craft, most notably because I have regular conversations in person with an audience that knows me. I get to query them back and have a discussion. They ask for various topics to be covered, or grill me for a spontaneous line on the spot. Here in the digital coterie, we may lose sight of how ready the non-writer is to engage with our work, but my takeaway has been to devote more time to prompts from my community and be ready to explain the techniques and tools that brought their idea to life.
Hey Todd, thanks for reading and sharing these interesting comments! I don’t think critical/explanatory notes about a poem that are separate from the poem itself fit in the category of self-referential poetry that I was describing. I actually like that model of providing extra context and info for those who are interested, while still having the poem itself stand on its own. Most importantly, if you are adapting your practices in response to and in conversation with a real, engaged audience, then this alleviates a lot of the potential issues that come when writing within a vacuum or an echo chamber of poets.
Interesting post, Steven, and I enjoyed reading it! So many ars poeticas have been written that it is hard to write one that really contributes to the conversation. However, I do think that self-referential poetry may not be as alienating to readers as you believe, because nearly anyone that reaches the point of reading a poem feels that they are a reader of poetry. I believe the problem is more that the quality of the ars poetica themselves, like the quality of a great deal of contemporary poetry in general, is rather low.
Billy Collins is probably the most well-read English language poetry alive today and references poetry directly in a large percentage of his work. I'd bet he has reached more "non poets" with his poetry than anyone. I think ars poeticas are so popular for two main reasons: 1.) they are pretty easy to write (writing is ____ is a fill-in the blank metaphor that almost functions as well as a mad-lib "writing is making spaghetti" or "writing is jumping in a cold pool" or "writing is eating all the chocolates off a conveyor belt" etc.) and it is easy to convince ourselves that what we have come up with is far more unique than it most likely actually is, and 2.) there's an assumption of interest that is somewhat warranted. It's like selling team jerseys to their own fans.
I found the reference to Magritte surprising. I disagree that his strength is most apparent for other artists. For me, the beauty of surrealist art is that it so blatantly challenges the ordinary in a way that feels drastically more removed from the esoteric circles of the art world. Like excellent poetry, it exists on so many planes of understanding all at once. Someone can simply enjoy the absurdity of a green apple blocking a man's face or they can spend a day wondering what the hell it means. That's what I aspire to in my own work.
Thanks for writing this. We desperately need more criticism/theory in poetry!
I wasn’t clear enough in my reference to Magritte, since I was trying to be concise. I don’t have anything against surrealism (like the “apple-face” in The Son of Man). I was thinking more specifically of his several paintings such as The Human Condition which feature paintings/easels within the painting, or The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe), which I think are brilliant works of art! But these types of conceptual pieces should be interesting anomalies within the broader tradition of painting—if too many painting are conceptual experiments about the nature of art, then the art form would seem to be in a sorry state. Similar to how you were saying there is only so much that can be done within the ars poetica mode of poetry
Ah that is interesting and helps me to understand better, thanks. Calls to mind a convo I had with Tim at a Dada exhibit recently--where the idea seems to be largely that placing anything in an acrylic case makes it art, but this is really what poetry does all the time--shows the extraordinary that lives within the ordinary.
Thanks for reading and continuing the discussion, Katie!
While Collins is a big name, I would think the contemporary poet most widely read by non-poets is Mary Oliver, probably by a large margin. (Even though Collins is still living, he was born only 6 years after Oliver.) I wasn’t trying to pick on Collins specifically, and I don’t think all of his work is bad, but he provided several examples of the kinds of things I wanted to highlight in the piece. The meta-poetry thing is a big part of his specific shtick, which he at least does with some humor. And in contrast to the bulk of his post-modern peers in the 70s-90s, at least his poems are easy to understand and approachable for non-academics (“hospitable,” I think you like to say). Still, I feel that readers who rarely read poetry or aren’t deeply interested already will struggle to appreciate the clever self-conscious reflections of a writer. The most universal poetry needs language that is more easily shared, drawn from broader human experience (which is probably why Oliver, despite her own shortcomings, is more widely beloved than Collins.)
I admit I didn’t survey readers to find their reactions and attitudes toward self-referential poetry. My guess is that people who read poetry some, but not a lot (maybe one book of poems per year) would not be as drawn to poems about poetry/writing. It’s definitely something I don’t enjoy as much as a reader, but that’s just my own personal preference, and I know others differ.
I cannot count how many people I know who have said, “Oh, I can’t read poetry” when I share what I’ve published. I think this reaction can come from this self-referential tendency in modern poetry, as well as from the idea some poets seem to have that if it’s easy to comprehend their verse, it’s not poetry. I have written some self-referential poetry, but it is by no means the majority of my work, and I think your warning to be aware of when we use poetry as an “input” is well-merited.
I think the problem of "poets writing for poets" is as much or more about the use of poetic techniques that poets appreciate but which alienate or leave cold the "general public," as it is about the subject matter they choose to write about.
That certainly is another piece of the broader problem. Here, I was more narrowly focused on the prevalence of using poetry/writing as subject matter for poems.
Thanks very much. This could be the basis of a fine poem, making a constructive contribution to the education of readers and poets. Have you already written that poem?
This is a great article, and a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine for the last few years. There's something about self-referential poetry that reminds me now of a vacuous essay written to appeal to the markers.
Excellent work, Steven, and in under 1200 words! I'm so glad you wrote it. This does have me thinking though: How do you imagine your argument would apply in a culture (which, to be fair, I do not think truly exists, currently, anywhere in the world) like that of, say, Tang or Song Dynasty China (and later) or Edo Period Japan, where the poets are constantly writing to and referring to each other and to the act of writing poetry as well as constantly referencing or copying the other masters' poems and expecting their readers to know this, and yet this poetry is very much so to an audience, and was largely loved by the people and still is to this day? I need to think this through for myself (especially as I am engaged in projects on those subjects), but I am also curious what you think. I guess it probably has to do with the culture in which the poetry is being received.
Great questions, Ethan, and I did think about this a bit already. Maybe the best contemporary analogue is in hip-hop, which has a lot of the features you describe. The key distinction, I think, is that hip-hop has a very large and broad audience, and the interchanges, sparring, and boasting are all very performative and intended for the audience to appreciate, not just fellow artists -- along similar lines as the historical tradition of flyting. Also, hip-hop lyrics are part of a rhythmic/musical track which can be enjoyable to listen to even if you don't understand all the specific name-dropping or lingo. Though for me personally, even in hip-hop, too large a dose of intramural battling can become tiresome.
Contemporary English poetry, in contrast, has a very small audience, so a new poem that talks about a poetry seminar or quotes a line from Charles Wright provides minimal value or interest to a potential reader who isn't already deeply engaged in poetry. The poem would need to be really great in its own right to justify that kind of inside baseball. Or it needs to be acknowledged that the poem exists only for fellow aficionados -- which is OK! but should be acknowledged. The "Best American Poetry" shouldn't be the best poems for poets, as Frank Dent's helpful comment on this post illustrates.
Completely agree. And, yeah, ultimately your critique applies.
Steve, I love it. This has bothered me for a long time too, and I've been trying to reorient my own voice towards Reality, not simply towards Poetry. Thanks for writing this!
Thanks, Jane! Glad you appreciated it! It was helpful for me to boil down this general sense I had into a more concise argument.
As someone who enjoys encountering an ars poetica poem (or two!) in any collection, I was prepared to disagree with you at the start. Having now read your article, I am now totally persuaded of your stance. I think the most important thing you’re getting at, for my money, is not necessarily that we should be writing poems for the “general reader” but that poetry ultimately exists as a response to God’s world and not as a response to itself. Well-considered thoughts. Thank you, Steven!
Thanks for sticking through to the end. I'm glad it was persuasive! I don't think there's anything wrong with ars poetica poems -- they can be great! I just think those types of self-reflective poems are much too common and tend to be exclusive or off-putting to people who aren't already highly invested in poetry as an art form.
Ditto to this whole comment!😊
Great essay! You've articulated something which is, I think, at the root of many of the weaknesses of contemporary poetry.
It's interesting, as you say, that this sort of thing emerges most often when the tone is direct and laid-back. I think it used to be almost the opposite. There's a more serious kind of poetic self-reference that descends from the classical invocation to the muse through the romantics to the likes of Yeats and Rilke:
“O for a muse of fire”
“So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours”
“Be through my lips to unawakened earth...”
“I write it out in a verse —
MacDonagh and MacBride...”
Here I think there's a sort of positive feedback loop where the poet simultaneously calls for and embodies inspiration, generating a very high level of intensity. Of course, if the verse isn't actually inspired then the effect is ridiculous. What happens in your examples is almost the opposite: the poets trivialise and undermine their own work by referring to it in such a flippant way.
There's also a song/ballad variety of self-reference which is, I think, legitimate:
“And now I sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;”
“Come let me sing into your ear,
Those dancing days are gone”
Yes, invoking the muse or framing the poem as poetry isn't necessarily bad, as long as it is only a prelude to the real meat of the poem to come. Another example that comes to mind is “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” which is a poem about an encounter with a poem, but I think it universalizes the thrill of discovery rather than excluding those who aren’t "insiders." When I first encountered Keats’s sonnet as a teen, I had only a vague idea what was meant by “Chapman’s Homer,” yet the poem spoke powerfully to me.
Milton does a ton of it in Paradise lost, but it's like a windup to the real thing. And the real thing is awesome...
Poor Billy 😅
Yeah he really caught the worst of it here. Ironically, despite Steven’s rules which Billy breaks often, Billy is probably the contemporary poet most widely read by audiences not made of contemporary poets.
Collins’s name is widely known, but I would think the contemporary poet most widely read by non-poets is Mary Oliver, probably by a large margin. (Even though Collins is still living, he was born only 6 years after Oliver.) I wasn’t trying to pick on Collins specifically, and I don’t think all of his work is bad, but he provided several examples of the kinds of things I wanted to highlight in the piece. The meta-poetry thing is a big part of his specific shtick, which he at least does with some humor. Still, I feel like readers most need language that is more easily shared, not the semi-self-deprecating reflections of a poet being a poet (which is probably why Oliver, despite her own shortcomings, is more beloved than Collins.)
He’s easy to pick on because he’s rich and famous.
I once went through and classified the poems in a Best American Poetry volume according to various criteria (poet’s age, gender, occupation, whether Ivy alum, poem’s form, etc.) and counted 15 poems (20%) that referenced or talked about poetry, poets, the writing of poetry, the teaching of poetry, and poetry-adjacent subjects such as faculty parties.
That's some amazing analysis! And a perfect illustration of the point I'm trying to make here. Thanks for sharing!
I love this. Poetry isn’t preaching, but I’ve found helpful reminders from my homiletics training when I write poems - it takes extra work to write for laity rather than seminarians and clergy, but it’s vital if preaching is going to be something other than an intellectual exercise in re-presenting doctrine. And at the same time, a good sermon is as satisfying to the theologically educated as it is to a newcomer.
Here's an excerpt from the excellent book "Preaching" by Fred Craddock; I think the ideas about allusion in sermons translate pretty well to the way allusions can work in poems without alienating readers who aren't in the know:
"A third means of putting listeners in contact with Scripture is the allusion. By alluding to persons, stories, events, or even lines from the Bible, the preacher assumes a knowledge on the part of the hearers, a knowledge upon which the full value of the allusion depends. Allusions are not lost on those who are unfamiliar with the Scripture because the allusion usually carries its own meaning. For example, one does not have to know Daniel 5 to understand a preacher who says, "He saw `the handwriting on the wall' and resigned from the company." However, for those who do, the allusion is not only richer in meaning, but they enjoy the compliment paid them by the preachers' assumption that they knew. A final method of nourishing a congregation on its tradition is the echo of Scripture. The echo is a mild form of allusion in which the preacher does not assume or depend on the listener's knowledge of what is being echoed. Ministers who have spent years with the Scriptures often season their sermons, almost unconsciously, with words, phrases, names, and fragments of ideas from biblical texts. These are echoes, and though faint and fragmentary, they add to the mood and tone of the occasion and to one's experience of the message."
I don't understand the "cash value" of these guidelines, especially since you say there can be "exceptions." If my MS has two poems about writing poetry, should publishers refuse to publish it? Or is your view that the MS would be better, if I removed one of them, or replaced it with a poem on a different topic, *no matter how good the first, or how bad the second, poem is*? The answer to both is surely no! Is there any special objection here to poetry about poetry, that doesn't apply equally to poetry about an abstract piece of mathematics that no one cares about?
Yes, I’m specifically warning against poetry about poetry, because this is so prevalent and proliferates in a landscape where most readers of poetry are also writers of poetry. On the other hand, poetry about a special interest or obscure topic is generally a good thing, since it expands poetry’s scope and audience. Poetry about high level math is not going to have a very large audience, but it should have an audience beyond other writers. My biggest concern is about writers writing only for other writers and not recognizing or not acknowledging that this is what they’re doing.
So what you’re saying, Steve, is that *ars poetica* is the invasive bamboo species of poetry? 🤔🧐🤨
We can talk more about this in person next week, Brad. 😂
I agree, such self-referential poems should be few and infrequent in a poet’s output. I do confess that I love Billy Collin’s and Denise Levertov but I get your point. I think it still holds true that poems should have universal themes and significance. Your essay seems reasonable, one poem about poetry in a lifetime, and one poem about writing or teaching poetry, or about another poet’s poem in a single volume. And if I may say so, something similar holds true for excessively confessional poetry.
I think the broader issue is "universality." Poetry today is too individual, too narrow in scope and audience. The great poetry speaks to all, or at least a substantial proportion, of readers. The great poems about poetry capture something universal. From a pragmatic standpoint it's less about the language or the topic or the imagery (etc. etc.) than it is about striving to speak to something fundamental to the human experience.
Great thoughts here. One thing to add re: audience from my own experience fielding questions from many of my readers who know me personally (typically due to church connections), but in general don't read a lot of poetry otherwise: by far the largest response I receive is to poems supported by literary criticism, which I undertake as part of the distribution of the pieces (either in manuscript form as "notes" or, when publishing online, as a secondary post a week or two later that analyzes the poem).
I've been thinking a great deal about what this craving means for poetry going forward, and I suspect I am not alone. Before addressing my evaluation of this phenomenon, with respect to your comment about the self-referential variety of poems, the non-writer/poet readers I encounter typically do not respond enthusiastically to such pieces. When I ask what offends them or puts them off, it is generally some version of "I didn't get it" or "it was confusing" which may be as much an indictment of my skill than this mode, but given that I receive a lot of encouragement from this same group re: other modes, I am inclined to trust their palettes.
On the idea of providing notes or literary criticism in support, there seems to be a revival of interest in "the mind of the poet" not merely as a craving for personality or inspirational source, but as a genuine interest in form and technique. I don't think there is a parallel interest so much in the writing/poetry community (which is fine of course!). The non-poet readers like discovering an underlying chiastic structure running through the 400 line narrative poem on Jonah, and they ask me about what it was like to compose with that structure in mind. They like historical/etymological tidbits or explanations of allusions. For my audience, they especially like occasional poems that take up events in the life of the community/friendships and scriptural paraphrase, even if it is lifted up to a challenging register or deploys baroque figuration. The key feature though, is they really respond to guideposts that unpack the art.
If the "literary criticism" I am describing (which is a version of the self-referential poetics you are discussing) is to succeed (and I'm not sure it always does), it must have the following aspirations: first, I think it needs to excite a return to the poem. I want people reading the notes to have an "aha" moment and flip back to the poem to test the criticism. If it gets too tangled up in technical jargon, I think it risks an even worse version of the problem you are describing. Second, it needs to have variety, blending moral discussions a poem elicits with technical appraisals of the effects of a meter with contextualizations of history/allusion/etymology with narratives describing the moment of inspiration for a line or phrase. In this sense, I think notes in a manuscript are at their best when they are uneven - when they extend the imaginative life of the poems they are responding to not by subjecting the reader to a new, repeated structure of a formal close-reading, but by surprising them with fresh tones and insights. Finally, I think it needs to be separated out from the poems themselves; no footnotes or facing-page explanations or interlinear prompts. I think people should be able to enjoy the poems on their own, and encounter notes as a discrete part of the experience. Otherwise the whole enterprise feels like a compulsion to force "the vision" and it can be distracting.
This process has helped me refine my own craft, most notably because I have regular conversations in person with an audience that knows me. I get to query them back and have a discussion. They ask for various topics to be covered, or grill me for a spontaneous line on the spot. Here in the digital coterie, we may lose sight of how ready the non-writer is to engage with our work, but my takeaway has been to devote more time to prompts from my community and be ready to explain the techniques and tools that brought their idea to life.
Hey Todd, thanks for reading and sharing these interesting comments! I don’t think critical/explanatory notes about a poem that are separate from the poem itself fit in the category of self-referential poetry that I was describing. I actually like that model of providing extra context and info for those who are interested, while still having the poem itself stand on its own. Most importantly, if you are adapting your practices in response to and in conversation with a real, engaged audience, then this alleviates a lot of the potential issues that come when writing within a vacuum or an echo chamber of poets.
Interesting post, Steven, and I enjoyed reading it! So many ars poeticas have been written that it is hard to write one that really contributes to the conversation. However, I do think that self-referential poetry may not be as alienating to readers as you believe, because nearly anyone that reaches the point of reading a poem feels that they are a reader of poetry. I believe the problem is more that the quality of the ars poetica themselves, like the quality of a great deal of contemporary poetry in general, is rather low.
Billy Collins is probably the most well-read English language poetry alive today and references poetry directly in a large percentage of his work. I'd bet he has reached more "non poets" with his poetry than anyone. I think ars poeticas are so popular for two main reasons: 1.) they are pretty easy to write (writing is ____ is a fill-in the blank metaphor that almost functions as well as a mad-lib "writing is making spaghetti" or "writing is jumping in a cold pool" or "writing is eating all the chocolates off a conveyor belt" etc.) and it is easy to convince ourselves that what we have come up with is far more unique than it most likely actually is, and 2.) there's an assumption of interest that is somewhat warranted. It's like selling team jerseys to their own fans.
I found the reference to Magritte surprising. I disagree that his strength is most apparent for other artists. For me, the beauty of surrealist art is that it so blatantly challenges the ordinary in a way that feels drastically more removed from the esoteric circles of the art world. Like excellent poetry, it exists on so many planes of understanding all at once. Someone can simply enjoy the absurdity of a green apple blocking a man's face or they can spend a day wondering what the hell it means. That's what I aspire to in my own work.
Thanks for writing this. We desperately need more criticism/theory in poetry!
I wasn’t clear enough in my reference to Magritte, since I was trying to be concise. I don’t have anything against surrealism (like the “apple-face” in The Son of Man). I was thinking more specifically of his several paintings such as The Human Condition which feature paintings/easels within the painting, or The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe), which I think are brilliant works of art! But these types of conceptual pieces should be interesting anomalies within the broader tradition of painting—if too many painting are conceptual experiments about the nature of art, then the art form would seem to be in a sorry state. Similar to how you were saying there is only so much that can be done within the ars poetica mode of poetry
Ah that is interesting and helps me to understand better, thanks. Calls to mind a convo I had with Tim at a Dada exhibit recently--where the idea seems to be largely that placing anything in an acrylic case makes it art, but this is really what poetry does all the time--shows the extraordinary that lives within the ordinary.
Thanks for reading and continuing the discussion, Katie!
While Collins is a big name, I would think the contemporary poet most widely read by non-poets is Mary Oliver, probably by a large margin. (Even though Collins is still living, he was born only 6 years after Oliver.) I wasn’t trying to pick on Collins specifically, and I don’t think all of his work is bad, but he provided several examples of the kinds of things I wanted to highlight in the piece. The meta-poetry thing is a big part of his specific shtick, which he at least does with some humor. And in contrast to the bulk of his post-modern peers in the 70s-90s, at least his poems are easy to understand and approachable for non-academics (“hospitable,” I think you like to say). Still, I feel that readers who rarely read poetry or aren’t deeply interested already will struggle to appreciate the clever self-conscious reflections of a writer. The most universal poetry needs language that is more easily shared, drawn from broader human experience (which is probably why Oliver, despite her own shortcomings, is more widely beloved than Collins.)
I admit I didn’t survey readers to find their reactions and attitudes toward self-referential poetry. My guess is that people who read poetry some, but not a lot (maybe one book of poems per year) would not be as drawn to poems about poetry/writing. It’s definitely something I don’t enjoy as much as a reader, but that’s just my own personal preference, and I know others differ.
I cannot count how many people I know who have said, “Oh, I can’t read poetry” when I share what I’ve published. I think this reaction can come from this self-referential tendency in modern poetry, as well as from the idea some poets seem to have that if it’s easy to comprehend their verse, it’s not poetry. I have written some self-referential poetry, but it is by no means the majority of my work, and I think your warning to be aware of when we use poetry as an “input” is well-merited.
I think the problem of "poets writing for poets" is as much or more about the use of poetic techniques that poets appreciate but which alienate or leave cold the "general public," as it is about the subject matter they choose to write about.
That certainly is another piece of the broader problem. Here, I was more narrowly focused on the prevalence of using poetry/writing as subject matter for poems.
Thanks very much. This could be the basis of a fine poem, making a constructive contribution to the education of readers and poets. Have you already written that poem?