Silly Poet, Drama is for Snooky

The last century and the Romantics of yesteryear have collectively stripped the necessity for plot and narrative in poetry. Poetry becomes “better” when it abstracts a single image or feeling. It is best if the poet discovers something about life  or themselves in this scrutiny, but it’s not necessary. It is enough to point out how swollen with emotion the writer is.

Which is cool, I love poetry like that. I love purely descriptive poetry. It’s like well written guide book tid bits into the human psyche/condition. It’s anthropology, sociology, psychology, and even history rolled into a bite size nugget. If it’s really good, if the poet is to become respectable for her ability to convey all this, the writing must not be simply descriptive and informative. It has to be moving, right? Drama.

Human drama is what keeps us engaged, and away from the edge of boredom that potentially allows us to forget our need to eat and procreate and rear our off spring, right? It's also what pays the network bills. Do you think Jersey Shore could sustain itself without Sweetheart and her thug boyfriend didn't break up once a season?

My own drama is the reason I write poetry in the first place. Break up? Can't go around flinging your weakness and idiocy in the real world! If there’s no rough emotion tangling up my ability to function on the mundane level, I have to express it in some contained way, like planned demolitions. If you put enough individual scraps of emotion together, over a sustained period of time, you cannot help but provide plot-line for whoever is reading it, right?

Yet, so many books of poetry are simply collections of poems that loosely correspond to each other, like the poets just squirt out 400 poems and shunt some about nature into a Nature folder, and some about love into a Love folder, but there is no development of attitude towards these things through the course of the book. The reader is forced to start with fresh slate every page and absorb whole new emotions each time. It's freaking tiring. 

This sort of collection is great for picking and choosing read time. One poem for this 5 minutes, one for a break later in the day.

The next step up of coherence are books like Mary Oliver’s … anything, they’re all beautiful and all the same.  Every single poem has a subsumed drama to the grace and awe Oliver has for members of nature. None of the foxes, herons, ponds, clouds ever interact with each other, but if you read 3 or 4 of her anthologies you will have a new eco-system living in your imagination and its drama will revolve on an almost Stephen Crane sort of careless equilibrium.

The last level, however, is the genuine page turner poetry collection Claudia Emerson’s “Late Wife,” and Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” are brilliant. They are a cut above every other book of poetry I’ve encountered. Every poem in each of them is a single scrutiny of humanity. Every poem also builds on the last, mentions characters or instances in the another. They reward the reader for paying attention. They build suspense, and a deeper connection with the characters. At the end of reading one (and you’ll want to read them cover to cover) you are as in touch with the speakers as you are with Katniss Everdeen, or Jay Gatsby.

Thank you, Sugar and Wikipedia for these treasures. They are the only two I’ve found. I’m eager to learn, so if you know of more, I will give you a dollar per anthology.