On (poetic) taste
Chacun à son goût. Image: The Guardian
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
- Ezra Pound, Poetry magazine (April 1913)
A.O. Scott and Aliza Aufrichtig recently called Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro “one of the shortest great poems in the English language.” I just don’t see it.
I mean, I understand the arguments in its favor: the inventiveness for that historical moment, the spare language, the unexpected natural/technological juxtaposition. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I don’t feel it.*
My nerd credentials are pretty solid, but there are all kinds of writing I don’t get. William Carlos Williams’s This is Just to Say lands the same for me. I see what it’s doing, but meh.
I think this is inevitable, but also OK. Not every style will work for you. The slippery slope begins when we dismiss things we don’t like as “not real poetry” or “not real artistry” more generally. However, that’s just a slippery slope, not automatically an error. There really are bad examples of every human endeavor. I’m sure some of the cave paintings were relatively shit. It’s also important to remember there’s a natural winnowing process because much stuff has been forgotten, making past artistic ages seem more coherent and accomplished than they probably were at the time.
With all that said, I still think there’s value in deliberately seeking out experiences I don’t appreciate. Not necessarily because I’m seeking to change my mind, but because by definition you can’t be surprised by things you know well. And surprise is essential to any transcendent experience.
So what does this have to do with Pound, or with modernist poetry? Well, I hope it’s humbling. Saying “I don’t like poetry” is like saying “I don’t like music.” I mean….I guess that’s possible. But what you probably mean, without knowing it, is something “I don’t like rhymed couplets” (which, same), or “I don’t like Shakespeare” (which, OK, let’s examine that a bit more closely another time).
I tend to like verses that I can tell are hard but made to seem easy, verses that are primarily about ideas rather than experiences or feelings (to the extent those can be separated). Larkin looms large but the OG of this is Milton with his impressive control and massy momentum.
However, I actually think my own perspective here is immature and I’ll try to explain why. When I was a child, a neighbor of mine was a serious piano student; I recall hearing her practice from time to time, and she went on to a decorated career. At some point in my later childhood, I went to a concert of hers; I don’t remember the details but I believe she was performing the premiere of this particular piece. What I clearly remember—with shame—is that I didn’t understand or appreciate the music at all. Atonal, arrhythmic, abstruse. If I hadn’t been in a concert hall setting I would have thought a person was just fooling around on the piano. I didn’t know enough to understand what was being done, and for me that meant the music didn’t land at all. I strongly suspect that a lot of contemporary poetry is operating at a similar level of remove.
So this is a PSA both for being willing to accept your own taste, and a plea to keep trying to expand it. I regularly read Poetry magazine, and to be honest in a ~75 page issue there’s usually a maximum of two poems that I like, clip and save for later. In one sense this is a huge waste of time. But every so often I find something that becomes a new part of my aesthetic register.
I was hit by a thunderbolt in Stephen Partington’s elegy to lost elephants: “we once had tuskers; tell the birds!”
I got over my eye roll at the 15 pages of David Barker’s Whale Fall, and realize it works on me for reasons I still can’t articulate or justify.
I noticed that I keep pulling poems by Ellen Bass and A.E. Stallings; maybe I should look them up.
I was floored by a millennium-old phrase from a language I don’t speak, translated by someone I don’t know, set to a tune I’ve never heard: “Listen, crying bird / to live without this sadness is to see the mountain / without its weight, rivers without depth.”
Through this experience I’ve realized my taste also extends to poems about birds and angels, heartbreak and cleverness. Poems about sex bore me. Poems about reunions make me tear up. The only way to find such things is to try. If you don’t, then you’re left with rehashing and intensifying the things you already know, to ever-diminishing returns.
Fortunately, choosing to read poems is like choosing the tasting menu at a restaurant: you’ll be surprised. If you like one, you won’t get enough. If you don’t like one, you can move on pretty quickly.
So a question to end (and begin) on: what lands for you, aesthetically?
* The French say chacun à son goût - a level of acceptance that, in my experience, the French don’t traditionally extend to aesthetic choices.