“The Dramatic Element” by David Yezzi
by Ernie on 04/03/10 at 10:23 am
David Yezzi’s new essay on the dramatic element in poetry is making some waves, sowing controversy, and raising some hackles, as usual. Here is a bit of it. Click here to read the rest.
The critic David Orr was, I believe, talking about the current state of the lyric when he characterized “the trendiest contemporary style,” which
relies heavily on disconnected phrases, abrupt syntactical shifts, attention-begging titles … , quirky diction … , flickering italics, oddball openings … and a tone ranging from daffy to plangent—basically, two scoops of John Ashbery and a sprinkling of Gertrude Stein. It’s not hard to write acceptable poetry in this mode, which is one of the reasons so many people make use of it. After all, poets need jobs, and for those, they need books—and for those, well, they need poems.
Such careerist aesthetics are hardly new; they are the shopworn conventions of the avant-garde, which may have shocked and thrilled in the 1920s but now seem borrowed and mildly soporific. Every generation faces the challenge of discovering something both authentic and fresh in the lyric, without which it lapses into homogeneity and period clichés.
The poet William Matthews, in an essay from his prose collection Curiosities (1989), narrows the field of most lyric poetry to four basic themes from which the dramatic impulse is absent: “1. I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious. 2. We’re not getting any younger. 3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey. 4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent and on we know not what.” Matthews was a poet of intelligence and poignant wit; he means his characterizations as a joke, but he’s not far wrong. In other words, there’s the nature poem with spiritual aspirations (think Coleridge, Hopkins, Mary Oliver, et al.); the tempus fugit motif of Herrick and Marvell, to name just a couple; the odi et amo seesaw ridden by nearly every poet before and after Catullus; and the last which is just a mix-and-match of the previous three themes.
The quality of the voice tends to be internal and contemplative, not to say plaintive and wistful, a private communication uttered to the self or to a single listener that we are allowed to overhear. Such communications are striking in their intimacy, in their quiet beauties and skipping reveries. But the world is a loud and boisterous place, especially in urban settings. City-dwellers are less likely to notice the film fluttering in the grate than the subway rumbling beneath their feet or a cheer eminating from the sports bar on the corner. City-scenes are populous not private, social not personal, polyvocal not interior. What is contemplative poetry’s answer to the voluble argument, the casual exchange, the marketplace, the mingling of the solitary “I” with a crowd of others? If you are Keats, the answer is simply withdrawal.
