Bad Poetry for Editors Who Hate Alternative Word Order

 A discussion among the Society for Classical Poetry was informative, but startling.

I call what I write Bad Poetry (TM). I don't know that it is all that bad. I don't know whether any of it's very good, either. I'm too close to judge it. And also I don't know what is considered good poetry, these days, if it's not poetry that fits a new thought into an old traditional form. The more I study what some people seem to think is good poetry, the more I remain puzzled.

I have read some free verse that I thought was good, but I can't see what makes it poetry. It looked like short messy prose to me. Add punctuation, and maybe an introduction, and it'd be a good short essay. But since when does missing punctuation and an arrogant assumption that people will care enough to find out what you're talking about make prose into poetry?

Well, all right, I read one rhymeless almost-sonnet, when I was fourteen or fifteen or so, that made me sit up and think, "That is dang good." You probably remember it too; a lot of people think it's dang good. It was Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays." "Sundays too my father got up early..." to light the fire so that everyone else, despite "the chronic angers in that house," could come downstairs to a warm room. "No one ever thanked him," the speaker recalls, and, looking back, "What did I know, what did I know / of love's austere and lonely offices?"

It wasn't just the vivid image of the bitter old man still performing "love's austere and lonely offices," or the quick sharp thrust of "No one ever thanked him." It was the insight the poem poured into me and who knows how many surly teenagers who found that poem in a textbook.

Brought up on Hollywood's "toxic masculinity" images, a lot of baby-boomers' fathers didn't come to our performances, had no positive insight to offer into whether there was anything we might ever do that would please them, hardly seemed to have anything to say that didn't sound angry. They'd been taught to be shy about expressing approval of anybody. Reaching an age where they had to know they weren't going to do everything they'd wanted to do in life, they were also developing cardiovascular disease; they had headaches.

"Liked the speech the President made, did you? Well, he didn't write it himself."

"Yeah, that was well played. Now watch them raise his salary and him get fat and lazy. He'll never run like that again."

Seriously. When they'd voted for the President; when they were the ones who wanted to watch that athlete play that game. These men were no fun to be around and tended to alienate their same-age friends, too, if they didn't realize what they were doing in time. The ones who stayed married belonged to traditions that really punished divorce, socially. Some of my friends joked about forming a Fellowship of Children of Difficult Dads. Some of our Difficult Dads died of cardiovascular disease before age fifty; more died off fast in the 1980s because they tended to be neglected, if not positively pushed out of this life, in hospitals. And a few lucky ones realized what a vicious cycle their grumpiness had become, broke the cycle, and became delightful human beings, too.

Meanwhile...I was a typical teen mess. On the surface of things my father seemed to hate me, I returned the emotion with interest, and even my longsuffering mother and his best prewar buddy seemed to quarrel with him more than they enjoyed hanging out with him, so bleep would I want to please or listen to or learn anything from such a mean old man, anyway. But even in those bitter, lonely, hypertensive years Dad was faithful in "love's austere and lonely offices." Apparently hundreds, if not thousands, of miserable fifty-year-old men were. Apparently hundreds of teenagers read Hayden's poem and thought, "Well, yes, he does...if not light fires, he does other things that nobody would do if he didn't love his family in some miserable middle-aged way. Poor old Dad...I wonder if he'd let me thank him?"

Mine might not have received thanks from me in a gracious way. We'll never know. I had a brother who wanted to do everything I did. I left the book lying around where he could read it. He came to Hayden's poem, and he informed Dad that we all appreciated his getting up early and lighting fires. No, Drill Sergeant Dad was not too far gone to appreciate being appreciated, at least by a son.

And if it didn't turn every one of those fathers' lives around and set them on the way to recovery, in every case, at least it made the teenagers feel a little less discouraged. That's the sort of thing a really great poem can do. How a poem can do such a thing, I don't know, but timing in history seems to be critical. Nobody can sit down saying "I'm going to write a poem that will bring hundreds if not thousands of families together," and do it, in the way anyone can sit down saying "I'm going to write a sonnet," and do it. No, writers have our insights, write, rewrite, probably end up giving our poems away as publicity for our nonfiction books, and then wait for the next fifty or seventy-five years to see whether our poems have any good effect on anyone. Sometimes they have good effects on a generation that reads the poems after our own generation are dead.

So although it's not a "correct" sonnet with exactly fourteen lines rhymed in an official classic way, "Those Winter Sundays" is a great piece of writing. But, because it's not a "correct" sonnet with fourteen lines rhymed in an official classic way, you'll notice I can quote only one or two lines at a time. I've tried to memorize "Those Winter Sundays." I've failed. I can remember poems that have the memory aids of rhyme and rhythm. Many silly poems I would not call to anyone's serious attention, things like "I never saw a purple cow" or "How long, ye servers, oh, how long shall dinner hour delay?", stick in my mind. A serious free-verse poem, even one as good as "Those Winter Sundays," does not. I usually forget free verse altogether.

I don't flatter myself that my poems are good enough to stick in the mind without the benefit of poetic form. Whatever shortcomings a poem may have as a sonnet, or villanelle, or haiku, or Nashery, or exercise in re-creating some exotic verse form in a comment on a Petfinder animal's page, it never seems to me that the poem would be improved by just rewriting it as--wow!--prose, only dribbled down the left side of the page in short lines without punctuation! I don't know why people even bother with that.

Well. Yes. To get words lined up in a poetic form, we often vary the standard word order within a sentence. Sometimes this also works as an aid to memory.

In grade three we had to practice varying the word order in sentences. The textbook gave us groups of words, each of which could form at least three different sentences. We had to write out those sentences.

"My sister Mary is pretty."

"Pretty Mary is my sister."

"Mary is my pretty sister."

"Is pretty Mary my sister?"

"Is my sister Mary pretty?"

Those were the obvious choices but for some reason I thought the teacher might remember a poem I'd read a few years before ("When I try to skate, my feet are so wary / They grit and they grate; and then I watch Mary / Easily gliding like an ice fairy"), and appreciate:

"Pretty is my sister Mary (and she skates like an ice fairy)."

For the rest of the year that teacher tried to encourage me to write more poems. I liked that teacher.

In grade three I recognized that some lines in poems and songs were different from the way they'd be in prose, that sometimes funny poems sounded funnier if words themselves were twisted so that they rhymed ("Once there was an elephant who tried to use the telephant"), and sometimes serious poems sounded more serious if word order was changed to fit the rhyme and rhythm of the verse. Sometimes these variations made ordinary speech better poetry. Sometimes they didn't. I liked the original poem about Mary the skater better than my lines that recalled it. What about those "wary" feet, though? Are feet wary? It's not a way you'd normally describe feet, but is "wariness" about walking on ice what makes it hard to take off like Dorothy Hamill, after all? Sometimes unusual word usage made a poem better, too.

It is possible that word order didn't bother me because so many Americans' ancestors learned English as a second (or later) language. In Irish the basic sentence order is verb, subject, predicate, but in Irish the normal way of building a sentence around many verbs involves compounding them with other verbs, so you can have sentences with auxiliary verb, subject, primary verb, object; some sentences are more complicated, so in Irish nouns have subject forms and object forms (what grammarians call case forms) to help everyone keep track, except that the object form of one noun may be the same as the subject form of some other noun...I don't actually speak Irish. Sometimes I'm glad. In German, which just missed becoming the official language in Pennsylvania, the normal sentence order is subject, object, verb, with case forms for the nouns. Then there are French and Spanish, both of which normally have subject, verb, object word order when the object of the verb is a noun, but subject, object, verb when the object is a pronoun, and also have verb, object, with the subject embedded in a special form of the verb, when the subject is a pronoun. In French a pronoun that could be considered embedded in the verb is usually used, anyway; in Spanish it's not. (To keep things interesting Spanish also has a repeated object construction, where the pronoun comes before the verb and then an explicatory "(referring) to (the person)" comes after. Veo un arbol, (I) see a tree--the subject is embedded in the verb. Lo veo, It (I) see. Le veo a Juan, Him (I) see (referring) to Juan. After a while you don't think about it any more,) Spanish has some verb forms that embed a complete sentence, as (I'm told) has Cherokee and most indigenous languages: Digamelo, Tell it to me. Sentemonos, Let's sit down. Every native speaker of English not only knows how to construct a sentence with alternative word orders, but has a strong sense of which alternatives sound more formal, or goofier, or as if they have different meanings, or influenced by a specific foreign language, or just plain wrong:

Tracy hit the ball.

The ball was hit by Tracy.

The ball by Tracy was hit.

Hit Tracy the ball.

Hit Tracy the ball?

Hit the ball Tracy.

Did Tracy hit the ball?

Tracy did hit the ball.

Tracy hit the ball did.

It was hit the ball Tracy did.

It was by Tracy the ball was hit.

It was Tracy the ball was hit by.

The ball hit Tracy.

The ball Tracy hit.

Tracy the ball hit.

Some computer grammar checkers used to try to "correct" "passive voice" ("The ball was hit by Tracy"). This is wrong. Passive wordings are weaker than active ones. Full strength is not always what we want. In a report on a game it's usually better to say "Tracy hit the ball," but in a report on a fishing trip it might be better to say "The hooks were baited with worms" than to blather on about how Kayla pretended to be afraid of the worms and got Bryson to bait her hook, so "We all baited our hooks with worms" would be inaccurate. Discussions of these things probably do need to be addressed to grade three or four. Adults understand.

Sometimes a thought just didn't seem to work as a poem. All greeting card verses sound alike. On a greeting card that seems to be what people want; no awkward personal thoughts about the individual situation, just nice sentiments to go with pretty pictures lined up on a sill or a mantel. I accepted early on that any poem about a wedding, funeral, graduation, hospital stay, holiday, or romance was going to sound like a greeting card. The bland generic rhymed verses usually sounded better than the wordier, prosier effusions of generic emotion. A simple statement of what the card was about, "Best wishes" or "Condolences" or "Merry Christmas," always sounded best of all, to me. If all you want to say is "Happy New Year" you're never really going to improve on "Happy New Year."

For every nice thing
that this New Year may bring
here's a New Year's Day wish
from me and my goldfish.

On a handmade card from someone whose pet is a goldfish, this is cute and clever...but nobody would sit down and read a book of greeting card verses.

But recently I read that some "prestigious poetry journal" editors are prejudiced against "any deviation from the subject, verb, object word order in a sentence."

Well, isn't that a crock. ("Isn't" is a verb. "That" is a pronoun. "Crock" is a noun. "That" is the subject, but "crock" is not the object because "isn't" is not a transitive verb. Verb, subject, other noun is the normal order for sentences like "isn't that a crock.")

Apparently these editors are also prejudiced against words that aren't found on fourth grade vocabulary lists... which made me think about how they'd be likely to edit the best loved poems in the English language.

A Shakespeare Sonnet Edited by a Person with Fourth Grade Reading Skills

Sometimes I feel like I have bad luck & no friends
& can't do anything right
I yell at the sky
which isn't listening
I look at myself & curse my bad luck.,,
but remembering you makes me feel rich
& I'd rather be your boyfriend than be a rock star

A Shakespeare Lyric Edited by a Person with Fourth Grade Reading Skills

Your father drowned in 10m of water
his bones are turning into coral
his eyes are turning into pearls
his whole body
is changing
into something weird
Surf sounds are what he'll have for funeral bells
diiiinnnngggg dooooonnnnnnnggggg

A Burns Song Edited by a Person with Fourth Grade Reading Skills

Is there anyone who is poor
& so he walks around with his head down etc
He is a coward
We ignore him
We are poor & we don't care
A man's a man
Etc

Tennyson's Bugle Song Edited by a Person with Fourth Grade Reading Skills

The sun shines on the castle walls
& those white towers they tell stories about
The sun glitters on the lakes
& the waterfall sparkles
The bugles blow & make echoes
The bugles blow & the echoes fade

A Frost Poem Edited by a Person with Fourth Grade Reading Skills

I think I know whose woods these are
He lives in town tho
He will not see me stopping here
to watch the snow cover his woods
The woods are lovely
the snow is soft & deep
but I got stuff to do
I don't want to freeze to death in those woods

Because, of course, if you can't even figure out a sentence with alternative word order, you certainly can't figure out metaphors.

I think I'd rather stick to Bad Poetry, thanks.

Imagine all the fathers who would have died unthanked if Robert Hayden had been told to make his classic poem "simple and accessible," without poetic devices, unfamiliar words, or poetic figures, so that nobody would remember even individual lines. A computer might rate the mess below "more accessible" than the poem. I don't expect it would move a teenager to blink an eye.

My father woke up early
even on Sundays
to light the fire in the stove downstairs
because our house was so cold
No one ever thanked him
I hurried outside
because my parents were angry at each other
& dumped their feelings on me
What did I know
about the ways love comes out
even when it's hard work
& it looks as if your children
don't even notice what you are doing
because you still love them
even if the only way you know how to say it
is doing all that hard work