Like every non-serious person who grew up as a gifted kid, I secretly harbour hopes of achieving greatness through what I think of as a cheap shot. I might elaborate on what I mean by this another time, but one thing that would qualify is writing a widely and rightly beloved poem that shows up in anthologies all the time because it's such a stone cold banger. You'll be relieved to hear that this is not the only iron I have in the fire, but it is one of them. I should hasten to clarify that I do not expect any of the poems I've written so far to ever attain this status; the most likely candidate is probably 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long', which fans of the blog will already know and presumably love. One point in that poem's favour is that the balder I get the funnier it gets, which is incidentally a nice demonstration that the quality of a poem need not be fully intrinsic to it.
Immortality And Mortality
Achieving artistic immortality through a cheap shot is in many ways a numbers game, for a couple of reasons, of which only one is the obvious fact that one must typically cast many a sprat to catch a hake. The other reason is that in order to promote one's poetry one will ideally be legible as a poet, and this means putting out at least one slim volume of verse to supply a friendly environment for your banger to shine. The poems don't all have to be bangers, but people are much more receptive to a poem when they're in poetry-reading mode and it's surrounded by other poems than when it's sitting awkwardly in a rectangular space carved out of a magazine article.
So what I need is enough poetry to fill a slim volume. Let's suppose that'd be about fifty poems, counting long poems that take up multiple pages as more than one poem. I'm now forty years old, I have been writing my poems for about twenty years, and I have about ten poems that I consider successes, so at this rate I should be able to put out my slim volume when I'm 120. Actuarially speaking, I would do well to up my work rate a little.
Now you might be surprised to hear this if you're familiar with my poetry, but I actually find it very difficult indeed to write them unless inexplicably struck by inspiration. I don't know what prompts it or how to speed it up; I have just occasionally been struck by inspiration and written a poem I consider a success. I have also sometimes been struck by inspiration and written a poem I consider a failure, but there aren't very many of those either. I am painfully unprolific. In contrast to my blogging output, which I have been able to ramp up enormously over the last few weeks through an act of sheer will, I would have no idea how to make myself a more productive poet. I suppose I could commit to posting a poem every Tuesday come rain or shine, but nobody really wants to see that. So I fear that my projected slim volume may never appear, and any bangers I write will go wasted on the desert air.
Hits And Misses
As I said, I've written a handful of poems I consider successes, and a handful or two that I consider failures. 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long' is of course in the former category, but I'll show you another of the successes and one of the failures so you can get a sense of what my standards are.
First, the success. It is a double dactyl, information which is necessary to read it with the right meter and which helps explain some of the artistic choices. Years ago there was a brief and minor vogue for writing them about philosophy to which I made a couple of contributions, and I'm sorry to inform you that this is the better of the two.
Guggenheim Flügenheim
Leopold Löwenheim
Pondered the hierarchy
Cantor had sired
With Skolem's help he proved
Model-theoretically
Higher infinities
Are not required
I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I'll say a little about why I consider the poem a success, because I think it illustrates some things about the ethos with which my poems are written. First and foremost, when read correctly it scans. Lots of poetry settles for not scanning properly, whereas I am quite keen for my poems to scan more or less perfectly (except in the case of one called 'Computer' in which the meter breaks down intentionally in the middle).
It also adheres strictly to the rules of the form I've written it in, at least as I understand them, which is important to me when I write one in a specific form. Beyond these things the success criteria become more nebulous, and it's not something I've reflected on a great deal. Perhaps part of it is that there are no secrets: you might have to google who Leopold Löwenheim is, but in principle I think the reader should be able to understand this poem just as well as I do without me having to explain anything further about it (assuming you recognize a double dactyl when you see one). It is, in an important sense, not personal. When asked what my favourite poem is, my longstanding answer is 'Recipe For A Salad' by Sydney Smith, and I think one could say the same about that. Irritatingly, however, this isn't actually the case for 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long', because to fully appreciate it you have to know what I look like. Oh well.
Now for the moment you've all been waiting for: the failure. This poem is a limerick about Goethe.
There once was a fellow named Goethe
A novelist, bard and Frankfurter
Man of science astute
And a statesman to boot
He was basically Norris McWhirter
This poem is a failure in my eyes, although I hold out some hope that with some judicious workshopping in multiple places it could become a success. So, what's wrong with it?
Attentive readers will have noticed that it meets all the success criteria I mentioned for the successful one. It is undeniably a limerick. (If you don't already know, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that it really is normal for English people to pronounce "Goethe" to rhyme with "Frankfurter" and "Norris McWhirter".) When read correctly it scans perfectly. And while you might need to Google Norris McWhirter, you don't need me to tell you anything in order to understand the poem as well as I do. And yet, as I am sure you'll agree, it is deeply unsatisfying as a piece of art.
The problem as I see it is that it has holes in it: some of the words are essentially placeholders where a word that improved the poem could have been put but I couldn't think of one. "Fellow" is an example. That should be replaced by a more interesting word applying to Goethe. "Astute" is not great. "He was basically" is an abomination. When writing it I looked up whether I could put "The Westphalian Norris McWhirter", but unfortunately that's not where Westphalia is. Returning to it today I considered "The Enlightenment's Norris McWhirter", but I don't like that because drawing attention to the fact that Goethe was one among many polymaths of approximately his era rather detracts from the point of the poem. Maybe one day I'll come up with something, but today is not that day.
The poem was originally written as a reply to a tweet seeking recommendations for "a decent biography of Goethe that isn't 20'000 pages long"; it appears that the date (21 March 2018) was World Poetry Day, and so I replied with a poem. I thought it was funny, but as I recall the poster didn't like the tweet. I'm over it; as I say it's not a good poem. But when looking this up, I realized that today is March 21 too, so happy World Poetry Day, and see you next week!
