I wrote this to try to wrap signifiers around feelings. "The testimony of feeling," I guess. Which I ripped from a groupblog discussing "postmodern Christianity." That's why I wrote this. Now, I'm posting it to look cool. There are things it takes for granted that other models reconstruct, such as Jessica Smith's poetics of plastics -- to name something I just read -- with its notion of reader defined poetic space manipulation. My model prolly doesn't give the reader enough credit.

But my disclaimer rhymes with burk-shin-fogress.

So Here Goes:

Writing poetry is performing language. Language is performing thought.

Talking about how poetry works is notoriously tricky, as it lends itself to cutesy, "poetic" truisms like the first two sentences of this poetics statement.

That's understandable, as a breakdown of poetry seems to demand certain poetic accoutrements, such as tidy rhetorical patterns, just as talking convincingly about how baseball works demands you employ the baseball-contrived meanings of "slugger" or "closer." Poetry is an unnamable essence and baseball is an unnamable essence, so to identify either essence requires you catalog and use all the devices that point to that essence. There's no way of constructing a door to a house while attempting to circumvent all notions of "house" and "door."

So, following that, poetry's association with emotion triggers another kind of poetry breakdown that rehashes what it "feels like" to write a poem. These are usually fun. Let's try making a few new ones:

Poetry happens when you slice a pipe in your gut and let dawn and TV static mingle with your currents.

Poetry comes from experiences that twist themselves into cowprods and leave distinctive scars on the back of your heart.

Poetry is when words rearrange your headspace like a kitten invading your bathroom.

Poetry is when non-moments feel suddenly lucid, like coming across a face you've never seen before in a class photo you've scoured a million times.

Poetry is a ceiling fan talking to the moon.

But these are ultimately unhelpful. No axe-maker is going to instruct an apprentice solely through attempts to define how it feels to make a proper axe. And poetry happens/comes/is none of these things, really. Such definitions are what us anxious po-mo cripples would call Bullshit. I'm kidding with the "us." I have more confidence than that and wavy hair. But some would call them Bullshit for sure. Poetry happens when I write something and call it a poem. Poetry comes when I say "what is coming right now is a poem." Poetry is that which I get at least one other person to agree is poetry. Or, even worse, poetry is simply what I call poetry. Which is far too boring to be true.

Yet if these methods are too vague, a bog of exacting critical terminology doesn't usually help either. While very useful for naming parts and classifying things into abstract components to highlight the relationship between those components, an overload of clinical rigor seems to whir and wrangle and disappear from poetry entirely, waking up in a field of endlessly less certainty. Any struggle to diagram how poetry works gets you cutting grass blades smaller and smaller until you have to build new machines and microscopes to further your work, by which time you're no longer even thinking about poetry, you're thinking about grass blades.

Eventually, you have to give in and accept both the necessity of analysis and the necessity of a poetic and ridiculous analysis method.

So here is a temporary, shaky, analogy-slathered way of analyzing how I think poetry works.

You have two major elements: the scenic effect (the equipment/content/Furniture of the poem) and the linguistic effect. We're going to call the scenic effect the avocado. Within this avocado you have the avocado pit, that palpable sensation, feeling, insight, revelation, notion, joke, naggynaggyiosity that demands a poem as a vessel. Or that you construe as demanding a poem as a vessel. The avocado pit is inedible, impossible to approach directly, an obelisk full of stars, etc. In fact, it's downright non-existent, just like a pit only exists through the circumference that marks it. To convey the existence of this pit, one has to fill the scene with enough avocado gunk that the suggestion of the pit will arise. This avocado gunk includes: narrative, imagery, stuff. They're not always in agreement with each other. Sometimes the gunk goes crazy and suggests a million different pits. This is fine. There is no pit, remember? If the gunk is charged enough to suggest any pit at all, this is fine.

But the gunk is just going to sit there unless it has some way of getting to the poem's intended destination. This is not always the mouth. Sometimes the brain needs the avocado, sometimes the gut. To transport the gunk, we use the language helicopter. This helicopter is a carefully constructed, whirly assemblage of linguistic devices. The reason it's a helicopter and not an airplane is because an airplane goes down too smoothly, disappears too much, makes flight seem an inevitability instead of a miracle. That's the point of prose, to erase the medium in favor of the goal. The funky mechanics of a helicopter always remind you how cool it is to be flying in the first place, and this is the purpose of the poem. Sure, sometimes you try to mask your helicopter to look like an airplane, and sometimes this works, but to write a poem is always to embrace the notion that language is infinitely cool.

So the language helicopter takes the avocado gunk, replete with its suggestion of an unnamable but somehow tangible pit, and gets that gunk where it needs to go. Sometimes the arrival of the helicopter is the major cause for celebration, and there is only cursory gunk. And sometimes the helicopter is urgent and self-effacing if the gunk is urgent and radioactive. But this relationship, this tension of fragile gunk in a fragile flight, produces the poem.

My favorite poems happen when the sheer bombast of this process flaunts and flexes itself and still manages to retain relevance. My favorite poems juggle a surface razzle-dazzle, a vague aura of importance, a meaninglessness when examined deeper, and an even deeper meaning when really examined super-deep, to employ the utmost technical terminology. These poems are for me the poet, not because they don't trigger some of the same life-affirming clicks and purrs as more reader-oriented poetry, but because they get me thinking of poetry itself, of writing poetry as a living beast, as possible. Few poets do this for me, sadly: Clark Coolidge, John Ashbery, Ange Mlinko, Frank Stanford.

But that's fine, because there are tons of reasons for liking poetry, just as the relationship described earlier between helicopter and avocado can shift its weight and color in a million ways. Here are some of those reasons:

--Language fun
--Dead concerns and lifestyles come alive
--Humor
--Gutstring twistage
--Weirdness or defamiliarization
--Simple relation/sympathy to worldview
--And even sometimes that oft-battered "wisdom"

This is too reductive, of course, as most poets play more than one note. And I'm too timid to name all my examples, lest I forget people. But however the route, something has to dump avocado gunk into the yesyesyes machine.

***

Ergo: through the bass thrump of a helicopter dumping gunk inside of us, poems should drum us into caring about what it is to be.

But why bother to use poetry, why not just go out and stumble into life chunks that do the same thing? I suppose it's vanity.

I suppose it's the notion that, entirely devoid of circumstances and context, we as flimsy humans can announce ourselves. We can reproduce from nothing, from a matrix of arbitrary codes, those tricky moments when life seems to flicker an acknowledgement of our importance, our vitality, our smiles or shaky jaws or cold arms or all of it.