I first encountered the ‘essay poem’ some decades ago. Someone – I think LK – recommended Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Dust to me. It’s sadly unavailable direct from Dalkey Archive these days, but Natasha Randall’s review captures a sense of the formal unease it establishes in its opening lines: “If its lines were broken up, they might easily be poetry.”

Yet the argument for prose – no, not just prose, let’s say non-fiction – being poetic goes back a few more centuries than that. Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy makes the first and strongest argument, within my reading range:

• And even historiographers, although their lips sound of things done, and verity be written in their foreheads, have been glad to borrow both fashion and perchance weight of the poets. So Herodotus entitled his history by the name of the nine Muses; and both he and all the rest that followed him either stole or usurped of poetry their passionate describing of passions, the many particularities of battles which no man could affirm, or, if that be denied me, long orations put in the mouths of great kings and captains, which it is certain they never pronounced.

  So that truly neither philosopher nor historiographer could at the first have entered into the gates of popular judgments, if they had not taken a great passport of poetry, which in all nations at this day, where learning flourishes not, is plain to be seen; in all which they have some feeling of poetry. (hosted in full at the Poetry Foundation)

The problem with Sidney, as with a lot of essays of this ilk (cf. Louis Zukofsky’s Objectivist manifesto), is that it constructs a chimera/straw man concept of poetry which can be used as a patriarchal whipping stick for outsider poetics. Who decides on the right ‘feeling of poetry’ (/ how total one’s ‘perfect rest’ is?)?

As with the myth of an unregulated, ‘free’ market, there’s no possibility for such unless everyone has total access and there are no prior power structures / accrued wealth / subjective biases and all that jazz. Those already with power get to set hierarchies of access, visibility, importance and acceptance under the cover of objectivity.

One might say this is the problem with all poetics. TS Eliot’s celebration of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as one of the greatest critics of his generation and Eliot’s ensuing privileging of only one or two great minds per generation, is a simple, elitist trick. Compare to Peter Riley’s criticism of the ‘best’ poetry awarded by prizes today: “there is always a ready answer enshrined in the little word ‘best’, which is a mighty fortress against all accusations.” Every poetic argument establishes a subjective hierarchy in relation to the setter’s lived experience.

If the past decade has taught me anything, it’s that objectivity can never stand up to lived experience. There may be some collective agreement on cultural artifacts worth reading about, but how do you go about agreeing that? A brief list, which I’m not going to digress further into:

• major media outlets sell reviewing space to publishers
• reviewers are matchmaked, often by the publishing houses, for positive opinions
• the network of editors, journalists, agents and successful writers are demographically skewed toward white, middle class and above, often privately educated people based in/around cultural and state capitals
• prize culture often involves exclusive mechanisms, such as high entrance fees and publisher commitments, which excludes the peripheries, or called-in texts from judging panels, who invariably apply further personal biases to longlists and shortlists
• etc. There are probably more points to make here, I’m just tired of trotting over this again and again.

At heart, then, the (re)invocation of a new (peripheral/forgotten) literary form is a way of stepping outside of conventions and expectations. Is it a poem? Is it a short story? Is it an essay?

One of the key refrains I’ve heard around experiments in form is that they enable expression in context of events that have made prior poetries inadequate. This is true for me in Adorno’s terms that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. See, however, Reznikoff’s response  to the Holocaust (as Billy Mills eloquently puts it), or Heimrad Bäcker’s transcript (review on BOMB). Both put forward a new (documentary, collagic) poetics, zeroing in on the specific problem of lyric poetry.

And so the issue is subjective. And so, this introductory post to what might be coherent, or might be a loose jumble of barely connected posts, will now survey some of the talking points that have been building in my head for some time.

Early 20thC experimental poetries emerged from the horrors of mass war. The iambic pentameter had to break. Yet this pattern of breaking with traditions/conventions can be personal, also. Christopher Smart or John Clare, through outsider statuses and differing degrees of mental ill health, found their ways toward new expressions (Clare arguably getting closer to rustic life than Wordsworth/Coleridge ever could, but maybe that’s my privileging of lived experience).

Many women writers break with patriarchal traditions, trying to establish something new for themselves and future writers. I’m thinking more contemporarily now, the modern essay poem in the US, as put forward by Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Bhanu Kapil and younger generations following on like Emerson Whitney (whose book Heaven I reviewed). These emerge from a tradition of documentary poetry, which some argue has no fixed centre or origin (see Mark Nowak’s mini-essay), though this is clearly biased toward 20thC US poetry and is partly my fault for resorting to the Poetry Foundation for my cheap references…

But! I’ve also seen a line, through Cole Swensen and Eleni Sikelianos, drawing on Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid as a frame of reference. And I’ve seen, more recently, a trend entirely academic in its roots, presenting prose essay fragments, often in note form, within a collection of otherwise more familiar line-broken poems (no matter how creative with page space).

[Note to self: don’t forget Harry Josephine Giles’ Deep Wheel Orcadia (thanks AJB); though it’s narrative SF, playing with translation and mostly built of lyrics, there’s a prose crib on every page asserting a counter-hierarchy on the reader. But perhaps that’s a digression too far for this threading.]

There’s probably more to be said about the long poem, which has origins in narrative/story-telling. There’s an interesting provocation by BS Johnson about poetry’s retreat into lyric expression after Walter Scott switched from poetry to prose as the medium for his story-telling.

Yet I think there’s something also to be said about the sonnet form as a mini-essay. If an essay presents a situation and explores it (taking Montaigne’s essays as the starting point for the modern form), then the essay’s octet-sestet shape, or even the Shakespearean version, with its volta marking a shift, offers a form by which arguments can be presented and resolved.

This then starts to get behind the form of language to the form of intent in the act of writing. I’ve had many (literary-scholars/critically-minded) people malign this line in my questioning. Discussion of what a writer intends precludes the permission of the reader to interpret what’s actually there. But it’s vital for me, from the perspective of writing and practice.

It comes back to that intention I’ve flagged earlier: when prior modes of expression reach a point of failure to capture lived experience (or, in the case of some traditions, never arrive at any kind of adequacy for writers outside of the dominant demographics behind traditions), then intention is crucial. Choosing to write in an essayistic mode means you’re trying to do something you don’t understand. I think academia has fucked that intention massively, with its impositions of discourse communities, power structures and normalisations of what can be said and how. There’s always a sense that privilege overwrites the policing of such boundaries and it’s that angle by which I think I want to approach the essay poem, as a genre.

eventually
the wind takes to the blossom
mood: snow slash petals