An Email to a Poet

Jeff:

Thanks for sending the poem.  I feel remiss that I never have anything to say, except gushing compliment, but perhaps if I explain the way I read other people's work, you'll understand.  My first rule is I don't try to make it something it is not.  I don't belong to a "school".  In other words, whenever I read anything, I try as best as I can not to look for what's not there or what could be there.  At the macro level, this discipline means that if someone gives me a poem or story about a dog, I don't say, you know, dogs are okay, but what if it was about a cat.  Obviously, the temptation that requires resistance is more often centered on the argumentum of the poem, not the subject, but you get the idea. [I should hastily add that I have no quarrel at all with either the subject nor the argumentum of this poem, or any of your poems, that's not what I am saying.  I am thinking more of other occasions, other writers, but even then, to be frank, I am extremely open-minded and am almost universally delightfully surprised by what other people write about and where that subject leads the poem. The poem you sent is no exception to that general experience.  This poem does what, I think, poems do best.  It takes a "simple" image drawn from regular life and fills it with beauty, music, love, and grace.]

Instead what I look at are the technical aspects of the poem.  How does this poem set out to do what it wants to do?  Is there anything out of place, a stylistic detour that jars?  Is it ham-fisted or tinny?  Does the thought leave the poem at any point to grab some easy substitute, like cliche or sententiousness, etc.?  Those kinds of things.  And Jeff, your poems never do any of those things.  You are skilled and exact.  To the point, in fact, where the skill and exactitude seem like a kind of easy going looseness (the hardest and best thing to do.)

This last rule is going to seem weird.  I don't expect poems to be "perfect".  You know, the Golden Bowl rule.  Only an idiot would want to patch the cracks where humanity, humility and grace shine through.  Think in terms of meter and rhyme.  Nothing is more horrible than perfect iambic pentameter with inflexible masculine end rhymes. I strongly believe that the same is true for every other aspect of a poem.

So, when someone shows me a poem that is skilled, yet human, that comes from love and humility, that doesn't miss a step, yet still seems like a casual stroll, that embraces its own tentativeness and incompleteness, yet leads us to a place of wonder, all I can say is : It's great.  Jeff, it's great.  I love it.

Keith