Though I, on the whole, have a penchant for the traditional forms and meters of English poetry, I am not content to study it alone. Like any fruit-bearing crop, the fields of English poetry require rich fertilization in the form of inspiration. In the past 100 years, this was accomplished primarily by the abandonment of native techniques. It has been a marvelous experiment that has yielded so many fruitful concepts to poetry, that has caused us to ask what truly makes a poem a poem. It is this very modern exploration that has caused me to seek out what forms of poetry have proliferated the world over, has led me to study the poetry of several regions: Japanese, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Malaysian, etc.
Years ago, while doing such and attending university, I came across forms that caused the western eye in my poetry programs to tremble. I speak not just of formally strict professors or upstart free-versers only, no, but forms that caused the whole to come together—like heroes and their villains teaming-up in an uncanny moment—and squint, like the “man and butterfly meme,” and ask, “Is this poetry?”
The forms that cause this reaction have a similarity, a shared goal that seems the antithesis of Western Literature, those steeped in this tradition being utterly puzzled by these forms while lay readers can find immense joy in them. This is a bit of a critique on Western Literature when it comes to poetry that often metamorphizes itself into the great ouroboros, one having to note the length of its whole body just to find that it is eating its own ass. These forms adopt a different trajectory, one that “dazzles the most untutored of audiences” according to Agha Shahid Ali.
If Western Literature excels in promising and delivering a depth and a unity in art—sometimes a myopic unity, but often a fulfilling one— then these forms show what it means to lyricize breadth, to create links just strong enough to go from stanza to stanza in a sprawling motion, to run in every direction at once. If a western poem strives to be about one thing, a poem in this form strives to be about everything.
There are probably several advantages to a poem being about everything, to a poem adopting weaker thematic links and using formal techniques to pull the poem together. Ali’s assertion above is what intrigues me the most. While I do love and crave the jubilation of my peers at my verse, I deeply desire my poetry to “dazzle the most untutored of audiences.” This century has done something strange both to poetry and to liberal politics in the US: it has alienated them from the working class. I want to facilitate poetry enjoyment, not simplify it, but demystify it while keeping its depths.
It has taken me days to write this, and while I do put effort into my blog posts, they are more on the casual spectrum of my writing. I plan to write a future article about the forms I’m alluding to—Ghazal and Renga (Renku)—and how there is really only one corollary in English-speaking culture that I know of, how it is found more in internet threads than in poetry anthologies. Knowing how way leads on to way, I hope that I find my way back.
–M. Anthony
Over/Poetry 