How to write a long poem #9 - Go in Fear of Abstractions

 

9.

GO IN FEAR OF ABSTRACTIONS

 

The small poem can be a scale model for the longer poem to come. And vice versa. The long rambling poem that might not be quite working (or not yet) may contain the perfect smaller poem (or poems). The secret ingredients here are time and distance. The formula to apply here is TIME = DISTANCE. You need to get away and to come back to the work/s fresh in order to get a sense of what will work, in order to know where you are.

 

That nasty fascist, Ezra Pound, had a number of important and helpful observations about writing and poetry. One of my favourites (I’m sure you’ve heard me quote it) is go in fear of abstractions.

 

Abstractions are the great deep and meaningful trap for all writers, but especially for poets. It makes sense that many poets are very interested in the big picture – life the universe and everything. (There are other poets more interested in the minutiae of life and matter… and there are those who want to join the micro to the macro. There are all sorts!) An excess of abstraction is however whatever is frequently wrong with poetry that is not working.

 

What’s abstract is far from the fact, far from sensory experience, from what we can know through seeing, through touch, through hearing, through smell, through taste. The poem dominated by abstraction is a case of ‘nothing to see here’.  And when there’s nothing to see, hear, touch, taste, smell – well, why bother being there? To engage a reader involves lending them sensate experience. Plot is helpful too. But even if nothing happens in a poem, you can be there if there’s something happening for your senses.  

 

Homo proponit – deus disponit!

(Man proposes – God disposes)

 

But here the roles are reversed!  You are the god of your poem. The reader makes short work of what can’t be experienced in your poem. ‘So long lives this…’ said Shakespeare, when he was praising his own craft. Most poems are much more mortal than their makers!

 

The poet makes a world but unless the reader can see/hear/touch/taste/smell it, well, it’s like that philosophical tree in the forest … falling, without a witness.

 

In a way it all comes down to the question of how much work you can expect your reader to do. How far apart can the dots be and the reader still able to join them?

 

The poem with too much abstraction is like a sky where everything is so many light years from everything else, that no one will see where they’re going and no one will ever arrive!

 

 

 

Concretizing an abstraction – anchoring the idea in experience

 

In this exercise, we give a poem an abstract theme, but observe the discipline of writing about it (or taking that theme as a point of departure) without  resorting to abstraction at all in the body of a poem.

 

Choose one of the following abstractions for your theme (or add your own to the list)

 

death

love

the good

the bad

the ugly

grief

joy

hope

anger

freedom

poetry/ the poem

 

Note that these are topics and not titles. You might want to give the poem a riddling quality by NOT disclosing, from the outset, what it’s about …

 

Try to create a poem that deals with one of these topics without using a single abstraction … i.e. present the reader with images (that work for any of the five senses), with events

Tell the reader what is happening or has happened or will happen, what can be seen, touched, heard, smelt, tasted…

 

When you’ve created a draft, go over it with a fine toothed comb to make sure that abstraction hasn’t crept in… It’s actually harder to avoid than you might think.

 

Think of Dickinson’s ‘hope is the thing with feathers’ … how with those few words we are immediately on a journey… we might not be able to guess where we’ll end up, but we can see where we’re going and feel that we’re on the way …

Dickinson is really the gold standard in this activity – think of ‘I’m nobody. Who are you?’ It’s all rather abstract until we meet the frogs and then we know exactly where we are!

 

Keep it simple!  Find the most straightforward possible image to express what you want to express about the abstract idea with which you have chosen to deal.

 

Apply Brecht’s principle here, (as expressed in what is often cited as his second last poem)  –

 

And I always thought the simplest words must be enough.

When I say how things are, everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.

You’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself.

Surely you see that?