Anti-Villanelle; Contemporary Poetry

Post-Modern

An anti-villanelle would suit my mood.
Post-modern poetry should not make sense—
Brash metaphor, a narrative that’s crude.

Red dog, blue cat, the sawhorse was imbued
With hair; wash, cut, dye and rinse.
An anti-villanelle would suit my mood.

A man raking. Car crash. Somebody sued
My poems for using the pluperfect tense.
Brash metaphor, a narrative that’s crude.

The bearded lady and the dwarf collude.
The dog-faced boy won’t howl, take down the tents.
An anti-villanelle would suit my mood.

Grasshopper leaps, the cockroach crawls for food
While kilorats gnaw the New Testament—
Brash metaphor, a narrative that’s crude.

Such blather may result in hebetude
While its practitioners say, "It’s intense!"
An anti-villanelle would suit my mood--
Brash metaphor, a narrative that’s crude.


I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary poetry lately, as I had to review 27 issues of The Melic Review to pick 20 poems to submit to a net anthology. I’ve also read three books by an author for a review in the Philadelphia Inquirer (through the good graces of Frank Wilson).

In reviewing Melic I noticed there seemed to be a fall-off near the end of 2002 when the poems more and more became verse disconnect, where the primary voice of narrative was buried under layers of scene-setting, non-pertinent images, and disregard for continuity, with a touch of epiphany at the end--but not too much--not enough to confer unity on the poem. Here are three excerpts for your delectation (the authors will remain nameless):

1)

the body’s entire
expression is self-centered
in this glyphic hill
the architecture of a lost amazon
civilization the texture of foam

2)

Flesh and blood (mine . . . ours) mingled to form
a giant so large he would have difficulty
carrying his heart. Murmur . . . the traffic

between worlds, walls we learned
to listen to.
Had to!

3)

Now here I am on foot among scattered bags
Taxis ride the plains I whistle at one to bring it down
Muleskinner and sage
A birch rod dips
toward sacred words Everything's out of tune Tom


Much of contemporary poetry behaves like this. It screams: “Language and syntax are not enough! We must break it up with interruptions of imagery and bizarre, startling connections. It is a collage of words, not a narrative per se.” I have dealt with such claims in my essays on Logopoetry.

My problem with such poetry is that it is written for poets and aficionados, not for “the common reader”—someone with the equivalent of a liberal arts degree, whether dactic or autodidactic (though nowadays I don’t know what the degree is worth). Because of my stance on this I am considered retro, a bit of a dinosaur. In most of my poems my hope is that the reader will understand the theme without suffering consternation from images and ideas at cross purposes.

After this brand of poetry began to invade our magazine, I stopped and put out a call for “power lyrics.” Out of some thousand poems we were only able to find about eight that came close to fulfilling our criteria. It was plain discouraging. We wondered where the poets of our earlier issues had gone. I still don’t know. But I think there was a sea change in 2003, at least in what we were receiving in submissions.

In any case, my villanelle today likely makes too much sense to belong to the category I invoke, but I did try to make it a little more contemporary than my others. It doesn’t matter if you like it. It exists for itself. And that is frequently the attitude I find among contemporary poets, whether MFAs or just trendy. My poetry is not trendy. It aims for the human heart and failing that, the human mind. But I sometimes think I was born a little late.


Happily Rodent Neutral,

C. E. Chaffin