When is a poem not a poem?

What makes a poem a poem?

Poems by e. e. cummings and Stephen Crane

e. e. cummings

          plato told

him:he couldn’t
believe it(jesus

told him;he
wouldn’t believe
it)lao

tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes

mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or

not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn’t believe it,no

sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

One of the most famous situations in a comic strip – probably the most famous situation – is when, in Peanuts, Lucy holds a football for Charlie Brown to kick.  Kick-off?  Extra point?  Field goal?  It doesn’t matter.  Lucy suddenly, always, always, moves the ball away before Charlie can kick it.  This meme for frustrated hopes is a lasting and powerful American memory.

          In what follows, I will give you something and then remove it.  I will give you two meaningful sequences of words, one by e. e. cummings and one by Stephen Crane, and then claim neither is really a poem.   Even though both are colloquies of words that I dearly love and often quote to myself as touchstones when I navigate through the tangles of the world. 

A number of years ago I decided that, as I had long loved some poems by e. e. cummings, I should teach him in my modern poetry course.  I spent a month in the summer reading through his Complete Poems and found that almost every poem I liked was in the much shorter Selected Poems I had owned for many years.

          To wade through the entire oeuvre of cummings was to encounter a lot of misogyny, a lot of middling verse, a lot of racism.  Yikes.  Judged as a poet, he was mediocre and hateful; judged by a handful of poems, he was a master.  Which should it be?

          I taught cummings, but for only one semester.  The great poems were, in fact, great (in their fashion), but to be honest with the students I also taught a few poems which I had found were misogynist, misguided.  I was not going to whitewash cummings for my students.    Hmmmm.  Upon reflection, I thought that I could dispense with teaching cummings in future courses.  Better to stay with William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks:  All much, much, better poets.

          So why now do I single out “Plato told him” to read together with you?  First, the poem tells us something we need to hear, in a powerful way. He tells us that we rather easily ignore all claims that war is inhumane.  Second, I want to consider how a poem can say something important and still, in some fashion, fail as a poem.  To achieve that second aim, I will also consider another poem I have loved, and often cited to myself, this one a short work by Stephen Crane, “A Man Said to the Universe.”  It too says, powerfully, something important.  It, too, fails as a poem.

First, cummings.  His poem is in free verse and uses the idiosyncratic punctuation and spacing that we often encounter in cummings’s poems.  I’d like to move beyond that: Ignore the lack of conventional spacing, ignore the punctuation.  Ignore them, although cummings thought they were necessary, since they cut against the ‘conventions’ of language and so perhaps pushed readers to consider ‘reality’ apart from the conventions through which we see it and order it.

What did Plato tell us?  I am not sure, but further iterations of famous thinkers (and one general) tell us.  Jesus Christ told us that love should reign supreme.  Lao Tzu, author of the I Ching, told us that harmony should reign, not discord; humility and simplicity should guide us, rather than conflict and war.    The ‘message’ of the poem is conveyed most directly in these lines:

him,and general
(yes

mam)
sherman

There it is, short and simple, as General Sherman famously said it: “War is hell.”  We all know it, the poem insists – we, you, I. 

          Those concluding lines?  There was a report that, before an embargo on scrap steel sales to Japan was imposed in 1940, the scrap steel that resulted from the demolition of the IRT elevated subway line in New York City had been sold to Japan.    Not true.  It was sold as scrap in the United States.  An embargo on sales of steel to Japan was imposed in October, 1940.  Still, scrap metal is fungible: What entered any market made other sales easier to accomplish; Japan needed and bought steel for its war machine.  (In point of fact, ripped-up steel street car tracks in Seattle, WA were shipped to Japan shortly before the embargo was placed.)

          So that “nipponized bit of/the old sixth/avenue el” that landed on top of the head of the character in the poem is a bomb made from recycled American steel.  (Nippon is the formal, Japanese, way of designating the nation we know as Japan.)  That, says cummings, teaches the lesson: War is hell, war destroys – and we don’t listen to those who tell us that. 

          The poem has messages for us.  War is hell and destruction, and capitalism/world-trade go on regardless of the destruction, for nothing stands in the way of making money from selling things.  There are actually two overlapping messages.  One, war is hell, and people refuse the be instructed on that fact.  Two, financiers make their money regardless of the destruction that may ensue.

          So why is this not a great poem?  I myself certainly agree wholeheartedly with both of its messages.  And I am not sure if anyone has ever said this better; you will recall Alexander Pope’s description of poetic imagination: “True wit is Nature to advantage dress’d,/ What oft was said, but ne’er so well express’d.”  Yet to look at it as a poem I believe one would have to ask, does it deepen as we read it again, does it render into language the strange complexity that is the world?  (Even when the world seems simple!)  By this test, the poem fails, I think.  It is the same the fifth time we read it as it was the first time we encountered it.  It is all message, unambiguous.  (Not that a poem need be ambiguous: What I am claiming is that a poem needs depth, needs more than messaging.)

          I don’t want to pass over “Plato told him” too lightly.  The repetitions of “told him” bind the lines together, create a rhythm through that repetition.  The rhyme “told” is repeated six times before the ultimate transformation from the past tense of “told” to the infinitive “to tell”. “Couldn’t/believe” and “wouldn’t believe” rhyme.  “Believe” is repeated three times, an internal rhyme which resonates.  The repetition which creates the internal rhythm is everywhere.  Lines one through three are repeated almost verbatim in lines four through six, and resonances of this repetition occur again, and again.

I think the poem’s surpassing delight is in those lines I already cited,

him,and general
(yes

mam)
sherman

That “yes//mam,” a phrase which leaps over and is also disrupted by a stanza break, intrudes on the rhythm, creating a syncopation, a disruption of the rhythm, that is repeated several lines later by another parenthesis, “(believe it/or//not)” and then another “(he didn’t believe it,no//sir)” and so moves the poem from piled-on statements to a rhythmically disrupted and diverse list.  cummings did know what he was doing.   The intricacy of its aural patterns strongly suggest this collocation of words is a poem.

          Yet the verse remains a statement, and so despite the loveliness of the rhythms, for me (with my belief in deepening) it is not a poem.  It does not move beyond itself to say, somehow, more.  As a pacifist statement/argument, it is exquisite, and I value it greatly; as a poem, it has the limitation of not hinting at more than itself as argument.

          Here is another poem I value, only three lines long.   Shorter than cummings’s.   It is by a very political poet, Bertholt Brecht.

Motto

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.

It does not define dark times, nor does it define singing.  Is this poem about art, about celebration, about some kind of light in the darkness?  Can a song of catastrophe be something other than catastrophic?  And what are those “dark times:” political, martial, economic, psychological?  Maybe any or all of them?

          This poem says more, despite being only three lines long and repeating its words (“will be…singing,” “dark times”) even within that narrow space.  The poem extends beyond itself to poem encompass much of human existence.  It is general, not specific, but its generality affords the reader an opportunity to make its generalities specific.  It is astonishing, and points toward the complexity of human experience.  I am not sure the cummings poem does that, even though cummings does foreground a human capacity for disbelief.

          Emily Dickinson wrote a number of very short poems.  Here is one:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Short, at five lines.  A good bit of repetition.  It says that a clover, pollinated by a bee, can reproduce and reproduce again and again, until eventually a prairie is created.  The bee is motivated by a dream (“revery”) of  hunger satiated, of fulfillment, as it caresses the pistils of the flower and scatters pollen to the stamens.  And if there are no bees, just the imagination (here symbolized by the “revery”) will suffice: One can create a prairie in the mind, as well as in reality.

          The poem tells us that small things, like the clover and the bee, can become great things in time.  But it also tells us that the dream which propels biological process also functions in mental process: Creation and creativity work in both physical and mental realms.

          The poem opens outward into the large, indeed immeasurable, domain of the imagination.  And just as the imagination has no limits, neither does this poem.  Dickinson’s great contemporary, Walt Whitman, says in “Song of Myself,”  “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses” [section 5], and later, “Outward and outward and forever outward” [section 45].   The imagination is limitless, and as capable of creation as ‘natural’ biological processes are.

Let us move on.  I treasure the Crane poem which is cited at the start of this letter. I think I first encountered it in tenth grade.  (Not many poems encountered at age 15 endure as center poles of our imagination; then again, I love cummings because his poem too was a momentous encounter when I was a teenager, and his poems remain fixtures for me today.)  Crane’s verse is, as you may recognize, a statement: actually, two counterpoised statements.  The poem is short: Five lines, two sentences. 

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

I suppose you could say its ‘wisdom’ is sophomoric, and I certainly fell for it as a high school sophomore; yet its resonance has stayed with me for sixty years, and it still has an aura of ‘wisdom’ to me.  It says, the self has its claims; the physical universe does also, and in the vast purview of the universe, the self has no particular standing.  The fact of our existence has not ‘obligated’ anything.  We are, we exist – and that is all.  There is no entailment.  Existence is existence, and there is no necessary consequence. 

          As with the cummings poem, there is a strong message: Existence is all there is.  No entailment, no obligation, no special standing for human life.  I repeat Crane’s words to myself all the time because they are true, and I need reminding of that.  But is there ‘more’ here?  It declares that existence does not oblige anything, anything at all.  Beyond that declaration, do these words tell us more about the world?  I think not.

          There is an insufficiency to both the cummings and Crane ‘poems.’  To my mind, they each tell the reader something both important and true.  But neither has, to me, a sense that there is a ‘beyond’ that inheres in the words, a ‘beyond’ that deepens the statements they make into the sort of complexity that is the world and our experience of it.

          There is a difference, I believe, between statement and the reverberation of some collections of words (we call them “poems”) that enables us, as readers, to find more in the words than the statements alone.  So, and here I give kudos to both cummings and Crane, words can tell us important truths.  But statements may in those cases not go beyond those truths into a greater depth.  They do not achieve that movement beyond themselves into what, in a phrase of T. S. Eliot I return to again and again, the poet refers to when he says, “we must be…still moving into another intensity.”  Cummings and Crane say what they have to say, and that is it. What they say is important, but it is a statement and not something that expands into, somehow, more. 

Wallace Stevens, at the end of his extended meditation “Sunday Morning,” says “casual flocks of pigeons…sink,/ Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”  Neither cummings nor Crane, in the poems we have considered, have those extended wings.

I know that in a time of great deceit and ‘alternative facts’ and ‘truthiness,’ saying “This is, and no mistake,” (Ah! Thoreau said this!)  counts for a lot.  In fact, the second chapter of Thoreau’s Walden is all about simplifying the world so we can get beneath the “mud and slush of opinion...and delusion and appearance…till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.”

Thus, there is great appeal in both the cummings and Crane poems: They both tell us truths that seem to me grounded, “hard bottom and rocks in place.”  And yet reality, whatever difficulties we have in defining it, is a complex phenomenon, at least for human consciousness.  It is, and is there: When asked for a proof of the external world, in answer to George Berkeley’s refutation, in his philosophical work, of external reality as independent of mind, Samuel Johnson is said to have kicked a rock, and said, ‘I refute it thus.’   And yet, and yet…. Reality is so often multi-layered, complex.  We expect, or rather I expect, poems to convey the sense of depth that we encounter when we say we live ‘in the real world.’  That opening outward, that sense that in every small fact there is an entry into a larger universe, is perhaps the greatest legacy Ralph Waldo Emerson left to Americans: “Every natural fact is a symbol for a spiritual fact…the near explains the far.”

But this may not be true: It is, after all, a claim by Emerson, not what it appears, a statement of actuality.  (Although he states it as a reality, it is a claim about what reality is).  Maybe the near does not explain the far; as one changes dimension and scale everything may be changed.  Maybe, that is to say, Emerson is wrong.

But I operate under the Emersonian assumption.  And that is why, for me, sequences of words that deepen are poems, and words that do not deepen – where the message is clear, incontrovertible, and always the message – are not poems.

Ah, but perhaps there is a final reversal lurking here; Like Lucy, perhaps at the last moment I am about to pull the football away (again!).  Perhaps what I think are ‘not poems’ are, in an important way, poems?  

In the days since I began this letter I have been thinking and rethinking what I have been arguing here; that is, I have been having a kind of dialogue with myself.  Maybe what I have been saying is wrong, and poems that are messages are really poems?  I’ve always distrusted people who tell me what poems are, as if there is one standard and they know it.  Am I not falling into that same trap, being doctrinaire when I should be more open and more willing to distrust my own certainties?

William Carlos Williams, in an interview which he later incorporated into his long poem Paterson, said poetry is “words rhythmically organized.”  In the interview with Mike Wallace he put into Paterson, he claimed that even a fashionable grocery list could be a poem.  (Or, famously, a note left on a refrigerator.)  Certainly, cummings’s words are “rhythmically organized.”   Crane’s words, less so.

But let us suppose for a moment that certain couplings of words, often made more enduring by aural patterns different from those encountered in much of everyday language, or more enduring because they come to us as a memorable package, can be poems: That it is not the content, but the capacity of being remembered, that marks certain groupings of words.  By those measures, both what cummings wrote and what Crane wrote would be poems.

I wrote in an earlier letter that “Calypso II” by Williams is a poem.

Calypso II

Love the sun
comes
up in

the morning
and
in

the evening
zippy zappy
it goes

I do not think I was wrong.  I claimed the “zippy zappy” elevated the words to that status we recognize when we call something “poetry.” 

Even though it is the same from reading to reading, cummings’s “plato told him” is a source of aural delight every time I read it.  So too its portability – I can recall it even when its words are not present before me – makes it ‘different’ from the language we use every day, language which perishes.  Cummings’s words do not perish.

          Neither do Crane’s.  I remember them, they live in my imagination when millions of other packages of words do not. Does that not mean that the short colloquy Crane composed might, indeed, be a poem? 

Like Lucy with Charlie Brown’s football, I yanked ‘poetry’ away from you, and then, in a strange way, after you acknowledged the failed kick (or did you see further than me?), I yanked the ball away again.  What was, was not, and then, here at the end, it is restored.  A poem became a not-poem, and then the not-poem once again became a poem.

“Plato told me” and “A man said to the universe” are poems.  Perhaps.

          Wallace Stevens closed a wonderful lyric, “It can never be satisfied the mind, never.”  He closed an earlier lyric with this line: “There I found myself more truly and more strange.”

          I will let Wallace Stevens have the last word.