Misunderstanding of Contemporary Poetry - Literature review Example

Contemporary Poetry Contemporary poetry is often misunderstood by the general public because it doesn’t necessarily follow the same forms and patterns of more established poetic traditions, such as the sonnet. Rather than focusing on depicting the world as it is, contemporary poetry attempts to capture the feelings of the moment, particularly as they are experienced by the individual author. However, this attention to emotion is not always the romantically-inspired feelings of love or the metaphysical emotions brought on by experiences with nature. Many poets choose instead to focus upon the negative emotions they have been feeling in an increasingly busy and disconnected world. Still others have elected to embrace the confusion they’re feeling in the postmodern world and use that as their art form. These emotions, whether considered positive, negative or something in between, are captured through the careful application of language, rhythm and line as a means of expressing emotional appeal. To understand how these techniques might be employed to convey a specific meaning, it is helpful to look at an example, such as Rae Armantrout’s poem “Some” found in her collection entitled Next Life. The poem is divided into four major sections, each divided by an asterisk to help denote meaning. This unusual means of breaking stanzas is typical of Armantrout and usually function as a means of breaking one thought from another, representing often wide jumps in reasoning or subject, but still managing to contribute toward the overall meaning of the poem. For example, in the first section, Armantrout seems to be addressing her audience from a first-person perspective regarding her own dreams, or perhaps thoughts as she attempts to fall asleep: “Someone insists on forming sentences / on my pillow / … / but I’m told it’s she / who must go on / at all cost” (1-2: 7-9). This is contrasted sharply against the subject of the second section, in which Armantrout gives a brief description of a cat preparing to clean herself. Another asterisk and the author is again speaking in first-person and again sounding as if there is no cohesion between the various parts: “A sense of mission lost / in ink’s / jagged outcrops” (14-16). Although these jumps in thought seem to be rather random, further analysis will reveal that they all contribute to a single concept of hopeless confusion. In addition to the asterisks, the poem contains several other notable structural differences from more traditional formats that contribute to its overall effect. Each section of the poem is divided by line breaks of its own that further represent a change in thought, but not one as severe as that represented by the asterisks. In the first stanza, she describes the sentences someone is writing on her pillow as consisting of “marching orders, / wisecracks about others elsewhere” (4-5) and separates this description with the thought, “I’d like to kill her / but I’m told it’s she” (6-7). The line break in the middle of this sentence, which continues with “who must go on / at all cost” (8-9), forces a lengthy pause that sets the reader’s mind to wondering just who ‘she’ might be. Obviously, this ‘she’ is the Someone who writes sentences on pillows, but it also seems as obvious that this ‘she’ must exist within the mind of the author herself, as another part of herself – perhaps the difference between the conscious and subconscious mind or the differences between the emotions and the intellect. This sort of line break as a means of emphasizing a particular word or concept is also used in the fourth section of the poem: “Bright ranks of / of / / slip rapidly / over bars of it” (23-26). The line break between the second ‘of’ and ‘slip rapidly’ serves to indicate that the poet herself is at a loss for an appropriate term to describe the emotions, thoughts or impressions that she’s been trying throughout the poem to describe. Even at her best effort, she recognizes that there are things that simply cannot be expressed in words, not even to herself. This is emphasized by the repetition of the word ‘of’ as well as the staggered spacing of the word, in a line by itself and deeply indented to fall into line with the ‘of’ of the previous line. One final formatting technique employed within the poem as a means of bringing attention to a single word is the irregularly spaced ‘lost’ contained in line 14: “A sense of mission lost.” The placement of the word lost so far away from its fellows within the stanza serves to physically separate it from the other words, highlighting the concept of it being lost and again forcing the reader to consider the implications not only of the word itself, but of the poem as a whole. A final technique employed within the poem to convey the poet’s meaning is the sense of rhythm. Armantrout purposely places her readers off balance with a disjointed rhythm and a missing rhyme. Each stanza contains a differing number of lines, ensuring a lack of balance from the beginning. In addition, she includes some lines that contain as many as five words and others that contain only one, never repeating the same pattern twice. There is only one place in which the poem falls into an almost accidental iambic pentameter: “The old cat casts her eye / about the carpet near her” (10-11). This gives the poem a comforting sing-song appeal for only a moment before Armantrout pulls the rug out from under the reader again with the single word “jerkily” following in line 12. As has already been discussed, spaces and line breaks serve to further introduce lengthy pauses, stuttering breaths and doubtful expression, as if Armantrout herself were unsure of just exactly what she is trying to describe. By analyzing the techniques involved in the creation of the poem, it is possible to deduce the meaning that Armantrout is attempting to convey, the context of the poem. In the first segment, it becomes clear that she is finding it impossible to turn off her thoughts as she attempts to go to sleep at night. Although she’d like to kill the inner voice that is keeping her awake, she realizes that it is this inner voice that provides her with her waking life and is therefore essentially important to her personality. The shift to a discussion about an old cat preparing to give itself a bath is startling at first, yet at the same time soothing. No longer are we talking about killing anything and it is a comfortable subject that everyone is familiar with. The sing-song meter of the lines that introduce this section further soothe the reader as Armantrout conjures up an analogy of comfortable instinct honed by years of experience. However, this comfort is disrupted by the single word ‘jerkily’, which prepares the reader for the next section in which Armantrout demonstrates how her purposeful ideas have become lost in the mire of endlessly spinning concepts that defy explanation, “lost / in ink’s / jagged outcrops” (14-16). While she feels she must have been able to define it at some point in order to have an understanding of it now, she finally admits, in section four, that whatever it is remains completely undefined as she stutters over the word ‘of’ and must finally resort to leaving an empty blank space where this undefined expression must reside. Returning to the beginning subject, Armantrout concedes defeat as she admits she is doing nothing but “Blank-pedaling” (27), thinking in circles while producing no results as she tries to grasp “Long live illumined / oblongs” (28-29) that refuse to be ignored or defined. In the end, she can only determine she has developed a complicated cross-hatch that remains ever-changing, rearranging and undefined. Through this analysis, it can be seen that a complicated-seeming contemporary poem such as Armantrout’s “Some” can be understood through careful attention to the techniques that have been employed as a means of conveying emotion and meaning. While she is attempting to convey the concept that emotions are necessarily transitory things that cannot be fully understood or expressed to the satisfaction of others, or even of oneself, in “ink’s jagged outcrops”, Armantrout employs creative line breaks, asymmetrical rhythm and a personally meaningful structure to clearly illustrate the lack of ability for any human tongue to perfectly capture the emotions and feelings of the mind. She does this by indicating that although she herself is a poet and is accustomed to working in a sophisticated manner with language, even she cannot stop the thoughts from twisting around inside her mind, aching to be released but not finding the appropriate words, formats or other techniques to bring this goal to fruition. Works Cited Armantrout, Rae. “Some.” Next Life. Wesleyan University Press, 2007. Read More