Poets of the World, Rebel! Break the Bonds, Cut Loose the Subtle Snares, Shuffle off the Insidious & Diaphanous Coils of Truculent Self-Absorption and Willful Obscurantism!

You have nothing to lose but your prospects of getting a Guggenheim Fellowship or a Poetry in the Schools grant from the National Endowments to the Arts, prospects which weren’t too great to begin with.

Decalogue

I

Writers may write in clear English, without needlessly opaque, spectacular and tangential nonlinear remote associations, dazzling and perpendicular.

 Code obfuscates; poetic code obfuscates utterly.  OED2:: a1862 Thoreau Yankee in Canada iii. (1866) 43 The process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind.

II

 Exclude Italian epigraphy:  It adds no weight, but hot air, pretension and enigma by association. Likewise omit recondite and cryptic literary allusions in French, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Kwakiutl and other dead tongues. Do not fall back on hieroglyphics, pictograms, petroglyphs or cuneiform to enhance or bulk out effete and shaky poetry.

If your poem is enervated, infirm, and phthisic, rewrite in lucid English, or perform euthanasia. There is nothing that can be said in Periclean Greek or Mandarin that cannot be equally well-expressed in English, linguistic snobs and the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis to the contrary notwithstanding.

III

Rhyme, if you want, at your discretion. Use traditional verse forms; write ballads. It is not essential to have exactly 10 or fourteen syllables per line, nor is it essential to make each line of verse scan with scientific precision, unless these are tricks you are trying.

Elevate not tricks into principles; nor codify your affectations.

IV

Avoid self-absorption.  When all is said and done, who cares whether your mother didn’t give you red ballet slippers when you were a child?

Are you a sensitive soul? As Sterling Truffle said, “I, too, am sensitive.  And were I a barber, everyone would need a haircut.”

Poets may write poetry about topics of current social and political relevance, about issues. Above all, poets should seek to explore matters other than the infinite nuances of the poet’s own remarkable and unique personality and its bitter resentment at the implacable facts of mortality.

Personality is the last refuge of the ego.

V

Poets may, without penalty of scorn and depreciation, refrain from cultivating their sensibilities via thorough and systematic derangement of the sensorium by means of gargantuan and compulsive indulgence in alcohol and other drugs.

Brain damage has little to recommend it as an adjunct to art.

Cirrhotic livers have been known to descend per anum before they inspire a line of verse.

The muse does not shine only on the bacchanalian ear.

VI

One may show, without embarrassment, one’s moral commitment in strong lucid verse, and not coyly posture variations on dada or art pour art in surreal dreamsongs.

It is axiomatic that poets and barbers and ranchers and shoe clerks are sensitive people.

Poetic sensitivity resembles nothing so much as a kind of garrulous petulance, a mannerism.

One should be responsible for what one writes, and not pretend the poet simply presides at the birth of the poem, leaving the waif deumbilicized and orphaned, subject only to the care and interpretation of others. The refusal to say what one was “getting at” in a poem may be taken as an index of poetic nescience, validly leading one to infer that very likely the poet was not “getting at” anything at all, but simply rollicking with words, a valid, fun and trivial use of the language.

Some poems are clearly jokes; others are unintentional jokes.

VII

Write nonconfessional poetry.

Poets should feel under no compulsion to parade countless seductions, repetitious befuddled drunken binges and hilarious intoxications, humungous hangovers, fashionable fellatings, anomier-than thou guilts and other exquisite turpitudes.

On the other hand, a poet may be openly heterosexual and not write about it. This should not be taken as a dogmatic endorsement of the missionary position.

VIII

Write lite verse. Satire, parody and other impish forms of humorous poetry. Limericks. Poets need not take themselves so seriously.

And since poetry does not automatically, if ever, deliver Truth, whatever that is, poetry should not stand in need of rabbinical exegesis or cryptoanalysis in order to be understood. Poets should take as one of their chief goals: TO ENTERTAIN.

IX

It shall be OK for poets to live nonsuicidially, nonaddicted, and in a mannour consistent with holistic health.

This does not mean that the poet must become an ardent promoter of bean sprouts, nor must the poet be enjoined to write lusty paeans to yogurt, tofu, and stoneground wholewheat  flour. Cultivate awareness of relationships. Introspection automatically deludes.

X

Thou shalt write and rewrite; on the other hand, thou shalt not be led into the temptation of writing fast food poems and junk verse, unless thou hast published several novels, gained a cultish following, and it looks like there may be money in it.

The Beginning

Note:

For other fine decalogs see Hugh Arthur Clough, “The Latest Decalogue” and W.H. Auden, “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times.” Both poems have memorable lines.

There is also a risible quirky old decalogue found in Exodus 20: 1-17. It is generally held to be of historical significance only, but there are some who claim it has contemporary relevance. They, too, tend to be risible, quirky. and crankish.

A Lucidist Manifesto is part of a series on poetry, Advice To Young Poets, which includes The Worden Report, Aid to Dependent Poets, The Guinness Gambit, Tips on Marketing, Science & Poetry, The Type-A Poet (or Cacoethes Scribendi), Poetry & Health, etc.  Many of these pieces first appeared as guest editorials in The Small Press Review umpteen years ago.

©1999, 2000 Mark Worden, Morris Street Writers Group

 Ars Poetica To You Too, Buster
                               by Mark Worden

A poem should not mean, but be.
 — Archibald McLeish

What poets mean by what they mean
Is tougher than it's ever been.
— Carl Crane

Cryptic and thick
as an Assyrian brick
a half-baked babble-born cuneiform

A poem should be warm
as fresh milk,
smooth as silk and cute
as a recycled woolen suit
made in Taiwan

A poem should be able
to float
like a McKenzie Riverboat
serene
dutiful and cold
like coarse Yukon gold
acetylene
and refrigerated grapefruit

A poem should stand oblique, but stable
resembling an antique pine table
where good old Mable
sets 'em between rounds

See here, pseudo-Ezra-Pounds:
One should be rough and tough as an old boar!
A poem should endeavor not to snore.

—and move with the ease and dignity
of a constipated cat
who knows in the dark
precisely where it's at

—And demonstrate the technical power
at a conservative speed
not to exceed,
say, fifty-five miles per hour

A poem should not try to work too hard,
take time off, roll in the yard
One that tries to drain the swamp
will find it may be more tempting to dream
of skysful of exquisite blue guitars
hurt thumbs and empires of icecream

Like a ventriloquist birdsong
lascivious, clean
as a hound's tooth a poem should not be,
like a Fender guitar on an emerald sea,
or an elegant Rube Goldburg machine.

A poem should grind out truth
be ornery, hard and mean.

 More Lucid verse by Mark Worden: Here & Here

Addenda....................

On Poetic Obscurity

   There are many types of poetical obscurity. There is the obscurity which results from the poet’s being mad. This is rare. Madness in poets is as uncommon as madness in dogs. A discouraging number of reputable poets are sane beyond recall. There is also the obscurity which is the result of the poet’s wishing to appear mad, even if only a little mad. This is rather common and rather dreadful. I know nothing more distasteful than the work of a poet who has taken leave of his reason deliberately, as a commuter might of his wife.

   Then there is unintentional obscurity, or muddiness, which comes from the inability of some writers to express even a simple idea without stirring up the bottom. And there is the obscurity which results when a fairly large thought is crammed into a three- or four-foot line . . . .

   Sometimes a poet becomes so completely absorbed in the lyrical possibilities of certain combinations of sounds that he forgets what he started out to say, if anything, and here again a nasty tangle results . . . .

   My quarrel with poets . . . is not that they are unclear, but that they are too diligent. Diligence in a poet is the same as dishonesty in a bookkeeper. There arrafts of bards who are writing too much, too diligently, and too slyly.
      —E.B. White, “Unzip The Veil”

Character, I have suggested, is the first thing to think about in style. The next step is to consider what characteristics can win a hearer’s or a reader’s sympathy. For example, it is bad manners to give them needless trouble. Therefore clarity.

It is bad manners to waste their time. Therefore brevity first, then, clarity. The social purpose of language is communication—to inform, misinform, or otherwise influence our fellows. True, we also use words in solitude to think our own thoughts, and to express our feelings to ourselves. But writing is concerned rather with communication than with self-communing, though some writers, especially poets, may talk to themselves in public. Yet, as I have said, even these, though in a sense overheard rather than heard, have generally tried to reach an audience. No doubt in some modern literature there has appeared a tendency to replace communication by a private maundering to oneself which shall inspire one’s audience to privately maunder to themselves—rather as if the author handed round a box of drugged cigarettes of his concoction to stimulate each guest to his own solitary dreams. But I have yet to be convinced that such activities are very valuable; or that one’s dreams and meditations are much heightened by the stimulus of some other voice soliloquizing in Chinese. The irrational, now in politics, now in poetics, has been the sinister opium of our tormented and demented century.
        —F.L. Lucas, Style, 65-66

“On taking thought it seemed to me that I must aim at lucidity, simplicity and euphony. I have put these three qualities in the order of the importance I assigned to them.”
        —W. Somerset Maugham: The Summing Up, 22

“There are two sorts of obscurity that you find in writers. One is due to negligence and the other to willfulness. People often write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to learn to write clearly. This sort of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, in men of science, and even in literary critics. Here it is indeed strange. You would have thought that men who passed their lives in the study of the great masters of literature would be sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of language to write if not beautifully at least with perspicuity . . . .

Another cause of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not, either from lack of mental power or from laziness, exactly formulated it in his mind and it is natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused idea. This is largely due to the fact that many writers think, not before, but as they write.

 The pen originates the thought. The disadvantage of this, and indeed it is a danger against which the author must always be on his guard, is that there is a sort of magic in the written word. The idea acquires substance by taking on a visible nature and then stands in the way of its own clarification. But this sort of obscurity merges very easily into the willful. Some writers who do not think clearly are inclined to suppose that their thoughts have a significance greater than at first sight appears. It is flattering to believe that they are too profound to be expressed so clearly that all who run may read, and very naturally it does not occur to such writers that the fault is with their own minds which have not the faculty of precise reflection. Here again the magic of the written word obtains. It is very easy to persuade oneself that a phrase that one does not quite understand may mean a great deal more than one realizes. From this there is only a little way to go to fall into the habit of setting down one’s impressions in all their original vagueness. Fools can always be found to discover a hidden sense in them. There is another form of willful obscurity that masquerades as aristocratic exclusiveness. The author wraps his meaning in mystery so that the vulgar shall not participate in it. His soul is a secret garden into which the elect may penetrate only after overcoming a number of perilous obstacles.”
        —W.S. Maugham, The Summing Up, p. 23-24.

In the present, it is true that as soon as the student leaves school, all the seductions of mass culture and middle-brow culture, and in addition the whole way of life of our society, combine to make the reading of poetry a dangerous and quickly rejected luxury. The poet who teaches has immediate experiences in the classroom which give him some reason to hope for a real literary and poetic renaissance. As soon as he departs from the pleasant confines of the university, he discovers that it is more and more true that less and less people read serious poetry. And the last straw may be the recognition that even poets do not read very much poetry: Edward Arlington Robinson confessed that during the latter half of his life, he read hardly any poems except his own, which he read again and again, and which may explain the paralysis of self-imitation which overcomes many good poets in midcareer. Here then is another trait which distinguishes the vocation of the modern poet from poets of the past: he not only knows how language is inexactly and exactly used, he also knows that for the most part only other poets will read his poems.
        — Delmore Schwartz

GOOD SENSE is the BODY of poetic genius, FANCY its DRAPERY, MOTION its LIFE, and IMAGINATION the SOUL that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.
        —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: XIV

[On the Other Hand:]

“A few of us would like to pipe up, in a modest way, against this indiscriminate cult of clearness. We suspect that we are sometimes over-dosed with lucidity in leading articles and sermons, in novels and verse.. . . . No, the sun’s lucidity used to seem straight enough, once.  Then came Einstein and showed what a bad twist even those rectitudinous rays may contract. Such incidents make a man cautious.”  
        —C. E. Montague

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