'Gimmickry': the Emperor's New Clothes of poetry
I’m currently reading Paul Muldoon’s latest collection: Joy in Service on Rue Tagore. Although living in America for years, Muldoon is one of the grand old men of Irish poetry and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2003. Imagine my surprise when I came across ‘For Language and Brief Nudity’ mid-way through the collection. It consists of a single word - PARSE - printed again and again in small capitals, the letters equidistant and formed into a small block. There are no additional spaces between the repetitions of the repeated word except for right in the middle of the block where a ‘P’ has been missed out and two spaces inserted to delineate the word ‘ARSE’.
How entirely appropriate.
How can this nonsense masquerade as poetry?
Poetry is a literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm - Collins Dictionary
Poetry is literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm - Encyclopaedia Britannica
Poetry is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to its notional and semantic content - poetry.org
There is an increasing volume of Gimmickry being pedalled as poetry when it clearly isn’t. Pseudo-intellectual nonsense which is being applauded for its cleverness and originality - with that combination being mistaken for quality. Even the ‘big dogs’ of poetry - Faber, Carcanet, Picador - are selling this unreadable rubbish as ‘poetry’ when it clearly isn’t. Maybe they think they’re being ‘hip’.
How can it be poetry whey you can’t read it, either on the page or aloud?!
I have recently encountered the following:
‘Dog on a British Airways Airbus 319-100’ by Louisa Campbell (The Forward Book of Poetry 2023); selected by the Forward Prizes as one of the best ‘poems’ of 2023…
A section from ‘The Reasonable People’ by Harry Josephine Giles (Them!, Picador 2024). Lots of Gimmickry in this volume…
I have many other examples.
Knowing that there are thousands of poets trying really hard to produce good quality readable work, how can one not be riled to see this stuff not only making it into print but being praised, held up as laudable examples of our craft?
Will I win a prize with a poem rubbish repeat 1 line, garbage repeat 1 line, detritus repeat 1 line, filth repeat 1 line and others I could go on and on with?
Thanks for shining a light on this trend. I'm annoyed by the high number of self-styled poets who don't actually understand what poetry is. Poetry isn't a collection of sentences broken into random odd fragments intended to look like "deep thoughts." Poetry is all about rhythm, meter, sound, and soul. True poetic language is beautiful and introspective. True poetry isn't odd sentence fragments devoid of rhythm or meter. And it doesn't resemble word vomit or a written record skip.