Here’s a fairly typical poem by Lisa Olstein, who, according to the Poetry Foundation, has been associate director of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and who won the Copper Canyon Press Hayden Carruth award.

Negotiation

You take the mortar; I’ll take the pestle,
the weight we laid five years before the door.

You take the door, its flank and hollow.
You take the hollow morning we set out,

I’ll take the conch shell, the sea.
You take the sea, our kitchen window looking out on it.

I’ll take the kitchen; you take the potatoes,
their rough edges, their eyes.

You take the flashlight’s eye we turned skyward
to rebut the stars. I’ll take the sky it travels.

You take my fear of long journeys, of talking in my sleep.
I’ll take sleep and the first morning sounds

of the monastery on the hill. You take the monks;
I’ll take the way they sweep the ground

before every step, the way they nurse other men’s
crippled oxen through long flickering nights.

Reading this, one is quickly overwhelmed with questions. What is the point of one taking the mortar and the other the pestle when the one is of no use without the other? Does this mean that everybody loses in breakup, which seems to be the subject of the poem, though there’s nothing in the poem that would confirm it one way or the other? And is it even true? Or perhaps this is a metaphorical description of a breakup experienced by the poet. That also there’s no way of knowing.

Then what’s this about “the weight we laid five years before the door.” That would seem to be the pestle, but few pestles are heavy enough to serve as doorstops. But maybe it wasn’t the pestle, or it was a very big pestle. Then why mention it at all? In what way does it advance the subject of the poem?

And why “five years before the door”? One could place something five inches before a door or five years before a particular event, but not five years before a door. Is this a compact way of saying five years ago, five years before one of the protagonists went out the door? If so, it confuses rather than stirring one with the poetic sentiment, in contrast, say, to Dylan Thomas’s “Once below a time.”

I could go on, but the puzzlements merely pile up without edifying clues. One might be able to imagine a golden thread that ties all the disparate elements of this poem together, but I can’t see any way of verifying any such unifying theory from the poem. It’s rather like attempting to verify string theory by weaving cats cradles.

Now Hayden Carruth is a well-known poet and Copper Canyon is a press of high repute. I wasn’t able to find any explanation, in a quick search, as to why Olstein won the award, but the Poetry Foundation, also an organization at the summit of the American poetry world, quoted the following blurb on its page dedicated to information about Olstein.

“Olstein places the mystical next to the mundane, bees next to bricklayers, purple finches next to garage doors, reason next to faith, chance near fate.”

What is one to make of this? Does the blurber see bees as mystical and bricklayers as mundane? Both are really equally mundane. Perhaps the blurber meant poetic rather than mystical. But is that even true not to speak of edifying? Worse, is reason mystical while faith is mundane? Perhaps the blurber reversed the order of the examples here. But then, is reason mundane? And which is more mystical or mundane, chance or fate, though perhaps since they are merely near, not next to each other, the dichotomy doesn’t apply.

It’s difficult not to conclude that this whole business, and much of contemporary poetry, is an enormous scam, though my impression is that those perpetrating it fully believe in their own deceptions. It’s as if Bernie Madoff really thought his colossal pyramid scheme would enrich all the participants.

Email I sent to a friend after telling her her comments on a poem I'd sent her were in themselves a poem, and she asked me if she should try writing poetry:

"You don't need to try. You've already done it, written a poem and a good one. If you want to write more, it's simple, at least it is for me. I start from a feeling and say what I need to to evoke it for a reader.

"As for what I need to say, I begin with free association. This produces a list of things I associate with whatever it was that stirred up the feeling and can include metaphor and simile, tho it doesn't have to.

"I then work to sharpen up the images and language and edit to remove things, even very clever things ("Kill your darlings" they say in MFA workshops), that distract from the emotional impact. "I also try not to be too explicit. As the Roman grammarian Servius Maurus Honoratus says, and I fervently agree, 'The art of poetry is not to say everything.' If you're too explicit, it puts the reader in a prosaic frame of mind, rather then evoking feelings. Poetry is like rhetoric, political one-liners or bumper stickers. (Auden said it's memorable speech.) It should push buttons, be subliminal, tho not so much so as to make it obscure. At least that's the way I see it. Others have diffferent views.

"I'm also concerned with the music of the sound which consists of rhythm (close to meter but not the same--for a wonderful example of non-metric rhythm, google the text of Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill") and devices such as alliteration and rhyme, tho I only use rhyme sporadically and I never use it or alliteration deliberately. I just take it as it comes, and come it does, a lot of it automatically. Our minds work that way.

"I'll also take out things and use syntax you wouldn't normally in prose to make the sound flow better. I'll even put things in that aren't substantively necessary (the sorts of things I'd otherwise edit out) to make the sound flow.

"There you have it, a five minute seminar on writing poetry. Just add water and serve. Or, more helpfully, if you want to send me draft poems, I'll give you my thoughts. But the one you've written is perfect, aside from my one small suggestion. Doesn't need anything but a title. How about 'On Reading a Friend's Poem about the Coming of Spring'? Very Chinese."

Here's the poem I sent her:

Inching up on the Equinox

It comes a couple of minutes closer
every day,
the fiery notches in the ridge across the valley,
where the sun rises,
each one farther north,
the snow, so long on the ground,
reduced to patches,
and the path where I walk by the river
soft again,
ready for grass to sprout.
In a few weeks the starkness of winter trees
will be laced with budding leaves
and the woods, silent today,
will ring with the songs of birds.

and hers:

Lovely, lovely.
Two days of sun and we are so grateful.
I'll print your poem and put it on on the wall
along with my hope list,
Meanwhile I'll watch the woodpeckers
and the lady cardinal
munch suet in the bare garden.
They also are waiting for spring
along with the rest of us.
Oh my, the sound of a loon.
My friend last night promised I would hear them
soon.