The Main Types of Canadian Poetry and What's Wrong With Them

No, I’m not having a snit. I’m just pointing out the obvious. Every thing has something wrong with it, so why should the genres of poetry be any different? But I wanted to save people the trouble of having to go through the reviews and counter-reviews of poets like Carmine Starnino and Christian Bök as they harp on the deficiencies of each others’ literary camps. What I would like to do is sum up everyone’s weaknesses with a short piece here for your poetic one-stop sniping. I will not name names, though, because there are too many poets who excel at what they do to mention individually, and far too many who, well… suck.

Let’s start with the largest current genre – what many poets simply refer to as the mainstream. This includes by far the most poets, outnumbering probably all the other poets in all the other camps. Broadly speaking, this poetry descends from the lyric tradition where the focus is more on feelings than on abstract concepts. And since the Romantics, the emphasis has often, though not always, been on the importance of the common man and on using everyday language (even though Wordsworth’s own poetry seldom sounded like it could trip off the tongue of a leech gatherer). This type of poetry often focuses on the commonly shared moments in life, on childhood, love, nature, sickness and death. I’m generalizing wildly, of course, but if the poem you read is very personal and emphasizes emotional expression and the universality of common experiences, then you’re reading a mainstream poem.

The problem with these poems is they may succumb to unremarkability, both of subject matter and of language. The attempt to connect with the audience by recounting a moment by the bedside of a relative who is hooked up to machines in a hospital or to tell the story of a lost love is going to give the sense to the reader that anyone could have written the poem – which is both a good thing and a bad thing. The best mainstream poets make these moments new and interesting, while the worst make them banal. The other main flaw with this type of poetry is its tendency to play totally for the heart and give little sustenance for the head. Sincerity of emotion is seen as a virtue in the mainstream, although that is seldom enough to make a good poem. And don’t even get me started on the preponderance of nature poems. That’s worth another piece all on its own…

Other poets that carry on the Romantic tradition in many ways are the formalists who, at the time of this writing, are most vocal in the English Montreal community. They point out the laziness in the language and formal structure of the mainstream, and rightly so. But the problem with formalism is that, while it brings back a certain masculine air to poetry that has been absent for too long, it can’t seem to accommodate the notion that form doesn’t have to mean old form. There is an inability among formalists to recognize that forms haven’t existed as they are since the moment the Almighty flicked on the bathroom light. Forms come into existence and they fade and they return. Meanwhile, new forms emerge as language changes. Seems simple enough to me. As for the laxity of language, good consonant-clustered words mixed with the milk of vowels can make for a hearty breakfast, but it ain’t the whole ballgame. In fact, the traditionalists are the most likely among poets to forget that sometimes words get in the way of communication, that readers can get lost in those trees and lose the sense of the poem.

No one could accuse avant-garde and postmodern poets of taking words too seriously. They break them up into silly-bles, hard-bitten sounds and sometimes arrange them in humorous etymological crucifixions on the page. Their main advantage over the mainstream and the traditionalists is their sense of play and their acknowledgement of the constant flux of meaning. Of course, there’s a difference between flux of meaning and total absence of meaning – a distinction these poets don’t often care to make. And sometimes play can be a very aggressive and hostile activity – especially for the average audience member trying to make sense of these more experimental poems. In the cliquish world of poets, the indifferent avant-garde are the cliquiest – which is saying something. Finally, can we stop calling it the avant-garde if the attitude and approach hasn’t really changed all that much in the last twenty-five years?

Performance poets have it right in one sense – the audience comes first. They shape their poems for maximum audience effect. They hone the ancient craft of the bard and the scop, and I am embarrassed in their presence when I watch them recite poems from memory. Mind you, I’m also embarrassed in their presence when I hear what they’re reciting – often poems that don’t seem worth committing to memory. The incantatory power in some poems becomes mere repetition in others. And sometimes only the sheer force of personality can power a bad poem to a round of enthusiastic applause.

Perhaps the poets I most empathize with are the ones that pop up in lonesome self-published chapbooks in various big city bookstores across the country. They are the underground poets, writing among a few friends or working in isolation. Their poetry is too raw for the mainstream and too political for everyone. They may tend to overuse profanity and their poems don’t have a chiseled structure, but their tendency to direct strong emotions outward and to recognize social ills makes them unique among the types of poets we have. At the same time, the alienation from literary history and from the very public they are addressing weakens their poetry. They are not part of a clear or purposeful community.

And in this notion of community there might be a lesson. What strikes me is how hopelessly inept all these types of poetry are when left to their own devices. They each harbour strengths the others should (and secretly do) envy. And they certainly cross over into each other’s territory frequently. But not often enough. If I were the king of poetry I would decree that each of these groups trade places with each other long enough to learn valuable lessons about possibilities. On the other hand, maybe poets are like the civilizations they so often pretend to scorn and all our best inventions come out of the constant wars we fight between ourselves. Me, I’m for riding everybody’s catapults and flying over the brittle fortifications to pillage from everyone what I know of poetry.