Entry 401 — Experimental Poetry
Thinking about the poem I wrote yesterday:
. Poem in last the Where Yellow
. When sky Poem club over
. sundry conniving. chain Last; exceptions.
. Witheringly so so so, so example for
. doesn’t? It. instants and below.
. shifted candy bellowing bulge ‘s, s,o
. with her wristle
. exceeds which whistley love.
. Parties never part am he.
I realized that it was a genuine experimental poem–as many poems called “experimental” are not. That, unsurprisingly, put me into my defining mode. My first reason for deeming my poem experimental was that in composing it I had devoted myself seriously to doing something significant as a poet that I’d never done when composing a poem before. Or at least couldn’t remember having seriously done. First simple insight–that, for me, a poem I made could be experimental even if what I did as a poet was something others had done. Such was the case with this poem, for I’m sure language poets have made poems with the intention of avoiding any suggestion of sentences. Conclusion: there are two kinds of experimental poems, endo-experimental poems and exo-experimental poems. Poems experimental for their composers and poems that are experimental for the world.
There are also–those in which a p0et does something as a poet new for him that he claims is therefore experimental. Like trying out a new rhyme-scheme. But if it would seem to almost every knowledgeable person that a poet’s endo-experiment is at the level of the “experiment” almost any poet must carry out when composing a poem, since he must make a poem different in some way from any previous poem of his, his poem is pseudo-experimental. Else all poems are experimental, and the term has no meaning.
As I’ve opined before many times, in one way or another: a genuine experimental poem can easily, mostly likely will, be a failure as a poem, but it will never be a failure because one must learn from it. So an experimental poem that fails as a poem is as worth making as a non-experimental poem that succeeds as a poem, unless that latter succeeds majorly.
The main thing a poet might learn from an experimental poem of his that fails as a poem is that whatever it was that he did differently was unproductive, and not worth repeating. Better, he might see variations of his experiment he could try. There would remain the possibility that some variation of the experiment would yield a valuable new kind of poem. If not, he will have learned of a path not worth following. He might also end not only in learning in detail why that path was not worth following, but with a raised understanding of the non-experimental things he could do as a poet, and be able to appreciate and employ them better than he had.
So, what Have I learned from my poem? I’m not sure. Nothing definite, for sure. Just a few inklings that certain details may have potential. I like “instants and below,” who knows why. Ditto, “”example for doesn’t.” The “‘s” is outside the avoid-sentences experiment but makes me think an apostrophe in front of a single letter or maybe two letters might be artfully mysterious, if the letter or letters were not arbitrarily chosen. Something to let the under-conscious bat around. A word like “so” repeated for no apparent reason (except here I thought of “so-so,” and the fact that “so so-so” did make sense). “To part am,” somewhere in my head doing is something.
Another thought: that doing everything in a poem purposely wrong can help shake one out of the habit of doing everything purposely right, which I feel will almost never lead to a good poem.
A question: if I make a variation of the endo-experimental poem above will the result be an endo-experimental poem? By my definition, no. My first experiment will have to have been my only significant experiment. I wouldn’t be doing more than changing a rhyme-scheme. That, however, would make experimental poems too rare to bother naming, and no poet would qualify to be an experimental poet. So I would extend my definition to include as experimental poems in which the poet devotes himself seriously to doing variations of something significant he has never before tried as a poet.