Jody Azzouni

Jody's Notes

(October 23, 2012)

Perhaps aesthetic value (in poetry, anyway) should be characterized as an avoidance of flatness. And flatness should be characterized, in turn, as closeness to the norm of ordinary speech. Highly rhymic poetry avoids flatness in one way (even iambic pentameter does this).

But there are other ways--more important ways--of avoiding flatness. Of achieving curvature in poetry. Originality is one method that avoids flatness--it avoids flatness pretty much by definition. (If you haven't seen it before, it isn't flat.)

But more than originality is needed to make a poem. A jumble of fresh images on a page isn't flat. But (despite what some poets thinks they've done) that's not enough. A poem has to avoid high entropy as well (chaos shouldn't be welcomed into poems.)

So perhaps curvature should not be defined as the mere avoidance of flatness. High entropy isn't flat but it's not curved either.

Somebody might think that deviation from the norms of normal speech isn't an aesthetic value. After all, there is a lot of (contemporary) poetry that's flat--deliberately so. It looks and sounds like prose--a perfectly flat prose. And a lot of this poetry is taken seriously. A lot of this poetry gets awards. A lot of these poets get to hold forth about poetry.

Well, maybe so. But flatness has no future as an aesthetic value in poetry. It's at best something passing. At one time (oh you know, around the beginning of the last century), it was a fresh move in poetry to write flatly. And a number of poets who did that were celebrated for their originality and depth. But this was a totally local thing: we hadn't flatness in poetry before and so the people who introduced it were being "original." But of course there's the question of what you're supposed to do next.

Unfortunately, what always happens next is inertia. In this case, a lot of poets writing flat poetry because, after all, that's what they've seen (and it's amazingly easy to do). But if the only reason that something is aesthetically important is that it's not been done before in certain narrow circles, then the next thing that comes along that does exactly the same thing the first item did isn't aesthetically important. Not even a little bit. Curvature lasts (in poetry, anyway). Flatness doesn't.

I republished this poem in The Lust for Blueprints. It manages (I think) quite a bit of curvature. Through its content--its imagery: the way that art, photography and the medusa myth are brought to play upon one another. (Anyway, that's what I hope the poem manages to do.)