Jody Azzouni

Jody's Notes

We all understand chess. We all understand tennis. So we all understand Robert Frost when he churlishly says that free verse is like playing tennis without a net.

But then there's mathematics, right? We all know how to count too, and most of us agree that counting would make no sense at all if we dropped some of the rules.

Well (regardless of whether that's true) there's still this point: That there's lots of mathematics, lots of important mathematics, lots of interesting mathematics, that has different rules--not the rules we grew up with. (As it were.)

And new games. We could change the rules of chess, for example. (Here's a good reason to change the game--at least for a couple of years: increase the number of squares on the board, increase the number of pieces, introduce some new pieces with some new interesting properties (a piece that can only jump--the way that the knight can only jump--in some weird geometric shape). Doing so will stave off the superiority of computers in the game. At least for a couple of years. Don't you want humans to be superior to computers? At least for a couple of more years? If you do, the only way to do it--at least for a couple of more years--is to keep changing the rules. Until we can't handle the new rules anymore--or until most of us can't.)

So look: poetry. Different rules. But rules that make sense, that keep us interested. Rules that are connected to the way we can appreciate images for example. The way that our pattern-recognition capacities make the poem come together for us (if it's put together the right way).

Chaos is so dull (after a minute or two, anyway). And silly shallow rules (each line of the poem has to begin with a "t") are boring too. But that doesn't mean someone can't invent new rules to write poetry by. Rules that we haven't seen before. Rules that are nevertheless intricate and hard to execute successfully. Rules that are nevertheless interesting, and appeal to us.

It happens in mathematics all the time. Really. That doesn't mean it has to be possible in poetry too. Lots of things that are possible in one domain aren't possible in other domains. But I haven't thought of any reasons (yet) that rule this possibility out in poetry.

(Music, on the other hand. I'm a little worried about music.)

I republished this poem in The Lust for Blueprints.