PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

"Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me Man, did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me . . ."

---John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book X

Since my very first footnoted paper, written in the late spring of 1974 for a high school course entitled "Research And Writing" (the subject was a very sophomoric consideration of the very real historical rehabilitation of Richard III, the last truly English King), I have been plagued with an aggravating inability to thoroughly proofread (which follows upon my inability to keyboard without error).

   I dislike typos because they suggest or imply that I cannot spell correctly, or follow the conventions of acceptable grammar.  I worked very hard in juniour high school to learn these; in fact, when---due to budget contraints---our schooldays were shortened by two hours---my mother compelled me to study at home, at least one hour if not two per weekday, a textbook and a workbook on spelling and grammar.  By the end of eighth grade, I was able to diagram any sentence given me without fear of error or foolery.  In that year, the arithmetical achievements of my elementary school experience began to collapse, while my ability in English language arts (as they called it), which had been negligible in elementary school, began to emerge.  I had, regretfully, given up my ambition to be a working astronomer---due mostly to my parents' amused skepticism and their refusal to let me stay up past nine p.m., even on weekend nights, to use my very amateur telescope.  This early adolescent regret was soon replaced by my ambition to become a writer; which, in the autumn of my senior year, evolved into the ambition to write poetry.

    Since I began to read and study Poetry, starting on October 13, 1975, I have firmly held the belief (reinforced by the scholars with whom I was privileged to study during my senior year in high school and then for four years at college) that misspelling and poor grammar do not enhance the credibility or immediacy of a poem; they merely reflect the inability, or unwillingness, of the Poet to use an acceptable, and traditional, form of communication.  The so-called rawness that presents itself as an indicator of verisimilitude is, essentialy, an often self-perpetuated to excuse, and convert into an asset, a lack of verbal skill; and to disguise it as a virtue when, in fact, it is, in the writer, an indicator of apath, indifference, or ignorance.  

     I worked, for three summer breaks, as a the rear chainman, or rodman, on a road survey crew.  One of the best lessons, among many, that I learned was that the setting of a pin even one quarter inch of the center line, as determined through the transit, would---when the line extended a half mile, or full mile---put the center line of your proposed road into someone's backyard, perhaps even in their swimming pool.  My father, who was one of the department's executives by the time I worked there, had spent over two decades as the lead surveyor for the County:  he surveyed the center and edge lines for one of our area's most important, and busiest, thoroughfares, a route that almost totally encloses our metropolitan area.  (I might add that, when driving or riding in a car, I feel safest when I am on a road that I know he laid out.)  The transit operator on the crew to which I had been assigned---who had been trained by my father---told me, during my first summer there, that my father was absolutely an artist with the transit.  He turned an angle once, and only once, with an accuracy that his successors on the transit were unable to match in the day to day work.  Although until the last year of his life (during which, I narrowly survived---and only through the intervention of a miracle---open heart surgery), he and I differed radically on many issues (although he was the first to discern, in the summer of 1976, how much I loved BlueLevels and he did not---oddly, for him---condemn that emotion), I admired his professional accomplishments greatly, and consistently, even to this very day.  And I found his attention to detail, and that exquisite talent to turn an angle once and once only, was a metaphor of the care and conscientiousness that must be brought to poetry.

   That so-called rawness which is mistakenly, and often laughably, mistaken for verisimilitude, and the total engagement with reality; or as an indicator of "truth-telling" accuracy; is merely a deflection of the reality of (as stated above) apathy or ignorance, the inability to improve or the unwillingness to do so.  Should a steak or a chicken be served raw?  Of course not:  only an incompetent or indifferent chef, even the most amateur, would think so.  The turkey that my spouse is even now preparing for our Thanksgiving dinner will not be served raw, even though this adds a verisimilitude by keeping the turkey close to its natural, although butchered, state.  We cook it to make it more palatable, and safe, for consumption.  It is prepared.  A poem should be prepared, not just splattered upon the page, or screen, like so much slop from a plateful of too much gravy.  

     In college, I knew of an amateur composer, not even a music major because he found music too difficult to study formally, who had no knowledge whatsoever of harmony and counterpoint; and yet, the cacophonies he produced were, he felt, adequate homages to the work of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, the atonalists in Germany and Austria prior to the empowerment of the Nazi Party (who, themselves, believed in a certain sort of social rawness, and plunged the German people into enormous bloodshed and chaos to achieve it).  My friend, the amateur composer, only heard his own "raw" and "heartfelt" compositions in his own piano redactions, as we was unable to find profession, or good amateur, musicians willing to bother to attempt a performance.

      I despise typos because they appear to suggest an incompetence, a lack of attention to detail, and an offhand indifference.  I do not need "rawness" to make my poems credible.  I respect them enough, and (in some, like the spiritual poems or the Blue Levels sequence) I cherish their content sufficiently to feel obligated to present them in a prepared and not a "raw" state.

Starward