World Class Poetry Blog

How Pretentious Can Poetry Be?
22 March 2008, the poet @ 9:09 pm

John Hewitt wrote a fabulous blog post on how to write a pretentious poem in seven steps. It’s a rather fitting topic because the catch-phrase for poetry these days is “accessible”. Everyone wans to write poetry that is “accessible,” presumably because people who don’t ordinarily read poetry will flock to their poem and praise them for their accessibility. One problem with that: It seldom happens.

Instead, people who don’t read poetry don’t discover accessible poems. Imagine that. But then, they don’t read pretentious poems either. So I guess they’re at a total loss.

Hewitt takes a very ordinary, accessible poem - Roses are red, / Violets are blue, / Sugar is sweet, And so are you. - and turns it into a pretentious poem simply by changing the poem in some way through seven steps. How does he say to do it? Funny you should ask. Here are Hewitt’s steps to a more pretentious poem:

• Add old time words nobody uses in real life
• Add complex terms for simple words
• Add some foreign words and italicize them
• Add something technological so people realize you’re living in a new age
• Add some other modern stuff such as abbreviations and slang
• Mix up the line endings
• Take out the punctuation

I like this list and Hewitt is correct. All of these things can make for a more pretentious poem, but simply having them doesn’t make a poem pretentious. If you use old time words like doth and art simply to make an impression then you are obviously trying too hard to sound poetic. Stop it. But that isn’t to say that you couldn’t write a narrative poem that plays on Elizabethan English. The key is propriety. If it is right for the poem then it’s right to do it, not pretentious.

Generally speaking, simple words are best. Why use a million dollar word when you can use one that is more easily understood by the majority of your readers? Well, the obvious reason is that because a more complex word might actually be the right word to use for the context. It’s an editorial decision you’ll have to make. Just don’t make the decision based on your desire to sound poetic or more intelligent. That’s pretentious.

Foreign words are generally not necessary. I’ve seldom seen an instance when a foreign phrase in a poem made the poem any better. All it tells me is that a poet is bilingual, or in today’s technological world it may mean that they’re a decent researcher.

Contemporary poets love to use technological jargon in their poems. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If you think techno-jargon will improve your poem because the 21st century has arrived, think again. Future generations will just think you’re pretentious.

I’ve never liked to see acronyms in poetry. I’ve tried writing poems with acronyms and just thought it looked stupid. It’s pretentious. And the people who don’t understand the acronyms won’t get the poem. So why bother?

Line endings are important. Yes, you can take a poem like “roses are red … yada yada yada” and move around the line endings and that would be pretty pretentious, but if you are writing a poem from scratch, well, you have to put line endings somewhere. Just put some thought into them and don’t be pretentious.

Worse than taking out punctuation is trying to outdo E.E. Cummings and using odd punctuations like parenthetical clauses sandwiched between hyphens and capitalized letters in the middle of words. I’ve always thought that was pretentious, even when Cummings did it.

But if you really are going for the pretentious effect in your poems then I can suggest a way to do it in one simple step. Just make a real strong effort to be accessible. And make sure everyone knows it.

11 Comments a “How Pretentious Can Poetry Be?”

1. Jim Murdoch — March 23, 2008 @ 4:31 am
   

   A bit of fun - with a point. I’ve always been on the side of accessible poetry. That said, I’ve actually written two poems over the past few weeks with foreign expressions in them. The whole point of the poems IS the foreign expressions. I mean, ‘Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin’ is what is said on the wall and the whole problem was no one could interpret it till they sent for Daniel. There is, of course, the issue that religious education is not what it was but I can’t do much about my own upbringing. So maybe the poem will only be appreciated by an older generation. It’s only one poem. I’m not short of poems.

2. the poet — March 23, 2008 @ 6:03 pm
   

   I think you have to know your audience. I’d say there is a market for everything.

   I had a fiction workshop instructor in college who told the class one day, “My goal is to get you to walk out of here and moon me.” I took that to mean that whatever he told us we shouldn’t do that we should do it anyway and do it so well that he’d never tell another class that they can’t do it. I did my best to break every rule he gave, some with success and some not so. All literature is the act of breaking somebody else’s rules, and sometimes even your own.

3. John Hewitt — March 23, 2008 @ 11:45 pm
   

   Thanks for the mention and the legitimate analysis of my humorous suggestions.

4. the poet — March 24, 2008 @ 1:15 pm
   

   No problem, John. Thanks for the prompt. You hit a nerve since the tongue-in-cheek version on your blog actually hits upon some things I’ve written about in the past. Thanks for the comment.

5. G. M. Palmer — March 25, 2008 @ 2:45 pm
   

   Hey Allen,

   Interesting post, though of course all rules can be broken (and I’m tempted to write an unpretentious poem that strictly follows all 7 rules [to be arrogant in my humility]).

   The new post of strongverse.blogspot.com covers a lot of this material, too. We must be surfing the same brain wave.

   Cheers,
   GMP

6. G. M. Palmer — March 25, 2008 @ 2:46 pm
   

   I don’t know how “on” became “of” but please forgive me.

7. G. M. Palmer — March 25, 2008 @ 2:47 pm
   

   I don’t see what you mean by the last paragraph, though. Or are you saying that simplicity is the new pretention?

8. Justin — March 25, 2008 @ 6:36 pm
   

   First off props on the blog. I like the aestetics and highly personal content. That being said..IMHO, poetry is highly personal so why wouldn’t you make it the best that it can possible be by ommitting or adding words? By upgrading to a more appropriate or better suited simile when it is appropriate?
   I don’t know if I could write poetry for the masses. Just thinking about it makes my head spin… probably because I have only focused on creating poetry based on my feelings for one person, so I write a poem for that person.
   Anyway, I look forward to your future posts and Ezines.

9. the poet — March 25, 2008 @ 9:13 pm
   

   @ G.M. Thanks. I really like Strongverse. Perhaps I’ll submit something over there one of these days. The last paragraph is a jab at the “hyper” accessible crowd. “Accessibility” is the new catch-phrase. In their attempt to not be arcane, some contemporary poets strive to be accessible and make a big show of this. I don’t. I simply try to write good poems and if some people don’t understand them, well, then those poems aren’t written for those people. Sorry. I don’t understand calculus. It doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.

   @ Justin, thanks. Poetry is not always personal. Yes, poets should strive to improve their poetry with the right words and images. I don’t know what you mean by “the masses.” If you write poetry that can be appreciated for what it is then you are writing for your audience, whether that be one person or posterity. Thanks for reading.

10. paul — September 1, 2008 @ 5:27 am
    

    I think people are confused a lot of the time with the word ‘pretentious’. I think that most of the time, when people write difficult things, it isn’t to assert some unwarranted personal greatness, it’s just because they’re trying to write something original, which I personally think everyone should be striving for. And obviously, to write something original, you have to break out some new terms and phrases, as well as new subjects to write about of course. I don’t mean to make you sound stupid, but your use of the word pretentious isn’t really accurate here, and you used it like a thousand times.

11. the poet — September 1, 2008 @ 8:13 am
    

    Paul, I think some people are pretentious about the word ‘confused’.

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