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What is bad poetry?

© Kayt Davies

Say ‘poetry’ to most people and their minds go to Keats, Shelley, Bryon and/or Wordsworth -- the classical poets -- the guys who have stood the test of time, a test that proves that their poetry was good.

Thinking about their work though, these poets were not competing for the public ear with the people who wrote the rap lyrics. They were writing at a time when the public ear was attuned to the sounds of early morning roosters and folk tune-humming domestic staff. These days the public ear is overstimulated. Bombarded with the grind of heavy, machinery, traffic, advertisements, sound grabs, a wall of white noise that makes silence an uncanny experience.

While poetry was once valued for its ability to entertain, inform and stimulate discussion, these days it is cherished for its ability to create a pause, a moment of stillness in the midst of chaos.

The long poems, like The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, were the movies of their day, or the television mini-series. They shone brightly because they were written in the medium of the day. The advent of printing made them widely accessible and they were the blockbusters and new releases that had tongues around the city wagging.

It in this milieu it was fair enough to call a poem good or bad. Did it hit the mark? Was it as clear, as punchy, as insightful as the last big release?

Poetry, in this sense, is a relic. It can’t compete for impact with Dolby sound and computer enhanced images. This is not to say that the art of good writing isn’t valued in the modern mediums. It’s just that the genre has shifted.

Sure some people still like writing and reading poetry, but they’re a minority. They gather on websites and share ideas, but look at the publishing house stats and notice that, with the exception of works by a few well-marketed poets (like Michel Leunig), poetry books are not big sellers.

A new role for poetry is emerging though. Poetry as therapy. While the big beautiful classic poets were writing for mass market consumption, these days poetry is being written for another reason. It’s being written because the process of writing it makes people feel better.

Poetry therapists are cropping up in hospital settings and English teachers around the world are encouraging troubled teenagers to spill their emotions out onto paper.

To understand why this is happening, remember that Sigmund Freud initiated the idea of the "talking cure", an idea linked with the concept that each person has an "inner world". This inner world is a treasure house of impressions and images that shimmer and shift on the edges of our awareness, cropping up in our dreams and visions.

Freud’s hydraulic concept of the mind goes further and suggests that concepts swirling around in the inner world can disrupt behaviour, if the pressure that builds up in there is not given vent in the form of creative enterprises. Since Freud, several other models of the human psyche have been proposed and most of them endorse the use of "creative acts" as a means of finding out what is going on in an individual’s subconscious mind. Once the contents of the subconscious have been spilled onto the table they can be sifted and shuffled, challenged and clarified, providing a sense of emotional relief, for the client/poet.

This is the essence of art therapy and for a long time a debate has raged about whether "art" that is a real true image (or expression) of the muddy subconscious world of an individual is actually "good art", or if "good art" is art that demonstrates that the painter has a few skills in representation.

Poetry is now embroiled in the same argy-bargy. Because the main aim of the game is now expressing the contents of the inner world, the writing of poetry has been deregulated. The inner world resists following rules and so the rules of grammar and structure are often abandoned in the attempt to express inner chaos. This irritates literature lovers who respect the talent it takes to write a precisely structured poem, just as much "modern art" bothers those who appreciate the fine art of accurate representation with paint.

If writing "shit shit shit" a thousand times is a really honest expression of what’s going on in my inner world, does that make it a good poem? I’d be the first to say "No" - from a literary perspective. But if writing it makes me feel better, and if I put that piece of paper away and find it a month later and laugh because I no longer feel that it is a representation of my inner state then that piece of writing has served a valuable function. It has been a progress marker. You could challenge it and say that it was not grammatical or well expressed, but if it made sense to its audience then it worked, even if it only had an audience of one.

But most people still think of poetry as something that is written for more than just the writer’s peace of mind.

It’s often said in the world of psychotherapy that "what is most personal is most universal". The upshot of this is the assumption that if a poet can dredge into her (or his) inner world and pull out a live and squirming fresh insight and flop it onto the table for everyone else to see then other people will gasp and say "wow, that’s just what it’s like for me too" - and everyone will have a moment of enlightenment and be happy.

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