We’re seven weeks into the winter semester—and my students have written some terrible poems. It’s OK; I’ve asked them to. We’ve been reading W. D. Snodgrass’s De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong, and we’ve been following Snodgrass’s example of sucker-punching poems we admire. In De/Compositions, Snodgrass selects poems—by Dickinson, Hardy, Yeats, Bishop, and many more—that he finds especially estimable, and then he rewrites the poems, to disastrous effect. The book is divided into five sections: “Abstract & General vs. Concrete & Specific,” “Undercurrents,” “The Singular Voice,” “Metrics & Music,” and “Structure & Climax,” with each section devoted, as Snodgrass writes in the Introduction, “to the particular excellence I was trying to dissolve or drive out.” So, in the first section, the opening of Berryman’s Dream Song 22, “I am the little man who smokes and smokes,” becomes, in the de/composition, “I am an ordinary man with unhealthy addictions.” My favorite line from the same poem, “I am the auto salesman and lóve you” (my kingdom for that acute accent!), finds life again (barely) as “I will pretend affection to get your money.”
My students have been rewriting poems by Plath and Holub and Lorca and Tranströmer—breaking up the concrete, muddying the undercurrents, turning the singular into the familiar. This week they’ll perform a bit of musical mischief. One of Snodgrass’s examples, in which he reimagines “The Tyger” as a series of anapests (“O tiger, you creature that’s burning so bright / In the threatening, darkening forests of night”), will be tough to top.
The lesson, which can’t be repeated often enough: A poem has little to do with its paraphrase. Form and content are inseparable; “how” trumps “what.” Asking students to write de/compositions forces them to reflect on what makes Komunyakaa Komunyakaa, what makes Levine Levine. (That’s “makes,” present tense. Poets get to live forever.) Here’s Snodgrass, again from the Introduction:
Often, my de/compositions are easier to understand than the originals—usually because there is less to understand in them. It is also easier to tie up an animal whose blood has been drained; creatures not subject to taxidermy are less easily corralled, more likely to yield surprises both pleasant and shocking.
In 1934, Anna Wirtz, a 26-year-old reader from New Haven, wrote to Wallace Stevens, asking him to explain “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” Stevens answered in polite but spare terms:
Dear Miss Wirtz:
Some time ago I made up my mind not to explain poems, because the meaning of a poem is merely one part of it.
Of course, I never meant that ice cream is, for good and all, the summum bonum. If the meaning of a poem is its essential characteristic, people would be putting themselves to a lot of trouble about nothing to set the meaning in a poetic form.
So that’s the main lesson. But there’s a second lesson, as well: To know something, look at it—again and again and again. Look at a poem. (The de/composition process continually returns the de/composer to the original work.) Look at a poem that looks at a fish. (From Snodgrass’s instructive de/composition of Bishop: “And I tossed the fish away.”) Look at an actual fish. I’ll close with a passage from Pound’s ABC of Reading—a text as essential as Snodgrass’s, for students of poetry:
The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one “slide” or specimen with another.
No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:
A post-graduate student equipped with honors and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.
Post-Graduate Student: “That’s only a sunfish.”
Agassiz: “I know that. Write a description of it.”
After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.
Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.
The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.
