It’s not often that the nuclear radiologist in me shows up on this blog, but Dr. Majmudar—reader of medical images created by measuring positron annihilations and differential tissue attenuation—would like to talk literary physics for a moment.
Consider with me how American poetry includes poets as unalike as, say, Richard Wilbur and Albert Goldbarth—one a careful balancer of rhymes and syllables, the other a layer-down of chatty, nonfiction-quotation-sprinkled blocks of prosetry. Or Kay Ryan and John Ashbery—one creating her effects largely by the creation of meaning, the other by the subversion of meaning.
The concept by which I consider and enjoy (or, in Ashbery’s case, try to enjoy) these poets is entropy.
At the origin of the universe, right after the Big Bang (the theory goes), everything in the universe was crushed down to a few square inches. At this point in cosmological history, the universe was smooth—that is, everything was tightly packed, and there was little point-to-point variation. Essentially, the number of allowable configurations of matter and energy were very few. (If two atoms got too close together, gravitational forces would have collapsed them into a black hole.) As the universe expanded, it went from a low entropy state to a high entropy state. The number of allowable configurations became much greater. Notice how things have spread out. Matter and energy can cluster in one place and not in another—giving rise to stars and planets and the space between them.
How does this relate to poetry? I believe the poetic pairings I mentioned above write English at different levels of entropy. This dovetails with the concept of “ruinability” I have discussed elsewhere: How small a change will cause a poem to collapse in on itself? Some poets write lines that allow very little alteration. At the most basic level, appreciable meter, a rhyme scheme, a tone of voice (think Wilbur); at the more complex level, meaning (think Ryan)—these decrease poetic entropy. They diminish the number of acceptable configurations of words. Something is off, it shows, and the effect is ruined. Prosey, unrhymed rhythms and heterogeneity of tone and content (think Goldbarth), and especially the avoidance of clear intellectual and emotional meaning (think Ashbery)—these increase poetic entropy. The words in any given Goldbarth line usually admit rhythmic alterations or variations in linebreak without significant loss of overall effect. You can delete entire sentences from a verse paragraph of Ashbery without changing its overall—to use a phrase not frequently found in Ashbery criticism—
comprehensibility. This is high-entropy poetry. Almost anything can be almost anywhere else.
As I mentioned earlier, the universe increases in entropy as time passes. In literature, as time has passed, we have seen a shift, civilization-wide, from poetry to prose. Consider, in this light, how the bulk of popular American poetry reads a lot like prose, whether it’s Coleman Barks’s translations of Rumi, or Billy Collins and Maya Angelou. Such poetry, like most prose, strikes me as middle-entropy English: Meaning is preserved, but the words and sentences can be endlessly red-penned and revised—and, like a piece of expository prose, often improved. A low-entropy poem cannot be improved by revision; as soon as it attains its precarious equilibrium, its ruinability is too high; only this configuration of words is allowed. No editor can dare to touch it. Similarly, the high-entropy poem’s inspired disorder cannot be improved by a red pen, either. On what grounds would an editor “edit” Ashbery’s work? Ashbery is as he is: As unimprovable as the universe, and as indifferent to the mind’s quest for meaning. A given high-entropy poem could well be in some other configuration, but it isn’t; it is this way, and no other; this happens to be how poetic matter and poetic energy have come to rest on the page at this moment in time.
People’s tastes in poetry tend to fall somewhere along this spectrum of low, middle, and high entropy. Academics cluster at either end of the spectrum, popular audiences (such as they are!) go for the middle, poetry that has roughly the same entropic state as prose. Why is this? Probably because the universe itself exists in a state of middle entropy. Not the extreme crushed-down sphere right after the Big Bang, and not a big box full of randomly floating gas atoms, either. I prefer low entropy English, but not zero entropy English; I like poetry where every word seems inevitable as I’m reading it, but I also like sly breaks and jags in the pattern. This is probably why I prefer Kay Ryan to Richard Wilbur. I like a side of chaos with my order.