How does a poem begin?
The first time I wrote something for rob mclennan, it was a review of Stuart Ross’s The Book of Grief and Hamburgers. I know many writers in Canada and around the world, living and dead, have special connections with Stuart, so I don’t treat mine as an exception. However, I do sometimes feel alone in my appreciation for his discernment of mass media dynamics as they apply to Canadian poetry, which naturally abhors it.
One thing he said that has stuck with me through the years is his nearly Mark Twain-esque critique of those who profess their love of poetry. His response, paraphrased, was that he thought 99% of poetry he read was crap. Now, you may find my paraphrasing here charming or even affable, if not deliberately bombastic, but I assure you that is not the impression I intend to leave upon you.
Without question there are other authors in Canada with sharp opinions but I have never seen a poet say as much in one breath as he had with this one statement of his, likely on Facebook if memory serves me well.
Regardless, bombast and affability were far from his intent, in my opinion. For lack of a less confident adjective, I believe he was speaking pure fact.
It probably isn’t hard to see why I say so but I will tell you how I got there nonetheless before moving on to the questions originally posed to us by rob.
For months, I struggled to get a real start on answering the questions of this series, namely how does a poem begin and what makes a poem good. I’ve wanted, since reading Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (triple-O, for short) in 2023, to carve out a literary criticism praxis that incorporates his positions and I have largely kept this ambition hidden in plain sight since launching my return to book blogging with Bibelotages in 2024, principally because I felt that I had not yet read enough of Harman’s books to find a firm grasp of the value of his work on mine.
So I began, at last, by reviewing my past two years of notes on Graham Harman. I read not only his synonymous OOO (2018) book 2 or 3 times, but also Architecture and Objects (2022) and select essays from The Graham Harman Reader (2023), in addition to watching several of his lectures online and listening to a handful of podcast appearances over time.
He is as easy on the ears as he is on the page, and, perhaps a bit like Stuart Ross, Harman is burdened with a self-awareness for his unpopular opinions. If only the world of academic philosophy took Graham as seriously as the world of Canadian poetry took Stuart, although I think the latter’s international reception is generally loftier than his domestic praise, if not more sparing. I digress.
The book at the top of my Graham Harman to-be-read list, however, remained untouched for far too long, because life had distracted me and I’m not as hardworking as Graham or Stuart. That book, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (2016), is Graham Harman’s triple-O treatment of the Dutch East India Company as an object, a proverbial Ship of Theseus in terms of dauntingness to deal with from a materialist or social theory perspective:
While it might be assumed that this company was a material object, this view is difficult to sustain under questioning without having to make a number of concessions that are damaging to the materialist standpoint. For one thing, material objects always exist somewhere, but in the case of the VOC it is not at all clear where that place of existence would be. It was certainly not at VOC [Dutch East India Company abbreviated, in Dutch] headquarters in Amsterdam, since most of the company’s operations took place in Southeast Asia; […] Nor was the physical location of the VOC to be found in its Asian capital, Jayakarta or ‘Batavia’ (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia). […] Beyond this, the VOC existed from 1602 to 1795, and no person (and perhaps no ship) lasted for that entire period as an enduring element of the company.
There are many intermittent statements of fact and observation that I’ve intentionally abridged here to cut to the main point of my citation, and that is this:
There is an old philosophical paradox known as the Ship of Theseus, which poses the problem of whether the ship remains the same even when we gradually or suddenly replace each of its boards with a new one - especially if we assemble the old boards together nearby as a rival vessel to the new ship. Without going further into this paradox and its venerable history, it already serves to emphasize what I take to be a chief lesson of the VOC case study: the irreducibility of larger objects to the sum total of their material components. The Dutch East India Company was not just a collection of atoms and strings at various locations in space-time, but to a large extent was able to survive the motion and disappearance of these tiny elements while making use of others.
I think the main thing that prevented me from connecting what I remember and know of object-oriented ontology and the production and esteem of poetry, or literature in general, was that I made the perfectly honest mistake of expecting to understand it only from the standpoint of the senses, aesthetics, metaphor, or the effects on humankind rather than the object as it exists, ontologically and monadically, and how it comes into existence or emerges, and inevitably, disappears.
The fact of the matter is that Stuart Ross’s observation all those many years ago, that the overwhelming majority of poetry is perfunctory slop (still paraphrasing) and the pinnacle of platitudes in the contemporary publishing landscape, for publishers and writers alike, is the overused tagline “I love poetry”, is compelling because it accurately touches on an otherwise hitherto uncovered truth, recognizable but not widely acknowledged, evidenced in publishing houses’ increasingly trendy trend of publishing grad students’ manuscripts that theatrically depict typically one theme or one historical figure or subject then tack on all the pandering buzzwords and ideally in the form of a blurb from a set of authors in order of descending incomes. Call it poetry all you like, but you shouldn’t love it. If you do, then maybe you’re part of the problem. That problem: it’s very obviously not good poetry. Just because it qualifies as poetry doesn’t mean you should like it. The publishing industry is delusional.
Stuart’s pragmatic reaction to his realization was to start an imprint for experimentalism and those were the first works I committed to reviewing for my new blog last year, excited now as I was when he announced it that he would editorially reveal something interesting and enlightening in the process.
Why bring Graham Harman’s philosophy into this at all, you might be wondering. You’re busy, the world is full of quality distraction, and the bulk of it can be at least mildly entertaining. I haven’t even taken the time to review Graham Harman’s work and, although I’ve reviewed 2 of Stuart’s books in the past decade, I prefer to review the books he presides over as editor. In both cases, because it’s daunting.
But this is why Graham Harman’s treatment of the Dutch East India Company feels the most relevant to rob’s questions instead of Harman’s positions on metaphor and aesthetics.
The answer to what makes poetry good is not as simple or symmetrical as answering what constitutes a poem in the same way as summarizing the Dutch VOC by the parts of its whole would be undermining the object. A history book on the Company would not be considered a comprehensive treatment of the subject matter without an explicitly worded understanding of how its lead figures rose to prominence, the thinking behind their decisions, some ounce of interpretation or conjecture based on historical record as to their momentum as an entity and as individuals, so on and so forth.
Merely listing all of the officials, office locations, ships, goods, conflicts, resolutions, policies, successes, failures, and years of operation would be more akin to what you’d expect to find in a Wikipedia entry on the subject.
My strengths as a procrastinator and a yapper lie in their sources as problems: perfectionism and zeal. I never want to speak up, but if I manage to break through my shyness, I never want to shut up. The result is that I read myself back while writing and it can sound self-righteous and long-winded. I don’t want to do that.
If I could put it succinctly, summing up everything I’ve learned from reading Stuart Ross and Graham Harman, I think a poem begins when an object, whether it be The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the first snowfall of a Canadian winter, a political post on Instagram, a woman on the Montreal metro looking your way, or the Warsaw Uprising, exerts an influence or causal effect on a poet, and the influence is indirect, it’s finite, and this symbiosis of cause and writer is asymmetrical, irreversible, and does not necessarily result in the person writing a poem.
And a poem is good, for our purposes here meaning worthy of being liked, not merely because it checks all the boxes on a hypothetical checklist that adapts to every written or spoken object referred to as a poem, but because it achieves an effect for the moment it is consumed in, whether as a written text, oral recital, improvisation, or wordless sound poetry, even, or indeed even concrete poetry.
The best way I can account for this is in something I heard the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti say while I was researching him for a review I published online earlier this year:
[H]e paraphrases the poem of al-Shabi, in a way that is more economical yet direct than any written translation out there: “if people decide to live, destiny will obey.” He says with this one line of poetry, the Tunisian was able to spark revolution, in Tunisia and in Egypt, a century after it was composed.
I am not trying to say that a poem must spark revolution in order to be deemed good (morally good or well-made, in any case). But there is something to the way Graham Harman treats knowledge, as either what something does or what something is, that I think lends itself to my explanation, and it’s something I think Stuart Ross would agree with by way of extending his observation that not all poetry deserves your love.
This is from the introduction to Harman’s Immaterialism on the Dutch East India Company, where he expresses remorse for the fact that the editors of this book chose to cut out so much of what he deemed relevant to conveying his point of view, marking the distinction between the flat ontology of Bruno Latour’s revered but short-sighted Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which treats all objects as things that act, and his own object-oriented ontology:
Whether we praise objects for their agency or brashly deny that they have any, we overlook the question of what objects are when not acting. To treat objects solely as actors forgets that a thing acts because it exists rather than existing because it acts.
Harman’s concern is with continental philosophy’s delusion of boasting about decentering humans from the humanities and social sciences while still exclusively centering discourse on relations between humans and unrealistically not acknowledging the facticity and totality of non-human objects in the universe at large and humankind’s relative irrelevance among them.
So, if what poetry is doesn’t define what makes it good (i.e. Dante’s Commedia isn’t good because it is written in terza rima, it’s poetry because it’s written with poetic form and metre), and what poetry does (does it do any good?) cannot always be fully realized within the duration of a single human lifespan (if al-Shabi’s revolution song was good when it was originally composed, was it not just as good or better when it echoed through the streets of Cairo almost a hundred years later during the Arab Spring?), then how can we know for certain what makes a poem good?
I do not lack the confidence to conclude that, beyond human perception, what makes a poem good is its unknowable potential and our perception or indirect, or knowingly self-aware incomplete, contact with that.
If I say I like T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, as a critic, I am saying I see something good in it, even if that good is relative or finite to being symbolic of catalyzing literary modernism in 20th century Western Europe, and, as a critic, I disapprove of Eliot’s inspired religiosity or strategic associations with other poets.
It’s not only what he wrote and how it made an impact in his lifetime, nor the aftereffects of it continuing beyond during ours, but the sonority, complexity, and interpretability that I think extends beyond human relations, if, say, in the future, planet Earth is left in ruins and our species has died and all civil infrastructure has been destroyed or overrun by vegetation or disappeared by meteorological disaster or the erosion of water over a long stretch of time, to the point where the galaxy we inhabit not only never witnesses our escape from within, but becomes a makeshift sort of museum or run down abandoned space age ghost town that ended in a worldwide mass murder-suicide pact.
Or like that one scene near the end of Everything Everywhere All at Once where the mother and daughter come back as everything in the multiverse, including as sentient telepathic rocks, except in my allegory the rocks are not sentient or telepathic, nor do they possess googly eyes, they’re just regular everyday rocks, and The Wasteland happens to be playing on an infinite loop from a solar-powered Bluetooth sound system at them, as a natural riff off of artist Katie Paterson’s Future Library project, only old works instead of new ones.
Or that right before humanity’s certain demise someone reflects on Eliot’s speaker of the poem countenancing pestilence and silently nods to themselves that all those decades ago that meek little limey-wannabe American banker in London was onto something and we should have heeded the signs before it was too late even though The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was objectively the better, if not less demure, verse, he can be forgiven because his rhymes were on point, alas here we are at the end of the world and we have nothing to show for but a handful of good poems.
That’s usually how the good ones start.
Jay Miller is a technical writer, translator, and poet. He is @sootynemm on Instagram and he blogs on Bibelotages.com which doubles as a newsletter. He lives in Montreal.
