As a poet, I have an obsession with language. In economics, there’s a phrase that I learned long ago. There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch; it describes the concept of Opportunity Costs. Opportunity Costs state that for every choice made, there is an alternative not chosen, which would also have produced some utility. This could be a maxim on revision. Revision requires trade-offs and assumes that there are alternatives to the current draft. For poetry and prose, revision, among other things, is a focus on syntax, which is itself a form of meaning.
I have been thinking about sonorant consonants in prose poetry. Let’s call it the music of language. One of the most exciting examinations on the confluence of structure and music is by Adam Bradley. If you’re not familiar with Bradley's scholarship, his book, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, was a turning point for me. I first learned about Bradley when I was in grad school, where I continued writing prose poems and spent more time thinking about sentences and lines, with appreciation to William Wenthe for his essay “The Sentence in Contemporary Poetry,” published in The Kenyon Review.
“My goal is not to dignify or defend pop lyrics; they are their own best defense.” -Adam Bradley, The Poetry of Pop.
Gregory Orr’s essay “The Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” is published in the American Poetry Review. In it, Orr argues that poets are born with certain innate form-giving talents of varied measures that allow them to forge language into poems. This talent manifests in four temperaments: story, structure, music, and imagination. I like to translate these into the elements of narrative, form, sound, and beauty.
While a poem that seamlessly integrates all these elements may be considered exemplary, it’s crucial to acknowledge the anachronistic limitations of this framework. For instance, a purely structuralist lens might overlook the transgressive power of structure itself. Orr quotes Yeats in response to a structuralist perspective: “The correction of prose, because it has no fixed laws, is endless; a poem comes right with a click like a box.”
Significantly, in the 21st century, there has been a resurgence in the examination of form and its ability to expand our imagination. Claudia Rankine's Citizen is particularly noteworthy for its incorporation of narrative and form that challenge the constraints of conveying a story via conventional and visual means of poetics. In the current day, which is dominated by visual media, language is inevitably influenced by technological advancements. Rankine effectively employs contemporary linguistic tools to address the needs of our time.
The following is a prose poem by Heo Su-gyeong, translated by Soje from The Yale Review, Fall 2023.
Request Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry from the University of New Mexico Press for your literature, writing, or cultural studies courses.
Thanks to so many who have asked their local library to order a copy. Please keep it going.
Finally, I’m working on a Poetry Reading Tour for 2025—both virtual and in-person. I’m in Chicago, and I’d like to visit you. Help me celebrate the release of Brutal Companion, Barrow Street Book Prize, Editors’ Choice.