What is Good Poetry?

Marilyn Taylor is Wisconsin’s current Poet Laureate, ending her reign at the end of the year. Taylor was also the Poet Laureate of Milwaukee from 2004 – 2006 and has authored eight collections of poetry, with her most recent being Going Wrong (2009), published by Parallel Press in Madison. Her poetry has been nominated for various awards and has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, The American Scholar, Indiana Review, The Atlanta Review, The Cream City Review, and Sheepshead Review. Before becoming Wisconsin’s Poet Laureate, she was an adjunct assistant professor at UW-Milwaukee.

I sat down with Marilyn Taylor in October while she was facilitating a poetry workshop at Lawrence University’s Björklunden in Baileys Harbor. In our almost two hour interview, Taylor explains her standards of good and bad poetry as well as well as her view on the poetry scene in Wisconsin.

Mindi Vanderhoof (MV): What defines good poetry?

Marilyn Taylor (MT): Well, I think good poetry absolutely has to communicate. It should be understandable, accessible, and must express what it has to say in a compressed way, but with a lot of attention paid to sound and rhythm, probably more than one would do with prose. But most important, a poet should never lose track of what the poem is saying, of the content, of the theme. I think too much poetry these days does. Being ambiguous with your message is fine, but being totally obscure and opaque in my opinion is not fine. It is just self-indulgent, and I think all too often it closes out the reader.

Marilyn Taylor

MV: So what are some qualities of bad poetry?

MT: I think obscurity can be seen as self-indulgence. It can certainly be lots of fun to write poems in fragments that might be very beautiful little pieces that hang together, but that don’t make any sense. I think on the other hand that poetry that’s really trite, that doesn’t say anything new, that relies on the old clichés or the old rhymey stuff, is not good poetry. That doesn’t mean that poetry cannot rhyme, because I write a great deal of poetry myself that rhymes, but it has to rhyme in a fresh way, and it has to sound like a contemporary poem and not a poem of 100, 200, 300 years ago.

So often when I teach what I call formal poetry, some people might say “Oh, formal poetry! That means I can say things like ‘didst thou go’ or ‘alas.’” And I think wait a minute. Bad poetry often uses old-fashioned lingo that nobody relates to anymore, and I think self-conscious, overly fancy stuff is clearly bad poetry. So on both sides, I disapprove not only of the way too obscure to the point that you can’t understand it – but also of the hyper traditional kind that sounds like it ought to have been written in 1793, and it would have been bad even then. (laughs)

MV: With a handful of published books under your belt, are there any poems that you wish you never would have published?

MT: I think some are way better than others, and I think some are kind of weak, but I don’t think there is a poem that I necessarily wish had never been published. I don’t think I ever would have submitted it. They’re like my babies; I like them all.

MV: What if there was some sort of poetry god that determined you could only have one poem published in your entire lifetime. Which poem would it have been?

MT: Of the poems that I’ve already written?

MV: Right.

MT: Can it be long? (laughter) I have a couple of crowns of sonnets, a group of seven sonnets linked together. If that counts, I would probably nominate one called “The Seven Very Liberal Arts.” If it were just a single poem, gosh, that is hard to say; I have a lot of them that I like a lot. There is a poem I wrote about Cambodia called “The Blue Water Buffalo,” a serious poem that creates an image, a scene, a situation, and even a political situation, pretty well. I’m proud of that one.

MV: What are your personal goals as the laureate?

MT: As the laureate my goal is to broaden the footprint of poetry around the state and have people understand that it’s not what they might think it is. A lot of them were taught in a negative way, in my opinion, about poetry – boring, irrelevant, “I don’t get it.” I just hope to educate people about the wonderful things that poetry really is doing nowadays. Not enough people are aware of how much fun it can be and how stimulating it can be and how legitimate it is, right up there next to visual arts and film and music. I just hope to raise the profile, enlarge the footprint of that particular art form as Poet Laureate.

MV: Wisconsin established the Poet Laureate position not that long ago. You’re only the third Poet Laureate. So it seems like there is a real effort in Wisconsin to promote poetry. Why do you think that is?

MT: I think Wisconsin is a state with a lot of cultured, well-read people, who are beginning to understand that contemporary poetry is very interesting. More and more people are actually writing it and more and more people are buying the books. It still doesn’t hold a candle to the number of people who buy novels, but I think poetry is catching up, and I think the poets in Wisconsin are devoted to it. There are now nearly 40 states that have a Poet Laureate, and now we’re on the bandwagon too.

MV: To switch gears a little here, Marilyn, you’re primarily known as a formalist poet. What is your favorite form?

MT: Sonnets, without a shadow of a doubt. They’re wonderful, they’re just the right length; you present what you have to say and then you sum it up with a deft little closing, and I love doing that. I love writing about very untraditional subjects in a very traditional form.

MV: When you chose your subjects for a certain poem, does it come from your observations?

MT: Not so much visual observations. I often get it through words. I will hear a snatch of conversation, or something on the radio or TV, or shreds of conversations, or sayings, or something that I read that looks interesting enough to be expanded on, as opposed to the images I see visually. I’m not all that visual. I try to put interesting images into my poems but I write poems that are more involved with emotional landscapes than physical landscapes.

I tend to write about people and their quirks. I often write what they call dramatic monologues, in fact, in “The Seven Very Liberal Arts,” each section is in the voice of a different screwed-up woman. (laughter) So I guess I get my ideas just from observing people’s lives and sometimes the actual springboard for a poem is what someone says or writes to me in an email. Not as a line of literature but just some little oddness, and I write them down in a tiny little notebook and when I have time, I open the tiny notebook and there are all these beginnings to poems that I know I can develop.

MV: At what point in your writing career did you think, “I have something here, I should submit this for publication?”

MT: Actually, I was told to do that by the man who became my mentor in graduate school. I was just so nervous and unsure of myself as a poet. I thought that, yeah, I probably had something, but the idea of submitting was very scary until this professor, his name was Robert Siegel, told me that I should be sending out my poems. So I submitted and pretty soon stuff got accepted. The very first acceptance was just a local little thing in Milwaukee, but my second acceptance was with a fine West Coast magazine, so I decided I can do this.

MV: Did rejections come before the acceptance?

MT: Oh sure, and they still come. (laughs) They come all the time. I know some poets that are very well-known and they get rejections. I think What? They turned you down? Every poet that submits has to have a thick skin, expect the rejection and have the envelope ready for the next place when the poems come back.

MV: So you just published Going Wrong. What can readers expect if they pick up a copy?

MT: They are a little racy. I wanted a place to put all of my racy poems. I included the ones that have to do with relationships. A lot of them are sonnets but not all. They do seem to deal with going wrong a little bit, mostly women going wrong. Not literally you know, but just not quite walking the straight and narrow. They are primarily personality poems about women who are a little skewed. Like I am.

MV: Do you have any advice for aspiring poets?

MT: Sure. Be brave enough to submit, be thick-skinned enough to handle rejection, and read, read, read other people’s poetry. That is the way you get better. That is the way your own craft improves. Actually, I would add a little P.S. If you can afford it, buy the books and help keep literature alive, as opposed to always getting them at the library, especially with poetry. Build up a library of your own, so you can revisit the works, especially the poetry, because poetry is meant to be read more than once.