Posts on Poetry Pt. 1: Speak With Conviction.

I'm going to start a series of a few posts on the virtues of a poet. Specifically, if one wishes to write poetry, though I am no great poet myself, I am going to give a few pointers I have learned from listening to great poets, from mystical poets like Bernard to troubadour poetry to the sonnets of Shakespeare to modern slam poetry I myself have had the mixed experience of hearing. Why am I doing this, singularly unqualified as I am in actual poetry writing? Because the pointers of a poet to a poet are pointers of technique and experience; the pointers of an audience to a poet are pointers of the interconnection of persons that comes from having someone bear the innermost thoughts of their soul to a willing audience, and therefore pointers which are much more obvious, but still deserve great study for any would-be poet. These pointers will not be such as “write in rhyme”, or other assorted tips given by assorted people all of whom have views on technique. A Shakespeare is not the same as a Joyce, nor a Chesterton a Ginsberg, nor even an Eliot a Dante, except in an influential sense. I will not profess on who is better or worse; that is for critics, and I am the sort of critic who speaks to the poet as he writes and not the one who compares apples and oranges as fruit after they have fallen from the tree and been consumed.

And although I had told someone that I was thinking of writing on love, that comes after a few more immediate pointers, which have consequences in technique but are not technique itself. I'm going to start with that basic condition of public speaking and testimony, conviction and its needed root. I think it would be fun, in these posts, to show some examples in Spoken Word poetry that I think exemplify particular aspects, and I can think of none better to start with than Taylor Mali's “Totally like whatever, you know?”, also known on the Internet as “Speak With Conviction.”

Taylor Mali is an English teacher who has become very popular on the Spoken Word circuit. He is very versatile, but I think he is never more entertaining (though he is always entertaining) than when he is speaking on education, teaching, and language.

What is it to speak with conviction? To use Mali's working definition, it is to “say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks the determination with which you believe it.” To use the Thomistic way, it is to employ a linguistic form, definite, determinate language, that fits the matter, the interior belief of the speaker. In order to understand how vital this is to any poet, it is important to understand what one does in expressing something.

When one speaks a sentence as simple as “I think it is going to rain today”, one is not materially expressing a whole lot when the sentence is delivered in a monotone. Inflection permeates communication, though, and gives new expressiveness to a formerly very dull sentence. “I think it is going to rain today” implies a disagreement with another, or an emphasis on one's own authority. “I think it is going to rain today” implies an uncertainty, or an emphasis on the act of thought, in contradistinction to a meteorological knowledge; or if inflected in a testy manner, implies a somewhat tetchy correction of the preacher of a coming blue sky in the daytime. “I think it is going to rain today” implies a definition of the subject of the act of raining, like that particular cloud over there, that one, over there that I am pointing at as we lie back in the grass. “I think it is going to rain today”, implying an unexpected torrent on the horizon that has just suddenly become far more likely. “I think it is going to rain today”, implying that it is not yet, but bring your umbrella to the bluegrass concert anyways. “I think it is going to rain today” doesn't mean much on the face of it, but shows something about inflecting prepositions, that the inflection is led back into the “going” and ends up much the same in meaning; or perhaps one is making a linguistic-philosophical correction, that it is not “going rain” today, whatever that would mean. Finally, inflecting “rain” indicates that it will rain and not shine.

Why this extended, dull, English teacher explanation? The sentence I chose was terribly mundane for a reason. Something which seems very limited in meaning suddenly takes on no less than ten different meanings, simply based on a slight change in sound. Certainly the inflection is not built into English, as it is in Ancient Greek or Chinese, but it is tremendously potent when we apply it to our speech. Accordingly, people emphasize the spoken word, actual or imagined, as the emotional and even intellectual principle of interpretation of any work of writing. Even a line as simple and materially elegant as “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” is absolutely pregnant with meaning when a careful use of emphasis is applied in this fashion; thus one sees as many possible expressive significances in a single line as there are words to inflect and poets to inflect them. And lest one thing be assumed for every possible kind of inflection, let us not forget that inflection admits of degree and volume. That line from the sonnet takes on a very strange character when one shouts it angrily as a hastily retreating former lover, sarcastically and angrily, than when it is read softly and gently in a country field. Perhaps the former interpretation would be a violence to the sonnet, but none will deny that through the meaning of the sonnet that linguistic act has been given a particularly potent and bitter meaning when thus inflected.

This is very general. When applied to poetry and public speaking, it becomes very specifically relevant. Conviction bespeaks determination. Determination bespeaks sincerity. Sincerity bespeaks a penetrating, interested mind, capable of yielding something about reality which none have seen in quite the same way. When one lacks conviction, one lacks the ability to convey even the most basic interest of what one is saying; a poet who lacks conviction is a poet everyone has heard before, in their own mind, when they confront that awkwardness that is relationships, when they confront their own terrified fear of what they do not know and the fact that they do not know it; and if one wished to hear a poet without conviction, they could go to their average English department and listen to the bored attempts to write poetry just to get a grade. Poetry without conviction is forced, poetry for the sake of that for which poetry was not made to be. Poetry without conviction is a poet stopping in the composition of a poem, not knowing what to say, and instead of stating their own conviction of their own unknowing, which is itself a sort of honesty, trying to gloss over this real thing with a fake persona, a disingenuous attempt to convey strong knowing where there is none. Poetry without conviction is no poetry, no making, no poesia at all.

And what if I am wrong? Perhaps, the reader might think, they should be wary of my stating with such conviction the need for conviction itself. If not for the conviction of my diction, I respond, with conviction, the reader cannot ask that question at all. And if poetry cannot leave you with a real answer, an answer which arises from the honesty that produces conviction, it is better than nothing (and sometimes better than an answer!) that it leave the reader with a question. This article is, of course, not poetry. But I deliberately and decisively (that is to say, with conviction) write with poetic elements, because it illustrates my point in a way that dry prose cannot hope to achieve. And I do think the tradition of conviction is the answer to provide to the question “how ought I to speak poetically”, because even that poetry that writes seemingly in a non-convicted manner can only be fruitful as poetry when it is founded upon an even deeper conviction that it has something real to say, that this pouring-forth of the tormented or loving or angered or hopeful soul is not just a random mass of pointless spontaneity.

But let us say that the one asking about poetry is really and genuinely convinced (and being convinced is the foundation of conviction) that one has nothing of interest to anyone to say? The immediate answer to that is that there is conviction even in that statement, which when evinced in poetry can be a statement about its cause. The more distant answer is that in fact everyone has something to say, unless their mind is a blank slate and their life so distant from any sort of real contact with reality that they literally have nothing which breeds a most passionate response to that reality. And as even a child can pronounce that it is not right to take their toy away, or that they really do deserve to go to Disneyland, to deny that human beings always feel strongly about something requires some particularly extraordinary change in everything that motivates them. The child who wants that toy, and insists upon their deserving to have it in some way, has a very specific opinion on the justice of a situation; when one reflects upon this, to say one deserves anything becomes a reflection on justice in general (because no case of deserving, no matter how seemingly insignificant, says nothing at all about justice.) We grown-ups have, we fancy, much greater concerns about justice, although insisting that one has some injury dealt to them by the illegality of, for example, marijuana seems in some cases rather similar to the child with a bottle having it taken from them. For the most part, we do have greater concerns, the stuff of popular music. Why does she leave me? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why didn't I go to class? (Because I got high. This is seen as a self inflicted wound in the titular song, and the justice of its consequences does not escape such a one as Afroman.)

If one can make song of these things, one can make poetry. After all, spoken poetry is a species of song, having rhythm as its basis, and occasionally melody. The fact is that every human, as a willing being having human desires, priorities, dreams and cares, is a born poet in matter; the real desire in the poet seeking to write is for the form. And the first “form” of form in poetry is conviction.