Poetry: Craft/Content Versus Inspiration?

The following entry was sparked by a brief comment exchange in Aidan Kelly’s blog at Patheos.com from the other day that has had me thinking ever since…

Aidan has published quite a bit of poetry over the years; and, of course, I post a lot of poetry here on the blog. (What modern polytheists don’t?) My B.A. is in Creative Writing, and specifically poetry (though I did a tiny bit of fiction, too), and I realized at various points in my post-B.A. education that if I wasn’t writing something (usually poetry) at least semi-regularly, I was pretty much dragging my feet and dead in many respects. (The two years of my M.A. in religious studies, I wrote perhaps one or two poems; within two weeks of graduating, I had written about twenty poems…!) One of my professors at Sarah Lawrence my senior year said to me, after he read my final projects for him (a pseudo-Chaucer continuation, and a dramatic form of a further character’s stories in The Canterbury Tales, plus an analytic essay going through what thought processes and motivations I had for writing these things), and said “You’re going to be doing a lot of very intellectual stuff in your M.A. program–how will you survive?” (He was talking in relation to not having regular creative outlets, of course.) I didn’t have a very good answer for him, and thus my two years from that time were pretty bleak in many ways. Yes, I did end up having other creative outlets, but not like before…

In any case, poetry is important to me in ways that are far more significant than may be apparent otherwise, if it needs to be said.

When I read some of Aidan’s poems on his blog, I complimented him and mentioned that part of one of them reminded me of some Orphic cosmologies, and he said it was similar to those on purpose. Which got me thinking…

Most of the poetry I write is fairly well informed on the histories of the figures–divine or otherwise–involved. There are a lot of allusions and hints in the language that someone not familiar with the figures to the same extent I am might not catch (and even if they were familiar with them, they still might not always catch them!). Depending on the poem, I might labor very hard on single lines, or even single words, looking for the exact one that is right in a way all others would not be; and, strangely, if I decide to write in a meter or with rhyme, it’s often far easier to have things flow easily than it is without it. The “flow” factor is always unpredictable with writing poetry…some of the best things I’ve ever written have been things I’ve barely worked on at all, while some things over which I’ve slaved intensively don’t ever get noticed or commented upon and probably aren’t that well liked. It all depends on tastes, I suppose, to a large extent, as these things always do…

But, what really makes me think as far as modern pagan poetry is concerned is this: what do we value more, “transparency to inspiration,” or craft and content? I’ve read a great deal of modern pagan poetry that is purported to be “given” or quasi-channeled from some deity, spirit, or other incorporeal being…and I think to myself, “I’m glad that deity isn’t the god of poetry.” Then, there are totally beautiful verses that are written by people, with no claims about how directly inspired they were or anything on the matter, that are shatteringly profound, transformatively evocative, and breathtakingly resplendent in shining wonderful-ness…and it isn’t that the gods aren’t involved, it’s just that the poet has not made a big deal out of it. The skills of the poet come into the picture no matter what–the gods don’t just give words to someone who doesn’t understand them, I think, and if one doesn’t have the words in one’s head that a god communicating something feels are needed to express the poem or the idea, then I don’t think the god chooses such a poor potential messenger. (And, I often wonder if the ascription to a deity is kind of a cop-out for bad editing or lack of craft–”Oh, this is what the god said, and who am I to question a god?” is a really good excuse in many people’s minds for giving up all critical faculties and senses of aesthetic standards…not mine, of course, but anyway…!)

This makes me wonder: perhaps the reason that the Pythia at Delphi uttered her oracles, and then various priests put them into verse, is because the ancient Greeks of that area realized that apart from content–which is what gets revealed in an oracular utterance, i.e. information of a particular sort–that form and sound were just as important to sense. What would be a more effective message from a god, “No, don’t do that,” or a four-line poem that could get laid over a phat beat and a hook that totally ear-worms everyone in Ephesus for months? Do you see what I mean?

One of the poetry professors at Sarah Lawrence, Thomas Lux (who no longer teaches there) had a poem I really liked that he often read at readings called “An Horatian Notion” which essentially says that one isn’t simply inspired with a poem (or anything else), one has to work at it. The Muses never just hand anything over, I don’t think–nor any other deity. Hermes is the god of words, but I really don’t think he just gives them out for his minions to copy down; Apollon’s inspirational qualities are unmatched, and likewise, as exemplified by his oracle at Delphi, it’s not just a matter of repeating what he says, or what the oracle is able to say of what he says; and Dionysos, too, can inspire with poetry and other arts, but if it’s to be more than just the self-absorbed satisfaction at inspiration slurred in a drunken and incoherent rant, there’s got to be more to it than that…Nympholepsy of this sort needs to have just as much nymphology, perhaps…

Don’t get me wrong: imbas forosnai, “the great knowledge which illuminates,” is one of the Three Things Required of a Poet, and as a practitioner of filidecht, it’s the cornerstone of one’s practice; but, it’s not enough. Poets didn’t study for more than a decade just to learn how to be transparent to the words of gods. It’s certainly been my experience with Antinous that the more study I have done, and the more my own poetic talents have developed, the better I’ve been able to convey something of him to others. The poems I was writing in The Phillupic Hymns aren’t bad, but I think that many I’ve written in the years since then (four of them–my, my, my, tempus fugit!) have been just as good, if not in some cases better…and in a few cases, far far better.

So, I don’t know. As a polytheist, what do you value more highly: an excellent poem that demonstrates mastery of craft, a poem that demonstrates the person writing it knows their subject very well and imparts that subject in a new and interesting fashion, or a poem that is clearly inspired and carries the fire of inspiration from the gods to the readers? Of course, ideally, it would be all three, but how often does it happen that one has a specimen of all three before one? (Rare, I’d say.) If one had to err in one direction or another, which would it be?