The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Volume 4, Number 3 | |||||||
edited by Roger Dutcher | |||||||
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A review by Stephen M. Davis
A number of the poems in the Magazine of Speculative Poetry have clever lines in them, but with the
exception of a haiku, I don't find a single instance of a poem that defies paraphrase, and this is death to a
poem. By way of example, think of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken." This is the famous poem beginning
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" and ending with "I took the one less traveled by/ And that has made all the difference."
If you studied this poem in high school, you may well have had your teacher ask, "What does this poem mean?" And
someone may well have said, "Well, the speaker states that he took the more difficult path in life, and it has
made him what he is today." You may, in fact, have read "The Road Not Taken" a dozen times or more. You may believe
that it expresses a grand statement about righteousness and the Protestant Work Ethic. You would also be completely
wrong. If you examine the poem closely, and if you refuse to succumb to the temptation of paraphrase, you will
discover that the speaker is saying both paths lay equally before him. There was no difference between the
two. If you are only mildly cynical, you may well conclude that both paths arrive at exactly the same
place. That, in fact, is what the speaker wishes us to understand: we cannot plan for what has not arrived.
The path to misery and the path to fortune may lie equally before you; they may, in fact, be one and the
same. (And note how quickly I have lost bits of Frost's meaning by devolving into my own paraphrase.)
And here is the major failing of the poems in this magazine. They all can be neatly paraphrased. There is no
loss of meaning that results from the process; you might well ask yourself in some instances why the poet did
not simply choose to write a short story.
Wordsworth wrote of this kind of failing in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, where he reproduces a sonnet and
shows that, of fourteen lines, only five are markedly different from prose, though there is rhyme and meter
supplied by necessity through the sonnet form. I attempted the same demonstration on the poems within this magazine
and found few lines of real poetic worth. I suspect, though, that I would meet with the same results if I
examined closely a copy of the American Poetry Review, so I hope the reader will not think I am simply exercising
pedantic snobbery.
There were some nice moments in these poems. Charlee Jacob wrote,
I think, as I have already mentioned, that there is no memorable poetry here, which is not to say that I think
the poets represented do not have some talent. Perhaps I am being overly critical, but I believe that poetry,
being the most difficult of the writing crafts, must be judged by the most stringent standards, and I hope that
poets learning their craft would demand to be judged in that fashion.
Steve Davis teaches at the University of New Orleans as an Instructor of English. He enjoys chess, strong black coffee, and books by authors who care enough to work at their craft. |
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