When Adam Gopnik writes, “No prosody can immunize poetry against the test of experience… What’s always at stake with literature and lyrics is their relation to the world,” I take his point to be that one can’t read poems without concerning oneself one way or another with what they “mean,” with how they map to something outside both the text and the poet’s head, and which is perceivable by the reader. Gopnik puts signification up front by quoting the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.” I hazard a suspicion that some versifiers invert these terms.

Gopnik makes his observations in an essay about rhyme (“The Rules of Rhyme,” The New Yorker, 5-23-22). The fact is, rhyme has retreated from much lyric. I like to think of simile and metaphor as part of the “sound” that verse tries to make now. The other part comes from fractured syntax and irregular typography. These devices comprise the wave that carries signal, or meaning.

Gopnik’s position might be thought hidebound by some, but has validity if the notion of meaning is given room to rattle around in. A job of writers striving to be poets is to prosecute effrontery unforgettably. They’re not in the business of making things easy for the complacent reader. When, however, the carrier wave fumbles its cargo and signal is ungraspable, the reader perceives noise.

“Noisy” is an unforgiving descriptor to confer upon a text. I wonder if cases arise in which the burden sought to be lyricized remains stuck in the writer’s mind, snagged in jagged rhetoric, and wants only more cunning application of art in order to mount the wave? To course from the writer’s “soul” or “spirit” into the reader’s apprehending faculty?

Here’s a metaphor plucked from the November 2023 issue of Poetry:

… My willingness to sit still —
to bear the hornet’s nest
of everyday life turning
in my throat like a giant, wet eye…

(From “Jarrett Mosely” by Jarrett Mosely)

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