I’ve been listening to my usual hipster bullshit again, so I got to thinking. Side note: I hope that in an alternate reality, Alexander Pope (or someone very near him) would’ve written his famous colloquialism as “a little thinking can be a dangerous thing.”
Okay readers (all two of you), fasten your proverbial seat-belts cuz I’m about tackle one of the oldest questions in all of poetry. Well, at least in part. I’ve been going back through some of my older stuff, particularly from when I was still in High School. Under the gobs of formalist sludge and Keatsian doppelgangery I found quite a few poems with…well, let’s call them “strong Gothic themes.” In short, they were shit. I knew they would be, but I was surprised to find that it wasn’t the rhyme or language that dragged them down. No, the problem came down to ineffective presentation of bleak subject matter. This reignited a question that I’ve been wrestling with a lot lately: what makes some “dark” poetry good and some bad? Semantic clarification: when I say bad, I don’t mean “too much,” or “too shocking,” but rather just…I don’t know…cringey. Surely you’ve seen them, and surely you felt the same way: bored, awkward, like you want to roll your eyes right out of your skull.
If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, you know what I’m talking about. There’s always someone who slaps everyone in the face with their lyrical grotesques, their macabre meanderings, their provocative images. These poems don’t make you recoil in horror so much as twitch. When read aloud, you slump down in your chair, begging for the cringe to end. So, where do these poems come from? Why are they so common? How do you make them good? Well, I don’t’ have definite answers to all these questions but I can still try. So, join me on this safari into the “heart of little-lightness,” where edginess is supreme, and wit oft withers.
My first guess, partly from my own experience, is that dark poetry results from an inherent creative immaturity. Most writers start dark because most begin writing in their angsty teenage years. People usually turn to poetry as an outlet for their personal problems. Problem with that is, no one gives a shit about your angst. Most writers evolve out of that, accepting more realistic tones which can still be brutally depressing or dramatic.
I also think that it comes from laziness. To me, poetry is always about evoking emotions or thoughts. For some reason happiness is hard to communicate in a lot of poems, and, let’s be honest, excessively happy poetry is just as annoying. So, a lot of people think they can throw in some shocking images, some serial-killer mimicry, and BOOM poetry. Ah, did you see that? Do my words BOTHER you? Good! Haha! Except that doesn’t usually work either. If you don’t take the time to construct a poem with some effective method, whether that be decent rhythm, interesting language, clever syntax, etc., then all your shock factor falls limp.
The last point I’ll make on this subject is that “dark” poets typically lack variety. If all your poems are about self-harm, mutilation, the pointlessness of life, then they all blend together. I knew a guy back in undergrad with just such a brooding streak. One day, when I was asked which of his poems I like most, I found myself without an answer. Why? Because they all sounded the fucking same!
So, what makes a good dark poem? There are plenty out there: “My Last Duchess,” “Lady Lazarus,” “The Masque of Anarchy,” almost anything by Poe, the list goes on and on. I guess that question leads us to the much broader question of “what makes any poem good?” but that’s a broader topic for a more sobering day. Anyway, what makes those aforementioned poems work? Well, as I’ve already mentioned, these pieces all use effective poetic devices. It’s not always a matter of what you say but how you say it. Take this excerpt from “The Grave” by Robert Blair:
Men shiver when thou’rt nam’d: nature appall’d
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Shakes off her wonted firmness. Ah! how dark
Thy long-extended realms, and rueful wastes,
Where nought but silence reigns, and night, dark night,
Dark as was chaos ere the infant sun
Was roll’d together, or had tried his beams
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Athwart the gloom profound! The sickly taper
By glimm’ring through thy low-brow’d misty vaults,
Furr’d round with mouldy damps and ropy slime,
Lets fall a supernumerary horror,
And only serves to make thy night more irksome!
Freaky huh?
Alright, I know not everyone likes dark poetry, and yes there are a lot of great amateur writers who can use it effectively but if you want my advice:
1. Don’t sacrifice the verse for flat “grabbing” images
2. Do NOT stick to dark themes exclusively
3. Never write a poem with the intention of holding your audience hostage
That last point needs its own article, but I think you know what I mean.
What do I do? If you know my writing, you know I stray into a sort of absurd darkness every now and then. One thing I do is to hide them under the veneer of comedy. This way I can generate cognitive dissonance when the humor of the presentation and the dark reality of the stories intersect. Here’s a piece that does just that:
Open Mic in the City of Dis
Once, I would sweat
standing in the open room
gesturing to the audience of flies
between us
attached to the open chair
the clapping Duke of Dust
kept the fester-bugs
in their seats of silence
When the punchline failed
I tried to improvise the great tragedy
of Balius and Xanthus, the talking horses
Teeth with tongue, shrill thrills
to the meaty end
They buzzed with shocked surprise
they eddied with crimson joy
“Oh shit,” I said “that’s supposed to be inside of me”
I dunno, what do you think? Is that effective? Anyway, I’ll try to post more often. I’ve got a lot coming up writing wise so stay tuned for more updates.