Competence and Wit

I've been thinking about what can intelligibly be said to constitute material competence in certain strands of contemporary poetry. Specifically, I'm using "competence" to denote "mere competence": a baseline level of craft viability. Anne Boyer has suggested to me in conversation that one way to understand such competence is as the ability to produce a convincing semblance--that is, to write a poem that will not look out of place among other poems of a similar style or genre. But what are the qualities that will effect such a semblance? For example, what are the elements that make a Poetry Chicago poem appear normative, or a Fence poem, or a Quid poem? Can some of these magazines be analyzed in terms of a criterion for normativity and others not? And if so, are the ones that cannot be analyzed in such terms a) obviously more deserving of being taken seriously, or b) obviously lacking standards?

Let's back up a little. I suspect it is easier to identify criteria for poetic competence in some past historical periods and national literatures than it is in our own. Take Victorian poetry [please--ar ar]. Certainly one criterion must be a certain facility in metrical control and syntactical suppleness. Without a degree of demonstrable mastery in these areas, verse simply was not taken seriously. One can debate whether this was a good or a bad thing, but the point is simply that it was the case. Compare this to, say, the scene of middle-class white American confessional free verse in the 1970s. At best, we are reduced to a demand for "avoidance of cliches," or some other such negative requirement. In fact, this is part of what I want to argue: that positive criteria are increasingly replaced by negative ones. Whereas "euphony" might be an intelligible standard in certain restricted modes, it is by no means to be taken for granted as a relevant concern in all contemporary circles, not even all "mainstream" ones. It is much easier to point out things one should not do in writing poetry than to say what one should do. (In some cases, these negative imperatives can be camouflaged as positive: for example, "use concrete imagery," which translates to "don't be abstract.")

One possible candidate for a contemporary formal/material standard of competence is that which would apply to procedural verse that uses chance operations, like Cagean mesostics or Oulipian "seven-up-or-down"-type exercises. If one does not follow these procedures correctly, one has "failed," so it is tempting to equate them with techniques like meter and rhyme. But such operations generally entail a set of constraints over which the poet exerts no modulating control: they are conditions one accepts as they are from the outset rather than methods one may bend and emend at will. Or, if one does alter the constraints, it is not to produce an immediate aesthetic result, but an arbitrary shift in the conditions of production. Put more simply, one's ability to do the procedure "right" is a matter of following fixed instructions, not of mastering a variable skill. One poet cannot be "slightly" better than another at a purely aleatoric technique; it is done right, or it is not done at all.

A next logical step is to look to procedural methods that incorporate both aleatoric and "intentional" writing. A work like Ron Silliman's Tjanting, which uses the Fibonacci Sequence as an ordering principle, nevertheless contains language that is entirely of the poet's devising. We can imagine, then, a model of competency that measures the successfulness of aleatoric and intentional integration, the level of poetic skill required to balance the two approaches off of each other. But it quickly becomes clear that the standards for evaluation in this case are just as vague as the standards for success in "free verse" composition, since there are no preset, determinate guidelines one can appeal to, as there are in metrical composition.

Let's back up again. In earlier periods of verse production, I have suggested, "competence" is a measurable quantity. But let's look a little more closely at this supposition by complicating it a little. If competence is a baseline value, we should be able to imagine another value that accounts for poets' ability to rise above that baseline. Thus, if a merely competent verse exhibits certain qualities of rhythmic smoothness, controlled diction, and so forth, we would appear to be justified in thinking that the step beyond competence consists in some added quality or ability. This added factor, however, cannot simply be increased competence--hypercompetence, if you will--in metrics or any other mechanical aspect of craft; it must be something that introduces a new evaluative category. Any number of nebulous terms leap up for consideration: genius, feeling, heart, soul, brilliance, panache, pizzazz, oomph, etc. The term I'm going to insert isn't necessarily that much less mystified than any of these, but it does have connotations that make it a bit easier to adapt to a framework based on evaluative coherence. That term is wit.

If it were possible to state the relationship between competence and wit in terms of an equation, it might be something like wit = competence + awareness of the inadequacy of competence. This automatically suggests that irony plays a part in wit. I am not just thinking of irony, however, in the flattened-out sense of sarcasm or "blank" pastiche (though these categories might also be applicable at times). I'm considering irony as a sensibility grounded in various manifestations of negativity, or radical dialectical awareness. Keats' "negative capability" represents one partial apprehension of such awareness, but it is more or less limited to a context of aesthetic appreciation, and its potential for application in praxis is largely unexplored.

In a longer version of this post, I would go back to Classical and Renaissance formulations of wit, and examine their basis in the context of class ideology; here, however, I want to focus on its formal aspects, to the extent that such a narrowing is possible. And it is a fair question how possible this is, since wit depends for much of its power on the notion that it is impossible to define in physical terms. Wit is traditionally what one "just has," a talent that reveals one's innate superiority of imaginative conception--or, at the least, it is an ability that is sporadically and unreliably bestowed upon one as a gift from a mysterious source. Think of Spicer's "dictation," or countless other permutations of the topos of "inspiration."

One of the best expressions of the idea I have in mind is O'Hara's famous bit in "Personism": "As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you." The joke here plays on defeated readerly expectations: O'Hara frames the statement as a discursus on technical form, with a tacit acknowledgment that such things are after all important, but then leaves us with a single reductive formal concept: "tight enough." How tight is tight enough? Or not tight enough? Part of the idea, of course, is that it depends on the body in question, and that there is no one fixed measurement. But the idea is also that even for one body, the requisite tightness is always dependent upon the specific social instance, the tastes of one's prospective bed partners, and other things that are ultimately up to the whims of fate and the poet's intuition. In other words, the "technical apparatus" is both indispensible and ultimately unreliable. The poet who enjoys the greatest advantage is the one who realizes, accepts, and benefits from this unstable condition. The exercise of this advantage, I posit, is wit.

Part of how poetic wit has traditionally worked is by operating against the background of formal stability, but a formal stability that is continually ironized. The heroic couplets of eighteenth-century satire are one of the purest expressions of this approach: every closing rhyme is an elegant deflation, a simultaneous celebration of fine-woven order and an unraveling of that order. The inherent silliness of rhyme as a device accounts for much of the effect, and Byron takes this principle to its extremes in Don Juan in the early nineteenth century, returning to the comically multisyllabic end-rhymes of the Elizabethan epyllion. By contrast, Keats' highly straight-faced exercises in Shakespearean and Miltonian euphony seem to insist on a positive, "sincere" standard of poetic beauty--but the contrast is only apparent. For Keats too exploits the ultimately unbridgable gap between verbal eloquence and lived experience, laying decadent tissues of excess so thickly upon our senses that those senses are finally shut off from access to the poet's actual feelings. What we perceive instead is the well-wrought system of artificial flourishes Keats has constructed as a sensual distraction: his full-ripened pair of pants.

Roughly from modernism onward, however, the formal background has steadily grown hazier and more disordered. It is almost as though the gestures of wit have declared their independence, and go about ironizing not any specific formal apparatuses out of which they emerge individually, but the entire conception of poetic form as a historical fact. This is an overstatement. There are still many poems, and whole styles of poetry, in which the interplay between craft intricacy and the imperfections of human sentiment account for what is valuable in the work. But there is also a great deal of writing in which it is no longer possible to make such distinctions, and in which the "poetic" quality is much more difficult to theorize, as it does not in the first place posit a platform of mechanical competence off of which its motions send it engagingly toppling, or threatening to topple.

Returning to my opening questions, what then are the material features (if any) that differentiate a "competent" poem in a journal like--say--The Denver Quarterly or American Letters and Commentary or, for that matter, Abraham Lincoln from an "incompetent" one? Are the differences entirely relational (even, in extreme cases, based entirely on patterns of social affiliation), rather than concrete? And if so, have I been exaggerating the extent to which the situation was ever otherwise in past historical periods?

These thoughts are obviously still in their formative stages, and there's a lot of slippage and sloppy generalization here. I am interested, nonetheless, in what people think are the constitutive elements, if any, in contemporary formulations of poetic competence and wit, from whatever perspective; I am interested as well in their opinions about the relation I have sketched out between mechanical craft and ironic awareness.