“you may not understand my poem”

today i received yet ANOTHER submission from someone who told us, in hisher cover letter, that i “may not understand [hisher] poem, but…”  whenever i read something like this i have an urge to slap my own face.  it all comes with the territory of being an editor, but telling an editor that they might not understand your work is GODAWFULLY PRETENTIOUS AND OFF-PUTTING.  a few points.

1. saying an editor may not understand your poem is unnecessary.  it is like giving an art show and warning each person at the door that they may not understand your paintings.  in the plebe world it is like giving someone a massage and telling them they may not understand the happy ending.  maybe in highbrow writing schools there is someone who tells poets that their poems must be entirely comprehensible to be good and these poets who include this in their cover letters are in rebellion against them.  i don’t know.  i don’t care.  i’m just saying: you don’t need to say it.
2. one of the reasons you don’t need to say it is that any poet who goes out of hisher way to tell someone hisher poem might not be understandable is because a.) heshe has already had an averse reaction to the poem or b.) heshe deliberately made it incomprehensible.

   a.) is far less likely, but is impossible to tell until one reads the poem.  in this case, i tell the poet, grow some nuts and keep submitting- most people don’t get poetry to begin with, and that is why poets starve, because poetry books are not Jackie Collins bestsellers.

   b.) is far more likely, and this disturbs me.  making your poem deliberately incomprehensible is both annoying and the mark of an amateur.  there’s plenty of room for mystery in poetry.  the conciseness of a poem is, in itself, one way to shroud something in such a manner.  but by having the goal of writing an incomprehensible poem in mind when you start to write a poem, you are not even writing bad poetry- you are writing no poetry at all.

3. last, but not least, truly good poetry stands on its own, no matter how many of its themes or words are unrecognizable to the reader.  when i first read “epithalamion” by e.e. cummings, i was dazzled by it, despite not knowing what words like “chryselephantine” meant.  since i am a good reader, i looked it up.  that is what a person is supposed to do if they do not know what something means.  a good poet supposes this, and with good reason.  heshe writes hisher poem freely, without taking into account the audience.  the poet who engages in #2 on this list is thinking only of befuddling hisher audience and therefore not writing freely.

i will sum up this entry with a quote my father likes to throw around: “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”  in our case, if you can’t dazzle us with brilliance, keep your bullshit to yourself.

cheers, and i hope everyone is having a lovely spring.