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epitome of incomprehensibility
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This is about celebrity poetry and trees.
I was thinking about the first of the two recently. People might buy poetry by celebrities just because of the author's fame - fame derived from other sources than writing. Often the poetry won't be great, partly because a) it doesn't have to be for it to sell, and b) the person doesn't have that much writing experience.
This won't always be the case, but I was thinking of what Rachel Oates said in a review of Gabbie Hanna's second poetry book sometime last year. I saw part of the video earlier this week - wasting time on YouTube, I was. Anyway, the two people in question both make content there; the second is more famous. Audience reactions to Oates' video included arguments about whether Hanna was just cashing in on her unrelated-to-writing popularity and whether Oates was being too harsh.
In my opinion? Both. I thought Oates exaggerated the problems with the parts she found bad, which isn't the tone you'd take in a poetry workshop. Even a published written review would probably be more subdued.
But... THIS. IS. YOUTUBE! (said in a "This is Sparta!" voice, now that we're being memey).
In any case, a couple of things she said stuck with me. The poems I saw could have used more editing. Oates said that they seemed like thoughts or rambles rather than poems; poetic technique was nonexistent or its potential left unused.
Now, you could go overboard with this kind of argument. Do you have to study poetry in school to write it well? Do you have to be academic about it? No. Not necessarily. But I'd argue it generally takes time and effort. I've had moments where I've stumbled on a good line without really realizing it, or half_asleep_thoughts create one, but that tends to happen more if I've spent time working on writing in the recent past. Or reading good writing.
Anyway, concerning Gabbie Hanna's Dandelion (the name of the book), what's good and bad about poetry is partly subjective (subjectively, I'm inclined to like dandelions - root for the underflower! (though I've never been able to make dandelion roots into anything - too much work to clean)) aaaaand you can say that a conversational tone is a tone, as with the mess I made of my parentheses above.
But still, I agreed with Oates that some of the poems she showed onscreen were boring. They felt JUST like conversation and not like poems.
That's also how I felt reading tiny bits from Olivia Harrison's poetry book Came the Lightening - the ones in a Montreal Gazette article about it. This Harrison was married to the late George Harrison of The Beatles. So it's not exactly the same situation as the above: a bigger celebrity, but the writer isn't the famous person herself.
Still, the lines seemed kind of talky, kind of predictable. More interesting to me were the quotes from the interview where she talked about him, his entourage, and their son.
Until I came to this quote near the end, concerning trees: "My constant source of comfort, my oldest, tallest friends."
Constant source of comfort? Meh. But those last four words! Something about the juxtaposition of "oldest" and "tallest" gets me. And trees being one's friends. Lighthearted and serious, abstract and imagistic, all at once. Plus the idea of the garden trees being companions of a couple, a family, of them being a symbol of remembrance when a person dies.
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