Critical cliché: What's "at risk" in a poem?

When we’re not crafting our own poems, stories, or essays, we creative writers can be a remarkably uncreative bunch—and this is never more obvious than when we’re talking about writing.

It is ironic indeed that in conversations about our creative output, we very quickly devolve into clichés. We often use imprecise language and insular code, and neither tendency reveals any great insight about the art.

My least favorite concept when discussing writing is the “risk” a poem takes. The idea, of course, is nonsensical; poems are shapes on a page. They have no corporeal reality; they own nothing. There is nothing for a poem to risk.

There may be risk for a poet, of course. Some poems go into very dark territory, and the cost to the writer can dear. But I would maintain that the poet’s interior processes do not belong on the table in a workshop. Whether or not a poem was hard to write is an assessment exterior to the poem, and it’s irrelevant to a discussion of its effectiveness.

I would also argue that risk is not something a reader can discern from the poem. A poem that may appear very confessional and risky from a reader’s perspective may have cost the writer nothing at all; the idea of risk is a projection in this case. Likewise, a poem that seems very benign to a reader may have posed extreme difficulty for the writer. We’d have to be in the writer’s head to know.

I have observed that the writing gets easier, both in its technical aspects and in my ability to approach subjects that cause pain. My “risk” is reduced, even as I continue to try to go deeper and to cover new ground. Sometimes I’m surprised by what still has the capacity to hurt me. But that’s a deeply personal subject, and it exists apart from the poem.

On a related note, discussions of poetry frequently address what’s “at stake.” This idea is certainly appropriate, and even necessary, in discussions of fiction, where characters are engaged in conflict and face potential loss if they fail. Increasing the stakes also increases the narrative tension. However, in poetry, this phrase is a bit floppy. Does a poem feel important? That’s a slightly different question than to ask if anything is “at stake.” Inquiring about the stakes makes sense if one’s poetic exemplar is Robert Service—but I don’t actually know any poets like that.

I remember once in a workshop reading a poem about a person’s kitchen. The poem described what the kitchen looked like—the colors, what was on the table, the hum of the fridge. But in this poem—a failed poem, in my opinion—there was no particular reason to be cataloguing the contents of the kitchen. It was just a kitchen—kind of yellow, a bowl of fruit, the end. We could perhaps say that nothing is “at stake” in the poem, and we wouldn’t be wrong—but the phrase is a little too loosey-goosey to allow us to arrive at any enhanced understanding of the piece. That poem failed because it wasn’t connected to any particular consciousness—there was no sense of who occupied that kitchen. Falling back on coded language about stakes muddies our meaning. The kitchen does not need to be yellower; the fruit doesn’t need to be bigger.

I believe some people use the risk idea to get at a certain boldness of approach. Any aspect of a poem can go awry, from the form to the rhetoric to the syntax to the imagery, and some of those aspects are difficult and unexpected. Maybe the notion that a poem can crash and burn if something goes wrong feels like risk.

I’ve also heard people say that a poem risks something specific, usually sentimentality. Sentiment certainly does turn off some contemporary readers, who have ceded the turf of love, or faith, or hope, or even, I dunno, dogs, for heaven’ sake. They insist that the world doesn’t need your dog poem, so maybe writing one is perceived to be risky. Personally, I don’t see a lot of risk in turning off a reader who doesn’t care for my subject matter or my approach. A healthier mindset may just be that the risk is theirs, and if they aren’t open to reading my sentiments, they miss out on the poem. As the poet, I just have to work with what refuses to be ignored, and sometimes that’s something like love.

What do we mean when we use these shorthand terms, “risk” and “stakes”? That’s the key question, and it’s where the conversation starts. Workshop clichés presume that we’re all on the same page, and I’m not so sure that we are. If we do mean to talk about some reality, some pain, within the writer, well, then, that’s a conversation I don’t plan to participate in. I have no intention of weighing the value of my suffering, or its lack, in my art.