abstractions in poetry

Abstraction, as often criticised in poetry, isn't really just the opposite of 'concrete'. It tends to me you've given the reader something heavy to lift and not put a handle on it. Abstracts have to be made explicable in some fashion such as detail, application, point of view, analogy or imagery.

*shrugs* Critiques are very much matters of opinion. Too abstract for one is just enough for another. If the poem you want to write is on the abstract and written abstractly then that's the poem you should write. There is always someone that will get it and enjoy your writing. Just look at critique threads in general -one person thinks it's brilliant, the other thinks it'a all crap. There is no satisfying everyone...

I'm not a fan of abstractions.
A poem that isn't easy to understand and makes me think hard to even guess at the meaning is too much like a riddle. I'll read a line or two and quickly get bored with the piece.
In fact, I find a poem containing abstract metaphores, similies, etc. just plain hard work.
(And I'm not a fan of any kind of work.)
e.g. Dylan Thomas may well have been a clever poet but I don't get much enjoyment from reading most of his work because I just can't be bothered to try and translate the meanings into plain English.
I'm no good at crosswords either...

A poem designed to be abstract cannot be criticized for its use of abstraction, so long as the abstraction serves its purpose within the realm of the poem. (throw you off yet?) Now if the poem's central tool isn't the abstract, but for some reason hinges primarily upon an abstract descriptor/tion you risk damaging the strength of the poem. This is the paradox (not really) of careful diction. Nine times out of ten there is some way to produce the same effect with a different tool or wording, so look hard at each individual poem itself and figure out if the abstraction serves a purpose, or drags the work down.

Driving me to abstraction

What is the poet's purpose?

Is it to confuse? To astound with clever words? Or is it to communicate something felt or known?

Whatever the goal, use the tools at hand. If you are actually trying to communicate, the work stands or falls on the result no less than the craft used. If you fail to transfer the image/thought/feeling from your head to mine, what was the point? If abstract images do it for you, use them well. Create a montage which paints a larger picture out of smaller ones.

As to abstractions themselves, what the heck is an abstraction? Are you talking about; LOVE, JUSTICE, HATE and other capital letter abstract nouns or something else?

An abstraction is pretty much anything other than an object or the action of an object.

Objects and actions are very widely understood because we can make sure we all agree about what they are by pointing at them. We can say 'chair' and immediately have a rough idea what the topic is.

You might think the same would be true of dignity, love or anguish. But thousands of emo poems seem to suggest otherwise.

Chair, wooden, yellow, wicker is concrete

pain, anguish, extreme, hurt is abstract

The true joy, IMHO, is somewhere between. Even if I can picture the chair, why do I care about it? Even if I accept the writer is in abject anguish -- without knowing who they are and why they suffer, why do I care?

If the chair was the one in which the poet's dead mother once habitually sat, perhaps we are getting somewhere.

Why do people complain more about overly abstract poems than overly concrete ones? Because there are vastly more overly abstract poems out there than overly concrete ones. And, I believe, because the abstract is often rapidly implicit in even the most concrete subject--the reader brings their own abstract emotion in every reading.

e.g.

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold



The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


I would argue that is it a greater failure for the poet to neglect the concrete than to neglect the abstract but in a perfect world the dichotomy between the two fades away altogether:

(NB, 'seasons' are an abstraction of concrete changes in temperature and nature, the 'child' is a reification of the message to abstract 'youth' in general. The poem starts being about leaves and ends up being about mortality. This is the very poem that first made me want to write poetry.)

Spring and Fall, to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.



p.s. examples from William Carlos Williams and Gerard Manley Hopkins
p.s.s. but what would I know?

Your quite right, the first two are WCW, I was having a brainfart -- hey it's friday. I'll edit and correct.

There's something of a double standard applied to abstraction-- poets who are not well-established can't seem to get away with them, poets who are well-established seem to be able to sneak them by.

If one looks at poetry in a broad sense, its primary engines are image/metaphor, diction, and rhetoric. Abstraction simply cannot exist in the first, and poems that work with the third alone are often vacuous and boring. So, should one choose to work with abstraction, the "wroughtness" of the language is if paramount importance.

What I have found is that newer poets tend to think that the choices they have made with regards to diction are fresh when they simply aren't. I think working on an abstract plain takes considerable skill; I know it when I see it and I know that I don't have it. Few do-- even those mid-career poets working in the finest journals often pull up lame when they attempt to depart from image and metaphor.

Bottom line: If you want to be abstract, your diction, your sense of the poem as a thing made or constructed, must be exquisite.