Decomposition at the Cottage
By Jim Coleman
Sun contributor
Cottages have piles of crossword puzzle books, boxes of revered games, and dog-eared novels slouched in pine-board bookcases. A good addition to these summer amusements might be poet W.D. Snodgrass’s De/ Compositions (Graywolf, 2001). T.S. Eliot remarked that poetry was “a superior amusement,” and Snodgrass’s book is in that vein. It could fill a good stretch of languid summer time, and some winter moments before a crackling wood stove, for that matter.
W.D. Snodgrass was a Michigan poet when he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for Heart’s Needle, and he is the author of my favorite lyric poem, “April Inventory.” His De/ Composition draws on his lifetime devotion to poetic craft to study how to make good poems into bad ones. The book is subtitled “101 good poems gone wrong.” Will this pursuit catch on? Will the clack of Scrabble tiles be replaced by the scritch-scratch of de-composition on summer evenings? Probably not, and yet there is something seductive about watching Snodgrass take a poem and ruin it. Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” becomes “Raccoon Time.” Why is this first title right, and the second notoriously bad? De/ Composition presents us with many such mysteries, and explores the awfulness of the almost-right, and the humor inherent in the sentimental or the cloying.
Snodgrass breaks the book into five sections; each section indicates the type of violation to be perpetrated upon some good poems. Poems fail, the book argues and demonstrates, by being abstract instead of concrete. Secondly, they crash for the reader when the language carries undercurrents unintended by the author. Next, we can observe that they fail when the “voice” isn’t honed, and they annoy rather than please when their “music” is out of tune, just like an off-key voice in the choir.
Finally, poems try our patience when they miss the mark, even by a little, structurally or climactically. Snodgrass produces dazzling doozies of De/ composition to illustrate.
Is it time for you to make a hash of Tennyson, or to write your improved Shakespeare? Is this “superior amazement” just waiting to fill your idle hours, when the sun’s too hot or the jet ski is out of gas? Snodgrass suggests that “the secret of being perfectly dull is to answer all the questions.” Do you want to practice deep-sizing poems of mystery and the tragic with your bold rewrites? Is that a way to while away a summer hour?
Snodgrass insists that paraphrase does not capture the poem. Here are two pairs of lines, the first from William Carlos Williams’s “Nantucket,” the second a Snodgrass De/ composition. Notice how easy it is to lose the feel of the poem. It is gone in an instant in the second version:
1) Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow
2) Flowers through the open window
purple and golden
Or perhaps you prefer the second version? Why would you? Such are the questions Snodgrass’s 101 De/ compositions raise. Try your own version of #1, and see if you can improve the original.
Here are a couple of lines from John Berryman, followed by De/ composition:
I am the little man who smokes and smokes
I am the girl who does now better but.
I am the ordinary man with unhealthy addictions.
I am a young woman who does things against her conscience.
If in both sets of examples, you like the second version better absolutely, search around for your game of Sorry, or fix the tractor. De/ composition is not for you.