ecargo20 Apr 2006

If by "ordinary" language you mean simple language--well, to an extent, you're already doing that. And it's WHY you've improved so much in my opinion. Even this poem--yes, there are places where you 'commit acts of poetry' (a capital crime), but much of it is pretty simply stated. Most of the best lines are, anyway: "How many times I have bargained, drunk with God
To take this lust - I'll plead again tomorrow."

Here's what Louise Gluck, the former Poet Laureate in the U.S., said on the topic of ordinary--well, simple--language.

"The axiom is that the mark of poetic intelligence or vocation is passion for language, which is thought to mean delirious response to language’s smallest communicative unit: to the word. The poet is supposed to be the person who can’t get enough of words like "incarnadine." This was not my experience. From the time, at four or five or six, I first started reading poems, first thought of the poets I read as my companions, my predecessors – from the beginning I preferred the simplest vocabulary. What fascinated me were the possibilities of context. What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise; such language, in being generic, is likely to contain the greatest and most dramatic variety of meaning within individual words. I liked scale, but I liked it invisible. I loved those poems that seemed so small on the page but that swelled in the mind; I didn’t like the windy, dwindling kind. Not surprisingly, the sort of sentence I was drawn to, which reflected these tastes and native habit of mind, was paradox, which has the added advantage of nicely rescuing the dogmatic nature from a too moralizing rhetoric."

[From Louise Glück, "Education of the Poet," Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (New York: Ecco, 1994) 4-5.]

Gluck's not the final word on the topic, obviously--she's talking about her own experience, and certainly there's room for variation and experimentation. But there's something to be said for creating magic from common cloth. The trick to it is making simple, ordinary language seem fresh and your own, and using all the other poetic techniques--meter and the way the words play together--to make it something special. That's something not too many people can pull off, IMO--but it's worth striving for, I think.