Reading most of the new contemporary translations of the poems "Poet in New York" ("Poeta en Nueva York") by Frederico Garcia Lorca, one would hardly assume they were all about New York. That's the ultimate power of poetry, the sincere manipulation of reality, which is often forgotten in learning about the gritty mechanics of sonics, meter, diction, and imagery.
The community at the Poetry Free-For-All likes to teach that a poem is not good because of its subject, and because they're so intent on their method of "tough love" in training inexperienced poets (which is more like "condescending discouragement"), this rule is stressed to the point where the subject and atmosphere of a poem are inadvertently pushed to the background by all the things real poets do, such as imagery, elegant lists of household objects, and the mentioning of flowers most people haven't heard of.
Not to say the poetry published in today's most prestigious magazines isn't skilled. But what is skill if it's nothing to read? Look at the poem "Soundings" by Robert Wrigley, a poem randomly selected from Poetry Magazine: The birdhouse made from a gourd is wired / to a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast post / of the shack. Very fluid and exact description of a birdhouse. But two and a half lines were just expended on a description of how a birdhouse is hanging from a shack, an amount of detail of questionable importance to the poem.
Who would read this poem? Not even old people would read this poem. Old poets would. It's not up to anyone but Robert Wrigley to criticize who Robert Wrigley chooses to write for, but poems such as this fit the standard of what Poetry and the other most prestigious publishers of English poetry publish. The most esteemed contemporary poets sound nothing like this. Ted Hughes is sharp, atmospheric, poignant, and, most importantly, adored by the poetic community. Billy Collins is simple, fluid, and ponderous and he's one of the most popular poets alive today. So why, when new poetry must be published, is there a lack of, or even a rejection of, poetry that pushes boundaries?
This post really isn't meant to conclude anything, but to finish off, Lorca can be brought back into focus. In "Poet in New York," Lorca creates a body of poetry that culminates into its own grim, breathtaking, and inherently mysterious atmosphere. Great Depression-age New York is transformed into several images of Hell. Not only the general tone, atmosphere, and imagery have this power, but the language itself. Stumbling onto my face, different every day. / Murdered by the sky! he writes in "Back from a Walk." In "Dawn," he writes Dawn in New York / has four columns of filth / and a hurricane of black doves / splashing in putrid waters. He brushes the edge of sensationalism but has already characterized a dirty setting in four lines.
Lorca takes the real and morphs it into his emotions. He creates a universe through verse. And his words get to the damn point instead of lingering over their own sense of significance. What one can question is why poetry is not encouraged to be more like this: clear and emotionally moving rather than built on its own obsession with the craft. To quote Nietzsche, "Deep people strive for clarity; people who wish to appear deep strive for obscurity."
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