Mission to find poetry’s meaning

A novel fits between its covers. An essay must be as exact as a blade. An article clings… A novel fits between its covers. An essay must be as exact as a blade. An article clings comfortably to the page it’s printed on, but the poem has no home.

There is no one format, no one place and no one moment to which any of us can point and say with absolute certainty, “This is poetry.” We settle for agreeing among ourselves that these writers are poets and these lines make a poem, but no one can say definitively what it is to be a poet or a poem.

In attempting to do so, it seems best to focus on the lives and works of the poets themselves.

One Pittsburgh poet, though, isn’t even talking. The Dirty Poet “guerrilla publishes” his own lines, plastering them to bus stop poles and sundry other makeshift public venues. He writes his lines, signs them The Dirty Poet and below that he puts his e-mail address, ourtwocents@mindspring.com.

I first encountered The Dirty Poet’s handiwork while waiting for a bus near the Carnegie Library on Forbes. I skimmed the poem, saw the e-mail address, copied it down and hopped on my bus. I e-mailed our local Zorro poet figure hoping he’d drop his mask for The Pitt News.

He refused. All he gave me was a suggestion to look around the intersection of Forbes and Craig for more poems and the permission to mention that some guy is posting his poetry – and he did offer to allow me to run a poem in its entirety.

Even in silence, The Dirty Poet adds a level of intensity to the dialogue. Can anyone with a printer, some tape and an e-mail account be a poet? What does it mean to be one? Do we ourselves have the right to dictate who is and who is not a poet?

Sean Capperis offers a useful definition: “To be a poet is really to be sincerely yourself.” I met with Capperis and his friend and fellow poet, Claire Donato, at an uncomfortably hip cafe in Shadyside. We sat on some unnecessarily cool furniture. I sipped my Earl Grey tea and tried to pry the soul of poetry from these two Pitt students.

When I turned the discussion to the quality of poetry, Capperis again stepped up with a solid answer. He said that it wasn’t a question of “good or “bad” poetry but effective poetry.” If poetry is to be measured by its effectiveness, then it seemed to me that the poem’s whole meaning rests with the audience.

Capperis seemed to dig my interpretation of his words and added, “The reader is the person making the meaning, not the writer.” This brought up the question of the writer’s role. If the reader is making the meaning, what’s the writer doing?

We seemed to agree that it all came down to controlling ambiguity. Capperis clarified that “There is no room in poetry for ambiguous craft.” Donato added, “You can craft ambiguous poetry.”

By this point our poetry discussion was feeling a bit forced, so we disbanded and I followed up by e-mail, extracting more from both of them. Donato added some clarity to the discussion about the relationship between the poet and his reader:

“Effective poetry allows the reader to come up with his or her own interpretations. As a reader myself, I feel like it’s my duty to unravel pieces, layer by layer, even if the layers that I find seem to be really unusual. On the flip side, a reader can only come up with so much if a poem isn’t crafted well or without depth.”

So far, it’d seem that poetry exists in a space between the writer and the reader or listener, and a real poet is someone who sends as much of himself as possible into that shared realm. But there’s one more question that could provide quite a lot of insight: What should a poet aim for?

Capperis answers, “I think that real success happens when I have created a poem that is both uncompromisingly myself and displays a sort of fresh intensity.”

For information about Supernova, a reading series that Capperis and Donato are involved in check out: www.supernovaseries.blogspot.com. E-mail Zak Sharif at rzs8@pitt.edu to perform on his local stage.