In today’s online article at Books & Culture, Marcus Goodyear explains a new poetry game on Twitter where poets tweet lines of poetry on a particular topic in an effort to outwit each other. The purpose, Goodyear remarks, is to remind us that poetry is fun:
In the end, Tweet Speak Poetry is more than a game, it is a philosophy of poetry as a game. The rules and resources of the game are mostly decided by the rules and resources of poetry itself. Sometimes our attempts to study poetry in university settings can take the joy out it. We forget how to play with T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” and try instead to wrestle the meaning from it. If we play poetry at all, we treat the poem like an opponent, to be pummelled into submission. If we are to win, the poem must lose.
Applying game theory to poetry has helped us rediscover the fun of it—using our wits, exploring language through social media, imposing new boundaries on ourselves, and reminding ourselves that the outcome of the game is simple: more people who love poetry and write poetry.
Most of all, though, playing poetry games gives us permission to be silly again. We love T. S. Eliot, but we also love W. H. Auden. We love Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson and Julia Kasdorf and Scott Cairns and Luci Shaw, but we also love Shel Silverstein. We can’t be serious and disciplined about something if we forget how to play.
I don’t see any problem with this as a game. After all, some of Donne’s early poems and John Wilmot’s epigrams are mostly playful witticisms. However, as “a philosophy of poetry,” it is woefully inadequate.
I’ll have more to say on poetry and Twitter later this month at Public Discourse, but in the meantime: the idea that poetry is nothing but a game is to ignore, or at least minimize, the moral nature of poetry. This view of poetry often goes hand in hand with a purely materialistic view of reality that reduces the self, love, good and evil to the neuron firings of the brain. According to this view, if love, good and evil do not really exist, it is naive for the poet to write about them. What is left for the poet to do is to play word games that produce immediate pleasure via witticisms or jeux de mots. Frank O’Hara espoused this view in part when he said that it was most important for a poet to be “not boring.”
A better philosophy of poetry would explain that the pleasure poetry produces is not found in witticisms alone, but also in the truth that it expresses about who we are, or the nature of goodness or evil. Otherwise, the poem is merely technique, devoid of anything human. Yes, poetry can often function like a game (as Hans-Georg Gadamer has pointed out), but it is also much more than one.
January 14th, 2011 | 2:09 pm
Micah, this is the beginning of a discussion that I will follow with rapt attention. I hope you look into the possibility of a moral dimension in games, too.
January 14th, 2011 | 2:55 pm
Hi Aaron:
Good remark. If by “moral dimension” you mean that there are rules, you’re right. Games always have certain rules, and these rules must be followed in order for a game to function. These rules, however, can be either moral or immoral. There are games that require its participants to do certain things that are immoral or wrong. (Which is why I think you used the word “possibility”). But if the rules of the game reflect the higher-order rules of God, then, yes, a game can be moral, too. Though, most folks who espouse the poetry-as-a-game view of poetry hold to an epistemological relativism that scorns such higher-order rules (excluding Mr. Goodyear, of course). Hence, my point that poetry *can* be considered a game, but it cannot be reduced to being only a game.
I will actually touch on this issue of natural rules in my article for Public Discourse.
January 14th, 2011 | 6:52 pm
I don’t believe poetry is a game either, but I did create an experiment to see what would happen if everyone contributed to a poem collectively, and the best line wins. http://www.SumPoem.com Still trying to get traffic to see it in action, though!
January 15th, 2011 | 5:10 pm
Fun idea, Dan, but I wish I didn’t have to sign up for an account and agree to the terms and conditions first. That’s kinda a hassle in order to submit one line of poetry.
January 15th, 2011 | 9:48 pm
Micah, thanks for referencing the article. You make some good points. When I talk about poetry being a game, I don’t mean that in a small way. Games can be filled with common grace. As you say in your comment, they can reflect the higher order rules of God. They should be moral in themselves.
Really, what I’m pushing for is much more than just witticisms. I’m hoping for poetry to receive a renewed sense of leisure and play. Games seem to be one of the current ways that we experience play in our culture. Some of them are very unhealthy, as you say. But others are not.
January 16th, 2011 | 10:07 am
For more than a year, I edited the lines submitted in the TweetSpeak poetry jams on Twitter into poems. It was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done – to make some sense out of what often seemed less like lines of poetry and more like the chaos of 20 or 30 human minds interacting almost simultaneously. Order was brought out of chaos, and it surprisingly ended up being a moral order. It turned out, at least for the editor, that a poetry game resulted in a higher moral purpose.
Some of the poems ended up as pure fun; others became something striking, often arresting. And while many of the participants come to TweetSpeak for fun (and possibly online fellowship), they also come with faith and a sense of who they are as creatures made in the image of God.
January 16th, 2011 | 4:07 pm
this is (or at least reads to me like) one of those “arguments” where you seem to be taking issue with something Goodyear never actually said. Having a philosophy of poetry as a game is not the same thing as having a philosophy of poetry as “nothing but a game.” How did you make that leap, exactly…? Claiming that Goodyear’s philosophy of poetry is inadequate or that engaging in poetry as a game somehow ignores or diminishes poetry’s moral truth is pretty much like saying writing a structured poem such as a sonnet diminishes its moral truth. Truth of any kind -moral or amoral- comes from the intentionality of the person expressing himself. or in the case of TweetSpeak Poetry, people expressing themselves. If the poetry-as-a-game philosophy was conceieved of a desire to engage more people in the joy and beauty of poetry, I really struggle to see the validity of your claim that it is inferior because it is devoid anything human.
January 16th, 2011 | 6:59 pm
Isn’t “playing” human? Or does God not allow that?
January 16th, 2011 | 7:41 pm
Dana–
Thanks for your comment. To say that Tweet Speak Poetry is “a philosophy of poetry as a game” is to say that it understands poetry as a specie of the genus “game.” Gadamer’s “Relevance of the Beautiful” is the most extensive examination of art as a game, and, while it is interesting, I don’t find it convincing. Better is Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism.
Of course, given what you and Glynn have said about the project, perhaps Tweet Speak Poetry does not espouse a poetry-as-game philosophy after all, but understands it to be an intellectual craft, albeit a collective one.
January 16th, 2011 | 9:56 pm
I still to fail to see how something cannot be both poetry and a game. Or how there can possibly be an idea of what a superior philosophy of poetry is. Poetry is human expression which involves forms both structured and unstructured, individual and communal, elaborate and spare, artistic and utilitarian. The need to assign value to any of these forms declaring some to be better than others is, well, not a need that I have, I suppose… at any rate, regardless of the reactions of Glynn or myself, MG himself said at the begining of the explanation of TSP you quoted here that it is “more than a game.”
January 17th, 2011 | 2:10 pm
I find this very interesting, and the expose of bad philosophies, and how they can shape bad views of poetry, is important. I agree with a previous comment, though, that it seemed a bit unfair to suggest or insinuate that Marcus was influenced by this materialistic worldview or that his playful project was rooted in some pagan notion. You know he is not a secular naturalist, so why not clarify that you are writing something that his piece brought to mind, but is unrelated to his own position. Good conversation demands getting the views of one’s conversation partners right, and this ended up seeming to me to be a huge non-sequitur.
January 17th, 2011 | 2:20 pm
It’s interesting to me to think of poetry as a game. Even though I’m not much of a game person on the surface.
I always pictured what we were (and are) doing on Twitter as more of a celebration, even a party. So it fascinated me to see Marcus frame it as a game. I could see his point even though I come with a different mindset.
Perhaps the whole thing is best understood on a continuum. We play (party?) on Twitter and this is a form of communal poetry-speak (a gift to the participants during the real-time they experience it). Then larger poems come out of these Twitter-poems (Glynn or other participants reweave the bits and post them on Tweetspeak or elsewhere). Some of the poems are just “okay.” Some are stunning, in how they express truth and beauty.
The Twitter experience is like communal free writing evening. It is a beginning. Or, for the person who never experiences anything of it beyond that evening, it is an end— a more poetic one than perhaps he or she expected for an ordinary night. :)
Thanks for writing about us. Your thinking adds to the conversation. And we love conversation.
January 18th, 2011 | 6:27 am
Byron–
It certainly was not my purpose to imply that Marcus was espousing a materialistic view of poetry, which I noted in one of the previous comments.
However, what I did want to point out was that this view of poetry as a game is one that has developed in the 20th century, and it is indeed indebted to a relativistic, materialistic worldview. I think that as Christians we can certainly “redeem” certain non-Christian ideas, and that does seem to be what Marcus is trying to do in his Books & Culture piece, and I do owe, and have given him, an apology for not acknowledging that effort in my piece. Yet, if we are going to engage such an effort, we need to clearly distinguish our views from non-Christian ones. The notion of art or poetry as play or a game has a lot of baggage and a number of serious problems from a Christian perspective. I don’t have time to explain them all here, but some of the them at least will be made clear in a later piece for Public Discourse.
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