Spleen and Ideal: Anti-Poems
by Derick Varn

Entre dos novias
se ama a la que nunca existió
-Nacanor Parra, Artefactos

Form and frustration: those are the two f-words that fuel most poetry. Often both of them lead to muttering another f-word as struggle with our verse. I have pondered using plastic explosives on my computer as I rework stanzas and even had a pencil holocaust after trying to search for the perfect verb. Form and frustration habitually direct writers to an abstract approach to writing.

Parra's aphorism translated means: "Given two women, you'd love the one that didn't exist." Once I read that Percy Bysshe Shelly thought that the poem one writes is never as good as the one in one's head. Many writers feel the brunt of the same curse. This is where Parra's little maxim comes in. The poem in your head never exists, it's an illusion. Comparing your poems to your ideals leads to more frustration than envisioning your significant order as one of those heavily air-brushed erotica stars.

The formulas of the -isms don't help this. Surrealism, New Formalism, and Imagism all provide helpful forms for your poetry, but it also leads you to those illusional poetry ideals. This is part of why Parra endorsed the destruction of idealized poetics with his anti-poetry. At the same time many of the Beats were breaking down American poetry, anti-poetry was fragmenting Latin America's extremely formal traditions.

Your hands write as much as your head does. Creating is an act, not an ideal. All good poetry has a sense of action. Your hands know this. Anti-poets are still poets. They see life as action and incorporate form. When you see ideals as life and incorporate action, you will never be satisfied with your work.

Derick Varn is a poet and longstanding contributor to Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.