Let Your Poems Be Weird

Poetry Recommendation: “Tomorrow, No, Tomorrower” by Bradley Trumpfheller

Screenshotted from Poetry Foundation to preserve formatting. To read the poem’s text, find it here.

I adore this poem. It gives me permission to be weird. It is kaleidoscopically uncategorizable, simultaneously provoking and resisting interpretation, finding joy and pleasure and play in every detail of language and poetry and yet still transforming my perspective on life. It is, quite simply, a tour de force of contemporary poetry.

I could gush for pages, but I’ll try to focus on a few key elements:

• The poem’s constant play with language and its many rules.
• The poem’s use of page space, and
• The poem’s ability to find joy through its excavation of trauma.

Trumpfheller is constantly playing with language here, making words act in ways that words don’t normally act. These examples alone come from the first stanza: “no-kidding goldishness”, “in lovely w/”, “Cozy becoming the coming-at-the-seams, a couplet / of verbs mid-bodily inexperience.”

What’s with all this wordplay? Why “in lovely” instead of just “in love?” What is “no-kidding goldishness?” Can’t you just say “with” instead of “w/”?

It’s easy to get swept up in the literal here, but there’s a certain joyful irreverence at play in these plays on words, and if I don’t focus too hard on the meaning of any particular word, I find that the speaker is building a personal vocabulary, one of joy and liberation—which is challenged abruptly by this stanza break:

This is what I mean
when I say things like catastrophe.

From here, the poem ping pongs between joy and disaster, exploring the complex ways those two experiences often overlap, but still employing the speaker’s dynamic, rule-breaking vocabulary. I’m particularly keen on how the speaker defines themselves throughout the poem, typically expressed by “you [noun].”

You big good oak limb. You boy / genius. You treeline. You root song. You unchewable bark / but the headache’s gone.

These definitions of the self, fragmented and competing with one another, all occupy their respective contexts as pieces of a collective self-portrait.

In addition to the poem’s play with language, the poem plays with form too, often in ways that feel slightly incomprehensible. Why all the indentations? Why those lines specifically that get indented? I want to give an intelligent answer. I want to point out something about parallelism in the lines of equal indent, or the ways that words are getting emphasized, or the ways that words are made to align with one another. And, maybe something of the sort is happening underneath my radar.

But, truthfully I think what the speaker is doing is queering poetic form the same way they queer language: resisting any sort of thematic or structural unity in the discovery of their own personal form and vocabulary. Perhaps the poem’s indentations ought to be more intentional, but they nonetheless give the poem a sense of shape and movement, a three-dimensional quality that holds space for the speaker’s many selves and emotions.

What these dynamics of language and form produce is a poem that excavates joy out of trauma. The speaker explores their relationship with their mother, their journeys of gender and selfhood, their haunted past and the groundwork it lays for their bright and gorgeous future. I love the poem’s emphasis on joy and wonder throughout. In treating every word as an opportunity for play, we end up with delicious, brilliant turns of phrase like “Hurry up & sunspot, daylilies!” or “C’mon rapture. Let’s go bedazzling.”

The poem is hopeful and joyful in the face of sublime horror. It dances barefoot across a sea of lava. It sings through ash and smoke, and does so with grace and style. Though not every word makes concrete, literal sense, I enter the world of the poem and let its weirdness and ecstasy wash over me, my sense exfoliated from this poet’s radiant, vibrating joy.

Craft Perspective: “‘Make it New… Again.’ Why We Need Alexander Pope’s Wild, Weird Poetry Today” by Ryan Ruby

Read it here, in LitHub.

Did you know the phrases “to err is human” or “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” come from Alexander Pope’s poetry? If you did, you certainly know more than me. Alexander Pope was quite a character of 18th century poetry: pretentious, petty, and monomaniacal, yet a genius in his own right and a master of language and form.

I love this essay for its emphasis on weirdness. Ruby identifies something I’ve often felt about contemporary poetry: it’s emphasis on craft leaves little concession to freedom and strangeness. That’s not to say that craft-focused and highly formal poetry can’t be free and weird, but the literary culture’s obsessions with “the dos and don’ts” forces it to concede strangeness for intentionality, uniqueness for the standards of publication.

Ruby says it best here:

Once considered the gold standard of formal elegance, Pope’s poetry now seems totally bizarre. That is precisely what I like about it. To read The Dunciad in the twenty-first century is [to] ask oneself: why on earth would anyone write like this? And to ask that question is to be immediately confronted by another: why don’t we write this way anymore?

Well, why don’t we? Of course, the standards of poetry have changed quite a bit in the past three centuries. If we still had to write in iambic pentameter to get published, well, I’d give it the old college try, but I wouldn’t feel about poetry the way I do now. Contemporary poetry is great in that it lets me create new relationships with form and language: I admire the formal poetry of yesteryear greatly, and I’ve certainly dabbled in it, but I need language and form to each unlock new ways of understanding and experiencing the world, and I need it to do those things for me on my terms.

This isn’t to say that the contemporary writers of classic forms are antiquated—on the contrary, I’m deeply impressed, and I’m so glad that people are still discovering new things using old forms like terza rima or interlocking rubiyat or a poem in dactylic hexameter. I’m glad those poems can coexist in tandem with poems like Trumpfheller’s.

But Ruby identifies something important, nonetheless. Contemporary poets certainly have distinct voices, but they’re often following the same sets of rules and conventions for what makes poetry “good” and “publishable”—two arbitrary standards somewhat circumscribed by what makes poetry move the reader, but also circumscribed by taste, aesthetics, and the culture at large.

I don’t disagree with most craft rules, and I love a lot of contemporary poets. But, Ruby identifies something I’m starved for: weirdness. I want more of it. More rule breaking, more rough edges, more complexity, more defiance, more irreverence, more sincerity, and more experimentation, regardless of “taste” or “publishability.” And I want those poems published anyway.

Reading Trumpfheller’s poem, I feel like I can give myself permission to be just as weird and experimental. The reader might not understand every decision in the poem, but that doesn’t mean it won’t impact them all the same. I hope this poem and Ruby’s essay give you that same permission to be delightfully, strangely, uniquely yourself. May your next poem be your weirdest poem yet.