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6 December 2004. In my 3 December entry, I listed 10 things I look for in my evaluation of a poem. Later I remembered an eleventh: evidence of mechanical dexterity--the dexterity required for getting one's meter right if complicated formal forms of poetry, and all one's rhymes in the right place without grotesque inversions or the like, for instance. This is not trivial, expecially for those of us who have tried to construct formal poems and know from the inside how difficult it is. It's akin to watching a brilliant baseball player make an amazing catch, or a top-notch tennis player reach a ball that seems three feet past him and return it for a winner, or--most vividly, a champion juggler keep ten or fifteen dishes and vases in the air at the same time. It's not genuinely art, though, proof of what human beings at their best can do with their bodies.
Cleverness, a twelfth element of a poem that can contribute to its final value is the mental equivalent of mechanical dexterity. One admires the ability involved in the world-class pun, for example; but the world-class pun doesn't
lodge deep in most person's last consciousnesses. Hence, the inability of light verse to be taken seriously. In a poem with many of the higher virtues I've listed, though, both mechanical dexterity and cleverness can make significant contributions to the final excellence of the poem. I leave out "wisdom," by the way, because I consider it included in subject matter, and archetypality--and--probably--in most of the other things on my list.
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