Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
Exposition Kills Poetry
Most exposition is an
imposition
Like the supervisor who
shadows you
Babbling incessantly needless
admonition
Blocking your work so that nothing
gets through
Respect your verse, how it
dreams, how it flows
Your poetry is your will,
your work, your way
But if you have to explain it
in prose
Your verse is left with
nothing at all to say
Your poem is in itself your exhibition
Of art – so ditch the cluttery
exposition
So, like, you know, what I’m
saying here is don’t talk about your poetry because that’s talking about work
instead of getting it done and if you have to explain to the reader what your
poem means you’re not allowing the poem to be true to itself and so why attempt
the discipline of meter, rhyme, metaphor, simile, narrative flow, and the many
other elements of poesy if you’re just going to repeat in prose what the meter,
rhyme, metaphor, simile, narrative flow, and the many other elements of poesy should
be doing if you have crafted your work with artistry as well as imagination
because exposition implies that either you don’t respect your work and your
reader or that you have been deliberately obscure in your verse which in the
event is pointless because a poem is itself, it is supposed to communicate an
idea, a dream, a hope and not simply flounder about as a soup of disconnected
words in a sort of the king’s new clothes of deception which is patronizing and
not clever at all because if a reader who is reasonably well read and
understands an age-appropriate catalogue of literary, cultural, historical, and
artistic allusion to make connections then you have failed the reader and,
worse, failed your own attempts at poetic art.
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