A Note on (or against) Sentiment

No more dim land of peace, please.

Carol Rumens’ Poem of the week on the Guardian this week is ‘Find Me’ by Shanta Acharya. It’s a ghazal, not a form I’m mad about, to be honest, but for the most part it’s well done, and it’s topical, but I found myself metaphorically choking on the phrase ‘forsaken cities of grief’ for some reason, and I’ve been trying to work out why.

On an immediate level, it reminds me forcibly of Ford Maddox Ford’s ‘dim lands of peace’ and its place as a negative instance in the development of Imagism, which is to say, it’s to abstract to work. In a comment on Carol’s article, I described it as ‘too generic’; while the words used by Acharya are all concrete enough individually, placed together in this order they fail to evoke a specific world. Rather than pointing at the moon, the phrase waves its hands in some vague direction or another.

And while in this instance, the abstraction is something of an anomaly in an otherwise quite focused poem, its not unusual to find ‘poems’ that are built almost entirely out of such phrases. Such poems are often well-meaning ‘issue driven’ pieces, but they fail to engage the reader as poetry. Poems invite the reader to create meaning along with the poet. They deal in images, ideas, cadences and emotions, but these generic phrases are a shadow of these things, a pale imitation. They deal with sentiment, not feeling.

And this is one reason why sentiment is anathema to poetry; poetry demands a precision of language and perception that annihilates sentiment; sentiment is cheap explanation, poetry is restless, relentless questioning. It is not the job of poetry to tell you how to feel or what to think (which is sentiment), but rather to encourage you to feel or think.