On Being Specific

The American poet/educator Peter Kahn identifies specificity as a key ingredient that can help to elevate a poem, to breathe life into it. (He also places great emphasis on the avoidance of cliches, so would probably not take too kindly to that last metaphor, but we shall let that pass). It often happens, in my experience at least, that a students' poem feels a little flat, and referring to a specific incident, or giving an incident mentioned in the poem a greater degree of specificity, can help combat this. Kahn invites students to consider the following three sentences:

1. My grandma is a bad driver
2. My grandma crashed her car the other day
3. Last Tuesday, my grandma crashed her Toyota into Ronald McDonald

I think most of us can agree that these sentences get progressively more interesting, and it is the increasing levels of detail that draws us in. Students will often content themselves with sentences along the lines of (1), whereas sentences like (3) are what really capture the reader's attention. 

I have found Peter Kahn's advice extremely helpful in guiding children and young adults through the poetry writing process. The claim that 'most people don't care about poetry because most poetry doesn't care about people' is something of an old chestnut, and I think part of its truth lies in the fact that poetry can be ethereal to the point of nebulousness; specificity can help root it in the reality of our lived experiences. A poem rich with allusion and figurative language but entirely lacking in specific details will inevitably try the patience of many people, and leave them wondering how poetry relates to them and their lives. (It should be noted that Kahn himself encourages a mixture of specificity and figurative language; I think that, broadly speaking, this is good advice.)

However, things are not so simple. The author and creative writing tutor Ardashir Vakil has talked of 'the power arc', whereby ostensibly less 'powerful' words (e.g. 'walk') can in fact be imbued with a greater power than their more showy cousins (e.g. 'dash', 'stride') by dint of their very understatedness. This point was famously made by Chekhov:

"It is comprehensible when I write: "The man sat on the grass," because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: "The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully."

Is there a conflict here between Kahn's push towards specificity and Chekhov's apparent recommendation against it? Surely the answer is that in some circumstances specificity can help and in others it can hinder. I do not know exactly what these circumstances are (perhaps they have in part to do with the difference between poetry and other types of writing, but I doubt it: (3) does seem more interesting than (1) in many contexts other than poetry). I think we can get an intuitive grasp on when specificity is and isn't appropriate by considering an author whose writing is archetypally rubbish - Sue Townsend's fantastic creation Adrian Mole. Examples of Mole's hilariously execrable prose and poetry are dotted throughout Townsend's novels, and part of what makes Mole's writing so bad is the fact that he provides specific details that are utterly tangential to the thrust of what he is attempting to convey. Thus a sex scene will make reference to a 'Gossard Wonderbra', as though that specific brand and model were somehow relevant. Similarly, an opening line from one of Mole's 'novels' reads "Jake sat in front of his state of the art Amstrad and pressed the glittery knobs". The fact that the computer is an Amstrad is utterly irrelevant to any point that Mole is trying to make. Thus, unneccessary specificity is used by Townsend as a comic device.

The point that emerges, then, is this: specificity can help when it is relevant to the point that is being made. In a poem about the idiosyncracies of one's grandmother, sentences like (3) will be more interesting than sentences like (1), but in a poem about something else it might, in Chekhov's words, "detain one's attention." Similarly, were Mole concerned with the consumer choices of his lover or of Jake then Gossard Wonderbras and Amstrads might well be elucidatory, but he isn't and they are not.

I do not pretend that any of what I have said is especially enlightening. In many ways I am just trying to work things out in my own mind. The lesson that I have drawn from these meanderings is that specificity, when focused on the crucial points of a piece of writing, can heighten them, but when focused away from the crucial points can obscure them.