Gerald Burns
Games & Poetry
Years ago when I used to teach, my freshmen made it clear to me they
thought poetry had no rules. It had conventions, but no rules. I had no
quarrel with this pre-lapsarian stance. How can you quarrel wlth innocence
as such? There may have been a hint of sin tucked away in its corollary,
that anything you said about poetry was true, or might be true. Opinions,
which they believed statements about poetry to be, were valuable because
they were theirs, though other people's opinlons were common as dirt. I did
what I could to destroy these notions, but not in the way I would do it
now. If I taught those students today, I would describe to them some games
1 used to play.
At Harvard we had one called The Game. A pair of undergraduates would sit
opposite sides of a counter In Hayes Bickford's, by the window. When a
person passed by each of us would say either Yes or No. That was it. It was
a total judgment on the passerby, and probably has to be played by
undergraduates to work. If we both sald "Yes," or 'No,' it was satisfying.
But if we differed it was more satisfying, because one of us was obviously
right. The loser conceded at once. What was satisfying was conforming not
to a set of unstated rules, but to rules we knew were intrinsically
unstatable. That the two players invariably agreed on the rightness or
wrongness of a call was a pleasure.
When I taught at SMU we played Red Ball. This took an indefinite number of
players, a large air-filled plastic ball you bought for about a dollar in
drugstores, and quite a lot of beer. There were roughly two teams. The
rules were a little like football, a bit like soccer, and sometimes
basketball. The goal, in both senses, varied during play with terrain.
Trees and cars were incorporated as play, which was vigorous, moved past or
through them. Players were allowed to change sides. Beyond its physicallty
Red Ball was interesting because anomalous situations were always coming
up, so there was a referee to decide rights and wrongs, levy penalties, and
decide points scored. Everyone agreed wlth the decisions.
Willie Ball was David Searcy's spinoff of Red Ball. We played it (ideally
with a purple drugstore ball) on a tennis court with the net up, and
railroad ties at the margins to define very precisely what was in and out
of bounds. Players were issued thick wooden rackets-they weighed several
pounds-like oversize ping-pong paddles. The ball, only moderately elastic,
didn't rnove very fast or bounce very well, even wlth a vigorous serve; The
rules were a blend of tennis and ping-pong with (I think) a touch of
hockey. Again, when ambiguities came up a player would refer to a nonce
rule, made up on the spot, to settle the question. Players would frequently
shout, sometimes In chorus, the guiding rule of the game, "It doesn t
really matter!"
At Harvard one of my roommates was very fond of Monopoly. He played well
and crowed when he won, gloated and chortled, as if the houses and money l
were real. So my rnathematician friend Dave Fowler and I Invented Drag, the
World's Dullest Game. The board was a yard-square piece of off-white
oilcloth, on which we drew many, rnany circles (which we called "squares"),
which we connected according to a table of random numbers with one, two or
three lines with Marksalot. The pieces were Japanese tumbled stones, white
and black, and key pieces, miniature rough-glazed Mexican bowls, which
upside-down looked like unpleasant mushrooms. Some of the squares were
colored red or green, and we lettered two packs of blank cards with
instructions on how to move, Advance four squares, but some of them had
improving mottos, as dull as we could make them. (My favorite is still A
full sack stands straight .-Poor Richard.) And some had crude drawings of
common objects, a sailboat, things like that. The deck had to be shuffled
before play, and It was just bulky enough to be borlng. Everything about
the game was a little dull. The average game lasted four days. It was
impossible to triumph when you won. It was never quite dull enough to pull
out of, but we like to think we reduced the board game to its lowest terms.
What hs this to do with poetry? Nothing much. But my SMU freshrnen were
surprlsed and threatened to learn how quickly people who habitually read
verse achieve consensus. Similarly, there are people I can go to museums
with and we agree every time on how good the paintings are-how interesting,
how well executed, right through to agreeing how valuable each is or isn t.
There are principles to which we can appeal, but mostly its intuitive, and
often the rule to which we bow is difficult or impossible to state. lf
aesthetic judgments are a game, quite often they're a game like Red Ball or
the one we played in Hayes-Bickford's.
Show intelligent freshmen W. C. Wililams's "This Is Just To Say." Ask them
to rebreak the lines to make It better. They can't always say why their
linebreaks aren't as good, but will pretty much agree that they aren't.
Consensus occurs.
On a friend's recommendation I recently read Gogol s The Portrait -the
second version is the one you can find- and found it moving, troubling, and
great fun. There didn t seem to me a word out of place. I was thrilled by
his descriptions of good art, and the feel of dedicating oneself to it. I
did have one tiny objection. Gogol wanted to paint well-studied as a
palnter-and didn t. I think It shows in those descriptions. The one thing
he leaves out, in those white-hot descriptions of making art, is the small
element of boredom, of dullness, that are intrinsically part of it, not
just the consequence of circumstantial fatigue, that come from the fact
that making art means doing lots of little things, that aren t like the big
thing, In order to make the big things. I mean the respect In which art is
like sewing. I know there is a sense in which the small moves are always
exciting, in terms of their relatlon to the whole, but still there seems to
me to be something about the texture of making art which Gogol won't let
himself acknowledge, the sense in which even the best monumental court
palnting by Goya, or giant mural by Delacroix, was in the making a little
like Drag.
So my lecture would be about Games Wlthout Rules, or games which invent
rules as they go to handle things that come up. If you write long-line
poems, where you break the llnes is like that. Why you say what you say
where. Tyrone, who plays darts well, said to me when he s reading a long
thing he always wants to ask what's the point, why don t you get to the
point? I told him my long poem on magic, A Book of Spells, was about-wanted
to render-what it's like to live in a universe in which magic occurs, or in
which it makes sense for it to occur. Writing it took ten years. I had to
wait, I said, for events to occur, perceptions to happen, and wanted it
1,776 llnes long so it really would be living in it, and that, the effect
of that, was its point.
You make up the rules as you go, and forget them as you go on. You make
them up, but you forget them. If someone asks why you did a thing that way,
you can usually say. These simple admissions take you a lot farther than my
freshmen s favorite description, in which there can be no bad art (which is
why I called it pre-lapsarian) because anything you say about any art is
true because "just an opinion," unassailable but not worth very much, and
only valuable to them because unassailable. It might have worked, if I
could have shown them that art in its going on is more like Wlilie Ball,
for which the standard cry "It doesn t really rnatter!" is interesting
because nearly a profound statement, in context, of what rules are for,
especially nonce rules.
Previously published in Poet volume 6, #3
Copyright © 1995 Gerald Burns
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