High and Low Stakes

I’ve found myself very interested lately in the concept of “high stakes” we’ve discussed in class. It seems to me that most of the poetry I like happens to be tinged with significant sadness, and that, accompanying that sadness, there are usually high stakes and difficult questions: What if you make the wrong decision, and you manage to lose someone’s trust? What if you make a joke using uncouth humor? What if you write a poem like Dorothy Parker’s, “One Perfect Rose,” and come off as conceited to your readers? All these decisions have consequences that could potentially cause pain, and it is that risk to which we seem most attached. What makes the possibility and or expression of pain so appealing to people? Is it that we are all just melodramatic and suckers for punishment? I don’t think so; rather, I believe there is a much more sensible answer. Pain is a universal emotion that we all can tap into in some way. The fear of losing someone we love is a universal fear, as is tainting our own image and being judged by others. And, like I’ve said so many times before, poetry is all about universality. The question, then, becomes, do stakes have to be high in order to tap into universal emotion? Loss and love are powerful themes, but I would say that, inarguably, so are joy and simplicity.

We’ve also talked about in class about the ability poetry has to capture a single, split-second event, and to expand it into several pages of riveting description. Likewise, we’ve done exercises to exemplify that very practice, and prove that, however hard, such expansion can indeed be done. My question becomes, then, what happens if that single moments is meant to be happy? What if, instead of the confusion and uncertainty that tend to characterize high stakes, instead a writer wishes to epitomize the absolute certainty he or she feels within a given moment -- the absolute joy? I find myself wondering lately if this too has merit. Is there a way to throw high stakes into a poem about happiness, without necessarily expressing that you are afraid to lose it? Is certainty synonymous for amateur, and therefore unbelievable? Does one have to be a tortured soul to be artistically inclined?

There might be a lot of questions here than thoughts, but I wanted to throw them all out there and see what you guys thought. Are you equally affected by happy and sad poems? Which tend to resonate more within you, and how do you think that reflects stakes?