Artistic Statement

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Writing and Xnowing

We've been told again and again to write about what we know, but we don't trust that advice. We think our lives are dull, ordinary, boring. Other people have lives worthy of poetry, but not us. And what are the "great" poems about? The big subjects: death, desire, the nature of existence. They ask the big questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? We find it difficult to believe those sub­ jects, those questions, can be explored and contained in a poem about working at a fast food restaurant, a poem about our best friend, a poem about washing the dishes, tarring the roof, or taking a bus across town. If C. K. Williams had believed this, he might not have written "Tar," which is at one level a poem about fixing the roof, and at another, about the end of the world. Carolyn Forche might not have written "As Children Together," a poem about her best friend which is also about how we choose one life path over another. In the nineteenth century, John Keats wrote to a nightingale, an urn, a sea­ son. Simple, everyday things that he knew. Walt Whitman described

20 THE POET'S COMPANION

th t 1. e oak a field Elizabeth Bishop wrote about catching a e s ars, a iv , · . . .

fish, Wallace Stevens about a Sunday mornmg, Wilham Carlos

Williams about a young housewife and a red wheelbarrow. They

began with what they knew, what was, at hand, what shi:11�ere� around them in the ordinary world. That s what Al Zolynas did m this

poem: THE ZEN OF HOUSEWORK

I look over my own shoulder down my arms to where they disappear under water into hands inside pink rubber gloves moiling among dinner dishes.

My hands lift a wine glass, holding it by the stem and under the bowl. It breaks the surface like a chalice rising from a medieval lake.

Full of the grey wine of domesticity, the glass floats to the level of my eyes. Behind it, through the window above the sink, the sun, among a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches, is setting in Western America.

I can see thousands of droplets of steam-each a tiny spectrum-rising from my goblet of grey wine. They sway, changing directions constantly-like a school of playful fish, or like the sheer curtain on the window to another world.

Ah, grey sacrament of the mundane!

This is where we begin, by looking over our own shoulder, down our own arms, into our own hands at what we are holding, what we

Writing and Knowing 21

know. Few of us begin to write a poem about "death" or "desire." In fact, most of us begin by either looking outward: that blue bowl, those shoes, these three white clouds . Or inward: I remember, I imagine, I wish, I wonder, I want.

Look at the beginnings of some of Emily Dickinson's poems: "There's a certain slant of light ... " "A clock stopped ... " "A bird came down the walk ... " "I heard a fly buzz ... " and these first words: "The flesh ... " "The brain ... " "The heart ... " "The truth ... " "A route ... " "A word ... " There is a world inside each of us that we know better than anything else, and a world outside of us that calls for our attention-the world of our families our communities our history. Our subject matter is always with us, right here, at the tip; of our fingers, at the edge of each passing thought.

The trick is to find out what we know, challenge what we know, own what we know, and then give it away in language: I love my brother, I hate winter, I always lose my keys. You have to know and describe your brother so well he becomes everyone's brother, to evoke the hatred of winter so passionately that we aH begin to feel the chill, to lose your keys so memorably we begin to connect that action to all our losses, to our desires, to our fears of death. Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's. Poems that fail to under­ stand this are what a writer once parodied in a three-line illustration:

Here I stand looking out my window and I am important.

. Of course our lives are important, meaningful. But our daily expe­ nences, our dreams and loves and passionate convictions about the world, won't be important to others-to potential readers of our poems-unless we're able to transform the raw material of our experi­ ences into language that reaches beyond the self-involvement of that person standing at the window, so that what we know becomes shared knowledge, part of who we are as individuals, a culture, a species.

What do we a11 know? We know our lives. We all go through child-

22 THE POET'S COMPANION

hood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. We can write about it. Some of us go through marriage, childbirth, parenthood, divorce. We work, we go to school, we form bonds of friendship and love, we break dishes in anger, we daydream, we follow the news or turn from it in despair, we forget. These are all subjects for our poems, the moments in our own personal lives that need telling, that are worth our attention and preservation.

Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you-whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiri­ tual. It's about making something, in language, which can be trans­ mitted to others-not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art. Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" begins, "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, I and what I assume you shall assume, / for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." Whitman died in 1892, but the spirit embodied in his language still speaks to us-pas­ sionate, intimate, inclusive.

Here's a poem by former Poet Laureate Rita Dove, about a moment between mother and daughter which comes out of everyday experience and startles us with its frank intimacy:

AFTER READING MICKEY IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN

FOR THE THIRD TIME BEFORE BED

I'm in the milk and the milk's in me! . . . I'm Mickey!

My daughter spreads her legs to find her vagina: hairless, this mistaken bit of nomenclature is what a stranger cannot touch without her yelling. She demands to see mine and momentarily we're a lopsided star among the spilled toys, my prodigious scallops exposed to her neat cameo.

Writing and Knowing

And yet the same glazed tunnel, layered sequences. She is three; that makes this innocent. We're pink! she shrieks, and bounds off.

Every month she wants to know where it hurts and what the wrinkled string means between my legs. This is good blood I say, but that's wrong, too. How to tell her that it's what makes us­ black mother, cream child. That we're in the pink and the pink's in us.

23

Dove's poem is about knowledge of the body; the body, after all, is the starting point for what we know. Whitman also wrote, "I sing the body electric," and poets from earliest times have been doing just that, celebrating its sensual pleasures, contemplating its desires and the limits of those desires. In modern and contemporary poetry, a number of writers have taken the body as their subject, with memo­ rable results.

We begin with our selves. We are not only body, but heart and mind and imagination and spirit. We can talk about all those things, about what it is like to be alive at the end of the twentieth century. Wendell Berry has written about marriage, Galway Kinnell about the birth of his children, Sharon Olds about motherhood and pet fi1Iler­ als and her first boyfriend. These and other poets began with the sim­ ple idea that what they saw and experienced was important to record, and that the modest facts of their lives, what they knew within the small confines of their limited, personal worlds, could contain the enduring facts and truths of the larger world.

That much said, how about what we don't know? That's subject matter for our poems as well. Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question. No one can call herself a poet unless she questions her ideas, ethics, and beliefs. And no one can

24 THE POET'S COMPANION

call himself a poet unless he allows the self to enter into the world of discovery and imagination. When we don't have direct experience to guide us, we always have our imagination as a bridge to knowledge. Here's a poem by Susan Mitchell that details what she can't know, but can imagine:

THE DEAD

At night the dead come down to the river to drink. They unburden themselves of their fears, their worries for us. They take out the old photographs. They pat the lines in our hands and tell our futures, which are cracked and yellow. Some dead find their way to our houses. They go up to the attics. They read the letters they sent us, insatiable for signs of their love. They tell each other stories. They make so much noise they wake us as they did when we were children and they stayed up drinking all night in the kitchen.

The poet has mixed the ordinary with the fantastic to convince us that the dead, indeed, act this way. At the end of the poem, the dead merge with the memory of the living-parents or relatives who "stayed up / drinking all night in the kitchen." Death is a mystery for all of us, one of the many things we don't understand about the world; poets want and need to explore such mysteries. Poetry would be dull indeed if we limited ourselves only to the things we think we already comprehend; it would be limited, self-satisfied, the poem fin­ ished before it was even begun. Robert Frost said, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader."

But the old advice, 'Write about what you know," is still an excel­ lent place to begin. Start with that, and let yourself move out from what you know into the larger questions. If it worked for Whitman and Dickinson, for Williams and Forche and Dove, it can work for

Writing and Knowing 25

you. Here's what David Lee has to say about it in this prose poem from his first book:

LOADING A BOAR

We were loading a boar, a goddamn mean big sonofabitch and he jumped out of the pickup four times and tore out my stockracks and rooted me in the stomach and I fell down and he bit John on the knee and he thought it was broken and so did I and the boar stood over in the far comer of the pen and watched us and John and I just sat there tired and Jan laughed and brought us a beer and I said, "John it ain't worth it, nothing's going right and I'm feeling half dead and haven't wrote a poem in ages and I'm ready to quit it all," and John said, "shit young feller, you ain't got started yet and the reason's cause you trying to do it outside yourself and ain't looking in and if you wanna by god write pomes you gotta write pomes about what you know and not about the rest and you can write about pigs and that boar and Jan and you and me and the rest and there ain't no way you're gonna quit," and we drank beer and smoked, all three of us, and finally loaded that mean bastard and drove home and unloaded him and he bit me again and I went in the house and got out my paper and pencils and started writing and found out John he was right.

It certainly worked for Lee, author of The Porcine Legacy and The Porcine Canticles. He took John's advice to heart and wrote not just one poem, but books of poems about what he knew. And what he knew was pigs. You don't need to travel to exotic places or live through revolutions to write good poems. If you have a life full of drama, then of course that will be your material. But don't wait for something to happen before you begin to write; pay attention to the world around you, right now. That's what poets do. This is how Ellery Akers describes it:

WHAT I DO

I drive on country roads, where kangaroo rats shoot across the blacktop and leap into the bushes, where feral cats streak through fields, and cows lift their

26 THE POET'S COMPANION

heads at the sound of the car but don't stop chewing, where the horses' manes blow in the wind and the cheat grass blows, and the grapes are strapped to stakes as if they have been crucified

I drive past the Soledad liquor store, where the neon starts, and the argon, past the Ven-A-Mexico restaurant, past the fields full of white hair-it's just water spurting across all that lettuce-and a jackrabbit runs and freezes, and the Digger Pines stand on either side of the road and the car plunges over the cattleguards, rattling

Sometimes I listen to the earth, it has a sound: deep inside, the garnets churning

Sometimes I listen to the birds: the sharp whir in the air as the swallow veers over my head, as the wren flies, panting, carrying a twig longer than she is, and by this time I can tell by the sounds of their wings, without looking, whether a tihnouse just passed-flutter-a raven-thwack, thwack-an

eagle-shud, shud, shud-big wet sheets flapping on a laundry line

I paint: I draw: I swab gesso on canvas, stropping the brushes again and again, rinsing them, as the paler and paler tints go down the drain

I cook, I shell peas, breaking open the pods at the veins with a snap: I take vitamins-all the hard, football-shaped pills-sometimes they get stuck in my gullet and I panic and think what a modem way to die, they'll come and find my dead, perfectly healthy body

I pay attention to the willows: I sniff the river I collect otoliths, and the small ear bones of seals I notice the dead mouse on the path, its tail still curled, its snout eaten

away by ants

So that although I've forgotten what John and I said to each other outside the airport, I remember the cedar waxwings chattering and lighting on the telephone wires, the clipped stiff grass and how sharp it was against my thighs as the waxwings flashed by

And when I teach, I explain about semicolons, the jab of the period, the curl of the comma: the two freights of verbs and subjects on either side like a train coupling

I pick up spiders in my house, sliding a cup over them and a piece of paper under them, toss them, and watch them sail out the window. I catch moths

Writing and Knowing 27

the same way, open the latch with one hand and watch them come back and bumble against the glass, wanting the light

Bather in the night, the soap slides next to me in the tub Phone dialer when I'm scared, and want to hear Peter's voice, or Valerie's

or Barbara's, Xeroxer, the faint green light pulses over and over, repeating my name as my poems flick by, and the machine spits out copy after copy Swimmer, slow breast stroke, hand over hand, kick

I stand at the lectern in my jacket, always a jacket to cover up my breasts so I don't feel so naked

I watch as the clouds shred slowly outside and inside, as the hummingbird sits in her deep cup, her bill sticking out, as the phalarope flies around me in circles in the saw-grass and spartina and she wants me to leave her alone so I leave her alone

I squelch through mud in my sneakers and watch Barbara garden and remember to eat her tomatoes:

I bait traps with bird-seed and the door springs shut and I grope for sparrows as they flutter frantically away and I reach into the far corner of the cage and gently clasp them and put them in my bird-bag tied to my belt, so as I walk the bag keeps banging at my hips: and then, at the observatory, I take one out, and blow on her skull, fasten a band around her leg, toss her out the window and let her go:

I listen to myself: this kind of listening is both tedious and courageous

Depression is part of it too: sometimes I bolt awake at night, feeling a man is pressing on top of me, certain it's happening

I see my therapist, my words fill up the room, the past is enormous, I steer towards anger and practice anger as if it were Italian, I throw stones at the canyon and yell and sometimes a clump of shale falls down and a spider races out

I watch tadpoles sink, and water striders: once, six miles in at Mud Lake, some drunken men, a rifle crack, I ran the whole way to the ear-

l come back to Soledad: at night plume moths and geometrid moths flatten themselves against the motel windows, looking like chips of bark, and in the

28 THE POET'S COMPANION

morning a starling teeters across the trash bin-pecking at cellophane, walk­ ing over the styrofoam containers from McDonald's. A man who looks scared says, "Good Morning, Ma'am," as he throws away more styrofoam, and I drive under the cool overpass where pigeons nest every year, flapping up into the steel slots, as the trucks go down with their loads-

Needing to pile up silence outside me and within me the silence underneath the bulbs of Zygodene, Stink-horn and blood-red

saprophytes-

as the minutes open into parachutes that fall and fall again

Akers has beautifully evoked the world of one poet. As the minutes of your own life open and fall, catch them in poems. You've been given one life, one set of unique experiences; out of those particulars, make the poems only you can make.

IDEAS FOR WRITING

1. Make a list of the most memorable events in your life. Some of them will be large-a death, a breakup, some goal you finally accomplished. But list the small things, too, things you've always remembered as particularly special and important in some way. When you're finished, you should have a list of subjects for poems that could take you years to write. For now, start a poem about one of the events you've listed; every so often, you can go back to the list and pick another one.

2. List the objects in your bedroom or living room. Write a poem describing them and telling a little of their-and your-history. A good poem to read first is "Photograph of My Room" by Carolyn Forche, in her book The Country Between Us.

3. What do you do every day-or on a regular basis? Write a poem about showering, or jogging, or cooking, and so on. Try, in the poem, to get at the particular way you perform this activity, that might be different from someone else.

Writing and Knowing 29

4. What are the things you love? The things you hate? List them in two columns. Now, write a poem that combines something you love with something you hate.

5. Begin a poem with the words, "I don't know ... "You might list several things you don't know, or focus on a particular thing.

6. Begin a poem with a question word: Who, what, where, when, why, how. Ask a big question about life, and then try to answer it from your own experience. (A good poem which asks a lot of questions is "In a U-Haul North of Damascus" in the last section of this book.)

7. Write a poem instructing a reader how to do something you know how to do. First make a list of all the things you can do (hit a tennis ball, change a diaper, identify wildflowers, etc.). Remember that you don't want to sound like an instruction manual, but a poem; make it beautiful, make the lesson one that tells someone about how to live in the world.

Images

Images haunt. There is a whole mythology built on this fact: Cezanne painting till his eyes bled, Wordsworth wandering the Lake Country hills in an impassioned daze. Blake describes it very well, and so did a colleague of Tu Fu who said to him, "It is like being alive twice." Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implications outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have that explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

-Robert Hass,

Twentieth Century Pleasures

We are all haunted by images, both light and dark. You might remember the smell of honeysuckle, or your father's cologne. A day in your childhood comes back, every detail sharp and precise, and you hear a shallow creek running over the rocks, your dog snuffling in wet leaves, your friend's voice calling you. You can still see the face of your dead aunt, or cousin, can taste the meal you choked down after the funeral. Frances Mayes, in The Discovery of Poetry, says that images are closely linked to memory, that in fact many of our mem­ ories consist of images. That partly explains why they're so powerful, why we respond to them in a much more visceral way than we do to generalized abstractions.

What, exactly, is an image? For most people, "image" carries the

86 THE POET'S COMPANION

meaning of a visual picture, and it's true that many images are visu­ al. Put simply, though, an image in poetry is language that calls up a physical sensation, appealing to us at the level of any of our five sens­ es. Images may be literal: the red kitchen chair in a dim corner of the room; the gritty wet sand under her bare feet. Or they may be figura­ tive, departing from the actual and stating or implying a comparison: the chair, red and shiny as fingernail polish; the armies of sand grains advancing across the wood floor of the beach house.

Think of going to the movies, how at first you are aware of yourself, sitting in a darkened theater, watching people and objects moving around on a screen. You are aware of the person sitting next to you, the walls or ceiling of the theater in your peripheral vision. Then a shift occurs and the world outside the screen falls away and you fall into the movie, aware of nothing but its world of story, emotions, images. And sometimes, an even stranger occurrence: the actor on screen lights a cigarette or pours a glass of wine and for an instant, the scent of smoke or grapes is in the air. Some synapse in your brain has been nudged and produces the memory of the aroma. Magic. That's what an image should do, produce a bit of magic, a reality so real it is "like being alive twice."

We all have our favorite sense. If you ask several people to describe coffee, one person might describe its smell, another its color, anoth­ er its taste or the sound of beans being ground. Poets need to keep all five senses-and possibly a few more-on continual alert, ready to translate the world through their bodies, to reinvent it in language. Images are a kind of energy, moving from outside to inside and back, over and over, a continual exchange. You take a walk outside after the first snowfall of the season, fill your eyes with the dazzling surfaces of the fields and your lungs with the sharp pure air. Your boots sink in, crunching down to the frozen earth, and when you return to the cabin the warmth feels like a pair of gloved hands placed on your cold ears. You sit down and write about the snow. Miles away and years later, someone-a reader-closes her eyes and experiences it.

Images are seductive in themselves, but they're not merely scenery, or shouldn't be. An image, when it's doing its full work, can direct a reader toward some insight, bring a poem to an emotional pitch,

Images 87

embody an idea. Take a look at the following poem by T. R.

Hummer, which unfolds in a succession of carefully chosen images.

WHERE YOU GO WHEN SHE SLEEPS

What is it when a woman sleeps, her head bright

In your lap, in your hands, her breath easy now as though it had

never been Anything else, and you know she is dreaming, her eyelids

Jerk, but she is not troubled, it is a dream

That does not include you, but you are not troubled either,

It is too good to hold her while she sleeps, her hair falling

Richly on your hands, shining like metal, a color

That when you think of it you cannot name, as though it has just

Come into existence, dragging you into the world in the wake

Of its creation, out of whatever vacuum you were in before,

And you are like the boy you heard of once who fell

Into a silo full of oats, the silo emptying from below, oats

At the top swirling in a gold whirlpool, a bright eddy of grain, the boy,

You imagine, leaning over the edge to see it, the noon sun breaking

Into the center of the circle he watches, hot on his back, burning

And he forgets his father's warning, stands on the edge, looks down,

The grain spinning, dizzy, and when he falls his arms go out, too thin

For wings, and he hears his father's cry somewhere, but is gone

Already, down in a gold sea, spun deep in the heart of the silo,

And when they find him, his mouth, his throat, his lungs

Full of the gold that took him, he lies still, not seeing the world

Through his body but through the deep rush of the grain

Where he has gone and can never come back, though they drag him

Out, his father's tears bright on both their faces, the farmhands

Standing by blank and amazed you touch that unnamable

Color in her hair and you are gone into what is not fear or joy

But a whirling of sunlight and water and air full of shining dust

That takes you, a dream that is not of you but will let you

Into itself if you love enough, and will not, will never let you go.

The speaker here is fascinated by the color of the woman's hair and

overwhelmed by his love for her. He shows her to us, letting us observe

88 THE POET'S COMPANION

her closely: her bright head in his lap, her easy breathing, the jerking of her eyelids. These literal images give way to figurative ones as he articulates his feelings: her hair is briefly "like metal," and then -in the long, wonderfully imagined description that follows-he com­ pares himself to a boy falling into a silo. "Falling in love" is a familiar way of thinking about that dizzying rush of emotion; Hummer's image of falling into a silo full of oats, though, makes the reader experience

that rush in a way that feels true, and yet new. Notice how he deepens his imagery by using specific, physical details: "swirling in a gold whirlpool " is a vivid visual image, while the noon sun "hot on his back, burning" is an image that is tactile-we can feel the sun, imag­ ine ourselves falling "down in a gold sea, spun deep in the heart of the silo." Everything in the poem becomes connected, merges: the speak­ er of the poem is like the boy, the woman's hair is like the oats, the oats are like love. The image of the silo is both fascinating and frightening; love is both dream and nightmare, a sort of death which is terrible but also beautiful. Also notice that the whole poem is in the form of a question: "What is it ... " The poet never really answers his question (Richard Hugo once said, "Never ask a question you can answer") but we know that Hummer is asking, "What is it like to fall in love?"

The poet enlivens his images with the use of color: "gold whirlpool," "gold sea," "full of the gold that took him." Brightness, gold, and sunlight are everywhere. Like the love described, the poem won't let us go-in one long sentence it takes us into that whirling and shining. Now look at how another writer, Gary Soto, uses color in this poem about young love.

ORANGES

The first time I walked With a girl, I was twelve, Cold, and weighted down With two oranges in my jacket. December. Frost cracking Beneath my steps, my breath Before me, then gone, & I walked toward

'

l

.

I i I

l

Images

Her house, the one whose Porchlight burned yellow Night and day, in any weather. A dog barked at me, until She came out, pulling At her gloves, face bright With rouge. I smiled. Touched her shoulder, and led Her across the street, across A used car lot and a line Of newly planted trees, Until we were breathing Before a drugstore. We Entered, the tiny bell Bringing a saleslady Down a narrow aisle of goods. I turned to the candies Tiered like bleachers, And asked what she wanted­ Light in her eyes, a smile Starting at the comers Of her mouth. I fingered A nickel in my pocket, And when she lifted a chocolate That cost a dime I didn't say anything. I took the nickel from My pocket, then an orange, And set them quietly on The counter. When I looked up, The lady's eyes met mine, And held them, knowing Very well what it was About.

Outside, A few cars hissing past, Fog hanging like old Coats between the trees. I took my girl's hand In mine for two blocks,

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90 THE POET'S COMPANION

Then released it to let Her unwrap the chocolate. I peeled my orange That was so bright against The gray of December That, from some distance, Someone might have thought I was making a fire in my hands.

Knowing a little about how colors work together makes this poem and its last image even more impressive. Artists have used this trick: adding a bit of red to green to make the green appear brighter. Soto sets his orange against a gray sky. Using the color-gray as a backdrop makes the orange brighter, larger, wilder, more like the fire he likens it to with words. Also notice the other colors and references to light used throughout the poem: the porchlight that burns yellow, the girl's face "bright with rouge," and the light in her eyes that precedes the fire in his hands, all carefully chosen to create a feeling of unity. Each of these specifics works toward animating that last incendiary image.

In his poem "Ghost," Robert Lowell wrote, "You cannot turn your back upon a dream, / for phantoms have their reasons when they come." The same could be said of images that haunt us, especially those which we work hardest to repress and that return to us unwant­ ed and unbidden. In this poem by Marie Howe, the narrator is haunt­ ed by images of her younger sister being molested:

HOW MANY TIMES

No matter how many times I try I can't stop my father from walking into my sister's room

and I can't see any better, leaning from here to look in his eyes. It's dark in the hall

and everyone's sleeping. This is the past where everything is perfect already and nothing changes,

where the water glass falls to the bathroom floor and bounces once before breaking.

Images

Nothing. Not the small sound my sister makes, turning

over, not the thump of the dog's tail

when he opens one eye to see him stumbling back to bed

still drunk, a little bewildered.

This is exactly as I knew it would be.

And if I whisper her name, hissing a warning,

I've been doing that for years now, and still the dog

startles and growls until he sees

it's our father, and still the door opens, and she

makes that small oh turning over.

91

As we've said, images aren't always primarily visual. This is a poem

in which the narrator's vision is in fact quite murky, even blocked.

She enlists the aid of the dog to help her see what she can't bear to

see. What she remembers more vividly is mostly auditory, the sounds

of the past: the water glass falling, the dog's tail thumping, a whisper,

a hiss, a growl, and then that heartbreaking "small oh . .. " Even the

absence of sound is important to this poem. These vivid images

enable us to feel the helplessness and vulnerability of the sister.

Images are the rendering of your bodily experience in the world;

without them, your poems are going to risk being vague and impre­

cise, and they will fail to convey much to a reader. The more you

practice with imagery-recording it in as much vivid detail as you

can :--

the more likely it is that your poetry will become an experience

for the reader, rather than simply talk about an experience. We are

surrounded by images daily. Pay attention to those images, and use

them to make your poems.

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IDEAS FOR WRITING

1. What images obsess you? What do you think about when you are daydreaming? What kinds of images do you find yourself return­ ing to or seeking out for comfort? What object, person, place, picture could you look at for hours and not get bored? Look at one of your obsessive pictures and describe it intimately. Do it in prose, quickly; don't worry about making it a poem yet. Then, contrast it with an image that you repress continually, that you really fight with. Describe that second image just as closely. Once you've done that, try joining the two images; mingle them as Hummer does in his poem, and see what happens.

2. Keep an image notebook for at least a month. Jot down the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and sensations of your life. These are good seeds for future poems; take an image you've noted and try to expand it with lots of descriptions, and with your ideas and feelings about that image.

3. Describe a pair of shoes in such a way that a reader will think of death. Do not mention death in the poem.

4. Write a poem composed primarily of auditory images.

5. It is said that our sense of smell is the most primitive, that a scent can take us back instantly into a memory. Jot down some smells that are appealing to you. For each one, describe the memory or experience associated with that smell, making sure you bring

fin the other senses in your description. Write a poem for each smell. For starters, you might title each poem with the triggering smell: "Roses," "Chanel No. 5," "Garlic," etc. Do the same for smells that you particularly dislike.

6. Take an image from a film, something that impressed itself on your memory, and write about it. Describe the image or scene and then try to talk about why it made such an impression.

Images 93

7. Describe a painting or photograph (not an abstract one, but something that pictures people or objects) as though the scene is really happening; animate it with movement, speech, story.

Simile and Jvf etapfior

Imagine a literal world, in which nothing was ever seen in terms of anything else. Falling blossoms wouldn't remind you of snow. A dancer's sensuous grace wouldn't resemble the movements of a lover; the shape of a cloud would never suggest a horse or a sailing ship. If such a world were possible, it would be a severely impoverished o_ne.

In fact, we live in a figurative world; our language and our think­ ing, our very perceptions, are metaphoric. We continually make com­ parisons and connections, often without even realizing that we are doing so, so comfortable are we with seeing in this way. Contrary to what you might think if you are beginning to study the craft of poet- ry, the use of figurative language isn't a new skill; it's one you already know. The trouble is that most of the figures in our language are so common and have been heard so often that they're virtually useless for poetry, which deals not in cliched, worn-out expressions but in surprising ones that reveal new connections or cast a different angle of light on an idea or experience. (There, we've just resorted to figu­ rative language-"cast a different angle oflight" -to explain what we mean.) "Love is a rose" would not be high on our list as a poetic metaphor, but try "In my book love is darker / than cola. It can burn / a hole clean through you," from C. D. Wright, or Charles Bukowski's "Love is a dog from hell." Good metaphors and similes make connections that deepen, expand, and energize; they stimulate the imagination. Once, perhaps, to say "she sticks to him like glue"

Simile and Metaphor 95

was fresh and interesting, but now it's a simile that, if it turns up in your poem, should be sent to the Toxic Language Dump-a place we've invented for all those expressions that are deadly for the art. The Toxic Language Dump is a place you should get familiar with as a writer. One difference between good and not-so-good poets is that the good ones recognize when they've written stuff that deserves to be dumped, and load up the truck. The not-so-good poets leave it in. There's a line at the end of Norman Dubie's "The Funeral," about the death of an aunt, that has always haunted us: "The cancer ate her like horse piss eats deep snow." That's a memorable image, one so apt and effective it resonates years after reading it.

But using figurative language in poetry is more than finding a star­ tling simile or metaphor that grabs your reader. Look at a poem by Sharon Olds, who we're convinced has a machine in her basement which operates day and night generating similes. Along with her odd line breaks and often intense emotional subject matter, Olds's prodi­ gious use of similes immediately stands out as characteristic of her style. Here's a poem from her first book, Satan Says:

FEARED DROWNED

Suddenly nobody knows where you are, your suit black as seaweed, your bearded head slick as a seal's.

Somebody watches the kids. I walk down the edge of the water, clutching the towel like a widow's shawl around me.

None of the swimmers is just right. Too short, too heavy, clean-shaven, they rise out of the surf, the water rushing down their shoulders.

Rocks stick out near shore like heads. Kelp snakes in like a shed black suit and I cannot find you.

My stomach begins to contract as if to vomit salt water

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when up the sand toward me comes a man who looks very much like you, his beard matted like beach grass, his suit dark as a wet shell against his body.

Coming closer, he turns out to be you-or nearly. Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.

Look carefully at the similes in this poem. What if Olds had writ­ ten, in the second line, "your suit black as burnt toast," or "black as a cockroach's back"? Such a radical alteration would, of course, wrench the poem in another direction, taking us away from its cen­ tral concern: the speaker's fear that her companion might have drowned. The similes here reinforce her anxiety, help us as readers identify with it. They also set the scene vividly: we can see exactly how this woman walks along the edge of the water "clutching the towel like a widow's shawl." Had she said only "shawl;' we'd still get a clear picture, but imagining the widow's shawl lets us experience her emotional state as well. Strong similes and metaphors are integral to a poem's meaning; they aren't merely clever comparisons tacked on. Figurative language is a way to deepen and intensify the themes and concerns of your work.

After you've written a draft of a poem, at some point you might want to take a look at how you've handled that figurative level of language. Perhaps you've stuck to the strictly literal, and the associations of the poem could be expanded with the use of simile or metaphor. Or you might have chosen a comparison that takes the poem in the wrong direction-towards a meaning you didn't intend, or towards a humor­ ous tone when you were trying for something serious. Explore the impli­ cations of your language, too, to see what you've said. Was that disas­ trous love relationship really like a head-on collision, or was it more like jumping from a plane with a defective parachute? Both imply dam­ age-but in the first case you've probably both ended up with broken glass all over you, while in the second, you're the one who's crashed.

Another thing about the figurative: it gives you access to words and images that wouldn't be there otherwise. Take the above example: in

I L

Simile and Metaphor 97

the first case you might use words like highway, headlights, metal,

screech, crush. In the second, you'd have a different group of words:

wind, space, fall, ripcord, and the like. Take advantage of the vocab­

ulary that accompanies your figure; exploit it for its possibilities, so it

adds energy and depth to your poem. We'd like to mention a couple of other things we admire in

"Feared Drowned." At the end of the poem, the "you," previously the

speaker's husband or lover, changes. Now the "you" is anyone, and

the reader is included in that "you." "Once you lose someone" lifts

the poem from a private experience to a shared one, since all of us

have lost someone in one way or another. Even to imagine losing

someone, Olds seems to say, changes how we see them; now we're

aware of the possibility of loss. We were also struck by some of the

rhythms in the poem; read aloud lines like "Too short, too heavy,

clean-shaven" to hear the insistence in those words: TOO SHORT,

TOO HEAvy, CLEAN SHAVE-en. She seems to be saying to herself,

NOT YOU, NOT YOU, NOT YOU as her panic builds; the missing

person is not one of the swimmers. Or listen to "Kelp snakes in like a

shed black suit." Olds's simile machine also knows how to sing.

Simile and metaphor are often distinguished from each other with

the explanation that similes use "like," "as," or some other connector,

while metaphors remove it and say simply that one thing is another.

"That child acts like an angel" becomes simply, "that child is an

angel." But metaphors aren't always contained within poems in dis­

crete bits; often, entire poems work on a metaphoric level. This is

one of the pleasures of both reading and writing poems: the recasting

of one thing in terms of another, the revelation of the ways outward­

ly different experiences can be seen to have a similar core. In "Feared

Drowned," Olds makes a particular experience a metaphor for loss,

and explicitly asks us to consider our own losses in the last two lines.

The next two poems by Jack Gilbert talk about the death of his

wife, Michiko.

FINDING SOMETHING

I say moon is horses in the tempered dark, because horse is the closest I can get to it. I sit on the terrace of this worn villa the king's

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telegrapher built on the mountain that looks down on a blue sea and the small white ferry that crosses slowly to the next island each noon. Michiko is dying in the house behind me, the long windows open so I can hear the faint sound she will make when she wants watermelon to suck or so I can take her to a bucket in the comer of the high-ceilinged room which is the best we can do for a chamber pot. She will lean against my leg as she sits so as not to fall over in her weakness. How strange and fine to get so near to it. The arches of her feet are like voices of children calling in the grove of lemon trees, where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds.

The metaphor that opens this poem, and the similes that close it, are magical, almost surreal. Perhaps the horses are meant to suggest a journey-the narrator's wife is on her way to death. The dark is "tempered," the way a metal like steel is tempered, brought to the proper hardness by being heated and suddenly cooled; again, there's the resonance with dying, the cooling of the body as heat and energy go out of it. After this evocative beginning, the poet goes on to describe the scene and Michiko's suffering. Grief and beauty are mingled: "How strange and fine to get so near to it," he says, and then compares the arches of his wife's feet to the voices of children. Is he imaginatively led to the children by gazing at her feet, the way one passes under the arch of a doorway? He is called to her and yet away from her, to the lemon trees; and his heart is "helpless as crushed birds." A reader sees and feels those crushed birds, and the narrator's broken heart, simultaneously. Inner and outer landscape have meshed.

The next poem deals with the aftermath of death. To describe how one goes on after grief, Gilbert uses the image of carrying a box. We all understand grief as heaviness; and in fact, the word for grief comes from the Latin gravis, meaning weighty, sad. The simile is introduced

Simile and Metaphor 99

in the first line and then sustained and extended throughout the poem, to concretely and precisely evoke how the process of grieving feels from one day to the next.

MICHIKO DEAD

He manages like somebody carrying a box

that is too heavy, first with his arms

underneath. When their strength gives out,

he moves the hands forward, hooking them

on the comers, pulling the weight against

his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly

when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes

different muscles take over. Afterward,

he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood

drains out of the arm that is stretched up

to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now

the man can hold underneath again, so that

he can go on without ever putting the box down.

The heart is never finished with grief; that's the assertion of the poem. Though the burden is "too heavy," we manage it. A box is an apt image; we might think of a coffin, or a box of ashes. A heavy box might be filled with all our memories of someone, of the time we spent with them. The box in the poem is painful to carry, yet precious to the man who cannot, or will not, put it down.

Many poems don't make their comparisons explicit, the way this one does. A poem may consist entirely of literal images, but they may well resonate with metaphorical meaning. In "Finding Something," a ferry crosses the water-a seemingly literal description of what the narrator sees, but one that also recalls Greek mythology, in which the souls of the dead were ferried across the rivers of the underworld. Every day the white ferry travels "to the next island"; one day, Michiko's soul will be ferried away.

In this poem by Katha Pollitt, archaeology is a metaphor for writ­ ing poetry; but without the epigraph, we'd still know that she was referring to 1more than digging up bones and artifacts. The process

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described could serve for any creative activity that demands patient and loving attention.

ARCHAEOLOGY

"Our real poems are already in us and all we can do is dig."

-Jonathan Galassi

You knew the odds on failure from the start, that morning you first saw, or thought you saw, beneath the heatstruck plains of a second-rate country the outline of buried cities. A thousand to one you'd turn up nothing more than the rubbish heap of a poor Near Eastern backwater: a few chipped beads, splinters of glass and pottery, broken tablets whose secret lore, laboriously deciphered, would prove to be only a collection of ancient grocery lists. Still, the train moved away from the station without you.

How many lives ago was that? How many choices? Now that you've got your bushelful of shards do you say, give me back my years or wrap yourself in the distant glitter of desert stars, telling yourself it was foolish after all to have dreamed of uncovering some fluent vessel, the bronze head of a god? Pack up your fragments. Let the simoom flatten the digging site. Now come the passionate midnights in the museum basement when out of that random rubble you'll invent the dusty market smelling of sheep and spices, streets, palmy gardens, courtyards set with wells to which, in the blue of evening, one by one come strong veiled women, bearing their perfect jars.

Simile and Metaphor 101

Pollitt imagines the poet as archaeologist. Poets know "the odds on

failure" when they first imagine the not-yet-written poem, when they

are first moved by that mysterious impulse to articulate something. In

spite of the difficulties of making a good poem, and the real possibil­

ity that the results will be unsatisfactory, poets take on the task. A life

committed to that task, Pollitt suggests, has its price. But in the end,

it's clearly worth it: out of that "random rubble" something wonder­

ful can be made. She takes advantage of the possibilities of language

associated with her metaphor: "heatstruck plains," "splinters of glass

and pottery," "simoom;' "palmy gardens." Extending your similes and

metaphors in this manner, rather than simply sprinkling them

through your poems, can help you to explore the implications of your

ideas and your images. Notice that "Archaeology" not only uses a

central metaphor, but finds within it parallels for each step of the

process-those "passionate midnights" in the basement are a

metaphor for the work of shaping the materials of a poem, writing

and revising until the imagined world is fully formed. In developing

your own figurative images, don't worry if your language is clumsy or

confusing at first. Just have patience, and keep digging.

IDEAS FOR WRITING

1. Here are a few similes we like. After reading them, complete the

unfinished ones; try for something unexpected.

Her breasts like white wolves' heads

sway and snarl. -Sharon Olds

The baled wheat scattered

everywhere like missing coffins -Carolyn Forche

Her body is not so white as

anemone petals nor so smooth-nor

so remote a thing.

-William Carlos Williams

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Loneliness spreading fast like a gas fire

-Frances Mayes

A gull is locked like a ghost in the blue attic of heaven. -Charles Wright

tired as .. . hot as .. . waves unfurled like ... after the shelling, the town looked as if ... disgusting as . . . the child trembled like .. . the airplane rose like a-.. . black as ... he entered the room like .. . their lovemaking was like .. .

2. There's an old joke that goes, "Your teeth are like stars. They come out at night." The second sentence reverses our expecta­ tions of "like stars." In a poem by Margaret Atwood, a similar reversal occurs. The first lines read: "You fit into me / like a hook into an eye." Some clothes are held together by hook and eye-a small metal catch that hooks onto a loop, or an eye. The next lines, however, change the cozy image into something much more ominous: "a fish hook I an open eye." See if you can dream up some similes that change direction like this and surprise a reader's expectations of where they're headed.

3. Write a poem about a disturbing experience, using lots of unified similes, taking "Feared Drowned" as a model. Then write a sec­ ond poem on the same experience, only using as many different

similes as possible for what the experience was like; that is, keep changing the comparisons: "It was like ... Or else it was like ... "

4. Describe an activity-cleaning the house, fishing, painting a pic­ ture, bathing a child, dancing, cooking a meal-which could serve as a metaphor for your life, for how you are in the world.

Simile and Metaphor 103

5. Using "Archaeology" as a model, think about what the process of

writing a poem is like for you: building a bridge? falling off a

cliff? baking bread? taking an ocean voyage? Once you've chosen

the metaphor for your creative process, make a list of vocabulary

you might use, specific to that metaphor. Then write the poem,

trying to work in the most interesting words.

6. Write a brief seven-to-ten-line poem with an abstract title:

Loneliness, Fear, Desire, Ecstasy, Greed, Suffering, Pleasure.

Make the poem a metaphor for the title, without using the

abstraction in the poem.

7. Write a "negative simile" poem: "It wasn't like ___ ,, or "

8. Write a poem using a simile or metaphor which goes on for at

least five lines.

9. Find a poem you wrote some time ago and add at least three sim­

iles or metaphors to it.

rr'fie Jvfusic of tfie Line

A first thought is that the line is a unit to work in ... -Sandra McPherson

The line, when a poem is alive in its sound, measures: it is a proposal about listening.

-Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures

Most people who are beginning to write poetry are confused about line breaks. They wonder what the difference is between a poem and "chopped-up prose." They arrange their thoughts in lines without much sense of why they are doing so, beyond the hope that if what they write looks like a poem, it will mysteriously become one. We think McPherson's comment is a good place to begin thinking about the line: not as something language is "broken " into, but a method of making a poem-a line by line, brick by brick construction. Ellen Bryant Voigt made a similar statement at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference one year, asking the participants in a workshop, "Do you break your poems into lines, or compose by the line?" When you write, you may indeed find yourself at first getting your thoughts out in prose, and then trying to make a poem from that. Even so, we feel that this concept of the line as a unit of composition is an important one. At some point, if you want to make memorable poems, you'll

The Music of the Line 105

need to get a feel for the line, for what it does when it is very short, very long, and every place in between; you'll need to be able to test its weight and heft according to the rhythms of the language you've strung along it; and you'll want to use it to create tension or relax­ ation, to emphasize words, to speed up or slow down your reader's eye, to fulfill or thwart expectations. These are the advantages of the skillfully used line, and like any other aspect of craft, such skill comes from practice.

There are no real rules for line breaks. Give the same paragraph of prose to five poets, and each might break it into interesting lines; but their versions probably won't be identical. There's often no single correct way to do it. Instead, think of line breaks as effects; learn the different effects you can achieve, and then decide which you want. At first you'll feel very much at sea, but gradually, by experimenting and listening, and by noticing how line works for other writers, you'll begin to gain a sense of control.

Denise Levertov says that the pause at the end of a line is equal to a half-comma. The reader's eye and ear, having taken in the words and rhythms of the line, get a brief respite before going on to the next. In other words, there's a momentary silence; and as musicians know, silence is an integral part of the music. A line break is not just a pause in the action of the poem; it's very much a part of it. In a piece of music, the silence is notated by a rest, which tells the performer how long the silence lasts. Think of line breaks as rests in the music of your poem, and stanza breaks as longer rests. Meanwhile, of course, there's the line itself, with its flowing or agitated rhythms, its own

pauses within it that are the result of commas, periods, dashes-any­ thing that interrupts the words. Poets need to tune their ears as fine­ ly as musicians; that's why reading poems aloud is a good idea, including your own poems as you write them.

You need not be familiar with meter to gain an appreciation for the rhythms of writers' lines, and to begin to work with this principle yourself. All you need to do is to be able to hear the inflections of the language-which parts of words get a stress, a little push, when you say them aloud. Say the word "lily." You should hear it as a stressed

syllable, followed by an unstressed one (also c�lled a slack syllable):

106 THE POET'S COMPANION

LIL-y. Or try "forget": for-GET. Or how about AR-i-a, and in-FIN-i­ ty, and BLACK-ber-ry.

Here are the opening lines from a poem by Seamus Heaney, "Mother of the Groom":

What she remembers Is his glistening back In the bath, his small boots In the ring of boots at her feet.

Read it aloud to yourself. You should hear it this way:

WHAT she reMEMbers Is his GLIStening BACK In the BATH, his SMALL BOOTS In the RINGofBOOTS at her FEET.

This kind of reading is not always precise; you may pronounce some words differently than other people, or feel that some syllables seem to want a half-stress when placed next to those more strongly stressed. In the example above, you might not hear the word "What" in the first line as stressed; the poem could be read either way. Poetry lacks the more sophisticated notational system used for music; poets can only suggest certain intonations and ways of speaking. It's impos­ sible to reproduce the nuances of the human voice on the page. That's why it's especially important to pay attention to the tools we do have, to become aware of the sounds of language and begin to work with them -both in your choice of words, and how you organize those words into lines that are meaningful-not only in what they say, but how they say it.

Before we go on, a couple of definitions will be helpful. An end­ stopped line means just that: at the end of the line, there's a period that tells you to stop, or a semicolon, or a comma that makes you pause. The fourth line of "Mother of the Groom" is end-stopped. When a line is enjambed, it simply runs on to the next one, as the first three lines of the poem do. If a sentence goes on for several lines, the enjambment makes for a feeling of forward motion; when you get to

The Music of the Line 107

the period that ends both the sentence and the line, you're going to

have a momentary sense of completion, a release from tension. Take,

for example, this well-known poem, by Gwendolyn Brooks:

WE REAL COOL

The Pool Players.

Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We Die soon.

If this poem were written in end-stopped lines, it would look like

this:

We real cool.

We left school.

We lurk late.

We strike straight.

We sing sin.

We thin gin.

We jazz June.

We die soon.

Read these two versions aloud; you'll hear how the second one has

lost its energy, how it lacks the syncopated feel Brooks gets from that

"We" at the end of each line. In our rendition, the rhymes of late­

straight, sin-gin, and June-soon sound heavy-handed and obvious.

The end-stopped lines plod along; the last statement, which is now in

the exact rhythm of the previous lines, no longer surprises. Brooks's

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poem ends, not only with a different rhythm, but with the conspicu­ ous absence of that "We" we've come to expect at the end of the line, an omission that serves to point up the absence of these bragging pool players whose lives will be cut short.

Denise Levertov is a writer whose work is always carefully crafted, always alert to the musical possibilities of the line. Here's one of her poems, which deals with a kind of stasis, a waiting for inspiration, per­ haps-the narrator feels trapped, frustrated, unable to get to the thing that will release her into language.

WHERE IS THE ANGEL?

Where is the angel for me to wrestle? No driving snow in the glass bubble, but mild September.

Outside, the stark shadows menace, and fling their huge arms about unheard. I breathe

a tepid air, the blur of asters, of brown fern and gold-dust seems to murmur,

and that's what I hear, only that. Such clear walls of curved glass: I see the violent gesticulations

and feel-no, not nothing. But in this gentle haze, nothing commensurate. It is pleasant in here. History

mouths, volume turned off. A band of iron, like they put round a split tree, circles my heart. In here

it is pleasant, but when I open my mouth to speak, I too am soundless. Where is the angel

to wrestle with me and wound not my thigh but my throat, so curses and blessings flow storming out

and the glass shatters, and the iron sunders?

The Music of the Line 109

If you read this poem carefully, with your ears as well as your eyes,

you'll hear Levertov's control of each line. Notice where the ends of

sentences occur. In the first stanza, there's the opening question and

the last line of the stanza. After that, though, we find only three lines

end-stopped with periods. Two occur, not at the end of stanzas, but

inside them: "and that's what I hear, only that" in the fourth stanza,

and "gentle haze, nothing commensurate" in the fifth. Stanzas can

be thought of as being either end-stopped or enjambed, too, in a

sense; that is, if an end-stopped line occurs before the final line of the

stanza, we still have that sense of tension, and want to read on. So

Levertov keeps us moving through her poem all the way to its final

line. Each stanza ends, not with the satisfaction of a stopping point,

but in the middle of some idea the writer is pursuing. This makes the

final question resonate with greater power, since it brings us to rest

after a long wait. She's also set off the last line by itself, after sticking

to a three-line stanza throughout the poem. Considering the fact that

the narrator is still trapped at the end of the poem, still wondering

where her angel could be, the departure of that single last line is sig­

nificant- it's a vividly imagined breaking out, as the line breaks out

from the stanza pattern, even though the event hasn't occurred.

The rhythms of certain lines also serve to intensify the contrasts in the

poem. Levertov is working with two different states: the almost numb,

dull space the narrator inhabits, and the imagined one outside her "glass

bubble." So we get "driving snow" versus "mild September," "violent

gesticulations" versus "gentle haze," "silence" versus "curses and bless­

ings." But she also gives us the contrast more subtly, by setting up cer­

tain lines so that they reinforce her theme through rhythm. Look at the

following:

unHEARD.iBREATHE

Such CLEAR WALLS of CURVED GLASS

not my THIGH but my THROAT

and the GLASS SHATters, and the IRon SUNders

In each case, the same rhythm is repeated in the line, so that we

get it in parallel. Nothing storms out of these perfectly balanced lines.

They're pleasant, as harmony is pleasant, but that's not what the nar-

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rator seeks. What she is after, she describes this way: "so curses and blessings flow storming out"; and the rhythm of that line gives us the

rush of energy she 'd like to experience. A general principle of line breaks is that the word at the end of the

line, and to a lesser extent at the beginning of it, stands out a bit more

to the reader. You can see this working particularly strongly towards the end of Levertov's poem. When she describes "A band of iron,/ like they put round a split tree," the opposition of "iron" and "tree" is made more obvious. The words at the ends of other lines are also sig­ nificant ones. You can emphasize important ideas in your own poems the same way.

Levertov's poem is quiet, controlled; even when she uses enjamb­ ment, the poem proceeds rather than rushes headlong down the page. The rhythms are appropriate to the subject matter, and help to rein­ force the tone and mood as well. Paul Monette 's poem "Here," whose

speaker is dealing with the loss of his lover, Roger, to AIDS, adopts a very different strategy.

HERE

everything extraneous has burned away this is how burning feels in the fall of the final year not like leaves in a blue October but as if the skin were a paper lantern full of trapped moths beating their fired wings and yet I can lie on this hill just above you a foot beside where I will lie myself soon soon and for all the wrack and blubber feel still how we were warriors when the merest morning sun in the garden was a kingdom after Room 1010 war is not all death it turns out war is what little thing you hold on to refugeed and far from home oh sweetie will you please forgive me this that every time I opened a box of anything Glad Bags One-A-Days KINGSIZE was the worst I'd think will you still be here when the box is empty Rog Rog who will

The Music of the Line

play boy with me now that I bucket with tears

through it all when I'd cling beside you sobbing

you'd shrug it off with the quietest I'm still

here I have your watch in the top drawer

which I don't dare wear yet help me please

the boxes grocery home day after day

the junk that keeps men spotless but it doesn't

matter now how long they last or I

the day has taken you with it and all

there is now is burning dark the only green

is up by the grave and this little thing

of telling the hill I'm here oh I'm here

111

The poem is an outpouring that allows the reader no opportunity

to stop and consider. Part of this clearly comes from Monette's deci­

sion to forgo conventional punctuation; lines that would normally be

end-stopped, like the first one, now open into the rest of the poem.

Even the last line lacks a period, so that we feel cast away from the

final word "here" into the blankness of the page. The sentences run

together and help us to experience the speaker's distraught state.

Wordsworth once defined poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquil­

ity," but this poem expresses the white heat of immediate grief. The

way that Monette breaks many of his lines adds to the visceral appeal

of his language; we're made uncomfortable when words that usually

go together are suddenly severed from each other, like adjectives and

nouns ("blue I October"), articles and nouns ("the / merest morning

sun ," "a / kingdom"), when even verbs are split up ("Rog Rog who

will / play boy with me now," "but it doesn't I matter now how long

they last"). These and other line breaks cut across the normal flow of

sentences and are disorienting at times, mimicking and recreating

the powerful emotions the writer wishes to convey. Altering just a few

lines will give you a sense of how the poem would change:

feel still how we were warriors

when the merest morning sun in the garden

was a kingdom after Room 1010

war is not all death it turns out

112 THE POET'S COMPANION

war is what little thing you hold on to refug_eed and far from home

While the above version might make the poem a bit clearer on a first reading, it has lost some of the intensity and drive of the original. Sometimes this is the choice you'll make in your own work; your

poem may need the line-by-line unfolding of clear statements or

images, so that each thing is presented before moving on. At other

times you'll want to experiment with creating the kind of tension and dislocation you can achieve by such severe enjambment.

We haven't, so far, said anything about short lines versus long lines. We read somewhere that short lines speed up the pace of a poem, but we feel the opposite; we experience a poem in short lines as a more gradual movement. Read a few such poems -William Carlos

Williams and Robert Creeley wrote many-and see what you think. One thing we're certain of: the shorter the line (and the shorter the poem), the tighter the language has to be. All that white space around your words makes them really stand out. We're not suggesting that you write badly and hope to disguise it in long lines; that can't be done. But you might find it helpful to double- or even triple-space your lines, and to shorten them, to catch any flawed language. Short lines have another advantage, too: it's easier for you, as you're writing, to hear their rhythms. Write a few short lines and practice saying them out loud, so that you really hear the beats, the stressed and slack syllables; then try longer ones. A poet who handles the very long line beautifully, and is actually one of the few contemporary writers using it, is C. K. Williams. You should also look at Allen Ginsberg's famous poem "Howl," as well as his "Kaddish"; at Robinson Jeffers, who

wrote earlier in the twentieth century; and of course, read the poetry of Walt Whitman. Line lengths, ultimately, are something you devel­ op a knack for by fooling around with them. The same goes for using stanzas, and for starting lines somewhere other than the left-hand margin. As we said earlier, there are no real rules, only effects. Be careful that you don't become so enamored of what a line break can do that you begin using it as a clever trick, rather than a technique to

serve your poem.

The Music of the Line

IDEAS FOR WRITING

1. Take a draft of a poem and rewrite it in the following ways:

very short lines

very long lines

some length in between

in three-line stanzas

113

in five-line stanzas

You will probably find yourself changing some of the words as

you try out the various versions, adding and deleting material.

2. Look at several of your poems. ls there a line length that seems

characteristic of you? Or do you tend to mix up long and short

lines in the same poem? The same goes for stanzas: do you tend

to write in one block, or always to use four-line stanzas? If you

find you have a pattern, write a poem that breaks it.

3. Write a poem that is an emotional outburst-of joy, anger,

love-using a lot of enjambment, and few end-stopped lines.

Play with breaking apart parts of language that normally go

together.

4. Write a short nonsense poem, maximum five lines, in which you

pay attention to the rhythms of each line rather than the logical

meaning of the words. Read it aloud several times. When you

know the rhythms well, and like how they fit together, try to sub­

stitute meaningful words in the exact same rhythms .

5. Break the prose below into lines three different ways, to make

three different poems, and study the effects of each version. In

judging the results, think about the following: which words have

been emphasized in each version? How are you working with the

sentence structure-when are you highlighting it, or undercut­

ting it? Is there a tone or mood in the prose that one version

seems to capture best?

The cows stand under the trees in the wet grass, lifting their

necks to pull leaves down. We slow the truck, pull over to the

side of the road to watch them. How graceful they look, how

114 THE POET'S COMPANION

unlike themselves. We get out and lean on the fence. Thecows don't seem to notice we are there. 6. Choose a poet you admire, read at least one book of his or herwork, and carefully study how this writer uses line and stanza. Then take a draft of one of your own poems, and redo the linesand stanzas as you imagine this writer would. 7. Take a short poem by William Carlos Williams such as "The Great Figure" or "The Red Wheelbarrow," and copy the rhythmsof his lines exactly, substituting your own words. 8. Do the above for any poet you like, to sensitize your ear to thepoet's rhythms, and your own.

Voice and Style

We convince by our presence. -Walt Whitman

I am a black woman poet and I sound like one. -Lucille Clifton

When we listen to a person speaking, we hear a particular music unlike any other. The stamp of someone's voice is as individual as a fingerprint; if we know someone well, we instantly recognize the tone, pitch, resonance of that voice whenever we encounter it. In poetry, the term voice has been used to describe that sense of a unique presence on the page-an unmistakable something that becomes the' mark of a writer, a way of saying things that is the writer's own. This is usually what developing writers mean when they say they are try­ ing to find their voice; some would argue that it wasn't lost to begin with, that we all have a voice already. But either way, this idea of a recognizable voice is an important one for writers. We struggle with the voices of the past, the poets who came before us, and we try to learn from them without sounding like them. We read contemporary writers and imitate their line breaks, or their similes, and worry that we shouldn't, that we'll only create bad reproductions instead of orig­ inal works. We want a presence that convinces, one that engages and seduces a reader into the world of our poems, a voice a reader will

"

116 THE POET'S COMPANION

want to listen to. When we fail to produce this voice, the poem fails. The reader laughs when we want her to cry, or turns away disinter­ estedly when we passionately want his attention. The poem doesn't communicate what we meant; the voice is garbled, confused, talking to itself.

In actual speech, we don't choose our voice. We grow up inherit­ ing speech patterns and physical structures that largely determine how we sound. In poetry, we may write with a voice that is also deter­ mined by things beyond our control-an innate sense of language, early education, and previous exposure to other writers. But just as someone might go to a speech therapist to rid himself of a stutter, or erase a particular accent, writers can develop their voice so that it becomes a more flexible instrument to articulate their concerns. Style is really interchangeable with voice, in this sense, and it's use­ ful to remember that style in a writer is revealed by the characteris­ tic choices a writer makes. Beginning writers often sound remarkably alike, because they have the same limited range of choices; they haven't yet discovered a wider range. If you haven't done much read­ ing or writing of poetry, you're going to make your choices based on a narrow sampling of what you know, which might range from the sappy cliches of greeting cards to some fuzzily-remembered poets from earlier centuries crammed down your throat in high school, to popular song lyrics. That is, you'll make choices by default-rather than from a rich storehouse of possibilities discovered through work­ ing and playing with language, and through reading. Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them-consciously and unconsciously-your style will develop.

What are the choices a writer makes, that constitute a recognizable voice and style? If you're studying someone's style, just about every; aspect of her poems is worth considering. Let's look at two by Lucill,6 Clifton, to see what can be discovered about her presence on tJ'ie page.

Voice and Style

homage to my hips

these hips are big hips they need space to move around in. they do not fit into little

petty places, these hips are free hips. they don't like to be held back.

these hips have never been enslaved,

they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do.

these hips are mighty hips.

these hips are magic hips.

i have known them to put a spell on a man and

spin him like a top!

the women you are accustomed to

wearing that same black dress,

their lips and asses tight, their bronzed hair set in perfect place;

these women gathered in my dream

to talk their usual talk, their conversation spiked with the names

of avenues in France.

and when i asked them what the hell,

they shook their marble heads

and walked erect out of my sleep,

back into a town which knows

all there is to know about the cold outside, while i relaxed

and thought of you, your burning blood, your dancing tongue.

117

Does Clifton sound like a black woman poet? There's a reference

to enslavement in the first poem, and both are about the female body.

118 THE POET'S COMPANION

Certainly, being a black woman poet has been one of Clifton's sub­ jects. The sensuality and celebration of these poems are also charac­ teristic of her work. Her poems tend to be short, to forgo capitals and sometimes titles. They're small, but they tackle large subjects. They want to connect; they're accessible, seemingly simple, but not sim­ plistic. We hear a voice speaking directly, more conversational than formal. The person Clifton creates on the page speaks with passion and sometimes humor. This is a style that wants to collapse the dis­ tance between writer and reader, and between the poet and her poem. Of course, two poems is a small sampling; Clifton doesn't always write about her body, or about her own life, or in first person. If you wanted to further analyze Clifton's style, you'd need to read more of her work. (Her latest is The Terrible Stories from BOA Editions.)

Doing a close analysis of any writer is a useful exercise that can teach you a lot about why you may like or dislike the poems-why they appeal to you, why they move you or make you cringe. Of course, there's a mysterious element in poetry that seems to resist intellectual analysis, and this is good. William Carlos Williams said, "A poem is a machine made of words," and while it may be true that each word contributes to the smooth functioning of a poem, there's an organic and irreducible energy in a good poem that can't be logi­ cally accounted for. Call it the spark, the "blood-jet," as Sylvia Plath did, or whatever you will; you can take the poem apart and you won't find it. But from the standpoint of technique, you can learn from studying the styles of other writers-and from stepping back to take a good look at your own characteristic choices. Here's a list of things you might want to consider.

1. Subject matter. Subject and style, content and form-they really are inseparable. Still, poems are generally about something. Because writers write out of their interests, their beliefs and obsessions, partic­ ular subjects often become part of how we recognize them. Whitman wrote about the common mass of humanity, not the wealthy in their drawing rooms; Robert Lowell's work began to seem radically differ­ ent when he started producing pieces about his family; Anne Sexton

Voice and Style 119

wrote about suicide and the body, Sylvia Plath about death and the

true and false self. Sharon Olds, in each of her first three books, wrote

poems about her father; the fourth was titled The Father, and every

poem concerned him. C. K. Williams often takes the internal work­

ings of his mind, or the dynamics of relationships, as his subject; his

poems are frequently discursive and psychological. Is your own sub­

ject matter too narrow or too broad? What are your subjects? Are you

exploring the material you feel compelled to tackle? Are there new

subjects for poems that you haven't considered? Asking these ques­

tions of your work may lead you to new and deeper material.

2. Diction. Diction is word choice, the vocabulary of the poem.

Some writers take what we'll call the high road-it's hard to get

through their poems without a dictionary. (At least, we can't.) The

high road is filled with long, Latinate words-"expectorate" instead

of "spit," "indefatigable" instead of "untiring," and so on. In much

modern and contemporary poetry, the tendency has been to move

away from such diction, to try for the language of ordinary speech,

heightened by careful crafting. Taking the high road is tricky, but

some writers have done it successfully. The danger is that you'll

sound pompous and overinflated; the danger of ordinary diction is

that you'll sound ordinary. In any case, you'll want to look carefully

at the words you've chosen. At what level do you want to pitch your

poem? Who's speaking in the poem; would that person use the words

you've chosen for her? Maybe you want to mix up different dictions

and have several ways of speaking occurring in the same poem, as

John Berryman did in his Dream Songs. Who do you imagine read­

ing your poem? Besides these issues, there's the consideration of writ­

ing in the language of your time. Some student writers have baffled

us by insisting that they do not mind sounding like Shakespeare or

Shelley or someone else long dead; their poems are littered with

phrases like "her maidenhood," or "twixt the sea and thy shore" -and

such diction, used in earnest, ensures that no reader will take them

seriously. Consider your word choices in terms of both their denota­

tive, literal meaning, and their connotations-what they suggest and

imply.

120 THE POET'S COMPANION

3. Point of view. You should try out every possible point of view, to

expand your choices and learn how each functions . Many writers get

stuck in the first person singular; they never get away from "I woke

up. I looked around. I thought about my life." First-person poems

need not be avoided; but many writers seem to think they're the only option available. And a common difficulty, when you're starting out , is that you feel you have to tell "the truth" if you're writing in first per­ son. A poem is a work of imagination, not your autobiography. You

shouldn't let your poem be stifled by "what really happened." Sometimes putting your poem into third person-"He woke up. He

looked around. He thought about his life." -can help you get some

needed perspective, shake you loose from actual events, and let you

invent as the poem needs it. First-person plural-the "we" voice­ can be an interesting choice, too; it enlarges the scope from the per­ sonal to the collective. Then there's "you," which might either be an address to a specific person -lots of love poems get addressed to a

"you," creating a feeling of intimacy-or which might simply mean, "one." A "you" poem can also address the reader.

4. Syntax and grammar. Take a close look at how you tend to put your

sentences together. Do you typically write short sentences, or long elab­ orate ones, or something in between? Do you load up the adjectives

before your nouns? Maybe you have a bad habit like using passive

voice, or overusing a word like "which" or "that." Ezra Pound said, "poetry should be at least as well-written as prose," and we agree; bad grammar doesn't fly for either one. You have to know what the rules are

in order to break them in a way that serves your poem, so if you don't

know the basics , get help and read the chapter, "A Grammatical

Excursion." One common fault we've seen is inconsistency in things

like using capitals and punctuation. Whether to use them or not is your

choice, but a random scattering-capitals sometimes, proper punctua­ tion sometimes, with mysterious lapses-will only distract your reader and make her think you don't really know what you're doing. If you feel

enslaved by the sentence, try writing fragments, breaking apart words, playing with their arrangement on the page, as E. E. Cummings did and as many contemporary experimental writers are doing.

Voice and Style 121

5. Form: line breaks, stanzas, structure. As with point of view, you

should try out all the various possible arrangements for your poems.

If you always write in one solid stanza , it's time to begin experiment­

ing: couplets, tercets , quatrains. The same for line breaks-try some

different ways of doing them. If you always write free verse, try adding

some formal requirements-meter or rhyme or some other pattern

you must work with. If you always write in iambic pentameter, break

out into something less structured. Also take a look at whether your

poems as a whole follow a structural pattern-do they always end

with an image? With a "punch line"? Try ending with an abstract

statement , or something less conclusive , more open-ended. Maybe

they always circle back to something they began with; if so, make

yourself-let yourself-write something that keeps going outward.

Get away from starting your lines at the left margin , and use the field

of the page.

6. Imagery. We all have particular words and images that seem to

crop up in the course of our work. You may notice that you fill your

poems with images of mothers , or couples , or animals. A good thing

to look at is the kinds of images you make-are they vague and con­

fusing, or sharp and detailed? Do you use too many similes-or not

enough? Do you rely on statements-"She made me feel so sexy" -

to the exclusion of images which might embody some of your

thoughts and ideas? Less common is the opposite problem: image

after image without any abstract statement. Usually, image and state­

ment combine in a poem (though there are memorable exceptions).

Notice what your balance is , and see if you need to strengthen one or

the other.

7. Any other pattern that you perceive. Know your own work. Being aware of your stylistic strengths and weaknesses will not only help you

to grow, but will help you to deal with criticism from others. Everyone has certain things they can do well, and other areas that need work. Maybe you have great details in your poems, but have trouble making them add up to a coherent whole. If you know this, you won't feel so defensive when someone says, "This doesn't hold together." Instead, you'll recognize that again you've run up against

122 THE POET'S COMPANION

your limitations-and you'll be grateful for suggestions to help you overcome them. Maybe you're too literal and linear, and need to

make some associative leaps; the next chapter on dreams and experi­ ments can help lead you away from the logical. Read the symbolist and surrealist writers, and Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca's Poet in New York. Read and reread the work of Chilean poet Pablo

Neruda, whose earthy, compassionate verse often contains surrealis­ tic, magical images. Try contemporary writers like Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Ron Silliman, and Leslie Scalapino, who all have

unique and intriguing ways of making poems-and read anyone who

doesn't make logical sense to you. Write whatever comes into your head, without stopping; write down your dreams; let go. If you have

the opposite problem and no one ever understands your poems, though you think you're communicating something perfectly clear­ ly-if your work has been deemed obscure by several readers who are

otherwise astute, intelligent, literate people-you may need to focus on clarity, on what you intend to say and what is being heard by oth­ ers. Of course, we can't always see our own patterns, especially in the

heat of new writing. That's not the time, anyway, for thinking about these things. But when you're ready to step back and demand the best from your poem, see if you can regard your work objectively-and invite other readers to help you do that.

There's another aspect of voice to consider: the persona poem. Persona is Greek for mask; in a persona poem, you pretend to be someone else. In truth, all poems are in a sense persona poems-the "I" of a first-person poem that seems to be about the poet's true expe­ rience is just as much of a construction as a poem in the voice of a

medieval peasant speaking to us from the dead. In the latter case, though, we'd never mistake the peasant's voice for the poet's; a per­ sona poem usually announces itself. Such poems are a great way to

stretch your style. You may find you need to change it completely for the sake of the person you're creating on the page. And a persona

poem can let you explore events and states of being more freely; masks allow us to shed our ordinary identities. Frank Bidart has writ­ ten beautifully as various characters, including the famous Russian

Voice and Style 123

dancer Nijinsky and an anorexic young woman; when you read these

and others of his poems, you'll recognize his particular style. Ai has

also written a number of persona poems, one in the voices of John

and Bobby Kennedy. Rita Dove's book about her grandparents,

Thomas and Beulah, sometimes presents their experiences from the

first person. Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

brings alive the voices of a particular time and place.

This poem by Richard Jones not only portrays a woman of ancient

China, but does it in the style of early Chinese poetry, at least as it

sounds rendered in English. This would be a good time to acquaint

yourself with poets like Wang Wei, Tu Fu, and Li Po . Read some

translations by Sam Hamill, or Willis and Tony Barnstone, or earlier

translations by Arthur Whaley. A good recent anthology is A Drifting

Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry from White Pine Press.

WAN CHU'S WIFE IN BED

Wan Chu, my adoring husband,

has returned from another trip

selling trinkets in the provinces.

He pulls off his lavender shirt

as I lie naked in our bed,

waiting for him. He tells me

I am the only woman he'll ever love.

He may wander from one side of China

to the other, but his heart

will always stay with me.

His face glows in the lamplight

with the sincerity of a boy

when I lower the satin sheet

to let him see my breasts.

Outside, it begins to rain

on the cherry trees

he planted with our son,

and when he enters me with a sigh,

the storm begins in earnest,

shaking our little house.

Afterwards, I stroke his back

124 THE POET'S COMPANION

until he falls asleep. I'd love to stay awake all night listening to the rain, but I should sleep, too. Tomorrow Wan Chu will be a hundred miles away and I will be awake all night in the arms of Wang Chen, the tailor from Ming Pao, the tiny village down river.

Jones's poem, with its surprising and amusing revelation of the wife's betrayal, makes these readers, at least, question Wan Chu's dec­ larations of love as well. The voice convinces us with its quiet, straightforward style. The simplicity and clarity are characteristic not only of the translated Chinese poems we've read, but also of Jones's other work.

This next poem, by Patricia Smith, adopts a very different tone and style which suits its speaker-a white supremacist.

SKINHEAD

They call me skinhead, and I got my own beauty. It is knife-scrawled across my back in sore, jagged letters, it's in the way my eyes snap away from the obvious. I sit in my dim matchbox, on the edge of a bed tousled with my ragged smell, slide razors across my hair, count how many ways I can bring blood closer to the surface of my skin. These are the duties of the righteous, the ways of the anointed.

The face that moves in my mirror is huge and pockmarked, scraped pink and brilliant, apple-cheeked, I am filled with my own spit. Two years ago, a machine that slices leather sucked in my hand and held it, whacking off three fingers at the root.

Voice and Style

I didn't feel nothing till I looked down

and saw one of them on the floor

next to my boot heel, and I ain't worked since then.

I sit here and watch niggers take over my TV set,

walking like kings up and down the sidewalks in my head,

walking like their fat black mamas named them freedom.

My shoulders tell me that ain't right.

So I move out into the sun

where my beauty makes them lower their heads,

or into the night with a lead pipe up my sleeve,

a razor tucked in my boot. I was born to make things right.

It's easy now to move my big body into shadows,

to move from a place where there was nothing

into the stark circle of a streetlight,

the pipe raised up high over my head.

It's a kick to watch their eyes get big,

round and gleaming like cartoon jungle boys,

right in that second when they know

the pipe's gonna come down, and I got this thing

I like to say, listen to this, I like to say

"Hey, nigger, Abe Lincoln's been dead a long time."

I get hard listening to their skin burst.

I was born to make things right.

Then this newspaper guy comes around,

seems I was a little sloppy kicking some fag's ass

and he opened his hole and screamed about it.

This reporter finds me curled up in my bed,

those TV flashes licking my face clean.

Same ol' shit. Ain't got no job, the coloreds and spies got 'em all.

Why ain't I working? Look at my hand, asshole.

No, I ain't part of no organized group,

I'm just a white boy who loves his race,

fighting for a pure country.

125

126 THE POET'S COMPANION

Sometimes it's just me. Sometimes three. Sometimes 30. AIDS will take care of the faggots, then it's gon' be white on black in the streets.Then there'll be three million. I tell him that. So he writes it up and I come off looking like some kind of freak,like I'm Hitler himself. I ain't that lucky,but I got my own beauty. It is in my steel-toed boots, in the hard corners of my shaved head. I look in the mirror and hold up my mangled hand,only the baby finger left, sticking straight up,I know it's the wrong goddamned finger,but fuck you all anyway. I'm riding the top rung of the perfect race,my face scraped pink and brilliant.I'm your baby, America, your boy, drunk on my own spit, I am goddamned fuckin' beautiful. And I was born and raised right here.

In this piece, Smith, a black woman poet, sounds like a white maleracist. This boy comes alive on the page; we can hear and feel hishate and anger. (Smith, who was a National Poetry Slam winner,brings it out even more powerfully in performa'nce.) Interestingly,we're also drawn to, or at least compelled by, this boy who is bothphysically and psychically damaged. He has a sense of himself asbeautiful, as purposeful: "I was born to make things right." His vio­lence makes sense to him, and this is what the poem illuminates: the world-view of a radically different other. Smith gets at the issues hereby moving out of her own perspective. It wasn't enough to ask the question, "What makes a person like this tick, what makes him do

Voice and Style 127

these things?" Smith goes deeper to find her answers, and they are uncomfortable ones, not meant to reassure us but to make us look more carefully and thoughtfully.

Persona poems are shapeshifting, a chance to move beyond the boundaries of our personality, our particular circumstances. If we enter our imagination fully and deeply enough, we can experience our questions, our concerns and obsessions, with more empathy and insight. And whatever voices speak from that deep place will require attention.

IDEAS FOR WRITING

1. Do a stylistic analysis of a poet you like. You might want to start by using our checklist in this chapter, examining subject matter, diction, imagery, and the like; try to discover what sorts of moves the writer characteristically makes. Then write a poem in that writer's style.

2. Now do a parody of the same poet. A parody takes aspects of a writer's style and exaggerates them for comic effect.

3. Here's a tough one : swallow your pride and do a parody of your own style. This can be a lot of fun-trust us.

4. Try to write a poem that is the opposite of your style in every way.

5. Take a poem you've written and "translate" it into:

academic-intellectual diction

romantic diction

colloquial speech (this might be black dialect, or southern dialect, or East Coast dialect, or any other way of speaking that isn't mainstream, �onventional English)

6. Write a poem in first-person singular about something that hap­ pened to somebody else; tell it as though it happened to you.

128 THE POET'S COMPANION

7. Take something that happened to you, and tell it in third per­ son.

8. Write a poem that knows it's a poem and that addresses the

reader; step out from behind the poem and talk about the act of writing or what the poem is doing (or trying to). Some poems you could read first are "Portrait" by Pattiann Rogers; "The

Truth" by Dick Bakken; "Leaves That Grow Inward" by Susan

Mitchell.

9. Write a poem in the voice of someone in your family. It might be one of your parents talking about their lives or how they met; a brother or sister describing some family gathering. If you want, you can include yourself as a person in the poem-seen, of course, from the speaker's perspective.

10. Write a poem in the voice of a famous person, living or dead. Try to give the reader an intimate glimpse of this person, one

that couldn't be gotten from the media or history books.

11. What kind of character seems most foreign to you -a homeless man? A suburban housewife? A Zen monk? Whoever it is, that's the persona to adopt. Find a way to enter that character's experi­ ence, and write a poem in his or her voice.

12. Research a period of history that interests you, and write a poem that purports to be excerpts from the journal of someone who

lived during that time.

Stop Making Sense:

1Jreams and 'Experiments

a fte r the e l e c t i o n

our teeth rattle & our souls.

from the socket of the mask

mice swarm & swans. the mother's eye is running.

a small boy spins thru the furnace of grass, thru wheat spear & spire goes running. deep in the soil deep in the gut

death's bird-blue calyx is humming

-Michael Koch

Earlier in this book, we said that there's something in a good poem

that can' t be accounted for logically. If poems were only logical con­

structions, anyone could study the rules, glue a few phrases together,

and assemble a fine piece of work-just like putting together a model

airplane or painting a portrait by numbers. Ironically, what would be

missing would be the very thing that was essential: the poetry itself.

When we say of some gesture or experience, "That was pure poetry,"

we aren't talking about meter, or similes, or line breaks; we mean that

something ineffable, something beautiful and even beyond words,

'T'fie Music of tfie Line

A first thought is that the line is a unit to work in ... -Sandra McPherson

The line, when a poem is alive in its sound, measures: it is a proposal about listening.

-Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures

Most people who are beginning to write poetry are confused about line breaks. They wonder what the difference is between a poem and "chopped-up prose." They arrange their thoughts in lines without much sense of why they are doing so, beyond the hope that if what they write looks like a poem, it will mysteriously become one. We think McPherson's comment is a good place to begin thinking about the line: not as something language is "broken" into, but a method of making a poem-a line by line, brick by brick construction. E�len Bryant Voigt made a similar statement at the Bread Loaf Wnters Conference one year, asking the participants in a workshop, "Do you break your poems into lines, or compose by the line?" When you write, you may indeed find yourself at first getting your thoughts out in prose, and then trying to make a poem from that. Even so, we feel that this concept of the line as a unit of composition is an important one. At some point, if you want to make memorable poems, you'll

The Music of the Line 105

need to get a feel for the line, for what it does when it is very short, very long, and every place in between; you'll need to be able to test its weight and heft according to the rhythms of the language you've strung along it; and you'll want to use it to create tension or relax­ ation, to emphasize words, to speed up or slow down your reader's eye, to fulfill or thwart expectations. These are the advantages of the skillfully used line, and like any other aspect of craft, such skill comes from practice.

There are no real rules for line breaks. Give the same paragraph of prose to five poets, and each might break it into interesting lines; but their versions probably won't be identical. There's often no single correct way to do it. Instead, think of line breaks as effects; learn the different effects you can achieve, and then decide which you want. At first you'll feel very much at sea, but gradually, by experimenting and listening, and by noticing how line works for other writers, you'll begin to gain a sense of control.

Denise Levertov says that the pause at the end of a line is equal to a half-comma. The reader's eye and ear, having taken in the words and rhythms of the line, get a brief respite before going on to the next. In other words, there's a momentary silence; and as musicians know, silence is an integral part of the music. A line break is not just a pause in the action of the poem; it's very much a part of it. In a piece of music, the silence is notated by a rest, which tells the performer how long the silence lasts. Think of line breaks as rests in the music of your poem, and stanza breaks as longer rests. Meanwhile, of course, there's the line itself, with its flowing or agitated rhythms, its own pauses within it that are the result of commas, periods, dashes-any­ thing that interrupts the words. Poets need to tune their ears as fine­ ly as musicians; that's why reading poems aloud is a good idea, including your own poems as you write them.

You need not be familiar with meter to gain an appreciation for the rhythms of writers' lines, and to begin to work with this principle yourself. All you need to do is to be able to hear the inflections of the language-which parts of words get a stress, a little push, when you say them aloud. Say the word "lily." You should hear it as a stressed

syllable, followed by an unstressed one (also called a slack syllable):

106 THE POET'S COMPANION

LIL-y. Or try ''forget": for-GET. Or how about AR-i-a, and in-FIN-i­ ty, and BIACK-ber-ry.

Here are the opening lines from a poem by Seamus Heaney, "Mother of the Groom":

What she remembers Is his glistening back In the bath, his small boots In the ring of boots at her feet.

Read it aloud to yourself. You should hear it this way:

WHAT she reMEMbers Is his GLIStening BACK In the BATH, his SMALL BOOTS In the RING of BOOTS at her FEET.

This kind of reading is not always precise; you may pronounce some words differently than other people, or feel that some syllables seem to want a half-stress when placed next to those more strongly stressed. In the example above, you might not hear the word "What" in the first line as stressed; the poem could be read either way. Poetry lacks the more sophisticated notational system used for music; poets can only suggest certain intonations and ways of speaking. It's impos­ sible to reproduce the nuances of the human voice on the page. That's why it's especially important to pay attention to the tools we do have to become aware of the sounds of language and begin to work

'

.

with them -both in your choice of words, and how you orgamze those words into lines that are meaningful-not only in what they say, but how they say it.

Before we go on, a couple of definitions will be helpful. An end­ stopped line means just that: at the end of the line, there's a period that tells you to stop, or a semicolon, or a comma that makes you pause. The fourth line of "Mother of the Groom" is end-stopped. When a line is enjambed, it simply runs on to the next one, as the first three lines of the poem do. If a sentence goes on for several lines, the enjambment makes for a feeling of forward motion; when you get to

r

The Music of the Line 107

the period that ends both the sentence and the line, you're going to have a momentary sense of completion, a release from tension. Take, for example, this well-known poem, by Gwendolyn Brooks:

WE REAL COOL

The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We Left school. We

Lurk late. We Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We Die soon.

If this poem were written in end-stopped lines, it would look like this:

We real cool. We left school.

We lurk late. We strike straight.

We sing sin. We thin gin.

We jazz June. We die soon.

Read these two versions aloud; you'll hear how the second one has lost its energy, how it lacks the syncopated feel Brooks gets from that "We" at the end of each line. In our rendition, the rhymes of late­ straight, sin-gin, and June-soon sound heavy-handed and obvious. The end-stopped lines plod along; the last statement, which is now in the exact rhythm of the previous lines, no longer surprises. Brooks's

106 THE POET'S COMPANION

LIL-y. Or try "forget": for-GET. Or how about AR-i-a, and in-FIN-i­ ty, and BLACK-ber-ry.

Here are the opening lines from a poem by Seamus Heaney, "Mother of the Groom":

What she remembers Is his glistening back In the bath, his small boots In the ring of boots at her feet.

Read it aloud to yourself. You should hear it this way:

WHAT she reMEMbers Is his GLIStening BACK In the BATH, his SMALL BOOTS In the RING of BOOTS at her FEET.

This kind of reading is not always precise; you may pronounce some words differently than other people, or feel that some syllables seem to want a half-stress when placed next to those more strongly stressed. In the example above, you might not hear the word "What" in the first line as stressed; the poem could be read either way. Poetry lacks the more sophisticated notational system used for music; poets can only suggest certain intonations and ways of speaking. It's impos­ sible to reproduce the nuances of the human voice on the page. That's why it's especially important to pay attention to the tools we do have to become aware of the sounds of language and begin to work '

. with them -both in your choice of words, and how you orgamze those words into lines that are meaningful-not only in what they say, but how they say it.

Before we go on, a couple of definitions will be helpful. An end­ stopped line means just that: at the end of the line, there's a period that tells you to stop, or a semicolon, or a comma that makes you pause. The fourth line of "Mother of the Groom" is end-stopped. When a line is enjambed, it simply runs on to the next one, as the first three lines of the poem do. If a sentence goes on for several lines, the enjambment makes for a feeling of forward motion; when you get to

The Music of the Line 107

the period that ends both the sentence and the line, you're going to have a momentary sense of completion, a release from tension. Take, for example, this well-known poem, by Gwendolyn Brooks:

WE REAL COOL

The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We Left school. We

Lurk late. We Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We Die soon.

If this poem were written in end-stopped lines, it would look like this:

We real cool. We left school.

We lurk late. We strike straight.

We sing sin. We thin gin.

We jazz June. We die soon.

Read these two versions aloud; you'll hear how the second one has lost its energy, how it lacks the syncopated feel Brooks gets from that "We" at the end of each line. In our rendition, the rhymes of late­ straight, sin-gin, and June-soon sound heavy-handed and obvious. The end-stopped lines plod along; the last statement, which is now in the exact rhythm of the previous lines, no longer surprises. Brooks's

108 THE POET'S COMPANION

poem ends, not only with a different rhythm, but with the conspicu­ ous absence of that "We" we've come to expect at the end of the line, an omission that serves to point up the absence of these bragging pool players whose lives will be cut short.

Denise Levertov is a writer whose work is always carefully crafted, always alert to the musical possibilities of the line. Here's one of her poems, which deals with a kind of stasis, a waiting for inspiration, per­ haps-the narrator feels trapped, frustrated, unable to get to the thing that will release her into language.

WHERE IS THE ANGEL?

Where is the angel for me to wrestle? No driving snow in the glass bubble, but mild September.

Outside, the stark shadows menace, and fling their huge arms about unheard. I breathe

a tepid air, the blur of asters, of brown fem and gold-dust seems to murmur,

and that's what I hear, only that. Such clear walls of curved glass: I see the violent gesticulations

and feel-no, not nothing. But in this gentle haze, nothing commensurate. It is pleasant in here. History

mouths, volume turned off. A band of iron, like they put round a split tree, circles my heart. In here

it is pleasant, but when I open my mouth to speak, I too am soundless. Where is the angel

to wrestle with me and wound not my thigh but my throat, so curses and blessings flow storming out

and the glass shatters, and the iron sunders?

The Music of the Line 109

If you read this poem carefully, with your ears as well as your eyes, you'll hear Levertov's control of each line. Notice where the ends of sentences occur. In the first stanza, there's the opening question and the last line of the stanza. After that, though, we find only three lines end-stopped with periods. Two occur, not at the end of stanzas, but inside them: "and that's what I hear, only that" in the fourth stanza, and "gentle haze, nothing commensurate" in the fifth. Stanzas can be thought of as being either end-stopped or enjambed, too, in a sense; that is, if an end-stopped line occurs before the final line of the stanza, we still have that sense of tension, and want to read on. So Levertov keeps us moving through her poem all the way to its final line. Each stanza ends, not with the satisfaction of a stopping point, but in the middle of some idea the writer is pursuing. This makes the final question resonate with greater power, since it brings us to rest after a long wait. She's also set off the last line by itself, after sticking to a three-line stanza throughout the poem. Considering the fact that the narrator is still trapped at the end of the poem, still wondering where her angel could be, the departure of that single last line is sig­ nificant-it's a vividly imagined breaking out, as the line breaks out from the stanza pattern, even though the event hasn't occurred.

The rhythms of certain lines also serve to intensify the contrasts in the poem. Levertov is working with two different states: the almost numb, dull space the narrator inhabits, and the imagined one outside her "glass bubble." So we get "driving snow" versus "mild September," "violent gesticulations" versus "gentle haze;' "silence" versus "curses and bless­ ings." But she also gives us the contrast more subtly, by setting up cer­ tain lines so that they reinforce her theme through rhythm. Look at the following:

unHEARD. i BREATHE Such CLEAR WALLS of CURVED GLASS not my THIGH but my THROAT and the GLASS SHATters, and the IRon SUNders

In each case, the same rhythm is repeated in the line, so that we get it in parallel. Nothing storms out of these perfectly balanced lines. They're pleasant, as harmony is pleasant, but that's not what the nar-

110 THE POET'S COMPANION

rator seeks. What she is after, she describes this way: "so curses and blessings flow storming out"; and the rhythm of that line gives us the rush of energy she'd like to experience.

A general principle of line breaks is that the word at the end of the line, and to a lesser extent at the beginning of it, stands out a bit more to the reader. You can see this working particularly strongly towards the end of Levertov's poem. When she describes "A band of iron, / like they put round a split tree," the opposition of "iron" and "tree" is made more obvious. The words at the ends of other lines are also sig­ nificant ones. You can emphasize important ideas in your own poems the same way.

Levertov's poem is quiet, controlled; even when she uses enjamb­ ment, the poem proceeds rather than rushes headlong down the page. The rhythms are appropriate to the subject matter, and help to rein­ force the tone and mood as well. Paul Monette's poem "Here," whose speaker is dealing with the loss of his lover, Roger, to AIDS, adopts a very different strategy.

HERE

everything extraneous has burned away this is how burning feels in the fall of the final year not like leaves in a blue October but as if the skin were a paper lantern full of trapped moths beating their fired wings and yet I can lie on this hill just above you a foot beside where I will lie myself soon soon and for all the wrack and blubber feel still how we were warriors when the merest morning sun in the garden was a kingdom after Room 1010 war is not all death it turns out war is what little thing you hold on to refugeed and far from home oh sweetie will you please forgive me this that every time I opened a box of anything Glad Bags One-A-Days KINGSIZE was the worst I'd think will you still be here when the box is empty Rog Rog who will

r

The Music of the Line

play boy with me now that I bucket with tears through it all when I'd cling beside you sobbing you'd shrug it off with the quietest I'm still here I have your watch in the top drawer which I don't dare wear yet help me please the boxes grocery home day after day the junk that keeps men spotless but it doesn't matter now how long they last or I the day has taken you with it and all there is now is burning dark the only green is up by the grave and this little thing of telling the hill I'm here oh I'm here

111

The poem is an outpouring that allows the reader no opportunity to stop and consider. Part of this clearly comes from Monette's deci­ sion to forgo conventional punctuation; lines that would normally be end-stopped, like the first one, now open into the rest of the poem. Even the last line lacks a period, so that we feel cast away from the final word "here" into the blankness of the page. The sentences run together and help us to experience the speaker's distraught state. Wordsworth once defined poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquil­ ity," but this poem expresses the white heat of immediate grief. The way that Monette breaks many of his lines adds to the visceral appeal of his language; we're made uncomfortable when words that usually go together are suddenly severed from each other, like adjectives and nouns ("blue / October"), articles and nouns ("the / merest morning sun," "a / kingdom"), when even verbs are split up ("Rog Rog who will / play boy with me now," "but it doesn't / matter now how long they last"). These and other line breaks cut across the normal flow of sentences and are disorienting at times, mimicking and recreating the powerful emotions the writer wishes to convey. Altering just a few lines will give you a sense of how the poem would change:

feel still how we were warriors when the merest morning sun in the garden was a kingdom after Room 1010 war is not all death it turns out

112 THE POET'S COMPANION

war is what little thing you hold on to refug_eed and far from home

While the above version might make the poem a bit clearer on a first reading, it has lost some of the intensity and drive of the original. Sometimes this is the choice you'll make in your own work; your poem may need the line-by-line unfolding of clear statements or images, so that each thing is presented before moving on. At other times you'll want to experiment with creating the kind of tension and dislocation you can achieve by such severe enjambment.

We haven't, so far, said anything about short lines versus long lines. We read somewhere that short lines speed up the pace of a poem, but we feel the opposite; we experience a poem in short lines as a more gradual movement. Read a few such poems-William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley wrote many-and see what you think. One thing we're certain of: the shorter the line (and the shorter the poem), the tighter the language has to be. All that white space around your words makes them really stand out. We're not suggesting that you write badly and hope to disguise it in long lines; that can't be done. But you might find it helpful to double- or even triple-space your lines, and to shorten them, to catch any flawed language. Short lines have another advantage, too: it's easier for you, as you're writing, to hear their rhythms. Write a few short lines and practice saying them out loud, so that you really hear the beats, the stressed and slack syllables; then try longer ones. A poet who handles the very long line beautifully, and is actually one of the few contemporary writers using it, is C. K Williams. You should also look at Allen Ginsberg's famous poem "Howl," as well as his "Kaddish"; at Robinson Jeffers, who wrote earlier in the twentieth century; and of course, read the poetry of Walt Whitman. Line lengths, ultimately, are something you devel­ op a knack for by fooling around with them. The same goes for using stanzas, and for starting lines somewhere other than the left-hand margin. As we said earlier, there are no real rules, only effects. Be careful that you don't become so enamored of what a line break can do that you begin using it as a clever trick, rather than a technique to serve your poem.

The Music of the Line

IDEAS FOR WRITING

1. Take a draft of a poem and rewrite it in the following ways:

very short lines very long lines some length in between in three-line stanzas in five-line stanzas

113

You will probably find yourself changing some of the words as

you try out the various versions, adding and deleting material.

2. Look at several of your poems. Is there a line length that seems

characteristic of you? Or do you tend to mix up long and short

lines in the same poem? The same goes for stanzas: do you tend

to write in one block, or always to use four-line stanzas? If you

find you have a pattern, write a poem that breaks it.

3. Write a poem that is an emotional outburst-of joy, anger,

love-using a lot of enjambment, and few end-stopped lines.

Play with breaking apart parts of language that normally go

together.

4. Write a short nonsense poem, maximum five lines, in which you

pay attention to the rhythms of each line rather than the logical

meaning of the words. Read it aloud several times. When you

know the rhythms well, and like how they fit together, try to sub­

stitute meaningful words in the exact same rhythms.

5. Break the prose below into lines three different ways, to make

three different poems, and study the effects of each version. In

judging the results, think about the following: which words have

been emphasized in each version? How are you working with the

sentence structure-when are you highlighting it, or undercut­

ting it? Is there a tone or mood in the prose that one version

seems to capture best?

The cows stand under the trees in the wet grass, lifting their necks to pull leaves down. We slow the truck, pull over to the side of the road to watch them. How graceful they look, how

114 THE POET'S COMPANION

unlike themselves. We get out and lean on the fence. The cows don't seem to notice we are there.

6. Choose a poet you admire, read at least one book of his or her work, and carefully study how this writer uses line and stanza. Then take a draft of one of your own poems, and redo the lines and stanzas as you imagine this writer would.

7. Take a short poem by William Carlos Williams such as "The Great Figure" or "The Red Wheelbarrow," and copy the rhythms of his lines exactly, substituting your own words.

8. Do the above for any poet you like, to sensitize your ear to the poet's rhythms, and your own.

Voice and Style

We convince by our presence. -Walt Whibnan

I am a black woman poet and I sound like one. -Lucille Clifton

When we listen to a person speaking, we hear a particular music unlike any other. The stamp of someone's voice is as individual as a fingerprint; if we know someone well, we instantly recognize the tone, pitch, resonance of that voice whenever we encounter it. In poetry, the term voice has been used to describe that sense of a unique, presence on the page-an unmistakable something that becomes the mark of a writer, a way of saying things that is the writer's own. This is usually what developing writers mean when they say they are try­ ing to find their voice; some would argue that it wasn't lost to begin with, that we all have a voice already. But either way, this idea of a recognizable voice is an important one for writers. We struggle with the voices of the past, the poets who came before us, and we try to learn from them without sounding like them. We read contemporary writers and imitate their line breaks, or their similes, and worry that we shouldn't, that we'll only create bad reproductions instead of orig­ inal works. We want a presence that convinces, one that engages and seduces a reader into the world of our poems, a voice a reader will

116 THE POET'S COMPANION

want to listen to. When we fail to produce this voice, the poem fails. The reader laughs when we want her to cry, or turns away disinter­ estedly when we passionately want his attention. The poem doesn't communicate what we meant; the voice is garbled, confused, talking to itself.

In actual speech, we don't choose our voice. We grow up inherit­ ing speech patterns and physical structures that largely determine how we sound. In poetry, we may write with a voice that is also deter­ mined by things beyond our control-an innate sense of language, early education, and previous exposure to other writers. But just as someone might go to a speech therapist to rid himself of a stutter, or erase a particular accent, writers can develop their voice so that it becomes a more flexible instrument to articulate their concerns. Style is really interchangeable with voice, in this sense, and it's use­ ful to remember that style in a writer is revealed by the characteris­ tic choices a writer makes. Beginning writers often sound remarkably alike, because they have the same limited range of choices; they haven't yet discovered a wider range. If you haven't done much read­ ing or writing of poetry, you're going to make your choices based on a narrow sampling of what you know, which might range fr�m the sappy cliches of greeting cards to some fuzzily-remembered poets from earlier centuries crammed down your throat in high school, to popular song lyrics. That is, you'll make choices by default-rather than from a rich storehouse of possibilities discovered through work­ ing and playing with language, and through reading. Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them-consciously and unconsciously-your style will develop.

What are the choices a writer makes, that constitute a recognizable voice and style? If you're studying someone's style, just about every; aspect of her poems is worth considering. Let's look at two by Lucill/4 Clifton, to see what can be discovered about her presence on tfie page.

Voice and Style

homage to my hips

these hips are big hips they need space to move around in. they do not fit into little petty places, these hips are free hips. they don't like to be held back. these hips have never been enslaved, they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do. these hips are mighty hips. these hips are magic hips. i have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top!

the women you are accustomed to

wearing that same black dress, their lips and asses tight, their bronzed hair set in perfect place; these women gathered in my dream to talk their usual talk, their conversation spiked with the names of avenues in France.

and when i asked them what the hell, they shook their marble heads and walked erect out of my sleep, back into a town which knows all there is to know about the cold outside, while i relaxed and thought of you, your burning blood, your dancing tongue.

117

Does Clifton sound like a black woman poet? There's a reference to enslavement in the first poem, and both are about the female body.

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Certainly, being a black woman poet has been one of Clifton's sub­ jects. The sensuality and celebration of these poems are also charac­ teristic of her work. Her poems tend to be short, to forgo capitals and sometimes titles. They're small, but they tackle large subjects. They want to connect; they're accessible, seemingly simple, but not sim­ plistic. We hear a voice speaking directly, more conversational than formal. The person Clifton creates on the page speaks with passion and sometimes humor. This is a style that wants to collapse the dis­ tance between writer and reader, and between the poet and her poem. Of course, two poems is a small sampling; Clifton doesn't always write about her body, or about her own life, or in first person. If you wanted to further analyze Clifton's style, you'd need to read more of her work. (Her latest is The Terrible Stories from BOA Editions.)

Doing a close analysis of any writer is a useful exercise that can teach you a lot about why you may like or dislike the poems-why they appeal to you, why they move you or make you cringe. Of course, there's a mysterious element in poetry that seems to resist intellectual analysis, and this is good. William Carlos Williams said, "A poem is a machine made of words," and while it may be true that each word contributes to the smooth functioning of a poem, there's an organic and irreducible energy in a good poem that can't be logi­ cally accounted for. Call it the spark, the "blood-jet," as Sylvia Plath did, or whatever you will; you can take the poem apart and you won't find it. But from the standpoint of technique, you can learn from studying the styles of other writers-and from stepping back to take a good look at your own characteristic choices. Here's a list of things you might want to consider.

1. Subject matter. Subject and style, content and form-they really are inseparable. Still, poems are generally about something. Because writers write out of their interests, their beliefs and obsessions, partic­ ular subjects often become part of how we recognize them. Whitman wrote about the common mass of humanity, not the wealthy in their drawing rooms; Robert Lowell's work began to seem radically differ­ ent when he started producing pieces about his family; Anne Sexton

Voice and Style 119

wrote about suicide and the body, Sylvia Plath about death and the true and false self. Sharon Olds, in each of her first three books, wrote poems about her father; the fourth was titled The Father, and every poem concerned him. C. K Williams often takes the internal work­ ings of his mind, or the dynamics of relationships, as his subject; his poems are frequently discursive and psychological. Is your own sub­ ject matter too narrow or too broad? What are your subjects? Are you exploring the material you feel compelled to tackle? Are there new subjects for poems that you haven't considered? Asking these ques­ tions of your work may lead you to new and deeper material.

2. Diction. Diction is word choice, the vocabulary of the poem. Some writers take what we'll call the high road-it's hard to get through their poems without a dictionary. (At least, we can't.) The high road is filled with long, Latinate words-"expectorate" instead of "spit," "indefatigable" instead of "untiring," and so on. In much modem and contemporary poetry, the tendency has been to move away fron;1 such diction, to try for the language of ordinary speech, heightened by careful crafting. Taking the high road is tricky, but some writers have done it successfully. The danger is that you'll sound pompous and overinflated; the danger of ordinary diction is that you'll sound ordinary. In any case, you'll want to look carefully at the words you've chosen. At what level do you want to pitch your poem? Who's speaking in the poem; would that person use the words you've chosen for her? Maybe you want to mix up different dictions and have several ways of speaking occurring in the same poem, as John Berryman did in his Dream Songs. Who do you imagine read­ ing your poem? Besides these issues, there's the consideration of writ­ ing in the language of your time. Some student writers have baffled us by insisting that they do not mind sounding like Shakespeare or Shelley or someone else long dead; their poems are littered with phrases like "her maidenhood," or "twixt the sea and thy shore" -and such diction, used in earnest, ensures that no reader will take them seriously. Consider your word choices in terms of both their denota­ tive, literal meaning, and their connotations-what they suggest and imply.

120 THE POET'S COMPANION

3. Point of view. You should try out every possible point of view, to expand your choices and learn how each functions. Many writers get stuck in the first person singular; they never get away from "I woke up. I looked around. I thought about my life." First-person poems need not be avoided; but many writers seem to think they're the only option available. And a common difficulty, when you're starting out, is that you feel you have to tell "the truth" if you're writing in first per­ son. A poem is a work of imagination, not your autobiography. You shouldn't let your poem be stifled by "what really happened." Sometimes putting your poem into third person-"He woke up. He looked around. He thought about his life." -can help you get some needed perspective, shake you loose from actual events, and let you invent as the poem needs it. First-person plural-the "we" voice­ can be an interesting choice, too; it enlarges the scope from the per­ sonal to the collective. Then there's "you;' which might either be an address to a specific person-lots of love poems get addressed to a "you," creating a feeling of intimacy-or which might simply mean, "one." A "you" poem can also address the reader.

4. Syntax and grammar. Take a close look at how you tend to put your sentences together. Do you typically write short sentences, or long elab­ orate ones, or something in between? Do you load up the adjectives before your nouns? Maybe you have a bad habit like using passive voice, or overusing a word like "which" or "that." Ezra Pound said, "poetry should be at least as well-written as prose," and we agree; bad grammar doesn't fly for either one. You have to know what the rules are in order to break them in a way that serves your poem, so if you don't know the basics, get help and read the chapter, "A Grammatical Excursion." One common fault we've seen is inconsistency in things like using capitals and punctuation. Whether to use them or not is your choice, but a random scattering-capitals sometimes, proper punctua­ tion sometimes, with mysterious lapses-will only distract your reader and make her think you don't really know what you're doing. If you feel enslaved by the sentence, try writing fragments, breaking apart words, playing with their arrangement on the page, as E. E. Cummings did and as many contemporary experimental writers are doing.

Voice and Style 121

5. Form: line breaks, stanzas, structure. As with point of view, you should try out all the various possible arrangements for your poems. If you always write in one solid stanza, it's time to begin experiment­ ing: couplets, tercets, quatrains. The same for line breaks-try some different ways of doing them. If you always write free verse, try adding some formal requirements-meter or rhyme or some other pattern you must work with. If you always write in iambic pentameter, break out into something less structured. Also take a look at whether your poems as a whole follow a structural pattern-do they always end with an image? W ith a "punch line"? ending with an abstract statement, or something less conclusive, more open-ended. Maybe they always circle back to something they began with; if so, make yourself-let yourself-write something that keeps going outward. Get away from starting your lines at the left margin, and use the field of the page.

6. Imagery. We all have particular words and images that seem to crop up in the course of our work. You may notice that you fill your poems with images of mothers, or couples, or animals. A good thing to look at is the kinds of images you make-are they vague and con­ fusing, or sharp and detailed? Do you use too many similes-or not enough? Do you rely on statements-"She made me feel so sexy" to the exclusion of images which might embody some of your thoughts and ideas? Less common is the opposite problem: image after image without any abstract statement. Usually, image and state­ ment combine in a poem (though there are memorable exceptions). Notice what your balance is, and see if you need to strengthen one or the other.

7. Any other pattern that you perceive. Know your own work. Being aware of your stylistic strengths and weaknesses will not only help you to grow, but will help you to deal with criticism from others. Everyone has certain things they can do well, and other areas that need work. Maybe you have great details in your poems, but have trouble making them add up to a coherent whole. If you know this, you won't feel so defensive when someone says, "This doesn't hold together." Instead, you'll recognize that again you've run up against

122 THE POET'S COMPANION

your limitations-and you'll be grateful for suggestions to help you

overcome them. Maybe you're too literal and linear, and need to

make some associative leaps; the next chapter on dreams and experi­

ments can help lead you away from the logical. Read the symbolist and surrealist writers, and Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca's Poet in New York. Read and reread the work of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, whose earthy, compassionate verse often contains surrealis­ tic, magical images. Try contemporary writers like Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Ron Silliman, and Leslie Scalapino, who all have unique and intriguing ways of making poems-and read anyone who doesn't make logical sense to you. Write whatever comes into your head, without stopping; write down your dreams; let go. If you have the opposite problem and no one ever understands your poems, though you think you're communicating something perfectly clear­ ly-if your work has been deemed obscure by several readers who are otherwise astute, intelligent, literate people-you may need to focus on clarity, on what you intend to say and what is being heard by oth­ ers. Of course, we can't always see our own patterns, especially in the heat of new writing. That's not the time, anyway, for thinking about these things. But when you're ready to step back and demand the best from your poem, see if you can regard your work objectively-and

invite other readers to help you do that.

There's another aspect of voice to consider: the persona poem. Persona is Greek for mask; in a persona poem, you pretend to be someone else. In truth, all poems are in a sense persona poems-the "I" of a first-person poem that seems to be about the poet's true expe­ rience is just as much of a construction as a poem in the voice of a medieval peasant speaking to us from the dead. In the latter case,

though, we'd never mistake the peasant's voice for the poet's; a per­

sona poem usually announces itself Such poems are a great way to stretch your style. You may find you need to change it completely for the sake of the person you're creating on the page. And a persona poem can let you explore events and states of being more freely; masks allow us to shed our ordinary identities. Frank Bidart has writ­ ten beautifully as various characters, including the famous Russian

Voice and Style 123

dancer Nijinsky and an anorexic young woman; when you read these and others of his poems, you'll recognize his particular style. Ai has also written a number of persona poems, one in the voices of John and Bobby Kennedy. Rita Dove's book about her grandparents, Thomas and Beulah, sometimes presents their experiences from the first person. Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid brings alive the voices of a particular time and place.

This poem by Richard Jones not only portrays a woman of ancient China, but does it in the style of early Chinese poetry, at least as it sounds rendered in English. This would be a good time to acquaint yourself with poets like Wang Wei, Tu Fu, and Li Po. Read some translations by Sam Hamill, or Willis and Tony Bamstone, or earlier translations by Arthur Whaley. A good recent anthology is A Drifting Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry from White Pine Press.

WAN CHU'S WIFE IN BED

Wan Chu, my adoring husband, has returned from another trip selling trinkets in the provinces. He pulls off his lavender shirt as I lie naked in our bed, waiting for him. He tells me I am the only woman he'll ever love. He may wander from one side of China to the other, but his heart will always stay with me. His face glows in the lamplight with the sincerity of a boy when I lower the satin sheet to let him see my breasts. Outside, it begins to rain on the cherry trees he planted with our son, and when he enters me with a sigh, the storm begins in earnest, shaking our little house. Afterwards, I stroke his back

124 THE POET'S COMPANION

until he falls asleep. I'd love to stay awake all night listening to the rain, but I should sleep, too. Tomorrow Wan Chu will be a hundred miles away and I will be awake all night in the arms of Wang Chen, the tailor from Ming Pao, the tiny village down river.

Jones's poem, with its surprising and amusing revelation of the wife's betrayal, makes these readers, at least, question Wan Chu's dec­ larations of love as well. The voice convinces us with its quiet, straightforward style. The simplicity and clarity are characteristic not only of the translated Chinese poems we've read, but also of Jones's other work.

This next poem, by Patricia Smith, adopts a very different tone and style which suits its speaker-a white supremacist.

SKINHEAD

They call me skinhead, and I got my own beauty. It is knife-scrawled across my back in sore, jagged letters, it's in the way my eyes snap away from the obvious. I sit in my dim matchbox, on the edge of a bed tousled with my ragged smell, slide razors across my hair, count how many ways I can bring blood closer to the surface of my skin. These are the duties of the righteous, the ways of the anointed.

The face that moves in my mirror is huge and pockmarked, scraped pink and brilliant, apple-cheeked, I am filled with my own spit. Two years ago, a machine that slices leather sucked in my hand and held it, whacking off three fingers at the root.

Voice and Style

I didn't feel nothing till I looked down and saw one of them on the floor next to my boot heel, and I ain't worked since then.

I sit here and watch niggers take over my TV set, walking like kings up and down the sidewalks in my head, walking like their fat black mamas named them freedom. My shoulders tell me that ain't right. So I move out into the sun where my beauty makes them lower their heads, or into the night with a lead pipe up my sleeve, a razor tucked in my boot. I was born to make things right.

It's easy now to move my big body into shadows, to move from a place where there was nothing into the stark circle of a streetlight, the pipe raised up high over my head. It's a kick to watch their eyes get big, round and gleaming like cartoon jungle boys, right in that second when they know the pipe's gonna come down, and I got this thing I like to say, listen to this, I like to say "Hey, nigger, Abe Lincoln's been dead a long time."

I get hard listening to their skin burst. I was born to make things right.

Then this newspaper guy comes around, seems I was a little sloppy kicking some fag's ass and he opened his hole and screamed about it. This reporter finds me curled up in my bed, those TV flashes licking my face clean. Same ol' shit. Ain't got no job, the coloreds and spies got 'em all. Why ain't I working? Look at my hand, asshole. No, I ain't part of no organized group, I'm just a white boy who loves his race, fighting for a pure country.

125

126 THE POET'S COMPANION

Sometimes it's just me. Sometimes three. Sometimes 30. AIDS will take care of the faggots, then it's gon' be white on black in the streets. Then there'll be three million. I tell him th.at.

So he writes it up and I come off looking like some kind of freak, like I'm Hitler himself. I ain't that lucky, but I got my own beauty. It is in my steel-toed boots, in the hard corners of my shaved head.

I look in the mirror and hold up my mangled hand, only the baby finger left, sticking straight up, I know it's the wrong goddamned finger, but fuck you all anyway. I'm riding the top rung of the perfect race, my face scraped pink and brilliant. I'm your baby, America, your boy, drunk on my own spit, I am goddamned fuckin' beautiful.

And I was born

and raised

right here.

In this piece, Smith, a black woman poet, sounds like a white male racist This boy comes alive on the page; we can hear and feel his hate and anger. (Smith, who was a National Poetry Slam winner, brings it out even more powerfully in performa'nce.) Interestingly, we're also drawn to, or at least compelled by, this boy who is both physically and psychically damaged. He has a sense of himself as beautiful, as purposeful: "I was born to make things right." His vio­ lence makes sense to him, and this is what the poem illuminates: the world-view of a radically different other. Smith gets at the issues here by moving out of her own perspective. It wasn't enough to ask the question, 'What makes a person like this tick, what makes him do

Voice and Style 127

these things?" Smith goes deeper to find her answers, and they are · uncomfortable ones, not meant to reassure us but to make us look more carefully and thoughtfully.

Persona poems are shapeshifting, a chance to move beyond the boundaries of our personality, our particular circumstances. If we enter our imagination fully and deeply enough, we can experience our questions, our concerns and obsessions, with more empathy and insight. And whatever voices speak from that deep place will require attention.

IDEAS FOR WRITING

1. Do a stylistic analysis of a poet you like. You might want to start by using our checklist in this chapter, examining subject matter, diction, imagery, and the like; try to discover what sorts of moves the writer characteristically makes. Then write a poem in that writer's style.

2. Now do a parody of the same poet. A parody takes aspects of a writer's style and exaggerates them for comic effect.

3. Here's a tough one: swallow your pride and do a parody of your own style. This can be a lot of fun-trust us.

4. Try to write a poem that is the opposite of your style in every way.

5. Take a poem you've written and "translate" it into:

academic-intellectual diction

romantic diction

colloquial speech (this might be black dialect, or southern dialect, or East Coast dialect, or any other way of speaking that isn't mainstream, conventional English)

6. Write a poem in first-person singular about something that hap­ pened to somebody else; tell it as though it happened to you.

128 THE POET'S COMPANION

7. Take something that happened to you, and tell it in third per­ son.

8. Write a poem that knows it's a poem and that addresses the reader; step out from behind the poem and talk about the act of writing or what the poem is doing (or trying to). Some poems you could read first are "Portrait" by Pattiann Rogers; "The Truth" by Dick Bakken; "Leaves That Grow Inward" by Susan Mitchell.

9. Write a poem in the voice of someone in your family. It might be one of your parents talking about their lives or how they met; a brother or sister describing some family gathering. If you want, you can include yourself as a person in the poem-seen, of course, from the speaker's perspective.

10. Write a poem in the voice of a famous person, living or dead. Try to give the reader an intimate glimpse of this person, one that couldn't be gotten from the media or history books.

11. What kind of character seems most foreign to you -a homeless man? A suburban housewife? A Zen monk? Whoever it is, that's the persona to adopt. Find a way to enter that character's experi­ ence, and write a poem in his or her voice.

12. Research a period of history that interests you, and write a poem that purports to be excerpts from the journal of someone who lived during that time.

Stop :Making Sense: 'Dreams and tfxperiments

a fter the elect ion

our teeth rattle & our souls. from the socket of the mask mice swarm & swans. the mother's eye is running. a small boy spins thru the furnace of grass, thru wheat spear & spire goes running. deep in the soil deep in the gut death's bird-blue calyx is humming

-Michael Koch

Earlier in this book, we said that there's something in a good poem that can't be accounted for logically. If poems were only logical con­ structions, anyone could study the rules, glue a few phrases together, and assemble a fine piece of work-just like putting together a model airplane or painting a portrait by numbers. Ironically, what would be missing would be the very thing that was essential: the poetry itself. When we say of some gesture or experience, "That was pure poetry," we aren't talking about meter, or similes, or line breaks; we mean that something ineffable, something beautiful and even beyond words,

130 THE POET'S COMPANION

has touched us. When a poem moves us, it's not simply that the

writer has dazzled us with technique, but that some sort of emotion­

al energy has leaped from the words on the page, energy that we then

experience. Emily Dickinson said she knew a good poem when, after

reading it, she felt as though the top of her head were coming off.

Mystery, creativity, inspiration-these are the words that come to

mind when we think about certain aspects of poetry that are separate

from craft. These are things that can't neccessarily be taught, or

learned. What we can do is to try and access that source from which

they spring, to circumvent or suspend the logical, literal, linear mind

with its need to control and understand everything.

The surrealists were a group of French writers and artists who,

beginning in the 1920s, took a stand against logic and rational

thought by turning to dreams and the subconscious mind as sources

for their work. Their poems are characterized by fantastic images,

wild leaps of imagination, and a resistance to logical interpretation.

Their aim was liberation -not merely of poetry from the conventions

that bound it, but of the spirit. And as the poet Andre Breton pointed

out at the time, such ideas were not new. The surrealists had the

example of an earlier group of French poets, the symbolists, who

wanted to create symbols of a reality beyond sense, and then writers

like Arthur Rimbaud who saw the poet as an ecstatic seer and advo­

cated "derangement of the senses" in order to transcend ordinary

states of consciousness. Centuries before the surrealists or their

immediate predecessors, people of all cultures placed a high impor­

tance on dreams and visions as a means to spiritual knowledge.

Throughout the ages, people have enacted rituals that involve ingest­

ing hallucinogenic plants, fasting, sweating, self-flagellation, and

other practices with the aim of contacting levels of awareness unavail­

able to the everyday self. Even today, with the apparent triumph of

rationalism and materialism in many places, the mysterious, nonra­

tional impulse continually breaks through. In some cultures it sur­

vives relatively intact, though it's doubtful that this will be the case

too much longer, considering the encroachments of so-called "civi­

lized" societies. But the need to experience nonordinary reality is

Stop Making Sense: Dreams and Experiments 131

everywhere evident, from children who spin in circles to watch the world tilt, to the use of alcohol or drugs or loud music, to the com­ plete silence of a meditation retreat.

How does this translate into poetic practice? A poetry that seeks to subvert logical connections has as its operative principles surprise, juxtaposition, openness, and movement rather than predictability, linearity, closure, and stasis. It might focus on highlighting gaps and fragments, rather than on avoiding them. It might let the language lead the writer into whatever meaning was to be found, rather than the writer beginning with something she meant to say and then try­ ing to find the words to articulate what she already knows. These are, in fact, all ways of writing that have been increasingly used by writers in the twentieth century, though a number of them have seen it as a linguistic rather than a spiritual enterprise. For many writers, the focus has shifted from language as a means to an end-whether that end is communication, self-knowledge, or spiritual awareness-to focusing on the language itself, occasionally as the end. Poems about language, or poems that attempt to enact themselves in language as they happen -these stem from different ideas about poetry than, say, a personal poem or a poem of witness which seeks to use language in its conventional sense to portray an event. Another way to think about it, since we're trying to simplify some pretty complex ideas, is this: modem and postmodern poetry have more and more made language itself the subject of the poem and center of attention, rather than using language as a more or less "invisible" tool.

Before we explore these ideas further, let's look at a contemporary poem by Jan Richman that falls somewhere between conventional uses of language and complete subversion. Richman's poem is thor­ oughly modern in a number of ways: in its irony, its conscious play with language, and its juxtapositions. The poem invades the familiar story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to transform it for the writer's pur­ poses, and is comfortable along the way including a line from "Little Red Riding Hood," a Dream Date lunchbox, and a reference to Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" (Plath refers to the father in her poem as "Herr Doctor, Herr Enemy").

130 THE POET'S COMPANION

has touched us. When a poem moves us, it's not simply that the writer has dazzled us with technique, but that some sort of emotion­ al energy has leaped from the words on the page, energy that we then experience. Emily Dickinson said she knew a good poem when, after reading it, she felt as though the top of her head were coming off.

Mystery, creativity, inspiration -these are the words that come to mind when we think about certain aspects of poetry that are separate from craft. These are things that can't neccessarily be taught, or learned. What we can do is to try and access that source from which they spring, to circumvent or suspend the logical, literal, linear mind with its need to control and understand everything.

The surrealists were a group of French writers and artists who, beginning in the 1920s, took a stand against logic and rational thought by turning to dreams and the subconscious mind as sources for their work. Their poems are characterized by fantastic images, wild leaps of imagination, and a resistance to logical interpretation. Their aim was liberation-not merely of poetry from the conventions that bound it, but of the spirit And as the poet Andre Breton pointed out at the time, such ideas were not new. The surrealists had the example of an earlier group of French poets, the s-ymbolists, who wanted to create symbols of a reality beyond sense, and then writers like Arthur Rimbaud who saw the poet as an ecstatic seer and advo­ cated "derangement of the senses" in order to transcend ordinary states of consciousness. Centuries before the surrealists or their immediate predecessors, people of all cultures placed a high impor­ tance on dreams and visions as a means to spiritual knowledge. Throughout the ages, people have enacted rituals that involve ingest­ ing hallucinogenic plants, fasting, sweating, self-flagellation, and other practices with the aim of contacting levels of awareness unavail­ able to the everyday self. Even today, with the apparent triumph of rationalism and materialism in many places, the mysterious, nonra­ tional impulse continually breaks through. In some cultures it sur­ vives relatively intact, though it's doubtful that this will be the case too much longer, considering the encroachments of so-called "civi­ lized" societies. But the need to experience nonordinary reality is

Stop Making Sense: Dreams and Experiments 131

everywhere evident, from children who spin in circles to watch the world tilt, to the use of alcohol or drugs or loud music, to the com­ plete silence of a meditation retreat.

How does this translate into poetic practice? A poetry that seeks to subvert logical connections has as its operative principles surprise, juxtaposition, openness, and movement rather than predictability, linearity, closure, and stasis. It might focus on highlighting gaps and fragments, rather than on avoiding them. It might let the language lead the writer into whatever meaning was to be found, rather than the writer beginning with something she meant to say and then try­ ing to find the words to articulate what she already knows. These are, in fact, all ways of writing that have been increasingly used by writers in the twentieth century, though a number of them have seen it as a linguistic rather than a spiritual enterprise. For many writers, the focus has shifted from language as a means to an end-whether that end is communication, self-knowledge, or spiritual awareness-to focusing on the language itself, occasionally as the end. Poems about language, or poems that attempt to enact themselves in language as they happen -these stem from different ideas about poetry than, say, a personal poem or a poem of witness which seeks to use language in its conventional sense to portray an event. Another way to think about it, since we're trying to simplify some pretty complex ideas, is this: modern and postmodern poetry have more and more made language itself the subject of the poem and center of attention, rather than using language as a more or less "invisible" tool.

Before we explore these ideas further, let's look at a contemporary poem by Jan Richman that falls somewhere between conventional uses of language and complete subversion. Richman's poem is thor­ oughly modern in a number of ways: in its irony, its conscious play with language, and its juxtapositions. The poem invades the familiar story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to transform it for the writer's pur­ poses, and is comfortable along the way including a line from "Little Red Riding Hood," a Dream Date lunchbox, and a reference to Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" (Plath refers to the father in her poem as "Herr Doctor, Herr Enemy").

132 THE POET'S COMPANION

YOU'VE CHANGED, DR. JEKYLL

My, what big teeth you have. And I can't help but notice your inseam sneak up to your chin and beard your uncircum­ stance. Your lace collar shudders, and ... Now you remember: Smile, an ordinary word. Chat. Beat. Brag. While your left hand conducts an under-the-table ejaculation, your right flips the rusty tongue of a Dream Date lunchbox, airing its contents: laboratory mythologies. Yawn. Why do historical men either gorge or starve? Come midnight, you'll paint the town red, your lips wrapped around a block-long siren, greased and bawling like a burned baby. Now you're in the parlor deciphering forgeries. Good eye. But what's that stain? You're due at the Nobels' for dinner in an hour. Herr Doctor, Mr. Dad, you've handed down a scratchy decree, this cushion on which I sit to jerk off in the meager poem of your hiding place. Five hot minutes on the phone with legacy equals a cup of serum. Hallelujah! Accepting the award for Mlle. Hyde is cultured silence braying like a Baptist: Oh yes, I can love all things, just not at the same time.

Some of this poem seems surreal, dream-like: Dr. Jekyll's "lips

wrapped around / a block-long siren" is an eerie image, and the lips

seem to then be transformed into that "bawling" baby, who is

"burned." Dr. Jekyll seems to be slipping out of his good-guy persona,

like the wolf in "Little Red Riding Hood" whose canines are apparent,

even when he's dressed up like the grandmother he's devoured in the

fable. And he seems faintly ridiculous, too, with his inseam "sneaking

up" and his Dream Date lunchbox. The narrator mocks this charac­

ter as "Herr Doctor, Mr. Dad," but beneath that is a personal revela­

tion: the narrator's father apparently has a dark side and is a Mr. Hyde

figure. Is "Mlle. Hyde," then, the narrator's mother, who is absent --:­

someone is accepting an awa,rd for her-and whose presence 1s

replaced by "cultured silence"? The poem doesn't reveal its meanings

easily, or completely; it leaves gaps, deals with its subject matter

obliquely, requires that the reader recognize some of its strategies.

Stop Making Sense: Dreams and Experiments 133

Many poets currently writing have gone far beyond recording their dreams, or writing whatever occurs to them for fifteen minutes, or yoking unlikely things together simply for the sake of the new. These are all worthwhile writing exercises-dreams, especially, are some­ times so richly associative and intriguing that transcribing them faith­ fully can lead you to fascinating material. But let's try to delve a little further into notions of nonlinearity, into why it might be fruitful to explore more options for your poetry than straightforward description or narration.

One useful thing to remember is that words-however sensuously they may evoke the world-are not the world. You may beautifully describe a flower opening, but the flower you create in words is a vir­ tual flower; it can't be picked, or left to bloom by the roadside. From this obvious starting point, it follows that we can't ever capture the world "out there" and set it down on the page. There's always a gap between the word and the thing. We can't ever, in language, recreate the totality of our experience-which may involve what we encounter through our senses, a complex of emotional responses, and what we think and remember and desire, all at the same time. We can't know how something actually feels for another person; we can't crawl inside their skin. Language itself becomes an analogy­ what something is like rather than what something is.

Poetry is always, inevitably an experience in language-and not necessarily the experience you want to convey, since each person who reads the poem will bring to it his or her own ideas, beliefs, prej­ udices, intellect, emotions, awareness, cultural background, and indi­ vidual experiences. The question of communication, then, becomes a slippery one. Just what is being said in your poem depends partly on who is hearing it. This is why taste is so individual, why one person loves a poem that leaves someone else cold. In a very real sense, each one is reading a different poem.

Of course, a writer can narrow down ranges of possible interpreta­ tions; sheer chaos is generally not the aim of poets. When a poem begins with the words "the fighter pilot" instead of "he," the speci­ ficity keeps us from wondering who "he" is and beginning to make up our own answer, and so getting distracted from what the writer would

134 THE POET'S COMPANlON

like us to focus on. If you want to write a poignant poem about a child dying in the streets of Sarajevo, it probably won't serve your purpose if your language is so imprecise that everyone thinks you're talking about your inner child. We think the key here is intent; do you want to narrow the possibilities for the reader, and does this narrowing serve your purpose or defeat it? Do you want to widen the possibili­ ties and allow for more ambiguity, more multiplicity of meaning? Is it important to you to communicate something, and if so, what? Is it your intent to challenge your reader and the conventional meanings of words? Why or why not? What's the difference between mystery

and obscurity, and how valuable to you is each? Who is your audi­ ence? Does audience matter? Is language about describing experi­ ence, or can language and experience be separated at all? Is nonlin­ ear language, with its ellipses, its disjunctions, a more accurate ren­ dering of how we perceive the world than narrative is? These are important questions for a writer to consider. They need to be explored fully and honestly before you can develop your own poetics, your sense of what you are trying to do with language, and why.

There's one more crucial element we haven't mentioned-a sense of play. When you fool around with language, freed from the con­ straints of conventional syntax, grammar, meaning, you can more easily access that part of the brain where creative consciousness resides. In the visual arts, there's a trick for drawing that involves turn­ ing a picture of an object upside down before trying to copy it. The novice artist no longer tries to render a chair, or a bowl of fruit, but lines and curves and shadows. Anything that changes the way you habitually see or do something will tend to open new perspectives, .new possibilities. Familiarity breeds not contempt so much as blind­ ness; as we grow more habitual we lose the freshness of our percep­ tions, which is what children have in such abundance. So whether you feel resistant to letting go your grip on logic, or ecstatic at the thought of breaking out from the confines of conventional language, we urge you to try the exercises in this chapter in the spirit of creative play, to let your dream-self explore without judgment, to trust that raw chaotic place where the poems begin.

Stop Making Sense: Dreams and Experiments

IDEAS FOR WRITING

1. We said that recording dreams can be a worthwhile exercise.

135

Try keeping a notebook or tape recorder by your bed for a week, and jotting down dreams, or saying them, as soon as you wake, when they're still vivid. Don't try to do anything more than record them, in as much detail as you remember. After you fin­ ish the notations, go back and reread, or listen. Work with what­ ever now strikes you as fresh and interesting, and combine the best lines into one poem.

2. Many people have recurring dreams-of flying, of being chased, of being in a particular location or situation. Write a poem about such a dream that uses repetition to capture its obsessive nature. Try to repeat fragments rather than simply ini­ tial words or complete sentences; let the repetition interrupt the flow of the dream-story.

3. Do some research on dream interpretation, Freudian or other­ wise, and write a poem in which two voices speak: the dreamer and the analyzer. You might have them alternate lines, or inter­ rupt each other; you could separate them by using different typography, or mix them together so it's hard to know who's speaking when.

4. "Exquisite Corpse" is a game invented by the surrealists that can be done by a group. Each person writes a line, then passes the poem to the next person with the previous lines hidden (the page can be folded over to cover each new line). Try this with people writing anything they want, and try it again with every­ one doing something similar-beginning with the same word, or including a natural object, or anything else you think of that will allow for a sense of both predictability and chance.

5. Write a poem that steals from other, well-known texts, altering them in some small way so that the originals are recognizable. You might, for example, alter the famous opening of Charles

136 THE POET'S COMPANION

Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities by saying, "It was the best of times, it was the first of times." Let this alteration trigger a poem, or play with the poem by including several such lines.

6. Write a number of sentences that seem to follow the conven­ tions of a story, but don't tell a story. Use words like "once," "suddenly," "then," "finally," and whatever else you notice about how stories unfold; but make the "plot" nonsensical.

7. Leaf through several books of poetry at random and jot down a list of words that strike you. Don't pore over the poems; this works best if you don't pay any attention to the context, but sim­ ply write down words that appeal to you. Choose twenty of these and write a poem which uses them, adding as few new words as possible.

8. If you keep a journal of your daily activities, thoughts, emo­ tions, go back to entries that are at least a year old. Again, don't read for context; simply write down whatever jumps out at you from the page-a word, a phrase, a sentence. Ideally, after skim­ ming a number of pages, you'll have material that has personal and emotional resonance but is no longer tied to a particular sitmition or story. Such fragments can be compelling and pow­ erful without falling into predictable patterns.

9. A collage poem is simple: find several sources of language and put them together. This usually works best if you have some dif­ ferent kinds of language-say, a love 'letter, a book of postmod­ ern literary theory, an issue of Hustler. You can go through, cir­ cling interesting words and phrases to transcribe, or get out the scissors and begin cutting and rearranging. This can be a good tool for revising one of your old, failed poems; cut it up and throw it into the mix, and see what emerges.

10. Using a poem you've already written, invent some arbitrary prin­ ciple for arranging words on the field of the page and rearrange your own poem accordingly. Lyn Hejinian wrote a piece in which words beginning with "a" were placed at the left margin,

Stop Making Sense: Dreams and Experiments 137

words beginning with "b" started one space in, and so on. You might put nouns in one place, verbs in another, prepositions in a third position; or words that relate to emotion at the bottom, words that relate to intellect at the top; or any other interesting organizational pattern you can think of. See what this does to your language, and whether, and how, it changes the meanings.

11. Write an exhaustively detailed account, in prose, of something that happened to you. Then go back and try cutting out various things to see what happens. Cut out every other sentence, or every fourth word, or every second noun. Play with the results, and put them into lines.

12. Jot down scraps of conversation that you hear over a one-week period-at the office, on the bus, on the radio, in the park, wherever. Take these scraps and weave them together into a poem that seems to follow the usual conventions of language - that is, let each part seamlessly connect to the other. Here's a brief example:

He wanted to tell her about it but the horse was old and going blind from one end of town to the other

Meter, 'Rfiyme, and "Form

In contemporary poetry, free verse is the norm. Pick up an anthology

such as New American Poets of the '90's (published by David Godine)

or Up Late (Four Walls Eight Windows), or the annual Best American

Poetry-or any of the many poetry collections over the past few

decades. You're likely to find few sonnets or villanelles or rondeaus­

all traditional forms that were commonly used by poets in previous

times. Instead, you'll see lines of varying lengths, flowing down the

page without a predetermined rhythm; you'll hear sounds echoing

from word to word, through rhyme and other techniques, but there

won't be any particular pattern to where and when those sounds

occur. Until recent times, most poetry written in English used meter, and

often a rhyme scheme as well. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass,

which was first published-in fact, self-published-in 1855, was the

ground swell for the wave of free verse that would soon sweep over

American poetry. In the beginning of the twentieth century, poets

who broke away from traditional forms were rebelling against what

they experienced as the tyranny of certain formal requirements. Ezra

Pound, in his preface to a 1916 anthology titled Some Imagist Poets,

helped define a poetics that had a tremendous influence on the way

poetry came to be thought about and written; besides the emphasis

on concrete, specific imagery as an important technique, Pound and

other so-called imagists broke free of the restraints of meter. They

wanted, as Pound wrote:

Meter, Rhyme, and Form

To create a new rhythm-as the expression of new moods-and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon "free-verse" as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as a principle of liberty. We believe that the indi­ viduality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional form. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.

139

The poets since then have overwhelmingly agreed; today, only a few poets write in traditional forms more than occasionally, and many developing writers have never learned the structure of a son­ net, much less attempted one themselves. Lately, though, there's been increasing interest in a return to, or at least a reexamination of, traditional formal elements like meter and end-rhymes. Some people have suggested that maybe the baby was thrown out along with the bathwater, and that there may be good reason to take another look at the techniques which produced so many magnifi­ cent poems in previous centuries. The issue, of course, isn't whether anyone should write free verse or formal; that decision should come out of the poem's requirements, out of the integration of form and content. Free verse, after all, has form, too. And it could also be said that each individual poem, whether in free verse or a traditional form, has its own unique, specific form. But we think it's significant that the imagists and other poets were familiar with the formal tradition before they made the then-radical shift to free verse. They knew all about the effects that could be achieved with various meters, and that discipline was a good basis for formulating free verse lines that were rhythmically alive and interesting. These writ­ ers had extensive ear-training; they knew how to hear the music of language, and skillfully used that knowledge when they turned to free verse.

That music was apparent, too, to listeners in the days when poetry was an oral tradition, the myths and stories of the culture passed on in the speaking or singing voice. Today, many of us tend to read pri­ marily with our eyes and our minds-studying the words, trying to make meaning, to pick up the writer's nuances of thought and imagery. We don't often enough read poems aloud, to let the lan-

140 THE POET'S COMPANION

guage vibrate through our rib cage and vocal chords, to savor the deli­ cious taste of syllables on our tongue. And so we deprive ourselves of one of the crucial pleasures of poetry. As children, we all loved say­ ing nursery rhymes aloud, or repeating tongue twisters like "She sells sea shells by the sea shore." We delighted in language not only for its necessary function of helping us communicate, but for the sheer physical satisfaction of saying things. That delight is one of the fun­ damental bases of poetry; so if you find your attention to listening is rather rusty, start developing it by reading poems aloud-your own and others-and attending live poetry readings. Pick up some cas­ settes of poets reading their work, or the work of other poets. Being stuck in traffic takes on a whole new meaning when Galway Kinnell is on your tape deck, soothing and inspiring you with those rolling, expansive lines from Whitman.

What has all this to do with meter and rhyme? Plenty. Because meter and rhyme are ultimately about the sounds oflanguage. Meter is organized rhythm; rhyme has to do with echo, with a hearing again of a note that's been played before. Such formal elements are at the roots of poetry in English, just as classical music is a source for con­ temporary composers, or the blues was a jumping-off point for rock 'n roll.

So we think it's important not only to be familiar with traditional forms-after all, you'd want to recognize a sonnet or a villanelle when it popped up in your reading-but to experiment with writing them as well. And trying on such forms needn't be like putting on a straitjacket. In fact, if you've never had to make creative use of lan­ guage to fit a formal requirement, you're in for a pleasant surprise. Yes, it's challenging and often difficult, but it may well send you down interesting paths you wouldn't have taken otherwise. The restrictions of form push you to be more resourceful, to find the lan­ guage you need. This not only teaches you a lot about language, but it's also a lot of fun. Then, too, a number of writers have found that difficult emotional material may be more easily handled within some sort of defined boundaries; the restraints of meter, a rhyme scheme, or some pattern of repetition may help put the brakes on runaway material. But don't take their, or our, word for it. Try some of the

Meter, Rhyme, and Form 141

exercises following this chapter and see for yourself. First, though, you'll need to know a bit about the common meters in English, and about rhyme.

Meter

Meter comes from the Greek for "measure." Every poem has rhythm, but when the rhythm is highly organized into a pattern where the number ofsyllables is important, as well as whether those syllables are stressed or not then we have meter. (Remember from "The Music of the Line" that a stressed syllable gets a little push, an unstressed or slack syllable doesn't. The word "sparrow" consists of a stressed syllable followed by a slack: SPARrow.)

The unit of measure that we pay attention to when talking about meter is called a foot. Here are the names of the most common feet in English (a u marks a slack syllable; a (/) marks a stressed one):

iamb (u /): create, inspire, tonight, motel trochee (/ u): hungry, snowfall, argue, orchid dactyl (/ u u): longitude, messages, miracle, video anapest ( u u /): by the edge, intertwine, in the end spondee (/ /): trap door, new shoes, blind pig The other part of meter is knowing how many of these feet occur

in each line. For example, read the following sentence aloud:

In metric verse the meter keeps the beat. In terms of stresses and slack syllables, you should hear: daDUM

daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM. That's a pretty easy pattern to pick out: five daDUMS, five iambs. You've just identified the most commonly used meter: iambic pentameter. Penta, of course, is a pre­ fix from the Latin, for five. All the meters are described in this way; if the above sentence had read, "In metric verse the meter counts," you would have had four iambs, or iambic tetrameter. So depending on how many feet are in each line, you can then label them:

monometer-one foot per line dimeter-two feet trimeter-three feet tetrameter-four feet

142 THE POET'S COMPANION

pentameter-five feet hexameter-six feet and so forth

Scansion is the term used to talk about reading poetry in this way, paying attention to the prevailing meter. Scansion is not always, how­ ever, a precise technique. How do you pronounce the word "details"? Some people say DE tails, pronouncing it as a trochee. Many news­ casters choose the iamb: "Rock star pleads not guilty, deTAILS at six." One of your authors says TEEvee for the television; the other hears it as a spondee: TEEVEE. Such regionalisms may affect your reading of a line; and some stressed syllables may sound, to your ear, more stressed than others, though there's no system of notation for this. And, finally, here's the real trick to meter: it's more appropriately con­ sidered as the pattern behind the sounds you actually hear.

Confused? It is really not as complicated as it seems. Think of how boring it would be to always clump along going daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM in everything you wrote. You'd sound, pretty quickly, like a nursery rhymer and not a poet. Many nursery rhymes, in fact, are written in that strict a meter. That's why they're so easy to remember: strict meter, strict rhyme. But poets try for more subtle effects. You're not out to hit your reader over the head. When meter is working well, it announces its presence clearly but quietly. It hums along steadily behind the actual sounds of the words, keep­ ing the beat without intruding.

The best way to understand this is first to read and hear poems writ­ ten in meter, and then to practice writing some yourself. Read Shakespeare's plays and sonnets to get a feel for iambic pentameter­ or just about any other poet writing in English since Chaucer's time. Then get hold of some contemporary examples (there are some sug­ gestions for reading at the end of this chapter), so you don't think that you need to include a lot of "thee"s and "thou"s and "fie on't"s in your own efforts. You don't want to sound old-fashioned just because you're using something from the past. Language has changed since Shakespeare, and writing in the living language means your poems will be alive, too, not mummified in dead syntax and usages.

Meter, Rhyme, and Form 143

Let's look for a minute at how Shakespeare used iambic pentame­ ter, so you get a feel for what we mean when we say that meter is the pattern behind the actual sounds of the words. This example is from Hamlet:

0, that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! 0 God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Read this cheerful passage over a couple of times. It's in iambic pentameter, but there isn't a line that clunks along in strict daDUMs. Yet listen carefully, and you'll definitely hear it. Sometimes there's an extra syllable or two; sometimes he begins, not with the unstressed syllable, but with a stressed one: "O" and "Thaw." Such rhythms are more complex and interesting than any strict adherence to the pat­ tern. But they depend on our hearing a pattern, so that they can play with that, can follow it or work against it. If you're familiar with how jazz improvisation works, that's a useful analogy: after the melody gets established, the soloist takes off in a new direction while the same chord changes are repeated. The meter establishes your pat­ tern; then you, the soloist, get to dazzle your audience with variations and departures.

Meter can have an exciting effect on your language. Without it, it's you and the blank page; with it, you have some tension, something to pull you and to push back against. Meter can help you establish a cer­ tain distance between you and your reader, which could be useful if you're dealing with highly intense material. It can be a way of order­ ing chaotic emotions and experiences, which, come to think of it, is one thing poetry does anyway. Meter is a little added artifice, a heightening of the awareness that this thing you're making is not just a journal entry or a record of your thoughts. It's a way to work with those thoughts in a manner that constantly reminds you that lan­ guage and rhythm-the way in which you say something-are as cru­ cial as what you are saying.

144 THE POET'S COMPANION

Rhyme Everyone knows what rhyme is. That's the thing that poems are

supposed to do, right? Only now poems don't rhyme, do they? In fact, poems do still rhyme-even those written in free verse. Rhyme is based on similar sounds, and English is full of words that echo each other. It's true that free verse poets don't usually use end rhyme, the practice of placing rhyming words at the ends of lines-at least, not on a regular basis. They're more likely to use internal rhyme- to rhyme a word within a line with another word in that line, or with one in the next line; or maybe a word within a line with the word at the end of that line. But a regular pattern of rhymes at the end of each line is a characteristic of formal verse, not free. Here's an example of end rhyme, an excerpt from a Robert Frost poem:

The shattered water made a misty din, Great waves looked over others coming in, And thought of doing something to the shore That water never did to land before.

By the way, did you pick up the meter in Frost's poem? When we said iambic pentameter was common, we weren't kidding. You'll also notice there is a rhyme scheme, a pattern to the end rhymes. Letters are commonly used to show such patterns, the letter changing each time the rhyme changes. In the case of this example, the rhyme scheme so far is aabb.

Look over these three lines from a contemporary poet, Ai, and notice her use of internal rhyme:

I'm not afraid of the blade you've just pointed at my head. If I were dead, you could take the boy ...

Two rhymes stand out immediately: "afraid" and "blade" in the first line, and "head" and "dead" in the second and third. Such rhymes are called strict, or pure, or perfect rhymes. The initial sound of the word is different, but the rest is identical. Moon-June, trace-face, believe-relieve, go for it-show for it. Many people think that this is

Meter, Rhyme, and Form 145

the only kind of rhyme, but luckily for po�ts, it isn't Look again at Ai's lines, at the words "blade" and "head." They aren't strict rhyme, but they do share a similarity of sounds; the vowels are different, but the ending consonants are alike. Such rhymes of words whose sounds are closely related, but not identical, are called slant rhymes (also known as half rhymes or off rhymes). Some examples of slant rhymes are face-dress, fear-care, blend-stand, here-chair.

There are other kinds of rhyme as well. Apocopated, or cut-off rhyme, occurs when the last syllable of one of the rhymes is missing: wet-netted, trap-happen, ease-treason. There's even something called eye rhyme, which doesn't have to do with sounds at all but is visual: plough-cough, inflate-considerate, happy-sky. And you can use the same word twice and get away with it-that's identical rhyme. Or you might use vowel rhyme, commonly known as assonance: slope-road, sway-great, slim-glitter.

Knowing you have all these options puts a whole new spin on the prospect of using rhyme in your poems. Rhyme, like meter, is a tech­ nique that works best when it doesn't call attention to itself. You want someone to be reading your poem, not following your rhyme scheme. If you're working with a pattern of end rhymes, try not to make them all strict-take advantage of slant rhyme and other possi­ bilities. In free verse, you can still use internal rhyme and occasional end rhyme to unify the music of your poem.

Remember, too, that rhyme is related to meaning. A rhymed word stands out-you can use rhyme to emphasize important words. And because a rhyme is essentially an echo, it has a feeling of closure. We call out-we get an answer. There's something satisfying in that trans­ action, and free verse writers often take advantage of it to end their poems. Look at the last word of a number of free verse poems; then look back over the two or three lines before it. You'll find that some­ times there's a word that sets up that final word, a call and the answer­ ing echo.

A Traditional Form: The Sonnet

You know those ads that say, "If you see only one movie this year, see this one"? We want to say the same thing about the sonnet. If you

146 THE POET'S COMPANION

experiment with writing in only one traditional form, this should be it. The sonnet has been enormously popular with poets, and you're not going to get very far in poetry before you encounter one. You've no doubt encountered one already: something from Shakespeare or Wordsworth or Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Edna St. Vincent Millay. If this sounds like intimidating company, don't worry. After all, those writers are dead. You're alive and writing, and you don't have to compete.

The sonnet originated in Italy; its name comes from the Italian sonnetto, meaning "little song." A sonnet is short-just fourteen lines. It's written in iambic pentameter, and it has a rhyme scheme. Actually there are three different rhyme schemes for the three differ­ ent kinds of sonnets: Italian or Pet:rarchan (named after the poet Petrarch, who wrote many sonnets to his love, Laura); English or Shakespearean (named after guess who); and Spenserian, after the poet Edmund Spenser. The easiest one to write-or at least, the one in which you have to find the least rhymes-is the Shakespearean. Here are the rhyme schemes for each type of sonnet:

Petrarchan: The fourteen lines are divided into an octet ( eight-line stanza) and sestet (six-line stanza) rhymed a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a and c-11-f

i

-c--0--f' (the sestet is sometimes varied). Shakespearean: a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g. Spenserian: The least commonly seen, this is a mix of the other

two:a-b-a-b-b-c-b-c-c-d-c-d-e-e.

The original sonnet-the Italian one-took advantage of the great number of rhymes in that language. When English poets got hold of it, they devised a rhyme scheme that would be easier to handle in a language with fewer rhymes. Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets suggest different ways of developing your material, because of how the rhymes work. In the Petrarchan, an idea is commonly laid out in the octet. Then there's often a "turn" (volta in Italian), a shift of some sort; the sestet develops this new line of thought. That is, the shift in rhyming lends itself to a shift in the content of the poem-form and content working together. In the Shakespearean sonnet, there is also often a shift after the octet; but then, too, that final couplet pushes

Meter, Rhyme, and Form 147

the poem towards some sort of two-line closing statement, since those two rhymes back to back at the end give a reader a strong sense of finahty. The Spenserian sonnet, too, can end with a strong sense of closure-if you can get to the last two lines before losing your sanity.

Here's a contemporary Shakespearean sonnet by Molly Peacock:

THE LULL

The possum lay on the tracks fully dead. I'm the kind of person who stops to look. It was big and white with flies on its head, a thick healthy hairless tail, and strong, hooked nails on its racoon-like feet. It was a full grown possum. It was sturdy and adult. Only its head was smashed. In the lull that it took to look, you took the time to insult the corpse, the flies, the world, the fact that we were traipsing in our dress shoes down the railroad tracks. "That's disgusting." You said that. Dreams, brains, fur and guts: what we are. That's my bargain, the Pax Peacock, with the world. Look hard, life's soft. Life's cache is flesh, flesh, and flesh.

The tone here is casual, conversational: "I'm the kind of person who stops to look." The friends are "traipsing" in their dress shoes; the narrator's friend exclaims, "That's disgusting." There's none of the elevated language we might be tempted to think a sonnet requires; the poem, in fact, takes us down to the gritty level of "the corpse, the flies, the world," insisting that we "look hard." Some lines stick pret­ ty closely to iambic pentameter; some stretch the line out and out­ we counted eight beats in that second-to-last line. And what about the end-how does she get away with three stresses, instead of five? Imagine if she'd written "Life's cache/ is flesh, and flesh, and flesh, and flesh, and flesh." That would fit the meter, but the deliberate breaking of the pattern is more interesting. The line is cut off; we're stopped short by its abruptness. Perhaps it recalls the possum's life

that has prematurely ended; but in any case, it calls attention to itself, and to the word "flesh." Saying it five times would have been too

148 THE POET'S COMPANION

many. Remember, as a kid, how you could repeat a word like "dog" until it sounded completely meaningless? Then, too, there are three characters in this poem; maybe flesh is repeated once for each of them. The poet asks us not to turn away in disgust at the realization that for all of us, it all comes down to flesh.

Though she sometimes loosens the meter, Peacock's rhymes here are pretty strict. Notice, though, that she uses a lot of enjambment to keep those strict end rhymes from sounding too obvious; we get to the end of the line and move right on to see where she's going.

One tendency of contemporary writers has been to play with the sonnet form, to stretch it and expand it beyond the rules. Some writ­ ers develop their own quirky rhyme schemes, while sticking to the other requirements of the form. We've seen sixteen-line sonnets that faithfully follow the Shakespearean pattern, then add on an extra couplet at the end. And there are some pieces titled "Sonnet" that we can't, for the life of us, figure out why the writer thought there was any relationship-beyond, maybe, the original meaning of "little song"; they tend to be short, at least. The sonnet seems to have adapt­ ed well to the needs of all kinds of writers.

If you're curious about other traditional forms, we'd like to recom­ mend two anthologies, both of which are listed in Appendix B at the end of the book. Strong Measures contains many contemporary examples of ballads, rondeaus, rhyme royal, and a wealth of other possibilities. There's also a handy index that gives a description of the requirements of each form and refers you to which poems are in that particular form. A Fonnal Feeling Comes: Poems in Fonn by Contemporary Women not only includes formal poems but brief essays by each writer. In the meantime, if you can't wait for the book­ store to open, the next two chapters will give you more food for thought.

IDEAS FOR WRITING

1. Try a few lines of accentual verse. That means you only count accents (stresses), without worrying about iambs and anapests.

Meter, Rhyme, and Form 149

Write four lines, making sure there are four stresses in each line. (You can have as many unstressed syllables as you need.) When you're comfortable with that, write four lines of three stresses each. Then write four lines in which you alternate the number of stresses: 4-3-4-3.

2. Write a poem in blank verse-unrhymed iambic pentameter. To get the rhythm going in your subconscious, first read a lot of blank verse: besides Shakespeare's plays, try Milton's Paradise Lost, or more recent works by Robert Frost-"Mending Wall," "Home Burial," and many others; or Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning." Don't write anything until you've spent at least half an hour·reading.

3. Write foudines and use as much internal rhyme in them as possible. Push it to the point of ridiculousness. Don't try to write anything serious; just see how far you can go.

4. Write a "silly sonnet" using strict meter and rhyme-the obvi­ ous kind you're not supposed to write. These can be a lot of fun with a group of people, each person adding a line.

5. Write a serious sonnet following any of the three rhyme schemes, but forget about the meter; make the lines any length and rhythm that you want.

6. Write a free verse poem with a rhyme scheme you've invented. One we've tried is six-line stanzas rhyming a-b-c-c-b-a.

7. Take some raw material for a poem-notes, jotted images, thoughts-or use a failed poem from the bottom of the pile. Cast it into three different forms:

iambic tetrameter (rhymed or unrhymed)

rhymed couplets

a limerick (you remember limericks, don't you?)

8. Syllabic verse counts only syllables, not accents. Marianne Moore was fond of syllabics. Look also at Sylvia Plath's

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"Mushrooms" and Philip Levine's "Animals Are Passing From

Our Lives." Then write your own syllabic poem.

9. Do an acrostic, a poem in which you spell something down the

left-hand side of the page; those letters then start each line of

the poem. An example we like is Diane Wakowski's "Justice Is Reason Enough."

10. Invent rules that you then religiously, or not so religiously, fol

low: one sound per line; a poem that uses all the synonyms for

"love"; a poem in which each stanza begins and ends with the

same word. The point is to challenge yourself, to nudge your imagination in a potentially surprising direction.

'Repetition, 'R.fiytfi.m, and 'Blues

Everything repeats. The seasons, the patterns of day and night, babies being born and parents dying, two people discovering each other's bodies: everything, large and small, has happened before-or almost. Nothing repeats itself in exactly the same way. Every moment is new: this day, this child, these pairs of hands and arms and eyes.

In our lives, we need both the comforts of repetition and the delights of change, and they need to be in balance. Too much repe­ tition means a routine of dull habit, of closing out the world. Too much change, and we lose our center. The same principle applies to poems that use repetition.

Why say, in a poem, what you've already said? First, because it's pleasurable. We say "I love you" over and over to the people dear to us ( or we should!). If you've just fallen head-over-heels for someone, you're likely to write their name from margin to margin in your jour­ nal, say it twenty times a day to yourself, and work it into every con­ versation until your friends are sick of it. Like good food and wine, words can be savored more than once.

And repeated words are powerful; they assert themselves, insist on our attention. Children know this: "Can I have some more? Please? Please please? Please please please please please?" In Catholicism, the repetition of prayers by the living is said to help reduce the time departed souls spend in purgatory. Buddhists repeat Sanskrit phrases

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to bring themselves in contact with the divine. Many peoples of the world have a long history of using repetitive chants and spells, prayers and invocations, to get the attention of the powers that be-to heal the sick, bless the crops or the marriage or the household, or to show their devotion. Poems partake of this tradition, too.

In the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein was the great literary repeater. She was fascinated with the possibilities and implications of reusing words, and did so-sometimes to the point of tedium. But her use of language was innovative, akin to what visual artists of the time were also exploring. For Stein, repetition was a way of subverting tra­ ditional ideas about what words were doing on the page. If the page was a canvas, maybe words could have the properties of paint-like color and texture-without having to refer to something else, to make meaning in the ordinary sense; they could live on the page as words, as themselves, just as an abstract painting is not a painting "of' any­ thing; it's paint. As Stein said, "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."

Repetition as brushstroke, as incantation, as fundamental princi­ ple; it's basic to all poetry. Even when words aren't repeated, other things, like sentence structure or stanza patterns, may be. A tradi­ tional form like the sonnet is based on repeating rhythms and rhymes. The few subjects for poetry get recycled over and over again: love, death, loss, the self, the physical world, the world beyond it. All of it has been said before; all of it bears repeating, or we wouldn't be writing poems at all, but rereading.

There are two terms that might be useful to know: repetend and anaphora. Repetend is the irregular repetition of a word or phrase at various places throughout a poem. Anaphora is the repetition of a word or group of words at the beginnings of lines. Allen Ginsberg wrote many poems using anaphora, including his famous "Howl." His inspiration derived partly from Walt Whitman, who used repeti­ tion and long lines, while Whitman found his inspiration in the structure and repetition of Bible verses. A very different poet, Jane Cooper, uses the same strategies in this poem about grief:

Repetition, Rh yth m, and Blues 153

LONG DISCONSOLATE LINES

in memory of Shirley Eliason Haupt

Because it is a gray day but not snowy, because traffic grinds by outside, because I woke myself crying help! to no other in my bed and no god, because I am in confusion about god, because the tree out there with its gray, bare limbs is shaped like a lyre, but it is only January, nothing plays it, no lacerating March sleet, no thrum of returning rain, because its arms are empty of buds or even of protective snow, I am in confusion, words harbor in my throat, I hear not one confident

tune, and however long I draw out this sentence it will not arrive at any truth.

It's true my friend died in September and I have not yet begun to mourn. Overnight, without warning, the good adversary knocked at her door, the one she so often portrayed as a cloud-filled drop out the cave's mouth, crumpled dark of an old

garden chair ... But a lyre-shaped tree? yes, a lyre-shaped tree. It's true that at twenty-four in the dripping, raw Iowa woods she sketched just such a tree, and I saw it, fell in love with its half-heard

lament as if my friend, in her pristine skin, already thrashed by the storm-blows

ahead, had folded herself around them, as if she gave up nothing, as if she sang.

Cooper's repeated "because" in the first stanza immediately engages our ear. "Because" is a word that usually explains, but here, as the writer tells us, it explains nothing; behind that "because" is the question, "Why?" The second stanza reveals one source of the narra­ tor's confusion-the loss of her friend. Notice the repetition of other key words-"nothing," "no," and "no" in the first stanza; "truth" at the end of that stanza followed by "It's true ... " in the opening of the second. The image of the "lyre-shaped" tree is also repeated, lead­ ing us to that last line: "as if she gave up nothing, as if she sang." The

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lyre is silent, the friend isn't singing, the poet can't find language that will "arrive at any truth." Yet the poem does arrive at a truth we rec­ ognize: poetry and art have limits, they're not enough, though they may be all we have.

If Cooper had used the word "because" to begin every line of her poem, the opening word would have grown predictable and stale. It is tricky sometimes to know when you're crossing the line, from hyp­ notic incantation to ordinary monotony. Repeating seems an easy and obvious technique, but it needs to be handled skillfully in order to be effective.

We're all familiar with refrains from popular songs-repeated lines that are often the "hook," lyrically and musically, which we're likely to remember later. Earlier forms of poetry, like ballads, which were originally sung, used a line or entire stanza as a refrain. Writers have found that refrains can still be memorable. Anne Sexton's "Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator" repeats the line, "At night, alone, I marry the bed." Galway Kinnell's long poem, "When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone," uses that line as a refrain at the beginning and end of each stanza of the poem. The word "alone" opens out to new experience and ideas each time, but afterward there's a return to the fundamental fact of the poet's situation. In both poems, the repetition is dynamic rather than static; it reinforces and emphasizes what the poet has to say.

When repetition is combined with rhythm-as it is in poetry and song-we pay attention and tune in. Robert Hass, in Twentieth Century Pleasures, talks about the basic way that rhythm is related to form. First there's the recognition of rhythm, the hearing of a partic­ ular pattern rather than random sounds. The next step is fooling around, making something pleasing or interesting-repeating, repeating, varying, repeating, exploring the possibilities. Finally, there's bringing it to some sort of closure. In music, a popular song has a melody, then a middle part called the bridge; afterwards it comes back to the melody again. That's one kind of form: statement, departure, a return that repeats the opening. A repeated rhythm can be as powerful-sometimes more powerful-than the words them­ selves. Rhythm is a bodily experience. It's the beat-whether of the

Repetition, Rhythm, and Blues 155

conga drum, the bass guitar, or the stressed syllables in a line-that makes us not only listen, but long to dance.

Anne Waldman's "Fast Speaking Woman" is an example of a poem that explores repetition and variation exhaustively; it's hundreds of lines long. But a short poem can also make effective use of repeated rhythms and words. William Dickey wrote a series of chants, songs for the page that are brief but evocative. Here is one of them:

(from CHANTS)

5. The Lumber Company Executive

The sacred direction: down. Bring it to down. Bring down these tents of assertion, the enemy, the tall ones.

The sacred color: red. Bring it to red. Wash down the widening gorges of earth flesh till the stone stiffens.

The sacred instrument, fire. Bring it to fire. Fire's afterbirth, the long dangle of waste, pitted by unwilling waters.

The language of Dickey's poem might remind a reader of Native American chants and invocations: "the sacred direction," "the tall ones," "earth flesh," "fire." In this case the words are ironic, since the speaker is clearly against the earth, and the desire is to dominate rather than praise; the chant is profane. Each stanza begins with the repeated phrases "the sacred . . . " "Bring it to . .. " There's rhythmic repetition, too, even beyond those phrases; "BRING DOWN these TENTS of asSERtion" is echoed in the second stanza by "WASH DOWN the WIDening GORges." Each stanza's final line is shorter and has two stresses: "the TALL ONES"; "till the STONE STIFfens"; "the unWILLing WAters." All these elements, though we might not be aware of them on a first reading, unify the poem.

Here's the next piece from the series:

156 THE POET'S COMPANION

6. The Critic

I unscrewed the lip from the mouth, the mouth I discarded. I unscrewed the lid from the eye, the eye I discarded.

Here is a doll made from pieces. The pieces hate one another.

Here are the doll and I in a posed photograph. After the photograph was taken, I unscrewed the camera.

This is not exactly a flattering portrait; if we take the doll as sym­

bolic of literature, the critic is the one who takes it apart, who destroys rather than creates. Notice the rhythms again: the first three lines each have a pause in the middle-a caesura-from a comma or period. Then there's the departure in the line, "Here are the doll and I in a posed photograph." The return to the familiar rhythm-longish line with a caesura the middle-adds to the sense of closure.

A form that uses repetition of both language and rhythm is the blues. As a song form, you're probably already familiar with it. The blues was born in this country, out of the sorrows of the black experi­ ence in America. Modern jazz and rock have their origins in the blues, but the blues never died, for many musicians and music lovers. It's also a form that poets have sometimes used to good effect. Langston Hughes, a black poet who became a major figure during the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties, wrote many jazz- and blues-influenced poems; in fact, he was the first writer to use the musical form of the blues as a poetic form. His first book was titled The Weary Blues. The blues has always been down-to-earth and personal, a lament about hard times-a cry of pain for love gone bad and no money in the bank and a cold world that just doesn't seem to care. The blues sings of those days when nothing goes right; it's a good form to try when you're feeling, well-blue. Here's a poem by Etheridge Knight:

A POEM FOR MYSELF

(or Blues for a Missis sippi Bla ck Boy)

I was born in Mississippi; I walked barefooted thru the mud.

Repetition, Rhythm, and Blues

Born black in Mississippi, Walked barefooted through the mud. But, when I reached the age of twelve I left that place for good. Said my daddy chopped cotton And he drank his liquor straight. When I left that Sunday morning He was leaning on the barnyard gate. Left her standing in the yard With the sun shining in her eyes. And I headed North As straight as the Wild Goose Flies,

I been to Detroit & Chicago Been to New York city too. I been to Detroit & Chicago Been to New York city too. Said I done strolled all those funky avenues I'm still the same old black boy with the same old blues. Going back to Mississippi This time to stay for good Going back to Mississippi This time to stay for good- Gonna be free in Mississippi Or dead in the Mississippi mud.

157

If you've ever listened to a blues song, you could easily sing this poem. It opens with repeated lines, and then completes the begin­ ning with a rhyme-in this case, "mud" gets rhymed with "good." Map out the pattern he's using for yourself, and then compare Knight's blues to a poem by Sandra McPherson:

BAD MOTHER BLUES

When you were arrested, child, and I had to take your pocketknife When you were booked and I had to confiscate your pocketknife It had blood on it from where you'd tried to take your life

It was the night before Thanksgiving, all the family coming over The night before Thanksgiving, all the family coming over

We had to hide your porno magazine and put your handcuffs undercover

158 THE POET'S COMPANION

Each naked man looked at you, said, Baby who do you think you are Each man looked straight down on you, like a waiting astronomer's star Solely, disgustedly, each wagged his luster

I've decided to throw horror down the well and wish on it Decided I'll throw horror down the well and wish on it And up from the water will shine my sweet girl in her baby bonnet

A thief will blind you with his flashlight but a daughter be your bouquet

A thief will blind you with his flashlight but a daughter be your bouquet

When the thiefs your daughter you tum your eyes the other way

I'm going into the sunflower field where all of them are facing me I'm going into the sunflower field so all of them are facing me Going to go behind the sunflowers, feel all the sun that I can't see

McPherson's poem looks different on the page, but it's essentially the same pattern as Knight's, with slight variations. In both poems, the repetitions emphasize both the music and the meaning. Knight describes the experience of a southern black boy, McPherson that of a mother with a troubled teenager; both poems sing different sorrows. Knight's language is closer to what we're used to hearing in the blues-"Said my daddy chopped cotton," "I been to Detroit and Chicago," "Said I done strolled those funky avenues." McPherson sometimes moves into language we would not expect, like "Solely, disgustedly, each wagged his luster."

A blues poem need not limit itself to particular subjects or lan­ guage. You may want to follow the song form strictly, or alter it to suit your needs; you'll likely find that repetition of some sort is important to the idea of a blues, as well as a tone of sadness or complaint or loss. We poets always seem to have plenty of material in that area. But be forewarned: though it looks easy, a good blues poem is tough to write. If you're not careful, the constant repetition of words and rhythms can begin to sound dull or simplistic; that's the challenge of this par­ ticular form.

Repetition, Rhythm, and Blues

IDEAS FOR WRITING

159

1. Write a poem that uses anaphora. Use one or more of the follow­ ing, which are guaranteed to trigger something interesting. Or invent your own.

I want I remember I used to America Love Daddy Mother Give me back You never

2. Using repeated words from the following list, write a chant that seems rhythmically interesting and has a sense of closure. Don't worry about what it means; just create something that feels com­ plete. Let the words trigger the direction of the poem; you don't need to use all of them, and you can add as many words as you need.

smoke angels muror regret moonless pleasure rose glittering face oblivion burning strip breaking smolder hotel

160 THE POET'S COMPANION

3. Do the preceding exercise with words you choose from a book of poems or fiction.

4. Write a short poem that begins and ends with the same line. The reader should feel differently about the line the second time he or she encounters it, because of what has happened in the poem.

5. Get yourself in the mood by listening to a few blues singers (we like Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, and Sonny Boy Williamson, to name a few). Then write your own blues poem, about something in your life that's getting you down. Or write a blues for a friend, your sister, Marilyn Monroe, or anyone else.

6. Steal a title from a blues song: "Empty Bed Blues," "Dead Shrimp Blues," "Honeymoon Blues;' or anything else that appeals to you, and use it as a title for a blues poem of your own.

7. Write a poem with a refrain.

8. Write a poem with repetend.

9. Try repeating images in a poem: images of light, images of a certain color, images of things that are square, images of things that crawl-the possibilities are endless.

10. Take an old poem you wrote that does not use much repetition, and find words/images/rhythms/lines to repeat in it. Doing this might revitalize a poem that wasn't working.

Jvf ore 'Repetition:

Villanelle, Pantoum, Sestina

We'd like to introduce you to three traditional forms that use repeti­ tion. The first is the villanelle, a French form which derived from Italian folk songs. A villanelle is a nineteen-line poem of five tercets (three-line stanzas) and a closing quatrain (four lines). Two lines in the poem get repeated throughout the entire poem, in a particular order; additionally, there's a rhyme scheme: the tercets rhyme aba, the quatrain abaa. If you map it out, it looks like this:

al (repeating line) b a2 (second repeating line)

a

b al

a b a2

a

b a l

a

b a2

162

a

b a l a2

THE POET'S COMPANION

As you can see, each line gets repeated alternately at the ends of

the tercets; in the last stanza, the repeated lines get used one after the

other. But the best way to grasp how villanelles work is to read some.

Here's a lovely one by Martha Collins:

THE STORY WE KNOW

The way to begin is always the same. Hello,

Hello. Your hand, your name. So glad, Just fine,

and Good-bye at the end. That's every story we know,

and why pretend? But lunch tomorrow? No?

Yes? An omelette, salad, chilled white wine?

The way to begin is simple, sane, Hello,

and then it's Sunday, coffee, the Times, a slow

day by the fire, dinner at eight or nine

and Good-bye. In the end, this is a story we know

so well we don't turn the page, or look below

the picture, or follow the words to the next line:

The way to begin is always the same Hello.

But one night, through the latticed window, snow

begins to whiten the air, and the tall white pine.

Good-bye is the end of every story we know

that night, and when we close the curtains, oh,

we hold each other against that cold white sign

of the way we all begin and end. Hello,

Good-bye is the only story. We know, we know.

Collins's poem handles the requirements of the form beautifully.

You'll notice that she doesn't repeat her lines exactly; the principle of

variation we spoke of in the last chapter applies here, too. You have

some flexibility in working out your poem, and one of the challenges

More Repetiti on: Villanelle, Pantoum, Sestina 163

and pleasures of this form is figuring out variations in your lines. You may want to repeat them exactly as you wrote them the first time, or you may find they need to be altered to fit with what's developing. Developing is an important concept here; you don't want to just repeat yourself, but to move the poem somewhere. Collins begins with the socially conventional, but as the poem unfolds, larger con­ cerns emerge: beginnings and endings of relationships, and finally death, nonbeing, "that cold white sign / of the way we all begin and end." The knowledge at the end of the poem is the profound knowl­ edge of our mortality. That's "the story we know;' and it gets repeat­ ed, over and over.

One advantage of the villanelle is that once you settle on two good, interesting lines that you think will bear repeating-and that also rhyme-you've got much of the poem written. Just sit down, drop them into their slots, and fill in the blanks. (Remember that those middle lines of the tercets have to rhyme with each other, too.) Of course it's not as mechanical-or as easy-as that sounds. You may find you hate writing this way-or that you love it. But even if you don't produce a great villanelle, you'll get a sense of how they work. Some deservedly well-known villanelles you should look at are "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop; "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke; and "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas.

The pantoum, or pantun, is a form that a number of our students have taken to and really enjoyed. The pantoum is a Malayan form from the fifteenth century, and has its roots in Chinese and Persian poetry. Like the villanelle, the pantoum uses repeated lines. The pan­ toum is written in quatrains. The second and fourth line of each stan­ za become the first and third of the next. Usually, too, the first line becomes the last line, and the third line of the poem gets put into the very last stanza as the second line. Sound confusing? Once you have a first stanza, as in the villanelle, you can copy lines two and four into the next stanza as lines one and three, and you're in the midst of writ­ ing your poem. Again, you may want to repeat lines exactly, or to vary them as necessary.

In the following pantoum by Thomas Lux, notice how the lines are changed slightly so that the poem flows easily. We've seen much

164 THE POET'S COMPANION

more radical variations, even to the point of simply repeating only one key word in what is supposed to be a repeated line. As always, though, the principle is one of repetition, of echo.

ALL THE SLAVES

All the slaves within me are tired or nearly dead. They won't work for money, not for a slice of bread.

Tired or nearly dead, half underwater, wanting merely a slice of bread: the inner slaves, singing.

Half underwater, wanting only a few flippers to swim, the inner slaves, singing the depth-charges within.

Only a few flippers to swim! And a sensor to sense the sound of the depth-charges within­ that's all they ask for aloud.

A sensor to sense the sound, a hearer to hear the small aurals: that's all they ask for aloud. They're slaves with slaves' morals.

Hearers hearing small aurals, they won't work for money. They're slaves with slaves' morals, all these slaves within me.

You might have noticed that Lux follows a rhyme scheme; this, too, is part of the traditional pantoum's structure. Writers have felt to follow it or not, and to compose their own variations on the form. Here's a pantoum by Linda Pastan, one which repeats the lines strict-

More Repetition: Villanelle, Pantoum, Sestina 165

ly but varies the form slightly and doesn't rhyme. Instead of the first

line being the last line, it ends up as the second line of the last stan­

za; the third line of the poem is the one that comes back at the end.

SOMETHING ABOUT THE TREES

I remember what my father told me: There is an age when you are most yourself.

He was just past fifty then, Was it something about the trees that made him speak?

There is an age when you are most yourself.

I know more now than I did once.

Was it something about the trees that made him speak?

Only a single leaf had turned so far.

I know more now than I did once.

I used to think he'd always be the surgeon.

Only a single leaf had turned so far, Even his body kept its secrets.

I used to think he'd always be the surgeon,

My mother was the perfect surgeon's wife. Even his body kept its secrets. I thought they both would live forever.

My mother was the perfect surgeon's wife, I still can see her face at thirty.

I thought they both would live forever,

I thought I'd always be their child.

I still can see her face at thirty. When will I be most myself? I thought I'd always be their child. In my sleep it's never winter.

When will I be most myself? I remember what my father told me. In my sleep it's never winter. He was just past fifty then.

This poem, haunted by the past, by the speaker's memory of her

166 THE POET'S COMPANION

parents and her recognition of the cycles of life, finds its appropriate and moving expression in the repetition of the pantoum form. The third line, "He was just past fifty then," seems to resonate with heart­ breaking significance as it closes the poem, informed as it is by all that's come before. The compelling back-and-forth movement of a pantoum lends itself to obsessive subjects-the mind going over and over particular events. It is also a good vehicle for expressing conflict, or ambivalence. Once you try this form, we think you may become an ardent convert, as several of our students have. We've seen suc­ cessful pantoums on cocaine addiction, on divorce, on dieting, and even on 0. J. Simpson.

Another interesting-and often maddening-form is the sestina, said to have been invented in Provence in the thirteenth century. The sestina doesn't repeat lines, only words. It consists of six stanzas of six lines each (sestets), and concludes with a final tercet. In the six stanzas, the end words get repeated in a certain order; in the closing tercet (called the envoie or envoy), all six words are used. If the six end words of the first stanza are labeled ABCDEF, the order of the words in each stanza goes like this:

1 ABCDEF 2 FAEBDC 3 CFDABE 4 ECBFAD 5 DEACFB 6BDFECA 7 (the tercet): ECA for ends of lines; BDF in the middle of each

line; that is, BE, DC, FA What kinds of subjects are suited for a sestina? Interestingly, writ­

ers often feel compelled to write sestinas about writing sestinas! That's because this is truly a difficult one to pull off. Obsessions, com­ pulsive desires, dreams, recurring events-these are good material for a sestina. Obviously you need to choose your six repeating words carefully, as these will sound throughout your poem, helping to cre­ ate tone and mood and articulate your themes and ideas. We like what John Frederick Nims said about the form:

More Repetition: Villanelle, Pantoum, Sestina 167

A shallow view of the sestina might suggest that the poet writes a stanza and then is stuck with six words which he has to juggle into the re�uired positions through five more stanzas and an envoy-:to the great detriment of what passion and s�ncerity wo�l� have hi1:1 say. But in a good sestina the poet has six words, six images, six ideas so urgently in his mind that he cannot get away from them; he wants to test them in all possible combinations and come to a conclusion about their relationship.

As with the repetition in a pantoum or villanelle, you have some leeway here, too. One trick writers have use_d is to substitute :}oselr related words occasionally, instead of repeating them exactly: here might become "where," "two" become "to" or "too," "�arried" �ppe�r as "marriage" or even "marred." Coming up with creative solutions 1s part of the fun. Sometimes, too, poets will loosen the re�uirements­ say, using all six words in the last tercet, but not followmg an_y order for where in the tercet they appear. Occasionally a writer will drop the concluding tercet entirely. In this sestina by Alberto Rios, the six­ line stanzas have been collapsed together, making two eighteen-line stanzas.

NANI

Sitting at her table, she serves the sopa de arroz to me instinctively, and I watch her, the absolute mama, and eat words I might have had to say more out of embarrassment. To speak, now-foreign words I used to speak, too, dribble down her mouth as she serves me alb6ndigas. No more than a third are easy to me. By the stove she does something with words and looks at me only with her back. I am full. I tell her I taste the mint, and watch her speak

168 THE POET'S COMPANION

smiles at the stove. All my words make her smile. Nani never serves herself, she only watches me with her skin, her hair. I ask for more.

I watch the mama warming more tortillas for me. I watch her fingers in the flame for me. Near her mouth, I see a wrinkle speak of a man whose body serves the ants like she serves me, then more words from more wrinkles about children, words about this and that, flowing more easily from these other mouths. Each serves as a tremendous string around her, holding her together. They speak nani was this and that to me and I wonder just how much of me will die with her, what were the words I could have been, was. Her insides speak through a hundred wrinkles, now, more than she can bear, steel around her, shouting, then, What is this thing she serves?

She asks me if I want more. I own no words to stop her. Even before I speak, she serves.

Look at the words Rios has chosen for his sestina: serves, me, her, words, more, speak. These are the themes of the poem, too: the old woman's life that has been spent serving others, the consideration of the relationship between the narrator and nani, the concerns about lan­ guage, and the "more" that is asked for and given. Nani's speech· is of two kinds-the "now-foreign" words that the narrator has lost, having, we assume, grown up hearing and speaking them but learning English in school; and the speech of her body, which is eloquently translated by Rios. The portrait is a compassionate one, detailing the quiet everyday heroism of her life, and the cost of such selfless service. The simple words, repeated throughout, accumulate their own quiet strength.

More Repetition: Villanelle, Pantoum, Sestina 169

We once read a wonderful poem by Adam LeFevre, titled "Sestina Sestina-" one of those sestinas about sestinas. It concludes, "This form is a hungry monster. I Repetition wants something else every time. Six/ mad kings and you, locked in a cell-that's a sestina." We couldn't resist concluding this chapter with one more sestina, that takes a different view-half-comically, half-seriously. The writer, Dana Gioia, pokes fun at sestinas and the students laboring over them; and, of course, he's written one in order to talk about it all.

MY CONFESSIONAL SESTINA

Let me confess. I'm sick of these sestinas written by youngsters in poetry workshops for the delectation of their fellow students, and then published in little magazines that no one reads, not even the contributors who at least in this omission show some taste.

Is this merely a matter of personal taste? I don't think so. Most sestinas are such dull affairs. Just ask the contributors the last time they finished one outside of a workshop, even the poignant one on herpes in that new little magazine edited by their most brilliant fellow student.

Let's be honest. It has become a form for students, an exercise to build technique rather than taste and the official entry blank into the little magazines­ because despite its reputation, a passable sestina isn't very hard to write, even for kids in workshops who care less about being poets than contributors.

Granted nowadays everyone is a contributor. My barber is currently a student in a rigorous correspondence school workshop. At lesson six he can already taste success having just placed his own sestina in a national tonsorial magazine.

170 THE POET'S COMPANION

Who really cares about most little magazines? Eventually not even their own contributors who having published a few preliminary sestinas send their work East to prove they're no longer students. They need to be recognized as the new arbiters of taste so they can teach their own graduate workshops.

Where will it end? This grim cycle of workshops churning out poems for little magazines no one honestly finds to their taste? This ever-lengthening column of contributors scavenging the land for more students teaching them to write their boot-camp sestinas?

Perhaps there is an afterlife where all contributors have two workshops, a tasteful little magazine, and sexy students who worshipfully memorize their every sestina.

a 9rammatical 'Excursion

To many people, even those interested in writing, "grammar" is a dirty word. It sounds stern, forbidding, and worst of all dull. It smacks of the elementary school classroom, of the meaningless dissection of sentences, of onerous burdens laid on the helpless shoulders of chil­ dren. But if you are really interested in writing poetry, grammar can be something else: a door to rooms you might never otherwise dis­ cover, a way to realize and articulate your visions in language.

We asked a number of our students how they felt about grammar. Some were confident they knew their way around a sentence; many felt rusty, unsure whether they could remember much beyond the parts of speech. And others were downright terrified of the whole sub­ ject. Like fear of math, fear of grammar seems to be fairly common, rooted either in bad early experiences or an idea that such a mun­ dane topic is deadly to creative inspiration. We can't do much about your third-grade teacher forcing you to diagram sentences, but we can tell you that a working knowledge of the sentence can be an invaluable tool for your development as a writer. If you were a serious musician, you'd know how to read music in both clefs. If you wanted to be a carpenter, you'd know the properties of various kinds of wood. A good chef knows what goes into a sauce, and what ingredients on hand might substitute in a pinch for something that's missing. This isn't to suggest that you couldn't play very well by ear, or learn how

172 THE POET'S COMPANION

to make beautiful furniture by trial and error, or be a great instinctive cook. You may, in fact, already be writing luminous sentences with­ out realizing it. But the odds are that solidifying your knowledge of grammar can enhance what you already know how to do; and odds are, too, that your sentences aren't as interesting, developed, and complex as you might make them.

Many books on creative writing are relatively silent on the subject of grammar. If you take a poetry workshop, you will hear elements of craft such as imagery and line being discussed; you may hear a teacher say something about "varying your sentences," or "using active verbs" -both generally good suggestions. But in all likelihood, you won't hear much discussion of how sentences work, of how, at the sentence level, you can begin to use certain grammatical struc­ tures to create richer detail, to develop your ideas, and to produce more sophisticated sentences. This is partly because the way that grammar has been taught in this country has undergone a change, relatively recently; it's only in the past few years that composition spe­ cialists have begun' to explore more effective ways of doing it. Most of what they've discovered has been applied to teaching expository writ­ ing, but we think the methods could be just as useful for poets. If you study this chapter carefully, and practice the techniques in your own work, you'll see your language developing, achieving a greater flexi­ bility and style.

We can't, in a single chapter, begin to cover what is after all a very large subject. So we're going to avoid technical terms as much as pos­ sible, and instead try to show you how to incorporate those "certain grammatical structures" we mentioned earlier-the ones that will do all those wonderful things for your writing. You should be familiar with the parts of speech: noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition. If you're lost already, head for the dictionary or a basic grammar text, and be sure you know these terms. (Two good and unintimidating books for the grammar-shy are The Transitive Vampire

and Woe Is I.) You might also find the following poem helpful. It was written for one of your authors, who can't keep the parts of speech straight-proving that you can be a poet and not know this stuff. But

A Gra mmatical Excursion 173

since your other author has spent some time teaching it, she thought

she'd pass it on. But first, the poem. It's not only a lesson in grammar, but a clever

villanelle-you should recognize the form from the previous chapter.

THE GRAMMAR LESSON

A noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does.

An adjective is what describes the noun.

In "The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz"

of and with are prepositions. The's

an article, a can's a noun,

a noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does.

A can can roll-or not. What isn't was

or might be, might meaning not yet known.

"Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz"

is present tense. While words like our and us

are pronouns-i.e., it is moldy, they are icky brown.

A noun's a thing; a verb's the thing it does.

Is is a helping verb. It helps because

filled isn't a full verb. Can's what our owns

in "Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz."

See? There's almost nothing to it. Just

memorize these rules ... or write them down!

A noun's a thing, a verb's the thing it does.

The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz.

-Steve Kowit

Now that we've got that straight-or slightly fuzzy-in our minds,

let's say that you want to write a poem about your grandmother. So

far you have the following lines:

My grandmother stands in the kitchen.

She sings the old songs. Her voice

rises and falls.

174 THE POET'S COMPANION

. Is anything wrong with these lines? They're seemingly clear and ?uect. But in the writer's mind there are probably a number of images, memories, and ideas that haven't made it onto the page. !"1any _beginning writers aren't aware that they've left most of what's m theu head out of their poems. When you say "my grandmother" you see a person, vividly alive, unique, radiating all the things you love. All we readers see are the words "my grandmother." And what about "the kitchen"? You probably have a picture of that kitchen firmly in mind: how the light looks, the aromas, the sound of dishes being.washe�, where the kitchen table is, whether there are plants on the wmdows1ll or curtains on the window. All three of these lines cry out for greater detail, for more information so that we as readers can experience what you, the writer, are trying to show us. It's possible that your poem could go on and tell us what we need to know in lines that will follow these; but let's say you want to do it here, in each of these sentences, to make them fuller and richer.

How can you say more about your grandmother and the kitchen, to make the scene come alive a bit? One way would be to add an appositive to each of these nouns. "Apposition" simply means that one thing_ is put b�side another; an appositive is a word or group of words which explams the original in a little more detail. If you write "My grandmother, Stella," you have created a noun appositive for "my grandmother," since "Stella" is also a noun. Now we have a lit­ tle more information; we know her name, at least. But you may want to tell us �ore, to use a_ group of words to describe her: "My grand­ mother, a tmy woman with long white hair and the face of a Botticelli angel." Now you've used a noun phrase appositive. (A phrase is a group of words.) You can also add an appositive to "kitchen": "the kitchen, a long, low room filled with the smell of grilling onions and roasting garlic." Now you can put them all together and even add one more appositive, something that tells us a bit more about that "smell of grilling onions" line:

My grandmother, Stella, a tiny woman with long white hair and the face of a Botticelli angel, stands in the kitchen, a long low room

A Grammatica l Excursion

filled with the smell of grilling onions and roasting garlic,

a smell I remember from childhood.

175

Now you've presented the scene in much greater detail than the original. We catch a glimpse of the grandmother, inhale the scent of her kitchen, discover something of the meaning that the image holds for the narrator of the poem-in a sentence which unfolds across seven lines.

From this small example, we hope you might begin to see some of the possibilities of using appositives. Appositives are a way to say more, to go further in the implications of your thought or the details of your memory or experience. They're a way of digging in, a process of discovery at the level of syntax (sentence structure).

For practice in recognizing appositives, here are some lines of poet­ ry taken from several writers. The original word or phrase that's being added to is underlined, while the appositive (or appositives-some­ times there's more than one) is in italics. Notice how, in each case, the italicized language tells us more, extends and deepens and clari­ fies the writer's thought or image:

They crowd their rookery. the dilapidated outcrop

The ocean gives a bubble-top of glass to at high tide.

-Mark Jarman, "Awakened by Sea Lions"

I watch you watching the snake

or gathering the fallen bird, the dog in the road, those stiff bodies

from whom you cannot withhold your tenderness.

-Ellen Bryant Voigt, "Rescue"

what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which

I lived?

-Galway Kinnell, "The Bear"

176 THE POET'S COMPANION

I've tried to seal .il in, that cross-grained knot on the opposite wall . . .

-Stanley Kunitz, "The Knot''

What did you fear in me, the child who wore your hair, the woman who let that black hair grow long as a banner of darkness . . .

-Marge Piercy, "My Mother's Body"

The body of my lady, the winding valley spine, the space between the thighs I reach through . . .

-Gary Snyder, "The Bath"

Not all appositives are nouns; verbs can be set beside other verbs, prepositional phrases beside other prepositional phrases, various kinds of clauses-noun, adjective, adverb-beside other clauses (a clause contains a subject and a verb, whereas a phrase doesn't). If

we're confusing you, don't worry; though it's nice to know what an adverbial clause is, it's not really necessary. What's important is to be able to recognize similar structures, and then to work them into your own writing. Here, for example, are a few other kinds of appositives:

On the tiles, the woman whose throat is ringed with bandannas, whose collapse is a stain you want to step around. (adjective clause)

-Lynda Hull, "Gateway to Manhattan"

... We moved to the mountains, to a white house set into a notch above a shallow stream. (prepositional phrase)

-Charlie Smith, "Kohaku"

it is not like bringing a forest back, putting a truckload of nitrogen in the soil, burning some brush, planting seedlings, measuring distance- (verbal phrases)

-Gerald Stern, "The Shirt Poem"

A Grammatica l Excursion 177

Before we go any further, we want to give you a chance to practice

some of these constructions. Following are some sample sentences;

study them, and then complete the blanks with your own appositives.

(noun phrases) MODEL: I wanted to return to that place, the tiny fishing village

in Mexico. YOUR SENTENCE: I wanted to return to that place, __ _

MODEL: I remember the scent of my father, the cologne and

cigarettes, the whisky on his breath.

YOUR SENTENCE: I remember the scent of my father, __

MODEL: I was thinking of the soul, that body of light.

YOUR SENTENCE: I was thinking of the soul, ____ _

MODEL: All that I love tonight-your body curled beside mine,

the vase of white lilies, the one bird calling from the yard-might

be lost tomorrow. YOUR SENTENCE: All that I love tonight- _____ _

--. - might be lost tomorrow.

(prepositional phrases)

MODEL: If you look at the ugliness of the world-at the home­

less woman lying in a doorway, at her dress of rags and bed of old

newspapers-you might see a kind of beauty. YOUR SENTENCE: If you look at the ugliness of the world-

------------ -you might see a kind of beauty.

MODEL: After the funeral, after the flowers and eulogies, we

returned to our lives. YOUR SENTENCE: After the funeral, ___ _, we returned

to our lives.

(verbs) MODEL: The seagulls follow the boat, hover over the white wake.

YOUR SENTENCE: The seagulls follow the boat, ___ _

176 THE POET'S COMPANION

I've tried to seal it in, that cross-grained knot on the opposite wall . . .

-Stanley Kunitz, "The Knot"

What did you fear in !Ill:, the child who wore your hair, the woman who let that black hair grow long as a banner of darkness . . .

-Marge Piercy, "My Mother's Body"

The body of my lady, the winding valley spine, the space between the thighs I reach through . . .

-Gary Snyder, "The Bath"

Not all appositives are nouns; verbs can be set beside other verbs, prepositional phrases beside other prepositional phrases, various kinds of clauses-noun, adjective, adverb-beside other clauses (a clause contains a subject and a verb, whereas a phrase doesn't). If

we're confusing you, don't worry; though it's nice to know what an adverbial clause is, it's not really necessary. What's important is to be able to recognize similar structures, and then to work them into your own writing. Here, for example, are a few other kinds of appositives:

On the tiles, the woman whose throat is ringed with bandannas, whose collapse is a stain you want to step around. (adjective clause)

-Lynda Hull, "Gateway to Manhattan"

... We moved to the mountains, to a white house set into a notch above a shallow stream. (prepositional phrase)

-Charlie Smith, "Kohaku"

it is not like bringing a forest back, putting a truckload of nitrogen in the soil, burning some brush, planting seedlings, measuring distance- (verbal phrases)

-Gerald Stem, "The Shirt Poem"

A Grammatical Excursion 177

Before we go any further, we want to give you a chance to practice

some of these constructions. Following are some sample sentences;

study them, and then complete the blanks with your own appositives.

(noun phrases) MODEL: I wanted to return to that place, the tiny fishing village

in Mexico. YOUR SENTENCE: I wanted to return to that place, __ _

MODEL: I remember the scent of my father, the cologne and

cigarettes, the whisky on his breath.

YOUR SENTENCE: I remember the scent of my father, __

MODEL: I was thinking of the soul, that body of light.

YOUR SENTENCE: I was thinking of the soul, ____ _

MODEL: All that I love tonight-your body curled beside mine,

the vase of white lilies, the one bird calling from the yard-might

be lost tomorrow. YOUR SENTENCE: All that I love tonight- _____ _

_., - might be lost tomorrow.

(prepositional phrases)

MODEL: If you look at the ugliness of the world-at the home­

less woman lying in a doorway, at her dress of rags and bed of old

newspapers-you might see a kind of beauty.

YOUR SENTENCE: If you look at the ugliness of the world-

----------- -you might see a kind of beauty.

MODEL: After the funeral, a�er the flowers and eulogies, we

returned to our lives. YOUR SENTENCE: After the funeral, ____ we returned

to our lives.

(verbs) MODEL: The seagulls follow the boat, hover over the white wake.

YOUR SENTENCE: The seagulls follow the boat, ___ _

178 THE POET'S COMPANION

MODEL: The child spins in circles, whirls around until the world spins with her. YOUR SENTENCE: The child spins in circles, ____ _

MODEL: They make love, touch the tenderest places, kiss the boundaries of skin. YOUR SENTENCE: They make love, _______ _

(adjective clauses) MODEL: You were the one who took risks, who swam naked in the river, who laughed when the cops came. YOUR SENTENCE: You were the one who took risks, __ _

(adjective phrases) MODEL: The kitchen counter was �' littered with cigarette butts, crowded with unwashed plates. YOUR SENTENCE: The kitchen counter was dirty, ___ _

MODEL: She's cautious, afraid to leave the house at night. YOUR SENTENCE: She's cautious, ________ _

MODEL: The angels are beautiful, luminous and full of longing. YOUR SENTENCE: The angels are beautiful, ____ _

At this point we suggest-no, insist-that you take a break from this chapter. Don't read any further until you've had time to absorb everything we've covered so far. Read some other chapters. Write some poems. Do your laundry. Then, when you're ready, go back and reread the chapter up to this point, and practice more apposi­ tives until you're fairly comfortable with them. Take out some drafts of poems, look at your nouns, and see where the addition of some noun appositives would add greater detail . When you've got the hang of that, try other structures, such as the ones in the above sen­ tences. Look for appositives in poems that you've read-yes, they're really there, lots of them. You'll quickly see that there are many more ways to expand sentences, and you may begin to feel confused. That's okay; the important thing is that you are beginning to look at poems at the level of the sentence, to pay attention to the parts, even

A Grammatical Excursion 179

if you can't name them. You'll find that, having studied e_ven this

much, the way you read poems will have changed. Changmg your

writing will take longer, and at first it may feel very a';�ward.

Developing your syntax takes time. Keep reading, and prachcmg.

Okay. We assume you've taken our advice and been busy with

other things, and are now ready for further punishment. Let's return

to your original three lines about your grandmother and take the sec-

ond one:

She sings the old songs.

You could add an appositive to "songs;' of course. But suppose it's

not the songs you want to talk about, but the singing. Is there a way

to do that? Try this:

She sings the old songs, swaying back and forth, humming the parts she's forgotten, belting out the words she still remembers.

Now you've added three verbal phrases to your sentence. The ver? is "sings," but that's not the only a:tion ta�ing place here.� verb�l 1s

a form of a verb, but it has no sub1ect. Still, we know who s swaymg,

humming, and belting out the words: your grandmother. Ve�bals

always have an implied subject: the subject of the se?tenc�. So, if we

were to break down the syntax here, it would look hke this:

SUBJECT: She VERB: sings V ERBALS: swaying, humming, belting out

You can do this with any action that's taking place, by simply

adding an "ing" form of a verb. The first line of your poem could

have been expanded with an "ing" verbal as well:

My grandmother stands in the kitchen, washing the dishes.

or

My grandmother stands in the kitchen, wearing her plaid bathrobe.

180 THE POET'S COMPANION

There are two other kinds of verbals: the "to" form, as in to wash, to shimmer, to love; and the "ed" form (sometimes "en"): bored, excited, driven. Here's how you could have expanded your second line with them:

She sings the old songs to remind herself of Russia.

To comfort me, she sings the old songs.

Exiled from her country, she still sings the old songs.

Filled with her memories, she sings the old songs.

Here are some examples of verbals in the work of other poets: ... all her life She drank, dedicated to the act itself . ..

-Lynn Emanuel, "Frying Trout While Drunk"

He'd been a clod, he knew, yes, always aiming toward his vision of the good life, always acting on it.

-C. K. Williams, "Alzheimer's: The Husband"

She washed the floor on hands and knees below the Black Madonna, praying to her god of sorrows and visions ...

-Lynda Hull, "Night Waitress"

and the hawk hooked one exquisite foot

onto a last thing

to look deeper into the yellow reeds

along the edges of the water

-Mary Oliver, "Hawk"

A Grammatical Excursion 181

For practice, try writing your own verbals, following the models below. Verbals, like appositives, don't always appear singly; you can string them together. In the above examples, C. K. Williams uses two. Try to use at least two verbals in each of your sentences. (The implied subjects of the verbals are underlined in each case'.)

MODEL: The cat sits before the window, staring at the garden, anticipating the moment she'll be let out into it. YOUR SENTENCE: The cat sits before the window, ___ _

MODEL: Lurching down the street, smelling of cheap wine, the man approached me. YOUR SENTENCE: __________ , the man approached me.

MODEL: Exhausted, dispirited, temporarily defeated by the world, }'.Ql! want someone to hold you. YOUR SENTENCE: ___________ , you want someone to hold you.

MODEL: The boy studies his father to remember him when he's gone, to fix his image forever in his mind. YOUR SENTENCE: The boy studies his father ____ _

MODEL: To love the world, to know it, one wants to live long. YOUR SENTENCE: _________ _, one wants to live long.

By this point, you should have an idea of how you can expand your sentences and add detail to them with at least two kinds of grammat­ ical constructions: appositives and verbals. In a well-written poem, many sentences will use these and/or other structures, sometimes repeating them, sometimes mixing them up. When structures are repeated, we call this parallel structure. (The King James translation of the Bible is full of it.) When you string together two or more appos­ itives or verbals, you have parallel structure. When you make a list,

182 THE POET'S COMPANION

you are creating parallel structure, too: "I love the stars, the street­ lights, even the glittering flecks in the sidewalks." When you list a series of verbs-"The crow lifts its wings, flies to the highest branch of the maple tree, regards me without curiosity" -that, too, is parallel structure. The preceding "When ... " sentence, and the two before it, are also an example; parallel structure doesn't just happen within sentences. By sensitizing your eye and ear to pick up on how sen­ tences unfold, whether through the repetition of parallelism or the variation of different kinds of structures, you'll not only appreciate the writers you read at another level, but have a valuable tool for devel­ oping your own syntax. Here are some lines from poems in which appositives and verbals are used together:

I watch the orderly stack the day's dead: men on one cart, women on the other. You sit two feet away, sketching and drinking tequila.

-Ai, "Guadalajara Hospital"

Ai uses the appositives "men on one cart, women on the other" to tell us more about "the day's dead," making the description more graphic and disturbing. The action of the "you" in the poem is extended with the verbals "sketching" and "drinking." Bruce Weigl also presents his images in razor-sharp detail:

... another soldier and I Lifted the shelter off its blocks To expose the home-made toilets: Fifty-five gallon drums cut in half With crude wood seats that splintered.

-Bruce Weigl, "Burning Shit at An Khe"

The verbal "to expose" extends the action of lifting the shelter; the "home-made toilets" are described with an appositive, so that we can

A Grammatical Excursion 183

clearly see them. We can even almost feel those splinters from the wood seats.

Did Ai and Weigl set out to write sentences that used appositives and verbals in this way? Probably not. What's more likely is that they want­ ed intense imagery that would enable a reader to imagine those scenes. Ai knew that writing ''You sit two feet away" wouldn't be enough; the verbals give us the sharp contrast of dead bodies against the seemingly casual activities of the other person. Weigl realized that "home-made toilets" wouldn't quite convey the memory of them to anyone who had­ n't been there. In good writing, this is what happens. You have a sense, as you write and revise, of how to build your sentences so that they flow rhythmically, clearly, vividly. You aren't analyzing them as you go. If you are a pretty good tennis player, you aren't thinking "racket back, step forward, swing, follow through" as you rally; but in order to achieve that level, you probably spent some time practicing the motions, learning the component parts. Think of grammar in this way, too. It's hard going at first, but eventually can become second nature.

There's a lot more to grammar than we can possibly cover in one chapter. But we hope we've given you some options to explore in your own writing.

IDEAS FOR WRITING

1. Describe all the objects you see from a window in your house or apartment. That should give you lots of nouns; add appositives to them wherever possible, to describe them in greater detail. Let these descriptions trigger a poem about what these things mean to you, or let them remind you of some past incident or event which you include in the poem.

2. Observe an activity: a machine operating, a person doing some­ thing, the motions of an animal. Use verbals to capture every­ thing that is happening. When you've captured the action as fully as possible, think about how that action could stand as a

184 THE POET'S COMPANION

metaphor for how you live your own life; how is the way you do things like the action you've described?

3. Make longer sentences out of the short ones that follow, using lots of sensual details so that a reader can vividly imagine the scene: The old man sat in the park. She was crying. He loved everything about the woods. I'm terrified of ______ . (Fill in a word or words to describe your fears, and go on.) It was a beautiful day.

4. Take a draft of a poem and study your sentences. Do they tend to follow a similar pattern? One common problem is static syntax­ the same thing, over and over. Many people fall into a repetitive subject-verb construction: "I shot the bear. The bear died. I left it there in the snow. I headed home. My father sat there reading the paper. He asked what had happened. I told him." This can be an effective strategy sometimes, if used deliberately and not unconsciously. If this is your pattern, start fooling around and seeing what you can add to each sentence. Remember that idea of repetition and variation: if you have a lot of long sentences, break them down into short ones occasionally.

5. Take another draft of a poem and underline all the adjectives. Are there a lot of them? Do you tend to load them up before the nouns? Cut out as many as possible. See if there are other ways to describe things without using adjectives. (Another trick: put the adjectives after the noun; instead of "my frail weak grand­ father lies in his bed" try "my grandfather-frail, weak-lies in his bed.")

6. Write a poem which is one long sentence. Make it at least twenty lines.

A Grammatical Excursion 185

7. Write a sentence in which you withhold the subject and verb as long as possible; that is, begin with a preposition, or an adverb, and pile up the phrases and clauses.

8. Write a poem which uses a lot of parallel structure. Any time you do something, try and repeat it, to the point of obsession and probably comedy. Then, when you've pushed it as far as you can, go back over it and cut out what you need to in order to make it a good poem.

rtfie 'Energy of 'Revision

The energy of revision is the energy of creation and change, which is also the energy of destruction.

-Maggie Anderson

Revision is the poet's most difficult, demanding, and dangerous work. Difficult because it's hard to let go of our original inspirations or ideas or our best lines, as we may have to do in the service of the poem. Demanding because it calls for us to reach deeper or further than we may want to, or feel we know how to. Dangerous because we feel we might, in the act of trying to make a good poem better, lose touch with the raw energy that drove the poem into its fullness to begin with and destroy what we have so joyously created. But revision is neces­ sary work for poets who care about their craft. Richard Tillinghast, in an essay titled "Notes on Revision," says, "The willingness, the ardent desire even, to revise, separates the poet from the person who sees poetry as therapy or self-expression." Ardent desire may be a bit more than we can hope for, but certainly willingness is important.

A student once asked us why critique workshops are so "amputory" in nature, why they seem interested only in cutting away from the poem. Editing is one of the easiest and fastest routes to rewriting, sim­ ply because it's often much easier to identify something that doesn't belong: a cliche, an unnecessary adjective, a confusing or misplaced

The Energy of Revision 187

word, line, stanza or image. It's more expedient to get rid of what's not working than to figure out how to make it work. Similarly, a poem often opens with unnecessary lines-a kind of "throat-clearing," as one of our students called it-before the true poem begins. Another problem is that of going on long after your poem has ended. A good workshop can help point these things out to the writer.

It's much more difficult to see where or how a poem might be opened up, where a wrong turn has been taken, what's missing. A workshop should focus on these things, too, and try to illuminate as many possible avenues of development as its members can think of, so that the poet has a variety of options. Sometimes workshops are• limited in that they may not always have quite enough time for a thor­ ough examination and contemplation of the poem. A workshop should be considered a starting point for revision, a place where you can begin to gather ideas about what you need to do to make the poem what it wants to be.

True revision is just that: a re-visioning of the poem's potential and the strategies it has used so far. In an early draft, the language on the page should be considered temporary language, ripe with possibili­ ties, with the gifts your subconscious mind has offered up. In the act of getting down a first or second or fourth draft, you're likely to have tapped into not only some raw, pure, evocative language but also a lot of received language and attitudes-cliches, easy solutions, awkward phrasing, habitual ways of articulation, vague generalities. Some­ times your ego or your editor has gotten in the way, and tried to make things too pretty, or too petty; maybe irony has stepped in where sin­ cerity was needed, or vice-versa. Maybe you've been melodramatic in an attempt to be powerful, or sentimental when you wanted deep feeling. Maybe the poem is unfocused, with too many incidents, too confused a sense of what it's about, or no sense at all. The true poem, in other words-the one you wanted to write, the inspiration that got you feverishly tapping out lines on the computer at three a.m.-may not yet have found its realization on the page.

If you consider what you've written in the early stages as pointing toward the true poem, rather than being the poem itself, it will be eas­ ier for you to be open to what still needs to happen for it to succeed.

188 THE POET'S COMPANION

The more willing you are to let go of your own words, to demand more of your language and push your limits to get to something bet­ ter, the more likely it is that you will eventually produce a worthwhile poem. There's nothing wrong with "shitty first drafts," as Anne Lamott calls them in her book on writing, Bird by Bird. Every writer produces garbage-stupid, embarrassing, awful stuff. If you truly want to write well, you have to be willing to see when you've written badly, and keep trying to improve on what you've done.

Another question we are often asked is: How do I know when my poem is finished? Three drafts? Ten? Fifty? We can't give you a num­ ber. Some poems arrive fairly whole and need little work, others may come to you in fragments over a period of time, others may need reworking for months before you even begin to see results. The famous formulation is that a work of art is never finished, merely abandoned. One of the ways to abandon a poem is to send it out for publication. If it's published, is it finished? Maybe, though some­ times just the act of typing up the final draft to send out, seeing the poem objectively for a moment, through the eyes of a possible pub­ lisher, may lead to a last-minute revision. Even poems that are published may be in need of further work. We've seen several in magazines that we wish the writer had given one more critical pass. The painter Bonnard would actually go to museums and galleries where his paintings hung, sneak in, and rework his canvases. Revision is a process that has no clear ending point. A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

Can you revise a poem too much? How much is too much? Sometimes, in our fervor to revise, to get it right, we can end up edit­ ing the life out of a poem. We know we're on dangerous ground here to tell you that poems can be overrevised, because in fact, what's more common is an unwillingness to revise enough. However, it can and does happen. If you find yourself losing interest in a poem, if it begins to look pale and wan, corpse-like, it's time to bury it for a while; throw it into a drawer, along with each draft, and leave it alone. Return to it in a week, a month, a year. Come back to it with new eyes, new knowledge. When you do, it may be easier to see

The Energy of Revision 189

what's working and what isn't. (If you still find it difficult to part with those "golden lines" you know are brilliant but have no place in the poem, save them in a box labeled "great stuff.")

If you keep a journal like we do, chances are that most of what can be found there is pure junk: notes, diatribes, meanderings. But once in a while something begs to be let out of the journal and onto the printed page, saying I think I could be a poem. The simple process of transferring the journal entry onto the typewriter or computer is often the beginning stage of revision; that's when line breaks are usually begun, when you might add or delete a section, reconstruct an image or phrase, play with the music of a hastily written line. See, you've already begun and it wasn't that painful. However, once the "poem" is arranged into some sort of agreeable shape, the real work begins. Since it's hard to be objective about your own work, it's helpful, when you feel you've taken the poem as far as you can on your own, to get further reactions from a teacher or workshop or trusted reader-one who knows something about poetry. Ideally, such a reader, or readers, will send you back to the poem with fresh ideas for developing it.

Sometimes, though, you get to a point where you're stuck. You know the poem isn't working, but you can't seem to get anywhere with it. Maybe you've had some contradictory suggestions-one per­ son loves a stanza, another person has drawn a big "x" over it and handed it back. Feeling confused, demoralized, ready to burn your poem, or perhaps your critics-these are common reactions at this stage. As we said, it usually helps to leave the poem alone, let the dust settle, and come back to it after some time has passed. If you're still stuck, here are some tips on how to tackle the poem again.

l . Tum the poem over and start again. Rewrite it in lines or a freewrite, but cover the same experience/event/idea. Feel free to change, add to, or go in a different direction from the original.

2. Change the way your poem looks on the page; you won't be able to help changing some language as well. You might alter line length, stanza breaks, flush-left margins, poem length, punctuation, capitals.

3. Take· any problematic line in your poem and rewrite it at least

190 THE POET'S COMPANION

five ways. Don't just substitute one word for another-i.e., "skin" for "flesh" -though that might be part of it. But change, as well, the syn­ tax of the line.

4. Some poems start out well, but then veer off on the wrong track. Find your wrong tum and go in a completely different direction - even the opposite one. Rewrite the poem from that point on, ignor­ ing where you ended up before.

5. If the poem has a controlling metaphor, try changing it. If you've written a poem about falling in love as drowning in an ocean, try reimagining the experience as climbing a mountain or taking a train ride or finding a twenty on the sidewalk.

6. Write a question word-How, Why, When, What, Where, Who-in the margin where answering that question will help you develop further.

7. Try surgery-the "amputory" method. You can also think of it as weeding the garden of your poem. Lop off the beginning and/or the end. Or, cut 3-5 lines to see if you really need them.

8. Shake up the poem and break whatever pattern you've developed. Look at: point of view; syntax; imagery; adjectives; and anything else you can think of.

9. Radical surgery: Find the heart, the core of your poem - whether it's one line, or an image, or a statement-that is is the essence of what the poem wants to be about. (If you can't find such a line, try writing one.) Now forget the rest of the poem: use that one great statement/image/line and write a new poem that lives up to it.

10. If nothing seems to be working, and you've really tried, put the poem away in a folder that says "In Process." Then-yes, we'll say it a third time-leave it alone. Every so often, go back and try again.

Poet Jane Hirshfield has thought a lot about the more existential aspects of revision. Reprinted here is a worksheet she handed out to her students at the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.

The Energy of Revision

Some Possible Questions to Ask of Your Poem in Revision

What is being said? Is there joy, depth, muscle, in the music of its saying? Is there more that wants to be said? Does it want a more deeply living body of sound? Is it true? Is it ethical? Does it feel?

191

Does it follow its own deepest impulses, not necessarily the initial idea?

Does it know more than you did when you started it? Are there things in it that don't belong? Are whatever digressions it takes in its own best service? Are there things in it that are confusing? Are there things in it that are cliched or sentimental? Is it self-satisfied? Is it predictable? Does it go deep enough? far enough? Is it particular? Is the grammar correct? If the syntax is unusual, is it for a purpose? Are the transitions accurate? Is it in the right voice? Is it in the right order? Does the diction fit? Could any of its words be more interesting? more surprising? more

alive?

Do its rhythms work? (i.e., both seem right and accomplish meaning and feeling)

Does the music work? Does the shape/form work? (line breaks, stanzas, etc.) Does each image work? each statement? Does it allow strangeness? Does each of its moments actively move the poem toward its full real­

ization?

192 THE POET'S COMPANION

Should it go out into the world? Is it a seed for something else? Is it finished? Six months later, is it still finished? Six years later, is it still finished?

Some of these questions may never get answered to your satisfac­ tion. But they can provide a useful starting point for rewriting. Not all your revisions will become successful poems, but that doesn't matter; you'll have learned more about language, and your own process, and that knowledge will carry over into other poems and help you solve their particular problems. So don't despair, however hard it may seem to go back to that poem one more time. Finally getting it right will be worth everything it took to get there.