The title's a slant, a misdirection, a feint. That is, it's a metaphor. Of course this blog isn't about gardens and weeds. It's about making poems without extraneous elements.
What follows is a continuation of the blog for May 17, 2019, "Why They Tell You Not to Use Adjectives in Your Poems."
Certainly you may deploy modifiers in your poems. Stretching the concept, you could say that any figure of speech, like a metaphor for instance, functions as a modifier of whatever thought you're trying to convey. It highlights the thought, or foregrounds it, or conceals it, or dresses it up or down; it defines your thought or it redefines it; a metaphor, like any other modifier, limits the sense in which you wish your thought to be regarded, understood. The red barn says something meaningfully greater than the barn. And here's a paradox for you: it says something meaningfully less as well, something more restricted.
But you can overdo the modifying thing sometimes. And the less experienced writer will almost always deploy more modifiers, usually in the form of adjective-noun clusters or adverb-verb pairs than a poem can bear. Here's what that looks like:
The red barn
stood in the green field
under a blue sky
mottled with fluffy white clouds.
Beyond, an aging shepherd
drove home a lowing herd
over a gurgling stream
and around a grassy knoll.
The bucolic prospect
was like a beautiful painting,
something for a grand museum,
but it was not a painting.
It was real life.
I don't trust you, my reader, to see what I see in this "bucolic scene." And so I insert modifiers--adjectives--like nails, to fasten the meaning. I don't trust you to see that the barn is red or the field green. Though nothing in my poem quite reveals why this should be important to you or to me. I don't trust you to look up and see that the clouds in that blue sky aren't just clouds, but fluffy and white. I want you to know, though I never say why, that the shepherd is old. And just in case you never learned that streams gurgle and museums are grand structures full of beautiful things, that country scenes like I've just over-described are also known as "bucolic," well . . .
The operative word here is trust and, as a writer you should understand that the reader will feel that lack of trust. This is not (always) the relationship you should want to establish with your reader!
If the above poem were a garden, it would be a pretty weedy affair--not much room for fruits and vegetables or shoots and blooms. Virtually every noun is led by an adjective meant to limit the meaning of that noun to the writer's sense of it, that is, to recreate as nearly as possible what the writer (thought he) saw in that country prospect. But was the barn really red? What kind of red? I grew up in the Midwest where the barns are decidedly a tired red. What does that mean? And since most of us think of red when we think of barns, do I even need "red" in my image? What if I just wrote "the tired barn"? And what might that say about me, that I'm tired? And is being tired or coming to the end of things (like the end of a shepherd's day) what the poem is really about?
What if I just removed the modifying material? Let's see.
The barn
stood in a field
under a sky
with clouds.
Beyond, a shepherd
drove a herd
over a stream
and around a knoll.
The prospect
was like a painting,
something for a museum,
but it was not a painting.
It was work.
What I'm dong in the paragraph above is what you should be doing as a poet every time you come up against a noun that you want to modify (limit, expand, undermine, exaggerate, amplify) with a preceding adjective. (Alert: sometimes the adjective doesn't precede; sometimes it follows, as in, "the barn is red"; but to much the same effect). What you should be doing is thinking more deeply about the nouns and verbs you write into your poems. You should be asking yourself whether these parts of speech actually need to be modified and, if you decide they do, then to what effect? You should explore how they work without any modifiers, and what effect this has on the poem. You should be thinking about options, such as synonyms for the nouns and verbs you're working with, and how these might be more effective (emotionally, vocally, rhythmically, visually) than the nouns and verbs you presently have in place.
Admittedly, doing the above is hard work. That's writing! This kind of decision-making or exploratory word-choosing is what craft is all about. Next time a poem leaps or flows out of you in a single sitting, without much head-scratching or sighing or you pacing about stuck for a word, phrase or image, take a look at the product. How much of it is easy nouns choked off by easy adjectives?
If the answer is too much, get up (at least metaphorically) from your desk and pace for a while. Go in search of a hoe and a rake and start pulling out the weeds.
What follows is a continuation of the blog for May 17, 2019, "Why They Tell You Not to Use Adjectives in Your Poems."
Certainly you may deploy modifiers in your poems. Stretching the concept, you could say that any figure of speech, like a metaphor for instance, functions as a modifier of whatever thought you're trying to convey. It highlights the thought, or foregrounds it, or conceals it, or dresses it up or down; it defines your thought or it redefines it; a metaphor, like any other modifier, limits the sense in which you wish your thought to be regarded, understood. The red barn says something meaningfully greater than the barn. And here's a paradox for you: it says something meaningfully less as well, something more restricted.
But you can overdo the modifying thing sometimes. And the less experienced writer will almost always deploy more modifiers, usually in the form of adjective-noun clusters or adverb-verb pairs than a poem can bear. Here's what that looks like:
The red barn
stood in the green field
under a blue sky
mottled with fluffy white clouds.
Beyond, an aging shepherd
drove home a lowing herd
over a gurgling stream
and around a grassy knoll.
The bucolic prospect
was like a beautiful painting,
something for a grand museum,
but it was not a painting.
It was real life.
I don't trust you, my reader, to see what I see in this "bucolic scene." And so I insert modifiers--adjectives--like nails, to fasten the meaning. I don't trust you to see that the barn is red or the field green. Though nothing in my poem quite reveals why this should be important to you or to me. I don't trust you to look up and see that the clouds in that blue sky aren't just clouds, but fluffy and white. I want you to know, though I never say why, that the shepherd is old. And just in case you never learned that streams gurgle and museums are grand structures full of beautiful things, that country scenes like I've just over-described are also known as "bucolic," well . . .
The operative word here is trust and, as a writer you should understand that the reader will feel that lack of trust. This is not (always) the relationship you should want to establish with your reader!
If the above poem were a garden, it would be a pretty weedy affair--not much room for fruits and vegetables or shoots and blooms. Virtually every noun is led by an adjective meant to limit the meaning of that noun to the writer's sense of it, that is, to recreate as nearly as possible what the writer (thought he) saw in that country prospect. But was the barn really red? What kind of red? I grew up in the Midwest where the barns are decidedly a tired red. What does that mean? And since most of us think of red when we think of barns, do I even need "red" in my image? What if I just wrote "the tired barn"? And what might that say about me, that I'm tired? And is being tired or coming to the end of things (like the end of a shepherd's day) what the poem is really about?
What if I just removed the modifying material? Let's see.
The barn
stood in a field
under a sky
with clouds.
Beyond, a shepherd
drove a herd
over a stream
and around a knoll.
The prospect
was like a painting,
something for a museum,
but it was not a painting.
It was work.
What I'm dong in the paragraph above is what you should be doing as a poet every time you come up against a noun that you want to modify (limit, expand, undermine, exaggerate, amplify) with a preceding adjective. (Alert: sometimes the adjective doesn't precede; sometimes it follows, as in, "the barn is red"; but to much the same effect). What you should be doing is thinking more deeply about the nouns and verbs you write into your poems. You should be asking yourself whether these parts of speech actually need to be modified and, if you decide they do, then to what effect? You should explore how they work without any modifiers, and what effect this has on the poem. You should be thinking about options, such as synonyms for the nouns and verbs you're working with, and how these might be more effective (emotionally, vocally, rhythmically, visually) than the nouns and verbs you presently have in place.
Admittedly, doing the above is hard work. That's writing! This kind of decision-making or exploratory word-choosing is what craft is all about. Next time a poem leaps or flows out of you in a single sitting, without much head-scratching or sighing or you pacing about stuck for a word, phrase or image, take a look at the product. How much of it is easy nouns choked off by easy adjectives?
If the answer is too much, get up (at least metaphorically) from your desk and pace for a while. Go in search of a hoe and a rake and start pulling out the weeds.
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