Here's a writing issue that surfaced during a recent Wednesdays@One salon: finding the rhythmic line on which to hang a poem.
Even seasoned writers of poetry commit the occasional clunk line, the line that trips over itself or that falls on the ear like a sack of flour dropped to the floor. Musically, sonically, the clunk line doesn't thud down so much as it falls out of step with everything around it. Imagine, then, if you will, a series of clunk lines, an entire poem of clunk. Who wants to read that? Who's likely to retain the thought embedded in that?
But isn't this just a case of conversational style rendered into lines, normal English speech covering a crucial topic? Lest we all jettison contemporary speech and conversational rhythms for the Popian couplet, the Frostian quatrain, let me explain myself. You don't have to choose between
Whose woods these are I think I know
and
two-dimensional grid of colors in relation to its perception
(simultaneous), reversal of thought back to thinking mind
left hand's weight on grey-white plane of table for example,
which isn't itself the feeling but pictures it (physical)
(line) between a person's left shoulder and the blue of her back . . .
Not that this set of couplets * is especially clunked. It deploys some poetic figures other than a tight rhythm: a flow of narrative description and an absence of identifying pronouns, which creates a sonic as opposed to a rhythmic pattern. The extreme of clunked would be the printed instructions for assembling your new TV wall mount, or most peoples' Twitter and Facebook posts.
What brought this topic into our discussion was a poem, or proto-poem, that begins like this:
Can we balance our scales in time?
We humans are like kids in a free candy store making ourselves sick - the whole world too.
Continually grow the economy - tip.
Populations exceeding sustainability - tip tip.
Pesticides, plastics, herbicides, fossil fuels - tip tip tip.
Flora and fauna extinctions, sea levels rising - tip tip tip tip.
From here, the poem descends the page piling up a catalog of human arrogance and disregard for the environment. It's not the preachiness of the content that offends. To teach is one half of the Horatian poetic ideal. It's the prosey listing, the lack of song, or maybe more to the point I'm trying to make, the lack of expressiveness, that hurts the ear and confuses the mind. To "delight" is the other half of Horace's formula; in this case, that would mean to "move" or to affect. That's what expressiveness does, affect, and what this draft fails to do.
Now, you might argue that the desecration of Mother Earth is not to be told in song, is not a beautiful thing, and therefore should be told "straight." In this sense, "straight" means an emphasis on rhetoric, at the expense of the poetic. If that's your position, then you might argue that the polluted world is no place for poetry. Not even the satiric kind. The subject belongs to Rhetoric. I might not argue with you, either! Not every subject is automatically suitable for poetry.
But what if you decided to make a poem (i.e., art) from the lines above? How would you go about it? One solution would be to look for the rhythmic line, the musical and sonic component--that is, the art component--and build from there. So let's look at that opening line:
Cǎn we bálance oŭr scáles in tíme?
I have marked the syllables with heavy (á, í) and secondary (ӑ, ǔ) stress, leaving the unstressed syllables unmarked. Try it out loud. You may read the line with slightly different stresses, but however you read it, it's clear the line unfolds with a measured beat. And that's where to look (or hear, or feel), if you want to balance out the poem's rhetorical and poetic qualities.
What if you rewrote the second line this way:
We're kíds in a cándy stǒre, máking oursélves síck,
And the wórld síck tóo.
I've performed two major edits here: 1) one long line becomes two shorter lines; and 2) extraneous syllables (and sense units) are eliminated. The idea is to capture the sonic brevity of that opening line. But does this operation then cut out the sense (the sense) of the statement? Well, to answer that question, I'll ask another: Is it important to the poem's meaning that we are "like" kids? What's gained by the simile? What's lost by not using the simile? Or put another way, what's gained by not having the simile? Similarly, is it really all that crucial to the meaning that the candy store be "free"? The point is the old cliché about kids in a candy store: uncontrollable desire meets endless supply, with the inevitable result: the kids get sick. By eliminating the sense-units (e.g., "like" and "free"), I've also tightened the beat, continued the rhythm and melody of that first line, as the marked syllables indicate.
Maybe more importantly, my revision highlights the real meaning of the original: that we're destroying our world. The idea now gets its own line, as opposed to being tacked on at the end of line two, a change which also brings out the sonic quality of the phrase "world sick too" with three strong beats in succession. It's like a lecturing finger jabbing at my (guilty) chest!
This poem goes on for a full page, center-spaced, with wide and wider lines that make it look like a poem but read like an environmentalist's screed. Which, as I say, is perfectly acceptable, if screed-ness is what you're after. But if it's poem-ness that you want, and therefore expressiveness, then go for the rhythm, the music of that jabbing finger.
* From "Portraits & Repetition," by Stephen Ratcliffe, in New American Writing (20), eds. Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover. OINK! Press, 2002.
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