Writing the Villanelle (9.5.19)

Villanelles are notoriously easy to write and hard to write well. So kudos to John P. for bringing his first effort to us at yesterday's salon. His poem is appropriately serious in subject and tone, and formally correct (five beat lines, exact rhymes). And thanks to Delaney, who gets it exactly right when he describes the villanelle as an "anthemic" form, for the villanelle's peculiar repetitiveness more than invites us to make big statements.

What is a villanelle? The original villanelle form was so named by a French prosodist* in the 17th Century. The form actually derives from Italian songs of the 15th Century. A villanello/a is a rustic song (you can see the roots for the Italian villa and French ville in the word). From about the 19th Century on, the form technically became this:

• A more or less rigid form of five tercets followed by a single quatrain
• Pentameter lines (often iambic petameter)
• A rhyme scheme of a-b-a | a-b-a | a-b-a | a-b-a | a-b-a | a-b-a-a in which the rhymes are often exact
• A regularized scheme of repetitions involving the first and third lines of the opening tercet

And for much of its history, the villanelle dealt in pastoral themes. But before I go further into any description of the form, read this famous example by Dylan Thomas . . .

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

So you can see in this poem how the rhymes work and the lines repeat in strict order. Note that after the first stanza, the opening line contains a new rhyming word to be paired with the closing line or lines of the remaining stanzas (which means that the same rhyme sound is utilized throughout the entire poem). "Night" and "light" are the controlling rhymes. Matched to them are "right," "bright," "flight," "sight," and "height." Also note that the middle line of each stanza rhymes: day/they/bay/way/gay/pray. And note finally that all rhymes are masculine, meaning, words of one syllable, as well as nouns (with the exceptions of "they," a pronoun, in line five, and "bright," the adjective in line seven).

What's the effect of such simple nouns and rhymes? Seriousness, for one. Thomas redirected the form away from the pastoral to the more anthemic (to use Delaney's word again) and serious.** To feel the difference between using masculine and feminine rhyme, trying writing a few lines rhyming multi-syllable words. It's hard NOT to veer into light or comic verse. The poem's boom-boom cadence also lends seriousness to its tone, and of course the subject is mighty serious!

The other effect is control, or, if you will, pressure. The speaker is contemplating the father's death, the inevitable against which he builds a dike of pressurized language and sound-stress. You might hear in your mind how this poem might be recited just shy of a scream. Thematically, the speaker is addressing the approaching loss of a loved one, of course, but also his own mortality. He will not accept the human fate, universal as it may be. And so the language of the poem, the tight syllabics, the noun-rhymes, the drum beat from phrase to phrase and line to line, is resistance. The villanelle's repetitive format only enhances this drum beat quality.

Here's a less strident poem done as a villanelle, by Marilyn Hacker (anthologized in The American Poetry Anthology, ed. Daniel Halperin, 1975):

Villanelle

Every day our bodies separate,
exploded, torn and dazed.
Not understanding what we celebrate

we grope through languages and hesitate
and touch each other, speechless and amazed;
and every day our bodies separate

us farther from our planned, deliberate
ironic lives. I am afraid, disphased,
not understanding what we celebrate

when our fused limbs and lips communicate
the unlettered power we have raised.
Every day our bodies' separate

routines are harder to perpetuate.
In wordless darkness we learn a wordless praise,
not understanding what we celebrate;

wake to ourselves, exhausted, in the late
morning as the wind tears off the haze,
not understanding how we celebrate
our bodies. Every day we separate.

This poem is a riot of rhyme, rhythm, usage, enjambment, syntax and word choice. It breaks certain formal conventions: no capitalization exception at the beginning of a sentence; periods inserted mid-line; three- and four-beat lines; use of masculine and feminine rhyme. The poem also breaks a stylistic convention in being more "spoken" rather than "sung" (as in lyrical); it's made up of declarative sentences, rather than "lines," per se. The rhymes are a mixture of exact and slant, mono- and multi-syllable. Yet the poem is every bit as serious as the Thomas poem, and as mournful. It is a poem of the pain of separation--physically and metaphysically.^

I've probably spent more space examining these two villanelles than you'll find useful to write your own, but I want to make the point that the form presents challenges and opportunities at the same time. The challenges:

• to come up with two good lines strong enough rhythmically and thematically to warrant this much repetition. Not easy! I get at this challenge by trying to write a good couplet. If I can accomplish that, then I have the first and third line of the first stanza and the last line of every other stanza. All I have to do after that is to insert a line between the couplets six times.
• the first and second lines of stanzas two through six have to introduce new rhyming words and, inevitably, new content.
• the new rhymes and content of each stanza will of course affect the meaning of each, and, in turn, the development of the meaning over the entire poem. This can get complicated.  To move forward, try letting each new rhyme direct you to possible new content that can then be "fitted" together with the recurring lines/content.

And the opportunities:

• The constantly new rhymes and content are really a rewarding challenge, if you choose to go with the poem's flow. In fact, introducing the new content in the first two lines of each stanza will encourage a forward flow of thought and feeling, if you're paying attention and move deliberately through the writing process. You'll be surprised where your villanelle takes you!
• The repetitive structure of a villanelle also encourages you to use the same words in different ways--different meanings, different parts of speech--throughout the poem. Look again at Marilyn Hacker's poem. She uses the word "separate" as both an adjective and a verb; needing a good and meaningful rhyme, given the theme she's developing in the poem, she also comes up with a humdinger of a word: "disphased."

Just one more example, on a lighter subject but still taking on a more serious and philosophical theme, by Gregory Orr, from his recent book, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write:

The Ferris Wheel at the World's Fair

The wheel swoops you up, swoops you down again.

The giddiest ride in the world, they swear.

When you're high, you're high, but where does it end?

You take your seat and then your seat ascends

And far below you: bright lights of the fair.

The wheel swoops you up, swoops you down again.

When you're high, stars and neon blur and blend

But don't get off, unless you walk on air.

When your'e high, you're high, but it will end.

They look so small down there, your former friends.

Like ants or insects. Who could really care?

But the wheel swoops up, swoops down again,

And when it does, when the big wheel descends,

You'll step off dizzy. You'll want someone there

When all your highest highs begin to end.

Fortune has a zero for a heart--defend

Against Her, whose wheel is noose and snare.

It swoops you up to swoop you down again.

It takes you high, but all highs have their end.

So then.  Have some fun with this project.  Spend a little time this week thinking up a couple of good lines--and marry them into a rhymed couplet.  Do that, and you're almost half the way home!

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*A prosodist studies formal poetic elements like meter, syllabics, accentual verse, stress and non-stress in a line or phrase of verse.

**So did Edward Arlington Robinson a generation before Thomas, but in a slightly altered, less strict form, in "The House on the Hill."

^I admire the subtle, moving irony in the statement, "Every day we separate." If the lovers separate every day, they necessarily reunite every day as well, in order to separate again.  This works in the villanelle because it's in the repeated line.

How to critique a poem II (8.19.19)

In March, we talked at some length in Wednesdays@One about how to critique a poem, someone else's or your own.  Since that is part of what we try do week in, week out at W@1, everybody thought it would be a good idea to have that discussion.  I wrote a kind of short primer for the subject (posted here on 3.5.19) that I'd like to expand on now.

Something I've noticed at W@1 over time is that we tend to respond to a colleague's poem by trying to re-write it for the author.  (I have been as guilty of this as the next W@1-er.)  We suggest a different topic or a different take on a topic.  We point out certain aspects of punctuation that we'd change, or line length, choice of words, syntax, usage, grammar, rhyme or lack thereof, meter and rhythm, stanza format, tone, point of view . . . you get the idea.  Everybody responds somewhat differently to any given poem and, with the best of intentions, advises the poet how to rewrite it.  Sometimes, we even debate among ourselves how best to rewrite somebody's poem while that somebody sits on the sidelines and watches!  (I know I have been guilty of that.)

To a certain extent, this kind of critique can be helpful, especially if it's delivered at the right time.  It's the standard approach for most writing workshops I've experienced.  The poem is read aloud, there is a moment or two of silence as the hearers gather their thoughts, and then bam!  The threads are pulled until the whole poem unravels in a kind of shoulda-coulda-woulda critique.  I can't think of them at the moment, but I've read some pretty good poems by some pretty well-thought of poets about this very subject--enduring a workshop shark attack.

So long as the writer of the poem in question maintains a kind of esprit de corps with the critiquing group, and a thick skin, he or she can use what's useful in this kind of critique and ignore what's not useful.  But it's not always easy to separate the useful from the not useful when you're deep in a thicket of suggestions for rewriting what you've already spent a good many hours thinking about and revising.

Which is what leads me back to this subject.  How can W@1, as a group and a cohort, avoid the steady drumbeat of the pile-on, the "nice-effort-but-this-is-how-you-should-write-the-poem" comment?  First off, I'm not sure I want to suggest that we abandon even the picayune criticism, for nitpicking can help a writer see his or her poem through other eyes in ways that can sometimes be helpful--sometimes.  And every reader at W@1 (or in any workshop or salon) should feel not just free, but obligated to share his or her point of view in this respect.  Writers need the feedback whether they acknowledge this or not.

What I want to propose is a small change in how we critique each other's work.  I want to propose that we hold off telling a writer how to rewrite his or her poem to suit us personally; in fact, hold off telling the writer what we think the poem means or how we experience it or why it doesn't work as written (or, for that matter, why we think it DOES work as written).  Hold off, that is, long enough to ask the writer about the poem, how the writer conceived it, what obstacles or other difficulties the writer experienced trying to compose the piece, when and how the writer felt the poem begin to gel, why a certain image or word order or adjective or verb or other part of speech was chosen.  Indeed, hold off long enough to hear the writer tell why the poem was written in the first place!

What I am proposing is that we start by interviewing the writer of the poem we've just heard, so we can dig below its surface (the draft brought to W@1) for the writerly soil in which it came to be.  To that end, here are some questions that might help us all move in that direction in our next sessions.

• Ask about the experience of writing the poem.  Did it unfold in one sitting?  Is this version a second, third or later draft?  Did a line or phrase come first, or a rhythm, or an image, an idea? Was it easy to write, was the writing stop-and-go?
• Ask about the writer's understanding of the poem.  Did your "intent" change as the drafting progressed?  That is, did the creative process become a discovery process, too?  (Another way to ask this question: Did the poem turn out the way you expected?)
• Ask how the writer feels about the poem now.  Now that you've read it aloud, and then heard it read back to you, are there any aspects of the poem that sound especially "right" to you?  Any that sound like they might need more work?
• Ask about the origin of the poem.  Aside from the project in question, why did this poem (or subject) occur to you to write?
• Ask about the form and figures of the poem.  Ask how or at what point certain figures (metaphors, similies, expletives, interjections, rhymes, modifiers, etc.) revealed themselves during the writing process.  Ask how or at what point lines, stanzas, paragraphs, meters, etc. began to take shape and to inform the writing of the poem.

You may have ulterior motives for asking such questions--perhaps you noticed an ambiguity, a difficult metaphor, a misaligned rhythm, an inconsistent tone, faulty grammar or usage.  Maybe you think the poem isn't yet a poem or that a line or stanza is unnecessary or detracts from the poem.  The writer needs to know your concern; but you need to know how the inconsistency or strange image or uneven rhythm or change in tone got there in the first place--because it's possible that you are misreading the poem!

Finally, before you tell the writer how to correct his or her work, consider two things:

1. Does the item really need correcting (i.e., is it wrong, given the poem), or am I just insisting on what I think makes for a good poem?
2. Would my suggestion improve the effort appreciably?

A big part of writing of any kind is the writer's motive--not necessarily what he or she or the poem "means," but what the writer is trying to accomplish.  When critiquing, it's better to start by trying to understand the writer's motive and experience before we suggest improvements.

Making room for ambiguity (8.12.19)

At last week's Wednesdays@One salon the poem I shared--"Everything About This Moment"--has an interrogative in the first stanza . . . 

Who knows but it will be a fine script,

maybe the greatest poem I shall ever write?

. . . but, someone noted, both I and the companion reader spoke the lines like a declarative statement.  This led me to think about ambiguity and its role in a poem.

What I'm talking about here is not the unintentional ambiguity we sometimes find in our writing or speaking, vagueness or impreciseness, in other words, when we seek to be specific and straightforward.  I mean the conscious (at least marginally), meaningful ambiguity that seems possible only in poems and jokes.  (Though having just written that, I immediately think of the prose of James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov.)

The English literary critic William Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1930, a book whose ideas went on to influence literary criticism and the way poems are approached at least through my college years.  (Most of us who studied poetry in college were taught by a New Critic.)  The main point of Empson's book, and why it became formative for the New Criticism, is that the poem is a product of the poet's intent and should be interpreted so; any reference to the poet's personal biography, psychology, faith, politics, gender, is beside the point, or at least secondary to a legitimate reading of a poem.  You don't understand the poem through the poet's background; rather, you understand the poet's mind through a close reading of the poem.  The poem is a puzzle of intent, and the only fair reading is to solve the puzzle.

In Seven Types, Empson identifies . . . er . . . seven ways that a poem can produce multiple, often conflicting readings, or, if you will, puzzle pieces.  No need to go through those here--you can look them up yourself.  The thing I'd like you to think about is this: ambiguity in a poem relates to multiplicity of meaning; a conflict between thoughts and feelings that the poet attempts to resolve through a single image or word use; evidence of a divided mind, as in, "being of two minds" on a subject; and, most importantly, simultaneity.

This idea that an image or use of a word in a poem can mean two or more things at once (simultaneity) seems fundamental to the idea of poetry itself.  Or it once did.*  Empson argued that this "at once-ness" of a poem reveals the complexity of the poet's creative mind, which in turn constitutes the poem's worth or value.  The more subtle or inventive the complex of meanings, the better the poem.  Note that "complexity" never meant "vagueness," lack of clarity, to Empson and his cohort.  It meant depth.  New meanings might be discovered with each re-reading of a poem.  It came to mean, by the time I attended college, "hidden meaning."

By the early 1960s, the notion that complexity equals quality in poetry began to give way to its opposite: simplicity, straightforwardness, "honesty," directness, and "authenticity."  Read "The Wasteland" and then Donald Hall's famous short anthology, Contemporary American Poetry (1961) if you want to get a sense of the sea-change.  This is when ambiguity became a knock on a poem and an otherwise well-written poem could be faulted for not being "clear," "authentic," "immediate," or "accessible."**

In Shakespeare's plays and poems, as in those of many of his contemporaries, the very idea was to let multiple meanings compete or spill out or, most often, emerge slowly.  The word "mortal" could mean "human," "subject to death," and "deadly" all at once in an expression, and Shakespeare would have been aware of all the meanings in play.  "Crown" might mean "king," "state," "head," and/or "money," if understood as a noun, and a "blow to the head" or "to be anointed" if understood as a verb.  And nobody could make a word function as both a noun and a verb in a single expression and simultaneously quite like Shakespeare!

Most of the time, in our poems at W@1, we seek the opposite of ambiguity: we expect absolute clarity of language, and by this we often mean mono-signification: each use of a word in a poem constitutes a single meaning for that usage.  For us, as for the vast majority of casual writers and readers of poetry, mono-signification is a sign of a well-made poem or image.

We think of poems as reductive engines that boil words down to their "essential meanings," that clear away the imprecisions of everyday language like so much debris.  And so, when we write poems, we aim for the simpler term, the more straightforward syntax, the unambiguous, and we often fault a poem whose language is not simple enough, whose word order is not S-V-O straightforward, and whose meaning is not unambiguous.

But regardless what some poetry may have become in the last 60 years in American writing, poetry historically celebrates the richness of language, its multiples of meaning, its layered quality.  Language is much more slippery than mono-signification allows.  Here's an example of layered-ness:

Wilfred Owen's hunched
Over his shovel,
Muttering about
Corpse-stench, mustard gas.

And no matter how loud
I shout, he won't look up.

His ears are ruptured;
His brain, concussed
From gigantic artillery
Explosions.
                    He's dug
Enough trenches
To fill the entire
Twentieth century,
Yet no line is deep enough
To save a single one of us.

Is this poem, by Gregory Orr ^, about the futility of the trenches dug in WWI and of trench warfare, or about the inefficacy of poetry in the face of human catastrophe?  Well, these two interpretations depend on how you read the last two lines of the poem and what you take "no line is deep enough" to mean.  The device of literary ambiguity invites you to understand both meanings at once: the depth of a trench along the front, the deeper meaning of a line of poetry.

So, to return to the example I began this piece with, when we see a question mark at the end of a sentence, we expect that sentence to be formulated like an interrogative (verb precedes subject), and the sentence to be uttered with rising pitch, as our voices do ordinarily when we ask a question.  What happens to our critical eye and ear when a question mark comes at the end of a sentence that is otherwise structured like a declaration (subject precedes verb) and/or is uttered in a falling or level pitch (as I read the line above at last week's W@1)?  You know what I mean?  You know what I mean!  Ambiguity happens.  Is this a good thing in a poem or a bad thing?  Does it lend meaning to the poem or the line, deepening it intellectually or emotionally, or does it merely confuse?

Let's try an experiment for our next project.  Let's use a word "pluri-significantly" in a poem.  That is, let's each find a word in the language that can have multiple meanings and try, consciously, to exercise its many meanings.  Bless you if you can make like Shakespeare and deploy a word once in a poem in such a way that its different meanings can be understood all at once!  But here are some easier options.

Option 1: select one of the following words and use it in a poem in as many ways as you can find meanings for it, so that it has one meaning in one line or stanza, another meaning in a second line or stanza, and so on, until you run out of possible meanings.  (Note: the meanings you deploy should be fairly recognizable to your audience.  No fair making up meanings or creating new "portmanteau words.")

mortal, crown, dispatch, fair, cleave, quick, buck, foil, loose, true, spirit, cell, hot, queen, mark, butt, rag, tattoo, walk, line, sing, hatch

Option 2: write a poem that contains a phrase or an image in which a word or words can have two different meanings (within the context of the poem).  Length of the poem is not the issue, but you should write something involved enough to provide context for a term or phrase that can be read differently.

To help you get a sense of what I am suggesting, in the passage below, take a look at the use of the words "accept" (in the seventh line), and such phrases as "face of the water," "the glacial calve," and "the muzzle in thirst."

By the time I came upon him, it was late in the day,
he was pounding water near the rock-walled well,
standing over the bucket of water so black in that December light,
so like a mirror, one hand gripping its rim, the other, a fist,
a hard pink fist raised over the back bent to the thing
he was so earnestly about.  The fist came down and down
onto the face of the water which seemed to accept it,
the pummeling, as water accepts all things--
the diving sea-hawk, the sea wreck, the suicide,
the fly-cast, the glacial calve, the tea bag, the muzzle in thirst,
the test finger, the leaf released, Narcissus' gaze . . .

What are some of the many ways that water "accepts" things?  The last three lines of this stanza list them.  In this poem, these are all possible meanings of "to accept" at the end of the seventh line.  Listing them all together tends toward ambiguity--the water is more than just a reflective surface.  In this case, the ambiguity of meaning is emphasized.  But also note the ambiguous terms or phrases "the muzzle in thirst," "the glacial calve," and, at the start of line seven, "the face of the water," where key words can have two meanings.  The additional meanings of these are not so emphasized, yet they are there to be understood, should you pause long enough to consider them.

------------
* Ambiguity was an expression of High Modernism in poetry--think T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens.  You had to be erudite to write great poetry, and erudite to read it.  (The New Critics came along after WWII to help the rest of us--veterans attending college on the GI Bill, but also working-class people like me in the 60s--make sense of poetry.)

** Take this a step further into Confessional Poetry, and the authentic poem becomes a cri de coeur.  Keep going, and here you are, Instagram Poetry!
^ In The Last Love Poem I will Ever Write, Norton: New York, 2019.  

Another poem by Angelaurelio Soldi (8.9.19)

Schooldays

A day goes by

nothing unforeseen happens

another day changes your life.

That way day after day

year after year we learn

to appreciate joy

to navigate misery

to reassure the memories

our affections and loves.

They live longer than

life would concede.

They fill even empty days.

They soften sad days.

---

It seems pretty clear to me that a poem like this can't be written without some aging in the barrel.  You know what I mean.  Okay, it skirts sentimentality, but what is aging if not the advent of the sentimental?  What is memory if not sentiment?  Those opening lines, though--A day goes by / nothing unforeseen happens / another day changes your life.--couldn't Milosz have written this?  

A poem by Angelaurelio Soldi (7.31.19)

Another day comes before another

Living is not always

a voluntary act.

You wake up in the morning

and the day runs through you

before you know it.

You want to write a poem

but your body doesn't want to

and they still play

the same music on the radio.

If you had to mix the air for you to breathe

trouble

only trouble

what do you know?

But you walk outdoors and there it is

from yesterday weather

today arrangements and you breathe

another day of no consequence.

You'll find out only later.

My friend, Elio, wrote this poem.  He shared it with me yesterday during a visit to his home outside of Hillsborough.  It's a lovely, peaceful place with meadows, tall leafy oaks, and a long prospect from the porch to his three acre pond.  He gave me permission to post it here.  There's nothing else to say about this poem, other than when I rose this morning to walk the dog, I very consciously breathed the air.  Oh, and one more thing; if you like this poem, you'll like the poetry of William Bronk.

The habits of poetry: honesty (7.23.19)

W. H. Auden once declared--it was in an interview, I believe, though I can't recall where or when I read it--that upon finishing a new poem, he was never entirely sure he could repeat the performance.  This might have been tongue-in-cheek (ya think?), given the man's prolific output, but a truth underlies his admission.  He was never sure, from composition to composition, whether he was creating a new work of art or just being "W. H. Auden, Famous Poet."

In other words, even Auden sometimes questioned his relationship to his art, how honestly he practiced it.

Back in January, I started a kind of thematic thread about the habits of poetry (see the blog entry for January 23).  Along those lines, I've been thinking for the past week about the habit of "honesty" in poetry.

What I mean by this isn't what a generation ago was labeled "authenticity"--at least I don't mean just that--but rather "Am I being honest with myself about this poem I'm trying to write?"

And what I mean by this question is, whether I step back from a poem that I'm writing to examine my motive in writing it, to ask myself whether I really believe (in) what I'm laying down.  This might be another way of stating my commitment to the art of the poem, or its artifice, the thing I am making.  Am I really trying to listen to this poem and its demands, or am I just role-playing, being The Poet, the Man of Feeling, the Intellectual, the Wit, Mr. Wisdom?  In other words, is this stuff a poem, or bullshit?

We've established or concurred at W@1 that pretty much any piece of writing that we produce is a poem if we choose to call it a poem.  It's time we challenge that notion, individually and intimately, at the level of each composition, by asking ourselves Am I making art here, or am I simply "writing pretty"?  Am I making a poem, or am I "expressing"?

Since the middle of the 20th Century, Western poetry, and especially American poetry, has taken a decidedly personal turn.*  It has become a vehicle for personal expression, for imposing one's self upon on the world.  Each poem we write is "authentic" insofar as it "comes from the heart" and/or expresses some "truth" as we personally see things.  Read a poem that I've written and you can know something about me, the person.  You'll hear echoes of the so-called confessional poets in this line of inquiry: they may have been artists, but to much of the poetry reading public, they were memoirists who rhymed.  We read their work not so much for the art of the poetry as for clues about the writer's (tormented) life.  Thus, the authenticity of a poem is its adherence to the facts of its writer's personality.

You won't be surprised to learn that T. S. Eliot wrote about the "extinction of personality" in the art of poetry.  It has taken me a lifetime of study and thinking and my own writing to begin to understand what Eliot meant by that curious phrase.  He didn't mean annihilation in that post-WW I Modernist sense, the sense that we are mere chits in a universe of forces that are beyond our control and our understanding.  What he meant (an in this he was reacting against 100 years of poetic practice) is the poem as artifact is not personal statement; a poem is not a personal essay or a short memoir.  It's a work of art just as any painting or sculpture or musical composition or dance figure is a work of art.  In so far as a poem contains certain facts about a writer, or reveals certain aspects of a writer's personality, it is not a poem.  If it is a poem, it is for other reasons.  (And in a way, that's what we're after in W@1, I hope, to discover those reasons.)

How far we are today from that formulation!  Poetry of protest, Instagram poetry, dog poetry, so-called confessional poetry, authentic poetry--these are all forms of writing driven by personality.  What Eliot meant to describe by the phrase, "the extinction of personality," is the relation between the maker and the made: poems that are not made to be selfies, even when we use the first person pronoun in them.

So if we mean to cultivate the habit of honesty in our writing, one way of doing it is to step back from a poem we're working on and ask, Am I committed to this art or am I taking a selfie?  The question is harder to answer, or its answer is harder to determine, than it is to ask.  But therein lies the habit of honesty I'm talking about.  The more you stop and ask yourself what you're doing with a piece of writing, ask yourself honestly, the better you will get at finding that answer.  The more widely you read and experience poetry and so-called poetry, the more readily you'll recognize each kind.  And this is the habit I am urging.

For next week, then, let's each bring a poem to W@1 that we have honestly asked these questions of.  With the poem, let's each also try to come with some responses to the questions we ask.  We'll share the poems, the questions, and, if we're lucky, the answers.

* That's not to say personal/biographical poetry--or its impulse--didn't get written before Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Louis Simpson began publishing their work.  Philip Sidney: look in thy heart and write; William Wordsworth: emotion recollected in tranquility; Elizabeth Barrett Browning: how do I love thee; even Sappho: in my dripping pain. Or Ben Jonson (1616):

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O could I lose all father now! for why
Will man lament the state he should envy,
To have so soon 'scaped  world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.

Page Real Estate: Imagining a Poem's "White Spaces" (7.4.19)

Happy July 4^th everyone!  Yesterday’s W@1 was interesting, to say the least: dirty limericks day.  Why was it that I was the only writer to take Curt’s topic suggestion at face value?  For those of you who weren’t there for the “reading of the bawd,” I can only say it was pretty tame, by and large, but I can’t reprint here any efforts that I shared.  Not on a blog open to the public!

Speaking of what’s not said, we discussed topics for future projects and decided on the following for next week. [1]  

Poems leave a lot of blankness on the page (literally and figuratively), what we often refer to as “white space.”  White space is so much a part of poetry that we might say that some of a poem’s meaning lies in what’s not imprinted.  Emily Dickinson’s poetry has long been read and celebrated for what’s not there, for what lurks in the pauses and textual interstices (the m dashes and the very definite [deafening? detonating?] use of punctuation).  

Go to your shelves and find a book of poems where the entire printable page is utilized typographically, margin to margin.  I am certain you won’t find many, if any.  There are two reasons for this.  One, not many writers of poetry write poems that present in such slab-like ways (Ashbery has done so, as has C. K. Williams).  And two, not very many readers collect books (or stop to read poems in journals) that are printed margin to margin—even when the poems are composed in “lines.”  No, most readers of poems expect a poem to take up relatively little of a page’s real estate. [2]

We’ve approached this idea of typographical real estate in various ways over the past year and a half through projects involving lineation, haiku and bright image poetry, the prose poem, so-called “concrete” poetry, even “list poems” and discussions of how poems end. [3]  The question we’re taking up this week is how a poem’s effect or meaning is established / felt / rendered / implied / cemented via the “white space” it creates. [4]  

Think of it this way.  Consider the text you’re reading at this moment.  It’s prose, right?  As prose, it utilizes as much of this page’s blankness—it’s white space—as possible.  The default on my word processing program, by the way, is left-right and top-bottom margins of one inch.  Ordinarily, when I write prose for Wednesdays@1 consumption, I keep the paragraphs short.  I start a new paragraph frequently.  In the past, I’ve begun new paragraphs by inserting a return between them, and have not provided an indentation at the first word.  You see here that paragraphs are not separated by returns but instead by indentations of 0.25 inches (the default on my processing program is 0.5).  

Does this technique change the meaning of the statements I’m making?

Does it affect how you interact with the text?

Does it matter?

Each instance of an indentation creates (or declines to utilize) white space, the page’s natural real estate.  Each instance also signals, typographically, that a new unit of meaning follows. [5]  And each uses exactly the same amount of return (0.25 in.) to do so.  But look more closely at the three preceding paragraphs.  Each creates (or declines to utilize) increasing amounts of the page’s real estate in succession.  Does this change the meaning of the overall text of what I’m writing here?  Does it affect how you’re interacting with the text?  Does it matter?

I think that when it comes to poetry, this kind of textual-typographical play does matter, very much so.  Here are some examples of what I’m talking about, taken from poems you’ve shared with the W@1 group over the past months.  I’ve replaced the meaningful phonemes and morphemes (typographical letters, units of sound) with relatively meaningless notations—minims.

Bennett’s “Recompense”

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─        ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─  ─ ─         ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

Doug’s “Duet # I”

─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─   ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─   ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─    ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─

Note above that the short lines interleaved throughout Doug's poem are actually continuations of the line above, wrapped due to lack of real estate to utilize for the entire line.

Janet’s “Playing God Today”

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─

─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

─ ─  ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ 

I don’t know, is this even meaningful?  Perhaps not much, but it does matter.  It matters because of the amount of page space utilized in each example—the middle one, Doug’s poem, could pass for a standard prose paragraph; it takes up page real estate the way prose writing might.  I am betting that one of the many things your brain computes when it gets this space utilization “signal” from Doug’s poem is “prose.”  Yet Bennett’s and Janet’s “poems,” for all their similar graphical features—they “waste space” from a prose point of view—use page space quite differently, line by line.  What luxury!

Here is the project for next Wednesday.  Grab a poem you’ve already completed (or simply write a new one!) and consider its footprint on the page.  Ignore the text of the poem, but focus on the amount of white space that is left undisturbed by each line and/or paragraph/stanza. [6]  Then change the relationship between graphical text and surrounding white space.  You can do this by moving words around between or among lines, by adding or subtracting returns between lines/stanzas, and by adding or subtracting spaces between words and syllables within a line.  Have some fun with it.  Break your poem!  Punch new holes in the page!  Then try to put it back together in some way that is different from the original, but not gratuitously dismembered.

Give some thought to how you interact with the poem as you do this, whether it changes the poem for you for better or worse, whether it gives you new insight into the poem, etc.

Select at least one example of an altered version and bring it along with the original to our next session.  Have fun!

---

[1] The others we discussed were “a return to rhyme”; “something seasonal”; “grammar, good and/or bad”; “articles & other parts of speech.”

[2] Poems made up of wide lines, that take up all or most of a page’s available real estate, test our notion of “poem,” right?  They are “prose” poems.  They are “speech” but not song.

[3] To access those projects, go to my poetry blog at http://clarkspoetryblog.blogspot.com/. 

[4] I am asking you to exercise your “negative capability” here: to see not the imprint upon the page, but the “hole in the blankness of the page” that the imprint creates.  Not only to see it, but to feel it as well, in terms of rhythm, pace, sound, and to consider from there how the poem makes you feel when you “read” it not so much as meaningful language as “lack of” or an “absence of” white space.  I suggested that this will be an experiment for us; I know it will feel weird.  And I bet it will contribute to your understanding of the poem.

[5] Newspaper text violates this “rule” of one paragraph-one unit of meaning, partly because columns of newsprint are narrow and long, making it difficult for the eye to follow the text.  One sentence paragraphs are common in this type of media.

[6] Like a field of freshly fallen snow?