Find the rhythmic line (7.19.21)

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.

Bias (7.9.21)

Reading poems is a matter of applied bias.  Always, I look for something that says "poem" to me, when I sit down with a verse, that depends on an assumption, an expectation, a predetermination, a bias.  How would I recognize "poem-ness" otherwise?

Now, these statements are problematic, of course.  For bias acts most often as blinders, forbidding us to "see" in a poem all of what's there.  Or, conversely, to see only what we are "trained" to see.  We have names for bias that functions this way: gender bias, race bias, class bias, cultural bias and so on.

There are other kinds of bias, less dangerous, but just as limiting.  There is the kind of bias that a fellow writer, a non-native speaker of English, once shared with me in a workshop.  A poem must follow the rules of grammar (i.e., of Standard English); otherwise, it is "less than" a poem, or certainly not a "good" poem.  She objected to poems that use sentence fragments because she learned her English in a classroom and from a textbook only, that is, by sight more than by sound.  She also objected to using conjunctions and articles as line endings (she understood the poetic line as a complete unit).

How often have you heard a dabbler poet or occasional reader of poetry insist that poems must rhyme?  Or that iambic pentameter is the only poetic beat?  Or that a "poem" must record a complete thought?  Or that it conclude something?  Or "be about" something (besides itself)?

So to the kinds of bias listed above, we should add literary bias, or what might be called "English Lit Survey Bias (ELSB)": the insistence that poems fit the models collected in your Norton Anthology (Vol. 1).  ELSB . . . otherwise known as The Canon.  

Still, everybody writes and reads poetry with bias of some kind or another, and in fact with a complex of biases: cultural, gender, race, class, literary.  That's what makes unfamiliar poems unfamiliar--that they come from some other understanding--and such a rewarding experience.  They call our biases to the surface, in the form of value judgments, misreadings, forced readings; they puzzle us; sometimes, they escape us altogether.  We can't avoid bias when we write or read a poem; we can only try to be aware of the bias that we bring to a poem.

One way to make ourselves more aware of our biases is to read outside our normal range.  To read poems that confuse or perplex us, that might even anger or annoy us.  And of course it does no good just to become aware of ourselves in this way, unless we also interrogate our responses, as opposed to passing judgment on what we're reading.  Why is this poem so difficult (for me) to understand?  What's the point the poet is trying to make?  How does this image make me feel and why?  What does this word or expression mean (to me & why do I take that meaning on board)?  What's the effect of the line endings, line length (on me, as I read)?  And then to ask ourselves, is this poem really poorly conceived or written, or am I just not "there" yet in terms of understanding and accepting it as a work of art?  If I am finding fault, where does the fault lie, in the poem or in me?

And THEN, maybe you'll start to see or hear the biases in your own writing, how you "lean" toward certain themes, expressions, images, tones, rhetorical devices, cultural tropes, meanings.  Which is all part of growing as an artist, expanding and deepening your understanding of your art, how it works and how you make it, what you make with it.

This is not a prescription for ridding yourself of bias as a reader or a writer.  Not only would that be impossible, it probably would be undesirable, for writing/reading without bias means to experience art without belief and personality.  No, what I am suggesting is that you work to expose your biases to yourself as a means of deepening not just your literary experience, but your life.  Including your life as an artist.  If you harbor a bias that really should be got rid of, like a race bias, then shouldn't you want to expose it?  How else to rid yourself of it, or at least to defend yourself against it, than to bring it to your attention, to call it out?

Now, go, friends, and find some poems that heretofore have left you "cold" or annoyed or confused or feeling attacked or whatever . . . poems that are outside your normal reading comfort zone.  Read them.  Read them twice.  Re-read them.  Internalize the images, the tones and voices, the turns of phrase, the very words of them.  Ask yourself why you respond to them the way you do (even if, and maybe especially if, you respond positively).

Then try to write differently the next time you sit down at your keyboard or journal.  Try to write with those biases exposed.

Stephen Dunn, 1939 - 2021

You know how, when you're reading a poem, a phrase 

or image grabs you but you keep on reading anyway, 

not really absorbing or thinking about what you're reading 

farther down the page because your thinking remains stuck 

on that earlier phrase or image until you realize, some number 

of lines on, that you haven't grasped another thing about the poem 

but just that phrase or image, which dwells in you, 

in your imagination or memory or image-making factory?

Well, this is what happened (again) this afternoon as I was reading 

a poem by Stephen Dunn, whom the New York Times reports has died

of complications from Parkinson's disease in his Maryland home,

at the age of 82, Stephen Dunn, June 24, 1939 - June 24, 2021,

an exotic bit of timing if you ask me, to die on your birthday,

they way my mother almost did, going one day short of her 98th,

especially for a poet who according to the Times "celebrated

the ordinary," and he did, celebrate the ordinary, that is,

as I learned in the mid-to-late 1980's when I first got interested

in his poetry, began looking for it in magazines and bookstores.

Not that my poetry has turned out to be anything at all like his,

which has veered off into fable, the fantastical, the romantic,

the classical, the pop, the balladic, the rhapsodic, and rarely

has achieved the celebration of the ordinary except maybe for

the occasional image of a dead fly, a fighting cardinal, a swaying

elm, a passing airplane, a pause upon a staircase, an errant

shoelace, a moment of Sunday grace, an interior space, 

a cold place, a home base, a beautiful face . . . er, maybe 

the maybe of likeness is less certain than I thought?

And maybe that's because we have called upon the same spirits

over our creative lives in poetry writing, which is to say,

Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, and agree

that it has been Roethke, "especially Roethke," whom we both

returned to and returned to for sustenance and course-correction

and reaffirmation and just general how-to in the best kind

of song for either of us, for the music, that is, for the music.

You know how that is, getting mired in that one phrase or image

in the most luxurious way that interferes with your reading?

This is what just happened as I was reading in Local Time, 

a book of Dunn's poems I bought in 1987, in Atlanta, apparently,

though I've forgotten what I was doing in Atlanta in that year,

visiting no doubt from the university in Alabama where 

I had been hired to teach on a limited but long-term contract

(i.e., no tenure offered, just work, a lot of work, doing 

the shit-work the tenured faculty didn't want to waste time doing),

the only book of Dunn's I should add that I have in my library

and which I pulled from the shelf this morning after reading

of his death in The New York Times Sunday edition, 

as I often do when a poet is remembered there, just out of respect,

opening it to the first poem, a 7-parter titled "Round Trip"

and read there these lines:

        I'm watching from the window,

the father who knows education

    is all about departures, who knows

        when things are right

nobody comes home the same

lines that changed fundamentally the way I approached teaching,

even the shit-work my more sinecured colleagues eschewed,

for the brief months that I kept teaching before giving up

and trying something different something that could buy a house

and a new car and a nest egg that I knew long before 1987,

the purchase date inscribed in black ink on the book's title page,

the university was never going to buy for me, which was this:

when things are right in the classroom, nobody comes home

the same, that that is what teaching is all about and if any one

of my students goes home even marginally recognizable 

to her family after a year, two, four at university then Mom 

and Dad and student and the university and I have all wasted 

our money our expertise our time on that student, collectively, 

a massive failure I began warning my students of on the first day 

of class and on the last before term's end as home beckoned.

Which fell, I suppose, on deaf ears or at least ears unable

to comprehend though those lines were a revelation to me,

what I'd been all about or should have been about the years

I'd spent at the head of a classroom trying to help kids

improve their chances in the world, not fully understanding 

myself that one's chances in the world requires so much

of leaving oneself behind, abandoning one version for another,

reinventing, which I soon did myself, the reinvention, so

long ago before you, Stephen Dunn, had written half the way

through the opus of poems you were eventually to create

in a career that today has been celebrated as I say in the obit

pages of The New York Times Sunday edition, and so thank you 

for the education, the poems and particularly the career.

Mind the gap (6.27.21)

Consider the caesura.  

"A rhetorical and extrametrical pause or phrasal break within the poetic line."

This is how my Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines the caesura.  There's a lot in the definition, like the presupposition of intent (rhetoric), meter, phrasing, and of course, lines.  Which is to say, the PEPP understands caesura as a formal poetic element, not, in case you're wondering, as an organic element of ordinary speech.  It's not about taking a breath as you do when you are in conversation, or the natural cadences of everyday speech.

Caesura is one of the figures of poetry.  It is a tool, a strategy, part of the meaning of a poem.  When you and I think of caesura, we tend to see it as a space separating two or more parts of a line of poetry.  And when moderns like us write poems with caesura, we often insert blank space typographically.  Watch what the San Francisco Renaissance poet, Robin Blaser, does with caesura in this poem:

The Fairie Queene

AN APPEARANCE

Okay        A nightingale 

does sing    

              outside this window

A mirror of leaves and noise

                             This monument

has torn to pieces our guide book 

of facts

                             This startles

A nightingale,

                        the bird so ancient

he    (    anybody    )

                                  falls back

on   his   dusty   shoes,   pointing

The event darkens            So  like

our trembling,

                                we caught at it

breaking the skin

You might call this example typography run amok.  Or you might suspect Blaser is representing breaths or speech patterns.  Or, you might think that he's drawing your attention to particular words, word associations, word order, and to various degrees of stress (heavy to light to non-existent).  Whatever he's doing in this little poem - which has a lot to do with feeling your own experience as a palpable thing - Blaser certainly wants caesura to be a part of the meaning.  Reading it, you might feel pressure to pause slightly, to skip a beat here and there, to read in a stop-and-go way.  That is, you might feel you're being asked to slow down as you read, to make the words palpable, which is another way of asserting the meaning of the poem: the palpability of experience or awareness or consciousness.  All of which lends this poem immediacy.

Typographically, the poem looks chaotic.  It bends and/or breaks - or self-consciously ignores - the conventions of meter.  Hard to make out iambs, trochees, dactyls and anapests here!  What does caesura look and sound like in a more regularized setting?  Here is what it looks like in Old English poetry, where the caesura was a critical element of structure, sound and meaning:

Nu we sculon herigan        heofonrices Weard,

Meotodes meahte        ond his modgeþanc,

weorc Wuldorfæder,        swa he wundra gehwæs,

ece Drihten,        or onstealde.

Now must we praise    Heaven's guardian,

Mighty Measurer     and his purpose,

The Wonderous father working     wonder everywhere,

Eternal Lord,     the beginning's creator.

My translation from the famous "Caedmon's Hymn" is rough and not even close to the original in form, structure or metrical grace; I mean it only to give a sense of the content of the prayer.  I have highlighted the caesura in each line and attempted to preserve some of the alliteration.   

Something you can't see but would hear if spoken by an expert reader*, are the stresses, both heavy and light, primary and secondary, in each verse and line.  (In OE studies, the half line on either side of the caesura is called the "a" and "b" verse.)  Suffice it to say here that each verse contains two heavy-stress syllables and two light-stress.  Generally in Old English poetry, the heavy-stress syllable comes first, followed by the light-stress syllable.  This arrangement of stressed/non-stressed syllables repeats across each "a" and "b" verse, a pattern that's reinforced by the repeating alliteration as well.

All of which is to say that Old English poetry, which is accentual, incorporates caesura in order to create structure, repetition, emphasis . . . meaning.  It is a shaping tool.

But what, exactly, does caesura shape?  In a word, sound.  The caesura you can "see" typographically, is merely a convenience for literate, sight-oriented readers of texts.  It is there to indicate not a pause, per se, but a repeating pattern of stresses and non-stresses in a spoken text, for it is vocal stress, not typographical spacing (page real estate, if you will) or even "breath-space," that determines accentual-syllabic forms of poetry.  That would be every kind of poem from ancient Greek epic to Old English saga, to iambic pentameter.  Stress is also the key to the poems of Walt Whitman, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams . . . and contemporary hip-hop.  In Old English poetry, it's simply that stress is a predictable - required - pattern of sound that repeats once each line, that splits a line of OE poetry into two verses with an identical pattern of stress.  This is how it looks in a modern translation of Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney . . . first the OE version, with the gap minded, and then the Heaney version of the opening lines:

Hwæt wē Gār-Dena        in geār-dagum 

þēod-cyninga        þrym gefrūnon, 

hū ðā æþelingas        ellen fremedon.

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by

and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.

We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

You can rough out where the caesura falls within the line.  You'll see that, as in the case of the second and third lines in Modern English, the word and syllable count is not quite irrelevant, but it's not determinative either.  It's all about the number and relation of stresses or beats.  

Modern English poetry uses caesura liberally as a way rhythmically to mark off segments of a complete thought that unfolds inside a passage of poetry.  The complete passage could be a line, could be a stanza.  It could be a sentence that begins and/or ends in the middle of a line and is marked with a period or semi-colon or some other punctuation that indicates a shift in thought.  

In OE poetry, the caesura functions as a kind of fulcrum, rhythmically, rhetorically . . . and sonically.  I can't stress this point enough.  Sonic balance between the two halves of a line of OE poetry is what the poetry is all about: order, norm, regularity, expectation.  For OE poetry - and for most poetry in the Western cultural tradition - order is the given.  From Aristotle's Poetics down at least to the poetry of Tennyson, order is beauty is art.  One of the distinguishing factors of Modern poetry is its abandonment of order and the expectation order creates for a reader.  

I want to discuss what the critic Austin Warren called "a rage for order" in his book of that title, but that will have to be in another posting.  For the time being, my point is just that in poetry written before modern times, in the West at least, the caesura functioned as a stabilizing force.  

Enough here to say that in modern and contemporary poetry, the caesura does more than bifurcate a line into two sonically equal halves.  Rhetorically speaking, the caesura often serves to interrupt the flow of thought, rather than to qualify or deepen it.  And rhythmically, the caesura often breaks the flow of a line or a thought.  Break?  Disintegrate!

Not one        but many energies shape the field.

It is cortex.            It is a compost.

In brute strength and the refined alike

            the creative works 

        by focus, by diffusion,      by potency

of the pure released form,      the clean

          realized ovoid dream of Brancusi,

                Pythagoras made tactile,

or, at Tirgu-Jui,     the Column,

"which, if enlarged, would support the vault of Heaven"

            conceived to be Endless.

This passage is from a poem by Robert Duncan, "Transmissions," a segment from his long poem, Groundwork: Before the War.  You can see how deeply typography has influenced the construction of the passage, how some lines return to the margin while others begin at various positions away from the margin; and how many of the lines are broken internally.  Generally, the caesuras seem to break along sense units: not one        but many . . .  But not always.  there appears to be no rhyme (no pun intended) or reason to the spacings.  The language is heroic (many energies, brute strength, potency of the pure, clean realized ovoid dream, Pythagoras, vault of Heaven), allusive, and self-regarding.  Look at me, it says, not at the flow of thought you think you may be following.  The caesura lends power to this triumph of words.  

Duncan, a Language Poet, was known for treating words materialistically, as the materiel of the poem.  For him, spaces count, either intellectually or rhythmically or both, wherever they are "inserted":

The returns to margins in the poem are not schematic but follow rhythmic and architectonic impulses in the felt flow of the ongoing versification . . . .  The demarcation of stanzas then 'counts': a space of one and a half lines counts as one verse of arrest or attention--a silence in which the preceding verse may be echoed and/or the following verse be awaited.  But silence itself is sounded, a significant or meaningful absence, its semiotic value contributing to and derived from our apprehension of the field of the poem it belongs to.

Lest the above seem a bit overcooked, just think of Duncan's explanation of his poem's versification as this: silences are as much a part of a soundscape as utterances.  The silences come in the form of internal spaces within the line, lines beginning two or three or more tabs away from the margin, and line/stanza breaks of varying length.**

Other poets use the caesura, following Duncan's lead, not just liberally but strategically, integrally.  Reading their poems, you always feel on broken ground, like you're walking on large gravel that can twist an ankle.  You have to walk slowly and deliberately, pausing between steps.  Take this poem, "Underneath (2)," by Jorie Graham:

ghosts               not having

lived                  lived alive now

        it            possible

        eventually

explain                         calm

explain                         vision

explain                         property 

also     summer            compromise

as        soon                  as 

explain                         hidden life

explain                         echo

also which flower is

heaviest        how it

has            any bearing

on                 color

explain                         energy

bear                              waste

explain                         place

explain                         accident

                after gods

                  is born

                   (fall)

              (I'll catch)

                  (you)

I'm asking                for weight

The ready                   flowers

Explain caesura in this poem!  

"A significant or meaningful absence," is how Robert Duncan described the caesura in his book's commentary.  Read Graham's poem visually and you're likely to be frustrated.  Who wants to work that hard, even with poetry?  What's the payoff?  Well, that comes from reading out loud.  Go ahead, try reading Graham's poem out loud, pausing "significantly" where the spaces indicate you should.  I think you'll have a completely different experience, a much richer experience.

Just as soon as I think up a project related to the caesura, I will lay it on you.  Meanwhile, make your silences meaningful!

*No one actually knows exactly how Old English was enunciated or OE poems were uttered - none of it was recorded before the language evolved away from this form!  But scholars have pretty well deciphered the grammar of the language, and therefore can approximate its sounds, stresses and rhythms.

**I've heard recordings of Duncan reading his work.  I can attest that he pauses where there's a typographical space on the page.

What? (6.22.21)

How many times have you encountered a new poem in your reading and said that?  And then quickly turned the page or tossed the book or mag you read it in to one side, and gone looking for stuff you can understand?

Access is not always granted free of charge in poetry.  The price to be paid comes in the form of readerly, intellectual labor . . . and that just to get at the referential basis of the language . . . under which lies, usually, a poem's emotional message.

Often enough we--that is to say, I--throw our mental hands up, complain about trendy "difficulty," and move on, none the wiser for our encounter.

I hate when this happens to me!

I feel like I've ditched the long, slow, deliberate schooling in reading literary texts that I underwent through nearly ten years of higher education.  In favor of the easy read.

And because I feel this way, I redouble my efforts to absorb a poem that refuses to accommodate my laziness.  I read and re-read, then read again, ignoring, or trying to ignore, my pique at the opacity of the language.  

I love when this happens to me!

I've done a Sonia Sanchez poem with my spoken word band, Program for Jazz, that I love to lyricize.  It's titled "Small Comment," and you can find a recording of it on the Words & Rhythm page at the above link.  That poem is more or less accessible - textually speaking, though perhaps not culturally for a white male reader - and it's rhythmically, imaginatively exciting.  But this poem, written in a more current style, just leaves me scratching my head:

"There Is No News from Auschwitz"

along that funeral plain

green wipes away old waves 

that rolled the eyes 

and tangled flowers veil vile kennel dust

bequeathed to dawns.

the years are done.

the earth bent toward canals bears

sterile bowels repenting woven eyes

while bone-filled drifts that scattered blood 

yield other births. 

death is not there: no special people 

trailing alien dens, 

or children moving in the rain of ash 

unraveling minds. 

life is not there: not even myths that rode 

young stallions to a circus tent 

and carried torches on a convent wire 

beyond the tides.

no other signs that men patrolled chained 

sheets of sea. 

i grieve our empty ships.

there is no news from Auschwitz.

What?!  I mean, what am I to make of lines like "not even myths that rode / young stallions to a circus tent / and carried torches on a convent wire / beyond the tides"?  What are "chained sheets of sea"?  One must really exercise one's mind's eye to see these images, and maybe that's exactly where this poem sets up house . . . in the mind's eye.

Reginald Dwayne Betts, the NYT Sunday Magazine's poetry editor & commenter, is as mystified as I about this poem.  In introducing it to the average Magazine reader, he can find nothing to say about the poem itself:

"This poem . . . first appeared in 'Under a Soprano Sky,' a book I ordered while in solitary confinement in a Virginia prison.  The first poetry collection I purchased, the book became all the clichés for me: my life raft, my rope, my talisman, my four-leaf clover.  From the history of the MOVE bombing to reminding me of Auschwitz's horrors, I got it from that 'Soprano Sky.'  All these years later, I can see myself flipping through these pages in my sleep, astonished and alarmed by what words might do--amazed to find so much of the world I'd thrown away in the lines that were saving me."

So, what "it" did Betts get from "Under a Soprano Sky" or this poem?  Ordinarily, he will give us a clue to a poem he's selected for the Sunday Magazine, or a key, however subtle, to at least one way to read a poem.  That is, he talks about the poem.  But in this case, Betts can only tell about himself and his first encounter with the poem and the book in which it was published.  He, too, must remain vague about the text, about its affect on him or his literary understanding of it.

Some poems - many more and more today than when I was coming up - simply don't offer themselves up to be paraphrased or "interpreted."  You can only experience them.  If what you're looking for in poetry is transparency, or in effect, the invisibility of words, then you're bound to be disappointed and even frustrated by poems like "There Is No News from Auschwitz."

That is, until you've read and re-read it many times, as many times as it takes for you to begin to internalize its suggestions, allusions, voicing, pitches and tones, until finally its emotional imprint. There is no news from Auschwitz . . . because "news" is new information, and nothing is old news quite like the horrors that human beings can visit upon one another, nothing is more with us or more standard human behavior.  Doesn't matter whether you're a Jew, Black, Crow Indian, Irish, Tigray, Hutu, transgender, a trafficked woman or child, or White, Male, privileged and genocidal: evil and injustice are not news.

At least, this is what I "get" from my first ten re-reads of this poem.  It's not much, admittedly.  And it's surely laced with assumption, self-reference, clumsy intellect, prejudice . . . all those things that stand in the way of understanding.  It's most likely a gross misreading.  

But it's a place to start and, more importantly, a takeaway from 10 readings.  I could read this poem a hundred times over and still be mystified by it.  Or maybe I'd come into it.  That's poetry for you.  I'd better get started.

That indelible image (6.2.21)

A project idea came up during our regularly scheduled Wednesdays@One salon: writing from an indelible image.

Every so often, we encounter an image that (to us if not to others) is so striking, that touches us somewhere so deeply, that it lingers in our minds, sometimes permanently.  This is what lay behind the opening passages of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman - an image out of which (according to Fowles) an entire novel grew:

But where the telescopist would have been at sea himself was with the other figure on that somber, curving mole.  It stood right at the seawardmost end, apparently leaning against an old cannon barrel upended as a bollard.  Its clothes were black.  The wind moved them, but the figure stood motionless, staring, staring out to sea, more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from myth, than any proper fragment of the petty provincial day.

It's an image that may not be terribly arresting for me or you, but that captures the imagination of the narrator of the story to unfold over the next nearly 500 pages of text.  

I wrote the poem that follows many, many years ago from a similar experience, though a vastly different kind of prompt: a dead fly on a bright white windowsill.  Here's the poem . . .

No Sign of Struggle

Remember that final moment in Blade Runner when Rutger Hauer,
playing the renegade cyborg, bows his head and dies, run out of battery,
gently after so much terror, and gives up his ghost—a white pigeon
from a nail-pierced hand—gives it to the black, acid rain of the future.
Extraordinary, such a death after that life of terrifying, angstless freedom.
 
Then to witness this little death on the sill of a south-facing window,
mid-afternoon in February with a foot of snow cleanly fallen just beyond,
a black fly on brilliant white, its wings broad and flat casting a wedge
of shadow beside the haired body fixed in feeding or self-cleaning
or, if nature granted such a thing, a moment of knowing, last thought
 
happening who knows when, an instant ago or in the cold fore-noon
but happening as large and finally as on the roof-edge of the movie screen,
when just as certainly this machine seized, stopped, stiffened into place
for its eternity, as if eternity would be given it for having lived awhile
in this space, however long and strong its life-cord, its moment . . .
 
How Hamlet-like, eaves-dropping on death’s ghostly aftermath
(I kneel in reading glasses for a closer look) with a heat register knocking
its confirming knell in another part of the house—machine for machine.
No rage, no rejection, no rush to embrace, either, but with big questions
forming: angstless freedom?  Is this what you want?  Are you sure?

Well, it was two images, really, that made this poem . . . the one from the movie, the one on the windowsill.  They both remain with me today, because of the context . . . I had recently seen the movie; and I was alone in a room on a bright day after heavy snowfall the night before.  They didn't coalesce into this poem automatically or at once.  But they drifted into each other, as it were, like boats in a current, and became forever inseparable, bound by the theme of death and ideas of freedom, fate, and nature.  

So our project?  Search your data banks for just such an image, something that will serve to launch a poem.  Your poem needn't - in fact shouldn't - be "about" the image, that is, merely a description of something you've witnessed.  Instead, the image should provide a kind of gateway to other things, like a rumination or reverie on Life, Death, Eating Breakfast, Snoring, Friendship, Loss, New Love, Uncertainty, God . . . well, maybe not that last one.  Let's not get carried away!  The image you work with need not be from long ago at all.  It could be something you saw, heard, smelled, tasted, felt in Whole Foods the other day.  But it should be "intense," in the sense of indelible on your consciousness.  

Rhyme Removal (6.1.21)

Here's a curious idea for a writing project: find a poem written in rhyme and revise without the device.  

I was thinking of letting the poem be your own, but what's more delicious is to hack a famous poem, or at least one written by an established poet.  

This is an exercise in seeing a poem differently, how or whether the art can be made without traditional devices like rhyme and meter.  It's also an exercise in understanding what rhyme actually contributes to a particular poem, how it reinforces meaning or "beautifies" the reading experience.

This is not an exercise in humor.  The idea isn't to reduce a sober piece of writing, like "Stopping by Woods," for example, to a funny little poemlet.  Nor is it to make something strident or passionate into something ironic, sardonic, satirical.  Try to preserve the tone, temper, timbre, etc. of the original.

I recommend borrowing something from one of your lit survey anthologies, where you know the rhyme is "professional grade."  Failing that, go to an online compendium or catalog of poets and poetry, like one of the two provided through the links below.

So here is the project . . .

1. Choose any poem that is more or less a “standard,” such as “Stopping by Woods . . .” “Ozymandias,” ”On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” or something by Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, Poe, Dickinson.  Or maybe something more modern, say, by Frost, Cummings, Roethke, Sexton, Lowell, Plath, H.D., or a poem by a recent or contemporary poet, like Arthur Sze (if you can find a rhymer by him!) or Rosanna Warren (ditto that).  You might also go out to Academy of American Poets or Poetry Foundation to look for the well-known rhymer and/or the well-known rhyme.
2. Read the poem several times through to get your footing in it.  Read for its theme(s), tone, voice, persona, etc., and, of course, for its rhyme scheme.  Your objective is to come to an understanding of the poem that’s deep or involved enough that you will be able to “break” the rhyme it’s built upon WITHOUT ALSO DESTROYING THE POEM’S “MEANING” OR TONE OF VOICE OR PERSPECTIVE OR STYLE/DICTION.  In other words, the only thing you want to change about the poem is the rhyme.  So, let’s say you select a poem by Sir Philip Sydney (Renaissance).  You’ll want to recreate the poem sans rhyme, but still using Elizabethan diction.  (One day, we’ll try a project in which we revise an Elizabethan poem into contemporary American English – but not next week!)
3. As usual, send your poem to me by Tuesday evening so I can collect everything into a single file for Wednesday’s salon. 

Have fun with it, learn something new about writing poems.  You know, just to see and hear what happens.

👍