You Can Observe a Lot

You can observe a lot just by watching, Yogi Berra once said. And you can learn a lot about poetry and what we do when we write poetry and what we do when we write poetry by listening to what artists in other genres say about their art.

John Sayles’s Thinking in Pictures is about making his movie Matewan, and making the transition from novelist to filmmaker. Matewan’s climactic scene is the classic Western shootout on Main Street between the good guys (union miners) and the bad guys (strikebreakers from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency), but although the body count is higher for the bad guys, it’s hard to say who wins. And the movie doesn’t end with the gunfight. It ends with the miners going back to work. They’re changed by the experience, touched and inspired by the nonviolent union organizer whose advice they ultimately don’t heed, but their lives are still down in the mine.

Sayles describes the structure of Matewan as cyclical, as opposed to the finite ending of a Hollywood movie, which “sends the audience out with a definite jolt, a sense that justice (or injustice) has been done. Justice is “Rocky at center ring, victorious, wrapped in an American flag.” Or the handsome but heretofore shallow mogul climbing up the fire escape to declare his love for the still-idealistic prostitute. Or Baby racing across the dance floor and leaping into Johnny’s arms, to be raised aloft triumphantly as dance conquers all. Injustice, no less satisfying, is “Cool Hand Luke or Butch and Sundance or the hippies in Easy Rider all blasted dead by the forces of oppression.”

The finite ending has to satisfy. You can’t have Jaws end with the shark winning, but “when Moby Dick rolls back into the depths…it works fine, because the story is a lot more than catching a whale.”

How is this a useful lesson for poetry? Isn’t it always cyclical? Doesn’t the resolution of a poem, to the extent that it ever has one, happen sometime after you’ve read the poem, after you’ve read it more than once? Because a good poem will keep happening in your head, keep expanding or changing.

Well, no. Not always' Poetry can be finite, too. In Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman,” beautiful dark-haired Bess is always going to warn her lover away with the shotgun blast to her breast, and it’s always going to be sad and noble and satisfying, like the one little kiss Marty Robbins’s Falena gives to the dying cowboy. And the lesson of moving forward inexorably toward a climax can be applied even when the poem is cyclical, when it’s about more than just catching a whale. Or a pig.

ANIMALS ARE PASSING FROM OUR LIVES

Don’t you love the ending? We know that the pig will go out In a blaze of glory like Butch and Sundance, like Thelma and Louise, but that’s its own kind of triumph.

In workshops or seminars, I caution against “punch line poetry,” poems that end up by feeling like nothing but a setup for a rock ‘em – sock ‘em last line. But there’s a difference between poetry that packs a punch and punch line poetry. What’s the difference? Read “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives.” How do you know if your poem is a “not this pig” or just a punch line? I can only quote what John Berryman said to W. S. Merwin –

… you can never be sure

And what is the pig’s blaze of glory, anyway? He isn’t going to die in a shootout, like Butch and Sundance. They’re prepared for that – they’re watching for him to turn on the boy. We don’t know. Is he going to die with dignity, keeping his pride and his soul intact? Does he have another plan? “Animals Are Passing From Our Lives” isn’t “The Highwayman.”

In a way, it’s more like Matewan. There’s the dramatic ending—the shootout—and it is viscerally satisfactory, but then comes the reminder that life is a little more complex than Rocky. But a poem does it differently. Matewan gives you another scene. “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives” gives you a last line that is both satisfying and tantalizing at the same time. And that’s poetry.