Make it Scan, Dammit!

Why write in forms anyway? Only one reason. Because they speak to you. Because the poems that resonate for you were written by Keats, or Tennyson, or Hardy, or Yeats, or Richard Wilbur or Annie Finch, and they are the voices in your head urging you to try it yourself. Because it doesn’t really feel like a poem to you unless it’s got that formal component, because it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing that only rhyme and meter can give you.

And why burst out of the formal straitjacket? Maybe like Allen Ginsberg, you had a father who wrote cramped, constricted, mediocre poems in received forms, and as much as you loved William Blake, his example wasn’t the one you were going to follow. But Ginsberg, too, spent a lot of time thinking about issues of form. His letters to formalist John Hollander are full of theory and justification for the long lines he ultimately chose.

Or maybe you just don’t like the idea that there’s something you can’t do. Just as studying Latin, not that anyone does it anymore, gives you a strong foundation for understanding grammar and learning any other Indo-European language, so mastering formal verse is a good foundation for writing anything.

Formal restrictions are restrictions. But poetic language is all about compression, about making words do more than they can do in other contexts, and the restrictions of form can add an important dimension. Mary Oliver, in her book Rules for the Dance, talks about Shakespeare’s Sonnet 87, “Farewell! Thou art too dear for my possessing.” She tells us that in his words, Shakespeare tells us that he is heartbroken; he is going to lose his love.  But with his iambic pentameter and strict rhyme scheme, he lets us know that he is not falling apart. He is going to treat the loss with dignity, and learn something from it. We look at the page and we see that it’s a sonnet, so we know that Shakespeare is going to resolve the situation efficiently, within fourteen lines, with a couplet punching it home at the end.

But they’re still restrictions. If you start a poem by rhyming the third line with the first line, and the fourth line with the second line, you’ve entered a little contract with the reader—that you’re going to keep doing it. Same if you write a couple of lines that are ten syllables long, with accents on every other syllable.

There are two things you can do with any such contract. You can honor it, or you can break it.

Both have their uses. Eliot powerfully promises a dreamy romantic poem in rhymed couplets in the first two lines of “Prufrock,” and then savagely breaks that promise in the third line.

But for the most part, a promise of rhyme and meter is better kept than broken, and if you do break it by faltering in one or the other, the reader is going to be let down.

Okay, you’ve put up with all this blather in the hopes that sooner or later, he’s going to offer some real advice. So here it comes.

A poem is, according to Coleridge, best words in their best order. Which is more important? Hard to argue with “best words.” But I would argue that when you’re writing the first draft of a formal poem, the most important thing is to get the scansion right.

And there’s a reason for that. Sure, you need both. If you don’t end up with the best words in their best order, you’ll have a bad poem. It’s no disgrace. We’ll all write lots of them.

But if you don’t have the best words, you can go back and revise, and tinker, and slash and burn, keep playing with words until you get it. If your poem doesn’t scan, you’ll be more likely to delude yourself into not noticing it. But the reader will notice it. To put it another way—not the way we ought to be thinking, but I can be, in the immortal words of Lou Costello, a ba-a-a-d boy—you might get away with something less than the best words, but you’ll never get away with less than the best order.

So get that scansion right. Do not write a line that doesn’t scan. If you can’t find the right words, leave them out. Put in the slashes and dashes that indicate the metrical pattern of the words that you don’t have.

I’m currently writing a long – 40 pages or so—poem based on a medieval French romance. Why? I dunno, it seemed like a good idea at the time. So I’ve had plenty opportunity to screw up the words, and plenty to screw up the order. Going back and looking at my rough drafts, here’s what I find.

And I’m already in trouble because I’ve used “war” twice in three lines, and I’m going to want to use it again in the next line – a terrible war, where many died.  And that doesn’t scan. And I’m writing ottava rima, which means I need one more “A” rhyme, so I know that the next line has to end with “a crime against humanity,” but how do I get there?

So here’s what my notebook page looks like:

OK, lots of synonyms for war that are one syllable long. I considered “a bloody conflict ending in calamity,” but I thought I needed that blunt one syllable, so I went with “a bloody strife.” The second blank space in the next line was easy – many hundreds or many thousands, depending on how big I decide to make the battle. My scratched in notes, over the dashes and slashes, are

Well, I was smart enough to know that “’tis truly said” was awful, but at least I had the sound of line. I did change it. The person who is being addressed, the one who called for war out of vanity, is a witch, so I used that. The verse as written now, unless I tinker with it some more, is as follows:

I decided to go big with the fatalities.

A few stanzas later, Willem confronts the queen/witch:

“Reverse the spell, or feel my deepest wrath.”

She won’t give in right away. Or “at first,” because I knew that would be the rhyme word. So…the queen won’t give in at first? The queen stands her ground at first? I left it blank. And I had to leave some blanks in the next line, where he tells her that her husband will be executed if she doesn’t reverse the spell, and the next line, where she won’t give in.

I had the structure, and I had the rhyme.  Now I just needed the words.

It scanned; it still felt weak. If I’d left it that way, and the story was compelling enough, I probably could have gotten away with it. But a weak quatrain that you get away with is like the one spot of rot in a barrel of apples. It can spread to affect everything.

Still, at least I was on the right track. OK, why isn’t it right that the spells not be reversed? And for that matter, what spells? What they? There’s only one spell, but I don’t want to use “it” twice in the same line. Anyway, it’s not right because the witch says it’s not right. Actually, as Willem knows, it is right. But the last line needs to be dialogue. Here’s how it ended up.

Another reason for going for the best order first: It’s easier. It’s easier because it’s either right or wrong. You either have an accentual-syllabic line, with the right number of syllables and the accents in the right place, or you don’t. And once you get that straight, you can keep working on the words.

This isn’t always going to work, because nothing always does. That’s why they pay us poets the big bucks. And as Richard Hugo points out in The Triggering Town, just because something works for me doesn’t mean it’s right for you. But it’s good advice, and I know, because I can vouch for it myself.