|
There are certain things you can count on from prose, prominent among them being structure. A sentence is united around one idea. It can be simple: I like baseball. Or equally simple, but more specific: I like the Mets. Or it can be a little more involved: We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. Or it can get complex: And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. But you can still count on it to knit together one unit of thought, and to distinguish itself from all other units of thought. A paragraph strings together a bunch of sentences, all related. When you come to the end of a paragraph, you know you’ve finished a certain unit, and you’re about to start a new one, and you can count on the writer to let you know when you’ve wrapped up that digestible unit, because they’ll finish that paragraph and start a new one. In poetry, all bets are off, and it’s deliberate. The functional structure of prose is meant to make it easy for you to move forward, across the line, down the page (in most Western languages, anyway). The theoretical response to a subjugated and starving island is a little slower going than the ringing declaration by the Mets fan, but still the movement is there, and the guidelines are there. The structure of poetry is anything but. Poetry is written in lines, and is organized around those lines, be they long, short, or very short. Poets are aware that such things as sentences and paragraphs exist, and they can either either honor them or subvert them. Because poets don’t want you to move forward easily. Churchill did. The language of his “on the beaches” speech may be described as poetic, but it’s not, really. It’s structured in sentences, in paragraphs. It tells the reader (or listener—Churchill originally delivered it as a speech) that it’s OK to keep going, to move from one sentence to the next, one paragraph to the next, all the way to the end. Adrienne Rich…not so much. When she writes there are only three
she’s got all sorts of ways of telling you that it may not be OK to keep going, and that maybe that’s not what you want to do. If you’re sure it is what you want to do, you probably don’t like poetry. If you’re not so sure, you may well be a poetry lover. Rich is working at defiantly cross purposes with the syntax of sentence/paragraph. Not only does it take three lines of stopping and starting to complete one sentence, that one sentence actually runs over two paragraphs (or stanzas, as we call them in pobiz). And here’s another way poetry crosses you up. In prose, short, punchy sentences move you along quickly. That’s why crime novelist Mickey Spillane wrote things like: God, but it was fun! It was the way I liked it. No arguing, no talking to the stupid peasants. I just walked into that room with a tommy gun and shot their guts out. And Winston Churchill slowed the pace down with all those strung-together clauses about the beaches and the landing grounds and the fields and the streets, and slowed it down even more with all those qualifying clauses and phrases leading up to the rescue and liberation. Poetry is just the reverse. That’s why poets are mad, using Lewis Carroll’s definition: “To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?" "I suppose so," said Alice "Well, then," the Cat went on, "you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad." Poets use long lines when they want to speed the pace up. Like Allen Ginsberg: who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, Or they bounce along on lines rolled forward by meter, like John Masefield: There's a surf breaks on Los Muertos, and it never stops to roar, …where the bouncing ballad meter keeps you going, even when the words say they want you to come to anchor. Never mind that – we’re going ashore. Let’s get to it. But when they use short lines, they stop you in your tracks. You have to wait, because the line break tells you to, before you discover three what? Then when you find out it’s hours of dark, you have to stop again, and think about that, and the fact there’s also a stanza break involved is another clue to you that you’re supposed to stop. And at this point, you’re perhaps remembering the title of the poem, which is “In the North.” Here’s the whole poem. And since all that stopping pushes you back, you can very easily be pushed back to the title and start wondering, aren’t the nights supposed to be longer in the north? Oh, yeah, that’s in the winter. In the summer they’re shorter, and what are you supposed to with all that daytime, especially if you’re an old king, trapped by age and comfort as the young heroes pull out to sea, singing. And since Rich is a poet, growling when she’s happy and wagging her tail when she’s angry, the glories of summer and wealth and position and a beautiful beard are all revealed as a trap, which you’re only released from when the actual trap of a northern winter is sprung around you. And yes, it took me a lot more words to talk about it—and I could have used a lot more; I was just getting warmed up—than it did for Rich to say it, but that’s poetry, with its stops where you shouldn’t stop, and starts where you shouldn’t start, with a caesura that gives you a new sentence in the middle of a sentence (looking at a line as poetry’s equivalent of a sentence –a basic unit of words): in your night. You are Yeats said that no matter how long we work on a poem, …if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Stitching together words into grammatical units like sentences, unstitching them by breaking them into lines. Stitching them back with enjambments that let the reader know that this unit is stitched and unstitched at the same time—unstitched because it’s a stanza break, stitched because it continues a sentence. Unstitching lines by putting caesuras in the middle of them (but stitching two sentences by putting parts of them on the same line). Stitching things together with stanzas or unstitching them by making the stanzas end with enjambments, or simply in the middle of a thought. Like John Berryman:
And the Americans put Pound in a cage On the ground. Shih in his pocket luck jammed there And after four weeks were afraid he’d die Everyone revises, takes stuff out, puts stuff in (sometimes the same stuff). Novelists, essayists, playwrights. Revision is part of writing, perhaps the most important part. But no one stitches and unstitches like a poet, except maybe Penelope as she held the suitors at bay while waiting for Odysseus. And even more than her, because our stitching and unstitching is our warp and woof. We do it with grammar and syntax, and we do it with sound. Rhyme is perhaps our most potent stitch, but it’s not the original. Old English and Old Norse poetry used alliteration to stitch a line together, as seen here in Caedmon’s Hymn, thought by many to be the earliest surviving English poem. Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard, Now we must honour the guardian of heaven, From Daniel Paul O’Donnell’s web page The Old English line of poetry had a caesura at the center, and not a namby pamby punctuation mark as a caesura, but a longish space (unstitching). The units on either side of the caesura were stitched together by alliteration—the first letter of one, or preferably both words in the first part of the line, is repeated in the first stressed syllable of the second part. You wouldn’t really do it any more. It sounds forced to a modern ear, more the stuff of light verse or Dr. Seuss (of course, rhyme sounds that way to many modern ears, as well). Seamus Heaney does it, in his modern translation of Beowulf: So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by . . . There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes, . . . A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on …and Heaney’s deft touch makes it readable to the modern ear while at the same time retaining that aura of a different time. And Lewis Turco recreates a bygone era with his The Hero Enkidu, in which he creates his own epic hero out of Gilgamesh’s sidekick: Then he saw the wolf-man in agony and woe . Which proves, perhaps, that no form is moribund when confronted with the virtuosity of Heaney or Turco. Rhyme stitches lines together, and separates them from other lines, so neatly that rhymed couplets can become epigrams, as so many of Alexander Pope’s have: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; Shakespeare likes the clicking closed of a rhymed couplet let his audience know that a scene is ending: Discharge my followers: let them hence away,
But he also likes the delayed stitching-up that comes with a quatrain, as in Sonnet 138, with its delicious promise given in the opening lines: that he will rhyme both “truth” and “lies,” that he’ll do it in a way that will give us not only the wit of an epigram, but also the disturbing awareness that more subtle truths are to follow: When my love swears that she is made of truth, We have other ways of stitching with sound. Mary Oliver, in her excellent book on form, Rules for the Dance, writes about how this happens in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” writes about how each stanza is stitched together by the sounds of consonants—not the alliterative first consonants in a word, but sounds of consonants that weave their way through the stanza. The first stanza is soft and meditative, and the consonants are soft, rounded—“semivowels,” Oliver calls them, consonants that you can actually sound without attaching a vowel to them. Prominent are w, th, v, and ll. In the second stanza, as the little horse intrudes on the dreamy mood, Oliver points out that Frost introduces “little raps of sharper sound,” like the two k sounds in “think it queer.” In the third, the horse jolts the speaker out of his reverie by giving the harness bells a shake, and the k sounds are insistent, along with other harder consonants. Oliver points out that “I don't mean to suggest that Frost sat down and counted out the mutes, aspirates, etc., while writing the poem. Or that any poet does anything like this.” But what if you did? What if you paid conscious attention to the stitching value of sounds? Richard Hugo addresses this, in The Triggering Town. These are the first four lines of the fourth stanza of an early poem called “At the Stilli’s Mouth”: With the Stilli this defeated and the sea When I was a young poet I set an arbitrary rule that when I made a sound I felt was strong, a sound I liked especially, I’d make a similar sound three to eight syllables later. Of course it would often be a slant rhyme. Why three to eight? Don’t ask. You have to be silly to write poems at all. In this case the word “cascade” fell lovingly on my ear, and so, three syllables later, “suicide” [which] led to “victim of terrain” and “martyr,” associative notions at least, but also words that sound like other words in the passage, “martyr” like “drama” and “water,” “victim” like “final” and “Stilli” (Northwest colloquial for Stilliguamish, the river). When I taught undergraduate poetry workshops, I used to try to come up with assignments that would take students away from writing about their lives or their feelings, and get them to focus on the process (not that your own lives and feelings aren’t important, they’re just not what you really need to be studying). One such assignment dealt directly with the sound of words. Write a poem that’s three stanzas long. Each stanza six to eight lines, each line eight to twelve syllables. Each stanza must be controlled by a different vowel sound. That doesn’t mean every vowel sound in the stanza will be the same, but one vowel sound should dominate each stanza. The poem must more or less follow the rules of grammar, and be written in complete sentences. And it can’t mean anything. The last instruction was tossed in to keep them away from “meaningful” subjects like their lives or their feelings. I didn’t really expect poems that meant nothing—that would probably be an impossibility. It turned out to be a generally good assignment. I think my students learned something from it about how poems work. And the first time I gave it, I took the challenge myself. The result was a poem called “Le Soldat et Trois Soeurs.” LE SOLDAT ET LES TROIS SOEURS After he woke up, no one was quite sure spiffed up his pillows briskly, changed his sheets, At that the youngest, whose habit it was |