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The Fire
When a human is asked about a particular fire,
she comes close:
then it is too hot,
so she turns her face–
and that’s when the forest of her bearable life appears,
always on the other side of the fire. The fire
she’s been asked to tell the story of,
she has to turn from it, so the story you hear
is that of pines and twitching leaves
and how her body is like neither–
all the while there is a fire
at her back
which she feels in fine detail,
as if the flame were a dremel
and her back its etching glass.
You will not know all about the fire
simply because you asked.
When she speaks of the forest
this is what she is teaching you,
you who thought you were her master.
–Katie Ford, from Blood Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 2014)
I’ve been reading and re-reading Katie Ford’s collection Blood Lyrics off and on for over a week now. I think I keep coming back to some of the poems because of her use of metaphor and the duality in her poems.
I particularly like “The Fire” because I feel exactly what the speaker means. The poem uses the metaphor of a fire to write about when someone is asked about an event or occurrence in life. My guess is that it also refers to when someone asks about a particular poem. Writers often find themselves in situations where readers want to know exactly what is true–even in fiction. Many times people assume a poem is about the poet’s life, and that’s often not the case.
There’s also a fierceness in this poem in the way the speaker wants to protect what is hers. This strikes a chord with me because I’m introverted and shy, so I’ve struggled at times to take risks in my poems or to be bold because I am not comfortable putting myself out there, even if I’m not writing about myself.
The point of this poem, though, is that we don’t have to answer these questions about our writing. We don’t have to say, “Yes this is true. It happened to me.” That’s our decision only. I personally don’t think we should lie about our experiences, but that doesn’t mean we owe our readers details about our lives. I love the lines, “…so the story you hear / is that of pines and twitching leaves / and how her body is like neither–” because the point isn’t to find out what’s true and what happened. The point is to experience the poem. The point is the fire, “which she feels in fine detail, / as if the flame were a dremel / and her back its etching glass.”
We live in a culture where it’s okay to insert ourselves into the fine details of another person’s life. We become so preoccupied with other people’s lives that we forget to experience our own. We want so much more that we miss out on the way literature and art can shape and influence us because we’re so focused on the details we aren’t given. We think we deserve to know, but we don’t. We’re missing the point. And Ford is quick to remind us, “When she speaks of the forest / this is what she is teaching you, / you who thought you were her master.” This turn in the poem resonates with me because even if I write a personal poem, a “true story” poem, the only details I owe anyone are the ones I leave on the page. I’m not obligated to fill in the blanks. Doing so would lessen the power of my writing. So, write without fear. And leave it all on the page.
-S
af·ter·glow
af·ter·glow \≈\ n. I. The light. esp. in the Ohio sky after sun-
set: as in the look of the mother-of-pearl air during the morning’s
afterglow. 2. The glow continuing after the disappearance of a
flame, as of a match or a lover, and sometimes regarded as a type
of phosphorescent ghost: This balm, this bath of light / This
cocktail of lust and sorrow, / This rumor of faithless love on a
neighbor’s lips, / This Monday morning, this Friday night, / This
pendulum of my heart, / This salve for my soul, / This tremble
from your body / This breast aflame, this bed ablaze / Where you
rub oil on my feet, / Where we spoon and, before sunrise, turn
away / And I dream, eyes open, / swimming / In this room’s pitch-
dark landscape.
–A. Van Jordan
I’ve been reading and rereading Jordan’s collection M·A·C·N·O·L·I·A for the last couple of weeks. It takes me a while to get through it because along the way I see something in a poem that inspires me to either write a poem or revise one I’ve already written, and “af·ter·glow” is one that has helped me to look at my own poetry in a new light.
Throughout the collection, there are poems that are formatted like dictionary entries. Some of them use actual definitions as part of the poems, while others, like this one, simply provide a new definition for the particular word. There are two things that strike me about this particular form. First, it offers a frame and context for the poem. If you know the heart of a poem is in this one word or image, then you can build on it from there. Writing the poem in the form of a definition can be freeing in a way because it helps you lock your focus in place; it helps you be extremely specific and detailed without getting lost along the way.
The second thing that really strikes me about this is the form itself: it’s a prose poem. I’ve never been a fan of prose poems and many people argue that prose poems don’t exist: they either aren’t really poems or they are poems that simply lack enjambment of any kind. One thing that is particularly interesting about this prose poem is that it includes the / to indicate a pause. Typically, you consider a line break as a short or brief pause in a poem, and you break a line in a place that draws the reader forward. This doesn’t mean that when you read the poem aloud you should pause at the end of each line, but it is a place for a short breath or for emphasis. I’ve written extensively about the various ways the individual lines can function in a poem and how a line break can add weight and meaning, but in a prose poem, you don’t have line breaks. You start writing at the left and basically move to the right until you run out of space, like you would in fiction or nonfiction.
The inclusion of the / in this poem provides a caesura or pause in this poem where there otherwise might not be one. A caesura is a pause in a line of poetry. We know that we pause at a period or a comma, but there are other ways to create a caesura, and these strong pauses help to create musicality and rhythm within a line. How does the / function as a pause? It makes us stop and take note of what we’ve just read. Even if it’s for a brief moment, it creates a break in the text, and that can affect how we read, hear, and process the poem. Consider the line “of phosphorescent ghost: This balm, this bath of light / This.” Here the / helps to add emphasis to the phrase “This blame, this bath of light.” By placing the / after “light,” we pause, then we read the word “This.” The / slows us down and that draws our attention to particular phrases. The two other lines where I think this technique works especially well in the poem is in the lines, “pendulum of my heart, / This salve for my soul, / This tremble” and “away / And I dream, eyes open, / swimming / In this room’s pitch-.” In these lines, the / works to slow us down and that adds as much weight to the poem as it would if the lines themselves had been broken.
I really love A. Van Jordan’s collection and will probably write about at least one other poem in it in the future. However, you should really consider reading it. I’ve already picked up two new techniques for my own poems: writing a poem as a definition and creating more caesuras in my poetic lines.
-S
In Which of These Details Does God Inhere?
"God is in the details.“
Albert Einstein
In which of these details does God inhere?
The woman’s head in the boy’s lap? His punctured lung?
The place where she had bitten through her tongue?
The drunk’s truck in three pieces? The drunk’s beer,
Tossed from the cooler, made to disappear?
The silk tree whose pink flowers overhung
The roadside and dropped limp strings among
The wreckage? The steering column, like a spear?
Where in the details, the cleverness of man
To add a grace note God might understand,
Does God inhere, cold sober, thunderstruck?
I think it’s here, in this one: the open can
The drunk placed by the dead woman’s hand,
Telling her son, who cried for help, "Good luck.”
–Mark Jarman
My life right now feels like complete chaos because we’ve reached the research paper part of the semester, which means I have a lot of grading to do right now, and I’m working to put together the literary journal that’s published by the community college where I teach. What this really means is that I haven’t made time to read new poetry or to work on my own writing. It’s always been a struggle to actively study and work on my writing during the academic year, but this past year I’ve been able to develop ways to keep myself involved with writing and poetry, at least to some extent, and I’ve started noticing how even little things have helped me develop more as a poet. One thing I try to do, even when I’m swamped, is turn to some of my favorite collections and poets, particularly those that relate to what I’m trying to consider with my own work. Today’s poem is from Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets, a collection I’ve been studying as I work to revise, shape, and reconsider some of the pieces in my persona poem manuscript.
This poem is clearly a traditional sonnet. It’s 14 lines long and it follows the rhyme and meter scheme of a traditional sonnet, but what I really like about it is the fact that when I’m reading it, I forget it’s a sonnet. I don’t get caught up by the end rhyme. The rhyme seems natural and it doesn’t glare at me and say, “Hey, stop and pay attention to all the words at the ends of the lines.” That’s important because so often end rhyme can feel singsongy and can distract from the most important aspects of the poem.
There is a lot of deliberateness here, particularly with the line breaks and in word choice. This is something I’ve been looking at in my own work. I have a complete manuscript, and I took a break from it for a few months because I knew I needed space from the poems. I’d been working on them diligently for quite a while, and I needed time away so that I could be more objective in determining if and where to revise. Part of what’s been important to me is shaping each persona’s poem into a form (whether free verse or sonnet or some other form) that exemplifies both the persona’s characteristics and the poetic elements. In short, I don’t want my poems to all be shaped like dramatic monologues. I want them to have more depth, and I want the reader to see them as more than a character standing on a soapbox, telling his or her story. For me, looking at this collection of sonnets has helped because it’s made me realize just how deliberate I need to be in my choices, whether the choice is about form or line breaks or even whether or not to even include a poem in the collection.
The poem poses a very important question and it challenges the belief that God is in all things because we often struggle to understand why particular things happen. This poem magnifies that feeling, but it doesn’t beat us over the head with it. It’s subtle, but the end really packs a punch.
I like this poem a lot as a reader because it asks important questions, and it really makes me think. As a poet, I love this poem because it makes me ask questions of my own work and, in turn, makes me a better poet and writer.
-S
Return to Rome
Today in Rome, heading down
Michelangelo’s Spanish Steps,
under an unchanging moon,
I held on to the balustrade,
grateful for his giving me a hand.
All for love, I stumbled over the past
as if it were my own feet. Here, in my twenties,
I was lost in love and poetry. Along the Tiber,
I made up Cubist Shakespearean games.
(In writing, even in those days,
I cannot say it was popular to have “subjects”
any more than painters used sitters. But I did.)
I played with an ignorant mirror for an audience:
myself, embroiled with personae
from Antony and Cleopatra. Delusions of grandeur!
They were for a time my foul-weather friends–
as once I played with soldiers
on the mountainous countryside of a purple blanket.
–Stanley Moss
I’ve had this poem bookmarked for a while now and it seems appropriate that I’m running across it again at this point in time. It’s from his collection A History of Color: New and Selected Poems by Seven Stories Press.
This poem is fitting for this time in my life for multiple reasons. For one, it’s a reflective poem, and I’ve been in a reflective sort of mood lately (that is, when I’ve had time to think or reflect on anything). I’m approaching a birthday that is apparently a fairly decent milestone in one’s life, and I’m just not sure how I feel about it. I’ve had friends who have slightly panicked about their own milestones. They’ve had wild nights, made rash decisions, and pierced things, while other friends of mine have handled it quite well. How do I feel about it? Well, I’m beginning to think that I’m going to be on the fence about everything my entire life. I’m usually stuck close to the middle in my thoughts and beliefs, and that’s where I am right now. Part of me wants to throw one big hooray party and make poor decisions like I’m still young, but most of the time I’m just like, “eh. Give me a book.” Does this make me uninteresting? Unlively? I’m not sure.
I’ve been thinking about my twenties a lot lately. It was a good decade for me: I traveled a fair amount, finished my MFA, published a little, wrote quite a bit, made wonderful friends from all over, worked in a job that I was clueless about but grew to love (television production), and then transitioned into a job that I really love, even when I’m swamped with papers (which is all the time apparently). When I think about that time in my life, I’m very grateful for those who gave me their hand. I’ve been very fortunate to work with and befriend a lot of truly fantastical people in a variety of capacities.
To a huge extent, I’m still “lost in love and poetry,” and part of me hopes that never changes. That’s also the line in the poem where the speaker becomes reflective about his own writing, and it’s the part of the poem I appreciate most. I can pinpoint the actual pieces where my writing stepped up its game through the years. Sometimes I know what brought on the shift, and sometimes I’m not sure, but I do know the exact essays or poems that indicate growth in myself as a writer. Recently, I realized that in order to grow as a writer, I need to experience life more. I guess you could say I’m moving out of my delusions of grandeur, and I’m becoming more realistic about what stories I feel compelled to tell. And so it’s good to return and reflect on the past because that helps us approach the present with a greater appreciation for where our journey has brought us. I won’t lie, though. A small part of me will always be a kid who enjoys imagination as much or more than reality, except my blanket will probably be red.
-S
Depressed by a Bad Book of Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me
Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone.
I climb a slight rise of grass.
I do not want to disturb the ants
Who are walking single file up the fence post,
Carrying small white petals,
Casting shadows so frail I can see through them.
I close my eyes for a moment, and listen.
The old grasshoppers
Are tired, they leap heavily now,
Their thighs are burdened.
I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.
Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins
In the maple trees.
–James Wright
I believe in being honest, so I think I should just own up to how I’ve been feeling lately: exhausted. I’m exhausted by teaching, by reading, by grading papers, by writing poetry and reading poetry and writing about poetry. I am just bone tired. I usually reach this state at some point in the semester, and these past few weeks have just sucked the life out of me. I mean this in the best of ways. I love teaching. I love my students. I love writing, reading, and studying, but when life gets as busy as it has been the last month or so, I eventually just need a break. I’ve reached this point and right now I’m trying to just hang in there these next few weeks until the semester ends. Then I can catch up on sleep and watch Christmas movies and recover my mental energy. I share all of that to say this: you need a reliable store of poetry and poets to turn to when you’re too exhausted to delve into something new. For me, James Wright is one of those poets.
I have always loved James Wright’s poetry for a number of reasons. First, he often writes about the agrarian and natural world. He finds peace in nature, and I can relate to that. I also love how his poems can surprise me, and I love his titles. When I was in graduate school, I challenged myself to write poems with really long titles. It was fun to see what I could come up with.
I particularly like this poem because it encompasses how I feel right now. I haven’t read a particularly bad book of poetry lately. Although sometimes I don’t love a collection as much as I’d like, I usually do find something I can at least appreciate and learn from. I haven’t had time or energy to spend with a new collection lately, and I feel depressed about that because I try to keep reading and discovering new poets and poems. This poem, however, reminds me that it’s okay to put the book down and turn towards other things for inspiration.
I also just finished editing my manuscript of persona poems, and it is as complete as it can be (at least until I let it rest, submit it to contests, etc.), and for me, taking time to pay attention to the little things has been a relief. In writing, I’ve been engrossed in this world of the personas in my collection, and in teaching, I’ve been swimming in drafts of essays. I haven’t taken the time to notice or participate in the world around me. I’ve made more of an effort the last couple of weeks, but even then, I haven’t taken time to slow down, breathe, and spend some time outside with nature. I really love my neighborhood, and I need to explore it again. I need to let go of all of my stress and listen for the crickets. The fact that there are poets I love and collections I can turn to when I feel overwhelmed makes me value poetry even more because this reminds me that it’s okay to slow down and reacquaint myself with the familiar. I hope you, too, have these poems, poetry, and collections that you can rely on, and if you don’t, I’d be happy to recommend some.
-S
40 Fortunes
1. There isn’t an ocean for a thousand miles, but that doesn’t mean this
isn’t the beach.
2. At the necessary moment, going naked will be your most convincing
disguise.
3. If you can fix a lawn mower with a pen knife, you are a funny old
man.
4. Desert crossings are impressive only if the desert has been given
an ominous name. Go forth and name your deserts.
5. Only fools ride the train facing backwards.
6. Among life’s great injustices: no commemorative stamp has been
issued in your honor, while several have been for Muppets.
7. Rare is the picnic that doesn’t spread itself atop a snowman cemetery.
8. If you’re alive enough to feel lighter, then the appendectomy was a
success.
9. Muppets, appendectomy, snowman: the longer a list grows, the
more suspicious its lacunae.
10. Years from now, you will need this combination to escape: Right:
23. Left: 14. Right: 8.
11. No matter who walks with you into the woods, you walk into the
woods alone.
12. Your Nature Number is 27. Your Destiny Number is 14. Your idea of
a decent stir fry is an abomination.
13. Here is the name of the person who truly loves you the most:
.
14. Life is full of little disappointments. The country of Turkey has no
state bird.
15. Art is the uneraseable image: on your mother’s kitchen counter, a
bouquet of knives.
16. You don’t realize how cruel you can be. Do you find bandanas funny
simply because poor people use them as handkerchiefs?
17. Accident is as sure a path to insight as will. The inventor of the
typewriter, for instance, was trying to create a prosthetic for the
blind.
18. Every bridge gives the traveler two destinations, though one is
always retreat.
19. Do not reveal your deceit lest you reduce it to mere crime.
20. The dream state is the only beautiful form of suffocation.
21. With friends by your side, fight with your fists. With a wall at your
back, fight with compliments.
22. The ploughman prays for rain; the roof of your mouth for the pizza
to cool; what are our thirties supposed to be good for again?
23. “That was the audition,” says the avant-garde director, “and you
nailed it! We’re looking to cast someone who knows how to stand
in line nervously.”
24. Your life, like a Ferris Wheel, will ultimately deliver you facing
backwards at a destination that looks suspiciously similar to your
initial point of departure.
25. “Daddy, I’m afraid of dying,” says the little girl. “But there’s nothing
to be afraid of, silly,” says the father, suddenly terrified of his child.
26. God is the only one among us who has mastered invisibility. This
space has been intentionally left blank.
27. “Son, I am not really your father,” says the old man. “Father,”
responds the young man, “it’s too late.”
28. Bald men know.
29. If that cloud looks like a lion, what does a lion look like? Answer: the
statues outside the museum. People used to go there to see what a
naked lady looks like.
30. We fuck what we think we lack.
31. Write your phone number here: . Drop this
in public. Something wonderful is about to happen.
32. Show a scientist the moon and he’ll tell you how it got there. Show
a poet the moon and he’ll start thinking about your wife.
33. Read frequently, but beware of being read to, too close it is to being
told what to do.
34. Do not aspire to be the tiger. Aspire to be the sparrow who knows
how to sit upon the tiger’s back.
35. “No ideas but in things,” reads our guidebook as we continue to
refine our list: moon, sparrow, tiger’s back.
36. A one-line poem called “Upon Leaving the Infertility Clinic”:
Six times I tried to tie my necktie, and not once did I get it right.
37. The reporter of any miracle tells a lie.
38. You don’t have to travel farther than the birth canal to be born a
wanderer.
39. Let the leaves forget the tune that the wind can never quite blow.
Then forget the leaves.
40. Beware of the wolves. They’ve been raised by wolves.
–Dobby Gibson
This poem from Dobby Gibson’s collection It Becomes You is a list poem that’s positioned smack-dab in the middle of the book. My attention was first drawn to it mainly because I’ve been seeing these types of list poems everywhere lately. Some of them are numbered, while others are not. For instance, Matthew Dickman has been posting some really fascinating list poems on his instagram. I really love these types of poems because they’re like little flashes of insight and story that all work together to create a bigger picture, like pointillism or a patchwork quilt.
Often, the titles of these poems provide the anchor that helps us stay focused. Otherwise, we might get lost along the way. I really love the idea that each of these is a fortune, and I’ve been trying to pick out which one I want for myself. My favorites include “Only fools ride the train facing backwards,” “Rare is the picnic that doesn’t spread itself atop a snowman cemetery,” “Life is full of little disappointments. The country of Turkey has no / state bird,” “The dream state is the only beautiful form of suffocation,” and “‘No ideas but in things,’ reads our guidebook as we continue to / refine our list: moon, sparrow, tiger’s back.”
There’s a lot of poetic elements that tend to get left out of these poems, but one thing I think this poem has to offer is that each item could be considered a truth. The poem is titled “40 Fortunes,” and each item could be a fortune, but there’s also a lot of honesty in these lines. Granted, we arrive there in a really interesting way (think “Rare is the picnic that doesn’t spread itself atop a snowman cemetery”), and I think this helps the list poem to do what poetry should do best: present the perspective in a new light. Consider #25. In this fortune, the father becomes cognizant of his own child’s awareness and perception. It’s unsettling to think about children being so aware of how life really works, but they’re much more perceptive than we give them credit for. It’s a very calculated move to approach the loss of innocence in this way because it’s not just the child’s loss; it’s also the father’s. I’m not sure I would have paid this much attention to list poems a few years ago, but when I really study them, there’s a lot to be learned, both as a writer and as a person.
I don’t usually do this, but here’s a little exercise for you: Go write a list poem. Come up with your own “40 Fortunes” or something similar. List all the things you hate about your lover or your car or your cat. List all the things you’re afraid of and juxtapose them with all the things you’ve conquered. List your grocery items and explain what meal they’re a part of or who will eat them. List it all, but list it in a new way!
-S
A Wife Explains Why She Likes Country
Because those cows in the bottomland are black and white, colors
anyone can understand, even against the green
of the grass, where they glide like yes and no, nothing in between
because in the country, heartache has nowhere to hide,
it’s the Church of Abundant Life, the Alamo,
the hubbub of the hoi polloi, the parallel lines of rail fences,
because I like rodeos more than I like golf,
because there’s something about the sound of mealworms and
leeches and the dream of a double-wide
that reminds me this is America, because of the simple pleasure
of a last chance, because sometimes whiskey
tastes better than wine, because hauling hogs on the road
is as good as it gets when the big bodies are layered like pigs in a cake,
not one layer but two,
because only country has a gun with a full choke and slide guitar
that melts playing it cool into sweaty surrender in one note,
because in country you can smoke forever and it’ll never kill you,
because roadbeds, flatbeds, your bed or mine,
because the package store is right across from the chicken plant
and it sells boiled peanuts, because I’m fixin’ to wear boots to the dance
and make my hair bigger, because no smarty-pants, just easy rhymes,
perfect love, because I’m lost deep within myself and the sad songs call me out,
because even you with your superior aesthetic cried
when Tammy Wynette died,
because my people
came from dirt.
—Barbara Ras
This poem is pure proof that asking your students to read poems and find poems that they like can sometimes pay off. Several of my classes just completed an exercise where they had to visit The Writer’s Almanac and find a poem they liked, any poem. One student found this one, and I’ll admit I’m a bit jealous I didn’t already know this poem and poet.
As a class, we discussed this poem last week, but I’ve continued to come back to it and even shared it with other classes because I have enjoyed it so much. I’ve committed to blogging about at least one poem per week for Structure and Style, and I’ll admit sometimes that’s hard to do because I get busy and stressed out and tired of thinking critically about poems. I am also a poet, so I not only read poetry to enjoy it and analyze it, but I also read it to learn more about the craft. It can be overwhelming, but poems like this one, poems that I love from the get-go and still think about when I’m doing everything EXCEPT think about poetry (grading, cooking, hitting the snooze button for the second or third time), poems like this one make me happy and excited to write, read, and analyze.
Part of why I like this poem is because I’m from the country and there’s ambiguity starting right with the title because “Why She Likes Country” is clearly a reference to country music, but it’s also a reference to the place, the town in the middle of nowhere that’s surrounded by other towns in the middle of nowhere. I totally understand lines like “heartache has nowhere to hide,” “the sound of mealworms,” “the dream of a double-wide,” “the package store is right across from the chicken plant,” and the big hair. I have lived this life.
I also really love poems that throw you right into the scene and are so full of local color and description, you know where you’re at and what’s going on, even if you’re in the unfamiliar. All of these images are things that we can picture, even if we haven’t lived that life. We understand the “simple pleasure of last chance,” “the parallel lines of rail fences,” and “the sad songs” calling you, and we’ve seen the black and white cows and the grass, the rodeo, and the hauling hogs. I fully understand not everyone has the same love or respect for this way of life, but we can all relate to the nitty gritty, particularly if we’re part of the 99% in this country, because sometimes life gets messy and we long for what feels simple.
There’s a universality in this poem and it’s most evident in the closing lines: “because even you with your superior aesthetic cried / when Tammy Wynette died.” The poem moves from the very specific (the cows in the field) and slowly pans out to show the bigger picture, and even if you could ignore all the other things, you couldn’t escape the power of Tammy Wynette. Then, with those last two lines, we’re thrown back to the specific: “because my people / come from dirt.” This is both specific, in reference to the rural, and universal in its Biblical reference to Genesis 3:19: “for thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
I really am glad to have students who take the time to consider their assignments, and I’m really excited to check out some of Barbara Ras’s poetry collections.
-S
The Poetic Line
Here at Structure and Style, we spend a lot of time discussing poetry on the blog and amongst ourselves. One thing we really wanted to do as part of our two year anniversary celebration was write an essay about an aspect of poetry that we really enjoy or are intrigued by because the more you understand poetry, the more you enjoy it. If you read any of my posts at all, especially in the last year or so, you know that I pay attention to line breaks in a poem, so this essay was born out of my love for the line and my attempt to explain line breaks to my co-creator.
One main thing that separates poetry from prose is the poetic line and use of line breaks. You can either end a line with an end stop or employ enjambment and break the line where it might not naturally break. An end stop would be a comma, dash, or ending punctuation to a sentence or question. Whether or not you use end stop or enjambment can often depend on if you’re writing in a particular form, whether it’s an established form or one that you’ve created, or if you’re trying to draw attention to a particular phrase or image. The line can also be broken to control the pacing of a poem.
If you’re going to break a sentence mid-way or quarter way or any place where it might not naturally pause or end, there should be some reason for it. Often, the break is used to draw the reader further into the poem. The line break leaves a word at the end of a line that makes you wonder what comes next and you keep reading. Take a look at a couple of lines from Tom C. Hunley’s “Ode to Being a Wreck:” “when I woke hungover / in someone else’s car and couldn’t / find my own. You were there when…”
I think breaking the line at “when” keeps pulling you further into the poem because you wonder “when what?” These breaks don’t have to be obvious and they might not be something that the naked eye would pay much attention to, but they can make all the difference if you’re studying a poem for scholarly purposes, to further improve your own writing, or to simply enjoy the poem at a deeper level.
Another reason to break a line in a particular place is to add emphasis to a particular line or to add depth and meaning to the line. When you read a poetic sentence, it means one thing, but when you look at the lines themselves, they mean something else or something more altogether. Look at these lines from Jan Beatty’s “Love Poem w/ Strat:” "he’s got a hard-on for traditional, fuck / special effects, fuck overplay/he’s got love / for his whammy bar, got love…“
This isn’t the entire sentence, but when you read it in one long, rambling sentence, it’s simply talking about his love for the guitar and all the parts of it, and when you study the individual lines, there’s more implication and innuendo: "he’s got a hard on for traditional, fuck.” This line has weight to it. Even though many of the lines in this poem use enjambment, some of those lines are more significant than others and stand out more than others, and that’s true for any poem.
One other thing that breaking the line can do is create a contrast in imagery or just a contrast in general. Look at Matthew Dickman’s “Getting It Right.” The entire poem is a contrast of images where he compares the woman’s body to these outrageous things, but often one line is outrageous and the next is not quite so–or the first two are outrageous and the third is not quite so (if you read them as separate lines, not as sentences):
Your thighs are two boats burned out
of redwoods trees. I want to go sailing. Your thighs, the long breath of them
under the blue denim of your high-end jeans,
could starve me to death, could make me cry and cry.
Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas,
a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once
when I was falling in love with hills.
Your ass is a string quartet,
the northern lights tucked tightly into bed
between a high-count-of-cotton sheets.
In the line, “Your thighs are two boats burned out,” the line break makes you keep reading because you want to know what they’re burned out of, and since when are thighs boats or burned out anyway? You also have two lines of these crazy images: “thighs two boats burned out / of redwood trees. I want to go sailing. Your thighs, the long breath of them / under the blue denim of high-end jeans.” That line “under the blue denim of high-end jeans” offers a balance to all these contrasting images in the two lines before it. It’s an ordinary line and could be attached to a very ordinary image and it is (the thighs), but it’s also attached to the boats and the trees. It offers balance. The line “a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once” does the same thing, as does “between a high-count-of-cotton sheets.” I think Dickman uses these lines to offer balance throughout the poem. If you read the poem closely, or any of his poetry for that matter, Dickman actually does a lot of amazing things with his line breaks.
This all isn’t to say that using end stop and breaking the line at a comma, dash, period, etc. is a bad thing. It’s not. Even a poem that uses end stop throughout can have really evocative individual lines. Sometimes line breaks relate to form in terms of syllabics or stresses, as well (see Shakespeare). It really just depends on where you’re going with the poem and what you want to emphasize.
When I’m writing, I try to write the poem and break the lines where I think they should be broken, but when I go back and revise, I pay more attention to where I broke the lines and I always revise the line breaks to some extent. Sometimes it’s best to just get the poem out on the page and then go in and play around. I have also had many, many poets tell me not to break the line with words like “and,” “or,” “but,” etc. and that’s good advice, particularly when you’re a newer poet, but I’ve also read poems that broke the lines with these words and it worked successfully. It’s a little tricky to pull off–there needs to be a good reason for it–which is probably why it’s easier to say, “Don’t do it.” It is something that could create tension, but it’s not the best kind of tension and it can get frustrating if you read an entire poem and the lines break on all of the conjunctions.
The best advice I can give to a writer of poetry is this: don’t be afraid to experiment with your line breaks. Go in, play around, see what happens. You can always fix the lines or neglect to save the changes. At the same time, it’s equally important to read poetry and to study how and why poets are breaking their lines where they do. Often, so many people want to write, but they don’t want to read, which prevents them from developing their craft. As a reader, study the lines to see if you can find new meaning and new connections that you might not have noticed at first. Regardless of why you do it, deeply considering the line breaks can make reading a poem a much more rewarding experience.
-S
Words for Worry
Another word for father is worry.
Worry boils the water
for tea in the middle of the night.
Worry trimmed the child’s nails before
singing him to sleep.
Another word for son is delight,
another word, hidden.
And another is One-Who-Goes-Away.
Yet another, One-Who-Returns.
So many words for son:
He-Dreams-for-All-Our-Sakes.
His-Play-Vouchsafes-Our-Winter-Share.
His-Dispersal-Wins-the-Birds.
But only one word for father.
And sometimes a man is both.
Which is to say sometimes a man
manifests mysteries beyond
his own understanding.
For instance, being the one and the many,
and the loneliness of either. Or
the living light we see by, we never see. Or
the sole word weighs
heavy as a various name.
And sleepless worry folds the laundry for tomorrow.
Tired worry wakes the child for school.
Orphan worry writes the note he hides
in the child’s lunch bag.
It begins, Dear Firefly….
–Li-Young Lee
I’ve had this poem set aside for quite a while now, but I held onto it until it was time for Father’s Day. I think there’s an appropriate poem for every occasion.
What I really love about this poem, and it’s something I try to do in some of my own poetry, is the use of personification. Worry takes on human form and completes human tasks. Just as there are different types of people, there are different types of worry, and each one represents one aspect of being a father, or at least what being a father would mean for a lot of people.
Yet this poem is about more than just being a father. This poem is also about being a child. There are multiple examples of worry that could simply replace the word father in the poem: “And sleepless [father] folds the laundry for tomorrow. Tired [father] wakes the child for school. But in the last stanza, there’s a new kind of father, an orphan father. The use of the word orphan implies that the father himself either never had a father or no longer has one. I think the use of the word orphan here is a perfect example of how playing with language and choosing the right word can add so much depth and complexity to a poem without being obtuse or abstract. We see worry perform these tasks because we’ve performed these tasks. We understand the weight that falls with the phrase "orphan worry” because some day, or maybe now, we won’t have parents.
I’m not a parent yet, but I connect with this poem on a deeper level, and that’s something I think is very important in poetry. A poet must find a way to reach even the remotest of readers, whether it’s through language, form, story, rhythm, rhyme, etc. It would be an interesting revision exercise, or even as you’re writing a new poem, to take a poem you’ve written and replace one of the nouns or pronouns with an emotion you’re trying to portray, just to see what might develop.
-S
Piscatory Diner
I’m squeezed behind Formica and chrome, sitting in a diner booth
waiting for my steak and eggs, spitting tobacco into an empty Coke can,
and scratching some words on a paper napkin,
just hoping to hook a rhythm on a stale bait while
outside in the millbrick midnight, the canals of the Merrimack
run red in the blood glow of brake lights.
Casting my lines across these city veins where carp slip in the muck
among blown tires, immigrant bones, and the used-up breath of
all of us bottom-feeding for meaning, I try
to fishplate this downtown mise en scène
of a hooker named Flowers sucking glass dick in an alley,
then stilletto-stepping through the parking lot
where a couple stumbles toward their car from the Worthen bar,
their tongues tangled as they lean against a burnt-out street light
while two kids hooded in gang rags slide like cobras
into the diner, smoking butts and taking stools in the corner
near Jimmy Sullivan, the old bantam weight whose sauced body
bobs and weaves over a half-eaten turkey sandwich
served by a waitress walking under nicotine halos
who smiles through too much makeup at my going hungry
as a hairnetted cook throws baking soda on a grease fire
that shuts down the grill for the night.
–Matt Miller
A friend of mine recommended I check out Matt Miller’s poems that are featured in the Winter 2013 issue of Drafthorse, and I am really glad I did. Read them and also watch the videos of Miller reading his poems.
What I really like about this poem is the way it throws you into the story. Right from the start, you’re in the scene and you see the speaker in the diner. Miller includes all of these details that draw us further into the atmosphere and the poem: the tobacco in the empty Coke can, canals that run red in the glow of brake lights, two kids sliding into the diner, the grease fire. We’re thrust forward with each line, like we’re surveying a scene and trying to make sense of it, but there’s no time so we just go with it.
The language in this poem is very precise. It revolves around the diner, the town, and fish. It’s colloquial, but in a different kind of way. I love some of the descriptions: “millbrick midnight,” “hook a rhythm on a stale bait,” “Casting my lines across these city veins,” “all of us bottom-feeding for meaning,” “stiletto-stepping,” “two kids hooded gang rags slides like cobras,” “bantam weight whose sauced body / bobs,” and “nicotine halos.” There’s so much juxtaposition in these descriptions, in these things that aren’t necessarily related, yet when I read this poem, I picture the story unfolding because these descriptions make sense. This is how it is. And this is poetry at its finest.
Often when people recommend poems or poets, I’m skeptical, but today I’m thrilled that I took time from grading essays to explore this recommendation. I intend to keep reading this poem and many more of Matt Miller’s because there’s a lot I can learn from him, and I think that studying his poetry will help me become a better poet. Can you tell I’m excited?
-S
