13 Ways of Thinking About the Poetic Line
Brilliant necessary necessary necessary list by poet Dana Gioia. The line is THE engine of the poem: “Lineation is the most basic and essential organizing principle of verse.”
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“How a Poem Means” class takes on Terrance Hayes’ “Sonnet”
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Last night in my workshop “The Art of Craft” we began our discussion about how a poem means. Not “what it means,” but how poems work, how to pay attention to music, rhythm, sound, repetition, what happens at the end of lines, tenor, tone, and all such matters. The first poem we took on was Martín Espada’s “Alabanza,” and we talked our way through it for a good long while. (Watch Martín read it if you don’t know it already!)
Next we took on the Terrance Hayes’ poem “Sonnet”:
Sonnet
Terrance HayesWe sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
Everyone read it aloud (which you should do, too, because the experience of reading the poem out loud is very different than having your eyes glance over it!). A few things about the poem we discovered:
1. By the time you are done reading the same line 14 times, you are SO over smiling. Which is, of course, one of the meanings of the poem.
2. Each line jerks you back and forth between two pairs of sounds, “we” and “watermelon” and “sliced” and “smiles.”
3. The similarity in sounds between “sliced” and “smiles” makes the latter seem not so much smiley at all.
4. The separation of the first twelve lines into 3 stanzas creates cycles of repetition, which both pace the poem and trap you in the nearly-never-ending cycles. And the last two lines, home of the volta in a traditional sonnet, promise a change or resolution. But this doesn’t happen in the words or sounds of the lines, which stay in the same, but in the finality of them. After the reading the line in sets of four, reading it only twice stops you, breaks the pattern, and that breaking IS the resolution of the poem. (or, as Ezra said, “We are SO not slicing watermelons and smiling anymore).
5. Watermelons are the physical and emotional center of the poem. If the slicing and smiling are over by the end, the softer sounds of the “we” and “watermelon” remain hanging in our ears.
6. And this (thanks, MJ!) which I had NEVER seen in the poem: the sounds of the word “sonnet” appear in order across each line. S in slice, ON in watermelon, T in into. Hayes is clearly using the sonnet form, by breaking it, to make a new kind of meaning, but at the same time harnessing the power of the form. Wow.
Next week we take on two different villanelles will discussing how syntax and voice create the spine and joints of a poem. There’s still space in the class if you want to join in! Register here: The Art of Craft Series
once more into the archives…. “The War”
Again, from either a 9th or 10th grade (so 1978 or ’79) creative writing class. The actual page has the words “picture writing” printed across the top.
The War
One day, the governments of America, Russia, China, Japan, Canada, Germany, England, France, Mexico, Switzerland, and Italy decided to have a war. They decided to have this war in the Sahara Desert, so the bombs wouldn’t destroy their lands.
The governments started drafting people. They even drafted women. They started producing weapons and shipping them to Africa. The date was set, and the troops were sent down.
But none of the people like the idea. There was no reason to go to war. None of them wanted to kill anyone just because their government said to.
When the day arrived, five hundred million people met in the middle of the desert. But none had weapons. They had refused to fight.
So instead they had picnics with the provisions. The younger men had tank races. People of all nationalities made friends with each other. They posed with their new friends for pictures, which were taken from the bombers. The bombs were re-fused, and they set off a beautiful fireworks display. This went on for two weeks.
As for the people who wanted to fight, they were loaded on a special ship, and sent into deepest space, where they could never harm anyone again. The End.
out of the archives…
This poem, from, I think, 9th grade, with original syntax and spelling unchanged:
Study Hall
Quiet
Is the rule here.
As pages rustle
As pencils write.
Murmers
Are launched here
Science, English, Math
Float thru the air
Can you
catch some?
Dreams
Are manufactured here
Happy or sad,
They come cheaply,
Half price on Friday
“deeper than dirt” by Rachel McKibbens, the best piece of writing you will read today, or maybe even this week or month
deeper than dirt
Rachel McKibbensafter the poet asked how I would bury my brother
Beyond the carrots and blind white worms, beyond
the yellowing bone orchards and corkscrew roots,
beyond the center of this churchless earth, beloved Peter,
my little sorcerer, brought up dirty & wrong, you deserve more
than to be smothered in mud. For all the gravel you were fed,
for every bruise and knot that named you, I must plant you
in a bed of blood-hot muscle, must deliver you into me,
so I may
carry you as the only mother you have ever known.
About This Poem
“Poets of witness navigate the world in such a peculiar way, seeking justice through writing; punishing and praising with language. This poem is entirely for my quiet brother who is blessed with the gift of withholding.”
–Rachel McKibbens
Poem-A-Day
Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.
Into the Dark & Emptying Field
Copyright © 2013 by Rachel McKibbens. Used with permission of the author.
“Suddenly” Sharon Olds’ poem for Ruth Stone
Too many people close to me seem to be wrestling with grief right now, the horrible weight of the loss of it. So here is Sharon Olds’ poem about the death of poet Ruth Stone, which is about the loss but even more about the love and legacy and connection of poet to poet, woman to woman, body to body.
Suddenly
by Sharon Olds(Ruth Stone, June 8, 1915 – November 19, 2011)
And suddenly, it’s today, it’s this morning
they are putting Ruth into the earth,
her breasts going down, under the hill,
like the moon and sun going down together.
O I know, it’s not Ruth—what was Ruth
went out, slowly, but this was her form,
beautiful and powerful
as the old, gorgeous goddesses who were
terrible, too, not telling a liefor anyone—and she’d been left here so long, among
mortals, by her mate—who could not,
one hour, bear to go on being human.
And I’ve gone a little crazy myself
with her going, which seems to go against logic,
the way she has always been there, with her wonder, and her
generousness, her breasts like two
voluptuous external hearts.
I am so glad she kept them, all
her life, and she got to be buried in them—
she 96, and they
maybe 82, each, which is
164 years
of pleasure and longing. And think of all
the poets who have suckled at her riskiness, her
risque, her body politic, her
outlaw grace! What she came into this world with,
with a mew and cry, she gave us. In her red
sweater and her red hair and her raw
melodious Virginia crackle,
she emptied herself fully out
into her songs and our song-making,
we would not have made our songs without her.
O dear one, what is this? You are not a child,
though you dwindled, you have not retraced your path,
but continued to move straight forward to where
we will follow you, radiant mother. Red Rover,
cross over.
Stephanie Vanderslice on Literary Citizenship
Yes yes yes. We aren’t in community to market to one another.
Over at the Ploughshares blog, Stephanie Vanderslice talks to Tasha Golden about teaching Literary Citizenship and other “professionalization” topics in MFA programs. Good stuff!
She says:
The two central myths are one, that literary citizenship is all about self-promotion, and two, that it’s connected deeply to the “marketplace.” For example, a lot of students (and a lot of authors who clutter my Twitter feed with tweets about their own publications and nothing else) think that literary citizenship and platform-building means nothing more than promoting their own work.
In reality, it’s about completely saturating yourself in the literary culture—and then curating and promoting the work that interests you, so that other people will find it and care about it as much as you do.
This rigid refusal to look at ourselves may well destroy us
from James Baldwin’s “Lockridge: The American Myth” (198) as quoted in Adrienne Rich’s essay collection A Human Eye (2009)
The gulf between our dream and the realities that we live with is something that we do not understand and do not wish to admit. It is almost as though we were asking that others look at what we want and turn their eyes, as we do, away from what we are. I am not, as I hope is clear, speaking of civil liberties, social equality, etc., where indeed a strenuous battle is yet carried on; I am speaking instead of a particular shallowness of mind, an intellectual and spiritual laxness…This rigid refusal to look at ourselves may well destroy us; particularly now since if we cannot understand ourselves we will not be able to understand anything.
Grown-ups and monsters
“Why do you think she’s scared of anything? She’s a grown-up, isn’t she? Grown-ups and monsters aren’t scared of things.”
“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters. And as for grown-ups…” She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, “I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
all its foolish casual cruelty
She was the power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.
and THIS is why Neil Gaiman is:
1. a god (because he knows this)
2. one of the most important writers in English in our era (because he says it so perfectly and therefore makes it so apparent it can’t be un-known)
This Frenzy 