NaPoWriMo: April is National Poetry Writing Month!
If you’ve been following along, you will have noticed that one thing I’ve requested people do is pay attention to the places in their own poems where unresolved tension resides. There is promise there.
What I mean by that is to call attention to the fact that so often we live in our episodic memory, where things come to us in a narrative stream: before, now, then. We’re seduced by order. Even our language betrays this sense: we experience a noun, a verb, an object (though there are non-English languages where this order is somewhat different). We expect a strict sequence, or—if that sequence sees a bit of upheaval—we are content to presume it will resolve in a logical fashion. What has yet to happen will happen, and then it will have happened.
But we often forget that experiences happen simultaneously. Everything is happening everywhere everywhen—all at once. Time is omnipresent and kinetic, but we experience it through space, which means traveling through a distance, a definite before and after. In the moment, though, we can interpret and intuit many things all together and assign meanings to each. We necessarily narrow our attention; in fact, our brains do this automatically, often outside of our conscious awareness. Yet often we will encounter a moment where we are of two minds of what has just happened.
I take a page from Stephen Minot’s Three Genres: The Writing of Poetry, Fiction, and Drama (pp. 49-50), where he examines ambivalence. I will break into his prose to insert the poems he references as he goes along.
Ambivalence is a crucial element in many poems. It comes from ambi-, meaning “both” (as in ambidextrous) and valence, from the same root as “value.” It describes a combining of two quite different emotions—love and hate, fear and desire, courage and cowardice.
Don’t confuse this with a change in outlook such as we [see] in Anthony Hecht’s “Lizards and Snakes”
Lizards and Snakes
On the summer road that ran by our porch
Lizards and snakes came out to sun.
It was hot as a stove out there, enough to scorch
A buzzard’s foot. Still, it was fun
To lie in the dust and spy on them. Near but remote,
They snoozed in the carriage ruts, a smile
In the set of the jaw, a fierce pulse in the throat
Working away like Jack Doyle’s after he’d run the mile.
Aunt Martha had an unfair prejudice
Against them (as well as being cold
Toward bats.) She was pretty inflexible in this,
Being a spinster and all, and old,
So we used to slip them into her knitting box.
In the evening, she’d bring in things to mend
And a nice surprise would slide out from under the socks.
It broadened her life, as Joe said. Joe was my friend.
But we never did it again after the day
Of the big wind when you could hear the trees
Creak like rockingchairs. She was looking away
Off, and kept saying, “Sweet Jesus, please
Don’t let him hear me. He’s as like as twins.
He can crack us like lice with his fingernail.
I can see him plain as a pikestaff. Look how he grins
And swings the scaly horror of his folded tail.”
where the first view of the boy’s aunt is altered by what they overhear, or Theodore Deppe’s “The Paradise of Wings”
The Paradise of Wings
My grandfather called it
the Paradise of Wings, a clearing
hidden in blue hills where thousands
of geese gleaned stubbled corn
beside a tapered lake. His favorite walk——
shared with me as a secret——made of that place,
those burnished wings, a sort of gift.
That fall, when flocks funneled above our house,
he’d hoist my sister to his lap
so I could go alone, be his eyes and ears.
I’d wait in a blind of scrub oak, calculate
the time to break from hiding, then whirl
my arms until the low sky rose in a wide arc
to settle out of sight behind the ridge.
One day my sister stumbled from the house,
panic in her face as she ran to me.
Though Grandfather stopped at the front steps
we ran all the way to the valley
I’d sworn to keep secret.
She made me promise
never to leave her alone with him,
told me just enough so that I, too,
feared his hands. Light kep draining
from black water, leaving in its place
an opaque stillness
where geese stood about on shelves of rotting ice
and my sister’s hate
was the only living thing in paradise.
in which the initial impression of the grandfather is dramatically reversed. With ambivalence the two conflicting emotions or attitudes occur simultaneously.
Feelings of love are often charged with ambivalence. Nikki Giovanni describes it clearly in “Balances.”
Balances
in life
one is always
balancing
like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers
or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)
3 grains salt
to one ounce truth
our sweet black essence
or the funky honkies down the street
and lately i’ve begun wondering
if you’re trying to tell me something
we used to talk all night
and do things alone together
and i’ve begun
(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you
At the end of that poem the narrator finds herself caught between “the pleasure of loneliness” and “the pain / of loving you.”
Molly Peacock describes a type of ambivalence all of us have felt in “Anger Sweetened.”
Anger Sweetened
What we don’t forget is what we don’t say.
I mourn the leaps of anger covered
by quizzical looks, grasshoppers covered
by coagulating chocolate. Each word,
like a leggy thing that would have sprung away,
we caught and candified so it would stay
spindly and alarmed, poised in our presence,
dead, but in the shape of its old essence.
We must eat them now. We must eat the words
we should have let go but preserved, thinking
to hide them. They were as small as insects blinking
in our hands, but now they are stiff and shirred
with sweet to twice their size, so what we gagged
will gag us now that we are so enraged.
The two forces in this case are our desire to be polite and our longing to express exactly what we feel. “What we don’t forget,” the poem states in the first line, “is what we don’t say.” The ambivalence we feel about being courteous is an almost daily experience.
Let me break here to interject another poem that deals with similar themes of falsity, and does so in a way that demonstrates, through metaphor and repetition, the tension of an upper-class melancholy: T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep… tired… or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Through the discussion of the rituals of this rarefied class, the speaker is able to convey a certain superficiality; and with the deft use of sound in repetition, assonance, and rhyme, the speaker lures us, like the sirens of the sea, into his tale of woe and wistfulness. The rhythm, too, though not in strict metrical feet, lull us like the waves of the sea. Here, in this space, the author speaks to us of the inherent tension of existence, this tightrope walking of finishing-school manners held against the elementalism of impending death.
Another example of this type of juxtaposition is demonstrated in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory”, published originally in 1897:
Richard Cory
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
”Good morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich——yes, richer than a king——
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
This poem never ceases to give rise in me gooseflesh and the standing hair. The effect created by the juxtaposition is almost ineffable. The close, sharp contrast highlights the tension living in the interstitial space—the places in-between where ambivalence resides. All manner of dramatic irony is reduced and condensed into the poem’s final clauses.
Minot continues:
When casting about for a subject that might generate a poem, consider your mixed feelings. And be honest about them! Few student poets make the mistake of attempting love poems that are simple expressions of unalloyed affection. We’ve heard enough of that in routine song lyrics. But tributes to older people like grandparents sometimes take on that same simple approach in spite of good intentions. Watch out too for the inverse, the expression of unalloyed hostility. Parents are often the target, as are former lovers and suburban life. If you are emotionally unprepared to include some ambivalent feelings, you are probably too close to the subject. Spare us!
Another risk is dealing with widely supported causes. Campaigns against drugs, street violence, and war are best treated in posters and television spots, not sophisticated poetry. The only way to handle these topics is to present them with striking ambivalence the way Gwendolyn Brooks does in “We Real Cool.” Every evil, after all, has its secret appeal.
We Real Cool
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
die soon.
Your writing prompt for today: Find some moment of ambivalence or unresolved tension and expand it. Explore each facet of the issue so that the sharpness of the ambivalence is exposed. This moment could be found in high drama; but also a small notice, a double take, or a harkening back to when you were pulled in two directions at once. Remember that imagery can be used to communicate what cannot be said straightforwardly.
Some of these poems given above as examples are lengthy. Don’t feel you have to write and write just to take up space! But do give space to that tug-of-war, that bi-directional tension. That’s where the poem is.
➡ IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM:
- National Poetry Writing Month: an invitation
- NaPoWriMo: a short exercise (Ten-Minute Spill)
- NaPoWriMo, Day 2: Telling a Secret
- NaPoWriMo, Day 3: Still Life
- NaPoWriMo, Day 4: One out of many
- NaPoWriMo, Day 5: Hanging together
- NaPoWriMo, Day 6: Home and introspection
- NaPoWriMo, Day 7: Like this or that, or not at all
- NaPoWriMo, Day 8: No more short shrift
- NaPoWriMo, Day 9: Poem as voicebox
- NaPoWriMo, Day 10: Caught between the horns