I want to touch upon many themes or subjects as this NaPoWriMo project goes along, nuts-and-bolts things like form and prosody, syllable, line length, line breaks, tone and voice. These are all important elements and without them it’s nigh impossible to write a poem. But more than anything, I want to talk about surprise. It is an element that is difficult to define, but without it the poem is bound to fail, like trying to leaven a loaf without yeast.
Where fiction has mood, the poem has tone, and in a similar sense fiction has suspense while the poem has surprise. These are analogous but they are not the same. In a poem, the writer often has a nebulous idea of what they want to write about, but the joy is in the discovery of what actually comes out. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
Because poetry works in association and image, in clumps of context huddled next to other shadowy forms of ideas, the je ne sais quoi springs from the spaces in between, the juxtaposition of these relationships. Of course, the English language works from left to right in a linear fashion, and syntax is equally logical; but the situating done by the poet in service to the craft is what brings freshness and ingenuity to the page. Poetry, it has been said, is in large part nondiscursive. In many ways, it is intuited rather than interpreted. Stephen Dobyns, paraphrasing and elaborating on Susanne Langer, says in Next Word, Better Word,
Discursive language cannot communicate the nature of emotion; it can give us the name of an emotion—happy—and the degree of an emotion—very happy—but it can’t tell us what the emotion feels like.
Richard Hugo wrote an amazing collection of essays about the craft of writing, titled The Triggering Town. It is a tongue-in-cheek yet serious set of pieces of advice for his graduate-level creative writing students. In the very first chapter called “Writing off the Subject,” he implores us:
When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music. If you believe the first, you are making your job very difficult, and you are not only limiting the writing of poems to something done only by the very witty and clever, such as Auden, you are weakening the justification for creative-writing programs. So you can take that attitude if you want, but you are jeopardizing my livelihood as well as your chances of writing a good poem.
If the second attitude is right, then I still have a job. Let’s pretend it is right because I need the money. Besides, if you feel truth must conform to music, those of us who find life bewildering and who don’t know what things mean, but love the sound of words enough to fight through draft after draft of a poem, can go on writing—try to stop us.
One mark of a beginner is his impulse to push language around to make it accommodate what he has already conceived to be the truth, or, in some cases, what he has already conceived to be the form. Even Auden, clever enough at times to make music conform to truth, was fond of quoting the woman in the Forster novel who said something like, “How do I know what I think until I see what I’ve said.”
Many writers commit the sin of verisimilitude, of chaining the poem to actual events in the world. Hugo goes on:
The words should not serve the subject. The subject should serve the words. This may mean violating the facts. For example, if the poem needs the word “black” at some point and the grain elevator is yellow, the grain elevator may have to be black in the poem. You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.
Stephen Dobyns, in his own way, agrees with this, saying, “Unlike memoir, the subject matter of poetry requires not fidelity to events, but fidelity to ideas and emotions.”
There are many ways to get at the marrow of a poem, but the quickest and surest way to shuck the strictures of discursive language is to accept and write in nonsense.
Now, this is a controversial stance. Most poems are straightforward or, at least, can be forced into a way of making sense. Indeed, the tried and true handbook of poetry is titled Sound and Sense. The two tend to reinforce each other and culminate in a right smart statement. Yet many poems we now celebrate in American verse utilize the inherent nondiscursiveness of nonsense. e.e. cummings experimented extensively with the intricacies of phrasing and even typography itself in order to pry new life from old husks. An exemplar is this untitled piece from 1958:
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
There is much to admire here, but the meaning of the poem can only be intuited. It derives its crux, its juice, from juxtaposition (as well as its implied motion).
Many more and different examples of nonsense exist. Take, for example, Wallace Stevens. An underwriter of insurance by trade, Stevens is widely recognized as one of the giants of the American canon. In many of his longer poems, he is measured and hefty, but several of his poems exhibit a lightness and airiness that borders on frivolity. This one is from Harmonium (1923):
Bantam in Pine-Woods
Chieftan Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.
Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.
You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,
Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.
The joy for the reader comes from not being able to predict where Stevens is going. The poem appears to be breaking its leash, advancing by sheer force of its devotion to sound. At the same time, there is a message being imparted here, so the reader can console him/herself that the poem has something to say.
Another fun, nonsense-embracing poet is James Tate. In a completely different way, Tate allows the poem to dictate where it is going, and the reader is brought along for the ride. Here is a short poem from his Memoir of the Hawk, published in 2001:
War and Peace
Someone has hit me on the head with a book
and I’m falling down. Okay, now I’m down. I
close my eyes. An ostrich is charging me. She
seems furious. I open my eyes. An ostrich is
hurtling toward me. I close my eyes. I’m on
the green bank of a babbling brook. My beloved
is beside me. It would be indelicate of me to
say more. But we did have a grass sandwich
after sundown.
What is the reader to do with this poem? Nothing at all, except enjoy it. The playfulness provides its own meaning.
Try also his “Cunning,” from the same volume:
I had gotten a nasty bite at the petting
zoo earlier that day. On the bus home I sat
next to a little old lady, tiny and stooped,
her head bobbing up and down. I don’t know why
I did this, but I showed her the bite on my hand.
She stared at it for a long time. Then she
reached out and took my hand in her papery
blue-veined hands. She brought my hand closer
to her eyes. Her mouth was open just a little
and my heart started to race. I jerked my
hand out of her grip just in time. She smiled
and showed me her teeth. “They’re beautiful,”
I said. “Brand-new,” she replied.
There is a “narrative” but it is entirely farcical. By the time the reader realizes this, the humor resolves, providing its own sense of surprise.
Today’s prompt comes from The Practice of Poetry, and it is one of my very favorite exercises in the entire book. It can be found on pages 119-120, and it is called “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” given to us by Jim Simmerman.
- Begin the poem with a metaphor.
- Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
- Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
- Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
- Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
- Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
- Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
- Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
- Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
- Use a piece of “talk” you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
- Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
- Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
- Make the persona or character in the poem do something he/she could not do in “real life.”
- Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
- Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
- Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
- Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
- Use a phrase from a language other than English.
- Make a nonhuman object say or do something human (personification).
- Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.
Open the poem with the first project and close it with the last. Otherwise use the projects in whatever order you like, giving each project at least one line. Try to use all twenty projects. Feel free to repeat those you like. Fool around. Enjoy.
I hope you come to like this prompt as much as I have across the years. It renews itself.
If this seems too daunting or overly complicated, do what I’ve been doing and write an acrostic! Try today’s theme: N O N S E N S E (or, alternatively, S U R P R I S E).
➡ IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM: