Reading Poetry, and Finding the Volta

22 07 2022

Over the years, I’ve been paying attention to the place of the turn in poetry pedagogy, investigating handbooks and textbooks to see how they attend to the turn, or not. Is the turn mentioned? Is it featured? Is the volta at least mentioned as a key part of the dynamics of the sonnet? Some of what I’ve discovered from this work can be found here, and here, and here.

I’ve also been interested in thinking about the place of the volta in discussions of the sonnet. Some of my thinking on this topic can be found here and here.

My most recent bit of exploration into Tom Furniss and Michael Bath’s Reading Poetry: An Introduction has turned up something very interesting: poetry pedagogy that explicitly recognizes the significance of the volta in sonnets. Though substantive, it’s still something of a brief recognition, a shining moment, with some sparkly follow-up. No matter what, though: it’s all worth considering.

“Part Three” of Reading Poetry, “Texts in Contexts/Contexts in Texts,” is about how information from outside of a poem informs a reading of that poem, including “Genre,” the explicit topic of chapter 11, and the chapter immediately preceding the chapter on “The Sonnet.” The chapter on the sonnet opens with a section titled “The Sonnet as a Fixed Form,” and in it the authors make clear that the sonnet was explicitly selected by them to continue the “discussion of genre…because [the sonnet] is in many ways a representative form as well as a distinctive genre” (280–I’m citing the first edition, from 1996). The authors liken the sonnet to a limerick, noting that the sonnet “is another example of a fixed or ‘closed’ form because its defining characteristics are largely formal” (280). Knowing about the sonnet’s form is crucial: “Arguably, it is possible to make sense of many poems without consciously identifying their genres, but to read a sonnet without recognizing that it is a sonnet is likely to frustrate any competent understanding” (280). 

The section “The Sonnet as a Fixed Form” then glances at Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), noting its rhyme scheme while also observing that “It is not difficult to show how this structure of three quatrains and a final couplet corresponds to particular developments in the argument of the sonnet,” including how, at the beginning of the third quatrain, “the speaker turns” (281). This interest in the turn only builds. The authors go on to state,

As this brief analysis shows, the overall argument of the poem has a logical structure that corresponds to the divisions of the verse form into three four-line sections and a final couplet. Each quatrain contains a stage of that argument, or a unit of sense that is syntactically complete by the end of the quatrain. Shakespeare’s argument depends on a contrast between the tenor and vehicle of his proposed metaphor, a contrast which turns on the word “But” at the beginning of line 9. That turn in the argument occurs at the place which had become the most important of the structural divisions in the sonnet form as it had evolved in Italy and elsewhere in the two hundred years or more before 1609 [the date of the first printing of Shakespeare’s sonnets]. (281)

The authors then define the sonnet: “A sonnet is a short poem in iambic pentameters, fourteen lines long, which can often be divided into two parts know as the ‘octave’, the first eight lines, and the ‘sestet’, the last six” (281). They differentiate the English and Italian sonnets, noting how “the Italian form appears to insist more strongly than the Shakespearian on a division between octave and sestet, which is why Italian readers coined the term ‘volta’ (‘turn’) to refer to this shift which the introduction of new rhyme sounds appears to signal after line eight” (281-2). They add: “In the Shakespearian sonnet each quatrain introduces new rhyme sounds, and the major formal break appears to be the shift from the three alternately rhymed quatrains to the final rhymed couplet, which is why some textbooks define the ‘turn’ in an English sonnet as occurring after line twelve” (282).

What’s beautiful about all of this, of course, is the focus on the turn, a focus that only increases in the next section, “Finding the Volta: Form and Meaning.” This section begins, “If things were this simple, we could end this chapter here. Needless to say, they are not” (282). The authors note that the volta is more than “just a matter of a shift in the rhyme pattern,” recognizing the shift between octave and sestet “corresponds to a turn in the syntax or grammar, a change in the argument or subject matter” (282). They refer back to the turn in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, then note that “Such a turn is very common in sonnets of all types,” and observe that the terminology used for Italian sonnets also can and should be used as well for English sonnets as “it can refer not just to sonnets’ rhyme scheme, but also to the conventionalized structure of their arguments” (282).

The authors then turn to discuss Shakespeare’s sonnets 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”) and 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”). As I’ve already discussed in a previous post the incredibly interesting discussion of the strange volta in Sonnet 130, I’ll leap to their discussion of Sonnet 29, where the authors’ commentary is perhaps a bit less idiosyncratic but at least as effusive about the power of the turn. For them, the sestet “overturns” the octave at the location of the volta, the poem’s “major shift”–and they add, as well, that “Certainly, the final couplet also stands apart in some ways by presenting a final resolution of the argument, identifying–for the first time–the ‘love’ which explains and motivates the turn, justifies the compliment, and finally reveals that this sonnet is some kind of love poem” (284).

Though Furniss and Bath note that other readings of this sonnet are possible–including one focused less on love and more on the patronage behind the sonnet (284-5)–they reemphasize that their point holds about the “clear way” the poem’s “formal and argumentative structures” relate  (285). They make clear, as well, that Sonnet 29 “is by no means exceptional, for that accommodation of meaning to form–or form to meaning–is crucial to the sonnet as a genre” (285). They continue: “Learning how to recognize and analyze this interplay of form and meaning is the fundamental skill required of any competent reader of sonnets. As with any genre convention, it is a matter of programming your expectations as a reader…” (285). 

However, after this, Furniss and Bath really do settle again into focusing for the most part on form rather than the structural volta. After a brief examination of the topic of “Identifying a Speaker,” Furniss and Bath then move in a section called “Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’: A Hybrid Form?” to a close consideration of one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, “At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow.” Of course, the authors note that “This sonnet turns very decisively on the ‘But’ of line 9” (286). How could they not?! This is one of the most shocking voltas in the sonnet tradition! However, after noting how “the volta at the octave-sestet division stages a dramatic swing in the mood and tone of the poem,” the authors themselves turn to discuss form, making the case that this sonnet’s structure “combines elements of the ‘English’ and the ‘Italian’ sonnet”: “The structure…appears to consist of an Italian octave followed by an English sestet, and the turn in the syntax or argument at the beginning of line 9 coincides with the way the third quatrain breaks away from the tight, infolded rhymes of the octave” (286; 287). Though they have moved back to discussing form, the authors still do the good work of reminding readers that “This hybrid form of sonnet suggests that the rules of this genre were never as rigid as some modern textbooks, with their clear distinction between the ‘Petrarchan’ and ‘Shakespearian’ forms, would have us believe. Indeed, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers did not distinguish between the two types of sonnet, or use our names for them….Whether they staged a turn in the syntax or argument of the sonnet at the beginning of line 9 was an option that always remained open to them, whatever the rhyme pattern used” (287). Also, at least it seems, no matter what, that a sonnet needs a turn.

In the next section, “Expectation and Variation,” Furniss and Bath continue this focus mainly on formal elements. In this section, the authors make the case that “The sonnet is a more protean form (always changing its shape) than our normative description allows” mainly by pointing to other forms, including the Spenserian sonnet and even the 18-line sonnets in Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia (287-8). Consideration of the variations with, say, the placement of the volta, does not enter in the discussions of this section. And this remains largely the case for the rest of the chapter, which moves on to give an overview of the progress of the sonnet. The remaining sections include: “A History of the Genre: Petrarchan Conventions”; “Constructing Voices: An Example from Sir Philip Sidney”; “The English Sonnet Tradition: John Milton”; “The Second Coming of the English Sonnet”; “Finding a Voice: Wordsworth and Milton”; “Romantic Sonnets: John Keats”; and “The Modern Sonnet.”

However, it also is the case that the authors’ keen attention to the volta never fully goes away. How could it? Not only have Furniss and Bath revealed their great interest in the volta, many of the sonnets discussed in the remainder of the chapter have some thrilling turns in them–they cry out to be commented on! These sonnets include Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 1 (“Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show”); Milton’s “When I consider how my light is spent”; Charlotte Smith’s “Sonnet: Composed during a Walk on the Downs, in November 1787”; and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the rites for Cousin Vit.” Additionally, Furniss and Bath really have strong interest in the volta. So, they make note of Sidney’s inventiveness with the placement of his ultimate volta (291-2). They also perform an almost Dantean analysis of the structural shifts in Milton’s sonnet, noting that “A useful kind of exercise with this and sonnets like it might be to break down the sense units in order to see how they correspond with or override the conventional divisions of the verse structure” (293). However, they go further to investigate the strange placement of the volta in Milton’s sonnet–“at a strong caesura in the middle of line 8”–and then speculate about a reason for that placement, stating, “One reason for this premature appearance of the volta, we might suggest, is that this is a sonnet about patience and frustration. The volta is perhaps anticipated because it is acting out the very manner in which ‘Patience’ (8) intervenes to ‘prevent / That murmur’. ‘Patience’ is the sestet’s answer to the octave’s question, and patience here is impatient” (295).

I love this reading! It really jibes with my work on “Strange Voltas.” In fact, I wish I’d encountered Reading Poetry prior to writing that brief essay. Furniss and Bath would have provided me with some fine material for that work, including this excellent summation of the powerfully (mis-)placed volta: “Whether or not a sonnet’s rhyme scheme corresponds with, or runs counter to, that semantic shift is always likely to be of interest, for the point about sonnets is that their conventional verse pattern traditionally relates to the organization of meaning in ways which are more direct than is the case with almost any other poetic genre” (282).

I’m happy to report, though, that I also think I could have brought something to Furniss and Bath’s reading of Brooks’s sonnet. Furniss and Bath are right, I think, to see the Brooks’s volta as occurring early in her sonnet–they suggest it occurs “in line 5, where the speaker imagines the corpse’s liberation from confinement in the coffin” (301)–and I think they’re pretty much right about that. However, the authors still feel compelled to recognize something happening between the octave and the sestet, so they speculate, asking, “Would it be true to say that there is more approval or celebration of [Cousin Vit’s] vitality in the octave, but more criticism and disapproval implied in the sestet?” (301-2). Perhaps, but there’s no need to fish for something there. As I argue in “Strange Voltas,” what’s beautiful about this sonnet is the way that Cousin Vit is so vital she not only breaks out of caskets and through death, but she also breaks the sonnet structure.

But that is a quibble. Furniss and Bath do great work, in my estimation, with honoring and thinking about the volta significance to the sonnet. 

Next step: an introduction to poetry–besides John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean?, from 1959 (!)–that is as interested and invested in the turn for all of the poems under discussion–not just the sonnets!


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Categories : Pedagogy, poetic turn, structure-form distinction, volta

Lucy Alford’s *Structures* of Poetic Attention

20 07 2022

Though titled Forms of Poetic Attention, Lucy Alford’s book really should be called *Structures* of Poetic Attention–Alford is far more interested in structural turning than she is in form as it is typically conceived of. This is incredibly interesting: it’s further confirmation that the structure/form distinction exists, and that it’s generally not recognized as such even when the turn is ubiquitous in a theorist’s thinking, as it is in Alford’s. Here, I’ll demonstrate Alford’s thoroughgoing interest in the turn, and I’ll discuss some of the ways that failing to more fully theorize the structural turn matters.

Forms of Poetic Attention is primarily interested in investigating the phenomenon of attention in poetry, how poems convey and embody different types of attention. Here’s a brief description of the book’s main endeavors from its publisher’s webpage:

A poem is often read as a set of formal, technical, and conventional devices that generate meaning or affect. However, Lucy Alford suggests that poetic language might be better understood as an instrument for tuning and refining the attention. Identifying a crucial link between poetic form and the forming of attention, Alford offers a new terminology for how poetic attention works and how attention becomes a subject and object of poetry.

Part of the book’s “new terminology” is the terminology related to attention. Alford, for example, attends to two different kinds of attention. On the one hand, there’s “the dynamics of transitive attention, or modes of attention that take an object,” which involves “five dynamic coordinates,” or “the ‘moving parts’” of this kind of attention: intentionality, interest, selectivity, spatiotemporal remove, and apprehension” (5). This kind of attention is covered in the book’s first part, called “Attending to Objects,” with chapters focused on “Contemplation: Attention’s Reach”; “Desire: Attention’s Hunger”; “Recollection: Attending to the Departed Object”; and “Imagination: Attention’s Poiesis.” On the other hand, there’s “intransitive attention, exploring modes of attention that are objectless,” the coordinates of which include “intentionality, scope, the presence of absence of an indirect object, temporal inflection, and the effect on the subject-space of poetic attention (its expansion, contraction, or kenosis)” (6). This kind of attention is covered in the book’s second part, called “Objectless Awareness,” with chapters on “Vigilance: States of Suspension”; “Resignation: Relinquishing the Object”; “Idleness: Doldrums and Gardens of Time”; and “Boredom: End-Stopped Attention.”

However, new considerations and their resulting new terminology abound. One area where this kind of happens is with form. In the “Introduction”’s section on “Form,” Alford notes that she uses “form” in its somewhat conventional ways, but also in a new way; she states, “It is true that poetic language is densely formed. But what is formed by and in poetic language is an event of attention generated in the acts of both reading and writing” (3-4). Alford clarifies: “I suggest that a poem might be better understood not simply as a gathering of composed formal features, but as an instrument for tuning and composing attention” (4).

However, the poem, when understood by Alford as such an instrument, is generally much less a formal entity and much more structural one. This is hinted at in this discussion of form, which includes an endnote reference to Robert Hass’s A Little Book on Form, in which Alford notes that Hass offers a number of definitions of form before settling on “‘The way a poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its making,’” the definition Alford understands to be the one “that comes closest to what [she is] suggesting in [her] book” (279). However, as I’ve written about here, Hass really is deeply interested in the turn and form as structure, specifically. And, it turns out, Alford shares this interest.

This deep interest is revealed right away in the opening pages of Forms of Poetic Attention, in which Alford recounts her engagement with James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” acknowledging that what really draws her attention is the poem’s turn; she writes,

The poem turns on the word “therefore,” and the necessarily long mental space that precedes it, which it creates in turn. Semantically, the poem enacts a series of removes, lifting off from the immediate context of the high school stadium to the mental recollections or reflections on other spaces: bars at workday’s end, steel mill work lines, then the step back to the collectivity of “all the proud fathers” and “their women.” “Dying for love” draws to a full stop. Rhythmically, nothing can follow the absolute downbeat of “love.” At “Therefore,” the poem gathers itself into a hairpin turn of pure force, a kind of blast of wind smiting from above and beyond. (2)

Wow! Although I’m not sure I exactly follow Alford’s tracking of the attention in Wright’s poem, including the way it seems to move backwards through the poem, what is obvious here is Alford’s attention to and interest in the poem’s turn. 

And there’s more. After a paragraph in which she describes contemporary culture’s general inattention to poetry, Alford writes,

At a gut level, I know that the kind of operation Wright’s “therefore” performs in my mind is experientially different from the kinds of attention valued at this particular cultural moment. This difference, and all the differences contained within it, are the subject of this book. Thinking about “therefore” and its reshaping of the space-time (textual and readerly) that surrounds it entails and inspires a consideration of how other poems activate and manipulate shifts in the field of spatiotemporal perception we call attention….This book is an exploration of the multitude of forms “poetic forms” assumes… (3)

As one reads Forms of Poetic Attention, it becomes clear that that “multitude of forms” includes–and perhaps even features–structures: significant turns abound, and in fact, as we’ll see, turns, and even the related concept of “liftoff,” will be repeatedly pointed to by Alford as significant features of poems.

Indeed, turns and liftoff will be attended to not only as crucial parts of poems but as elements of attention itself; attention itself seems to be largely composed of turns:

[I]n poetry as in prayer and meditation, the act of contemplation turns out to be far from simple, and no small attentional feat….Sometimes attention’s reach is an intrusion, an act that changes what it tries to contemplate. Other times, the subject of contemplation is changes, acted upon, and altered by the object even in the act of consuming it. And often the object resists consumption altogether, evading the observer’s drive to grasp, to metaphorize, to metabolize, to apprehend. The reach and granularity of our attention determine our ability to grasp or perceive the object, and yet the mind interferes at every turn, analyzing, moving into abstraction and away from direct perception, muddying attention’s lens with distractions, ambitions, and ideas. Often the object of the poem’s contemplation turns out to be other than its initial semantic object of focus, either through metaphorical liftoff or by turning attention back onto the poem itself. Perhaps because of the intrinsic limitedness of contemplation (its tendency to diversion as well as  its dependence on our limited, variable, and environmentally swayed perceptual capacities), contemplative poems must grapple with thwarted apprehension as much as plentitude–the reach of attention does not always grasp. And, when it does, a further challenge lies in keeping this grasping from doing violence (through usage or fixation) to its object, thus shifting the relation out of (spatial or aesthetic) contemplation and toward instrumentalization. (74-5)

While brought up in the context of “Attending to Objects,” in the chapter on “Contemplation,” this idea is largely repeated in the discussion of “Objectless Awareness,” in the chapter on “Resignation,” where Alford states,

The sociohistorical conditions of reading and writing in the postmodern era are characterized by a provisionality, a contingency, and a lowering of expectations that can be reread as a phenomenon of attentional resignation, a choiceless shift from one attentional mode, or from one perception of salience, to another. Frederic Jameson reads the shift between modern and postmodern modalities as not merely a shift in stylistic choices or literary fashions, but a necessary environmental response to social conditions overwhelmed by spectacle, repetition, and arbitrarily, externally determined valuations and devaluations. This response is reflected in the role of the poet… (195)

It seems as though, for Alford, attention in its many forms is essentially made up of turns and shifts. This fact comes into increasingly clear focus when one considers some of the poems Alford examines, but even more importantly, what she attends to in her own engagements with the poems.

Many of the poems Alford discusses, especially in the first part of her book, are famous for their turning. Alford tracks the shifts in attention in poems such as

Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish”–which concludes with “epiphanic closure” (69);

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18–“As the poem moves forward, this dynamic of involvement and layered address is heightened by repeated layering of phrases separated by semicolons, so that each new rhetorical turn is contained within the one before….In the couplet…we arrive at a kind of kernel of the poem’s attention: the ‘thee’ of the poem gives way to another beloved, the ‘this’ that is the poem itself, and the poem seems to hold itself forward as an object of attention, the object that has been forming over the course of the poem from the living beloved to the textual beloved, from the textual beloved to the life-giving text” (85);

Psalm 137–which moves from “grief” to “imperative” to “indictment” to “curse” (105-6);

William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”–in which “[t]he imaginative attention at play…places us between recollection, direct contemplation, and a projected future act of recollection” (138);

Sappho’s Fragment 31–which ends with a strong suggestion of a big turn, as commented on by Anne Carson: “Carson’s reading is hemmed in by the breaking off of the poem itself, where the papyrus’s incompleteness necessitates a reading of the poem’s own potential development: ‘Unfortunately we don’t reach the end, the poem breaks off. But we do see Sappho begin to turn toward it, toward this unreachable end. We see her senses empty themselves, we see her Being thrown outside its own center where it stands observing her as if she were grass or dead’….Reading the potential turn of the poem’s lost conclusion, Carson asks, ‘Why does she consent?’ only to reframe the question according to the condition of the Sapphic subject: ‘What is it that love dares the self to do?…Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty’” (162); and

Catullus 51–which is “a rewriting of Sappho (Fragment 31)” that contains a massive final turn: “when Catullus breaks off his inhabitation of Sappho’s lovelorn daydreaming, the poem becomes a warning against idleness’s mental quicksands” (216).

But even with poems that may not be as well-known by readers, Alford’s readings focus greatly on tracking turns. Alford’s reading of Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” registers how “[t]he task of attention…moves from discovery to meditation to a revelation of a deeper kind, a revelation that brings with it a burden of perdurance and a responsibility to open doors, shed light, cast the ray of attention into forgotten histories” (33). Alford reads Wallace Stevens’s “Study of Two Pears” as “something of a manifesto in itself, a summary of what is wrong with the aesthetic appropriation of things for symbolic purposes,” and, as such, it is largely “an enumeration of wrong turns”; however, “[w]ith the fifth stanza, something miraculous happens: an active verb, some movement that belongs to the pears themselves: ‘The yellow glistens’….The pears have passed from passive, inert ‘forms,’ a series of disembodied negotiations, into active and changing presence that ‘flowers’ in multiple dimensions” (61; 65). 

Especially with difficult, longer poems, tracking turns seems to be a key strategy for Alford to use to grapple with the work and the shifting attention embodied within it. For example, Alford reads Paul Celan’s “Engfürung” as having multiple shifts, but one key one: “At its nadir, in stifled silence and the height of obscurity, the poem turns. A kind of genesis unfolds, tentatively and slowly: ‘Speak, speak. / Was, was.’ Wrought at the final hour, ‘an der letzten Membran,’ a hard-won speech comes into being” (111). Attending to “Friedrich Hölderlin’s long poem ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage…’ (‘As on a Holiday…’),” Alford notices that “At the level of ‘plot,’ very little happens in the course of the long poem”; however, she adds, “Yet, at the formal and figurative levels, the poem composes a dynamic terrain of suspense, expectation, and waiting, punctuated and brought to climax by dramatic turns, composed primarily through a highly crafted syntax of extended hypotaxis punctuated by sudden reversals and emphatic declarations” (170-1). And, indeed, the reading that follows observes features such as “the sudden shift into active and emphatic now” at stanza three (172), and “[t]he declarative suddenness of ‘Jezt aber Tags!’” that “is also the shift into presence, the sudden turn of direction, that throws the preceding vigil into contrast, making it sensible” (173). Ultimately, according to Alford, “Through the repetition of this cycle of attenuated vigilant contemplation followed by abrupt turns in the present of deixis and declaration, Hölderlin crafts a flow of intransitive attention whose semantic content pales in importance beside the continual modulation of temporal and contemplative intensities” (174). 

Hölderlin’s turning becomes even more extreme in his poem “Brod und Wein,” about which Alford states,

We find a sustained example of this cycle of modulatory turns [like that of “Wie wenn am Feiertage…”] in the long poem “Brod und Wein,” in which the shift between the vigilant present and the emphatic present takes place not through an explicit repositioning of temporal cues, and not through the contrast between syntactical futurity (hypotaxis, colon, and conditional) and immediacy (declaration and exclamation), but rather through a series of hairpin turns that take as their hinge the uniquely Hölderlinian aber (“but”) found in “Jezt aber Tags!” (174)

Alford then tracks many of the shifts marked by “aber/but,” noticing that 

These turns in contemplation, subtler than the emphatic daybreak of now, hold the reader in tension, each turn disallowing philosophical or narrative onward march, modulating the present with the dialecticism of autocritical hesitancy. Temporally and attentionally, what is produced in these modulations is a zaudernden Weile, a wavering moment–a present continually represencing in question and rerouting. (177)

Alford figures that “In nine stanzas we find no less than sixteen abers, each signaling a hairpin turn into a different present,” along with a host of smaller turns: “scatterings of emphasis and intensity in Hölderlin’s interrogatory clusters, pilings of question after question…” (179). In short, Hölderlin “accentuates the effect of poetic vigilance by repeatedly interrupting it with a poetics of epiphanic immediacy” (181).

Alford then attends to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, which offers an example of poetic vigilance “without…revelatory relief–without the hairpin turns into immediate presence offered by Hölderlin’s uses of aber and jezt” (181). Still, Mallarmé’s poem turns: according to Alford, “We can see numerous patterns of alternating oppositions throughout the poem: ABAB–thesis and antithesis in recurrence, a relation of alternation without synthesis or conciliation” (182). And after providing a reading of the poem that largely tracks its dialectical–or perhaps negatively dialectical–structure, Alford states that, unlike Hölderlin’s poems, “The poem remains in the mode of vigilant potential, without the vigilance leading to a culminating or interruptive event. The deliberateness with which the poem’s form resists synthetic resolution exhibits a greater restraint than would a more traditionally resolving closure” (189). Ultimately, and succinctly, “The work of poetic attention in Mallarmé becomes an ongoing labor of guarding both the something (being) and the nothing (potentiality) against the anything (arbitrary)” (190).

Alford leapt away from Hölderlin with her discussion of Mallarmé, but she returns with her discussion of the poetry of Charles Wright: “In Hölderlin, the attentional pivot was the word aber, marking a shift, a turn, into a different present and giving relief and contour to the suspended state of vigilance. In Wright, the equivalent pivot is still, indicating the point at which resignation becomes meditation and marking the difference between Wright’s resigned metaphysics and despair” (209). Alford clarifies that Wright’s still signals “both a semantic turn of perseverance in the sense of ‘nevertheless’ and a call to stillness” (209). Either way, or both ways at once, it’s a turn: “Often the ‘still’ comes as a reversal or a rethinking of everything that has come before, creating a shift in direction, rerouting thought and calling it back from whichever closure it has been trending toward” (209-10).

I could–perhaps you, my patient, persistent reader, already get this–go on and on. I could dive into Alford’s attention to how “suddenly, the poem turns” in Rilke’s “Die Rosenschale” (139). Or I could delve into how Alford’s take on Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations understands it to be “by turns apocalyptic and messianic,” occupying “a temporality shaped by this convergence of leaning toward a nostalgic past, repulsion from the present moment, and grasping for a possible future that might offer an escape from things as they are” (202). Or I could dwell on how Alford sees Joan Retallack as making “of idleness an interventionist procedural methodology, mixing a variety of formal constraints with intuitive play to perform and produce ‘swerves’ in poetic experience” (231). I could offer examples of self-reflexive turning in a number of the poems cited, including Thom Gunn’s “Wind in the Streets”–the penultimate line of which begins, “But I turn…” (250)–and Wallace Stevens’s “Angels Surrounded by Paysans”–which ends with the lines “an apparition appareled in // Apparels of such lightest look that a turn / Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?” (278), and which happens to be the final words of the main part of the book: the next page begins the “Notes.”

For someone who is fascinated by turns in poetry, Forms of Poetic Attention is a treasure trove. It’s wonderful to read a contemporary commentary on poetry that is so enamored of the turn–enamored because it understands how useful seeing turns can be for deeply and fully engaging poems. In a way, reading along with Alford feels a bit like reading with Dante as he reviews some of his poem’s great structural shifts in the prose of his La Vita Nuova. It’s terrific, as well, along the way, to be introduced to new material that might be related to turning, such as Joan Retallack’s poetics of the swerve. (My copy of The Poethical Wager is wending its way to me right now!) And I’ve been a fan of Charles Wright’s poetry for a long time–his notion of sottonarrativa, or sub-narrative, was the inspiration behind the chapter on “Substructure” in Structure and Surprise. However, I don’t think his stillness registered for me–this insight will send me back to Wright’s work. In short, Alford’s book has given me much, as I think it will for anyone interested in turns.

And yet, for all its insight into and all the new material and work focused on turning that it points to, Forms of Poetic Attention is confounding in that it’s not clear that it actually knows how important the turn is to its endeavor. Turns are not mentioned at all, so far as I can tell, in any of the book’s official publicity material–such as the publisher’s webpage for the book. In fact, that page states that Alford “theorizes the process of attention-making–its objects, its coordinates, its variables–while introducing a broad set of interpretive tools into the field of literary studies.” However, its main interpretive tool is the time-honored one that Dante emphasized: track the turn. “Turn,” however, does not even appear as an item in the book’s index. And nor does “shift.” And nor does the important word “liftoff”–more on this in a moment.

This lack of acknowledgement of the centrality of the turn to Alford’s project does not only affect my sense of the project’s own self-awareness, but it also makes me think about what is missing from this book. It’s surprising that Alford’s chapter on “Contemplation” does not once refer to Louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation, and nor does it ever even glancing refer to some of poetry’s extensive traditions of contemplation, including the emblem tradition. M. H. Abrams is mentioned once, briefly and in passing, but his “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric” receives no mention, even though it is a great investigation into the structural turning of the descriptive-meditative poem, of which Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” is a prime example. Even if Alford’s reading of “Tintern Abbey” differs from Abrams’s it likely at least should have been in conversation with the previous reading. The end result of these omissions is that, at times, it seems like Alford is reinventing the wheel, or at least its turning, when she in fact is not, and need not have.

The problem is so bad that Alford seems to miss one of her own inventions: liftoff. This word gets used repeatedly in Forms of Poetic Attention–it has appeared a few times in some of the previously cited quotations from the book. I will point out as many of the uses as I can detect–again, an entry for “liftoff” in the index would be helpful for this, but I’ll do the best I can, and then I’ll try to analyze the uses to see what Alford means by this term. Here are the uses:

  • “…in many poems of contemplative focus, regardless of the object, the movement of the poem shows as much about the movement of the mind around and away from its focus–including in the liftoff to metaphor, in which the object serves as a starting place and a touchstone even as the attention moves to connect, to analogize, to make meaning” (57).
  • “Often the object of the poem’s contemplation turns out to be other than its initial semantic object of focus, either through metaphorical liftoff or by turning attention back on to the poem itself” (75).
  • In Audre Lorde’s “Sowing”, Alford notes that “the movement of desire opens an absence in a present full of the matter of life–daily repetitive work and the lull of an afternoon offer a space in which the mind lifts off from the present occupation into fantasy,” adding that “In this liftoff, desire’s lack wells an absence in the everyday, which is filled by a conjuring act of imagination” (88). In what might be a clarifying comment, Alford states that “The poem turns on the word ‘lack,’ which falls midline, almost buried in a flow of thought” (89).
  • “Sowing” “shares an attentional form with an earlier lesbian love poem,” Amy Lowell’s “The Blue Scarf” (90), and Lowell’s poem also has liftoff: “In Lowell’s poem, the dream is sparked by an object–an abandoned scarf left on a chair, whose touch and lingering scent ignite an attentional liftoff from present sense into erotic fantasy” (90). The poem contains at least one other turn, “[t]he rupture upon ‘waking’ from fantasy” (91)–but it does not seem to be an example of liftoff.
  • When reflecting on the poetry of imagination, Alford notes, “The crafting of attention in the poem, and the periods of intentional, focused concentration required to enter and engage, can be seen as the long trudge through pathless darkness, the hours of wait, the cold and unpromising terrain. No promises offered, only potentiality, only glimpsed moments, moments of resonance and rhythm that suggest a ‘something there’ behind the opaque bramble of lines….This lack of guarantee in the emergence or liftoff of imaginative attention is part of what animates and rarefies experiences of vision when they come” (147). Alford adds, in what is likely a connected idea, that “the ‘grace’ of a poem’s imaginative happenings is never guaranteed” (147).
  • On the next page, Alford states, “[P]oetic imagination enables more than simple mental representation…: it makes possible a coming to life that develops beyond the sphere of the words on the page. The few words present in a single line serve as potential triggers for something larger than what they represent–a leap or liftoff, an event that takes on life, layers, dimensionality, and movement. It is not surprising that the lexicon of imagination is tied to ‘flights’” (148).
  • Concluding her main discussion of Hölderlin by focusing on some specific lines, Alford states, “The suddenness of the potential poetic event, possible only in the stillness of vigil and sacred, contemplative, wakeful night, is one of grasping, active seizing, and making-present: a sudden shift from highly endogenous intransitive attention to radically exogenous transitive apprehension: revelation. In stark contrast to both the meditative stillness and the contemplative inquiry of the preceding stanzas, this passage breaks in with an almost violent, ecstatic urgency of near liftoff–” (180).
  • About Charles Bukowski’s “the old big time”, Alford observes, “At no point does the poem lift off into metaphor or symbolism or go out of its way to add complexity, layered significances, hidden references, or any of the other formal elements one might expect from a literary work. In other words, the poem seems to enact that motto it describes [‘Don’t try’] by refusing to try, having given up or rejected the notion of ‘working’ at poetry” (244).

So, what is liftoff? It seems that it is a significant, often sudden turn within a poem, one that transubstantiates the poem into an event that takes on life, layers, dimensionality, and movement; often the liftoff’s leap or flight transforms the poem’s material into the status of metaphor or symbol in a maneuver that has the power of revelation–and as it never is guaranteed, when it happens it feels like grace. Liftoff seems to have little or nothing to do with coming down or out of the privileged state of revelatory grace, little or nothing to do with ironic self-reflexivity.

This is a cool idea. I wish, though, that Alford would have theorized it more herself–in this way, Alford perhaps could have added something to the names given to turns, including Ciardi’s fulcrum, Rosenthal’s torque, Lazer’s swerve, Hirshfield’s window-moment, and many others. I also wish that Alford would have been more aware of her interest in turns, and perhaps tried to link up liftoff to some of the structures to which it very clearly is connected, including the midcourse turn, the emblem structure, the metaphor-to-meaning structure, the epiphanic structure. That is, there are traditions that should have been considered by Alford, not simply particular poems.

Alford notes that for her methodology she draws “on literary, philosophical, and psychological research on attention and poetic experience to develop [her] own concepts and terminology,” and as a result, her “reflections on the poems themselves are thus deeply subjective, rooted in firsthand acts of attention” (10). She adds: “This approach locates me in a limited position, bound by my own blind spots and conditioned lenses, which I have kept in mind throughout my theorization of poetic attention” (10). 

Still, it remains a mystery why the turn, and the related liftoff, which are so central to Alford’s project, so generally un-, or at least under-, recognized, under-theorized, so little attended to. This phenomenon obviously requires further investigation.


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Categories : Emblem Structure, Epiphanic structure, Metaphor-to-Meaning Structure, midcourse turn, poetic turn, structure-form distinction

Richards’s Reversals

25 06 2018

Today I stumbled upon a fine little essay I feel compelled to share: I. A. Richards’s “Reversals in Poetry,” collected in his Poetries: Their Media and Ends, edited by Trevor Eaton (The Hague: Mouton, 1974): 59-70.

In this brief essay, Richards examines a number of ballads and ballad-like poems. (He notes that “[t]he title of the original talk [of which his essay is a transcription] was Ballads” (65).) However, as his essay’s title indicates, Richards was intrigued by the structural reversals that he found in a number of the poems he was examining, and so he decided to focus on that. The structure Richards investigates is one “which often seems fundamental in poetic composition and really important: the way verses can be ABOUT a many-stepped hierarchy of situations simultaneously: up, up, up or, if you like, down, down, down, deeper deeper (63).”

“Down, down, down, deeper deeper” is right. Richards offers a number of poems that seem to be headed on way, but then, oddly, surprisingly, turn to either keep going in a downward (negative) direction or else, shockingly, simply turn negative. Here’s the first poem, a lullaby sung to former Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick by his mother:

White was the sheet
That spread for her lover,
White was the sheet;
And embroidered the cover.

But whiter the sheet
And the canopy grander
When he lay down to sleep
Where the hill-foxes wander. (59)

As Richards asks, and answers: “It has a powerful plot–hasn’t it? The pull and tension are pretty strong between the expectations generated by the opening…and the grimness of the last five words…” (60). He calls this turn a “violent grim reversal” and “an extreme reversal–sprung upon us as suddenly and unpreparedly as possible” (60).

About Sir Walter Scott’s “Proud Maisie,”  Richards notes, “Here are the same grim surprises: the same sudden reversals and the same polarities of Love and Death” (61). Then Richards offers this terrifying little gem, a motto from the beginning of a chapter from chapter ten of Scott’s A Legend of Montrose:

Dark on their journey frowned the gloomy day.
Wild were the hills, and doubtful grew the way.
More dark, more gloomy and more doubtful showed
The mansion which received them from the road. (62)

Glorious! Terrifying! Terribly ironic! Ah! This is how so many great horror movies have begun…! While I’m very glad my bookshelf wanderings led me to this today, I wish a bit that I’d discovered this in autumn, closer to Halloween. Ah, well: we are a few days past the solstice’s turn, so, even though it’s not yet fully registered, the days are getting shorter–down, down, down, deeper deeper…

Richards closes with two additional ballads. I’ll close with them, as well. I hope you enjoy the strange, dark gifts of these grimly surprising plots–!

“The Unquiet Grave” [The version Richards uses differs slightly from this one, but you’ll get the gist…]

“Faithless Nelly Gray”


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“the purr is a roar”: Michael McClure’s Turns

22 06 2018

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If you love haiku and the turns very near their cores, be sure to check out Michael McClure’s lovely and lively “Haiku Edge.” “Haiku Edge” is a poem of 58 linked haiku, and–chock-full of emblems, ironies, and negative dialectics–it’s also a masterclass in turns.

In the preface to Rain Mirror, the book in which “Haiku Edge” appears, McClure discusses his doing away with the overly-simplistic 5-7-5 haiku form, making special note of the primacy of the haiku’s bipartite structure:

Beat poet and the retired Buddhist abbot, Zenshin Ryufu Philip Whalen, explained to me, in the 1950s, how a haiku should be written in English. He showed me the ellipsis, the mirroring or the reflection of the two parts of the poem’s action.

Refresh your perception! Reshape the contours of your consciousness! Surprise yourself!


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Swivel toward a Stirring

19 06 2018

Courtesy photo Poet Donald Levering

So, this is pretty cool: at the 2018 New Mexico State Poetry Society Annual Meeting and State Convention, not only did Scott Wiggerman, a long-time good friend of the Structure & Surprise blog, present on the poetic turn, but so did Donald Levering. Check out this description of Levering’s workshop:

Workshop Information

Poems with a Turn:
The word “verse” derives from the Latin versus, meaning turning, where lines of poetry are likened to the turns at the ends of rows in plowing a field. And while line-break placement is important, sometimes the farmer swerves to plow a different field, or decides to sow potatoes instead of wheat, or turns to the sky to watch a flock of birds.

This workshop will look at shorter poems that take a sudden turn, poems that may find themselves in another season. The poem may surprise us, shift the argument or focus, move from real to surreal, intensify an emotion, or swing the tone from humorous to serious. Looking at several varied examples, we will examine where and how these poems make their turns, and inquire how the shift serves the poem. We will review the measured, rhetorical turn of Shakespearean sonnets, look at a famous Wordsworthian turn, and sample hinged poems by moderns and contemporaries. Time permitting, we will try our hand at writing turns to given poems and then compare to the author’s version.

This was a workshop that clearly acknowledged the structure / form distinction, and it clearly was focused on poetic structure (the volta, the rhetorical turn) rather than poetic form (line breaks, etc). Fantastic!

Levering is a poet who often engages the turn in his poems. Need proof? Check out his fine poem “Visitant” [scroll down], which swivels wonderfully, and frighteningly, at its conclusion. Glad he’s also teaching others about how to deploy this vital feature of poems!


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Categories : poetic turn, poetry, structure-form distinction, Uncategorized, volta

Turning the Field: The Poetry of Laurie Perry Vaughen

27 06 2017

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I’ve recently had the exciting experience of encountering the work of poet Laurie Perry Vaughen via the online publication of her master’s thesis, “Artifacts: Selected Poems.” There’s much to admire in the work: its thoughtfulness, its sinewy use of narrative and sound, its palpable imagery. But (of course!) what especially caught my eye was the poet’s attention to the poetic turn. Vaughen made use of Structure & Surprise to help create new work and/or to help articulate (often very movingly) what her work is doing. Very early on in her thesis’s introductory essay (the second section of which is called “Turning the Field: Structure and Surprise”), Vaughen clarifies the distinction between form and structure:

We may approach the field of a poem and immediately see patterns of rhyme scheme, repetition and the footprints of feet. However, many–perhaps most–contemporary poems require a different kind of field work, a deeper read, a deeper turning of the field. Any discussion of my work, of free verse poems, demands a look at the overall movement of the poem rather than noting couplets or beats. A formal poem such as a sonnet, pantoum or villanelle will also offer a structure of movement apart from its form, overall or within a line–if they are mature, polished, rich or ripe.

“Poetic structure is, simply, the pattern of a poem’s turning,” states Michael Theune… (2)

(I really like this idea of poems being “rich, or ripe“!)

Vaughen, though, also is aware of the larger significance and resonances of the act of turning:

Turning as the main movement of a poem is readily identified with nature. Maple leaves turn. Seasons turn. A chrysalis turns to a butterfly. A Jerusalem artichoke turns toward the sun. Evening turns to dusk before turning to morning. Man turns toward death, eventually, as a natural process. As the Catholics finally admitted, the horizon merely turns and the earth turns around the sun, not the other way around. The South African Zulu tribe and the Jew in his or her Diaspora turn to the ancestors for consultation. The structure, the turning in the poem, gives the art pulse, a life blood— and hopefully elevates our resting pulse as we write or read or listen. (6)

(Wow! I love that last sentence!)

Transitioning into her introduction’s third section, “Examining Shards: Emblematic Poems,” Vaughen explains her extra-poetic attraction to the emblem structure, noting, “My poems generally emerge from an emblematic structure. Perhaps this is because I was raised to be an observer of the small within the sublime since childhood and continued this with my undergraduate work in archaeology as an anthropology major” (7).

But, to her credit, for Vaughen poetic structure never ends up being an easy answer for some of poetry’s larger questions. Taking up the issue of increased fragmentation in more recent poetry, Vaughen (in another formulation I greatly admire) states, “There’s no clear answer to…[such] important…concerns about the parts and the whole and the tensions between these. There is a demand on the writer, critic, publisher and reader to explore contemporary poetry with new understandings of how structure, tension as transformation through language can work as synergy” (27). Vaughen then turns to Rilke, who then, in Letters to a Young Poet, “turns the young poet’s attention to nature as the source of synergy” (27). She quotes:

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable. No experience was too insignificant – the smallest happening unfolds like destiny. Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by another thread, and held and carried by a hundred others. (New World Library, 1992 edition: 24)

(Ah! What beautiful weaving Rilke accomplishes even here, even in the rough cloth of prose! It’s no wonder that Vaughen, a maker of so many fine phrases, is drawn to Rilke’s lovely formulation–)

What all of this results in, then, is that while Vaughen still sees structure as a major component of her work, it’s an altered version of structure:

While my poems often hold an emblematic tension or use emblem as a generating pulse that rises to a pattern, the poems are not idea-driven, but language- driven. Lines, enjambment, breaks, stanzas and turns are generated by language, and not a prescribed theme or concrete image. The image serves the language, remember. The emblem I begin with may be a word, a shard of language, which gets associated with another image through sound or syntax rather than symbolic gesture. Though association holds images in tension, sound is also at play. For example, in my poem “Taking Turns,” a secondary turn in the poem’s structure is the language of pedals moving to petals. (36-7)

And, of course, all of this gets enacted in the poetry. Of particular interest:

  • “Taking Turns” (47). A lovely dialectical poem, with a radiant synthesis.
  • “Eye of the Needle” (55). A fine fantasia on sewing and the Christian idea of “passing through the eye of a needle.”
  • “Birds Audubon Never Painted” (58). A brief poem with a stunning arrival point.
  • “Ode to the Faulty Microphone” (80). In fact, a lovely homage to the power of great poetry.
  • “Emblematic,” which begins: “Any metaphor you elevate / has its scarred sense of place–” (81).
  • “After the Tornado” (118). A fascinating (if unintentional) study in endings. I’d thought the poem was a single-page poem–there, it has a tremendous ending, I think. But the poem continues for a half-page. Initially, I was surprised by this: I wondered if that second page should be cut. But the later part of the poem also contributes great power, including fascinating turns, to the poem.
  • “Photograph, 1944” (132-33). An ekphrastic poem that uncovers the image’s seductive, tensive mystery.
  • “Sweet like Funeral Cake” (134). A bittersweet elegy.

I encourage readers of this blog to check out Vaughen’s thesis, and to dive into her poetry. Treasures abound!


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Structure as Pattern of Turning in James G. Hepburn’s Poetic Design: Handbook and Anthology

5 06 2016

When in Poetic Design: Handbook and Anthology, James G. Hepburn uses the word “structure” he means many things: “structure” comprises, among other things, stanzas, syntax, rhyme scheme, and line. However, for Hepburn, “structure” means, primarily, the pattern of a poem’s turning–the thing is, he is not explicit about this, though he should have been.

Right away in chapter 8, “Structure,” it seems as though structure might mean something  like the turn. Hepburn opens the chapter stating, “The structure of a poem is like the structure of a house: it is what underlies, supports, and frames the words, the alliteration, the metaphors, the rhymes. It is the integrated pattern and movement of all the parts” (109).

However, from this focused definition of structure, structure quickly comes to mean a great many things. In the next paragraph, structure means stanzas. Discussing Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow,” Hepburn states, “The most obvious aspect of structure is the division of the poem into two stanzas” (109). He also notes that syntax is a part of this structure: “But look at the poem again, and observe that the poet has crossed the structure  with another structure: the two stanzas are part of a single sentence” (109-10). Further on, Hepburn adds an additional element to structure: “One aspect of the structure of the poem that has been unmentioned–and there are still others–is the rhyme scheme” (110). And, Hepburn adds, “Of course the individual line is an important structural element in any poem, and a more complete discussion of the two previous poems [“Dust of Snow” and Shakespeare’s sonnet 73] would have dealt with it too” (114).

For all of this range, this diversity, of what structure entails, it is clear that, though he never says it, the heart of structure, as the introduction to the chapter seemed to indicate it could be, is the turn.

The three poems focused on in this chapter feature distinct turns. “Dust of Snow” turns sharply between its two stanzas. Sonnet 73, as one would expect of a Shakespearean sonnet, turns distinctly between the third quatrain and the final couplet. The third poem, William Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy”, turns profoundly between its two stanzas.

And Hepburn seems to be aware of this: most of his discussions of various structural components entail (though they only imply) the turn, that is, a major shift in the rhetorical and/or dramatic trajectory of a poem. Discussing the two stanzas in “Dust of Snow,” Hepburn notes, “The stanzaic division corresponds with a division between image and idea, or action and reaction: the crow shakes the snow in the first stanza, and the speaker of the poem reflects in the second” (109).

The same thing happens when discussing sonnet 73. Hepburn initially focuses on the rhyme scheme in this poem, noting that this particular sonnet has both a “fourfold structure” (abab-cdcd-efef-gg) and a “twofold structure” (ababcdcdefef–gg) (111). However, Hepburn knows (though he does not say) that the twofold structure pivots on the poem’s turn; he states, “The twofold aspect is supported by the structure of idea in the poem: the first twelve lines say that the speaker of the poem is growing old; the last two lines assert a consequence” (111). In the next paragraph, Hepburn expands on this, and, though he does not say it directly, directs his reader’s attention to the volta:

Now consider another aspect of structure, the development of image and idea. The first four lines present an image of autumn, the next four of a darkening evening, the next four of a dying fire. These three images can be thought of as constituting a single image of a dying fire on an autumn evening, or they can be seen as separate, essentially repeating images. Individually or together, they say: I am growing old. Again, one sees a structure in which the first twelve lines contrast with the last two. The division is further emphasized by the fact that the idea in first twelve lines is presented in sustained images, whereas the ideas in the last two lines is presented more directly. The two parts of the poem look different from each other: in the first twelve lines images are in the foreground, with the idea lying behind them; in the last two lines an idea is in the foreground, served by incidental metaphors. (111)

And the same thing happens with “There Was a Boy.” Of this poem, Hepburn first makes note of its “apparently irregular” structure, commenting on the different sizes of the stanzas (which are so irregular that Hepburn clarifies that each is “more fittingly called a verse paragraph”); on the presence of “several strong caesuras”; and on the facts “that the iambic pentameter rhythm is often broken” and “that there are many run-on lines” (113). Hepburn then turns from this view of the poem to argue for the structural unity of the poem; he states, “He [Wordsworth] does not rely upon a conventional form such as the sonnet, and he does not invent his own neat stanzaic structure; rather, he creates a fluid organic pattern” (113).

Hepburn begins his discussion of this fluid organic pattern by focusing on the poem’s use of line, including the ways that “incongruent grammatical structures” affect it–he notes, for example, that “almost every line in the first verse paragraph is run-on, and almost all the heavy grammatical pauses–ends of clauses and sentences–are placed within the lines rather than at the ends” (114). Hepburn observes that this technique creates “a steady forward movement” that feels “natural rather than sculpted” (114). Hepburn then contrasts the use of these structural elements to their use in the second verse paragraph, which feels “less unified than the first, and lacks something of its forward movement,” thus coming to seem “a diminishing afterthought” (114).

But, of course, this difference in the deployment of structural elements serves to help the poem enact the feelings and moods on either side of the poem’s major turn from lively celebration of wondrous, mystical life to fragmented mourning. As he considers the significance of this (unnamed) turn, Hepburn thinks about how it seems the second verse paragraph could be removed from the poem without too much loss (whereas “Dust of Snow” would be destroyed by the loss of its second stanza), but that in fact this is not the case; Hepburn states, “Yet nothing is more certain than that in its own way Wordsworth’s second verse paragraph is as important structurally as Frost’s” (114). To make his case, Hepburn notes the parallels between the boy’s and the man’s silent listening, and how, only with the second verse paragraph “does the reader himself [sic] stand mute, looking at boy and man in nature, listening to the meaning of life” (114-15).

Hepburn also makes a point that I think is not quite totally correct and that demonstrates a negative consequence of his inattention to the turn; he states,

As a further means of clarifying the structural importance of the second verse paragraph, contrast it now with the quatrains of Shakespeare’s poem. Any one of the quatrains (any one of the images contained by them) could be removed without vitally damaging the structure of the poem or the poem itself: something important would be lost, the clear and sedate narrowing of images and implication, but the poem could sustain the loss, and remain much the same as before. In Wordsworth’s poem the second image of the listening person reverberates against the first, enhances its meaning, gives the poem a direction into deeper meaning. (115)

I disagree with Hepburn’s comparing the second verse paragraph with a sonnet’s quatrain. The second verse paragraph, which comes after the turn, should instead be compared to Shakespeare’s couplet (or, had a different sonnet been used, Petrarch’s sestet). The result is the same: Hepburn still believes that the second verse paragraph cannot be removed. And this is good. However, this paragraph of Hepburn’s would have made much more sense had Hepburn written, “As a further means of clarifying the structural importance of the second verse paragraph, compare it now to the couplet of Shakespeare’s poem. Just as the couplet cannot be removed from that sonnet without irreparably damaging the meaning and significance of the poem, so can the second verse paragraph not be removed from ‘There Was a Boy.'”

The fact that Hepburn does not do this is the sign and seal of the fact that he does not pay adequate attention to the turn in his chapter on structure. He is generally aware of the turn, and his whole chapter on structure pivots on it, but he is not explicit about it, and so some infelicities and confusions arise where there need not be any. The bigger confusion that this partial inattention to the turn creates occurs at the outset of his chapter on structure. Hepburn states that structure is “like the structure of a house: it is what underlies, supports, and frames the words, the alliteration, the metaphors, the rhymes.” So, structure underlies, supports, and frames rhyme, but also rhyme is a structural “aspect” (110). This confusion could have been cleared up had Hepburn differentiated, as did Randall Jarrell in “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry,” between “musical structure” and “other sorts of structure in lyrical poetry.”

In the introduction to How Does a Poem Mean?, the only introduction to poetry textbook that contains a chapter on the turn (though this book refers to it as the “fulcrum”), John Ciardi refers to the book’s final chapter on the turn as “the important one.”  Ciardi clarifies, “The present volume sets out simply to isolate some of the characteristics of poetry and to develop criteria by which parts of the poetic structure may be experienced in a more comprehensive way.  The final chapter suggests a method whereby all the criteria developed in the preceding chapters may be applied to the comprehension of the total poem.”

I think Hepburn agrees. He examines a number of structural characteristics of poems, but the turn is the key aspect of the poem these other characteristics orbit and contribute to. And this is excellent! (In fact, about Wordsworth’s poem Hepburn notes correctly that “[i]t has been impossible to describe the structure without clarifying the meaning, and it would be equally impossible to state the meaning without discussing the structure” (115).) I only wish that Hepburn had been more consistently explicit in articulating the centrality of the turn to his conception of poetic structure. In this way, his treatment of structure would have been more accurate and likely would not have included the small but still unnecessary missteps that it does.


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On Tony Hoagland’s “Poetic Housing”

17 05 2016

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“Let us like a poem to an internal combustion engine. It is mounted, or housed, inside a sturdy frame. The structure must be sturdy because the contents of the poem are combustible; the vibrations are fierce.”

So, just a few days ago I published a post on James Longenbach’s “Lyric Knowledge,” an odd essay that goes a great distance to say something simple but vital: that the organization of a poem is significant. Longenbach goes so far as to reorder some poems to show the effect of organization, and especially to reveal the achievement of the originals. In that blog post, I argue that though he doesn’t come right out to say it, one of Longenbach’s great concerns in his essay is the vital poetic turn. When he reorders the poems under his consideration, Longenbach destroys the power and the beauty of the original poems’ turns. He then argues that the poems were fine–even great–just as they were.

Interestingly, today I read another essay that performs the same kind of critical act (reorganizing a poem) and agrees about the importance of poetic organization and the turn–though, very much like Longenbach’s, it doesn’t exactly come right out and declare its admiration for the turn. This essay is Tony Hoagland’s “Poetic Housing: Shifting Parts & Changing Wholes” (The Writer’s Chronicle 45.5 (March/April 2013): 90-99).

Here is my argument that chief among Hoagland’s concerns in fact is the turn:

1. Almost right away (in the second paragraph), Hoagland establishes the structure-form distinction: he will not be discussing form but some other aspect of poetry:

This constant threat of imbalance, of eruption, or potential amorphousness is especially present in the writing of free verse poetry. The sonneteer or a writer of villanelles has at least a pre-ordained form to fill–to tell her roughly where the poem’s beginning, middle, and end belong. But the free verse poet is always wondering about structure–guessing where the end of the poem might be, trying to detect what optimal dramatic shape might be emerging. (90-91)

2. What Hoagland means by “structure” is not something amorphous, but rather is “dramatic shape.” The next paragraphs after the one quoted above state:

The reason concise dramatic shape is important, even in “loose” associative poems, is because poems are pressurized containers. A poem must contain energy; that is, hold it in. You can’t carry water in a colander. And in order for the poem to contain, accumulate, and release pressure it must have shape, a dramatic progression.

Housing and Transmission: Let us liken a poem to an internal combustion engine. It is mounted, or housed, inside a sturdy frame. The structure must be sturdy because the contents of the poem are combustible; the vibrations are fierce. The housing contains and directs the explosive force of combustion with precision.

I know that these principles apply to fiction and nonfiction as well as poetry. But structure is an especially crucial issue in poems. Why? Because poems have so few words, and, given the small space they occupy, the relative proportion and relation of words to each other can change very fast. Suddenly, the theme turns out to be different than expected, or an image appears which is so resonant, it becomes indisputably structural. (91)

3. When Hoagland sums up “the whole of the poem-reading experience,” he states that there are “two general by useful assertions”:

  1. Each of the lines and moments in a poem has different degrees of force and prominence; each moment has a relative weight, color, intensity, and sound. And some of them are–must be–more important than others. In other words, poems are hierarchical.
  2. As soon as we decide on the primary moments, we can know what is secondary. Then, the secondary materials begin to orbit around those primary moments in a supplementary role. The primary moments define the contexts for the other moments. (91)

Here, before turning to clinch my case, I want to pause for a moment to argue that the turn is one of the most primary moments a poem has. It certainly is the case that poet-critic John Ciardi thinks this. I make the case about this here.*

And I think poet-critic Jane Hirshfield also would agree. As I argue here, Hirshfield refers to the turn as a “window-moment.” As I note in that earlier, linked-to blog entry, “Though Hirshfield notes that such window-moments may be momentary elements within a poem, most often the window-moment is associated with the turn.** In my blog post about Hirshfield’s notion of the “window-moment,” I note, “The relation between the window-moment and the turn is made even clearer when one considers that many of the poems Hirshfield discusses in her essay have major turns, turns which often are equated with the window-moment.” And the same can be said not only of Hirshfield, but also of Ciardi (for whom all fulcrums really are principal turns), and Hoagland.

The poem that Hoagland attends to most closely is Jean Follain’s “The Art of War.” This twelve-line poem is largely a list. It begins, “At the window a rose / the color of a blonde’s young nipple / a mole walks underground,” and then includes two other image clusters: “Peace they say to a dog / whose life is short. / The air remains full of sunlight.” It concludes with one longer item: “Young men / learn how to make war / in order to redeem / a whole world they are told / but they still find the book / of theory unreadable.”

About this poem, Hoagland argues,

If…we were to identify the internal dominant moment of “The Art of War,” we would choose the complex final sentence, identifiable by size, grammatical momentum, and complexity, with its many turns and developments….Follain’s poem has a loose structure, and Follain’s work in general is the quintessence of the associative mode, which is to say, the relationships between its parts are largely inferential. Little is explicit, yet this last sentence in “The Art of War” carries much of the intelligence of the poem. It is a sequence in which, as the sentence unfolds across line breaks, a chunk at a time, we watch the poem’s emphasis and stance complicate and shift….We apprehend it all in a second; our cognitive process is swift, nimble, and resourceful at recognizing and adjusting the parameters of the poem, determining what is the essence of the poem, the housing. Every other inflection of the poem turns upon that structural recognition. (my emphasis)

Opening with six lines of largely paratactic listing that then accumulate in six lines of hypotactic conclusion, this brief poem is the kind of poem that Longenbach seems especially taken by in “Lyric Knowledge,” in which Longenbach investigates the same kind of paratactic-hypotactic turn in the first section of Wallace Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn.” And Hoagland treats this poem in a way similar to the way Longenbach treats the section from Stevens: he rearranges it in order to show, ultimately, the power of the original.

Hoagland creates a poem, called “Why I Grow Flowers,” which reshuffles “The Art of War.” “Why I Grow Flowers” begins with the sunlight, then moves to the mole, then the young men (minus the book of theory), then the dog image, and it concludes with the window-rose-nipple image cluster. About this poem Hoagland states,

This rebuilt poem has quite a different thrust. This version emphasizes the pleasures of peace, and seems to infer some sound reasons for applying for conscientious objector status. After all, it concludes with palpable arguments for peace: a flower garden and the promise of erotic adventure. In its favor, this revision is distinctly more unified than the original. Yet, unfortunately, it is a less dynamic and less interesting poem. Loose as it still is, and not without nuance, this version is a lesser poem. (94-95)

I couldn’t agree more with Hoagland’s assessment. Great poems rarely offer simple unity. Rather, they offer dynamic shifts and surprises. As Randall Jarrell notes in “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry,” “A successful poem starts from one position and ends at a very different one, often a contradictory or opposite one; yet there has been no break in the unity of the poem.” (I also tend to agree with his critique, later in his essay, of the “elliptical mode,” a mode which, according to Hoagland, can be much too tolerant of structures so loose that they have no center, no key turns, at all, offering instead “only the mystique of mystification.”)

Much like Longenbach’s “Lyric Knowledge,” Hoagland’s “Poetic Housing” is important reading for anyone interested in the poetic turn–it’s full of great insights. However, as readers of this blog know, I look forward to a day when discussion of the turn is not quite so deeply and variously encoded and embedded (as housing, fulcrum, window-moment, center, torque, or swerve) and is acknowledged more explicitly as the vital feature of poetic significance- and experience-making that it is.

—

*I offer the following paragraph from the linked-to blog post as a glimpse of that larger argument:

The importance of the turn is clear in Ciardi’s book.  Though Ciardi discusses the turn in the last chapter of How Does a Poem Mean?, “The Poem in Countermotion,” this chapter is the ultimate chapter, the chapter which Ciardi in his introduction calls “the important one.”  Additionally, Ciardi states, “The present volume sets out simply to isolate some of the characteristics of poetry and to develop criteria by which parts of the poetic structure may be experienced in a more comprehensive way.  The final chapter suggests a method whereby all the criteria developed in the preceding chapters may be applied to the comprehension of the total poem.”

Ciardi even differentiates between “principal” and “lesser” fulcrums (“fulcrum” is the term Ciardi uses for the turn). A poem’s major turn or turns are primary moments, indeed.

**Here’s a glimpse at what Hirshfield says, which supports my belief that a window-moment really is a turn:

In the swerve into some new possibility of mind, a poem with a window stops to look elsewhere, drawing on something outside of its self-constructed domain and walls.  A window can be held by a change of sense realms or a switch of rhetorical strategy, can be framed by a turn of grammar or ethical stance, can be sawn open by an overt statement or slipped in almost unseen.  Whether large or small, what I am calling a window is recognized primarily by the experience of expansion it brings: the poem’s nature is changed because its scope has become larger.


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On James Longenbach’s “Lyric Knowledge”

13 05 2016

At first glance, James Longenbach’s “Lyric Knowledge” is an incredibly odd and, so, perhaps weirdly intriguing, essay. It begins in a seemingly interesting way: it’s opening line states, “The impulse to be lyrical is driven by the need to be no longer constrained by oneself.” Whoa. Okay. It seems, as the whole introductory paragraph–about suffering, love, the familiar, novelty, experience–indicates, we’re entering some strange, new territory. But what follows such an opening turns out to be pretty standard stuff–stuff which, in fact, is only interesting for how obvious it is.

Or so it seems. Here, I want to explore “Lyric Knowledge” and suggest that this convoluted essay really is about some incredibly plain but incredibly potent truths about lyric poetry, truths that have been discussed repeatedly in Structure & Surprise, and in this, it’s accompanying blog. But I’ll then speculate on some reasons why a critic such as Longenbach might work to keep such plain truths mysterious.

Here is the key idea of “Lyric Knowledge,” which is subtitled “Ideas of order in poetry”: poems offer a different kind of readerly experience when read out of the order in which they are written. That is–to be clear (yes, you did just read correctly what I wrote): again and again in this essay, Longenbach takes poems, restructures them–sometimes putting the final few lines first; sometimes reversing the whole text (with a few, necessary syntactical adjustments) so that what was the final line goes first; what was the penultimate line goes second; what was the third-to-last line goes third; etc–and then claims amazement at the fact that the two texts create different experiences for readers.

For example, Longenbach takes an epigram inscribed, according to Plato’s Phaedrus, on Midas’s tomb, mixes up the lines (1, 2, 3, and 4 become 3, 2, 4, and 1), and then is kind of blown away by the fact that the two poems don’t have the same effect. He states,

In this version we discover in the final line that the poem is spoken by a bronze statue of a girl, eerily similar to any girl who might have received Midas’s amorous attentions; in the original version our experience of the poem is predicated on this knowledge. What does the fact that one can alter significantly the effect of a poem without changing a single word tell us about the power of structure? What did Socrates [earlier quoted as having said of this epigram “that it is of no consequence what order these lines are spoken in”] not want to recognize about that power?

He treats similarly the concluding fourteen lines of Wallace Stevens’s “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” and “Western Wind.” To focus just on “Western Wind,” Longenbach takes that four-line poem and switches it around so that the final two lines become the first two lines; so that this:

Western wind, when will you blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.

becomes this:

Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
Western wind, when will you blow?
The small rain down can rain.

While I probably should simply celebrate Longenbach’s work here–after all, it is largely a recognition of the importance of poetic structure (and, as I’ll demonstrate later on, I mean structure as I’ve long meant structure: as the pattern of a poem’s turning)–I can’t quite get over the fact that what is so odd about this work is how much labor is spent to make such a painfully obvious point. Small changes make big differences in great writing–that’s one of the main ways we know it’s great writing. Big changes make really big differences. It is shocking that the bulk of an essay in Poetry is spent re-making such palpable points.

*

At least, initially. When we get clear on some key details, this fact turns out to be not so surprising at all.

Here are the key details:

Longenbach really is concerned with poetic structure–that is, he is concerned with the pattern of a poem’s turning, a poem’s rhetorical and/or dramatic trajectory. At different points throughout the essay, Longenbach notes how what he is pointing to are turns. For example, reflecting on the two versions of “Western Wind”–noting about his alternative version that “while the form of the poem is unchanged (alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, rhymed xaxa), its structure has been radically altered”–Longenbach states, “Here [that is, in his alternative version], we turn from an experience of longing to the weather, an external drama that confirms the emotional turmoil. Something happens in this shift from interiority to exteriority [that is, in both versions], for we feel in both arenas the power of absence, the desire for change, but something more momentous happens in the original structure, in which our expectations are not confirmed but shattered.”

Longenbach isn’t the only critic interested in turns. Of course, I am. But so are the editors are Poetry. (Here is some proof.) So are, frankly, just about all critics and editors. However, most critics and editors do a lackluster–and certainly, overall, an unsystematic–job of acknowledging how much they admire well-executed turns. Longenbach’s essay is guilty of this, as well–it is enthralled by strong turns, but it doesn’t articulate this well.

More specifically, Longenbach is concerned with a particular kind of turn: one that ends up leading to what I have called “fitting surprise.” (This kind of turn is, indeed, special; many critics and commentators have been intrigued by fitting surprise–check out a constantly growing collection of quotations on the topic here.) In “Lyric Knowledge,” Longenbach’s interest in fitting surprise emerges most clearly when he discusses the first section of Wallace Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn.” Longenbach notes that in this section, the poem moves from a great deal of paratactic syntax to, in its third-to-last and penultimate sentences, to some key uses of hypotactic syntax–as Longenbach notes, “‘This is his poison: that we should disbelieve / Even that.’ This is the first sentence that thrusts our thinking forward by suggesting that one thing follows from another not merely by chance, association, or accretion but by necessity (‘His poison is that we should disbelieve even in happiness’).” Just as with “Western Wind,” the effect of rearranging the poem serves mainly to highlight how well-constructed the original version is:

It is not surprising that, without altering a single word, this lyric reads as elegantly backward as it reads forward, the form unchanged (iambic pentameter lines arranged in tercets) but the structure radically different: ‘The moving grass, the Indian in his glade, / Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal / Made us no less sure.’ But deft as this arrangement may be, its structure sacrifices the crucially delayed turn from parataxis to hypotaxis, a turn that makes the figure of the Indian, when it finally appears at the end of the poem, feel simultaneously unprecedented and inevitable. The poem is a dramatization of the thinking mind in the process of discovering that thought itself is the mind’s most indomitable foe. ‘Here are too many mirrors for misery,’ says the final lyric in the sequence, and the work of ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ is to make this simple remark feel authentic, to allow us to exist in the temporal process of discovering it again.

“[U]nprecedented and inevitable.” There is in fact some precedent for Longenbach prizing such poetic effect. In “Composed Wonder,” the final chapter of The Resistance to Poetry he recognizes the power of this effect in Anthony Hecht’s “‘It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.” Longenbach writes,

And though by the end of the poem we have become quite used to the aural pleasure of these rhymes, something astonishing happens in the final quatrain: the content of its last line…is potentially overpowering.  Nothing in the preceding eight stanzas prepares us for it, and even if the Holocaust seems in retrospect to be everywhere in “‘It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It,'” the poem’s final lines continue to surprise.  When we hear the first half of the final stanza…we are fully prepared for the aural experience of the stanza clicking into place with a rhyme on “childermas.”  We don’t necessarily expect the poem to jump to a new register…, but the expected rhyme makes the leap seem horribly inevitable. (99-100)

And, as I note in my critique of The Resistance to Poetry, “This standard is hinted at elsewhere in the book,” and that elsewhere is particularly interesting: “Longenbach employs the language of structured surprise to express his admiration for one of the oldest poems in the English language, ‘Western Wind.’ About that poem…Longenbach states, ‘The expostulation—Christ!—marks the place where the poem breaks open, releasing an emotion that is both unpredictable and, at least in retrospect, logical.'”

*

And so, Longenbach has created another work–this time, an essay–that suggests the deep importance of great, unique turns. Indeed, he even goes back to cover in greater detail a poem, “Western Wind,” that he thinks has fitting surprise, and then, essentially, closes “Lyric Knowledge” with another poem–or section of a poem, the first section of “The Auroras of Autumn”–that he thinks also has fitting surprise. It’s clear that Longenbach admires these kinds of turns. But if he does, why doesn’t he do more with them? Why isn’t he more explicit and articulate about this feature of great poems?

In my critique of The Resistance to Poetry I argue that Longenbach does what he does because he understands that if he were to really prize fitting surprise he would have to do away with other ideas about poetry that he values. I note, for example, how valorizing the poetry of fitting surprise would put to the test other valorizations of poetry Longenbach was trying to promote:

[Fitting surprise] can be used to draw party lines in new ways. Putting all weight and pressure on the poem, it doesn’t make judgments according to poets or schools. Wet disjunction [the kind of disjunction used by a poet such as T. S. Eliot, which Longenbach valorizes] might create structured surprise, but so might dry [the kind of disjunction used by a poet such as Ezra Pound, which Longenbach does not valorize]. Ashbery might have twenty poems that do this, but so might a lesser-known poet—and such a fact should encourage us to get to know those works of that lesser-known poet. In fact, what Longenbach says of Bishop’s expectation that art lead to “perfectly useless concentration,” that it “makes the hard work of art seem simultaneously rare and available to everyone,” can also be said of structured surprise.

It is more difficult to tell what Longenbach is doing with fitting surprise in “Lyric Knowledge.” At one level, Longenbach again generally uses fitting surprise just as many other critics before him have: sporadically, acknowledging its great power, but without an effort to try to spell out, let alone act upon, how valuing fitting surprise might really and interestingly upset longstanding valuations of and distinctions in poetry. At a slightly different level, this odd essay–in which he seems mystified by the fairly obvious fact that (unlike, say, a “paragraph from a blog or a parking ticket”) some poems, reread and reread, keep enchanting us–powered in part by fitting surprise affords Longenbach opportunities to subtly reinscribe some of his old favorite distinctions (parataxis successfully transmuted into hypotaxis corresponds to his valorization of wet disjunction over dry).

At another level, though, Longenbach’s sporadic use of fitting surprise allows him to sidestep a key issue: what makes poems powerful and memorable? Longenbach has set up a kind of either-or, combined with a straw man: either some text (such as a parking ticket) is weak and unmemorable or else it strong and memorable due to fitting surprise. But, of course, there’s a huge amount of middle space Longenbach does not investigate. What about a cheesy favorite song one loves to hear again and again for nostalgic reasons, for the associations the song conjures rather than, say, the structure of the lyrics? What about a note announcing a break-up? Language has power and is memorable–and yet is returned to again and again–for a host of reasons, not necessarily because a text in some way delivers fitting surprise. Longenbach takes a shortcut with his essay, avoiding discussing these other kinds of texts.

But here’s the thing: whenever fitting surprise–be it in the form of a poem or a short story or a joke or a play–is delivered, you do indeed know you’re in the realm of powerful, moving–and it is tempting here to say specifically literary–language. (NB: even as I write this, I realize how much more deeply I still have to think about this…) Longenbach uses a shortcut, but it is, to some extent, legitimate: after all, Longenbach is trying to demonstrate the importance of structure in great lyric poetry, and he clearly believes (and I certainly agree) that fitting surprise is a vital part of great lyric poetry. I hope Longenbach might start saying so more clearly and systematically.


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Surprise/Moves

29 06 2014

moving

I’ve recently been deeply engaged by Jack Collom‘s Moving Windows: Evaluating the Poetry Children Write.  The book is intriguing for a number of reasons.  Perhaps chief among them is the fact that Moving Windows actually broaches and attempts to handle one of the trickiest–and therefore least discussed–topics in regard to poetry: evaluation.  Also of particular interest, especially for readers of this blog, is the central role that structure and surprise play in Collom’s method of evaluation.

Surprise is key for Collom.  Not only is it one of the many ways of valuing children’s poetry, it is perhaps the most important way.  It certainly is a term that keeps coming up in Collom’s writing.  On the first page of the book’s preface, Collom notes that “[t]he verbal juxtapositions” of children’s poetry are often “full of surprises.”  Such surprise also is at the heart of grown-up poetry: “However significant the elaborate adult skills are in poetry–and this is not to deny that significance–the spirit, the vivifying spark, remains surprise, which is proof of the accuracy of the moment, of originality.”

Surprise also is personally significant for Collom.  In the book’s closing paragraphs, Collom notes how he came to poetry relatively late–he wrote his first poem at the age of twenty-three–but he also notes that what kept him interested in poetry was surprise.  Collom states, “What made me try [writing poetry] a second and third time was the sense of discovery.  I found I wasn’t writing just what I knew…but that the movement through the poem brought variations and surprises.  I felt that there was no end to it.”

In the section devoted specifically to surprise as a criterion for successful poetry, Collom again registers the primacy of its stature, stating, “Of course, surprise is the fruit of everything the poem has: tone, soundplay, and rhythm as well as ladders and twists of meaning.”  Collom notes that surprise forms “a spectrum of emotions,” and that, depending on context, the areas of this spectrum reveal themselves as “humor or poetry–or both–or just plain shock.”  (By “poetry” Collom means “the condensation, emphasis on measure and sound correspondences, and lack of linear thought [that] move the sources of incongruity more clearly into the physical aspects of language.”)  Collom describes the poems in his section on surprise in this way:

Some of the poems in this chapter lead up to one big surprise at the end.  Some even have a double surprise as a climax.  In others the continuing quality of the language, when word-to-word choices are being made rather than formulae followed, may contain surprise as a recurrent, or at least occasional, characteristic.  These syntactical surprises draw attention to points that may be parts of the poet’s intention…or may open up serendipitous side-issues, many of which turn out to connect meaningfully within to poems.

Noting the similarities among the evaluative criterion of surprise and other criteria, Collom further describes the poems included under “Surprise” in this way:

Surprise is definitely a manifestation of energy.  And surprise is candid.  What separates these poems from those in the previous two chapters is, again, emphasis rather than some fundamental difference.  When the essence of the poem seems to me to lie in the way one or more phrases are “set up” to stand out, like secular epiphanies, I’ve classed it here: jack-in-the-box words and tone changes.

Collom concludes his “Surprise” section with this summation:

Many of the poems in this chapter involve the reader in a sudden alteration of perspective.  These rapid changes may be between reality and appearance, large and small, love and its lack, fact and quality, talking and crying out, sound and sight, sense and nonsense, rhythm and image, inside and out, and so forth.  Involved readers get a sudden shock, and also a perspective on perspectives; they can derive from these poems and their energetic transitions a sense of the utter richness of the myriads of possible viewpoints available and, as a corollary, the limits of any one.  Writers of course learn likewise as they make the poems.

While, as shown above, surprise is related to a number of Collom’s evaluative criteria, the criterion with which it is more closely associated is that of “Poetic ‘Moves.'”  Surprise seems to be part and parcel of poetic moves:

The plural noun ‘moves’…is used by many contemporary poets to designate a supple use of language in poems.  It is more a matter of sophistication than…natural candor…, there is a sense of the deliberate play of ideas and of the flavors and impacts of words, the dance of language, the image and idea counterpoint of sheer rhythm.  I’m not referring here to the extremes of surrealistic play but to a writing situation wherein some kind of logical thread is evident but is not pushed to an all-consuming conclusion; rather the perceptions of the poet dance around it, play with meaning, create slants and surprises.

Additionally, in an effort to raise the notion of the poem above that of a device for merely conveying ideas or meanings, Collom suggests that a poem is more properly a place for the play of ideas, and turns and surprise are vital parts of such play:

So in this century the play of ideas has assumed a greater importance vis-a-vis ideas themselves, though a strong case could be made that, as far as the essentials go, “it was ever thus” in poetry; that is, that the key poetic qualities in, say, Shakespeare, the “lights” that bring his writings above others, and have made them for so long a time delightful, are the humors, the almost indefinable touches and turns, the inevitable surprises, of his instant-to-instant language…, and not his ideas, which are all derivative, at the service of his art rather than presented as any kind of gospel.

Collom also signals this close association by feeling the need to differentiate between the two criteria; Collom states, “The distinction I feel between ‘moves’ and surprise is simply that with the former the emphasis is not so much on a particular verbal leap, the breathless shock of that, as it is on just what has been moved from and what to, and how these combine to set up ongoing implications.”

Specifically, Collom defines poetic moves as the criterion that covers what he calls a poem’s ability to convey or embody “psychic geometry,” which he defines as “the way ideas rise for us, when reading a poem, and form a succession of shapes that interrelate.”

Collom wants these successions to shapes to offer surprise, and this is what leads me to think that Moving Windows is largely concerned with structure–and so, of course, the poetic turn–and surprise.  Consider a small selection of the poems included in the book:

A boy is
Lying to me.
Oh, I
Need the
Excitement.

*

My sisters sometimes
bother me.  So what? I
bother them back.

*

This is just to say
I have eaten the ice cream
in the freezer which you were probably
saving for your boyfriend.
Forgive me,
it was so cold and I was so angry.

*

My hands are
up in the air but
I don’t care.

*

Ugly singing birds
stand behind my uncomfortable bed.
Too much bother.

*

Some people are sad
And others are
Dead.

Each of the above poems comes from a chapter in Moving Windows other than “surprise” and “poetic ‘moves.'”  However, it’s clear that each of them contains a turn and a surprise.  While not all of the poems included in Moving Windows behave like these poems, many of them do–so many, in fact, that it seems to be a large-scale trend among the included poems, and this trend, I feel, invites me to make a few observations and ask a few questions.

Collom tends to teach content-driven poems, such as “thing” poems, and formal poetry, such as acrostics and lunes.  (The majority of the poems included above are such formal poems.)  However, his assessments tend to have very little to do with the accomplishment of the form.  Rather, they have to do with the creation of a turn and a corresponding surprise.  It seems, then, that Collom himself is making a structure-form distinction and quite clearly values structure over form.  If this is the case, it leads me to wonder if there might not be some better exercises to use to teach young students the power of the surprising turn.  What about, for example, teaching the two-line poem?  Might such a collaborative exercise be appropriate for young students?  Are there other exercises that would be appropriate to young students that could make more explicit the vital value of the surprising turn?

How explicit should a teacher be about the criterion of surprise?  For example, Collom notes that for the lune form–“a simplification of formal haiku,” consisting of “three/five/three [words/line], any subject, any mood”–“[s]urprise in the short, third line (especially) is a common vivifier…”  But does Collom discuss this with his students?  Should one?  I would argue that this is a good idea, and I believe Collom would agree.  Collom notes that, generally, “the simple exhortation ‘be original’ can slam things open.”  I would assume this could be the case for surprise.  It only takes a little encouragement to help students seek surprise, especially over what is all-too-often the alternative to that option: merely clinching meaning.

Giving some focus to surprise might also be the element that could keep the more advanced students interested in poetry.  Consider the following poem–a vastly successful poem, but a poem that uses structure to create a critique of the acrostic assignment:

Teachers give us
Easy work.
Ai!  They waste their time.
Cat
Hat
Eat
Rat.

Jack Collom’s Moving Windows is a excellent book, brave, original, passionate, and pragmatic.  Published over 30 years ago, it also should be considered a starting point.  I hope some of my brief reflections on Collom’s work helps to signal a way forward for the education of young writers, a way forward that honors what is both explicit and implicit in Moving Windows.


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