In her entry in “Endless Structures” in Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, Rachel Zucker refers to three poems that turn to sudden revelation near their conclusion. Here are links to those poems:
“Archaic Torso of Apollo,” by Rainer Maria Rilke
Here is Mark Doty on Rilke’s great poem.
“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” by James Wright
Other poems that feature a sudden, final revelation include:
“Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh,” by Thomas James
“The Impossible,” by Bruce Weigl
“Body as Argument,” by Jillian Weise (in The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (Soft Skull, 2007), p. 81).
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Terrance Hayes’s “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin” (“Rilke ends his sonnet ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ saying”) offers an intriguing take on–and perhaps critique of–the epiphanic turn.
[…] Here are two student poems that ended up fitting the metaphor-to-meaning structure perfectly. Yet, even though these poems closely engage the structure, they do so in very different ways. With the metaphoric status of the blister(-as-poem) remaining a mystery until the end, Anjelica Rodriguez’s “Blister” makes a beautiful kind of surprising sense. However, the turn in Stephen Whitfield’s “Maturity” is more sudden, more shocking—it resonates with what Rachel Zucker calls the epiphanic structure. […]
[…] Rachel Zucker discusses “Archaic Torso of Apollo” as a kind of turn that she calls “the Epiphanic structure.” About poems using this kind of structure, this pattern of turns, Zucker states, “The […]
[…] Also of particular interest is lesson 4, “Wonder: The Poet Surprises Herself,” which focuses on a kind of turn we here have come to call, after Rachel Zucker’s naming it as such, an “epiphanic poem.” […]