“Now, everyday objects are borrowing the idioms of computing technology to bring about a poetic turn.”
…Awesome! Check out August de los Reyes’s “The poetic turn of everyday objects” to read about “the fourth stage of software experience,” a stage that’s bound to be as surprising as a great turn–
As I argue here, there is a necessary difference between poetic form and poetic structure.
Though I did not make this case in the linked-to essay, it also is the case that discussions of form often hide discussions of structure (by “structure,” I mean specifically the pattern of a poem’s turning). Something like this happens in Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, and I write about this here.
This also happens in X. J. Kennedy’s An Introduction to Poetry (1966). The first two paragraphs of chapter 10, “Form,” state:
Form, as a general idea, denotes the shape or design of a thing as a whole, the configuration of its parts. Among its connotations is that of order made from chaos: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void…”
Like irony, the word form has been favored in literary criticism with several meanings. This chapter will deal with five of these: (1) form as pattern of sound and rhythm, (2) form as a shape that meets the eye, (3) flexible form or free verse, (4) form in the sense of a genre, or particular kind of poem, and (5) form as the structure of a poem–the ways in which its materials are organized. (164)
Though one of the five kinds of form, the fifth, “the structure of a poem,” clearly stands apart. Kennedy notes, “Within a poem, this organization of materials other than stresses, sounds, and visual shapes is the kind of form called structure” (191). And, when one examines the discussion of structure, it quickly becomes clear that this section very much is about structure as the pattern turns in a poem. After acknowledging that all poems have their own unique structure, and that, therefore, “brief descriptions of the structures of poems can be no more than rough sketches,” Kennedy notes, “but certain types of structure are encountered frequently” (191). Among the at least six brief descriptions he offers, five describe kinds of turns:
A poem, like many a piece of expository prose, may open with a general statement, which it then illustrates and amplifies by particulars, as does Mrs. Browning’s sonnet beginning “I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless” (p. 185) (191).
Or it might move from details to more general statement, as does Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (p. 321), presenting details of the urn’s pattern and arriving at the conclusion, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (191).
A poem may set two elements in parallel structure:… [Here, Kennedy offers Alexander Pope’s “Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His Royal Highness” as an example.] (191)
A poem may also set two elements in an antithesis, as the two halves of Robert Frost’s short poem quoted at the beginning of this book: “We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.” (Not all poems containing parallels or antitheses need be so brief; and some contain other things in addition to statements set side by side. (192)
If a poems tells a story, it may build to a crisis or turning point in the action, as might a novel or play. (192)
Noting that “[t]hese are just a few kinds of structure possible,” Kennedy then performs a close reading of Robert Herrick’s “Divination by a Daffodil” to identify and describe the many kinds of turns in the poem, “a poem containing–like most poems–more than one kind” (192):
This poem is arranged in two halves, bound together by a metaphor. In the first three lines, the speaker sees a drooping daffodil; in the last three, he foresees his own eventual drooping in like manner. There is another relationship, too: the second half of the poem explains the first half, it specifies “what I must be.” Furthermore, the last three lines make a one-two-three listing of the stages of dying and being buried. There is also in these lines a progression of narrative: the events take place one after another. (192)
Asking “How do we look for structure?,” Kennedy suggests fourteen “methods of approach to a poem” to help one find a poem’s structure (192). While he notes that such work to newly approach a poem must also entail a return to and a more deeply informed rereading of the poem, Kennedy is clear about the kind of ingress structural awareness gives to understanding, stating that applying such knowledge to a poem “can be a means of entrance into the most difficult of poems, whether conventional in form or flexible, whether an epic or an epigram” (193).
Of course, I admire greatly Kennedy’s work with structure, and his sense that structure is something significantly different from form. However, of course I also wish that Kennedy would have gone further and released structure’s turning from the discussion of form. I wish Kennedy might have gone so far as to give structure its own chapter, as it received in John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean? (which I discuss here). Such focus is, alas, extremely rare, but it shouldn’t be: it’s simply a matter of being clear about what the vital elements of poetry in fact are, about what we really do, in fact, value in poems. Great turning certainly is one of those values.
“Black Cat,” by Rainer Maria Rilke
In his terrific Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address, William Waters suggests there is a kind of “Rilkean ‘volta'” (94). It is the kind of volta one finds in “Black Cat.” He states,
Later in the poem, when the form you returns suddenly, we may mentally narrow the range of you to a single addressee, as the Rilkean “volta” isolates a punctual single event…That is, this poem, like so many of the New Poems, turns from an imperfective aspect–the first twelve lines describe not an event but generally valid conditions–to a perfective one; and a singular event–“she turns her face straight into your own”–implies a specific you unlike that of the opening stanza. (94)
…
What these poems [“Black Cat,” “Snake-Charming,” and “Archaic Torso of Apollo”] finally depict is not “someone’s” encounter but encounter itself: Rilke’s fascination is not with autobiographical events but with the possibilities of mind and world. The you-form, able to address each comer, permits this level of inclusiveness while yet retaining the insistence on the solitary, particular, one-time nature of meeting. The architecture of Rilke’s verse draws the reader in, eliciting the absorbed encounter that the poem describes and that its second-person grammar replicatingly calls forth. (98)
I love this idea: that some poets have a kind of turn all their own, or that seems primarily theirs. Can other poets be said to lay claim to a specific kind of turn? Shakespeare, of course, famously moved the location of the sonnet’s turn, but are their other poets we could argue have a kind of turn all, or primarily, their own?
A lovely song, and each verse and chorus combination is its own concessional poem. Worth a listen or three–
What a treat! Poet Dora Malech has recently published a thoughtful appreciation of Structure & Surprise on the Kenyon Review blog. Check it out here.
While such kind words about the communal project that is Structure & Surprise are always welcome, Ms. Malech’s words are especially gratifying–she herself is a master of the turn. Want proof? Check out her poem “Makeup,” and revel in the poem’s turn-to-another structure, featuring its soulful, prayer-full, playful outcry.
Many thanks, Dora Malech!
Inevitable, but unforeseen.
Surprising, yet apt.
Startling and true.
Novel and appropriate.
These are some of the ways that the vital creative quality of (what I have come to call) “fitting surprise” has been described. It’s a weirdly magical quality, one that a number of poets, writers, and artists agree is a necessary ingredient of important art.
In the latest issue of Poetry, poet Stephen Dunn reflects on and plays with the idea of fitting surprise. His poem “Always Something More Beautiful” attempts to both describe and enact fitting surprise, and even goes so far as to suggest that fitting surprise is a significant part of what might be considered “Beautiful.”
Check out the poem, read up on fitting surprise, and let me know what you think–
January 26th.–I wish I could here write down all that Wordsworth has said about the Sonnet lately, or record here the fine fourteen lines of Milton’s ” Paradise Lost,” which he says are a perfect sonnet without rhyme, and essentially one in unity of thought. Wordsworth does not approve of uniformly closing the second quatrain with a full stop, and of giving a turn to the thought in the terzines. This is the Italian mode; Milton lets the thought run over. He has used both forms indifferently. I prefer the Italian form. Wordsworth does not approve of closing the sonnet with a couplet, and he holds it to be absolutely a vice to have a sharp turning at the end with an epigrammatic point. He does not, therefore, quite approve of the termination of Cowper’s ” Sonnet to Romney,”–
” Nor couldst thou sorrow see
While I was Hayley’s guest and sat to thee.”
–Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson (223).
In a previous post, I wrote an appreciation of Jane Hirshfield’s “Close Reading: Windows,” an excellent essay on the poetic turn (which Hirshfield describes and labels a poem’s “window-moment”). Here, I want to rave about her new collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, a collection which includes a great deal of material that would be of interest not only to anyone interested in the poetic turn–though this will be the focus of my comments here–but also to anyone interested in how poems more broadly and generally work their magic upon us.
Ten Windows presents again “Close Reading: Windows”; however, as the book’s title indicates, Hirshfield’s interest in window-moments / turns is so great that it comes up in many of the book’s other essays. In “Kingfishers Catching Fire: Looking with Poetry’s Eyes,” Hirshfield remarks, “From the work of Hopkins, and each of the writers presented here, springs a supple turning aliveness, the hawk’s-swoop voracity of the mind when it is both precise and free” (18). In “Language Wakes Up in the Morning: On Poetry’s Speaking,” Hirshfield notes that “[e]ven in motionless, time-fixed paintings and sculpture, there is the feeling of hinge-turn we find in poems and often name with the terms of music–alterations of rhythm or key that raise the alterations of comprehension or mood” (31). In “What Is American in Modern American Poetry: A Brief Primer with Poems,” Hirshfield notes that “[g]ood poems require…some reach of being: they move from what’s already known and obvious to what is not. All poets travel, then, whether in body or only in mind” (211).
Hirshfield also is aware of the deep connection of the sonnet and the turn (about which, more information can be found here, here, here, and here). In one essay, Hirshfield points out how the fourth stanza of Seamus Heaney’s “Oysters” “makes a turn of the kind made formal in sonnets: an addition that both quickens thought and brings a question needing an answer” (202). In another, commenting on Gwendolyn Brooks’s “My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait till after Hell,” Hirshfield notes, “Sonnet form, like that of the haiku and villanelle, carries the arc of transformation within the DNA of its structure. The pivoting volta, or ‘turn,’ after the eighth line, demands a deepened and changed comprehension” (263-4).
More broadly, Hirshfield notes that “[p]oetry’s leaps” is one of the elements of poetry (along with “images, stories, and metaphors”) that “are the oxygen possibility breathes” (271). Additionally, in a previous post, I pointed out how Hirshfield’s “Poetry and Uncertainty” (in Ten Windows, titled “Uncarryable Remainders: Poetry and Uncertainty”) gathers a number of poems that involve a decisive turn, and I would say that this is true almost throughout Ten Window‘s ten essays: even when not discussing the turn in any specific way, the turn is very present–is consistently re-presented–in Hirshfield’s work.
So, reading Ten Windows will allow anyone interested in poetic structure a close and thoughtful engagement with the poetic turn. However, Hirshfield is not only concerned with structure; she’s also very interested in surprise. Her seventh chapter, “Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise,” focuses on the characteristics and effects of poetic surprise. It’s a fascinating meditation. Hirshfield’s insights into surprise are startling and profound. Here are a few:
Regarding the distinction between “poems [that] seem essential” and “others [that], however accomplished and interesting of surface, do not,” Hirshfield states,
Deep surprise is that way the mind signals itself that a thing perceived or though is consequential, that a discovery may be of genuine use. The experience itself, though, especially in responding to a work of art, may well be felt as some different emotion, the one that follows; surprise, neuroscientists report, lasts half a second at most; and so the reader may notice the powerful upsurge of grief or compassion or wonder a good poem brings, but not the surprise that released it. Surprise plays a major role in survival’s own sorting–what most surprises will be most strongly acted on, and most strongly learned. The poems we carry forward, as individuals and as cultures, are those that strike us powerfully enough that they call up the need for their own recall. (187)
*
About the power of surprise, Hirshfield notes,
How is it that something that lasts half a second can be so essential, not only to art but to our very survival? Not least is the particular way startlement transforms the one who is startled. Among other things, surprise magnetizes attention. An infant hearing an unexpected sound will stop and stare hard–the experience of surprise is itself surprising. It is also, literally, arresting; in a person strongly startled, the heart rate momentarily plummets. The whole being pauses, to better grasp what’s there. Surprise also opens the mind, frees it from preconception. Surprise does not weigh its object as “good” or “bad”; though that may follow, its question is simply “What is it?,” asked equally of any sudden change. Startlement, it seems, erases the known for the new. The facial expression of surprise, according to one researcher, is close to rapture, to the openness of a baby’s first awakeness. Charles Darwin, in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, grouped surprise with astonishment, amazement, and wonder.
In poetry, surprise deepens, gathers, and purifies attention in the same way: the mind of preconception is stopped, to allow a more acute taking-in. (187-88)
…
Whether by means large or small, noticed or almost imperceptible, poetry’s startlements displace the existing self with a changed one. (188)
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According to Hirshfield, surprise also is always attended by a lesson about the negation of self:
Surprise carries an inverse relationship to that which harness self and will: it is the emotion of a transition not self-created. Though infants can visibly surprise themselves by sneezing, there is no self-tickling. We tend not to laugh at our own jokes, at least when alone. Yet one of the reasons a poem–or any creative effort–is undertaken is precisely to surprise yourself by what you may find. Poems appear to come from the self only to those who do not write them. The maker experiences them as a gift, implausibly won from the collaboration of individual with language, self with unconscious, personal association and concept with the world’s uncontrollable materials, weathers, events. (189)
*
In one section of her chapter on surprise, Hirshfield connects surprise to the comedic, stating,
Lyric epiphany is democratic, equally intimate with Aeschylus and the stand-up comic.
…
The more surprise in good poetry is looked at, the more poetry’s work seems close to the work of the comic and trickster. (192-93)
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While all of Hirshfield’s ideas about surprise are insightful, one stands out for me: Hirshfield’s effort to explain how surprising poems, even after being read and/or recited multiple times, retain their ability to startle and awaken. Hirshfield opens “Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise” by noting:
Art’s brightness is a strangely untarnishing silver. One of the distinguishing powers of great art is its capacity to unseal its own experience not once, but many times. A Beethoven quartet many times heard, a painting by Bonnard looked at for decades, does not lose the ability to lift us out of one way of being and knowing and emplace us, altered, into another. A poem, long memorized can raise in its holder, mid-saying, stunned tears. Pound described the paradox simply: “Poetry is news that stays news.” Why this is so, and how it is done, has something to do with the way good art preserves its own capacity to surprise. (181)
According to Hirshfield, this magical seductive quality exists in large part because art is a ceremony that must be re-engaged for it to have power. It is a ritual, and “[a] ritual must be passed through with the whole body, not glimpsed through a door” (198). According to Hirshfield, “Poetic epiphany gives off a kind of protective mist; it exudes an amnesiac against general recall. The poem must be read or said through fully to be fully known” (184).
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Provocative and profound, Hirshfield’s insights amaze, and work to re-instill in readers a wonder at poems and poetry. Certainly, Ten Windows will be a revelation to those intrigued by poetic structure and poetic surprise–one fifth of the book concentrates specifically on these concerns, while the other chapters are deeply informed by and infused with them.
However, even though I try to keep the work on this blog focused on the poetic turn and its effects (chief among them being surprise), I do feel called upon to say that, more generally, Hirshfield’s book is a treasure trove for all those interested in poetry, in thinking more deeply about what it is, how it works, how it moves us. While structure and surprise are, for Hirshfield, vital components of poetry, they are not necessarily at the core of what poems are and do.
At core, according to Hirshfield, poems are vital parts of the liveliness of the world, intimately related to and very much like biological life. Hirshfield begins her book, noting, “A mysterious quickening inhabits the depths of any good poem–protean, elusive, alive in its own right. The word ‘creative’ shares its etymology with the word ‘creature,’ and carries a similar sense of breathing aliveness, of an active fine-grained, and multi-cellular making” (3). In “Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise,” Hirshfield notes, “Cognitive and creative discoveries are made in the same way as much of biological life is: by acts of generative recombination. Disparate elements are brought together to see if they might make a viable new whole” (185).
And this, in fact, is what Hirshfield has done with Ten Windows: she has used gleanings from the life sciences–often combined with her natural inclination to make stunning metaphors–to think anew about poetry, to raise organicism to a thrilling new pitch. I conclude with a few quotes from Hirshfield, which I set out as bread crumbs, meager offerings of the full feast that await those who read Ten Windows…
In the last instants of a shark’s approach to its prey, it closes its inner eyelids for self-protection, and most of its other senses shut down as well. Only one remains active: a bioelectrical sensory mechanism in its jaw, a guidance system uniquely made for striking. The poet in the heat of writing is a bit like that shark, perceiving in ways unique to the moment of imminent connection. (8)
The sentences of poetry, fiction, drama, attend to their music the way a tree attends to its leaves: motile and many, seemingly discardable, they remain the substance-source by which it lives. (31)
In the realm of art, knowledge carries with it at all times an inevitable flavor–the individuality of the artist is in the work as the physical hands of the potter are in the clay, no matter how smoothed. (42)
The elusive–in life, in literature–raises knowledge-lust in us the way a small, quick movement raises the hunting response in a cat. (107)
Encounter with the unknown seems almost a nutrient in human life, as essential as certain amino acids–without it, the untested self falls into sleep, depression, boredom, and stupor. (136)
Poetry’s ends are, in truth, peculiar, viewed from the byways of ordinary speech. But it is this oddness that makes poems so needed–true poems, like true love, undo us, and un-island. Contrary, sensual, subversive, they elude our customary allegiance to surface reality, purpose, and will. A good poem is comprehensive and thirsty. It pulls toward what is invisible to an overly directed looking, toward what is protean, volatile, unprotected, and several-handed. Poems rummage the drawers of what does not yet exist but might, in the world, in us. Their inexhaustibility is the inexhaustibility of existence itself, in which each moment plunges from new to new. Like a chemical reagent, water passing through limestone, or a curious toddler, a good poem reveals, entering and leaving altered whatever it meets. (244)
The possibility-hunger in us is both illimitable and illimitably fed. (274)
In art, we seek something else: possibility opened to a vastly increased range of swing. (280)
Over at the Samizdat blog, Bob Archambeau offers some great insights into an amazing turn in a recent poem by Daisy Fried, a turn that occurs with the poem’s final word. Check it out here.
Paul Otremba’s strong new thinking on the descriptive-meditative lyric is available here.
More information on the descriptive-meditative structure can be found in the essay on that structure by Corey Marks in Structure & Surprise. Additional examples of the descriptive-meditative structure are available here.
Structure & Surprise 