King of the One-Liners: Bill Matthews and the Volta

31 05 2012

by Bradley Paul

 

My students love Bill Matthews’ “One Liner” poems, especially these:

 

Sleep

border with no country

 

Why I Didn’t Notice It

The moss on the milk is white

 

Lust Acts

But desire is a kind of leisure

 

or especially

 

Premature Ejaculation

I’m sorry this poem’s already finished

 

Why do they like them? “They’re witty,” “they’re smart” — interestingly, two adjectives that were commonly employed to describe Matthews himself —and, “I don’t know, there’s, like, a sort of twist at the end.”

A “twist?” Like in a movie, where the cop turns out to be the killer? No, nothing that silly. Like in a joke? well yeah, that’s closer, but not exactly a joke, because they’re still “poem-like” or “poem-y” or “poem-ish.” But in some of the poems there’s a punchline-like feel.

But how can there be a punchline in a one-line poem? Punchlines respond ironically to some antecedent in the joke: it’s funny that the secretary put Wite-Out on her computer screen because we know she’s blonde. It’s funny that there are skidmarks in front of the dead dog but not in front of the dead man, because we know the man is a lawyer.

Which brings us to a basic truth about these poems: they are not one-line poems. They’re two-line poems, because the title interacts in a specific and ironic way with the subsequent line of poetry to create the poem’s meaning and its effect, whether humorous or languorous or “poetic.” The titles do more than provide a context of setting or tell us what inspired the poem or sum up the sentiment, and they are not at all arbitrary or replaceable. They are an active part of the mechanism by which the poems operate.

And that mechanism is the volta.

Most poetry readers know the concept of the volta from studying the sonnet. The volta typically occurs between the octave and the sestet, though in some of Shakespeare’s sonnets it occurs as late as the thirteenth line, and it represents a fundamental “turn of thought”: my love isn’t so pretty, but at least she’s still precious to me. Life is sad, but when I think of you, I’m happy. It’s appropriate that the volta in many sonnets is typically signified by words like but, yet, still, then. The loudest volta one might hear is in the recording of John Berryman reading from the Dream Songs (which — don’t be fooled — are 18-line sonnets) on Halloween, 1963 at the Guggenheim. When, in Dream Song #29, he gets to the line “But never did Henry…” he pauses, then literally SCREAMS the word “but,” then pauses again, as the turn of thought, coming at a point when Henry tries to rationalize the feelings of guilt he’s just described, echoes over what we imagine is a stunned and perhaps frightened New York audience.

But the volta doesn’t always have to announce itself, and it doesn’t have to be in a sonnet. As a matter of fact, it is one of the fundamental units of poetic thought, and most of the poems where it occurs aren’t sonnets. But we typically don’t recognize the volta as such because we are trained to associate it with the change in a sonnet’s rhyme scheme or to identify it by a blatant transition like “but.” If we divorce ourselves from a formulaic definition of the term, though, and look at it just in terms of what it itself does (it “turns” as, the etymology of the word tells us, a dancer turns) and if we allow a certain amount of subtlety in the poems we read, it becomes apparent that the volta is present and necessary in a wide variety of poetry.

It is the volta that students are responding to when they say a one-liner is like a joke, but not a joke because it is “poem-like.” I believe that what they see as “poem-like” is the fact that the result of the “twist” isn’t irony, as in a joke, but emotional revelation. One could say that each one-liner is itself essentially a volta on display: say one thing, then a twist that makes it interesting. But the volta is also the source of much of what we think of as Matthew’s emotional smartness in all of his poems, his ability, after speaking casually about some topic, to suddenly end with a line that “hits home.” Matthews’ last lines typically make a sudden turn away from intellectual wordplay to clearly express a striking emotional fact. For example, at the end of “Search Party,” when, after a lot of poetic musing, we discover the basic fact that the missing child is alive, and Matthews tells us to “Admit you’re glad.” Or at the end of “Black Box,” when what has seemed like chatter about planes cruising and crashing is subverted by the doomed pilots’ simple and incontrovertible realization: “‘We’re going down.’ ‘I know.'” To read a Mattthews poem is to think one is cruising through a pleasant and witty chat and then, just as you think your host is handing you your coat, to instead get punched in the face.

It’s no surprise that Matthews was such a fan of Martial, whose epigrams rely on puns or stabs in the last line to create their humor or poignancy. I frequently show students Matthews’ translations of Martial after we’ve looked at the one-liners, then have them write their own one-liners and epigrams. Recognizing and using this little twist, this little turn, starts off as a fun exercise, but quickly gets serious, especially as students begin to write longer, more serious poems. Taking the one-liners as a starting point, they see that in their lives, as in Matthews’ poems and the poems of many great poets, there are two kinds of speaking: the articulate, stylized speech of the brain and the simple, shattering facts of the heart. And just a small dance step leads you from one to the other.

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Bradley Paul was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1972. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review,Smartish Pace, Fence, Pleiades, Iowa Review, and numerous other journals. In 2004 his first book of poetry, The Obvious, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the New Issues Poetry Prize. His second book, The Animals All Are Gathering, won AWP’S Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, and was published in 2010 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Paul taught a variety of film, literature and writing classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Towson University before relocating to the West Coast. He has also directed, written, line produced, and edited several short and feature films and commercials. A graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter and writer Karri Paul.

To check out Paul’s website, click here.

This essay first appeared in Poetry International, 2005 (issue 9).  Reprinted by permission.

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For more on surprising turns in short (one- to two-lined) poems, click here.

For more on the volta, click here, and here, and here.  Aw, heck: explore this whole blog–where we aim to give the volta its star turn!


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Turn, Turn, Turn

10 03 2012

The turn stars in three of my recent print publications.  Here they are…

“Raising the Net” appears in Spoon River Poetry Review 36.2 (Summer/Fall 2011).  “Raising the Net” is a review-essay that uses Christina Pugh’s ideas about “sonnet thought” to consider the fate of the turn in some contemporary books of sonnets, including The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (a glorious mixed bag), Iteration Nets (in terms of turns: there are none), Nick Demske (interesting, and problematic), and Severance Songs (pretty great).

I state in “Raising the Net” that “I revise Robert Frost’s idea that writing free verse is like ‘playing tennis with the net down.’  Writing formal sonnets, it turns out, is not too difficult; it’s the writing of sonnets without great turns that’s akin to a netless game.  In contrast, crafting sonnets with an eye toward their turns as well as a critical approach that can account for them not only raises the net but also raises the bar on what we expect from sonnets.”

“The Shadow of Sirius: A Critical Conversation” appears in Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin, edited by Jonathan Weinert and Kevin Prufer (Seattle, WA: WordFarm, 2012).  “The Shadow of Sirius: A Critical Conversation” is an essay I co-authored with poet-critic Mark Halliday in which Mark and I debate the merit of Merwin’s latest book of poems–Mark: generally against; me, strongly for.

As I prepared to write my portion of the essay, it became clear to me that Merwin was a great poet of the surprising turn.  Though, of course, I make my case for this claim more fully in the published essay, a preview of my argument can be found here.

“Other Arrangements: The Vital Turn in Poetry Writing Pedagogy” appears in Beyond the Workshop.  “Other Arrangements” is, in large part, a friendly amendment to Tom C. Hunley’s excellent Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach.  In his book, Hunley argues 1) that we need to get beyond the workshop as a core pedagogical method for teaching poetry writing, and 2) that one way to do this is to orient teaching toward the five canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

I contribute to Hunley’s argument by arguing that strong consideration of the turn should be a key part of the discussion of the second canon, arrangement.  I wrote a little on this here, though, again, the published essay is much more complete.

It feels good to get more thought about the vital turn out into the world.  My thanks to my insightful and generous editors–Kirstin Hotelling Zona, Jonathan Weinert, Kevin Prufer, and Paul Perry–for allowing me the opportunity share my ideas, and for helping to make my writing and thinking on behalf of these ideas as strong as possible.


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Add Excitation to Your Recitation: Attend to the Turn

27 08 2011

W.W. Norton & Company is organizing The Norton Anthology Recitation Contest.  This contest is open to college and high school students worldwide.  Additional information, including rules, can be found here.

Recitation is a demanding–but also very rewarding–art.  At poets.org, John Hollander’s “Committed to Memory” offers some helpful insights into and advice about recitation.

Here, I’d like to offer a simple but also powerful bit of advice to anyone preparing to recite a poem: attend to the poem’s turn.

A turn is a major shift in a poem’s rhetorical and/or dramatic trajectory.   Most poems–certainly most great poems–have turns.  And almost all of the recitation contest’s eight authorized poems have turns in them.  Any skilled recitation needs to communicate the power of the turn.

Writing about the volta–that is, the turn in a sonnet–Phillis Levin states, “[t]he reader’s experience of this turn (like a key change) reconfigures the experience of all the lines that both precede and follow it.”  Thus, when reciting a poem, the performer must know where the turn is–or, turns are–and must be aware of, and communicate, the nature of the turn’s key change: what is the argument and tone of the poem prior to the turn?  how does the argument and tone shift after the turn?

To assist potential performers with this aspect of their recitation, I offer a few notes on the turns in some of the authorized contest poems.  Links to some of the contest’s authorized poems are below.  Each link is followed by a brief discussion of the poem which locates and describes each poem’s major turn(s). 

A few details:

While there certainly are numerous minor–yet still significant–turns in each of the following poems, I will only discuss the major turns, offering what I hope will be a helpful orientation to the poem and introduction to some of the poem’s demands on the performer.

Additionally, I suggest that if you plan to participate in the contest, you should use the versions of these poems found in the Norton anthologies listed on the contest webpage–the Norton judges may be very particular about what edition of a poem is recited.

Sonnet 12 (“When I do count the clock that tells the time”), by William Shakespeare

This poem has two major turns: one at the end of line 8, and one at the end of line 13.  (Notice that there is no major turn at the end of line 12, where one might expect one in a Shakespearean sonnet.  For information on the mobile volta, click here.)

The first turn turns from an account of the omnipresence of aging and death to then consider the beauty of the person to whom the sonnet is addressed, which also will be subject to aging and decay.  The turn here goes from serious to even more serious, from general considerations of mortality to the mortality of the sonnet’s addressee.

The second turn turns from an impossible situation–the truth of the addressee’s mortality–to offer some hope: breed (this word requires a lot of emphasis), that is, have children so that you may brave death when it comes to take you away.

“Death be not proud,” by John Donne

The major turn of Donne’s sonnet occurs right before the sonnet starts.  One needs to imagine Donne’s speaker hearing someone (such as the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnet, above) talk about how all-powerful death is, making claims the speaker recounts in lines 1 and 2: “some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful…”  

A kind of cliche-and-critique poem, Donne’s whole poem is a turn from thinking death is powerful to offer an alternative vision.  And it needs to be read this way, with emphasis on the words that stress the speaker’s alternative viewpoint.  Take, for example, the first two lines–they need to be read with the following rhetorical stresses:

“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / [“]Mighty[“] and [“]dreadful[“], for thou art not so…”

(One can imagine scare quotes around “Mighty” and “dreadful”…)

So, the major turn occurs before the poem even starts, but there are some vital, minor turns in the poem.  The speaker turns at the end of line 4 from his almost mocking introduction to offer a picture of how peaceful death–which is no worse than rest or sleep–must actually be.  This new, softer kind of mockery of death ends at the end of line 8.  Lines 9-10 become heavy again, a direct attack on death.  And then comes, again, that softer approach to critiquing death in the next line-and-a-half.  The rest of the poem is explanatory, showing the reasons death should not “swell’st,” that is, get all puffed up with pride, and it is (for the poem’s speaker) glory: death is just sleep until the resurrection.

A great question for anyone thinking about reciting this poem is how to perform its final four words, “Death, thou shalt die.”  Certainly, as the end of the poem is making clear a paradox, “thou” must get a good deal of rhetorical stress, as in, “Surprise, Death: YOU are the one who will die.”  But what’s the voice here?  Is it heavy, growling, antagonistic?  Or is it already victorious, and, so, matter-of-fact?  Try it many ways, and see what works for you.

“Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666,” Anne Bradstreet

Bradstreet’s poem has three major turns: one in the midst of line 13, another at the end of line 20, and another at the end of line 36.

The first part of this poem is filled with distress and despair, fright and sadness, mixed with pleas for God’s assistance.  One must imagine a long pause at the end of line 12: the speaker has just realized that her whole house has been destoyed by fire.  But, in line 13, a virtual miracle is in the making: the speaker collects herself and realizes that, even in the midst of such (seeming) loss, she is participating in the playing out of the will of God, of the way things should be.  Again, one needs to pay attention to the rhetorical stresses in this section, especially those needed to make clear the speaker’s new realizations: that all that she had thought she had owned actually all along was God’s.

The next major shift occurs at the end of line 20.  There’s a temporal shift–the poem has moved beyond the night of the fire.  And there’s also an emotional shift: the confidence the speaker felt in the Lord’s will slips when she looks sadly upon the ashes of her house and remembers what life had been like in the house. 

But then, in the pit of despair–having acknowledged that it seems to her that “all’s vanity”–the speaker moves again to acceptance, and even to praise.  This final section–perhaps up until the final two lines, which might be read as summation–should largely be read as an ever-growing crescendo; the speaker, after all, is delivering a sermon, sharing a vision.

“How do I love thee,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The major turn in this poem occurs in the middle of line 13.

While any performer will have to work out how to modulate the voice while performing this list, it’s clear that there’s some crescendo from the middle of line 12 to the middle of line 13.  This crescendo suddenly stops, and the speaker, in the space between the words “life!” and “and” (one imagines there must be a significant pause here), realizes that death could end her love, and so prays quietly that God (whom she seemed earlier to have given up on) allow her and her beloved to live on after death.

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Enjoy exploring these poems!  And, if you decide to participate: best wishes in the recitation contest!


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The Poetic Turn: The Seat of the Soul of the Sonnet

24 07 2011

In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, Phillis Levin discusses eloquently the power of the volta, or the turn, in the sonnet.  Levin states:

“…the arrangement of lines into patterns of sound serves a function we could call architectural, for these various acoustical partitions accentuate the element that gives the sonnet its unique force and character: the volta, the ‘turn’ that introduces into the poem a possibility for transformation, like a moment of grace.

“The volta, the sonnet’s turn, promotes innovative approaches because whatever has occurred thus far, a poet is compelled, by inhabiting the form, to make a sudden leap at a particular point, to move into another part of the terrain.  Reading sonnets, one constantly confronts the infinite variety of moves a poet can make to negotiate a ‘turn.’  Though a poet will sometimes seem to ignore the volta, its absence can take on meaning, as well–that is, if the poem already feels like a sonnet.  We could say that for the sonnet, the volta is the seat of its soul.  And the reader’s experience of this turn (like a key change) reconfigures the experience of all the lines that both precede and follow it.  The volta foregrounds the paradigm, making us particularly conscious of the rhyme scheme; likewise, the poet’s anticipation guides every move he or she will make.  The moment a pebble is dropped into a pond, evidence of that action resonates outward, and at the same time continues to draw the eye back to the point from which all succeeding motions ensue.”

Along with three other experts on the sonnet–Heather Dubrow, Paul Muldoon, and Susan Wolfson–Levin discusses the above idea, and many other ideas about the sonnet, in a panel called “The Art of the Sonnet.”  A video of the panel discussion can be found here:

And it seems as though video poet Tapas de Luna had some fun with this panel, taking her own turn with the presentation, having some riotous fun…  Enjoy!


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Christina Pugh’s “On Sonnet Thought”

11 07 2011

I’ve recently read an incredibly interesting essay by Christina Pugh.  The essay, “On Sonnet Thought” (Literary Imagination (12.3 (Nov. 2010): 356-64), presents a number of fascinating ideas about the sonnet, including how what Pugh calls “sonnet thought” can be differentiated from the formal properties of the sonnet, and the central role the volta, or turn, plays in formulating sonnet thought, in making possible sonnet energy, and combustion.

While writing “a book of poems loosely inspired by sonnets,” Pugh “came to identify something [she] called ‘sonnet-thought’ or, alternately, the sonnet ‘mind-set.’”  Pugh means by sonnet-thought “the necessarily economical formal harnessing of expansive, complex (or hypotactic) syntax-as-thought, thus incorporating a capacious amount of often recursive mileage, contrast, and change within the small poetic space of fourteen lines.”

Sonnet thought, Pugh makes clear, is different from sonnet form; Pugh states, “I discovered that ‘sonnet thought,’ or sonnet energy, may be separated from the metrical norms and rhyme schemes that have constituted the traditional sonnet in its various formal mantles….It is the manner of thinking that the sonnet form has enabled or inaugurated, even if the more tactile scaffolding of that form has fallen away.”  And, in fact, the point of “On Sonnet Thought” is “to show how sonnet energy, or combustion, may be harnessed from the traditional formal sonnet and reignited through the modality of economical free verse that utilizes certain aspects of sonnet manner.”

So, if not formal, what is the nature of sonnet thought?

For Pugh it is two things: “the formal sonnet’s predilection for wide-ranging conceptualization—as well as incorporating, and sometimes pluralizing, the sonnet’s traditional volta, or turn.”  Regarding the sonnet’s “predilection for wide-ranging conceptualization,” Pugh states, “In a manner rivaled only by the epigram, the sonnet requires us to think big.  It asks that we expand, even as it contracts the stage on which that expansion must occur.”  She adds, “As a result of this contraction, we can experience both transport and devastation.  Indeed, as a free-verse poet who derives incalculable inspiration from formal poetry, I have long been interested in the sonnet as a peculiarly discrete verbal ordeal…”

However, though the sonnet’s “predilection for wide-ranging conceptualization” is listed first in the list of what constitutes sonnet thought, the volta is the part that gets the most focused attention.  Implicit and explicit reference to the volta occurs numerous times throughout the essay, as when, in the course of her reading of Milton’s “When I consider how my light is spent,” Pugh makes note of the poem’s “swift yet incremental movement from despair to implicit assuagement,” the “emotional transformation” taking place.

And, ultimately, it is the volta that represents sonnet thought, even as the sonnet form keeps changing.  Inquiring into “the nature of the sometimes-elusive volta within the sonnet form in general,” Pugh states:

“What is the precise degree or cant of the turn, and how does it reconfigure the sonnet’s microscopic unfolding?  Whether it occurs before the closing couplet in the Shakespearean sonnet, before the sestet in the Petrarchan scheme, or elsewhere in a sonnet, the volta’s often breathtakingly indefinable pivot remains a vital component of the governing structure.  The volta even thrives on its own variousness.  As Paul Fussell shows, in sonnets by Santayana, Keats, and Wordsworth, the volta is characterized, respectively, as ‘a logical action’ [answering a question posed by the octave]; ‘a moment of sheer metaphoric power’; and, more indexically, ‘something like a literal turn of the body or the head.’  This capacity for rhetorical shape-shifting—perhaps its only indissoluable ‘property’—makes the volta a metonym for the surprising elasticity of sonnet form over the centuries.  One need only name the often eponymous variations across literary history: Petrarch, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Spenserian, or the curtal sonnetry of Hopkins.  Though all of these forms have particular relationships to the modality of ‘sonnet thought,’ such plurality of ‘sonnet-ness’ suggests that the resiliency of the template transcends the strictures of any single rhyme scheme or prescribed placement of volta.”

“On Sonnet Thought” is necessary reading for anyone interested in the turn.  In fact, in many ways, its ideas jibe with the ideas advanced in Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns and on this blog. 

For example, the idea that there is a structure-form distinction, that poetic structure, the pattern of a poem’s turning, can and should be differentiated from poetic form.

And the idea that turns are incredibly important parts of poems, not only contributing or crafting but truly offering the thought, the energy, the combustion of poems.

Finally, I would even add that some of the issues Pugh raises in her notes, side-comments, and clarifications also are taken up on this blog.  For example, Pugh seems concerned to make clear that volte are often stranger and less predictable than they often are thought to be—when discussing the location of the volta in a sonnet, Pugh (as quoted above) is careful to note that the volta can occur “before the closing couplet in the Shakespearean sonnet, before the sestet in the Petrarchan scheme, or elsewhere in a sonnet…” (emphasis mine).  Additionally, in her third footnote, Pugh takes pains to make clear that there can be more than one volta in a sonnet; she states,

“Plural volte are part of the tradition: see, for example, John Donne’s use of elements from both the Petrarchan and Shakespearean templates for his Holy Sonnets, with multiple volte.  As Donne demonstrates, the sonnet is remarkably suited to reversals and reconfigurations—including changes of mind, distractions, detours, and palinodes.”

The potentially strange, surprising placement of the volta (or volte) in sonnets was a topic I took up here.

It is a pleasure to corroborate / be corroborated by the serious, detailed, new thinking of a poet and critic as good as Christina Pugh.  Do check out her work, and keep an eye out for her free verse, high-voltage sonnets.


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