Hi everyone,
In 2010 I posted a series of eight poetry tips. Visitors to my blog still refer to them from time to time. For anyone who might be interested, I’ve decided to repost the tips, one each Thursday (unless I need to reschedule for a good reason). For some, these will be helpful as you continue to explore poetry and develop your skills as a poet. For others, the tips will be basics you already know well and use automatically in your work. If you fall into that category, feel free to argue, clarify, expand, or add examples as we go. Many thanks in advance.
POETRY TIP #2, THE LINE: ARRANGEMENT
Poetry, whether verse or free verse, is constructed in lines and a great deal depends upon how the poet arranges them. Pulitzer winning poet Karl Shapiro said, “The line provides the greatest possible concentration of meaning and feeling in the most controlled manner possible.”
Free verse provides the poet with more flexibility (and more decisions) about the best arrangement for conveying meaning and feeling. Generally, positions of greatest emphasis fall near the end or the beginning of a poetic line. Read some poems by another Pulitzer winner and 2007-2008 U. S. Poet Laureate, Charles Simic, for good examples of how a single sentence can be crafted into a powerful stanza of free verse. Here’s the opening to “Evening Walk” from The Voice at 3:00 A.M. (Harcourt, 2003, page 61).
You give the appearance of listening
To my thoughts, O trees,
Bent over the road I am walking
On a late summer evening
When every one of you is a steep staircase
The night is slowly descending.
Would you have arranged any of Simic’s lines differently? It would be as simple as moving furniture around a room.
You give the appearance
Of listening to my thoughts, O trees
Bent over the road
I am walking on a late summer evening . . .”
. . . is still a poem, but in the first line the emphasis has changed from what the trees appear to be doing –listening – to how they look, which is less important at this point. In the third line we have traded off walking along the road for a stronger emphasis on the road itself, another poor exchange. The road isn’t what’s important; walking along it is.
In certain fixed forms of verse, the poet has less flexibility. A short ballad stanza must be phrased in four lines with three beats (usually iambic) in lines 1, 2, and 4 and four beats in line 3. Change the basic recipe and you bake something else.
A limerick is told in five lines with lines 1, 2, and 5 three anapestic beats long and lines 3 and 4 two anapestic beats long. A lot of limericks fall somewhat short of the goal, but they all have five lines that approximate the basic definition for that kind of Cinquain (or Quintet if you prefer).
However the poem is told, the line establishes at once the rules for reading it. Here’s “Giraffe” (from Snowman Sniffles and Other Verse, by N. M. Bodecker, Atheneum, 1983, page 18).
I like giraffe and hope that he
In his own way is fond of me
Despite the fact that he and I
Did never quite see eye to eye.
That’s known as a long ballad stanza (4, 4, 4, and 4 beats respectively) told in two couplets and it’s typically Bodecker-clever. But the poet didn’t choose to break the lines the way I’ve written them. Since no one could see eye to eye with a giraffe, Bodecker obligingly arranged his lines into something more appropriate.
I like
the giraffe
and hope that he
in his
own way
is fond of me,
despite
the fact
that he and I
did never
quite
see eye to eye.
The poet chose to emphasize the imposing height of his subject by breaking four traditional lines into twelve and further dividing them into two stanzas. The new lines, some now as brief as one or two words, urge us to read a bit slower and think a bit longer about the tall star of the poem.
Next Thursday – Poetry Tip #3, The Line: Lengths and Endings — will include similarly brief discussions about other aspects of poetic lines, including number of beats, end-stopped, enjambment, punctuation, capitalization, syllabic, and accentual.
