Dear SunWinkers!

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–

Of cabbages–and kings–

And why the sea is boiling hot–

And whether pigs have wings.”

Lewis Carroll

 

Well, I got Len to write a poem, so pigs must have wings…..

Anyway, poetry is many things, and consists of many things, and we are going to talk about one of them. Today I want you to think about the placement of the words on the page.

Now, poetry is an oral medium. A good poem must be read out loud, both by the poet in the process of composition, and by the discerning reader.

It follows that the organization of a poem affects how it sounds when read out loud. When it is written in a fixed form, such as a ballad, the form is imposed on the content, and the content must be manipulated to fit the structure. Therefore, much of the music of the poem comes from the superimposed formal structure.

The emergence of open form (or free verse) spearheaded by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams in the 1940s is based on the idea that the form of a poem ought to grow organically from the thoughts, words, and breathing of the poet. Pound said that poets should “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.”

Williams proposed that a poem be approached as a “field of action,” and the idea of “composition by field” took shape via such influential poet-theorists as Charles Olson and Denise Levertov.

Think of a scale model of a battlefield on which you array your soldiers and tanks and artillery. The poet works on the field of the page, and the elements of battle are the granules of thought and speech and breath and meaning which coalesce into a poem. The poet marshals her resources as a general his soldiers, according to the demands of the situation and the capabilities of his forces. If the general merely set his army in motion in a fixed pattern as though they were in a parade, they would lose the battle in short order.

Olson, in his 1950 manifesto “Projective Verse,” proposes that each granule of thought and language is infused with its own energy, and it is the poet’s job to find and marshal that energy (and that mechanically proceeding from the jello mold of a fixed form squanders most of that energy). Levertov, in her influential 1965 essay, uses the term organic form for this general idea. These explorations go much deeper than my ability to explain, and deeper than what is needed to benefit from these ideas as students of poetry. I’ve included links to these influential essays below for those of you who want to go deeper.

To our main point: Playing with the placement of the words on the page can convey the pace and the energy with which the poem should be heard and read. It can convey the relative weight and intrinsic energy behind each kernel of thought. It can represent the way the poet breathes when writing it, and the way she desires the reader to breathe when reading it aloud.

You’ve doubtless been told that, in punctuation, a comma is a pause (caesura) of a certain length, and a period represents a stronger pause than a comma. In certain modern poetry, other typographical devices imply different sorts of pauses. I can’t find it now, but I believe I read that Levertov said a blank line is the equivalent of two periods, or two carriage returns, which seems logical.

Another technique is to

drop part of a line down one line without returning to the left margin.

Indenting a line can add strength to the caesura (i.e. breath) preceding it.

Isolating a
word
in a line by itself,

isolating a line in a stanza by itself,

adding    spaces    between    words    within    a line,

oreven,likee.e.cummings,omittingthem,

all of these can affect the pace and breathing of a poem in unique ways.

There are no hard-and-fast rules about how these devices translate into oral interpretation. You, the poet, need to experiment, try different things, see if the way the word placement “makes” you read a passage jives with your intentions regarding what the poem means and what it should sound like. I’ve done some recent experimenting along these lines, and here is one example:

And here are some examples from the literature:

Ezra Pound

Alba (from Langue D’Oc)

When the nightingale to his mate

Sings day-long and night late

My love and I keep state

In bower,

In flower,

”Till the watchman on the tower

Cry:

‘Up! Thou rascal, Rise,

I see the white

Light

And the night

Flies:

© Ezra Pound

Galway Kinnell
Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World (section I)

James Dickey
The Strength of Fields

e. e. cummings
in just-spring

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Constantly Risking Absurdity

Denise Levertov
The Crack and Eros at Temple Stream

Here are the seminal essays I noted above, for the really ambitious:
Levertov: Some Notes on Organic Form (1965)
Charles Olson: Projective Verse (1950)

The Prompt

Study the examples. How does the typography affect the way you would read them if you were to read them out loud?

Write a poem, or take one you’ve already written. Experiment with the typography to vary the pace, emphasize certain words or phrases, even create visual puns—see the Kinnell poem or, in mine:

The opening

isn’t wide enough, and

my arm

is much

too short.

Post your response on your blog. If it’s a WordPress blog, tag it WeSun. If you don’t have a blog, put it in a Note on Facebook or some such functionality, something you can link to.

Then comment to this post with the link to your response.

I reblog this column at WritingEssentialGroup.com (you should be following that blog, too) and will post the links to your responses there. I will also comment on all responses.

Please don’t put your responses in a comment here on the SunWinks! blog. It won’t travel to the WEG group along with the post. (Okay, I confess, if you simply must put it in a comment, if it’s just not worth the trouble otherwise, I can link to it in a pinch. But it’s much preferable if clicking the link takes the reader to your blog.)

Finally, if you enjoy this, please be a good citizen and share this with your own friends and poetry circles.

Love,

Doug

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. Please share, reblog, link to, but do not copy or alter.