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When I was asked to speak today, I realized that most of you don’t write poetry and many of you may not even have read any poetry in a while.  As a result, to be relevant, I decided to talk about how poetry can improve your writing because it has certainly improved mine.

I can’t remember not writing—I’ve always loved it—and I write something every day.  I have a creative writing life of poetry, essays, short fiction, and, once, an incomplete novel, and I’m going to try another soon.  I also have an academic life that requires published research, reports, academic documents, and other snooze-making materials.  All of these writing forms have been improved by poetry, both poetry I’ve written and poetry I’ve read.

My attitude, I’m happy to say, is not unique to me.   Montaigne, famous for his essays, believed in getting “lost” in words and in the “the gait of poetry, all jumps and tumblings,” as he wrote in his essay “On Vanity.”  If Montaigne is too removed for you, here’s someone from our own day–Mario Cuomo.  He once said:  “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.”

There are many qualities in poetry, but I want to focus on these:  Density, Scansion, and Sound.

Blaise Pascal is famous for the following statement, sometimes mis-attributed to Mark Twain:  “I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.”  He captured the issue of density, didn’t he?  Density is achieved by finding the essence in your work, knowing what’s core and making it shine.  It takes time to reduce writing to its essence and poetry is all about essence.  Here is an example, William Carlos Williams’ arguably most famous poem, The Red Wheelbarrow:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Before some of you roll your eyes and think “spare me,” let me assure you that Williams was no lightweight.  He was associated with the movements of modernism and imagism (this poem is in the imagist tradition), and he was also a pediatrician.  According to his biographer, Linda Wagner-Martin, he excelled at both, but “worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician.”

This concept of density is equally critical to prose.  Isaac Babel, the Russian writer, believed in density.  His biographer reported that if Babel couldn’t sleep at night, he would get up and go over his work, crossing out unnecessary words “with glee.”  Babel used to say that you knew that you were finished when you had taken out everything that didn’t belong.  It’s the same idea that Michelangelo expressed about sculpture.  It wasn’t about carving a sculpture out of marble.  It was about taking away the marble to reveal the sculpture. 

Here is an example from the first story in Babel’s The Red Cavalry (admittedly in translation, this one by Peter Constantine), but it’s such a great example.  This is the opening.

The commander of the Sixth Division reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken at dawn today.  The staff is now withdrawing from Krapivno, and our cavalry transport stretches in a noise rear guard along the high road that goes form Brest to Warsaw, a high road built on the bones of muzhiks by Czar Nicholas I.

Fields of purple poppies are blossoming around us, a noon breeze is frolicking in the yellowing rye, virginal buckwheat is standing on the horizon like the wall of a faraway monastery.  Silent Volhynia is turning away. Volhynia is leaving, heading into the pearly white fog of the birch groves, creeping through the flowery hillocks, and with weakened arms entangling itself in the underbrush of hops.  The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, gentle light glimmers in the ravines among the clouds, the banners of the sunset are fluttering above our heads.  The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill.

It’s not just description, is it?  It’s mood, it integrates the scene, it’s essence, it’s density.  It goes beyond writing to become art.  And that’s what we want, isn’t it?

Turning to scansion and sound, which go together, here is an excerpt from Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade.  For Tennyson, this was a current event.  The poem, published in 1864, memorialized a suicidal charge by British forces in the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War (1854-56).  It begins this way:

Half a league half a league, 
Half a league onward, 
All in the valley of Death 
Rode the six hundred: 

You can hear the horses’ hooves, can’t you?  Here is a full stanza:

Cannon to right of them, 
Cannon to left of them, 
Cannon in front of them 
Volley’d & thunder’d; 

Storm’d at with shot and shell, 
Boldly they rode and well, 
Into the jaws of Death, 
Into the mouth of Hell 
Rode the six hundred. 

The horses’ hooves go on.  You can hear them in that thundering beat.  It comes from scansion, the short and long syllables, the driving sound of the hard consonants, the repetition. 

Here’s a different example, from Derek Walcott’s Omeros, a full-length poetry work, published in 1990.  The setting is St. Lucia and if you listen, you can hear the endless waves rolling on the Caribbean shore, attributable to the three-line stanzas and the iambs (short, short, long) he uses in the work.

The moth’s swift shadow rippled on an emerald

lagoon that clearly showed the submerged geography

of the reef’s lilac shelf, where a lateen sail held

 

for Gros Îlet village like a hooked butterfly

on its flowering branch: a canoe, nearing the island.

Soundless, enormous breakers foamed across the pane,

 

then broke into blinding glare.  Achille raised his hand

from the drumming rudder, then watched our minnow plane

melt into cloud-coral over the horned island.

Now, let’s turn to prose.  Hemingway—short, pithy, to the point.  The Sun Also Rises was his first major novel, published in 1926.   Jake, after World War I, is unable to consummate a sexual relationship with Brett because of a war wound, but he is still in love with her.  Here is a brief dialog between them:

“Don’t touch me,” she said.  “Please don’t touch me.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t stand it.”

“Oh, Brett.”

“You mustn’t.  You must know.  I can’t stand it, that’s all.  Oh, darling, please understand!”

“Don’t you love me?”

“Love you?  I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do about it?”

If you apply scansion to these passages, you see how the language reflects the emotion.  The beginning is staccato, matching the frustration between them.  At the end, when they reveal themselves to each other, the scansion changes.  “I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me” to which Jake responds: “Isn’t there anything we can do about it?”  The contrast of short to long scansion and the change in the hardness and softness of the sounds provide the change in mood within the dialog.  There’s also the balance between the two, in scansion, sound, and relationship, all of which reinforce each other.

These poetic concepts aren’t just about works for adults. I know there are a number of children’s writers here.  What about Inspector Mouse, written by Bernard Stone and illustrated by Ralph Steadman?  This fabulous children’s story won several Canadian awards and came out in the U.S. in 1981.   Here’s the opening.  Listen for the scansion and the sounds.

Fatty Mouse couldn’t believe his eyes.  He looked around the store.  All the shelves were empty.  There wasn’t a piece of cheese in sight.  Someone had found their secret hoard and stolen it all.  This was a case for Inspector Mouse.

Look how the scansion shifts between rolling along like a Shakespearean sonnet and driving with a beat and harder sounds.  No wonder it’s a modern classic.  Stone even uses poetry in the names of his characters, for example, Joe Gorgonzola Mouse, Betty Brie Mouse, Dolcelatte Mouse (the siren singer in the band), and Toothy Mouse, Inspector Mouse’s assistant.

This is poetry.  This is art.  This is what we want.

I have a set of “tips and tricks” I use when I think I’ve finished a piece.  I’ve been building these ideas for years.  When it comes to density, scansion, sound, and other elements, you can read the list on my weblog at http://alinesoules.wordpress.com. 

I teach information literacy at California State University, East Bay and when I work with my students, I give them assignments, but since you’re not required to do anything I suggest, I’ll call them opportunities.  First, please read and/or write poetry—in whatever form.  Second, find two pieces of your writing—one that works and one that doesn’t.  Analyze them poetically.  For example, take the piece that doesn’t work.  Remove all the words that aren’t needed and don’t kid yourself, they’re there.  If you need to, get a fellow writer—in your writing group or wherever—to help you do this.  Apply scansion, listen to the sounds.  Refine, refine, refine.  One of my tips and tricks, for example, is to remove every single definite and indefinite article.  Then I read my piece aloud and I only put back the ones I need, usually where I stumble when I’m reading out loud.  You’ll be amazed at how many you don’t need.  For you novelists who are worried about length, this may not make you too happy, but if your work doesn’t sing, it won’t be what you want anyway. 

If you have other tips and tricks, I’d love to hear them.  Just put a comment on my blog and I’ll be happy to add them to my list (with attribution, of course). 

copyright Aline Soules 2009 under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

TIPS AND TRICKS

Note:  I began this list years ago, but there’s plenty of room for suggestions.  Just put one in a comment and I’ll add it to the list (with attribution, of course).  Aline

General Axioms

• Show, don’t tell
• Be concrete and specific
• Check your images for originality
• Choose point of view with purpose
• Choose the right title
• Cut, cut, cut—fill “the jar” [if something doesn't fit your piece, save it for later, use it as a 'start' for another piece, recycle/re-use]

Grammar, Usage, and Word Play

• Pay attention to verb choices—
  • present tense gives immediacy—“sit” vs. “sat”
  • active vs. passive—“sit” vs. “is seated”
  • direct vs. participial forms—“sit” vs. “is sitting”
  • the correct tense for time relationships—sit, sat, has sat, had sat—check consistency
• Concentrate on verbs and nouns
• Be sparing with adjectives—none or one per phrase
  • for description, be sure it contributes to the work and isn’t just “there”
• Avoid adverbs unless you have a specific purpose for using one
• Choose the right “little” words and minimize—prepositions, articles
• check your “references”
• Switch things around—
  • words, phrases, clauses, whole blocks
  • rearrange/reverse lines within stanzas or a whole poem
  • rearrange/reverse paragraphs within a short story or chapter of a novel
  • rearrange/reverse chapters of a novel
  • invent whatever weird configuration you can find—anything that doesn’t make sense
  • experiment with line breaks and lengths in a poem—1, 2, 3, 4 …
  • experiment with paragraph lengths and chapter lengths in a short story or novel
• highlight your best phrase or couple of phrases and see if you can match that in the rest of your piece; if it continues to stick out, cut it and put it in your “jar”
• Use repetition with care

 Sound

• Listen to sounds and how they fit together—right down to individual sounds
• With dialogue and accents, check how sounds change
• Check rhythm – scan, if necessary – this applies to both poetry and prose
• See where the rhymes fall, including slant rhymes – this applies to both prose and poetry
• Read out loud, read into tapes, ask a friend to read it to you
• Read your poem with a breath at the end of every line and see if each of your lines can stand alone or, at least, has some significance;
• Try the same process with your “throwaway” sentences in prose, particularly in cases of transition
• Read individual paragraphs into a tape and listen to see if the paragraph completes its arc
• Get “players” and read your dialog like a play

Format

• Try different forms, formats, and layouts
• Test your format—print, oral, Internet

Time

• Give the work time and try these tips and tricks again
• Use your tape recorder to help you do that—tape a reading, leave it for a week or a month and see what it sounds like
• Call on a friend whose “out loud” reading skills you trust—either listen “live” or ask your friend to read it into a tape for later
• When you think you’re done, set a goal to cut a certain number of words (10, 20, 30, 100 – it depends on the size of your piece) and look for places to cut. There’s always something
• To stick to your schedule, fool yourself with postcards. Address the postcard to yourself and put each step of your “plan” on the information side of the postcard. Then address the postcard to yourself and stamp it. Add a post-it note with the date you want it mailed. Give them all to a friend to mail. When it arrives, you either feel satisfied because you met your deadline or it kicks you into gear if you haven’t met it.

Submitting

• Don’t send something out until you’re confident it’s ready to go
• Use the “revolving door” trick to keep your spirits up
• After a few rejections or if an editor gives you feedback, look at it again

Find other tips and tricks from books, colleagues, your own inventive head

copyright Aline Soules 2009 under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/