IV. In Our Uncertainties

First frost, at last. The only stalks in the garden with color are asters and ragweed. Long shadows fall across the white grass, while my adopted deer family stands amid broomsedge eating the scattered corn, drinking from their bucket, nervous now that the shooting has started. I'm sitting at the pine table by the east window, where sunlight warms the wood and the bird feeder's shadow is distorted before me. The shadows of birds whirl over the page, and the Audubon clock in the mud room chirrups the chickadee hour. Sure enough, there's one fidgeting at the feeder.

I suppose this rumination is called "warming up" after a cold night, but the grander rhythms, diurnal and otherwise, occupy my mind. No longer rocking on the porch, I'm watching the light change toward winter, yet remembering the sound of ladybugs pelting the window like hard rain last week when we had unseasonable mildness. "Unseasonable" says "rhythmic variation" to me — blackberry winter, goose summer, "a cold snap," "a dry spell." If we can ever learn to watch and listen closely enough, no doubt we'll find the precedent to most of our devices of artifice in the "natural," or that which hasn't yet been dominated by human orchestration.

When I first applied for the editorship of Shenandoah, I had been teaching two or three poetry writing classes per year (occasionally more, occasionally fiction, too) at Auburn University, and I felt I had exhausted my resources for refreshing the effort each time. Leaving the classroom and the flatlands was a relief. Moving to Rockbridge County was a homecoming, back to the Blue Ridge, and the seasonal rhythms — with their specific variations: this dogwood, that creek, this damp stone — of the mountains were so worked into my life as a young writer living in Watauga County, North Carolina, that I felt I could not help benefiting from the return, the refrain. Another thing I hadn't counted on was the way the separation from the academic calendar and marriage to the steady wheel of a literary quarterly's schedule would complicate and intensify the seasons. What this series of articles — reading the books, sorting my responses, walking the sentences up Reid Road and down Mt. Atlas — has given me is a renewed belief in the commitment to teaching people to write better, not to be professional poets, but to create lines that they can walk with, instruments for their own rumination, new lenses with which to appreciate their world. No tear floods nor sigh tempests, but the invigoration of moving forward through language.

Desmond Tutu has said that perhaps the best healer is the wounded healer, which encourages me to discuss how particular books might assist other people in the learning and teaching of writing poems. I wonder how many years of frustrated circling could have been avoided if I had taken a poetry writing class, or if someone had just handed me the right books and suggested how to use them. I tore at myself daily for the something-I-couldn't-name until I began to see organized approaches to working out one's salvation with fear and trembling. Of some surprise to me is that I am brought back now to the books which helped me most during the eighties and early nineties at Auburn, though some of them have, themselves, evolved over the years. If I were to step into a poetry writing classroom next semester and try to share with a band of willing followers my curiosity about how poems work and why, when, for whom, I would try to find some way to furnish them with the following texts: Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms (Louisiana State University Press, 1986) by Miller Williams (though in honesty, Lewis Turco's The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics has "worn...really about the same"), The Structure of Verse: Modern Essays on Prosody (Fawcett, 1966) edited by Harvey Gross and Writing Poems (Addison-Wesley, 1996) by Robert Wallace and Michelle Boisseau. Certainly I would end up using ideas and exercises from most of the other books I've mentioned, but it's necessary, in the end, to compile a manageable and affordable list for beginning students. I would recommend but not require that they purchase a copy of the shorter version of Preminger and Brogan's The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton University Press, 1993), whose larger brother is exhaustive and exhausting and close to the final word on matters of definition and precedent.

Miller Williams worked with John Ciardi on the later editions of How Does a Poem Mean? and was eminently qualified to do so, as he is a genuine authority on the contours of poems and the inner trajectory of the thoughts that occupy them. His Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms begins with "Notes on the Elements of Poetic Forms" (rhyme, metrics, terminology), followed by chapters on traditional stanza lengths from the couplet to the sonnet redouble, which is in turn followed by poems of set, and then indeterminate, length. He then discusses variations and the nature of the line and provides an extensive glossary and index.

The greatest strength of this book lies in the shrewdly chosen examples. Williams provides poems by Nemerov, Justice, Meredith, plus the usual suspects — Shakespeare, Hopkins, Dickinson. Like Turco, he relies on Wesli Court's renditions of intricate Welsh forms, as well as work by the mysterious Cosmo Monkhouse. I do wish that he supplied more of the Irish bardic patterns, and the near-absence of women as models is a little abashing. Surely there's room here for Hacker, Rich, Bishop, Moore, Plath, Dove. On the other hand, it's quite refreshing to rediscover here a section of R. S. Gwynn's "Narcissiad" and to study inventive poems by Ciardi, Michael Heffernan, Whittemore and the author himself (though a sense of balance argues for fewer of these). I can't resist displaying an actual poem here, in the midst of all this talk. It's the book's example of a caudate sonnet, which Williams explains more than many of the forms, as he usually relies on a rhyme-and-meter diagram and the force of the examples themselves. The Latin for "tail" will cue the reader to how this form, developed by Berni in the 16th century, received its name, and it's pretty easy to see how the pair of trimeter lines and the pair of heroic couplets added to the Italian sonnet result in this form. As Williams says, "The rhetorical pattern of the sonnet is rigidly observed."

Her Slightly Longer Story Song

She cried, imagining the pretty wife
I'd hammer with some grief. She said the breath
Of love — this kind — was mostly arrogance.
She'd drink and then she'd dance
Alone and naked to the radio.
She said I was her baby. I said no.
She said in time I'd throw
Away her memory. I knew she lied.
I loved her body, loved her pride.

Whitehead's engaged in some pretty serious mischief here, and that the sonnet will lend itself to be thus employed is something that I, for one, can always stand to be reminded.

Since Williams, unlike me, truly understands what he's doing here, his introduction reviewing the relationship between historical periods and their poetic ceremonies is pithy and convincing, and when he discusses the way "the energy of originality" diminishes once any response to a previous generation has ceased to interrogate what it rejects, it's easy to see why he believes that it's time (has been for a while) for us to question the production of more or less automatically dictated free verse. He remarks that "a disdain for the past itself [is] a kind of temporal chauvinism," based on his conviction that the current vogue of lawless "free verse" is accompanied by a rejection of anything artful or ordered as shackling. Though this argument can get much more subtle, and then less decisive, I do remember that Twain claimed he was not a radical when young to prevent himself from being a reactionary when old, and someone more recently said that not to be a liberal at twenty meant you have no heart, not to be a conservative at forty means you have no brain. In matters of prosody, these notions are at least worth entertaining, if only to give us something rough to whet ourselves on. Who knows, we may even learn how to retain the song element in American poetry if we heed some of the demanding advice Williams offers. In his appendix on the line, Williams suggests that "at the end of a line the reader feels rhythmically pleased but expectant," which seems to me one of the essential dynamics of any art, that the audience be offered satisfaction, surprise and suspense in carefully meted portions.

The Structure of Verse: Modern Essays on Prosody is my quirkiest choice. The book is no longer in print, apparently (see the Amazon.com listing accompanying this article), and I would pity the student who set out to read it cover to cover. Many of the essays harbored in this little book seem seminal, not because they are in any definitive sense correct, but because they stir the waters, churn the mind. George Saintsbury's "The Mothers," for all its breadth of historical intent, probably underestimates the impact of Celtic prosodies on our English. Northrup Frye's "The Rhythm of Recurrence: Epos" undervalues the impact of accentual-syllabic measurement. Robert Bridges's letter to a musician leans so heavily on his knowledge of Greek and Latin that it nearly eludes me. Mea culpa.

But this collection brings into focus and investigates the very matters that seem completely uninteresting to the majority of poets who submit work to Shenandoah. How to achieve a normative line without falling into the mechanical? How to weigh the merits of particular variations on that regularity? How to reckon the on-going dialectic between the poem in the ear and the poem on the page? As many of these critics agree, there is no substitute for a good ear, but good ears don't become excellent ones without education, experimentation, the casting of some historical light on what might otherwise be a forbiddingly dark path.

And if this book demands much, it repays much, not all in hard coin. Roethke's essay "What Do I Like?" begins with Mother Goose and hopscotch rhymes and moves with Eliot's "auditory imagination" through Blake and Kunitz, Ransom's "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" and his own "Elegy for Jane" and "Big Wind," which he calls his "manure machine." The essay is full of fun but informed by the poet's agreement with Eliot and Gross that (according to the latter) "formal structure, such as meter, exists to be evaded, varied, departed from." Students who believe that knowledge of subtle rhythmic effects will drive them to rigidity will be relieved and perhaps elated to discover in Gross an ally against any "academic" monotony.

The essay from this collection that has haunted me for years (occasionally to my detriment) is Robert Graves's "Harp, Anvil, Oar," reprinted from his book The Crowning Privilege. Although Graves seems to appreciate the hypnotic effect of regularity more than the surprise and modulation of variation, he brings together the mythic mind (so often neglected in questions of prosody) and the rhythmic appetite, meditating on the development of the bardic harp from tendons on a beached whale's ribs played by the wind. The world singing to itself through itself again. The iamb, he tells us, preserves the smith's steady pace at his anvil, the sailor in time with his mates at the oar. The old dance of work abides at the heart of the poem, just as the spell of poetry once gave shape to our work. "Poetry," Graves theorizes, "presupposes an inspired knowledge of man's sensuous and spiritual nature. Smithcraft... presupposes an inspired knowledge of how to transform lifeless material into living forms." Whether he is speculating on the brotherhood of Jubal and Tubal or narrowing the category of "sacred-dance verse," Graves is almost always eccentrically winning. His essay closes with a discussion of what he sees as Virgil's conviction that all poems must be equally rich in sound, equally beautiful. From this, and his conclusion that subject and tone will determine the way pearl is interspersed with the more functional mother of pearl, Graves offers this living advice: how to construct a poem "out of accompanying sense to sound without impairing the original thought has to be learned by example and experiment." That's the long, hard and rewarding road students need to be ever mindful of.

Late night, mild dark under a half moon. I lay on the grass and watched for falling stars, and as usual, one came. Remembering years ago when I was unexpectedly asked to teach poetry writing, I recall that I was certain there could be no book I would want to teach such a course from with the exception of one I would write myself, were I not too slothful. No one else would be able to come up with examples or explanations that wouldn't give rise to immediate argument from me. I don't know much now, knew even less then. A hundred students later, I found Robert Wallace's Writing Poems and understood right away that he was someone who knew more about poetry and pedagogy than I. Using it as a text along with Alvarez's anthology, I gladly learned and taught. Looking at the fourth edition now, edited with Michelle Boisseau, one edition beyond the last one I used, I still find it pretty easy to say why this particular book seems to me the best.

Tone, emphasis and order. These are the most difficult facets of any text about applying a body of knowledge. Wallace and Boisseau (whom I'll abbreviate as W & B from here on) have found a way of talking to less experienced readers and writers without condescending or congratulating, and without abdicating their hard-won but lightly-worn authority. They don't allow the clever or lighthearted (which students need as much as I do) to fall into the cute or whimsical. They are contemporary without being trendy, and their introduction is just beguiling enough to encourage without suggesting that the path is easy or success inevitable. Quoting Howard Nemerov "wryly defin[ing] writing poems as a spiritual exercise 'having for its chief object the discovery or invention of one's character,'" they lead the student in the direction that has always made the most sense to me, away from that "scrimmage of appetite" called the lit biz and vitas and toward "love's austere and lonely offices," toward life and the rewarding and demanding craft that Yeats speaks of in another of their examples:

I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitiching has been naught...'

Writing Poems is a suite in three rooms. The first, following a phrase from Robert Francis, is "Form: The Necessary Nothing." What a compact and precise phrase that is, and under its auspices, W & B discuss meter, free verse, sound and sense. They are especially effective at opening the notion of potential subject matter (their chapter is called "VERSE IS: Catsup and Diamonds," which is far less whimsical than it first appears) and free verse, which they explore line by line in terms of pull, drag and balance. Recently, when Reetika Vazirani told me that many new books were frustrating her because she couldn't understand why the poet was turning his or her line in particular places, I thought of this section as the best discussion on that subject I know. A free verse line that will not yield some of its secrets to W & B's method is probably anarchic.

The second chamber, "Content: the Essential Something," devotes significant space and intensity to explaining descriptive implication and metaphorical implication, which work together to create much of a poem's undersong. This meaningful undertow has always seemed to me the hardest concept for students to grasp. The authors also emphasize clarity and the ways that creating characters in a poem ("A Cast of Characters: Duke, Drunk, Pig, and Lily") might allow the poet to discover his or her own character. Another crucial point they lead the student to, though they don't say it quite this way, is that a poet does not so much find his voice as make it, that it is a construct, an instrument capable of variations to suit an assortment of rhetorical circumstances and motives.

The final section of Writing Poems is "Process: Making the Poem Happen." Here, W & B guide the student between Wordsworth's recollections in tranquillity and Whitman's "the secret of it all is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood." It may take a writer quite some time to acquire a taste for revision, and despite the temptations to minimize the effort and cheerlead, these authors insist upon the difficulty of revision and are not apologetic about the investment required. They occupy about sixty pages discussing and showing revisions, and I find it very rewarding to see their demonstration, through three examples, of how a single student grew in craft and confidence as she developed patience, prudence and not a little cunning.

Perhaps most importantly, the authors of Writing Poems show how a living poem is comprised of counterweights and balances, echoing Yeats as he admitted to the complexity of those arguments we make with ourselves: we "sing amid our uncertainties." They offer samples of lively, crafty poems from authors as diverse as Sharon Olds and Wilfred Owen, Alexander Pope and Greg Pape, Kooser and Keats, Jarman and Komunyakaa, Twichell, Mitchell, Issa, Hass and Blake. And if I miss the work of Ammons, Rodney Jones and Heaney, Pinsky's "The Want Bone" and some Dante, these are supplements I can supply myself, for what this text provides is a wise and companionable foundation, which is the thing I once thought no teacher could effectively provide for another.

Things fall apart — the general condition of our outpourings, no matter how smart, wise, shrewd, spontaneous, sensitive or informed we may be. No way to prevent it, but we can toil against anarchy and entropy, toward governance and shapeliness. In this effort, we need both imagination's "wild nights" and sweet reason. The Great Resistance Movement — evident among beginning poets and even some long-time practitioners who love the stream's flow more than the proposition that it can be harnessed — instills the need for guidance and dialogue, the encouragement of both delight in disorder and the instinct to be neat. Reading through blizzards of manuscripts in the offices of Shenandoah, I often wish to have fewer poems before me so that I could actually say some of these things to promising writers, just as they have sometimes been said to me. Sitting back in my rocking chair, observing the way the wisteria wraps itself in intricate surprise around the regular rails, I think of those signature cadences of my grandfather's and grandmother's chairs. Ending where I began, I think of the variations we develop around our own primary rhythm and how the angle of the seat and the length and curvature of the rockers determine the possibilities. If I want to understand how to move with various rhythms, I should study the construction of the chair lovely in its bones. Our current good fortune is two-fold: there are an abundance of books to show us how poems mean and are made, and the discussion goes on into the night. It's enough to help me to believe in a design that would not appall the darkness whose music, amid our uncertainties, astonishes us all.

R. T. Smith
Rockbridge County, VA

Copyright © 1998 by R. T. Smith.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.