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A POET'S GUIDE TO POETRY

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

A Note on Sources...........................................................................................................ixIntroduction: The Enchantment of the Work...................................................................................11 Writing the Poem You Read: A View of Artistic Process.....................................................................13Part I The Elements of Relation and Resemblance.............................................................................452 Line and Half-Meaning.....................................................................................................513 Syntax and Whole Meaning..................................................................................................754 Diction and Layers in Meaning.............................................................................................1115 Trope and Thought.........................................................................................................1426 Rhetoric and Speech.......................................................................................................1877 Rhythm as Combination.....................................................................................................212Part II The Elements, Controlled in Time....................................................................................2158 Accentual-Syllabic Meter: The Role of Stress and Interval.................................................................2179 Stanza and Rhyme: The Role of Echo........................................................................................26210 Further Rhythms in English—Counted Forms: Accentual Verse and Syllabic Verse (including Haiku).....................29011 Further Rhythms in English—Non-Counted Forms: The Four Freedoms of Free Verse......................................330Part III Writing in Form....................................................................................................34512 Exercises for Beginning and Advanced Writers.............................................................................34713 Poetic Terms.............................................................................................................38014 Annotated Bibliography of Further Reading................................................................................483List of Poems by Form.......................................................................................................503Author and Title Index......................................................................................................508Subject Index...............................................................................................................517Credits.....................................................................................................................558

Chapter One

The Limbo of Beginning

The first rule of thumb is simply put: To become better acquainted with poetry you must read poems as if you were writing them. Then you must accept the even stranger idea that the process of reading is instructive because it retraces the intricate paths of composition. Reading is like writing in beginning in uncertainty and driving toward speculation and experiment. The reader follows, via the poem as a ghostly map, the many paths that were not taken by the author, but whose possibility leaves a shadow like crosshatching on the paths that remain. To read this way keeps a poem always provisional and still in the making, which is how the process of reading absorbs the act of writing to their mutual improvement in terms of skills and understanding. Eventually writer and reader see their present way more clearly than the paths not taken.

Furthermore, reading in the present detects what writing in the present also suffers: a list toward something precarious. Reading, like writing, hangs over the abyss: The ways poetry can be written in a given period trail off into nothingness. The solid conventions hover, break up, and eerily recombine when subjected to experiments that distort them (and even obedience, at the extremes—such as William Shakespeare's or Gerard Manley Hopkins's obedience to the sonnet tradition—can produce difference and distortion). Reading becomes the process of recognizing how poets stand upon the given in order to peer over into the unshaped but unfolding present. What aids both writer and reader to fill out this partial presence are the forms of verse.

Pursuit of the poem, by reader or writer, involves trial and error against the backdrop of form. I would call error a form of blessedness: The best poems satisfy by surprise, either because they reject something more familiar, or because they teeter on the edge of confusion in knowing something else. Reading, like writing, requires us to uncover a poem that is in the process of uncovering itself.

Understanding the poem we are reading is a process that moves from ignorance through partial insights to higher levels of understanding. Similarly, to write the poem is to move from ignorance to higher levels of understanding (understanding being seen, in part, as achievement). But first it is necessary to explore one's ignorance, to feel about in the darkness ignorance makes. The aim even in rereading a poem we already know is to climb back down into the limbo of the half-shaped.

Perceiving how shape emerges from the half-shaped background provides the reader with a lens, or vantage, similar to the writer's. But this does not require us to say much about the lives of the poets or how they went about making their works; I am more interested in how the poems themselves wrestle with their tasks and occasions. For task and occasion arise only from a clear sense of poetic mission, a mission that articulates itself most strongly when responding (among other spurs) to a poetic tradition. Therefore, reading cannot be limited to the poem on the page—or to data about its author—at the expense of relevant context about the poem's medium and its imaginative scope.

"Context" implicates the language of poetry with its movement in verbal time (prosody) and its movement in intellectual time (poetic mode—the analogue of plot in fiction). Definitions of relevance may be debated, but I am drawn to a definition by familiarity: You know that you have begun to master the poem's relevant context when you can take on the perspective of the artist and follow the clues planted in the work to the curious rightness of its shape. Background turns into foreground and apparent digression turns into primary signal if you move through the poem from within. (New Criticism, by contrast, typically insists on a distanced role for the reader.) I believe the effect of the craft of writing is actually to entice readers into the same domain as the creative imagination. The most dependable map for the re-creation of a work of literature (and I would include fiction here, too) comes with the creative work itself through its address to the unknown as an ethical idea realized aesthetically. "Realization" as a metaphor for literary art thus asks us to discern what needed realizing, what was once less than perfectly formed—intuitions and resemblances. Over time one becomes better at reading and interpreting from within and participates more subtly in the...