Briefs Blog
ABCs of Poetry: X is for Xray
A few years ago I became interested in the artist Man Ray’s camera-less photographs of the early 1920s. Like many of the budding Dadaists, he tried out several types of media – painting, sculpture, as well as photography. He also had to earn a living, which he did with his portraiture and fashion photography. One day, by accident, Mr. Ray placed a glass funnel and a thermometer on photographic paper. This was definitely an accident; his valuable supply of paper was dwindling and he did not need to waste it. But he switched on an electric light and exposed the paper. Images of the objects emerged. Light was refracted through the glass, yet stopped by the solidity of the materials, so the shapes turned up white where they sheltered the paper against the black of total exposure. He slipped the new creations into a packet of fashion shots and brought them to Paul Poirier, the great fashion designer, who somewhat reluctantly took them and passed them along the artistic pike. A genius of artistic self-promotion, Man Ray called these pieces “Rayographs.”
He went on to play with this new medium by taking objects and puting them together so they made their own connections with each other. We see the results. A wire fan makes concentric circles of white on black combined with metal springs and a flat ribbon of a yardstick. Human faces touch their lips together as models lay their cheeks on paper. A wood and iron hand drill pierce a cloud of a circle, in white against black, the hard metal twist positioned to seem as though inserted into soft fruit.
These days, we are used to seeing X-rays of our own insides. Break a bone, and an X-ray will locate the fracture in a tibia. Even if only at a dentist’s office, we are allowed to see our interiors. Like an X-ray of a giant goat’s stomach after it has devoured an indigestible meal, a Rayograph displays its contents in reverse: white against black. Like bones in an X-ray, the hard parts stand out while the soft matter melts away. Flesh, which acts as padding, a bag full of the liquid of blood and plasma, becomes transparent. Skin, the only layer of a body which can normally be seen, reveals its true nature as a mere cover, a blanket for what lies beneath. An X-ray can beam through all that, until it is stopped by bone.
We do not really know what lies beneath this cover of skin. Assume an ignorance of what lies beneath. Epidermis, callous and scar mask our muscles and sinews and the ultimate bones of our skeletons. All that is inside us is hidden. This is the point in the analogy where the X-ray and the Rayograph part ways. An X-ray is a picture of inside us. We do not take pieces from outside, set them into our cavities, arrange them. Our inner workings stay put, inside us, without our conscious handling of them.
And I would go so far as to say that our insides are supposed to be hidden. We are told to not cut ourselves open. Don’t break the skin. What is there, is there. It is what it is. And sometimes, what is inside us calls out. It calls out in the language of poetry.
One day, a person wants to write a poem. She would like to find hummingbirds flittering among hollyhocks. But on this particular day, in order to write that poem, she would have to put flowers and pretty insects on a piece of photographic paper and expose them to light. That particular garden cannot be found, even if the weather seems perfect for it. Sunshine falls on a golden field. But a chill runs in her bones. At the edge of that field stands a house. On the roof of the house perch six large dark birds. All she can see are the dark birds on the Victorian roof. Closer inspection from a safe distance shows a hole in the roof where rotten beams have given way.
The person stands transfixed at the edge of the field, wondering if emergency medical personnel have been dispatched. The vultures have called out. Something not-beautiful inside requests a showing; wants to be revealed, exposed, as certainly as if the sun or a ceiling light shines on it.
But who knows that, if one cannot see inside? The vultures may simply station themselves on the highest perch around, so they can see over the fields in case some animal has already fallen. They aren’t birds of prey, and will hurt no one. Perhaps there’s nothing in the house to be terrified of. I am telling a narrative, that’s all. The words float on the page.
Words in a poem float on skin. They refer to a point underneath. The skin need not, should not be broken. Maybe a scratch or two might be okay. But the flesh should not be hacked at, like some amateur surgeon. One should allow words to suspend and refer through the top layer. If one has a hand drill, don’t let it pierce. Lay it on a piece of paper and admire it for what it is.
It may just be an object, this drill, this vulture, this hollyhock. Or it may expose itself as something more personally compelling. No one knows until the words sit on top of the paper what they refer to inside. Here is why a poem is an X-ray, though sometimes it’s a Rayograph. Usually, it’s better for writer and reader alike if it’s an X-ray.
Jeanne DeLarm writes from a house built by a ship captain in 1853 in a Connecticut shore town. She received an MFA from Fairfield University. Her poems have been published in various journals, one being nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Currently she works on a novel.
ABCs of Poetry: W is for Weaving
Some of the most common questions I receive when someone reads my work, whether the reader is my mother or a friend or a stranger, are these: Did this really happen? Did you really feel like this? How real are these feelings/situations/repercussions/_______?
Poetry exists in an uncertain space. Fiction can be realistic and still exist in an imagined space; non-fiction can be creative and still exist in the actual. But poetry—where does poetry find itself? A weaving of both, I think. Sometimes more actual, sometimes more imagined, generally concerned with language and sound and emotion in a kind of reaching beyond.
The very asking of the questions about real-ity generally shows me that I have successfully woven my poems in a way that causes readers to question their own reality. Writing poetry in 2018 means access to form and content and media like never before. So whether you are approaching lyric or conceptual or spoken word or formal or visual, no matter the genre, it is inevitable that weaving will occur.
When I apply the idea of weaving to my own work, I generally find that this is how the metaphor plays out:
- Loom: Sometimes I’ll apply formal rules or patterns to my work, though in my own process, form, often appears after initial drafts, not before.
- Warp (the longitudinal threads, static across the cloth): The world external to my own experience – what Richard Hugo would call “the triggering town.” Pieces of language I jot down, Wikipedia articles I read in the middle of the night, scientific discoveries, historical events, artwork, dreams.
- Weft (the lateral threads, active and changing): Emotion or experience, sometimes personal, sometimes imagined. This is usually unplanned for me – when I start writing, beginning with the warp or external world, I’m never quite sure where the weft is going to go, but I can guess that figurative language and imagery is going to be pulled through.
- Weave (the final product): In the end, after revision and critique and reworking, the poem becomes such a mingling of the warp and weft that it can be difficult for even me to tell which is which – where my own reality is different from the figurative language or external world or persona the poem has taken up on its own.
On a recent visit to the American Writers Museum in downtown Chicago, I read part of a letter that Rose Wilder Lane wrote to her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder. While both daughter and mother are known for genres other than poetry, I think that the advice that Rose gives Laura, deep into edits of By the Shores of Silver Lake, is quite useful for us poets.
“You must take into account the actual distinction between truth and fact. It is beyond all human power to tell all the facts. Your whole lifetime spent at nothing else would not tell all the facts of one morning in your life, just any ordinary morning when you get up, dress, get breakfast and wash the dishes. Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts which illustrate it.”
(You can read the letter for yourself here: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7722943.)
Rose is talking about weaving here, weaving towards truth, where the reader nods their head in agreement or empathy or acknowledgement or witness, when they wonder about the very reality of the poem itself.
My answer to the questions about the real-ity of my poems is this: More-or-less. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But I’m more concerned with the fact that the poem is real, and that there is a very real person reading it. I’ve woven something real, put warp and weft together and created something new. And if it’s difficult to tell the difference between the threads, then I think something has turned out well.
For poets interested in the writing metaphor of weaving, here are some questions and places to start:
1. Identify your own warp and weft, as well as any looms that you turn to frequently. What formal constraints are you most comfortable using? Where do you usually begin your poems? Are there any trends in how your poems are built? Habits in how they reach their end? It might be useful to mark up your own poems in terms of warp and weft – where do you write towards yourself, and where do you write away?
2. For those inclined to begin with the personal, try the opposite. Begin with a different kind of warp: a random Wikipedia article, a particular place, a first line borrowed from someone else, a piece of visual art. (Ekphrasis and found poetry lend themselves particularly well to weaving!)
3. For those inclined, like me, to begin with the external, try the opposite. Begin with an emotion, something internal to the self. Make that emotion as visceral as possible before moving outward towards your external weft.
4. Read some poets who are particularly attuned towards moving between the personal and the external, whether in form or content—I would recommend Sandra Beasley’s I Was the Jukebox, Matthea Harvey’s If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?, Monica Youn’s Blackacre, and Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas.
Hannah Kroonblawd is a PhD student at Illinois State University. When not teaching or student-ing, she can be found over-watering her peace lily and watching Chinese rom-coms. A graduate of the MFA program at Oregon State University, her recent work can be found in the Blue Earth Review, Radar Poetry, Ruminate, and the South Dakota Review, among others.
ABCs of Poetry: V is for Volta
The volta.
You might be thinking, oh you mean the turn? That spot in a Petrarchan/Italian sonnet between the octet and the sestet, or in a Shakespearean sonnet between the third quatrain and the final couplet, where things change? Things like rhyme scheme, stanzaic structure, and argumentative agenda? And in other poems, regardless of whether they’re rhymed and metrical or in another received form, or even free verse (which is still formally astute or at least ought to be), you mean that location where the cinematic, rhetorical, imagistic, and/or some other poetic pattern is suddenly and significantly disrupted?
And I’d say, yes, but. I’d say, sure, the turn, yes, but I’d rather say the volta, and not just because I like the woozy hit of pretention it gives me. Because yes the turn is great, something about the volta seems to crystalize more of the function and aims of poetry than the turn does.
Why? For one, whenever I say the word volta (which comes from the Italian and means, surprisingly, ‘to turn’) I also hear the ghosts of other words strafing and swirling around it.
One is the lavolta, a dance popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, which involved quick steps and leaps, and very intimate (almost erotic) contact between dance partners in order to achieve these leaps. The dance was considered lewd, immoral, and even grounds for police intervention. Critics were scandalized and dancers shocked, in part because other dances of the day, like the pavane, were more like line dancing—less about propinquity than group rhythm, more about conformity than contact.
Another is vaulting (derived from the French voltige), a competition sport in which riders perform acrobatic tricks on a horse who is tethered to a central hub around which it trots or canters, depending on the rider’s level of skill or foolhardiness.
And another is vault, which in turn calls up its several different forms in the world of the actual: vault as in the type of ceiling characterized by high arches where air circulates and the eye is drawn upwards, and vault as in a room (like bank vault) in which goods are stored for later use, and, finally, vault as in the action of jumping, as in pole vault, as in to leap over.
But so what? This is all at best rather tangentially affiliated with the essential action the volta describes and performs, the yoking together of noticeably different expressions of a particular poetic pattern, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be more helpful to talk about the way that the volta acts as a hinge between, say, a description of boiled prawns and the rosy flush of sunset? Between, say, a stately if mundane description of a bus ride and a passenger’s sudden hurling of a racial slur? Or how it bridges the disparity between maligning one’s lover before affirming one’s undying admiration for them?
Perhaps. But the volta, like poetry, is more than just its function. When we turn the lamp of our attention on the meanings which the volta draws to its periphery like people who thought they heard their name called, we can see in the half-light bizarre and exciting resemblances that explain some of the more understated features inside the volta, which its particular function has compacted and smoothed over time.
So, we might wonder how the volta is like an essential component of a dance the mainstream disapproves of for its action, intimacy, and iconoclasm. Or how it relates to the marriage of steady hoofbeat rhythms (akin to meter and breath, maybe) over which perilous and exciting contortions occur. Or how it is like one brick in an airy internal space masquerading as open. Or how in silhouette, it looks like a leap from one shore to another.
You might interpret the volta (and poetry, which it metonymizes) through the lens of these etymological resemblances differently. Maybe instead of a disapproved-of dance you’d say an erotic and motile commingling of oppositions. Maybe instead of someone doing flips on horseback you’d say poetry’s an ornate and circular performance that endangers its performer while frivolously titillating its audience.
Sure. That’s your interpretive prerogative. But when you do this, whatever your conclusion, you’re still performing one of the most critical actions of poetry: the leap, from one thing onto another. The connecting of unlike elements to show how they are, however tendentiously or absurdly, alike, so we can see the world is made with as many (if not more!) resemblances as it is with divisions (I’m thinking of John Donne and his famous flea in particular here, but great examples outnumber constellations).
The volta also calls to its side the volt, the unit of electromotive force it takes to move one ampere of current past one ohm of resistance. In other words, a unit of electricity. A unit which takes its name not from the same radix as volta as one might expect (the *wel- of Proto-Indo-European, which means ‘to turn or revolve’), but from Alessandro Volta, the Italian physicist who invented the battery, that ubiquitous, sold-separately, small cylindrical container which is full of dormant turns and jolts and shocks that are ready at a moment’s notice to be, by some outside apparatus, activated and transformed into motion. Say, a leaning in. Maybe a clapping. Some laughter. A jeer. Whatever hope as an action might look like.
Conor Bracken is a poet, translator, and teacher. His poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in places like the Colorado Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and Waxwing. He is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the fifth annual Frost Place Chapbook Competition, and translator of Mohammed Khair-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, September 2019). An assistant poetry editor at Four Way Review, he teaches English at the University of Findlay.
ABCs of Poetry: U is for “Un,” as in “Un” the Prefix
I.
Choose the word you want, the part of speech, attach the prefix and there you go.
Writing poems is like that (for me, anyway)—Un-shoring, uncoupling, un-troubling, unburdening, unending, un-fucking…
That’s the one: Un-fucking.
Writing poems is like that, like un-fucking yourself.
And when I say write, I mean draft, again and again and again—so much that you’ve un-fucked the “a” from the “gain” so its “again” again.
II.
You want to write poems. You sit down to do so. Maybe, in whatever “writing space” that you write, you crack books, you find pages and place the books spine-up so the books look like distant birds in a landscape. You write some lines or stanzas—hell, you might even write a poem.
Nice work. Tomorrow, un-fuck it. The next day, un-fuck it again.
Choose your editorial method, the way you dice up what you’ve written, and there you go.
III.
If poetry is the art of anything, it’s the art of the “Un,” a prefix that breeds the anxiety and liberty of detachment, a prefix that helps us recognize what we have by knowing what we can lose—which means, to my mind, a rejection of ego…
An un-fucking.
Or, really, any other “un” word you can muster—it all fits. Poetry, writing poems, is the “un,” the voice of us yearning the way God must’ve yearned hovering over the formless deep: in un-ease, in unraveling, and then in understanding.
IV.
Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Maybe writing poems is the opposite of the “un.” Maybe I chose “un” the prefix because I had to choose “U” as a letter for this series of craft essays. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe by not knowing I’ll find something cogent to say by the end of this. And then I’ll be undone, unfurled, un-fucked, understood.
V.
I sit down to write with an idea, almost always (I’m not one to free-write or write about not being able to write in the face of writing). I pull out books, scan some, don’t look at others, then place them text down (spine-up like distant birds in a landscape). I have an idea, and maybe the spine-up books have helped or hindered it, but it doesn’t matter. My idea is unformed.
Tomorrow I’ll understand the idea’s unimportance; tomorrow I’ll have un-fucked myself from the idea and un-fucked the idea from the poem.
The un-writing of however I start a poem is the core of the poem, the poem’s id, the un-caged animal lusty and unquenchable.
I have to feed it. But first I have to understand how to unshackle it, unlock it, un-cage it.
VI.
Am I unclear?
Whatever you write, un-do it. Your poem will crawl out un-shackled and un-caged.
And then you’ll be un-fucked, at least for a little while.
Matt LaFreniere is a husband, father, teacher, poet–not always in that order. His first poetry collection, Don’t Turn the Projector Off!, was recently published by Unsolicited Press. His poems have appeared in Dunes Review, Main Street Rag, Pilgrimage, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Spry, and others.
ABCs of Poetry: T is for Tone
Kristin Tenor
It’s often been said in order for a poem, or any piece of literature for that matter, to truly resonate, the writer must build a bridge between him/herself and the reader. One way to construct that bridge is through tone. Tone is defined as the attitude a poet exhibits toward the poem’s subject and/or audience. For those who like to keep it simple, think of it as the emotion propelling the words onto the page.
One doesn’t necessarily need to be a poet to understand the possibilities in tone are endless—from angry to melancholy, humorous to even whimsical—there’s an entire spectrum at the poet’s disposal. In fact, the folks over at Poetry In Voice compiled a list of approximately two hundred tones a poem might convey.
There are several devices one can use to help create tone in poetry. Some of the most common include:
- Rhythm
- Imagery
- Word Choice
Let’s take a look at how each of these are handled by William Butler Yeats in his poem, “When You Are Old”:
When You Are Old
By William Butler Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moment of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
[Credit: This poem can be found in the public domain.]
Rhythm: You can see this poem of unrequited love is comprised of three stanzas, each including four lines written in iambic pentameter. Also, the last words in the first and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme, as do the last words in the second and third. Read the poem aloud. Do you hear the sing song tone the repetition creates as the speaker addresses his lover? How does it make you feel? Wistful, maybe full of longing? Think how different the tone would have been had Yeats used short, choppy lines. Perhaps, instead of regret one might have felt resentment or even anger.
Imagery: So many beautiful images and details are tucked inside this poem, especially within the first stanza—the young lover imagining herself as an old woman nodding by the fire, the book held in her hand as she slowly reads, and then, the dream of the soft look her eyes had once. Yeats creates this scene so we as readers experience the same bittersweet tenderness regret brings for this man as he addresses his former lover. Colors, objects, seasons, weather, light—all these bring with them the power to evoke emotion and set tone, especially when they are juxtaposed against one another.
Word Choice: Just about every word in the English language has more than one meaning or connotation associated with it. For instance, the third line in the second stanza of Yeats’ poem:
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.
The word pilgrim often refers to a person who journeys a long distance to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion. On the other hand, it can also suggest a person who wanders. Each connotation gives the line, and potentially the entire poem, a different vibe all together. Is the speaker devoted to this woman or is he frustrated because he feels she has wandered away from him? Considering the context surrounding the line, one can surmise the speaker is telling his lover he loved her to the very depths of her soul, which as the reader leaves us breathless.
Finally, there are two other elements one may want to consider when it comes to identifying tone—mood and voice. Mood refers to the poem’s atmosphere, as well as the emotions and feelings evoked while reading it. You might say mood is tone’s translation. Similarly, the narrator’s voice and diction determine tone or attitude. Tone, mood, and voice—all these are important when it comes to building resonance between the writer and reader. One cannot exist without the other.
Kristin Tenor finds inspiration in the quiet details and believes in their power to illuminate the extraordinary. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Midwest Review, Spry Literary Journal, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere. She resides in Wisconsin with her husband. Learn more @ www.kristintenor.com or find her on Twitter @KristinTenor.
ABCs of Poetry: S is for the Poet as a Sculptor
Some poets speak of the blank page as a tabula rasa, view the act of writing as one of pure creation. Something from nothing. But I don’t believe that any artist begins with nothing. Although a writer may start a poem with no preconceived idea of topic or form, her preferences in diction, gradations of experience, and frames of reference will color each draft, no matter how rough or free. I prefer to see the poet as a sculptor, someone who shapes raw material step by step into a unique and beautiful artifact.
When a poet is drafting, it is a corporeal, visceral act. Sculptor Anish Kapoor believed that “Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.” When writing, the hand actively dances, pausing, retracing, looping and whirling. The brain fires, neurons building bridges with each leap in image or syntax. The gut churns, reacts. The heart rends or mends or palpitates at each discovery. A poet gets her hands dirty, feels the tension in her neck and her back, gets an endorphin rush when the words come smoothly. The poem occupies the same space as the body as it comes through the body. In this way, the poet sculpts a reality that is grounded, weighty, one that has substance, birthed through blood and flesh as well as language.
So, a draft creates a physical object, but a first draft does not a poem make. Auguste Rodin is quoted as saying, “Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.” Ah, the holes in those initial drafts! The places where connections are missed, where the music falters, where the story is too linear, the leaps too far. The places that are incomplete. These holes beg to be filled, whether in a single poem or in ordering a collection. We want to move toward a feeling of wholeness when writing a poem. But, of course, there are also the lumps. The clumsy places. The overwrought and overwritten, the clichéd, the too-familiar. These places must be smoothed out for the poem to succeed.
And this is where the intellect comes in. According to Picasso, “Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.” The poet brain now takes over, uses its ability to view the raw material with eyes that see the future, for this is what the art of revision is. To let go of the constructs of the original draft and see the poem for what it might be. This ability to envision a form in the amorphous shape and whittle away at the unnecessary pieces, to hone and carve the block of text into new life, makes the poet the finest of sculptors. Even poets who meticulously plan lines before committing them to paper are doing the work of the sculptor – waiting to understand what shape wants to emerge before putting chisel to stone.
Once a poem is shaped and polished, it needs a reader. So a poet seeks a pedestal on which to place the finished object, a public place where it can inspire reaction. This is the submission and publication aspect of writing, the part that seems the most dry and business-like, but one that is important, too. Sculptor Anthony Caro once said, “So, in other words, how you respond to a sculpture, how a viewer sees the sculpture, is vital.” The poem is similarly not complete without readers, readers who bring their own sensibilities about language and syntax, who bring their own experiences and references to the poem. The reader may see holes where the poet saw lumps or find faults where the poet imagined none. The reader’s body may react in different ways than the poet’s did as the words travel down the page. No matter. Without a reader, all of that sculpting may as well still be a square block of marble or a pile of unformed clay. One of my favorite sculptors, Alberto Giacometti, said, “I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality… to protect myself.” And isn’t this what a poet does–seek shelter in language, write to observe, to understand, to explicate her world?
Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress, 2013) as well as eight chapbooks, most recently The Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2018).
ABCs of Poetry: R is for Repetition
I have heard Pete Townshend tell Karen he can see for miles—57 times per song, in fact. I can feel his eyes. I do not need to hear another descriptor of his jealousy.
My lungs have faltered beneath the heartbeat of Elisabeth Bishop’s Sestina. I am glued under the child’s inscrutable house.
I have cried still always cry every time Plath confesses, “I think I made you up inside my head.” I am sorry, miss. I think you might be right. I think I might have, too. Each time you say it, I am a little more certain of us both.
But why?
There’s a lot to be said about the power of repetition in language. It is used in speeches and songwriting to bring people together, to create memorable takeaways, to give people spoken souvenirs and a role to play in any given event. In certain instances, it creates predictability.
In others, it allows you to take the predictability you have established and subvert it; creating something wholly new, unnerving, and meaningful.
When I think back on innovative uses of repetition in poetry, I often think of the poet Matthew Lafreniere, who we were fortunate to publish in the third issue of Spry. His poem, “Dream of the Jar,” is haunting, surreal, and at once blushes with humor. It’s a good study in the ways in which repetition, not only of certain words, but of sounds and of concepts, each in their own way transformed throughout a piece, can create the slow, steady sensation of movement.
Linsey Jayne is a wave-headed poet with a penchant for jazz who received her MFA in creative writing at Fairfield University. Her writing has been published in such publications as The Standard-Times, The Dartmouth-Westport Chronicle, and exactly.what. She has served as the chief poetry editor for Mason’s Road, as well as the student editor for the Bryant Literary Review and the opinion section editor of The Archway. Linsey is currently at work on her first chapbook, entitled Idle Jive.
ABCs of Poetry: Q is for Quatrain
When you’re a poet and are given the option to write something using the letter “Q,” the first thing that springs to mind is QUATRAIN. Well, it did for me, anyway. So what IS it, you ask? The shortest answer is that a quatrain (from the French word for four: “quatre”) is a four-line stanza of poetry. It can be a stand-alone poem of only four lines, or can be a four-line stanza within a longer poem.
As a dramatic device, a quatrain not only aids in the memorization of a poem, it also helps give structure, form and rhythm to it. The quatrain organizes the poem, much like paragraphs in an essay help organize a page. By creating some white space, the words become less overwhelming and more accessible to the reader. Additionally, the stanzas as well as the rhyme scheme and meter help propel the reader audibly forward through the poem, navigating to its conclusion.
In formal poetry, the rhyme scheme and meter help define the specific type of quatrain. Historically different types of quatrains have been used for specific purposes and are found in literary traditions from cultures around the world. There are many different variations, but according to Literary Devices some include:
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Ballad Stanza – rhyme scheme is ABAB with iambic tetrameter
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Envelope Stanza – rhyme scheme is ABBA with iambic tetrameter
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Goethe Stanza – rhyme scheme is ABAB but no meter
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Italian Quatrain – rhyme scheme is ABBA with iambic pentameter
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Hymnal Quatrain – rhyme scheme is A4 B3 C4 B3; multi-stanza contains three alternating rhymes with iambic trimester and iambic tetrameter
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Decasyllabic Quatrain – rhyme scheme is AABB or ABAB; if written in iambic pentameter, qualifies as Heroic or Elegiac Stanza
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Memoriam Stanza – rhyme scheme is ABBA with iambic tetrameter
Let’s take a brief but close look at the Heroic Stanza or Elegiac Stanza. An elegiac poem is one that is sad, somber and generally about death, and traditionally follows this format through the stages of loss: lamentation, praise/admiration, consolation. A famous example is “Elegy Written in Country Courtyard” by Thomas Gray:
“The tolls curfew the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea
The plowman plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”
Another example is William Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont.” Not only is this an elegy, it is also an ekphrastic poem as well. Written in iambic pentameter, each individual stanza has an “ABAB” rhyme scheme, and proceeds through the stages of loss, seeking solace and consolation.
“Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied; for ’tis surely blind.
But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.—
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.”
As a literary device, quatrains have a long history; the cultural variations are worth exploring further. For a deeper dive into quatrains, especially those from world literature, check out these more extensive descriptions and type examples.
Heidi St. Jean received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing/Poetry from Fairfield University, where she was selected as the recipient of its 2013 Academic Achievement Award for the M.F.A. program. She was poetry editor of Theodate, an online ekphrastic poetry journal. She also previously worked as managing editor for the literary journal Drunken Boat, and was one of two poetry editors for Mason’s Road. Her poetry and essays have published in Spry; Rock & Sling; Afterimage: Inklight; The Lyon Review; The Barefoot Review; Long River Run; Mason’s Road and Theodate, among others. Her ekphrastic poem, “The Lawrence Tree,” was selected as Third Prize winner in the 2013 Al Savard Memorial Poetry Contest, sponsored by the Connecticut Poetry Society. (The judge was Russell Strauss, past president of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.) Her poem, “Surrealistic Dream of the Synesthete,” won Honorable Mention in the Maine Media Workshop and College contest, displaying in Maine Media Gallery’s “Dreams” exhibit during Spring 2014. Her media criticism/op-ed piece, “Dickinson Film More Fiction Than Fact” was written after a private screening of “A Quiet Passion,” the Terence Davies’ film, and was published in June 2016 in the Hampshire Gazette. In 2017, thirty of her poems appeared in the June issue of Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project, and her ekphrastic poem “Bobolink Song, En Plein Air” displayed as part of “ekphrasis v” with the exhibition “Michael Gallagher — Sketching the Landscape: A Plein Air Journal” in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries/Fairfield Museum of Art. In 2019, her poem “Igneous Dreams” appeared in the “Ekphrasis III” exhibit in Fairfield, CT. She is currently seeking publication for her latest manuscript. She works professionally as a creative strategist, writer and editor.
ABCs of Poetry: P is for Puzzle
Reading poetry sometimes involves a degree of puzzlement. How are we to make sense of the abstractions and ambiguities of figurative language? How are we to comprehend the ways in which the sounds and rhythms of a poem create emotion beyond the words themselves? When one image is placed next to another in a surprising way, how are we to move past that delightful shock into understanding and even revelation?
Writing poetry, however, does not always involve the same kind of puzzlement that reading does. As we write, we usually come to a clearer and clearer understanding about what and how we hope to communicate. Instead of being puzzling, writing a poem, becomes a puzzle: the challenging, sometimes frustrating, often highly pleasurable process of fitting the parts of the poem together so that all of the poet’s tools (language, sound, rhythm, trope, form) work together to create a meaningful, though perhaps at times puzzling, experience for the reader.
Puzzles and the Pleasure of Revision
Helen Vendler once famously said of the Roman poet Horace that he “made every word count.” In fact, the best poems make everything count. Ideally a finished poem, like a finished puzzle, is unified and elegant: each word is in place; every line contributes to the poem’s total meaning; and every image, trope, and sound device works in the service of the whole.
Nevertheless, the process of revising a poem and the trial and error that leads to the finished piece is rarely straightforward, elegant or easy. Since each part of a poem interlocks with and affects every other, if a poet adds, drops or shifts something during the writing process, the entire poem will need to be re-examined in light of what we have just revised. Imagine a fantastic puzzle in which the pieces themselves seem to change shape, grow legs, hair, and begin to stoop just when you thought they might be captured and defined!
Puzzling Yourself: Writing with Constraints
Sometimes, even if we begin a poem with a good idea about what we want to say, it’s hard to know exactly how to go about saying it. To give our writing form and to make writing more fun and/or challenging, it can be useful to set the terms of a poetic puzzle by defining in advance the rules for how the poem should look, sound, and/or be presented on the page. These constraints could include the challenges of writing in a fixed rhyme and meter or in the form of a sonnet, ballad, or villanelle, but a poet can also devise constraints, or puzzles, for writing that offer a wide variety of options for poetic playfulness.
The French Oulipo group (a name that stands for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or “workshop of potential literature”) worked within a variety of whimsical constraints including writing entire novels without the use of the letter “e” and writing in palindrome. However, less radical constraints might take the form of limiting the number of syllables in a line or requiring the poem to use a certain trope, image pattern, or type of language. Other self-imposed constraints could include deciding in advance to include, say, an insect, a hairnet and a reference to a television program, to make use of dialogue, a pattern of internal rhyme, or to repeat the same word once, or ten times, in every stanza.
The result of puzzling a poem within the confines of constraints is often surprising since the restrictions work against our instincts, forcing us, in an effort to complete the puzzle we have set for ourselves, to reach beyond the easy word or well-trodden image. In this way constraints can inspire a poet to incorporate new ideas and innovative forms of expression. Like the tension between nature and nurture, a constrained poem is shaped not just by the poet, but by the structural “DNA” of the poem itself, so that the very puzzle of the poem becomes a poet when the poet becomes a puzzler.
Abra Bertman lives in Amsterdam where she teaches English literature at the International School of Amsterdam. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Citron Review, Rust + Moth, and Slipstream Poetry Magazine, among others. Abra was nominated for the Best of the Net in 2016. Her poem “When the World Comes Home,” a collaboration with jazz pianist Franz Von Chossy, appears in the liner notes of the CD of the same name.
ABCs of Poetry: O is for Ode
Poems can accomplish many things: self-reflection, repentance, emotional evocation, observation, lamentation, and beyond. One of the most common things people think of when they think of poetry is love—and what a true, opportune correlation that is. Poetry is a perfect vessel to express love, adoration, and appreciation. While love can be conveyed with nearly any poetic form, odes are traditionally used as a means to celebrate the subject of the poem.
Think of an ode as a chant or a song (as derived from the Greek word aeideina). Odes are lyrical in style and can rhyme or not. There are three types of odes: Pindar Ode, Horatian Ode, and Irregular Ode. While understanding these three types can help appreciate odes, it isn’t necessary in order to start writing one. Odes can be written systematically with formal patterns, or they can be more relaxed and intimate. In odes today, what takes precedence is the thematic content rather than the structure.
Odes do not have to written about love of people (while they certainly can be)—in fact, odes most often express love for ideas and inanimate objects. For example, in the famous poem “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”, William Wordsworth writes primarily about youth (the contents of odes tend to reveal themselves within their title). Within its eleven stanzas, this ode dotes on the sensations of experience and life through a child’s eyes, such as meadows, groves, and streams.
Odes can also embrace common, everyday things. In his poem “Ode to Kool-Aid”, Marcus Jackson reminisces on the simple pleasures of a delicious beverage while also invoking memories of people: “In ninth grade, Sandra / employed a jug of Black Cherry / to dye her straightened / bangs burgundy.” In this way Jackson finds something that most people can relate to and transcends to personal and cultural levels.
The poem “Short Ode to Screwball Women” by Rachel Wetzsteon highlights womanhood during times of stress. Wetzsteon writes about times “when your wayward husband /
courted the heiress, you stormed her gates / disguised as a floozy” but redeems such struggles in the last stanza with “But a girl can dream, can realize, high / on heroines, that she is mortal / and therefore fearless”.
Odes can also be self-reflexive. Sharon Olds, who wrote many odes, countered Elvie Shockley’s “Ode to My Blackness” with her own “Ode to My Whiteness”. Shockley writes of her blackness: “you are my shelter from the storm / and the storm / my anchor / and the troubled sea” to which Olds responds of her whiteness, “You were invisible to me, / you went without saying. / You were my weapon, secret from myself.”
When writing an ode, consider keeping the subject as specific as possible. The more idiosyncratic or concrete the subject, the more detail the poet will be able convey. An easy way to begin an ode (once the subject is selected) is to write directly to the subject; if it sounds like the speaker of the poem is communicating to the subject, praise will be evoked efficiently.
Odes are perfect for celebrating beloved things, whether it is a favorite drink, matters of the self, or idealistic concepts. Think about something you can’t live without, something you adore, something you’re thankful for. Write an ode to this thing and you will be surprised about how much you have to say. This exercise may also lead to other themes you want to pursue in your writing, and will also make you feel good inside for cherishing the this beloved thing with words.
Nathan Elias is the author of the chapbooks A Myriad of Roads That Lead to Here: A Novelette and Glass City Blues: Poems. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Antioch University Los Angeles, and he has served as editor on the literary journal Lunch Ticket. His work has appeared in Entropy, PANK, Hobart, Barnstorm, and elsewhere. His films and screenplays have been official selections or finalists in festivals such as Cannes Court Métrage, Glass City Film Festival, Canadian Film Centre, Texas Independent Film Festival, and both Hollywood and New York Screenplay Contests. He has taught a variety of creative writing classes, including fiction, poetry, and screenwriting. Find him on his website or @_NathanElias