Why Your Poetry Fails - Part IV

While the rest of the world continues to prefer metrical, rhyming narratives editors, judges and academics adore comparisons: analogies, juxtapositions, symbolism, contrasts, similes and metaphors. Especially metaphors. Metaphors are like honey-glazed catnip to these people. Indeed, the reason analogy plays such a small role in poetry is that similes and metaphors do the same thing more succinctly.

The bad news, then, is that if you're going to impress judges or editors you will have to come up with scintillating, original metaphors.

The good news is that this requires remarkably little effort.

Hold this thought for a moment:  "Once you know the answers the questions are simple."

Similes:

A simile says that something is similar to something else. Typically, the word "like" or "as" is employed. Suppose you want to describe a setting as being in a particular hemisphere during extremely troubling, portentous times. Think of something disturbing. What could be more so than a sick baby? How does one make it clear the action takes place south of the equator? By having September be spring, not fall. Put this together and you have:

"September came like winter's ailing child."

Now suppose you want to describe a situation where the police and armed forces form a tight conspiracy against their government because it has nationalized the copper mines. Nothing could be more obvious than:

"As close as coppers..."

Metaphors:

Metaphors are more hyperbolic than similes, stating directly or indirectly that one thing is something else. Think of how a child might revere his grandmother and consider her current location to be the family home, much like the famous song "Papa was a Rollin' Stone. Wherever he laid his hat was his home."  Think of someone who is worshipped and something that carries its abode around with it and, voilà!, you have:

"Of course, you are a turtle god."

Now suppose the fix is in for a physician. It takes little imagination to come up with a "verb modification" like:

"...every doctored moment lied."

There's nothing new here. About 3000 years ago Homer (not Simpson) sat down, wondered how to describe the intoxicating, addicting, mysterious effect of the port-colored ocean and effortlessly produced the greatest "noun-modification" metaphor of all time:

"...the wine-dark sea."

As poets on Usenet used to say:   "Hey, this poetry shit is easy!"

Actually, these comparisons are not poetry techniques. They are logical constructs found in any explanatory text (e.g. "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawkings uses many of them).

Symbolism:

There are two myths about symbolism that need to be dispelled:

1. Symbolism is common, if not downright ubiquitous.
   
   We get this impression from our English teachers constantly asking us: "What does this poem mean?" (In my perfect world posing this question would, itself, be a fireable offense.)
   
   In fact, symbolism is comparatively rare in English poetry. This is because English is an "open", Borg-like language that uses a myriad of synonyms rather than cross-referencing its terms through iconic metaphors. By contrast, Japanese developed in an isolated environment where most significant terms would be associated with colors (think "green with envy" here), animals (e.g. "sly fox"), seasons ("our autumn years") or other common noumena or phenomena. (This, incidentally, is a key reason why haiku and haibun do not work as well for anglophones as for native Japanese. Our poetry isn't symbolic because our language isn't.)
    
2. Symbols should be undefined.
   
   "Undefined symbols" is interchangeable with "meaningless and pointless distraction". Very few poets today inspire enough readership trust for amphigouri. Do they really think we have nothing better to do than sit around like sophomoric stoners and guess at what they're writing about?
   
   Symbolism is far more common in repressive societies. For example, if Soviet era samizdat readers didn't know which animal character corresponded to which hated official the whole process would become pointless.

Connections:

Many of the tricks we've discussed in this series so far are subtle: diaeresis, palindromics, curginas, corata, et cetera. Some of the crudest and laziest approaches, though, can be the most effective.

Juxtapositions:



     Poetry being a no-frills form of communication, the mere mention of any two items, individuals or events or of the same expression twice (why not use synonyms?) invites the audience to compare the pair. Haiku is built on such juxtapositions. Until we see that "Beans" is an acrostic, at least, we wonder what the relationship is between yellow beans in the second stanza and the central figure in the first.

Anaphora:

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #38

     Allen Ginsberg's famous prose poem "Howl" relies almost entirely on anaphora: the repetition of words like "who...", names like "Moloch..." or phrases like "I'm with you in Rockland..." at the beginning of many lines. In poetry or rhetoric, anaphora can be an excellent way to built tension from one iteration to the next.

     If done judiciously, anaphora can have both a chanting and enchanting effect.



Anadiplosis:

Everyone is familiar with "The Skeleton Song", including many who wish they weren't.



Anadiplosis is a fancy term for using an expression from the ending of one sentence to begin the next. It can be a very effective, economical way to create links in a narrative chain.

Your face was always saddest when you smiled.
You smiled as every doctored moment lied.
You lie with orphans parents, long reviled.

The Dreaded List Poem:

When a poetry fan wakes up in a cold sweat chances are good that they were having a nightmare about the "list" poem that put them to sleep in the first place. These itemizations rarely work--especially on the page--unless their particulars increase in intensity and/or move the narrative along with subtle differences in the items or presentation. Most often, the details become blurred; the listener's processing center shuts down under Information Overload, such that only the tone, mood and pace survive.

Michael Ondaatje's "Sweet Like a Crow" is a successful list poem. "Remedies for Vertigo" by Walter Bargen is so full of lists that it seems like an encyclopedia of interesting lines, none of them contained in a poem worth reading.¹

Conclusion:

Repetitions of words or phrases at the beginning (anaphora), end (epistrophe) or end and beginning (e.g. anadiplosis or symploce) of sentences, of sentences ("repetends") in whole or part, and even stanzas (choruses) are the stock and trade of the performing poet. They are to slam judges what metaphors are to editors and writing contest judges: catnip.

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Footnotes:

¹ - That said, the chilling story poem, "Flight Lessons", from "Remedies for Vertigo" is worth the price of the book.

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Series Links:

1. Why Your Poetry Fails - Part I - Diaeresis
2. Why Your Poetry Fails - Part II - Brackets
3. Why Your Poetry Fails - Part III - Judges and Editors
4. Why Your Poetry Fails - Part IV - Comparisons and Repetition

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Practical Poetry: Forms, media and venues

     At this point, the student is expected to understand the basics:

• The definition of poetry (i.e. verbatim speech);



• scansion;



• that song lyrics have eclipsed [spoken] poetry in our culture; and,



• that a market for [spoken] poetry will have to be created.

     In this installment we flesh out the student's understanding of technique and discuss how and where an audience for poetry might be built. 

The Elements of Form

     Because it needs to be memorized and reproduced word-for-word, all English language poetry, as opposed to prose or the hybrid, prose poetry, has one thing in common:  mnemonics.  The simplest of these is concision.  It isn't a chore to memorize William C. Williams "The Red Wheelbarrow".  Even epic poems exhibit an economy of language. 

     The longer the piece, the more repetitions the poet uses, including:

1. Choruses
   
        A chorus virtually ensures that we'll recall at least part of a song we hear.



2. Repetends  
   
        Sections of Federico Garcia Lorca's "Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías", arguably the greatest poem of the 20th Century, featured lines like "a las cinco de la tarde" ("at five o'clock in the afternoon") and "¡No quiero verla!" ("I don't want to see it!").  Villanelles and some other forms rely on repetends.  The issue is:  "Why is this person saying the same thing over and over again?"



3. Anaphora and Anadiplosis

     Starting sentences with phrases from the beginning (anaphora) or ending (anadiplosis) of the previous sentence is an effective way of building drama.


4. Sonics
   
        Along with rhythms, the judicious use and melodious repetition of sounds is what distinguishes poetry from prose.  The master of craft employs long (e.g. "shawnee") sounds to slow down the pace, sharper ones (e.g. "pit") to build excitement.  Repetitions include alliteration, consonance, assonance and, most saliently, rhyme (which deserves a discussion of its own).  The general rule for rhyme is this:  the less serious your poem the more perfect and proximate your rhymes should be.
   
        Consider all the repetitions in this uniquely effective advertising jingle:
   
   You'll won|der where | the yel|low went
   when you brush | your teeth | with Pep|sodent!
   
        Note the assonance of "You'll"/"you" and "won"/"brush" in the first foot and in all three syllables of "yellow went"/"Pepsodent", along with the alliteration of "w" sounds throughout.  Together with the iambic tetrameter and the alliterative anacrusis of "when" after "went", it's easy to see why this brainworm survives as the single most brilliant couplet of the 20th Century, if not of all time.  Even those who would dearly love to forget it cannot.  That is what poetry does.  That is what poetry is.  Nothing more, nothing less.  This is a point that every succcessful poet knows and that no failed poet understands.



5. Rhythms
   
       Patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables form feet in verse and rhythm strings in free verse.  After a pattern like "de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-", knowing that the next syllable is probably stressed can help a forgetful reciter.



6. Meter
   
       Meter is the quantification of something, usually either feet (accentual-syllabic) or beats (accentual).  Notice that "The Red Wheelbarrow" has the same number of words (three then one) and beats (two then one) in alternating lines.  Such poems with two or more meters (i.e. accentual dimeter and monometer in this case) are called "heterometrical".  T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" has no less than four meters (trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter and two heptametric lines) but only one rhythm (iambic).

Paradise Has No Colonies

     There are two aspects of a poetic form:  structure and application.  Structure is the more visible:  a villanelle has repetends and rhymes in set places, a sonnet is usually 14 lines of rhyming iambic pentameter, et cetera.  Anyone can invent a new structure but, until it has a "killer application" and is emulated by others, it isn't considered a form.  For example, "Paradise Has No Colonies" (on left) is a "cada línea"*, a structure wherein the whole sounds like a prosey, prosaic story while each line, examined in isolation, addresses a different aspect of that theme.  Until others write successful poems using this format it is not a form**.

     During this process a general purpose develops.  For example, the sonnet usually entails a condition in the octave and then a turn ("volta") toward a resolution in the sestet.  Traditionally, sonnets have tended to pursue romantic motifs but I see no reason why a poet couldn't use the form to expound on, say, politics (i.e. where the condition is dire and the resolution is the writer's proposed political solution).

     The theme of a villanelle rests on the purpose for repeating a line over and over again.  Is the person crazy?  Often, yes, with worry in the case of "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas.  Sometimes an event is being repeated.  In "Holly Would" an old Parisian man remembers his bride doing a striptease:  "another pearl black button comes undone".

      Other forms include the rondeau or rondel, the triolet, limerick, pantoum, ghazal, and sestina.  Coincidentally, the two most famous poems of the 20th Century were both in form--a sonnet and a rondeau--and were written by members of the Canadian armed forces who died scant months later.

     Forms can be combined.  "¡Ni Una Más!" is both a sonnet and a glose.

Media and Venues

     Poetry can be presented in written, oral, audiovisual or multimedia format.  One might think that print and pixel poetry would be similar.

    "Text is text, right?"

      Well, for starters, internet text has many advantages over books and magazines, among them:

• Multimedia
  
       The same poem can be presented as a text, audio, audiovisual or as background to a video.  Just as it is best to watch a Shakespearean play first and then study the script, text usually works best as secondary exposure.  Enjoy first.  Study later.



• Hypertext
  
        One can link the words and phrases not only to references (such that there would be no need for T. S. Eliot's footnotes) but to related videos.



• Graphics
  
       Web sites can employ pictures with far greater ease and far less expense than print publications.  Some of these can be moving GIFs or, of course, videos.

     Even without these extra capabilities, comparing print text to pixel text without embellishments, there is a qualitative and quantitative difference.  The underlying reason for this can be described in one word:  readership.  Magazines that mirror their content on the web soon discover that the same poem by the same poet gets significantly more attention online.  Over time, this creates [gasp!] competition for that attention***.  Eager for any edge, students learn the elements of the craft, which is the raison d'être for this course and blog. 

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Footnotes:

* A "cada frase" would do the same thing, changing subthemes in each phrase.

** It may be worth noting that, without an audience--a testing ground--for poetry, it is difficult to establish new forms.  Structures, yes.  Forms, no.

*** In the current print world competition ends with publication.  Online, the competition begins with publication.

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