[Katy Evans-Bush]

Hi guys,

Well, what I saw in Alicia's example was that the enjambment did exactly what Kevin said: it takes that word "they" for a running start and then gallops off into the next stanza completely.

But there is a lot of tired practice, where people just adopt this "sophisticated and exciting" (I agree) practice without knowing why, or how to use it well. You do get loads of these poems where people have written something and then, seemingly, chopped it into random sections resembling quatrains. It just ends up looking as if they don;t know what they're doing. Why adopt a form and then work against it? (I'm talking here not about Auden and Larkin and people like that; I'm talking workshop members of the world.)

(It's like, especially when peopl ewerite free verse, they write these line breaks, and then in a reading they read against them completely - this happens all the time - then when you do see their poetry written down, it looks completely different to how they spoke it! So WHY did they write it like that?)

Doesn't "stanza" mean "room"? Isn't it a concept originally from the Memory Palaces (or whatever they were called!) of the Renaissance, mnemonic devices in which the person arranged information round a sort of mental mansion? So one stanza, or room, is one lot that goes together.

That's how I understand it, anyway.

I think that's WHY it's exciting when someone jumps over the hurdle. Of the partition wall. Or something.

Brodsky of course was the King of Enjambment. He took it to new levels and if I get a chance tomorrow I'll look some out.

K

[This message has been edited by Katy Evans-Bush (edited March 12, 2005).]

[VictoriaGaile]

(It's like, especially when peopl ewerite free verse, they write these line breaks, and then in a reading they read against them completely - this happens all the time - then when you do see their poetry written down, it looks completely different to how they spoke it! So WHY did they write it like that?)



Sometimes poets choose to treat the written form of the poem and its visual presentation as an extra "channel" of information, using the line ends for significant words; arranging lines so that words in adjacent lines are interestingly juxtaposed, suggesting an additional image or thought, or adding additional emphasis; or using a linebreak to isolate an image that they want to draw particular attention to; or to suggest an alternative meaning that applies only to the isolated line, but not to the fuller phrase.

In many cases, I don't think the problem there lies in the writing, but in the reading. Why did they READ it like that? Their audience (!) then misses all the careful craft they put into the creation of the lines.

For instance, here's a poem by Denise Levertov that does many of these things. I've italicised bits that I've noticed:


The Metier of Blossoming

Fully occupied with growing--that's
the amaryllis. Growing especially
at night: it would take
only a bit more patience than I've got
to sit keeping watch with it till daylight;
the naked eye could register every hour's
increase in height. Like a child against a barn door,
proudly topping each year's achievement,
steadily up
goes each green stem, smooth, matte,
traces of reddish purple at the base, and almost
imperceptible vertical ridges
running the length of them:
Two robust stems from each bulb,
sometimes with sturdy leaves for company,
elegant sweeps of blade with rounded points.
Aloft, the gravid buds, shiny with fullness.

One morning--and so soon!--the first flower
has opened when you wake. Or you catch it poised
in a single, brief
moment of hesitation.
Next day, another,
shy at first like a foal,
even a third, a fourth,
carried triumphantly at the summit
of those strong columns, and each
a Juno, calm in brilliance,
a maiden giantess in modest splendor.
If humans could be
that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,
swift from sheer
unswerving impetus! If we could blossom
out of ourselves, giving
nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!



I notice it particularly in these last three lines:
If we could blossom - there's a coherent image

out of ourselves, giving - now she's changed the image: blossom by coming out of ourselves, by giving

nothing imperfect, withholding nothing! - she's changed it yet again: not just by giving, but by giving nothing imperfect. Furthermore, by isolating this last line, she emphasizes the idea. The envelope with "nothing" emphasizes it further.

I find this poem ends with *much* more of a bang than if it were broken the way the phrases might naturally break:

If we could blossom out of ourselves,
giving nothing imperfect,
withholding nothing.

[Tim Murphy]

I've not read this entire thread, but Kevin's explication is excellent. Further food for thought are the excellent materials on stanza in Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form and In Tim Steele's All The Fun's In How You Say A Thing. For flawless examples of interstanzaic enjambment study Wilbur's Hamlen Brook where he weaves a sentence of say 17 lines across quatrains and justifies each stanza break by the shifting imagery.

[Roy Carr]

Hamlen Brook

Richard Wilbur


At the alder-darkened brink
Where the stream slows to a lucid jet
I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat,
And see, before I can drink,

A startled inchling trout
Of spotted near-transparency,
Trawling a shadow solider than he.
He swerves now, darting out

To where, in a flicked slew
Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves
Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,
And butts them out of view

Beneath a sliding glass
Crazed by the skimming of a brace
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,
In which deep cloudlets pass

And a white precipice
Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.
How shall I drink all this?

Joy's trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.

[This message has been edited by Roy Carr (edited March 13, 2005).]

[A. E. Stallings]

It's true that this is something that can be well and poorly done--it isn't always sophisticated and exciting, as Katy points out. And yes, there is a lot of free verse out there that seems to adopt tercets or quatrains quite randomly--they look nice, I guess.

And I'd agree that to work it does have to work against the expectation of stanza as a discrete room--a sudden corridor opening up, perhaps. It is especially true of rimed stanzas, I think, where the aural closure works against the opening of syntax. What I love about the Larkin is how the sentence closes (or almost closes with that semi-colon) and the "they" starts a new sentence in the very last syllable of the line.

Also a wonderful enjambment in the Wilbur with that "out".

It strikes me that this is really a syntax issue in some ways. Syntax certainly strikes me as one of those engines that really move a poem, precisely because it can cross borders of lines and stanzas.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Alicia, you're probably right; syntax driving the whole structure of a poem will drive, to some extent, the stanza breaks too. I love that image of a corridor.

Katy

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

I think one of the good uses of enjambment across stanzas is to convey sudden movement, as Larkin does with the horse slipping its lead, Wilbur with the sudden darting of the trout, or as Dickinson does with the sudden movement of the snake:

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,--
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.


Dickinson's enjambment isn't as extreme as Larkin's or Wilbur's, but while all of the stanzas save S3 end in a very natural end stop, the larger thought of S3-S4 needs basically two connected rooms, as Katy pointed out, and running the sentence across the stanza break gives it a "whip-lash" as Dickinson mentions next, the movement of of a snake suddenly darting.

My general thought is to keep all the stanzas as separate rooms unless you have a good reason to kick out a wall. Larkin, Wilbur and Dickinson all had good reasons, and it adds to the poems. However, randomly arranging text until it looks aesthetically pleasing until you actually try to read it is one of the classic evils of typesetting. I have a friend who's regular prose article was printed by the magazine designer in a five by five grid of twenty-five separate text boxes--visually, the page looked gorgeous; actually trying to read the text was a nightmare.

If doing something like that will ruin prose, it will certainly ruin poetry. Besides which, there are already some tried and true typesetting conventions that can add a little visual interest to a poem without detracting from its readablity. One of the oldest is simply chaining stanzas down a page, like this:

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,--
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

Another, which I noted going through my copy of The Ingoldsby legends, is to split any lines with Leonine rimes in the middle of a long narrative into two lines, the first indented one tab, the next two, so there's a little extra bounce to emphasize the rimes, as well as a visually pleasing break in a long passage of text. I'm not certain if that was the poet's idea or the publisher's, but it reads just about the same and certainly does look prettier.

[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited March 13, 2005).]

[Roy Carr]

I like it when we get to syntax. I believe that all poets sooner or later recognize syntax as one of the true friends or enemies:

How much do I have left of the loyalty to earth

Galway Kinnell


How much do I have left of the loyalty to earth,
which human shame, and dislike of our own lives,
and others' deaths that take part of us with them,
when we find out how we die: clinging and pleading,
or secretly relieved that it is all over,
or despising ourselves, knowing that death

is a punishment we deserve, or like an old dog,
off his feed, who suddenly is ravenous,
and eats the bowl clean, and the next day is a carcass.
There is an unfillableness in us--in some of us,
a longing for that blue-shaded black night
where the beloved dead, and all those others

who suffered and sang and were not defeated--
the one who hushed them by singing "Going Home"
when they lynched him on Bald Mountain,
the klezmer violinists who pressed bows
across strings until eyes, by near-starvation
enlarged, grew wet and sparkled--have gone.

Yet I know more than ever that here is the true place,
here where we sit together, out of the wind,
with a loaf of country bread, and tomatoes still warm
from the distant sun, and wine in glasses that are,
one for each of us, the upper bell of the glass
that will hold the last hour we have to live.


One could easily have done this:

How much do I have left of the loyalty to earth,
which human shame, and dislike of our own lives,
and others' deaths that take part of us with them,
wear out of us, as we go toward that moment
when we find out how we die: clinging and pleading,
or secretly relieved that it is all over,
or despising ourselves, knowing that death
is a punishment we deserve, or like an old dog,
off his feed, who suddenly is ravenous,
and eats the bowl clean, and the next day is a carcass.

There is an unfillableness in us--in some of us,
a longing for that blue-shaded black night
where the beloved dead, and all those others
who suffered and sang and were not defeated--
the one who hushed them by singing "Going Home"
when they lynched him on Bald Mountain,
the klezmer violinists who pressed bows
across strings until eyes, by near-starvation
enlarged, grew wet and sparkled--have gone.

Yet I know more than ever that here is the true place,
here where we sit together, out of the wind,
with a loaf of country bread, and tomatoes still warm
from the distant sun, and wine in glasses that are,
one for each of us, the upper bell of the glass
that will hold the last hour we have to live.


I did not realize it at the time I first read this, but a wineglass only truly becomes a bell the emptier it gets.

I am just a newcomer, but if I had some authority or clout, I would require each one of you to tell me how this poem should be cut. Of course the answer is how GK intended it to be cut. And years from now his disciples may be arguing how "right" was the way he chose to cut it. But for those of us in the fall or winter of life know, it doesn't matter how this poem was cut. The "conceit" will stand as a softly spoken monologue or dialogue, poet to poet or poet to everyman or everywoman.
For those who are not familiar with the original format of the poem, I will tell you if you will guess without trickery (ie, without already knowing the answer).

Roy

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Roy,

Challenging folk to play your games is tiresome. But were GK to have posted the two versions for comment, I'd vote for the second, and I suspect that the second was the one he settled for as well, as it fits with the sense of his words. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

However, claiming a shared wisdom for any stage of life, and moreover, speaking for all of your generation, is, respectively, incorrect and presumptuous. There will always be folk, of any generation, who either failed to get the memo, or else did and respectfully disagree, and moreover will get ticked off if others presume to speak for them. Or at least I know that this is the case with myself whenever anyone presumes to speak for me by dint of a shared birthday.

I do agree that the right choice is always the author's choice, but there are sometimes editorial decisions that take place after the fact. For example, with Dickinson's "The Snake" above, in Dickinson's original manuscript, where the standard textbook version today is "child," she had chosen the word "boy."

I prefer Dickinson's original, both because of the better music of "boy and barefoot" than "child and barefoot" and because it makes it clearer of her writing in persona, rather than the automatic assumption of all poetry being autobiography. However, I'm certain that the editor -- aside from changing her funky, nonstandard punctuation that might weird out some readers -- knew that there would be all sorts of people who would be freaked out by the gender-bending of a woman writing from a male perspective (these people exist even today) and it might be easier for more folk to identify with (and not cause gender-perspective discussions) the universal unisex word "child" instead.

There's also a matter of editors doing the "pee on it so it smells like them" maneuver and authors choosing to live with this because they'd rather have something published with trivial changes than sitting in a drawer unsold exactly as they conceived of it. If the poem by GK was published in the first version, I strongly suspect that those stanza breaks were the work of some tin-eared copy editor or layout designer.

I know I've certainly had that sort of copyeditor muck with pages of my fiction.

[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited March 13, 2005).]

[Roy Carr]

Kevin, with all earned respect, who we choose to speak for us as part of our generation is a matter of individual, personal, not necessarily group taste. Robert Frost was chosen to speak at Kennedy's inauguration because he spoke for a lot of people of his, and the younger, generation.
All of us want to feel that there are some key individuals, not all individuals, who feel the same as we do. It is just as peremptory for you to say that no one agrees with me as for me to say that I "speak for the others with a common birthday." Birthday does not have near the impact that shared experience or parallel experience does. No two people have the same experiences across the board, but threads of unity exist. Galway Kinnell speaks for many of us nearer his age than yours, in some of his poems, not all of them. And yes I am sure a lot of people will get ticked off in disagreement with me, but if I let that bother me I would have stopped any input into these forums weeks ago.

As far as the Dickinson poem goes, I read that dramatically to my grandson's and change to a cold hissing tone of voice when I get to the last stanza, and that I believe, in deference to your original claims, could be considered "a sense break."


[This message has been edited by Roy Carr (edited March 13, 2005).]