Poetry was the unit I most regretted compressing. Three Sundays for the form that holds the whole language. What follows is each session expanded — the poems and the poets at length, the movements they belonged to, the questions I posed and the answers I would have given had we more time.
Bishop · Frost · Williams · Oliver
The two great units of the poem are the image — a piece of the world rendered so precisely that the reader can stand in front of it — and the line — the measured length of speech that gives the image its weight. Most other elements of poetry are arrangements of these two. In this session we read four poems that teach us, between them, almost everything an apprentice needs to know about both.
The poem is a villanelle, a strict French form: nineteen lines, five tercets and a quatrain, two refrains — “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” and “(Write it!) like disaster” — repeating in alternation through the poem and joining at the close. Bishop chose the most artificial form she could find to talk about the most personal loss of her life: her lover. The form is the wall the feeling has to find a way through. The escalation is mathematical: “the door key,” “the hour badly spent,” “my mother’s watch,” “three loved houses,” “two cities,” “two rivers, a continent,” and finally — at the breaking point — “you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love).” The poem’s great moment is the parenthesis in the final line: “(Write it!).” The poet has to command herself, on the page, to say what the poem has been refusing to say.
That form is not decoration; it is structural restraint. That a poem about grief is more powerful when grief is the thing the poem refuses to admit. That the most ordinary words — keys, watches, houses — are the materials of the largest poems.
“Birches” is fifty-nine lines of blank verse — iambic pentameter, unrhymed. It begins as a meditation on bent birch trees and slowly admits that the speaker has been telling himself, for forty lines, a story he prefers (boys playing on them) to the true story (ice storms bent them). Then, with the great pivot — “So was I once myself a swing of birches. / And so I dream of going back to be.” — the poem opens onto its real subject, which is the speaker’s wish, in middle age, to leave the world a little and come back to it again, refreshed. The famous last lines are the great American negotiation between the wish for transcendence and the love of the earth that pulls us home.
That blank verse is the closest a poem comes to ordinary speech without being ordinary speech. That a poem can lie to itself for forty lines before telling the truth, and the lying is part of the truth. That an image — a boy climbing a birch — can carry a metaphysics.
Sixteen words. Four stanzas of two lines. “so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens.” The poem is a single sentence broken into eight units. Each break is a deliberate slowing of perception. So much depends — on what? Upon — pause to let the verb register. A red wheel — color before object. Barrow — and now the object completes. Williams forces us to look the way a child looks — by parts, by surface, by surprise. The poem is the demonstration of the credo.
That the line break is the poem’s smallest and most powerful instrument. That a poem may name no abstraction and contain the whole world.
Eighteen lines on a grasshopper that has just landed in the poet’s hand. The opening — “Who made the world? / Who made the swan, and the black bear?” — is theological. The middle is microscopic: the grasshopper eats sugar from her hand, washes her face “thoroughly” with her front feet, opens her wings and floats away. The end is the famous interrogation: “Tell me, what else should I have done? / Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? / Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” The poem proceeds from the largest question to the smallest creature to the question the poem has been moving toward all along, which is addressed to you.
That close attention to a small living thing is a religious act. That a poem may end with a direct question to the reader, and that the question may change them. That accessibility is not a literary sin.
Behind these four poets stands a single conversation about the American line. Frost keeps the iambic pentameter and uses it for conversational rural speech. Williams breaks the line into the rhythms of the speaking voice and refuses meter altogether. Bishop accepts both inheritances. Oliver inherits the free verse line from Williams and Whitman and turns it toward direct address and the natural world. This is not a tidy lineage; it is a quarrel that lasted a century, and these four poems are four of its most readable battlegrounds.
Heaney · Kenyon · Clifton
Voice is the part of a poem that, if a friend read three lines of it aloud to you across a room, you would know who wrote it. Voice is not subject; voice is not style; voice is the meeting of a particular language and a particular life. The lyric “I” is the speaker who lives in the poem — sometimes the poet, sometimes a mask the poet wears.
The poem is twenty-nine lines, in three voices: the speaker at his window with a pen, his father digging potatoes outside, and his grandfather cutting turf on a bog twenty years before. The pen is “snug as a gun” in the second line — a line written in Northern Ireland in 1966, three years before the Troubles broke open, and it is impossible not to hear the gun. The poem returns to the window: “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. / Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” The pen is reclaimed; the gun-image is laid down; the inheritance of the father’s and grandfather’s craft is transferred to the son’s craft.
That voice is rooted in the soil of a particular place. That the first poem in a first book can announce the project of a life. That craft is inheritance.
“Otherwise” is twenty-six lines, almost all of them beginning with “I.” “I got out of bed / on two strong legs. / It might have been / otherwise.” Then breakfast, then a walk with the dog, then work, then dinner with “my mate,” then bed. And finally: “But one day, I know, / it will be otherwise.” The poem is a list of ordinary blessings, said by a woman who has been ill enough to count them, ending on the small word otherwise which carries the whole weight of her mortality. It was written in the year of her diagnosis. She knew.
That a poem can be made of plain sentences in plain order. That repetition can become a prayer. That a single shift in the last line can change the meaning of every line before it. That gratitude is a literary subject.
Fourteen lines, no capitals, almost no punctuation. “won’t you celebrate with me / what i have shaped into / a kind of life? i had no model. / born in babylon / both nonwhite and woman / what did i see to be except myself? / i made it up / here on this bridge between / starshine and clay, / my one hand holding tight / my other hand; come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” The poem is a sonnet by way of Black gospel: an invitation, a self-historical sketch, a self-mythologizing image, and a closing turn — the volta — that lands with the force of a verdict.
That the lyric “I” can be a political instrument. That the poet may make herself up out of nothing — “i had no model” — and that the poem is the record of that making. That a sonnet need not look like a sonnet to be one. That survival is enough subject matter for any poem.
Williams · Oliver · Clifton (revisited)
We returned, in our last poetry session, to three of the poems we had read before — but this time to ask a different question. Not what is in this poem? but what is left out, and how does the poem hold the missing world inside its few lines? Compression is the secret art of poetry. A poem of sixteen words may carry what a novel of three hundred pages cannot.
There is no farmer. There is no house, no field, no fence, no weather beyond the rain. There is no judgment — Williams does not tell us the wheelbarrow is beautiful, or important, or sad. He says only that so much depends upon it and then lets us imagine, for the rest of our lives, what. The poem is sixteen words and a vast cone of inference.
There is no biography of the grasshopper, no Latin name, no entomology. There is no other human in the poem. There is only the speaker, the field, the insect, and at the end, you. The poem holds an entire ethic in eighteen lines because it has stripped away everything that is not the ethic.
There is no narrative of the things that tried to kill the speaker. No list of injuries, no names of oppressors. The poem is a sonnet of unspecified survival. The compression is the point: the “something” that has tried to kill her every day stands in for everything — racism, sexism, illness, grief, history. The unspecified is universal.
Poetry survives in a culture that has lost the patience to read because a poem demands so little time and gives so much. A page of Chekhov takes five minutes; a page of Clifton takes twenty seconds and stays with the reader for a year. Compression is what makes poetry strong against forgetting.
Prompt: Write a poem of no more than twelve lines about a person you loved and lost. The poem may not name them, may not name the loss, and may use no abstract noun (love, grief, loneliness, time). Use only objects.
Her cardigan still on the back
of the kitchen chair.
Sleeves crossed at the wrists.
On the table the cup,
the spoon in it,
the spoon’s shadow.
The kettle, cold.
Outside, the snow
beginning, then settling
into what comes next.
I have not moved the cardigan.
I do not know that I will.