ELECTIVE 2: Creative Writing

WEEK 9

Learning Outcomes/Objectives:

a. Analyze a poem based on its structure and poetic styles.

Discussion:

STRUCTURE

The structure of Carver's ‘Sunday Morning', one of the simplest, is that of a list. This next poem by the
Czech poet Miroslav Holub combines ‘list’ with ‘narrative’ in its structure:

The Fly

She sat on a willow-trunk

Watching
Dart of the battle of Crécv.
the shout,
the gasps,
the groans
the tramping and the tumbling

During the fourteenth charge

of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly

from Vadincourt.
She rubbed her legs together
as she sat on a disembowelled horse
meditating
on the immortality of flies.

With relief she alighted

on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.

When silence settled

and only the whisper of decay
softly circled the bodies

and only
a few arms and legs
still twitched jerkily under the trees,

she began to lay her eggs

 ELECTIVE 2: Creative Writing
on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armourer

And it was thus

that she was eaten by a swift
fleeing
from the fires of Estrees.
(Holub, 1990:52)

When referring to ‘In The Waiting Room' and ‘The Fly’ as tree verse, we don’t mean that they are tree
of structure

In free verse (where there are no rhymes or consistent metre), inner structure can completely displace
surface regularity, and for a tree verse poem to succeed, that inner structure needs to be strong and visible. It
definitely is in Holub s The Fy: She sat on a willow-trunk..She mated... She rubbed her legs together. With
relief she alighted... She began to lay her eggs…she was eaten. Once a structure is established you can fit in the
details and make them speak as you wish. The structure might appear to you before you write the poem, making
you want to write it, just as a vague ghostly skeletal suggestion, but more animated, more definitely alive.
Sometimes when we are reading a poem the structure doesn’t seem to be very obvious; you have to search for
it, especially if a poem exhibits a lot of surface regularity, as in the famous poem by W.H. Auden that was
spoken by one of the characters in the film Four Weddings and A Funeral. The following is probably its most
well-known stanza:

From ‘Twelve Songs’

He was my North, my South, my East, my West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song
thought that love would last forever. I was wrong

The last line above has six stresses. The rest have five and so keep the consistency intact. Yet rhythm
and rhyme mark the strongest signifier here of regularity. If we look at this poem from a different angle we can
see that it also has another kind of form that has nothing to do with surface regularity. It begins with a plea-to
stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, and then suggests that the policemen wear black cotton gloves. These
details are not the same thing as dismantling the sun and pouring away the ocean, with which the poem ends.
The poem moves from the small to the vast, away from the local towards the panoramic. To reverse that
sequencing would alter the poem and destroy its emotional power. The sequencing is gradual but relentless, and
we might describe this form as the poem s inner structure or architecture and identify it as a change of
perspective or even a transformation.

So we need to be clear about these two kinds of form: surface patterning and inner patterning or
structure. Why, then, does Auden s poem have both? Given that the inner structure is so obviously the more
powerful, why have regularity? The answer is that the stress patterns and rhyme scheme act as a framework, a
loom-like system into which odd and surprising details (the public doves is a good example) are threaded. The
poem creates a tension between expectation and surprise, and produces its extraordinary effects within the
constant security of the rhyme. It is at once both predictable and unpredictable. The point of using regular form
is to increase the reader's pleasure by combining reassurance with surprise, and thus to produce a heightened
 ELECTIVE 2: Creative Writing
level of attention, or, as the American poet and critic Donald Hall expressed it, this type of form enables the
poet and reader to feel 'the values of sameness against the improvisations of variety

We can easily see how Holub's The Fly' follows a step-by-step narrative structure. Each encounter in the
story is rendered stanza by stanza. Susan Burns' s poem shows a single main encounter followed by potential
minor ones, and the stanza lengths have co-operated with this major-minor element to produce effectively one
stanza surrounded by others less substantially developed, Olds s The Hand even though it refers to different
episodes, is a single, unbroken act of thought Its single extended stanza form is appropriate for following
through to completion that process of thinking and remembering.

FREE VERSE COMPACT TREATMENT

The full text of Bishop’s poem In the Waiting Room describes an encounter. What happens when things
meet is still the question. The poet, within the poem and its autobiographical setting needs time to reach her
conclusions. The voice of considered careful exploration, therefore, leads towards the more open or extended
treatment we find in Sharon Olds. But free verse can also be tightly arranged, formally exact, emphasising8
mage rather than voice. The two poems below by Norman MacCaig combine a degree of formality-a clear
visible shape-with a sense of the poet’s speaking voice:

February-Not Everywhere

Such days, when trees run downwind,

their arms stretched before them.

Such days, when the sun s in a drawer

and the drawer locked.

When the meadow is dead, is a carpet,

thin and shabby, with no pattern.

and at bus stops people retract into collars

their faces like fists.

-And when, in a firelit room, mother looks

at her four seasons, at her little boy,

in the centre of everything, with still pools

of shadows and a fire throwing flowers.
(MacCaig, 1988:47)

This poem is constructed from oppositions; the simple structure is stocked by brief details that are listed
as opposites. One set of opposites doesn't replace the other; they coexist. But of course one has to come first, so
that we do not experience this coexistence until the end. We are left with it; something was held in reserve. In
 ELECTIVE 2: Creative Writing
their small space, the contrast injects vitality-cold to heat, unpleasant to pleasant. Imagine the sets placed in
reverse order, beginning with:

Such days, when in a fireli room, mother looks

at her four seasons, at her little boy.

in the centre of everything, with still pools

of shadows and a fire throwing flowers.

-And when trees un downwind,

their arms stretched before them.

Such days, when the sun's in a drawer

and the drawer locked,

and at bus stops people retract into collars

their faces like fists.

When the meadow is dead, is a carpet,

thin and shabby, with no patter.
(MacCaig. 1988:38)

The poem’s meaning is in its vitality, and depends not just on contrasts but on the relevance position of
the scenes. In this version, the positive tone of the poem is lost completely. Which two-line stanza would make
the most chilling ending?

POETIC STYLE

- Metaphor

Metaphors are used in everyday speech. They find their way into common use even in more formal
situations. Couples in therapy with relationship problems might be attempting to "build bridges..to embark on a
journey of conciliation’. In such situations, exactness of expression is not essential; the context permits a margin
of inaccuracy. If I say that common speech harbours dead metaphors, the word 'harbour in this sentence is dead
metaphor applied to a dead metaphor. We need to be careful-especially when the context is a poem. Good style
brings poems and comparisons to life. Faces don t just look miserable and cold; they are like fists. In a recent
poem by Simon Armitage, a coffee house waitress in an off-duty moment 'gives the kiss of life to a Silk Cut by
the fire-escape, (The North, 2005, Vol 36, p 4).

To say faces look in that instant in the street like fists, is a response coloured with strong subjective feeling
for which the poet offers no apology, no argument or proof. The metaphor itself is the proof and evidence.
Only someone who felt things to be that way could say it that way. Metaphor, therefore, doesn't make things
up. It is a feature of style based simply on the facts as they are seen and found to be . A guiding principle
with using metaphor is that it might well exaggerate, yes, but along the line of feeling-response, so that it carries
a sense of intent, of action and consequence, so that it dramatises the world. Charles Causley writes: An iron
 ELECTIVE 2: Creative Writing
bowl sent out stiff rays of chrysanthemums. It grew colder. (Causley, 1975:155). We feel the cold of an iron and
stiffened sun, as if the flowers emitted actual darkness. What could be seen as static objects-
chrysanthemums in a bowl-are given animation and energy.

But we also need to acknowledge that the world of a poem can be made dramatic without metaphor. If a
sense of action and story is one key to an effective style, it can be achieved by other means. Holub's poem, The
Fly' contains no metaphors, apart from the ‘whisper of decay’.

- Adjectives and Verbs

Basil Bunting s advice to student poets at Newcastle University in the 1970s was as follows.

1. Compose aloud: poetry is a sound.

2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to loose impetus.

3. Use spoken words and syntax.

4. Fear adjectives they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.

5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape.

Put your poem away till you forget it. Then:

6. Cut out every word you dare.

7. Do it again a week later, and again.

Never explain. Your reader is as smart as you.

A useful list, but one that needs some comment. After you have worked on your own poems, revising
and rewriting them, Would you agree with Bunting’s do’s and don’ts?

Cut every word you dare-yes, but be careful not to sacrifice number three in the process. Beginning
writers can sometimes produce a clipped style they believe signifies poetry. Number four is the main point here,
though. A common warning: it can be read as ‘All adjectives are bad, never use them'. This advice is certainly
familiar, and for the most part desirable. But what it most usually means is use adjectives carefully rather than
not at all. 10 use no adjectives at all can indeed create great poetry. The tiger springs the new year. /Us he
devours. (T. S.Eliot, Gerontion). Only one adjective ( new), and the emphasis falling as it should on nouns and
verbs, verbs particularly springs...devours. But no adjectives ever? Where would Eliot have got to without the
word dry? We possibly do need to know about the snow in King Wenceslas - and more than the fact that it just
'lay round about. Adjectives can only describe static states. The snow will always be deep and crisp and even.
More important are the voices speaking and the word tread which comes next. With adjectives, choose
carefully. But, in preference, concentrate on action, use verbs.