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American poet Adrian Blevins wrote that "actual speech broken into lines is not the same thing as poetry, for all good poetry must . . . alarm us into apprehending more than one meaning at a time" (qtd. in Wright). As a student of poetry, I am interested in how the poetic line functions in the making of meaning. The line does this in several ways; for example, suspending apprehension of full syntactical sense in a sentence broken over two or more lines, foregrounding particular works or phrases, and creating tension or contradiction between line meaning and overall syntactic meaning, to name a few. Many well-known contemporary poets write in verse in such a way that breaks not only the line, but syntax and even sense. As I read such poetry, I often feel frustrated with the difficulty of putting together fragments and associations into a comprehensive form. Most of this kind of poetry, poetry that doesn't at least offer immediate syntactical sense, seems arbitrary and empty of meaning. However, I have found that close attention to some of these poems at the line level can provide some illumination. In this essay, I will examine the use of verse in three poems; John Ashbery's "Well-lit Places," Barbara Guest's
"Dissonance Royal Traveler," and Robert Hass's, "Time and Materials." By examining how these three poets craft lines, I hope to reach a deeper understanding of the potential functions of verse and the meanings of the poems so crafted.
In "Well-lit Places," Ashbery presents a series of mostly end-stopped lines, prompting me to ask, as a reader, why use verse? In a Slate article, Meghan O'Rourke calls Ashbery "a kind of radio transistor through which many different voices, genres, and curious archaeological remains of language filter" ("An Instruction Manual"). Ashbery considers his own poetry "a kind of generalized transcript of what's really going on in our minds all day long" (qtd. in Swensen & St.
John 22). In light of these descriptions, I might take each line in "Well-lit Places" as a fragment of this ongoing transmission, and they might be, but I sense there is more to an interpretation of
Ashbery's versification.
"Well-lit Places" appears, on the surface, to be a list of occurrences. The lines are, for the most part, short declarative sentences, end-stopped, and offer little room for "apprehending more than one meaning at a time" (Blevins qtd. in Wright). Still, there is a music to the lines and, in places, provisional meanings. The second line states, "The laurel nudges the catalpa" (Ashbery
23). The consonance of the L in "laurel" and "catalpa," the bouncing trochees in "laurel,"
"nudges," and the continuity of this rhythm in amphibrach foot, "catalpa," all combine to make a rhythmically pleasing line. This is only one example of a rhythmic pleasure offered by Ashbery's lines, contributing to weight of each line. The first three lines set up a list pattern that is intensified in line four. The line lists "The proud, the famous, the magnificent" (Ashbery 23).
The line is enjambed, leaving a moment to wonder what the proud, magnificent, and famous
(like the horse chestnut tree, laurel, and Mussolini) will do. Line five, syntactically imperative on
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its own, answers the question prompted in the silence of white space. Ashbery continues the list
2 of declarations for the remainder of stanza one.
The first two lines of stanza two (lines eight and nine) echo lines four and five in enjambment and syntactic unity. However, line eight stands alone as a distinct image. While continuing the martial victor theme
1 , the image of "A man declaiming in front of a coat of
arms" (Ashbery 23) is clear in the mind of the reader. Ashbery continues his listing, declarative, end-stopped lines throughout stanza two, referring always to the man, then shifts focus to "the girl" in stanza three while maintaining the pattern. So, how does this structure function in the balance of the poem? Each line is rhythmically pleasurable and, with few exceptions, constitutes a full syntactic unit. The end-stops slow the reading pace and offer a pause for reflection, as well as laying out the images evoked in the lines for examination and comparison. This is one potential function of verse—slowing pace and inducing meditation through end-stops and white space.
In "Dissonance Royal Traveler," Guest crafts spreading lines with sparse punctuation and stylized syntax. Guest's versification in the poem offers an example of her "loose referentiality and . . . active use of white space . . . [as well as] ambiguity and indeterminacy [that] keep her poems open" (Swensen & St. John 172). The poem's heavily indented first line is a strange concept—"sound opens sound" (Guest 173)— lacking both punctuation and syntactical connection to the next line. This immediately sets up a pattern of unconventional syntax that works differently in different lines, allowing the lines to work toward various effects. Line two consists of two phrases—"shank of globe" and "strings floating out" (Guest 173)—separated by an inch of white space. Again, these phrases are syntactically separate, almost lines unto themselves (though "strings floating out" as an image carries little weight in isolation). Line three is indented and italicized, two spaces below the first two lines. The italicization implies a meta comment on the first lines. The line reads, " something like images are here " (Guest 173).
Here is a move that presents multiple meanings. On its own, the line might be commentary.
When combined with the fourth line, " something like images " becomes the subject of the sentence, "opening up avenues to view a dome" (Guest 173) in line four. As the sentence continues, lacking a comma after "dome," we read in line five that "a distant clang reaches the edifice" (Guest 173). The lack of standard punctuation provides a provisional meaning to each line, allowing the sentence to be read as a single unit (by mentally inserting punctuation) or as single syntactic units as lines. The dome can be the edifice, or another edifice entirely. As the poem continues, this open interpretation continues, compounded by strange and recurring images. Another example of this is the sentence (if it can be called a sentence) created by lines eighteen through twenty two. Taken as a single utterance, it reads "explaining music and their
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1 I'm specifically thinking of "laurel," "Mussolini," and "megalomania." Also, considering that "Well-lit Places" was publish in November 2004, we might imagine G. W. Bush as the "man declaiming" in line 5.
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clothes entangled who walk into a puddle of minnows; minnows in a bowl consonant with water"
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(Guest 173). Again, the subject of the sentence is unclear and changeable depending on how one fills in the missing punctuation. Much of the possibility of meaning comes from the
3 position of the phrase in individual lines, playing off of preceding and subsequent lines to different effects. In this poem, we see another function of verse—breaking syntactically stylized sentences into lines allow for multiple interpretations depending on how one mentally connects the lines.
In "Time and Materials," Hass uses verse to different effects in the poem's six sections.
In the first section, Hass breaks fairly standard sentences into lines, sometimes breaking on punctuation while other lines are enjambed. There is nothing extraordinary about the lines in the first section when taken alone. Here, Hass seems to use enjambment to propel the reader down the page. As the poet Mary Kinzie put it, “partial meaning and dissatisfaction” can keep us reading a poem (qtd. in Wright). This seems to be the function of Hass' line breaks in this section. In the second section, Hass' lines mimic the content. Here, Hass ends the line before ending the last word. Hass writes, "The object of this poem is not to annihila" (180). In this line, Hass obviously mimics annihilation. As the section progresses (after the word
"annihilation" fails to materialize), the idea of theft appears. "The object of this poem is to report a theft" (180), Hass writes. The lines about theft are repeated in two subsequent stanzas. Hass separates words in the lines; for example, "object o f this" and "progre ss" (180). In the third stanza of the section, missing letters mimic theft. This poem is self-conscious of its "materials," playing with them, though the lines themselves mostly propel reading or, perhaps, highlight final words. One exception is the fifth section in which, much like Guest, the lines have some standalone qualities, allowing for more than one meaning. Still, Hass does not push the syntax to the extremes as does Guest. Examining "Time and Materials" offers an example of form imitating content within lines, as well as using line breaks to propel the reader down the page.
After examining these three poems in detail, I have gained a deeper understanding of the flexibility and potential of verse. End-stopped lines can slow reading, giving time to reflect in the white space. Omitting punctuation and crafting lines as potentially-single units can allowing for multiple interpretations when syntactically connecting to other lines. Line breaks can function more subtly, emphasizing whole-sentence meaning over single-line provisional sense.
There are many more ways that verse can function, to more effects. Close examination of other poets' lines is a useful practice, not only for understanding verse, but for interpretation of poems.
While such examination of the more purposefully difficult and evasive styles of poetry may be fruitless in some instances, it can also help one gain appreciation of what the poets are doing.
Adrian Blevins wrote, "perhaps it is possible to measure a poet’s worth by measuring his
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2 Note that I intentionally omit the standard slashes between lines in order to show the sentence in an uninterrupted fashion.
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willingness to spend his fearlessness, which is just another way of saying all his energy, on the verbal manifestation of his peculiarity" (qtd. in Wright). If this is the case, then appreciation of any given poet is a matter of both taste and educated judgement, for how can a reader assess the
4 energy a poet puts into his or her work without first recognizing the ways in which the poet uses the materials of language. I believe that much of the pleasure available in reading poetry comes from the way verse plays with sense and meaning. As a poet, a deep understanding of the range of the line's possibilities will help me offer that pleasure to my readers.
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Works Cited
Ashbery, John. "Well-lit Places." American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry.
Ed. Cole Swensen and David St. John. New York: Norton, 2009. 23. Print.
Guest, Barbara. "Dissonance Royal Traveller." American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New
Poetry. Ed. Cole Swensen and David St. John. New York: Norton, 2009. 173-174. Print.
Hass, Robert. "Time and Materials." American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry.
Ed. Cole Swensen and David St. John. New York: Norton, 2009. 180-181. Print.
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O'Rourke, Meghan. "The Instruction Manual: How to read John Ashbery." Slate . Washington
Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC, 9 Mar. 2005. Web. 4 Mar. 2011.
<http://www.slate.com/id/2114565/>.
Swensen, Cole, and David St. John, eds. American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry.
New York: Norton, 2009. Print.
Wright, David. "A Primer on the Poetic Line." Poetry, poetics and the Arts. Blogger: 27 Sept.
2007. Web. 4 Mar. 2011. <http:/ekphrastics.blogspot.com2007/09primer-on-poetic-line.html>
© 2013 Christopher Younkin