What Makes a Poem a Poem?

emagazine asked Michael Rosen, poet, broadcaster and newly-appointed children’s laureate, to explain what poetry is. Simple? Think again!

People often ask me, what is a poem, perhaps because they suspect that a lot of what I write isn’t really poetry even though it quite often says on the cover of my books something like ‘Poems by Michael Rosen’. Some people are a bit more combative from the off, and say things like, ‘What you write isn’t poetry, is it?’

Am I bovvered?

I have several answers to this line of questioning. One is to say that I’m not really bothered by what people want to call it. If it makes life any easier, just call it ‘stuff’ and then we don’t need to waste any more time bothering about names. After all, when you’re eating a tomato, you don’t really care terribly much if it’s a fruit or a vegetable, do you? You care if it’s a good or bad tomato. As I’m sure you’ve spotted, what I’m doing here is resisting the desire we have to label and categorise. At the same time, I’m criticising the way some people use the categorisations in a loaded, non-neutral way in order to determine whether this or that is good or bad. This is what people do when they talk about ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, or when they try to make distinctions between fiction, documentary, ‘docufiction’ and ‘mockumentary’.

Let readers decide?

Another line of answer is for me to say that a poem is quite simply whatever a group of people think is a poem. Usually, we leave this to a specific group – that’s to say a publisher, an editor, some critics, fellow poets and experienced readers. For as long as people have wondered if this or that is a poem, it’s the agreement between sufficient numbers of such specific people that has been decisive.

Now, once again, as I’m sure you’ve spotted, I’ve dodged the original question. Or if you were to be a little more charitable towards me, you could say that I’ve answered the question from a position standing outside of writing rather than inside it, looking for extrinsic explanations rather than intrinsic ones. So, by saying it’s an agreement between groups of people, I’ve simply observed how people behave in a sociological way towards writing.

Intrinsic features of poetry?

Someone could then ask me quite legitimately, ‘If groups of people decide that this or that is a poem, are there any reasons intrinsic to this kind of writing that makes them come to this conclusion?’

Now, I’m up against the wall. I can’t get away with any more ducking and diving. The problem is that if we take the whole body of what has been called poetry anywhere in the world, we have a hugely diverse range of writing types. Quite quickly we can see that there can’t be a simple one-factor answer. Some people have tried. The most famous is Coleridge’s ‘the best words in the best order’. This sounds all fine and dandy, except that, just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too is ‘best’ in the eye of the reader. What I think are the best words in the best order, you might think are mediocre words in a terrible order. My poem isn’t a poem for you.

A what-is-poetry checklist1

So, enough shilly-shallying. Here’s my checklist for what leads people to think that what they’re reading is a poem.

1. Patterning

Poems nearly always involve some kind of patterning of language where you could say that underlying the writing, there is a design that has some kind of regularity to it, like tartan or a wallpaper design. The most famous and obvious patterning systems are rhyme and rhythm. However, poets like Ogden Nash and John Hegley sometimes use rhyme without a regular rhythm, while other poets, particularly verse dramatists like Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot, use rhythm without rhyme.

But there are other patterning systems to look out for. English is a language that has stressed and unstressed syllables. You can use a pattern of stresses that’s regular, just as you do with a conventional piece of music, the beat of music hitting the stressed syllable. Or you can count syllables. This is called ‘syllabics’ and Sylvia Plath is someone who experimented with this way of writing. It’s one way to create pattern without being tied down by an unchanging rhythm.

Other patterning systems are repetition of sounds (alliteration and assonance), a repetition of a phrase or part of a phrase (an ‘echo’ or ‘framing’ technique) but also any kind of repetition of image or concept. These systems are much harder to discern and I call them ‘secret strings’. Once again, with a highlighter, you can often find deeper meanings of a poem, by drawing lines between words that have links with each other, using their sound or their meaning.

The particular kinds of patterning that we find in poetry are aspects of the cohesion that we find in all language-use. In poetry these patterns are often that much more visible or audible.

2. Pithiness

Most poets try to achieve ways of expressing ideas that compress as much meaning, thought and feeling as they can into a short space of time or space on a page. Sometimes, as with a Shakespeare sonnet, this makes for a particularly dense kind of writing, where each word, phrase or line seems to throw up complex, ambiguous, paradoxical ideas. But another kind of compression can be achieved in a different way, the emotional intensity being created by sound, a bit like in music. This is the principle behind the element of poetry that resembles chanting. If you repeatedly chant a single phrase, you can create sensations of pleasure or sadness or compassion and quickly reach deep levels of emotion.

3. Proximity

A much overlooked aspect of poetry is the way in which poems yoke together ideas and images. In unexpected – and often unexplained – ways, poems will place one idea next to another. This is the process of association. John Donne begins one poem:

Busy old fool, unruly sun...

If you let your mind run over some of the ideas here, you can quickly see how odd this is. How can the sun be a fool? How can it be unruly (‘unruly’ means boisterous or disobedient)? Easy to see that it’s old, but how can it be busy? What is a busy old fool? Are busy old fools unruly? In five words, there are five images, out of which only ‘old’ and ‘sun’ would seem to match up in any ordinary way. This laying of ideas next to each other in an unexpected and often unexplained way is part of the process known as ‘defamiliarisation’. So, as some have said, poetry makes the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar

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familiar. If you juxtapose two images that you would not normally see next to each other, you demand of the reader what might be called the ‘work of association’: the reader has to work out why such two images associate.

4. Pictures

One of the most commented on aspects of poetry concerns the way in which many poems use language over and over again to make analogies. The opening of one of Wilfred Owen’s poems is ‘Bent double, like beggars...’ As you know, the phrase ‘like beggars’ is a simile. Other ways to cue up similes are to use phrases like ‘as’, ‘as if’, ‘as when’, ‘in the way that’, ‘in the manner of’, ‘so does/do’, and there’s a slightly coded way of doing it, by using the comparator ‘more’. Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet says:

More than Prince of Cats, I can tell you.

In a more compressed form, poems create pictures using metaphor and metonymy and, following from what I said about patterning, they create patterns with the metaphors. Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 24’, uses the idea of a painting and explores similarities and differences between paintings and love across the whole poem. This is what’s called a ‘conceit’ (that which has been conceived), a process which underlies a great deal of poetry even when it isn’t immediately obvious. A poem about trying to walk through a forest can, on reflection, also be a poem about trying to get through a difficult time in your life and so on. A poem doesn’t have to say it’s a ‘conceit’ to embody a conceit!

But why bother with metaphors and similes? Because they are one of the most powerful and useful ways in which we can investigate and explain. Wilfred Owen’s poems are mostly jam-packed (a metaphor in itself!) with metaphors and similes and I’ve often asked myself why. I think that it reflects his desperation that people at home should feel and see the full ghastliness of the First World War. He is, in effect saying, over and over again: ‘it’s like this, it’s like this...’

5. Mode of address

One very special thing about poems becomes apparent if we ask the question of any given poem, ‘Who is this poem speaking to?’ In some poems, you could say that the answer is obvious: ‘He’s talking to his lover’ or some such. But, then we can say, if he’s talking to his lover, why has he bothered to write it down and publish it? Surely, if he wants to talk to his lover, he can go and see her, write her a private letter or get on the phone! The ‘writerly’ answer is to say that poets take on the voices of people and things in hundreds of different ways. Poems are very often imitations of the way people would write or speak if they were speaking or writing to this or that person or thing. The mode of address, then, is itself a kind of metaphor! Robert Browning wrote poems as if they were people in the act of talking. A Duke taking some people round his great house begins:

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive.

The mode of address of many poems is borrowed from the sound or style of earlier poems. Wordsworth begins, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. The idea of beginning a poem with the image of walking out and about goes back at least to medieval times when there was a tradition of poems and songs being about going out into the countryside on a May morning and has been picked up many times by other poets, as with William Blake and the poem that begins ‘I went to the Garden of Love’.

So the importance of mode of address in poetry signals the fact that ‘voice’ is of fundamental

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importance, perhaps more so than in much prose writing.

6. Scavengers

It’s not only voices that poets borrow – they are incurable scavengers. If you write poems, you give yourself the licence to beg, borrow and steal any kind of language from any source: political speeches, notices, advertisements, fragments of songs, any poem in the world history of poetry. T.S. Eliot’s early poetry was developed out of a patchwork of references, allusions and borrowed voices from a wide range of sources.

One of the things that makes a piece of writing into poetry is the unexplained way in which poets draw together these borrowed words, phrases, modes of address and allusions. When Alexander Pope wrote his poems many of the phrases he played with were borrowed from translations of Latin poets. Today, many of us might not recognise these without the help of notes. Bob Dylan’s songs are dense with borrowed phrases from the Bible, political speeches, proverbs and other people’s songs. Carol Ann Duffy’s poems are full of other people’s voices, like Miss Havisham from Dickens’s Great Expectations or old school teachers, or the imagined twin sister of Elvis. One of the tricks of poetry is to surprise readers by importing one voice into the context of another.

7. The mix

If you mix these six areas of language-use into one pot, you’ll be hard pushed to find a genre of writing other than poetry that can freely use any or all of them within the covers of one book.

Michael Rosen is a writer and broadcaster. He was appointed Children’s Laureate in 2007.

From emagazine 37, September 2007

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The language of poetry – alliteration

Gillian Clarke

Alliteration is the recurring sound of a consonant. That is, any sound except a vowel. Sometimes several consonants play together, weaving in and out. Alliteration is natural. We use it without thinking – in nicknames, comics and nursery rhymes. Think of Desperate Dan, Korky the Cat or Lucy Locket. Advertisers exploit it. Poets sing it. The Anglo-Saxon and British (Welsh) poets used it instead of rhyme.

I once saw a snake in France and looked it up in a nature book. It said ‘couleuvre’. Grass snake, a green-gold S. Into my head came the word ‘flamboyance’ which today means show-off behaviour and dress, but in mediaeval times it was the colour and gold decoration scribes used on manuscripts. In couleuvre and snake and flamboyance I could hear C, and the FLMBNS of flamboyance, summer, silence, sibilance, glance, silk, cool, spool. Celtic, flame. I heard Celtic swirls, not straight Roman roads. Most of all I sensed the S in the sound and movement of the snake.

The Grass Snake

All afternoon I hopeit’ll come back – rope

of sunlight, silenceof something silk, a sibilance,

the turning pages of a book,a breath that made me look.

Its soft elision parts the grassjust long enough to pass,

a word unspooled from somewhere,the fluent freehand signature

of flood, of cool couleuvrein a most un-Roman swerve

of Celtic knotwork, the heart’sblood-beat, the holy art

of gilding in the grass, a glanceof flame, of flamboyance

This article first appeared in emagazine, September 1998

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The language of poetry – Assonance

Assonance has been defined as ‘rudimentary rhyme’, and there used to be rules about where it could be used. Most of poetry’s music comes from assonance rather than the more often noted alliteration. Open any good recent anthology, or read anything by Shakespeare, and hearthe assonance sing. Listen for the echoes, not just at line-endings but anywhere in a poem. For poetry’s purpose ‘w’ and ‘y’ count as vowel sounds (as they do in Welsh), as well as all the long, short and combined sounds thefive vowels make. ‘O, wild west wind, thou breath of autumn’s being’, sings Shelley, and you hear the wind, especially in the first five words. There are words madeof nothing but assonant sounds. Add a little punctuation, a sigh and some dramatic expression and you can hold a conversation or write a silly poem using only assonance. Try it with:Where? Why, oh why? Away. Oh, woe! You. I. We? Aye! Aaah!

In a poem about the poor a hundred years ago breaking stones to sell to the road builders I repeat one main assonant sound: the long ‘o’ of ‘bones’, because ‘O’ is full of sorrow and suffering. I add a long ‘a’ in ‘aching’ and ‘breaking’, short sounds in ‘picking’, ‘swishing’, ‘tarmac’, ‘track’, and much more, for these are the games thatpoets play.

Breaking Stones

Out in the duskday after daybreaking stones,summer and winter,aching bones.

Nothing but dirt-tracks,nothing but muddy rutsfor a horse and cart,till they smashed stonesto smithereens.

Under the country laneswhere we dawdle in summerpicking blackberries,swishing at nettles with sticks,are their broken stones.

Under the tarmac of every road,every motorway,lie the old tracksand the stones they broke,the stones they sold.

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The language of poetry – iambic pentameter

Look up ‘metre’ in a book of poetry terms, and you’ll find too much to take in, so I’ve chosen the important one, Shakespeare’s favourite, the rhythm we still write and speak. Take iambic first. It’s where the stress falls on the second of two syllables in a line of poetry. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summers day’ – Shakespeare. When the stress falls on the first syllable, as in ‘double, double, toil and trouble’, it’s called trochaic metre. Pentameter means five beats in a line. There are monometers (one beat), dimeters (two), trimeters (three), and so on, but pentameter is natural to us all. "Your sister dyes her hair, I’m sure she does." Above all it is the tune of the sonnet, the 14 line poem centuries old and still written today. Look to Shakespeare for the best examples. I thought I had written a few, but my sonnets have so many irregularities that I must send myself back to poetry school. Here is a 16 line poem that at least shows how like ordinary speech a line of pentameter can be, whether it’s iambic or not.

A very cold lamb

With a book to finish and umpteen things to do,

here I am kneeling in straw with a young ewe

fussing and mothering about me, drying the lambs

she slithered from her hot womb into the stream

where we found them, took them for frozen or drowned.

Working together, my hair-drier and her breath,

we warm two shivering lambs from the brink of death.

One is so cold it can’t open its mouth to cry

for shaking, shaking hungry death by the throat,

that fox with a taste for soft tissue, that bird of doom

after each intricate beautiful brain, each eye.

We work for an hour, the drier humming, the ewe

licking their syrups with her passionate tongue,

calling the blood to their limbs, liver, lungs,

each womb as small as a nut. The two lambs strive.

They’re warming to the idea of staying alive.

This article first appeared in emagazine, Issue 8 September 2000 - Gillian Clarke

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The language of poetry – lineation

Gillian Clarke is a distinguished Welsh poet. Her latest collection is Five Fields, published by Carcanet Press.

Lineation. In other words, lines. According to the OED, the drawing of, marking with, arrangement of lines. Even small children know a poem on a page by the shape and pattern they see.Why do poets use lineation? Does it make a difference to a poem where a line breaks? The end of the line allows time for the eye to flick left to the beginning of the next line, creating a nano-second pause. It’s shorter, even, than a comma, too short to breathe. The voice continues, singing across the gap, as the eye and brain take in the line’s last word before reading the first on the next line. The pause is subtle, a potent moment that lays stress on the words and the lines it parts from each other.The pattern on the page is the tune in your ear. I’d call it timing, as in acting, comedy, or music. You can only find it by listening for it. The night the poet R.S.Thomas died, I wrote a poem in my notebook. Over the next 24 hours I murmured these lines to myself in trains and in station buffets, trying them for size, for sound, listening to the words as they shifted their shapes into lines. Then, just as important, I listened for the stanza breaks. Even when a sentence seems to be in charge of the poem, the syntax can leap the line-ending, and leaping a stanza-break offers a double nano-second pause, and therefore more silence, more light on a word, more echo, more resonance, more of a chance for the reader to pick up the tune and the meaning from the pattern. This is the first version of that poem, and then the final one.

His death on the midnight news.Suddenly colder. Gold Septembersdriven off by something afootin the south-west approaches.Gods breathing in space out theremisting the heave of the seasdark and empty tonight exceptfor the one frail coracle (boat)borne (carried) out to sea burning.

RSfor the poet R.S.Thomas, 1913-2000His deathon the midnight news.Suddenly colder.Gold Septembers driven offby something afootin the south-west approaches.Gods breathing in space out theremisting the heave of the seasdark and empty tonight,except for the one frail coracleborne out to sea,burning.

This article first appeared in emagazine issue 11, February 2001

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The language of poetry – Metaphor

A metaphor happens when one image suggests another, but without using the word ‘like’. The best metaphor is a mere hint, suggesting the companion image with a single word. Metaphor should trust us as readers, allowing our imagination to work on the image to make the connection with a flash of touching wires. W.B. Yeats, for example, writes of the ’dolphin-torn’ sea. You can see the fins ripping the surface. R.S. Thomas, in a poem about the cruelty of nature, writes of the stoat sipping from ‘the brimming rabbit’. It’s a wonderful metaphor, shocking and exciting. Metaphor is used every day in spoken English. Time flies. Snowdrops peep, Rain dances. You’re burning with rage. In fact, time has no wings, snowdrops have no eyes, rain has no feet, and you have a feeling inside you, not a fire. The thrilling thing about metaphor is that it fills ordinary language with colour. It haunts the way we talk, illuminates plain fact, and is the interesting part of everyday story-telling. In this poem, written for children, I use a series of methaphors, almost one on every line.

February

My car has growna woolly cover, yours a crown.

The door-mat’s disappeared.The hedge has grown a beard.

The bin’s a cornet. Laurel leavesare spoonfuls. Along the eaves.

a row of glassy swords.Starlings on the wires strumming chords.

Crocus strikes a match. Birdsprint on the lawn their lines of words.

Trees wear fur. Wire has learned to knit.Sheep aren’t white. Grubby as a clwt

in need of bleach, they’re at the gate,waiting for hay and grumbling that we’re late.

Touch-down and lift-off, look, a crow’sbeen making angels in the snow.

clwt: Welsh word for dishcloth

This article first appeared in emagazine, Issue 2, November 1998

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The language of poetry – onomatopoeia

aOn-o-ma-to-poe-ia. One-tomato-pizza. I-am-gonna-pay-ya. I love the word and can’t resist playing with it.It comes from the Greek and means ‘word-making’. Onomatopoeia imitates in sound the thing it describes, and because it uses musical effects it’s perfect for poetry. Children invent new words using it: quack-quack, bow-wow, moo-cow, brmm-brmm; and nee-naw is an excellent word for a fire-engine.Widely used in primitive languages, it’s at the root of many English words, words like wind, owl, cuckoo, sizzle. A snake hisses and slithers, like the sound of its voice and its movement in grass or sand. In parts of south-west Britain plimsolls are called ‘daps’, a perfect word for the sound you make running on the pavement in your daps – so ‘get your daps on!’ means ‘hurry!’No poet uses onomatopoeia throughout a poem, and most would be unconscious of using it most of the time. I think I can argue that Storm uses words that imitate in sound the things they describe, but I certainly wasn’t conscious of that as I wrote it.

Storm

The cat lies low, too scaredto cross the garden.

For two days we are bowedby a whiplash of hurricane.

The hill’s a wind-harp.Our bones are flutes of ice.

The heart drums in its small roomAnd the river rattles its pebbles.

Thistlefields are comb-and-paperWhisperings of syllable and bone

Till no word’s leftBut thud and rumble of

Something with hooves or wheels,Something breathing too hard.

(From The Animal Wall published by Gomer Press)

This article first appeared in emagazine, Issue 10 November 2000

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The language of poetry – Rhyme

I used to think rhyme was a crime. I was wrong, but I was put off by those people who say poetry isn’t poetry if it doesn’t rhyme. Rhyme can be a trap. It can sound glib. Classical Greek poets didn’t use it. Early British (ie. Welsh) and Old English poets relied on assonance and alliteration. Rhyme chimes vowels at line-endings, and the effect lies in echoes of almost twin sounds. Sometimes, because English spelling is crazy, there’s extra fun to be had in the ill-matched appearance of rhyming words, as with ‘daughter’ and ‘water’, ‘laughter’ and ‘after’. Children love rhyme. It’s wonderful for insults, name calling, ring games, talking to babies, spells, jokes, hymns, incantation and remembering. Glib rhyme makes us all laugh, even when we’re not supposed to, as in the doggerel of William McGonagall, but even simple rhyme can add poignancy to a convincing elegy like Auden’s Stop all the clocks, and Carol Ann Duffy’s beautiful, ‘the radio’s prayer-/ Rockall, Malin, Dogger, Finisterre.’ (Prayer). Shakespeare uses rhyming couplets to end a scene, or a play, ‘For never was a story of more woe/ Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.’ I love the full rhyming virtuoso performance of a Shakespearean sonnet with its delicious final rhyming couplet. But I also love half rhymes, rhymes inside instead of at the ends of lines, and rhymes so subtle you can’t see them as you read, and only your ear believes they are rhymes at all. I have put 6 lines between ‘stigmata’ and ‘Yamaha’ in a poem, but I enjoy hearing them call to each other. Here’s my attempt at a sonnet about a sculpture, using half and full rhymes and the a,b,b,a,c,d,d,c,e,f,f,e,g,g, rhyming pattern.

The Stone Hare

Think of it waiting three hundred million years,not a hare hiding in the last stand of wheat,but a premonition of stone, a moonlit reefwhere corals reach for the light through clearwaters of warm Palaeozoic seas.in its limbs lies the story of the earth,the living ocean, then the slow birthof limestone from the long trajectoriesof starfish, feather-stars, crinoids and crushed shellsthat fill with calcite, harden, wait for the quarryman,the timed explosion and the sculptor’s hand.Then the hare, its eye a planet, springs from the chiselto stand in the grass, moonlight’s muscle and bone.the stems of sea-lilies slowly turned to stone.

This article first appeared in emagazine, Issue 6, November 1999

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The language of poetry – similes

Gillian Clarke explores the use of simile in her poem ‘Breathing’. This article first appeared in emagazine 12/13, October 2001

The first article in this series was on metaphor; when one image suggests another, but without using the word ‘like’. So let’s look at images that do depend on ‘like’, or ‘as’.

Poets tend to prefer metaphor because the word ‘like’ can seem predictable, repetitive, avoidable. Sometimes, however, a simile is a good idea. It is more direct than the metaphor’s subtle hint. Occasionally, rhythm needs the extra syllable. ‘Like’ can prevent a confusion of meaning, and leaving it out can leave a poem with just a list.

My poem ‘Breathing’ helps to show what I mean. Three metaphors slipped in as well when I wasn’t looking. First, the metaphors, those little hints in ‘pours herself’ that suggest the cat is water, and the ‘breath of tap water’, as if water can breathe, and that gasp ‘of all the drowned in a breaking wave’, as if the wave or the drowned can gasp.

The simile too puts in three appearances, in stanzas 3, 5 and 6. I wrote all three instinctively, but I believe they are all essential to the poem. ‘Like’ is the first word in stanza 3. It helps the rhythm and directly connects the sweet-smelling fur of the cat, as it disappears into the night, with the mother-memory, also sweet, also gone into the dark. Leaving the word out might imply that cat and mother are breathed one after another in the hall, rather than one recalling the other.

In stanzas 5 and 6, ‘stolen like honey’, and ‘smell like the sea’ need the directness of the simile to bring the real taste and the real smell they imply. Also, that extra little syllable helps the rhythm.

‘Breathing’Prowl the house sniffing out gas leaks, a cloth festering somewhere, spilt milk, cat-piss, drains.

Such talent needs exercise. Putting the cat out, inhale her musk as she pours herself into the night

like your long ago mother, her fur, her Chanel number 5, before the whiff of a moonlighting fox, and frost, and the coats in the hall.

Some smells are faint, the distinct breath of tap water from each place you have lived, the twig of witchhazel two rooms away.

Some are stolen like honey, the secretive salts of skin, in Waterstones, say, or the Bank, as you lean together, breathing.

Or the new-born that smell like the sea and the darkness we came from, that gasp of the drowned in a breaking wave.

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The language of poetry – Syllable

‘Syllable’: the word for the beat in the word. However, nothing is that simple. Some syllables tap, some thump. There are strong and weak ones, stressed and unstressed ones. ‘Syllable’ has three syllables, ‘syll’ is stressed, ‘a’ and ‘ble’ are unstressed. At least, that’s how it’s said where I come from. Counting syllables is good for haiku (three lines, 17 syllables) but it’s a bad way to measure the beats in poem. Listen to this verse from a song invented by a group of children:River, ripple, shiver, quiver,Apron of the giantess,Rock, tomb, jag, knife,Chamber of a thousand bones.

That’s eight syllables, then seven, four, seven. Sing it, beat it, and four strong thumping beats in each line emerge clearly. The Old English words the Anglo-Saxons brought to Britain are often made of one beat, but the Latin words the Romans brought are multisyllabic and sometimes rather pompous. Compare ‘love’ (OE) with ‘affection’ (Latin), ‘road’ with ‘highway’, ‘fuss’ with ‘controversy’. The rhythms of poetry need plenty of strong Old English words, but official documents love to use important-sounding Latin. One-syllable words can be good for expressing fear, tension, cold, waiting. I set a task in a writing class once: write a poem of 100 words of only one syllable. Here’s mine, made of six Haiku, called February. Note the three-syllable rebellion in the last but one line.

February

Lamb-grief in the fieldsand a cold as hard as slate.Foot and hoof are shod

with ice. Our foot printsseem as old as ferns in stone.Air rings in ash and thorn.

Ice on the rain-butt, thickas a shield and the tap chokes,its thumb in its throat.

The stream runs blackin a ruff of ice, its caught breathfurls a frieze of air.

At night ice singsto the strum of my thrown stoneslike a snapped harp-string.

The pond’s glass eye holdsleaf, reed, fish, paperweightin a dream of stone.

This article first appeared in emagazine, Issue 5, September 1999

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Ways into Poetry – The Send-Off

Barbara Bleiman suggests that converting a prose version of a poem into poetry can give real insights into the poet’s choices, in terms of the look on the page, the use of line breaks, stanza breaks and the emphasis placed on particular words and phrases. Barbara Bleiman is co-editor of emagazine.

The Send-off Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way to the siding-shed and lined the train with faces grimly gay their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray as men's are, dead. Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp stood staring hard, sorry to miss them from the upland camp. Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp winked to the guard. So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went. They were not ours: we never heard to which front these were sent. Nor there if they yet mock what women meant who gave them flowers. Shall they return to beatings of great bells in wild trainloads? A few, a few, too few for drums and yells may creep back, silent, to still village wells up half-known roads.

A poem written out as prose. Does it seem like prose? Is there anything that suggests that it is poetry?Try writing it out in lines of poetry. What seems to you to work best as a form for the poem. Think about: rhythm; ending lines with words you want to emphasise; whether you think the length of the lines should be regular or irregular; whether you think there should be any spaces between lines or should it be all one continuous stanza?Compare your version with the poem as published. Explore the reasons for the poet’s choices. What effect do they have?Choose one of the choices you’re most interested in and write a short paragraph about it, using a quotation and analysing how it works.

The Send-off

Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their wayTo the siding-shed,And lined the train with faces grimly gay. Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and sprayAs men's are, dead. Dull porters watched them, and a casual trampStood staring hard,Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lampWinked to the guard. So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.They were not ours:We never heard to which front these were sent. Nor there if they yet mock what women meantWho gave them flowers. Shall they return to beatings of great bellsIn wild trainloads?A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,May creep back, silent, to still village wellsUp half-known roads.Wilfred Owen

This article first appeared on the emagazine website as part of emagplus 63,February 2014.

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The language of poetry – Enjambment

‘Enjambment’ is a word even poets might have to look up to check if it names something they do. It is a word for one of poetry’s dance-steps. It’s the nano-second pause at the end of a line, or the two nano-seconds at the end of a stanza, where the meaning runs on, leaping the gap to land at the start of the next line, or the next stanza. It pauses, and continues, the toe-to-heel step as the dancer reaches the edge of the space and turns. It’s the nose-nudge of the goldfish against glass on its journey round the tank. Prose is made of sentences while poetry is made of lines. The pattern a poem makes on the page is musical notation, or choreography. Enjambment arrests the sentence in its stride, forcing it to dance to poetry’s tune. Tension lies in the space between music and meaning. It adds suspense, ambiguity, drama. In Legend I tell a true story divided into five 5-line stanzas. The story unfolds slowly in sentences that run over the lines, and, at the moment of truth at the end of stanza four, there’s nothing for it but to leap a stanza gap, just as I remember leaping the cracks in the ice to pull my sister out of the lake.

Legend

The rooms were mirrorsfor that luminous face,the morning windows fernedwith cold. Outsidea level world of snow.

Voiceless birds in the treeslike notes in the booksin the pian#o stool.She let us suck top-of-the-milkburst from the bottles like corks.

Then wrapped shapelesswe stumped to the parkbetween the parapets of snowin the wake of the shovellers,cardboard rammed in the tines of garden forks.

The lake was an empty rinkand I stepped out,pushing my sister firstonto its creaking floor.When I brought her home,

shivering, wailing, soaked,they thought me a hero.But I still wake at night,to hear the Snow Queen’s knuckles crack,black water running fingers through the ice.

from Gillian Clark’s latest collection Five Fields, published by Carcanet

This article first appeared in emagazine, Issue 4, Summer 1999

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Finding meaning through structure in poetry

– Herbert’s ‘The Collar’

Knowing about the context of a poem can help you to read and interpret it. But when you’re faced with a seemingly difficult poem and little contextual background, perhaps an unseen in an exam, what might help you find a route through? Barbara Bleiman shows how attending to structure can support your reading.

Poetry has been described as ‘language made strange’ and because it’s strange, it can at times be difficult to find meaning, even at the most basic of levels. We’ve all experienced that moment of rising panic when the words on the page don’t make sense for us, as everyday speech or written prose usually do. One of the reasons for this is that poetry doesn’t always follow the grammar of speech or prose writing. It condenses, it leaves out words, it doesn’t always offer thoughts or descriptions in complete sentences. And that’s the richness of poetry that it leaves gaps and ambiguities that you the reader have to fill. However, despite this, poems usually have their own ‘grammar’ – a set of structures that allows you to find meaning. And the important thing is to develop experience and, above all, confidence, in finding those structures.

So rather than rushing to impose overhasty connections of your own, first take a bit of time to look closely at the clues about structure that the poem itself provides for you.

Take the example of ‘The Collar’ by George Herbert. At first glance it looks impenetrable – it seems to be all over the place, jumping about from past to present, with question upon question and references to all kinds of seemingly disparate things – a road, a harvest, wine, garlands, fruit, cages, ropes.

What’s the first thing one might do? Look for a structure. How might a structure be signalled? Well, perhaps by connections between the beginning and the end, perhaps by the use of tenses, perhaps by a moment of sudden change in the poem, perhaps by patterns, such as contrasts, parallels or patterns of imagery, perhaps by the use of punctuation. So let’s try each of these in turn.

If you look at the beginning and the end, you see that it starts with:

I struck the board, and cried, ‘No more!

I will abroad.

The narrator is angry. He’s had enough. Whatever his problem, he’s tired and emotional and at the end of his tether. But why? The ending gives some clues:

But as I raved, and grew more fierce and wild

At every word,

Methoughts I heard one calling, ‘Child!’

And I replied, ‘My Lord.’

Ah. So maybe he’s been struggling in some way and by the end of the poem that’s changed – in the midst of his ranting and raving he hears God calling him his child and he feels able, calmly, to respond. You might realise it’s God because ‘the Lord’ or ‘My Lord’ is one way of referring to God (as in ‘The Lord’s Prayer’).

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If that’s the case, what’s happening in the middle of the poem, where he speaks in the present tense and his language seems to leap about all over the place? Could that be him ‘raving’? A brief look at the punctuation helps to confirm this. The first six words of the poem introduce a speaking voice, his own. How long does that speaking voice last? Right to the closure of the speech marks four lines before the end of the poem. So everything within the speech marks (in other words most of the poem) is his ‘cry’ of anguish and the structure of the poem becomes clear: he’s telling us about a time when he was ranting and raving about something; he shows us what it was like by quoting his cries of suffering at great length; as he grows more and more angry and wild, he hears the voice of God calling to him and his resistance to God and suffering is instantly extinguished. The punctuation of speech and the shift from past to present tense and back to past help to make all this clear.

Are there other structural devices that help us to make even more sense of this poem? There is a moment of sudden change and it comes at the very end of the poem, so that if one were to represent the poem visually, as an electrocardiogram, it would have huge violent swings of the needle, right up to the last two lines of the poem where a calmer pattern is restored. The simplicity of the call and response (by linguists referred to as an adjacency pair) is quite different to the more open, lengthy and chaotic sentence patterns in the body of the poem.

And is the wild ‘raving’ just that, or can one see a structure within it? The more one looks at it, the less like a monotonous rant it seems. There are questions, ‘… shall I ever sigh and pine?’ ‘Shall I still be in suit?’, ‘Have I no harvest but a thorn?’ and so on. The questioning pattern is sustained throughout the main body of the poem but are there any answers? There are answers but not from an external source – instead they come from within. It is the voice of someone tortured by the questions he asks himself. This is signalled with the very first question, where both question and answer are shown to come from the same source, with the words ‘I’ and ‘My’ (my emphasis):

What? shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free; …

This pattern established, one is all the more surprised in the last two lines of the poem, when suddenly a new voice enters, with a different kind of conversational exchange – not question and answer, but call and reply.

Why is the narrator of the poem so wracked with questions and doubts? Patterns of imagery can help. ‘Harvest’, ‘thorn’, ‘blood’, ‘wine’ all in close proximity to each other are words associated with Christianity – Christ’s crown of thorns, the wine of Holy Communion, the harvest as a symbol for spiritual salvation. But alongside these conventional religious images are others: ‘cage’, ‘ropes’ ‘cable’ and indeed the ‘collar’ of the title, contrasted with others of freedom: ‘My lines and life are free’, ‘free as the road’, ‘Loose as the wind’. If one tries to connect the two sets of images, a plausible reading emerges – that the narrator is describing a moment of anguish in which he feels that religious faith is a prison, bringing no rewards, only suffering. In his torment, he is trying to break free of this ‘collar’. (Interestingly, the violence and anger of his feelings are suggested by the play on words in ‘collar’, with ‘choler’ being another word for anger.)

Having established a ‘broad’ and reasonably consistent reading, you’re now in a position to look more closely at the detail, perhaps at some of the more perplexing elements of the poem and offer possible interpretations, in the light of this broad reading. For instance, what might one now make of:

Have I no harvest but a thorn

To let me blood, and not restore

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What I have lost with cordial fruit?

In terms of a broad reading that this is a poem about feeling trapped and tormented by faith, one can see that here he is using the imagery of Christian faith to question why all his experience of religion should be suffering, without any spiritual healing or comfort. This is followed by his own reply to himself, in which he recognises that there was ‘wine’ and ‘corn’ (references to the bread and wine of the Holy Communion) which once gave him comfort but which are now spoiled by his own ‘sighs’ and ‘tears’, his own doubts and feelings of entrapment.

You could now go on to look at the rest of the poem and see how you might interpret phrases like ‘Forsake thy cage,/Thy ropes of sands’ in the light of this reading. And when you look at other poems, either for the first time or as unseen poems in exams, you might try this approach, of looking at the structures, whether it be the organisation of the poem as a whole, the punctuation or the patterns of language, as a way of constructing a broad reading as a springboard from which to explore the detail.

This article appeared first in emagazine 19, February 2003

The Collar I struck the board, and cried, ‘No more!

I will abroad.

What? shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free; free as the road,

Loose as the wind, as large as store.

Shall I be still in suit?

Have I no harvest but a thorn

To let me blood, and not restore

What I have lost with cordial fruit?

Sure there was wine

Before my sighs did dry it: there was corn

Before my tears did drown it.

Is the year only lost to me?

Have I no bays to crown it?

No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?

All wasted?

Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,

And thou hast hands.

Recover all thy sigh-blown age

On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute

Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,

Thy rope of sands,

Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee

Good cable, to enforce and draw,

And be thy law,

While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.

Away; take heed;

I will abroad.

Call in thy death’s head there: tie up thy fears;

He that forbears

To suit and serve his need

Deserves his load.’

But as I raved, and grew more fierce and wilde

At every word,

Methoughts I heard one calling, ‘Child!’

And I replied, ‘My Lord.’

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The continuous world – an introduction to metaphor in poetry

Moniza Alvi thinks ‘the most successful metaphors ... combine the delight of unexpectedness with a feeling of aptness’. She discusses Ted Hughes’ poem ‘Wind’, Vicki Feaver’s ‘Ironing’, Hugo Williams’ ‘Lights Out’, Heidi Williamson’s ‘Circus Pony’ and Peter Redgrove’s ‘The Visible Baby’.

Derived from the Greek word metaphora – meta meaning ‘over’ and pherein ‘to carry’ – metaphor involves a carrying across of meaning, and is at the core of figurative language, of simile, personification and allegory, as well as of myths and legends. In figurative language the stars can be pinpricks, the sun, a gold coin. Metaphor evokes one thing in terms of another, a process which, for Aristotle, enabled us to see something afresh, to grasp new ideas. He considered the making of metaphors a sign of great natural ability, of that which cannot be taught. Language itself is metaphorical. We speak, for instance, of ‘the eye of the storm’, of ‘getting wind of something’, of ‘going ahead’. Fundamentally, all words are symbols by which we represent, interpret and make our world. The use of fresh, overt metaphor in poetry is thus part of a continuum, an intensification of the language used by everyone.

Tenor, Vehicle and Ground

Let’s consider an example from Ted Hughes’ poem ‘Wind’: ‘The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope’. The impression given is of a wind so forceful that the hills themselves could take off. With the linking of the two images, hills and tent, we have been given a deeper access to the reality of the wind. The critic I.A. Richards brought to the discussion of metaphor the terms tenor (the subject whose attributes are being described, in this case, the wind), vehicle (that whose attributes are being borrowed, in this case, the tent), and ground (that which the two have in common, such as here, their shape, for instance, and their existence in the open air). The most successful literary metaphors are those which combine the delight of unexpectedness with a feeling of aptness. With this metaphor, the surprise involves the weight of the hills and the lightness (though hugeness) of the tent. Metaphors reverberate and can be hard to translate into other words. They will be interpreted differently by each of us, as we participate actively, bringing ourselves to the poem. They are enhanced by their place in the poem’s entirety. Here, the poem’s tautness, its rhythmic push and pull, combine with the poem’s metaphoric richness to enact the strength of the wind.

Extending the Metaphor

Simile is a form of metaphor which keeps the comparative words ‘as’ or ‘like’, but can nevertheless be extremely potent. In Vicki Feaver’s ‘Ironing’ (see page 9) the household task is transformed:

my iron flying over sheets and towelslike a sledge chased by wolves over snow... the sheath frayed, exposingwires like nerves. I stood like a horse with a smoking hoof.

A reader might well have a sense of recognition, of ‘yes, that’s it’, the iron swift and smooth as a sledge over clean white sheets and towels, the wires frighteningly like a part of us not normally exposed, and then the power, the animation and the danger conveyed by the giant (iron-sized) ‘smoking hoof’. The images are ingenious, but they move beyond cleverness to become emblematic of fury, partly fury at the burden of what was once accepted as women’s work. They culminate in the poet’s explosive

I’d have commandeered a crane

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if I could, got the welders at Jarrowto heat me an iron the size of a tugto flatten the house.

Ironing has become an extended metaphor for a psychological state across a passage of time. There’s the resistance: ‘Then for years I ironed nothing’, ‘I converted to crumpledness’, but then the choosing to iron again, this time with pleasure and a feeling of greater freedom

breathing the sweet-heated smellhot metal draws from newly-washedcloth

The Poem as Metaphor

At one important level, every poem is in itself a metaphor, resonating beyond itself, gleaming on the edge of our consciousness. The poet Hugo Williams has written:Given that poems themselves are metaphors, I find overt metaphors more and more embarrassing in poems.His poems are deceptively plain-spoken. Here is ‘Lights Out’ complete:

Lights Out

We’re allowed to talk for ten minutesabout what has happened during the daythen we have to go to sleep.It doesn’t matter what we dream about.

It is clear that the poem itself could serve as a metaphor for an experience of boarding school life, its restrictedness, the militaristic control, even of sleep. The incisive last line reveals the one domain of freedom, plus the school’s belittling of dreaming. It might leave us to wonder at the influence the school might actually have on the boarders’ dreams. The title, all the more prominent in such a short poem, carries emotional weight, and suggests a spiritual as well as an actual ‘lights out’.

‘Circus Pony’ – Overt Layering

In contrast Heidi Williamson’s first collection contains the subtle ‘Circus Pony’ (see page 9), a poem which demonstrates what overt metaphoric layering can achieve. The poem begins with a mother’s childhood relationship with a horse:

Each evening after school you metlike lovers.She found security in the daily encounterher heavy eyes and warm saluting breathbecame your fireside

She ‘dreamed’ the pony in the circus spotlight and finally leaping ‘away from the crowds, the beatings’. In a parallel flight, this child, grown older, runs away for her own safety:

and when you ran away at last,20

north to the gleaming Fens,you took a husband and a newbornto be safe.

The pattern is repeated when, as a mother, she takes her daughter to the fence to look at the circus ponies. In a final twist the mother ‘becomes’ the pony, and is, once again, ‘patient, headstrong, poised to bolt.’ The mother’s flight from her original family is, it is hinted, to be repeated in her desertion of her new family, the circularity of the poem echoing the roundness of the circus ring.

Visionary Metaphor

Metaphor is taken to glittering visionary height in the work of Peter Redgrove, one of poetry’s supreme alchemists. In one of his best known poems ‘The Visible Baby’ (see page 9) he captures the sheer wonder of a new baby to its parent via a catalogue of exuberant similes. The baby is transparent, and the revelations, amounting to a visual and sensual feast, include:

I can see his little lungs breathing like pink parks of treesHis heart like two squirrels one scarlet, one purpleMating in the canopy of a blood-tree.

The father, meanwhile, is impenetrable, ancient, finalised: ‘a closed book bound in wrinkled illustrations’. The images are organic, as well as jewel-like, the poem informed by Redgrove’s background in the Natural Sciences. The baby is a dazzling life-force. The repetitions and their cadences: ‘I can see’ ‘I can see’... ‘His eyes’, ‘His tongue’ ‘His heart’... enhance the sense of rapture and plenitude.

We might note here that the concept of tenor and vehicle seems to dissolve. In ‘The Visible Baby’ Redgrove’s vehicles are in the foreground and almost steal the show. The spine, for instance, is likened to ‘a necklace, all silvery strung with cartilages’, the necklace magical in its own right. Comparably, in Pascale Petit’s collection The Zoo Father which features a daughter’s traumatic relationship with a dying, formerly abusive father, images from the Amazonian jungle, such as those of fire ants, hummingbirds and jaguars, ward off, as well as transform, the father. They are central to the poet’s imaginative world.

Beyond Language

Metaphor in poetry has a binding quality, establishing as inseparable the familiar and the strange. Like the work of our dreams, it seeks wholeness, while retaining mystery, and we marvel at it. It seeks to ‘translate’ a world that often seems elusive, but has, nevertheless a kind of unity. At the heart of poetry, metaphor is language extending itself, bringing something new into being. It is language reaching beyond language, brushing against the inexpressible.

Ironing

I used to iron everything;my iron flying over sheets and towelslike a sledge chased by wolves over snow,

the flex twisting and crinklinguntil the sheath frayed, exposingwires like nerves. I stood like a horse

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with a smoking hoofinviting anyone who daredto lie on my silver padded board,

to be pressed to the thinnessof dolls cut from paper.I’d have commandeered a crane

if I could, got the welders at Jarrowto heat me an iron the size of a tugto flatten the house.

Then for years I ironed nothing.I put the iron in a high cupboard.I converted to crumpledness.

And now I iron again: shakingdark spots of water onto wrinkledsilk, nosing into sleeves, round

buttons, breathing the sweet heated smellhot metal draws from newly-washedcloth, until my blouse dries

to a shining, creaseless blue,an airy shape with room to pushmy arms, breasts, lungs, heart into.

Vicki Feaver

Circus pony

Each evening after school you metlike lovers. You angled offeringsthrough the tired wire fence –she accepted as the air accepts.Among the traffic fumes and concrete,her heavy eyes and warm saluting breathbecame your fireside.

Every night you dreamed herin the spotlight, all small girlscarried on her back, prettilytramping the ring, high-kickingover flames to gasps and applauseand for a finale leaping into darkness,away from the crowds, the beatings.

And when you ran away at last,north to the gleaming Fens,you took a husband and a newbornto be safe. Routines followed. Years

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lost like old flames. Chosenand not chosen became pathways.Fences were your tightrope.

And when the circus came,you took your daughter to the fenceto see the ponies waiting – wantingher to sense that you had stooddaily by a tired wire fence,calming the soft nose of a pony,patient, headstrong, poised to bolt.

Heidi Williamson

The Visible Baby

A large transparent baby like a skeleton in a red tree,Like a little skeleton in the root-let pattern;He is not of glass, this baby, his flesh is see-through,Otherwise he is quite the same as any other baby.

I can see the white caterpillar of his milk looping through him,I can see his little lungs breathing like pink parks of trees,I can see his little brain in its glass case like a budding rose;

There are his teeth in his transparent gums like a budding hawthorn twig,His eyes like open poppies follow the light,His tongue is like a crest of his thumping blood,His heart like two squirrels one scarlet, one purpleMating in the canopy of a blood-tree;

His spine like a necklace, all silvery strung with cartilages,His handbones are like a working party of white insects,His nerves like a tree of ice with sunlight shooting through it,

What a closed book bound in wrinkled illustrations his father is to him!

Peter RedgroveWith thanks to Bloodaxe Books, Random House and David Higham Ltd for permission to reproduce the poems:

Heidi Williamson Electric Shadow (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) Vicki Feaver The Handless Maiden (Jonathan Cape, 2009)Peter Redgrove Selected Poems (Cape 1999)

Moniza Alvi is a poet.

References

Williams, Hugo. ‘Leaping Versus Blabbing’ in Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry edited by Herbert, W.N. & Matthew Hollis, 2000. Bloodaxe Books.Hughes, T., 1982. Selected Poems 1957-1981. Faber.

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Feaver, V., 1994. The Handless Maiden. Cape.Williams, H., 1994. Dock Leaves. Faber & Faber.Williamson, H., 2011. Electric Shadow. Bloodaxe Books.Redgrove, P., 1999. Selected Poems. Cape.Petit, P., 2001. The Zoo Father. Seren.

Further Reading

Punter, D., 2007. Metaphor. Routledge.

This article was first published in emagazine 58, December 2012.

All shapes and sizes – form in poetry

Poet Moniza Alvi looks at the ways poets make decisions about the shape of poems, using her own writing and that of other contemporary poets as examples.

Poems – all shapes and sizes. Think of them as animals – we enjoy their diversity, relish their strangeness. Perhaps some appear well-behaved, but they are different when you get to know them. Some move with slow deliberation, others are terrific at leaping. Suppose poems are like landscapes – some give open vistas, while others are densely forested, packed with words. Or they may resemble building blocks, or small, neat postage stamps. Poetry can be affected by the time, or even the materials available, as when the American William Carlos Williams, who worked as a doctor, sometimes scribbled first drafts on his prescription pad. As well as giving a voice to a thought or experience, the poet also gives it a shape, and this shape is an integral part of the poem. It creates a first impression and can attract us, it influences how a poem sounds in the head or when read aloud, and it can affect how we read a poem for meaning.So-called ‘free verse’ is a form in itself and for this reason many poets refer to it as ‘open’ form, as opposed to the fixed form of, for instance, the traditional sonnet. Open form could be said to follow the irregular patterns of the speaking voice. It can be particularly suited to the kind of poetry which takes its power from the poet’s imaginative leaps. Robert Bly, in an interesting book Leaping Poetry (1972) explores how, in his view, the finest poems are those which make the greatest leaps and the richest associations between our conscious ‘known’ world and the unconscious world which we all have and which is at work in our dreams. Bly gives examples of this ‘leaping’, often through ‘free verse’ translations of European poets. Here, for instance, is the beginning of ‘Monologue With Its Wife’ by the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. The poem is striking in its associative leaps – cabinet ministers, North Sea, comets, telegrams …

Take two extra old cabinet ministers and overtake them

on the North Sea

Provide each of them with a comet in the rear

Seven comets each!

Send a wire:

If the city of Trondheim takes them in it will be bombed

If the suet field allows them to escape it will be

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bombed …

At the start of this century some poets writing in English found that working within a formal verse framework, seeking rhymes and half-rhymes, for instance, actually helped to free up the imagination, while for others imaginative leaps are curtailed by a fixed form. What’s important, though, is that the poem and the form are one, so the writing doesn’t appear to have been forced into a particular mould. Sujata Bhatt spent her early years in India, was educated in the USA and now lives in Germany. She is one of the most cosmopolitan of contemporary poets. She often chooses to write in a cadenced open form [using the rising and falling rhythm of speech and especially that of balanced phrases] which suits her restless, untrammelled imagination and allows the vibrant images in her poems to breathe. The irregular indentation of lines in, for example, ‘The Peacock’, suggests the movement of the bird, the lines themselves following a darting motion, and recreating the incident in the present:

His loud sharp call

seems to come from nowhere.

Then, a flash of turquoise

in the pipal tree.

The slender neck arched away from you

as he descends

Each image is imprinted separately on the mind and given a moment to exist. It is interesting to imagine the same poem arranged differently with stanzas of regular length and to consider what would be lost in terms of the vivacity and idiosyncrasy of the poem. Try the first line as the unbroken ‘His loud sharp call seems to come from nowhere.’ We would lose the sense of the reader being able to hear the call because the sound of it would seem muffled by the end of the sentence, and the line would trail away rather limply.In the second stanza of ‘The Peacock’ the isolating of ‘I was told’ puts emphasis on the idea of a story, and briefly allows us to fantasise a circumstance of the telling. What might be described as broken off ends of lines such as, ‘and read a book’, ‘with great concentration’ are given prominence by their placing, so that the reader ‘concentrates’ on the images. One could say that Sujata Bhatt’s poetry encapsulates an intense moment-by-moment concentration.

I was told

that you have to sit in the veranda

and read a book,

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preferably one of your favourites

with great concentration.

The moment you begin to live

inside the book

a blue shadow will fall over you.

The wind will change direction,

and the steady hum of bees

in the bushes nearby

will stop.

The cat will awaken and stretch.

Something has broken your attention;

and if you look up in time

you might see the peacock

turning away as he gathers his tail

to shut those dark glowing eyes,

violet fringed with golden amber.

It is the tail that has to blink

• for eyes that are always open.

Some poets, particularly those who are concerned with narrative, compose in long, dense blocks. For the American Sharon Olds this form suits her relentless, highly charged writing. She begins a poem on the death of a first lover intensely:

It was Sunday morning, I had the New York

Times spread out on my dormitory floor, its

black print coming off dark silver on the

heels of my palms, it was spring and I had the

dormer window of my room open, to

let it in, I even had the radio

on, I was letting it all in, the

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tiny silvery radio voices–

(First Love)

The poet breaks only for an indented line, then ends this tour de force with the paradoxical ‘the pain kept coursing through me like/life, like the gift of life.’ Her practice of ending a line with ‘the’ has the effect of pushing the reader to the first word of the next line. This, plus the sentence length and the repetitions, propel the reader through the poem. Contemporary American poems often appear longer and baggier than British poems. Cultural factors in the broadest sense influence the shape and size of poetry particular to a country or tradition. The American poet Wallace Stevens wrote intriguingly ‘Nothing could be more inappropriate to American Literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.’Stanzas of regular length often contain within them a kind of ‘free verse’. My poem, ‘The Suits’, inspired by the smart clothes my father and his Indian and Pakistani friends wore as immigrants to England, is written in unrhymed couplets.The final form was not entirely a conscious decision – rather like a photograph waiting to be developed, the poem often seems to be inside, waiting for release, and just as the right words are there somewhere (although they may not be easy to access), so is the shape of the poem. By the second draft ‘The Suits’ seemed to fall naturally into its couplet form. Perhaps the long lines seemed to fit the idea of walking and the journey through life and its difficulties, particularly the racial difficulties which are evident in the last few lines: ‘This was before Go back home! Their suits of armour/could have stood up without them. Walked on and on.’Consciously, I wanted to give space to the different images, and the place names mentioned so that the poem wouldn’t seem too cluttered. The division into stanzas provides more white space, more air, and can help to achieve this. There is one line ‘left over’ at the end of ‘The Suits’, which perhaps gives the impression of people walking forward on their own, somewhat unprotected! Via the couplets I may have wanted to give an outward order to the conflict suggested in the poem, just as the suits may have given the newcomers a feeling of being in control. After the opening two lines of the poem, sentences run on from one couplet to the next in an attempt to draw the different experiences and observations together and to create tensions and even small surprises within the poem.

The Suits My father's forties' suit he bought when he first came to England,pin-striped with broad lapels, comfortingly chocolate, but crisp.He and his Pakistani friends and their we-have-arrived suits.In a black-and-white snap, Dad sits on the grass at a rural crossroads,his head in his hands, signs pointing in all directions: Digswell, Welwyn,Tewin Wood… Even here, deep in the countryside, he’s wearinghis suit. He’s handsome as a doctor, our neighbour said.My father and his friends, marvelled at wherever they went, orderinga sandwich at the Comet Hotel, or shopping on the Barnet by-pass,This was before Go back home! Their suits of armour could have stood up without them. Walked on and on.

As we read poetry and listen to its cadences as well as we can, we internalise some of its shapes and patterns, and are able to make our own. We can also be aware of the origins of poetry in an oral tradition, listen to everyday speech, to songs, and to the sounds and rhythms of our daily lives, even to our own heartbeat. Visually, we can be aware of the page as a space in the way that the artist is aware of the canvas. The blank page is the poet’s playground, intimidating sometimes, but open to many possibilities.Moniza Alvi has published four collections of poetry, The Country at my Shoulder, A Bowl of Warm Air, Carrying My Wife and Souls.‘The Peacock’ by Sujata Bhatt is reprinted by kind permission of Carcanet Press Limited.

This article first appeared in emagazine 21, September 2003

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