How Poems Get Made

by James Longenbach

  It was an Abyssinian maid,

  And on her dulcimer she played,

  Singing of Mount Abora.

  Could I revive within me

  Her symphony and song,

  To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

  That with music loud and long,

  I would build that dome in air,

  That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

  Here, when Coleridge shifts abruptly from the account of Khan’s story in the past tense (“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree”) to this first-person account of an apparently unrelated narrative (“A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision once I saw”), the simple past gives way first to the subjunctive—

  Could I revive within me

  Her symphony and song

  —then to the conditional.

  I would build that dome in air,

  That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

  Anyone privy to this poetic act of creation would cry “Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair,” the pronoun now referring not to the magisterial Khan but to the maker of the poem, the conditional giving way to the present imperative—

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread

  —before reverting to the past.

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  Coleridge figures his poem as a making of something out of next-to-nothing, honey-dew transfigured into language, but the figure itself is extruded from the poem’s struggle to make something out of something, thereby making us feel intimate with the act of making: could the poet reanimate the song of the damsel, he would translate his vision of the pleasure dome into the language of the very poem we’re reading now.

  Infamously, Coleridge maintained that “a person on business from Porlock” interrupted the writing of “Kubla Khan,” causing the poem to remain unfinished; the language of social interaction invaded the private space of lyric reverie. But the poem suggests that the construction of that space depends on social interaction: the poet’s reverie is contingent upon his recollection of the damsel’s song, and, more precisely, as Coleridge’s deployment of borrowed language insists, the poem itself is forged from the linguistic medium shared by dreaming poets and persons from Porlock alike. The vision of the damsel with a dulcimer interrupts the story of what happened in Xanadu, and the resulting shifts in the tense and mood of the poem’s verbs direct our attention to the act of articulating what happened, the act of coming to know, which in a lyric poem is always happening now.

  From the beginning of this book, I’ve emphasized the importance of such shifting. Our experience of a lyric is determined not simply by its diction, syntax, figuration, or rhythm, but by the way the poem orders its movement between Latinate and Germanic diction—

  than the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange

  for hemp,

  rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber and fur

  —or between paratactic and hypotactic syntax—

  Take you a course, get you a place,

  Observe his honour, or his grace,

  Or the King’s real, or his stamped face

  Contemplate, what you will, approve,

  So you will let me love

  —or between discontinuous figures—

  A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,

  The portent wound in corridors of shells

  —or between regular and irregular rhythms—

  Though the night was made for loving,

  And the day returns too soon,

  Yet we’ll go no more a roving

  By the light of the moon

  —or between varying densities of echo.

  And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves

  Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard

  I’ve also shown that even a poem synchronizing its repetitions of diction, syntax, figure, rhythm, and echo may nonetheless feel like an unstable act of becoming, one thing following another in a way that feels simultaneously unpredictable and inevitable; I’ve shown how this seductively erratic movement of language may cause us to reach for the metaphors of poetic voice or tone. The lyric poem offers not extractable knowledge but what feels like an act of thinking that transpires in the time it takes to read the poem. I say what feels like an act of thinking because, as the word immediacy reminds us, that act is produced through a poet’s devotedly meticulous relationship with the medium; we have no access to the poet’s mind. If we did, we wouldn’t feel compelled to read poems, much less read them again. We would experience our pleasure immediately, without the intervention of a medium.

  Any reader who takes pleasure in poems also knows what it feels like to be left cold, just as every poet knows how it feels to fail. Especially when we’re in love, repetition may threaten to degenerate from rapture to routine; the feelings we point to with a word like rapture wouldn’t feel authentic if they weren’t so poignantly contingent, and, as Freud suggests repeatedly, the adult psyche may fall too easily into an unproductive repetition of what matters to it most. This is why poets, like lovers, must continually reanimate ways of doing the same thing over again, no matter how enduring the achievement of previous poems. My initial question—how did poetry in English begin?—is asked by every new poem forged from the medium. Every poet is a beginner. All poets are Cædmon.

  “I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,” laments Elizabeth Bishop in “At the Fishhouses,” the water swinging icily “above the stones and then the world”—as if the stultifying sameness of the water were a psychic condition that could swallow us, turning us all into stones. But then Bishop finds a way not to transform the dark water (that’s after all not possible) but to transform the repeated experience of it, so that the water no longer functions as a mirror for misery: rather than dipping her hand into the water, rather than tasting it, she wonders what such experience of water would be like—she makes a metaphor.

  It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

  dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

  drawn from the cold hard mouth

  of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

  forever, flowing and drawn, and since

  our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

  What does it mean to say that knowledge is free but forever derived? How could knowledge be flowing, happening in the moment of its discovery, but at the same time flown, always having existed prior to the moment of discovery, waiting to happen again? Every lyric poem answers these questions, not with what it says but with its transformative act of saying. This knowledge, lyric knowledge, comes to us in language that is flowing because it has flown.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The shape of this book first became clear to me about ten years ago, and over the past decade, I’ve formulated versions of its observations in a variety of essays and reviews. I’m grateful to the editors of the following magazines and books for permission to repurpose sentences and paragraphs that first appeared in their pages: The Nation, Poetry, Raritan, The Yale Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and John Donne in Context.

  Friends, colleagues, and students at the University of Rochester, the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Bogliasco Foundation have been equally supportive, and for various kinds of insight and advice I’m especially indebted to Debra Allbery, Matthew Bailey-Shea, Michael Collier, Jeff Dolven, Morris Eaves, Deborah Fox, Louise Glück, Jennifer Grotz, Thomas Hahn, Sally Keith, John Palattella, Donald Revell, Martha Rhodes, Michael Schoenfeldt, Susan Uselmann, and Ellen Bryant Voigt.

  Matthew Bevis, Kenneth Gross, Langdon Hammer, and Russ McDonald read drafts of the entire book, offering crucial suggestions. Joanna Scott, my first reader, my last reader, participated in the making of every one of its sentences. I finish this book with a lifetime’s worth of gratitude and love.

  FURTHER READING

&
nbsp; Diction

  The most engaging history of the English language that I know is Seth Lerer’s recent Inventing English; a more systematic account may be found in Albert Baugh’s venerable A History of the English Language. In contrast to the more thesis-driven work of Owen Barfield or Donald Davie, Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry contains brief but provocative descriptions of the inevitably mongrel nature of English diction; Marie Borroff’s Language and the Poet offers focused accounts of that diction in modern poems. The ways in which translation highlights questions of English diction are explored in John Hollander’s “Versions, Interpretations, and Performances.”

  Syntax

  While there exist many guides to English grammar and syntax, Charles Fries’s The Structure of English is refreshingly descriptive, eschewing all jargon. With some degree of polemical fervor, the mid-twentieth-century poet-critics William Empson and Donald Davie, along with critic William Baker, pushed syntax to the forefront of our thinking about poems: a poet writing today will want to begin with Ellen Bryant Voigt’s indispensable The Art of Syntax. Inasmuch as the effect of a poem’s lineation cannot be described without attention to a poem’s syntax, my own The Art of the Poetic Line may also be helpful.

  Voice

  Building on influential remarks by modern poets (especially T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost), Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s influential teaching anthology, Understanding Poetry, made “voice” an almost inevitable aspect of the analysis of English-language poetry. A critique of this apparent inevitability may be found in Charles Bernstein’s “Writing and Method,” in Content’s Dream, and, more concertedly, in Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric. In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses Susan Stewart lays groundwork for a rehabilitation of the notion of poetic voice.

  Figure

  The novelist Christine Brooke-Rose’s A Grammar of Metaphor remains as dazzling as it seemed half a century ago. So does William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. Indispensable for thinking about the work of figuration in any human utterance is George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. And far more usefully wide-ranging than its modest title suggests, Stephen Booth’s An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets offers (among other things) instructively lucid accounts of the work of figuration in poems. More interested in the ways poets and critics have understood figuration is Denis Donoghue’s Metaphor.

  Rhythm

  While almost any handbook to English poetry will discuss rhythm and meter, even the best are often marred by polemic (free-verse poems are inferior to metered poems or vice versa) or by knee-jerk assumptions about form and content (free-verse poems are suspicious of order, metered poems embrace it). Wonderfully free of these myopias is Derek Attridge’s Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction; also Charles Hartman’s Free Verse. John Thompson’s The Founding of English Metre is, like Steven Booth’s book, far more wide-ranging in its implications than its title suggests. A good introduction to Old English prosody may be found in Donald Scragg’s “The Nature of Old English Verse.”

  Echo

  Hugh Kenner’s “Rhyme: An Unfinished Monograph” offers surprising observations about the species of echo we call rhyme, as does Susan Stewart’s The Poet’s Freedom; Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry is especially good at describing rhyme as one of many ways in which words may sound like one another. John Hollander’s The Figure of Echo explores both physical and metaphorical versions of echo. And probably no one is better at describing the way poems echo other poems than Christopher Ricks. On nonsense, see Stewart’s Nonsense.

  Image

  Like our conceptions of the poetic voice, our commonplace notions of the poetic image congealed around a variety of influential remarks made by modern poets, especially Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Witheringly critical of those notions is William Empson’s “Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry,” in Argufying, and P. N. Furbank’s Reflections on the Word “Image”; one needn’t agree with their critiques to benefit from their analyses. More recent considerations of the relationship of visual, verbal, and mental images may be found in W.T.J. Mitchell’s Iconology and Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book.

  Repetition

  Unless it’s Plato or St. Augustine, the place where all ladders start must be either Sigmund Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” or Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition, both of which make insight feel like drama. Gertrude Stein’s “Portraits and Repetition,” in Lectures in America, is highly provocative, as is Elizabeth Margulis’s On Repeat, though it underestimates the power of repetition in poems. More to the point is John Hollander’s “Breaking into Song: Some Notes on Refrain,” in Melodious Guile. In A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms Richard Lanham describes the various schemes of repetition (anaphora, chiasmus, etc.) named by ancient rhetoricians.

  Song

  While many poets have written about the “music” of poetry (perhaps most famously T. S. Eliot), few have anything pertinent to say about music as such, consequently muddying our sense of what the “music” of poetry might be. In contrast, James Winn’s Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music describes music as intimately as it describes poems, as does Elise Jorgens’s The Well-Tun’d Word: Musical Interpretations of English Poetry, 1597–1651. Throughout the brilliant Counter-Statement, Kenneth Burke’s dynamically temporal sense of poetic form is derived from his experience as a musician.

  Tone

  The most approachable discussion of tone in the linguistic sense is, in my experience, Paul Tench’s The Intonation Systems of English. In “Intonation and the Conventions of Free Verse” Natalie Gerber adapts the terms of linguistics to a supple discussion of tone in free-verse poems. Less technical but bracingly clarifying is Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “On Tone,” in The Flexible Lyric, which is equally good at diagnosing the problems with earlier discussions of poetic tone and at laying the groundwork for a truly meaningful discussion.

  Prose

  Wallace Stevens called Ernest Hemingway “the most significant of living poets.” John Donne’s or Marianne Moore’s prose would command our attention if they had written no poems. Recalling Pound’s famous remark that poetry ought to be at least as well written as prose, Lee Mitchell proposes in Mere Reading that novels ought to be read at least as closely as poems; still dazzling in its fulfillment of this ambition is Ian Watt’s “The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors.” Once disruptive of poetic expectations, the now canonical prose-poem may be surveyed in David Lehman’s English-language anthology, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present.

  Poetry

  In recent years, there has been among academic literary critics a renewed interest in the way we conceive of the lyric poem; Jonathan Culler’s learned yet highly readable Theory of the Lyric feels like the culmination of this work. However revisionary, it stands on a body of venerable thinking about the lyric by Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, R. P. Blackmur, and many others, not to mention the influential poet-critics, past and present, whose work I’ve already suggested.

  Instructive as this work remains, there is of course no substitute for simply reading poems, which teach us how to read and write poems more efficiently than any work of criticism, including this one. If Wallace Stevens helps you to think about syntax, read Stevens. If Shakespeare helps you to think about figuration, read Shakespeare. “Nor is there singing school,” said W. B. Yeats, “but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence.”

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