(See the list of winners here.)

Alison Luterman’s five books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, In the Time of Great Fires, and Hard Listening. She also writes plays, song lyrics, and personal essays. She has taught at New College, The Writing Salon, Catamaran, Esalen, and Omega Institutes, and writing workshops around the country, as well as working as a California poet in the schools for many years.

Here’s her winning non-rhyming poem, “Charring Lemons.”

Charring Lemons

by Alison Luterman

February, and those fat yellow

knobby-nippled grenades

are dropping from everyone’s backyard tree,

to be kicked around like little hockey pucks,

or left to rot in tall grass.

One neighbor fills a cardboard box

with precious Meyers and sets it,

as an offering, on the sidewalk.

Another leaves a bag on my doorstep–

Take, take, m’ija, my tree is bursting!

And I remember walking

in the Berkeley hills decades ago

with my first husband who was not yet

my husband, gaping at all the front lawns.

Look, a lemon tree! Another one!

Fresh out of Boston, naive as a new puppy.

Everything in this golden state

was a wonder to me, not least

the boy-man on my arm

with his black curls and high-wire heart.

What did I know then of fire and flood,

mudslides or earthquakes?

Oh, to be twenty-five and free

from even the thought of disaster,

to be so simply dazzled by a tree

heavy with fruit in the heart of winter!

That was our first year together,

when everything was still possible.

Before the marriage collapsed

under our feet like a beautiful building

not built to code. Well now he’s dead

and I’m old, and standing over a hot skillet,

charring lemons—a trick I learned

on the Internet—blackening them just enough

to bring out the hidden sugars.

Hold anything over the fire

for a few minutes or a lifetime

and it turns into smoke.

Get recognized for your writing. Find out more about the Writer’s Digest family of writing competitions.

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Many of our earliest known stories were epic poems like the Epic of Gilgamesh, Odyssey, Shahnameh, and Beowulf. Many of these poem-stories have shaped countless other stories, regardless of genre or format, that came afterward. But poems don’t have to go big to tell stories. Some of the first stories I remember as a kid were simple nursery rhymes like “Jack and Jill”: 

Jack and Jill went up the hill 

To fetch a pail of water; 

Jack fell down and broke his crown 

And Jill came tumbling after. 

In four seven-syllable lines, children of all ages learn of the adventure of Jack and Jill upon a hill while running an errand. For thoughtful children like myself, there was also a lot of story left to wonder about: Did Jack survive breaking his crown? How did Jill fare from her tumble? Why were they fetching water? Was the water for themselves, their family, or some other party? Were there any witnesses? And so on. 

While there are many great prose stories for children and adults, I’m sure it won’t take you too long to remember several poems (and popular songs) that tell tales large and small. Recognizing that, you can write your own poetic stories. Here are a few storytelling elements to consider. 

In Medias Res

One of the stronger storytelling elements that lines up well with poetry—especially shorter poems—is to begin in medias res, which means starting the story somewhere in the middle of the plot as opposed to beginning when your characters wake up, brush their teeth, eat breakfast, et cetera. Instead, start with the action. A strong example of this is Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” which captures a scene and several lives (after leaving school) in fewer than 30 words.

Denouement

In prose fiction, the denouement is the part of the story where all the plot points are brought together and explained or resolved—unless there are threads left to be pulled in future stories. Sounds like fertile ground for a poem to me. Donald Hall’s “Adultery at Forty” strikes me as a good example of what this type of poem could be—examining the impact of an act while washing off in the shower afterward. 

Cliffhangers

Speaking of the end of stories, feel encouraged to leave readers hanging. Many of the best poems are collaborations between the poet and the reader, who fills the spaces the former fashions. Many of the most compelling love ballads live off the story of a lyricist who knows their love is real but is left unresolved. For an apocalyptic poem comprised of cliffhangers, read Franny Choi’s “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On.” 

Narratives

Regardless of point of view, narrative poetry is a perfect vehicle for storytelling. Look to Heather McHugh’s “What He Thought” (first person) and Jane Kenyon’s “Gettysburg: July 1, 1863” (third person) for two perspectives that capture compelling stories in fewer than 80 lines. That’s the kind of storytelling that sticks with a reader!

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Think Seasons

One great thing about seasonal poems is that they occur throughout the year. Another is that people tend to have strong emotional connections with each season. For many, spring may be about a reawakening of the natural world, though some may view it through the prism of insects and allergies. Autumn comes with bonfires and magic, summer promises heat and hangouts, and winter can be measured in cups of coffee and hot cocoa. 

Get Outside

Whether describing birds or trees, many poets have found that getting outside is the best way to get into writing cozy poems. As with the seasons, most writers and readers have developed strong emotional connections with the outside world. Capture the clip-clop of horse hooves, the distant rumble of a train, or even the kerplunk of a frog into water (for all my haiku fans out there). Even the frantic pace of city life has cozy potential when done well.

Stay Inside

Some people prefer to stay inside, which is just fine as far as cozy is concerned. After all, there are few things cozier than the crackle of a fire or the soft glow of candlelight—and don’t forget the companionship of a cat, dog, or other favored creature (is it possible to pen a cozy poem featuring a snake or tarantula?). The comfort of shelter is a real thing, especially when the storms are raging or snow is blowing outside. 

Find the Joy

Cozy poems don’t have to be filled with joy, but bringing the joy can make a poem cozy as heck. If I find myself smiling with delight while reading a poem, the chances are pretty good I consider it a cozy poem—and one I’d like to revisit and share with the people around me. There’s nothing wrong with exploring other emotions, but try mining for the poetic gems of humor, happiness, and hope to see how they shine in the light. 

Evoke Nostalgia

Dwelling on the past can be a dangerous emotional rabbit hole of anger and resentment, but it can also be fertile ground for funny anecdotes and enigmatic epiphanies. Remembering a friend from your youth or a special family ritual may recall a poem that writes itself. Even intense childhood fears or struggles may now provide paths to unexplored fields of meaningful poems—both for the readers and the poets who write them. 

Fall in Love

Of course, when all else fails, write a love poem, which may be the coziest poem there is. While the heat levels may be dialed back a bit, the emotions can still run strong and deep. And don’t forget not all love poems are romantic; some of the coziest love poems may be for friends, family members, mentors, and other loved ones.

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Leaps in Logic

Years ago, I stumbled upon a copy of Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry which looks at the leaps of logic made by poets from around the world. The gist is that many great poems involve quick leaps of thought and associations. (By the way, a great place to start your pursuit of world poetry is in The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris.) 

One example I love using involves my first memory, which involved seeing large blades of grass blocking a bright sun. It was only later that I realized those massive blades were actually my eyelashes. So, I could explain my earliest memory involved mistaking my eyelashes for blades of grass, or I could say, “i began as eyelashes blocking the sun / and my father was a digital clock,” as I began the title poem of my Solving the World’s Problems collection. 

When making leaps and associations in poetry, poets don’t explain their intentions or define their terms. They trust readers to have the imagination to leap along and, perhaps, make new leaps and associations of their own. 

Only in Dreams

One common rule of fiction is to avoid having the story be a dream. However, dream poetry is a great way to bring wonder to readers, because dreams make leaps of logic on the regular. Often, my dreams don’t make sense at all … but I still might try to tease out the meaning days or weeks later. 

For instance, I find my feet are floating a little off the floor. Then, my wife worries I might drift out the window and into the street, so she ties a rope around my waist. Nobody panics or seeks answers for why I’m suddenly gravity-averse; we just deal with the reality of the situation. 

Or I find myself alone in a house, my house, but not my current house (a previous house … that I then realize wasn’t my house, but a house I remember passing as a child). Only then, it occurs to me that the house is actually a barn. And I’m looking for someone. Or someone is looking for me. And there’s a car driving down the road that I should either flag down or from which I should hide. 

Both examples were real dreams I turned into poems. Keep a dream journal and see if you can resist writing your own wild poetry.

Get Young

Someone once said, “We are born poets.” And though many people are attributed with this phrase, the sentiment is true. We are all born with a mind that makes leaps of logic as it tries to figure out how everything works. The problem is we often replace poetry with reason as we age. 

My favorite example of this concept involves my stepson who, as a very young child, would take walks through his neighborhood which had a pool the HOA abandoned. Each time he passed the empty pool with its coat of white paint, he would refer to it as a marshmallow factory, because of course it produced marshmallows. That’s poetry! 

So, whether you’re making conscious leaps of logic, capturing dreams, or recapturing your young inner poet, I beseech you to seek your own marshmallow factories of wonder-filled poetry. 

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Nature poems include those written about birds, trees, waterways, insects, flowers, gardens, dirt, the moon, and so much more. Chances are pretty good that if you’ve read or written much poetry, you’ve interacted with a nature poem and seen it up close in its natural habitat. 

That said, since nature poems are so ubiquitous in the world of poetry, they’re easy to write in a way that’s been done and re-done before. This isn’t a bad thing, but here are five tips for writing nature poems that have been effective for others. 

Make Nature Human

In Paul Muldoon’s “Wind and Tree,” the poet compares the ways of trees to the ways of humans by describing how trees congregate together and hold and break each other. Then he shares how he’d like to be a single tree, so that the poem moves from being just an observation of nature to an observation of human nature. Another great example of this can be found in Alberto Ríos’ “Twenty Minutes in the Backyard,” which turns a normal backyard into a bustling city of action. 

Set the Scene

Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” does not happen without two things: woods and snow. But this nature poem, which also includes a lake, is not about the natural world; it’s about the poet having a moment of appreciation during his evening travels. Similarly, Louise Glück’s “The Pond” uses the pond as a setting for the poet to confess her thoughts to another.

Go Big

Williams Carlos Williams’ long poem Paterson was written to follow the course of the Passaic River, which runs through Paterson, N.J. Williams compared the life of the river to his own, citing the river above the Paterson Great Falls, the river below the falls, and its eventual exit to the sea (or Newark Bay)—and he used more than 200 pages to write about it. Of course, Walt Whitman also used nature as a mega-sized metaphor in his Leaves of Grass collection, which includes poems focused on the various aspects of natural and human nature. 

Get Small

While excess can be fun when writing nature poems, many poets find minimalism is preferable. Emily Dickinson wrote several nature poems—often in fewer than 10 lines—including “Who robbed the woods” and “My river runs to thee.” In fact, one of the most concise poetic forms is also a nature poem: the haiku! Many poets debate the number of lines and syllables (not everyone believes in 5-7-5), but every haiku poet agrees haiku should focus on a brief moment, provide a sense of enlightenment, and offer a cutting and season word. This brings us back to the old pond, Matsuo Bashō’s pond, which also features a frog and a sound (in a variety of translations). 

Use Poetic Forms

One more way to capture the majesty of nature in a poem is to fit it into a poetic form. The haiku is a good example, as well as the haibun. But other forms work as well, including Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “Hummingbird Abecedarian,” which uses each letter of the alphabet in order to start each line, and Elizabeth Bishop’s sestina “A Miracle for Breakfast,” which uses among its six alternating end words “river” and “sun.” Even Frost’s poem mentioned above was written using interlocking rubaiyat as the form. 

For an incredible list of poetic forms to try, visit WritersDigest.com/write-better-poetry/list-of-50-poetic-forms-for-poets. 

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Writing poems—drafts that will never see the light of day—has benefitted my mental health a great deal over the years. On the page of a journal or in a Google doc, I can rant, rave, praise, and confront all the emotions swirling within myself as they overtake me. There is nothing wrong with this; rather, everything is right with processing your emotions and excavating those feelings. But you don’t share a rough gem with the world; you cut it and polish it first. So, how do we write poems that touch others?

There are many ways to begin writing a poem: You could start with an image, or a bit of language that is sonically pleasing. But for the purposes of this exercise, we’re going to dive into emotion first—using examples of going from emotion to a bit of poetry.

Emotion #1: I’m in love.

How’s it feel? I feel so alive and can’t stop thinking about the person.

In my initial poetry journal, I might set off writing lines that explicitly say who I’m in love with and describe her various features and qualities and that I think about her on the bus, in meetings, and on walks. That’s all very interesting to me but nothing too poetic for others. So, I take the feeling I have and try to give it an image, something like the following:

I wait beside the tree
on the edge of the field
as cherry blossoms bloom
in the wild spring air
and her face in the clouds
asks me what I will do

While this is not an entire poem, this now gives me an image to use as a springboard into a poem. Or maybe this is how I end the poem, wondering what I will do. The main point is that I’ve gone from saying “I love (blank)” and listing features to showing how I feel.

Emotion #2: I’m depressed.

How’s it feel? I feel so empty inside.

Depression hits everyone in unique ways, and for me, it’s usually just this overwhelming force that feels like it won’t stop pushing down on me. And I can write that in my poetry journal, but it’s very abstract. So, after trying to find an image to describe this feeling, I might land on:

the river collects every fallen leaf
and carries them downstream to a new port
or maybe to be submerged in the cold,
murky water swirling over stone smoothed
by the relentless pressure of gallon
upon gallon of water, like worry,
always threatening to run past the bank

Again, this is not a finished poem, but it is a starting place of capturing that overwhelming, abstract feeling and giving it a form. From this spot, I can now add and subtract and continue the work of crafting a poem that will not only help me process my emotions but maybe touch someone else as well.

As an exercise, take an emotion you’re currently feeling or have recently felt and try finding an image that captures it. 

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However, poets don’t have to write epics to capture characters in their poems. In fact, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology collects the voices of more than 200 different characters, albeit dead characters. Nearly every poem in the collection is titled as the name of the narrator, who shares a bit about their life and death and the fictional town of Spoon River itself. These poems are epitaphs but also persona poems, which are written by poets taking on another person’s point of view.

Literature classes may debate whether all first-person poems should be treated as the actual poet (or a narrative persona representing the poet), but persona poems are blatantly supposed to be someone else. The persona could be someone famous but also someone more obscure or personal (for instance, I once wrote a persona poem in the imagined voice of my grandmother). A couple of great collections to find more contemporary examples of persona poems include Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, which includes persona poems for George W. Bush and Hurricane Katrina, and Julianna Baggott’s Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women’s Voices, which includes persona poems for Borden, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Monica Lewinsky.

Poets can write first-person poems about other characters without taking on their persona. In Zeina Hashem Beck’s “Message From My Aunt on Her Son’s Death Anniversary,” the narrator (possibly the poet) works through the possible reasons their aunt sent an orange emoticon, including whether it was accidental or with intention. In “The Carpenter Ant,” Terrance Hayes also writes a poem in which the narrator speaks of their aunt, this time using the aunt’s final behaviors in life to connect to the behaviors of the carpenter ant and the narrator’s own thoughts and desires.

Of course, we started with the epics, which were written in third person, and it’s definitely possible to write shorter third-person poems with characters. One of my all-time favorite poems, “Going Home,” by Wisława Szymborska as translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, is an 11-line masterpiece that explains everything about a nameless man’s life while putting him to bed. Another good example of a third-person character-based poem is Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” about two sisters and their interactions with goblins trying to sell them a variety of fruits. Donald Hall’s “The Man in the Dead Machine” is an interesting character-based poem, because the first two stanzas seem to be in third person about a deceased World War II pilot before a startling shift into a first-person persona poem for the final stanza (to imagine an alternate reality or fate for the man).

Write Your Own Character-Based Poems

Try your hand at writing character-based poems by choosing a subject (somebody famous or perhaps a local cashier or librarian). With your subject in mind, try all three of the following to see how each attempt is different:

• Write a persona poem, taking on your subject’s perspective and voice.
• Write a first-person poem about your subject in the narrator’s perspective and voice, which may or may not be your own.
• Write a third-person poem about your subject.

If you’re really feeling ambitious, you could even try your hand at writing the next great epic.

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As such, some may think it’s a fool’s errand to try to pin down ways to hook readers with poems. While I agree that poetry doesn’t easily conform to a formula (even with poetic forms), I also believe there are a few obvious and maybe less obvious places poets can “hook their readers.” There are surely many more, but here are five to get you started.

The Title

The title of a poem can serve many purposes, and for some poems, it is the first opportunity to hook a reader. For instance, these titles hooked me before I read the first line of each poem:

• “My Mother Dreams Another Country” by Natasha Trethewey
• “Us, Like a Bad Mix Tape” by Jillian Weise
• “Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats” by Kaveh Akbar
• “Don’t ride the mechanical bull” by Megan Volpert

Of course, a poem with a strong title still has to deliver an equally strong poem, but it could also be what draws a reader’s eye when scrolling through the table of contents of a collection or anthology.

First Line(s)

This may be the most obvious place poets think to hook their readers, and it’s true that a strong first line or stanza can get someone to read the entire poem. The opening of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” sucked me in from the first line, and like a catchy song lyric, they continue to roll around in my head at the most random (and maybe not-so-random) of times. As with a strong title, an incredible opening has to be supported by the rest of the poem, or there won’t be a reason to return to it. Consider your own favorite opening lines and think about what makes them so appealing to you.

Compelling Image

Many poems have hooked me over the years with a compelling image often juxtaposed with an interesting title. For instance, Donald Hall’s “Adultery at forty” is a three-liner focused on a drop of water. Patricia Fargnoli’s “The Undeniable Pressure of Existence” follows the image of a fox running through a developed area. In both examples, the poem only needed one compelling image, though it’s definitely possible to pack in more than one—as in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Ending a poem on a strong image can provoke readers to jump back to the beginning to figure out how they got there.

Strong Sounds

When I talk music with some people, they’re focused almost primarily on the meanings of song lyrics. Other folks focus on the sounds and really don’t know what the song is about—some even make up song lyrics that don’t actually exist. While I don’t think those extremes exist in poetry, there is a reason so many poetic forms use end rhymes and internal rhyme schemes. Sounds can definitely hook readers and meaning can bring them back for more. (Check out the September/October 2023 issue of Writer’s Digest for more on playing with poetic sound.)

Interesting Structure

Poetry is one of the few literary forms that can hook a reader with how it is presented on the page. Some poems are visually interesting before a single word is read because of how the lines and stanzas break, especially if they employ varying line lengths, indentations, and other structural experimentation. Such is the case with poems like Ocean Vuong’s “Aubade with Burning City” and Bob Hicok’s “A poem with a poem in its belly.”

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(How and Why to Write Poetry for Children.)

How does the first draft come about? One says she starts with an image. Another says she starts with language. Everyone is nodding in agreement. Yes, images and language. No one says she knows where the poem is going when she sits down to write it.

I imagine being led by language must feel like being gripped by the small hand of a child who never shows her face but tugs the poet hurriedly through the garden. Or perhaps the poet is alone, taking her time to amble past the shrubs, only to return and try another path by the river. Ultimately, she stumbles around a bend where a bed of orchids awaits. Ah, says the poet, that’s what I was looking for.

But I’m not sure. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that way. If writing is a garden, I’m more like my mother, who plotted the landscape on hand-drawn maps until she knew exactly where the lilies and rhododendrons would go. Only then, she planted.

I tend to romanticize the idea of the wandering poet because it’s how I’ve always been taught writing is supposed to feel. It feels like setting out into the garden without a map. Thus, there are certain tenets of the process poets hold dear, which are privileged above others: that you must allow yourself to be surprised, and that you must not know the answer before you start writing. Poem (not poet) as oracle.

Louise Glück says, when writing, “I feel like a tracker in the forest following a scent, tracking only step to step. … Of course, I have no idea what I’m tracking, only the conviction that I’ll know it when I see it.” Carl Phillips says the poem is “not a way of getting somewhere, but a record of having been lost.”

I was in eighth grade, eagerly taking my first-ever creative writing elective, when Robert Frost’s oft-quoted golden rule of writing found its way to me: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Frost’s lesson comes to us from 1939. It’s hung around that long in the annals of writing classes and in our magical way of thinking about the writing process. But this stipulation seemed to me, even as a young writer when I first heard it, a tall order, a threat.

In the world of fiction, there are plotters and pantsers. Plotters predetermine the general outline and course of the novel they’ll write. Pantsers, by contrast, fly by the seat of their pants. They might have an idea of the direction they’re headed, but they’re not sure how they’ll get there. Poets, as a breed, are encouraged to be pantsers.

Plotting out a poem ahead of time can feel antithetical to the act of making poetry itself. We’re meant to be free beasts, unbound by outline or plot device, ready to rove in any direction on a whim, bewitched by the sound of a word, an unexpected collision of images.

As Louise Glück said, “It’s not as though I have plot elements grafted onto the walls elaborating themselves.” But what if that’s exactly what you have?

Most of the time, the poem first appears in my mind as a shape. Not in a technical sense; I’m not talking about formal verse or structural elements like line, rhyme, meter, stanza. I’m talking about the shape of the argument. The parts arrive unassembled, like puzzle pieces tossed to the table. But I already know there are a finite number of pieces, maybe five or seven, and each piece could be an image, or a piece of language, or a question, or the volta, or closure, and I begin to visualize how they fit together to make the shape I first envisioned.

Check out Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s Exploding Head: Poems here:

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When I sit down to write, I start with a list of these ideas. Then I expand, riff, drag pieces around on the page until they settle into each other’s grooves. I know the finished puzzle is, for example, a horse galloping on the beach. I just have to put the pieces in the right place for the image to reveal itself. I’m not surprised by the horse; I knew at the outset what puzzle I was assembling.

Frank Bidart says, “Trying to make a poem, one measures the thing-that-is-struggling-into-existence against the containers that the world, the history of art offer it for existence.” Over the years of reading poems and essays and literature, I’ve internalized ways of gathering and ordering concepts, ways of asking questions and making arguments about the world, and those are my containers. The rhetorical argument in the poem is the hidden structure that lives inside the formal elements of poetry such as line and stanza.

There are many ways of making a poem. We may be in the minority, but I’m certainly not the only plotter in the poetry world. And the way of the plotter is not necessarily better. Charging forth headstrong down a predetermined route can be a struggle. If the only path to my destination is rained out, I will trudge through the mud as long as it takes. If I allow the language to bend away from my chosen path, I could write myself out of the poem I had intended to write. Sometimes, surprise can feel like failure.

I’ve been accused of impressing too much control upon my work. And they might be right. But I tend to value the poems I’ve written that say what I’d wanted to say, not those that say what the poem wanted to say. At times I have wandered on the page, allowing language to pull my ideas this way or that, arriving at the poem’s destination by having tripped over a rock hidden in the weeds. But I always end up feeling disconnected from those poems. The idea some external force (be it language or the muse) is exerting power over my thoughts feels entirely at odds with my intention to communicate. Some poets have the experience, every once in a while, of the received poem, which seems to arrive at the doorstep fully formed. I’ve experienced it myself. Those are the poems that feel easy to write by comparison. I rarely feel as if I’ve earned them.

It is the hard-won poems, the poems in which I set out to say something and successfully carved my path to that destination, that I can wholly claim as mine. I know this about myself and tend to write toward what feels whole. You might need to feel you’ve heard the call of language. I need to feel I’ve said my piece.

We’re all thinking about language and argument and structure and even surprise as we write. We’re just thinking about them in different orders, and that is what we call our “process.” Someone at the picnic table says process is the least interesting thing about writing poetry. But I find it endlessly fascinating to think about how differently our minds work and what we value in the ways we discover meaning in the world, and the ways we translate that meaning for readers.

Returning to Robert Frost. The problem with buying fully into his idea of “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” is that it assumes the experience of writer and reader are one and the same. It suggests we cannot create surprise for our readers without first having felt it ourselves, that intentionally crafted emotion is ingenuine, a trick. But if poets can borrow from the plotters of the fiction world, we know that’s not the case.

In the end, there’s no requirement that we experience a particular journey as we put the poem to the page. The only requirement is that we write.

________________________________________

Bidart, Frank. “Pre-Existing Forms: We Fill Them and When We Fill Them We Change Them and Are Changed.” pg. 619. (www.keble.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/TPE-Seminar-5.pdf)

Frost, Robert. “The Figure a Poem Makes.” Collected Poems. 1939.

Glück, Louise. “Internal Tapestries,” interview William Giraldi. Poets & Writers Magazine. September/October 2014. (https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53de9ddce4b0536a4957b6dc/t/544a4046e4b07f6735262b9e/1414152262664/gluck.pdf)

Phillips, Carl. “What We Are Carrying: Meditations on a Writing Practice,” excerpt from My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations From a Life in Writing. 2022, Yale University Press. Poets & Writers Magazine, November/December 2022. (https://www.pw.org/content/guided_by_surprise)

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There is a hornet in the room

and one of us will have to go

out the window into the late

August midafternoon sun. I

won. There is a certain challenge

in being humane to hornets

but not much.

(10 Irish Poetic Forms)

If “Buried at Springs” sallies from humor to naturalism to symbolism and, finally, to elegy, it’s these first seven lines that lend the poem its tension and introduce the electrical impulse for which the rest of the lines are charged. At its surface, there may be nothing consequential about a hornet in the “late August midafternoon sun,” but I also challenge any writer to come up with a better opening line with which to launch a tribute. By introducing this battle—a banal one no less—Schuyler is introducing the lens through which we follow the poem to its eventual end. This is not just a poetic tribute; this is a poem about someone trying to write a poetic tribute if only to be creatively stymied by that which stings. Call it pride, call it grief, call it a hornet.

Writers are often creating tension in their poems even if they’re seldom acknowledging it. In “Sharks in the Rivers,” the blissfully simplistic Ada Limón writes, “We’ll say unbelievable things / to each other in the early morning—/ our blue coming out from our roots / our water rising in our extraordinary limbs,” for which the reader must ask: What are these things? And why are they unbelievable? Why in the early morning?

When first reading Limón’s poem, one might confuse its lines tension for vagueness and decry the opening for being purposefully opaque; but in a poem that litigates symbolism (engulfs it in flames, really), the juxtaposition of the unclear first couplet with the symbolism of the second lends the poem its unusual symmetry: unclarity responded to by symbolic naturalism, and so on goes the pattern. This is the hidden structure of tension.

In my workshop, I asked my students to attempt their own tension-filled lines. Let me pause to say that this was the first workshop I’d ever taught, and on Zoom no less. So, my belief that this experiment would fail, and quite gravely, was by no means a reflection of the students (who ranged in age from twenty to eighty-seven) but of my own nascent teaching. Here is the exercise:

The writer thinks of an action, such as:

The dog jumped over the moon

Then, the writer thinks of a setting:

In Queens, New York

And finally, the writer thinks of a secondary action that draws tension from the first:

And the neighbors went stir-crazy

The fuzziness, or fussiness, of the third part, is the golden key to this exercise. The objective here is to allow the third line to act as an independent clause that may or may not relate to the first. If it relates, it should draw, as the poet Charles Olson once said, “the heart, by way of the breath, to the line.” If it is separate and unrelated, it should breathe life into the lines and stanza that will follow, thereby creating separate and unique energy that allows the writer (and reader) to make an illogical but no less profound connection between the two actions. The setting in this exercise is merely a bluff, a way of establishing concreteness or stickiness where none lies.

Then we jumble. Syntax, enjambment, word choice. It might look like this:

The dog jumped over

the moon in Queens

New York, the neighbors go*

stir crazy

*Note: I substituted go for went to make the line more active

or like this:

The dog jumped over the moon

in Queens

                     the neighbors go

stir-crazy

The exercise, in short, is written as this:

Action + Setting + Opposing Action/Tension = Surprise

Luckily (for me), the exercise worked, and students found new ways into and out of their poems. I stress the phrase out of because, sometimes, what a poem needs most is to find an exit strategy, an excuse to desert its conventions and logic it’s beholden to and unleash, as Olson, said “an energy-discharge.” Often, though not always, this relies on not consecrating the idea of where the poem came from but trusting where the poem wants to go. If a mirror were to be held up to the poem, the poem should not see its artificial construction but something else entirely: a passing glance of the person it wishes to be. 

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