At the outset of this primer, I proposed that an awareness of disorder and randomness and a need for order are two central human attributes. I further claimed that for us as poets the basic strategy is to turn our disorder (be it joy or despair) into words, at which point poetry steps forward with ordering principles to aid us in dramatizing this interaction of disorder and order. I intentionally ended Part One with the notion of the threshold between disorder and order and with the notion that the lyric invitation invites us as readers to identify with the poet and to follow his or her journey into the unknown that hovers at the threshold. But we are first of all poets or would-be poets. Suppose that, as poets, we have approached a personal threshold that is both exciting and perilous—how do we know we can handle the disorder we encounter there?
THE ORDER-MAKING POWER OF THE INDIVIDUAL IMAGINATION
Many of us, approaching our thresholds, fear that we will be incapable of finding the ordering response to the disorder and confusion we have let loose with our “permission.” How do we know that if we decide to become Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “maker of a sentence” who heads out “into Chaos and old Night,” we won’t get lost out there? After all, I encouraged you to revisit the more disturbing aspects of Chapter 1’s “I Remember” exercise—those memories that most clearly radiated the chaotic power of primal emotions for you.
It might be useful at this point to circle back to the Shakespeare passage we considered on here and look at it in terms of the concept of thresholds. With the infatuated lover and the madman, Shakespeare presented two types who are, in a sense, undergoing the peculiar power of their thresholds. The lover is too far back from his threshold: he doesn’t see the beloved in her variety and particularity, but as a cultural stereotype of beauty. It seems as if he is so far back inside his mind that he views his lover through a window shaped like the silhouette of Helen of Troy—an idealized cut-out that obscures the real shape of the beloved as a unique living body. By contrast, the madman is too far out past his threshold: he’s surrounded by chaos, by the demons that assail him from all sides. Only the poet stands confidently on his threshold, giving himself to neither ideal nor real, but to a third thing—bodied forth as language emanating from his imagination.
It’s fine for Shakespeare to talk boldly of the poet’s pen, but how do we know that we ourselves have the poet’s power to do that—to take in both unity and variety and form a third thing, a poem? There’s a simple exercise that demonstrates that each of us possesses an inherent ordering imagination of some authority, a power capable of creating the coherence we all seek in poems. I call it the random poem exercise.
My Students’ Random Poem Exercise
This is the second exercise I do with my poetry-writing students. I’m using as my example a class that consisted of eleven students. In our first meeting, I asked each student to do the following: “Write down on a sheet of paper a single line from a poem, either from a poem of your own or from someone else’s. Note: not a sentence, just a single line (most lines of poems don’t form complete sentences).” Chances are the students wrote down a line from one of their own poems. I asked them to pass in those lines (without their names attached). That gave us eleven lines. But I needed more than eleven for the exercise, so I asked them each to write down another line and then pass it to me. I now had twenty-two anonymous and unconnected lines. Just for fun, I shuffled them and then read the lines back to the students while they wrote them down. The result was what I declared to be the rough draft of a collaborative poem: twenty-two lines in a random order—a benign form of chaos. My student-poets were placed on a threshold where disorder seemed to have successfully overwhelmed order, but the process had only just begun; that is, they had given permission to let disorder happen, but now it was time to respond to it, to meet it at the threshold. Of course, the threshold represented by these lines had been created artificially, and it represented more of a linguistic chaos than an emotional chaos (which is usually the threshold that disturbs us most); but what we were working toward here is evidence of inherent order-making power in the individual imagination.
Here are the twenty-two lines as they appeared in that class:
hirsute penguins
the only thing that breathes is me
in an overly patriotic sweater
like skirts of bruises5
sea, struggling to be free yet unable to be
throw your wrench into scaffolding skies
there is no reward
and so cold
they scream “roll away the stone”10
but a concrete night
a slow sigh
storm clouds, sky, bursting into sea
a wave of porcelain faith
now, dance with me15
what station is the static on
see it in red letters
across my body, a universe
stood bursting with
sleep visited like a resentful friend20
in gray folds of
and one of them left me moaning
Now the fun begins. My instructions to my students for the assignment were as follows:
You are to arrange or rearrange these lines into the most interesting piece of language you can. There are a few absolute rules: You cannot change any words in the lines or break up a line into two fragments and insert another line or word between them. Nor can you add anything (anything!) to the lines (or take anything away from them).
However, you do have the following options: You may change the tenses of any verb into whichever tense you wish (past to present, present to past or future, etc.). You may also change any pronouns you wish (he to she or they or it or we, etc.). You may also punctuate lines in any way you wish (i.e., break up a phrase or sentence into two phrases or sentences using punctuation you provide). But you may not make any other changes in the given lines. In addition, you may make a long line into a shorter line by adding line breaks (or make two short lines into a longer one by joining them together), but you may not rearrange any words within the line or drop any words from the lines. You may also supply your own title to the poem.
A subsidiary instruction: try to use as many lines as you can, and feel free to try making several different poems from these lines.
At first, this assignment may seem very difficult, but actually people tend to get engaged by it after a bit and begin to see interesting possibilities.
One of the first, curious things to notice is that chance seems to have created moments of coherence and continuity in some of these lines: “a slow sigh(,) / storm clouds, sky, bursting into sea (,) / a wave of porcelain faith” (lines 12–14). These three lines seem to accumulate a tonally coherent picture that mingles personal emotion with external details of landscape or seascape. This passage also brings together what is almost a pun (sea and wave), although the lines came from three different poets. There’s another almost-pun with lines 10 and 11—“they scream ‘roll away the stone’ / but a concrete night”—where stone and concrete end up near each other by mere chance. Again and again, there are little snippets of story or sentence continuity: “see it in red letters / across my body, a universe”; “sleep visited like a resentful friend / in gray folds of.” So one thing the “first draft” reveals is that even in a set of random lines certain coherences happen, certain lines form briefly plausible continuities.
Here are some of the results from this assignment.
REM
Sleep visits like a resentful friend
Where the parachute sky
Stands bursting with a wave
Of porcelain faith.
But—a concrete night
In gray folds of a slow sigh.
See it in red letters?
The only thing that breathes is me.
They scream, “roll away the stone,”
“throw your wrench into scaffolding skies.”
What station is this static on?
Rory Finnegan
Notice that the student-supplied title “REM” is scientific shorthand for “rapid eye movement”—the sleep stage in which most of our dreaming occurs. It orients us as readers toward the basic story situation (“sleep visits”) and also gives the poet permission to have a fairly high level of disorder or confusion in her poem, since she’s claiming it takes place in the world of dreams.
Fresh Evening Scars
In gray folds of storm clouds, sky bursting into sea,
sleep visited like a resentful friend.
A wave of porcelain faith, a slow sigh
now dance with me.
Across my body, a universe
see it in red letters,
like skirts of bruises
There is no reward but a concrete night
where the parachute sky in an overly patriotic sweater
stood bursting with sea, struggling to be free yet unable to be.
The only thing that breathes is me.
Ian Garnett
Relapsing into Dreams of an Exquisite Corpse
Now, dance with me,
hirsute penguins—
what station was the static on
but a concrete night
where the parachute sky
in an overly patriotic sweater
threw its wrench into scaffolding skies,
in gray folds of
storm clouds—sky bursting into sea
like skirts of bruises?
they scream “roll away your stone,”
see it in red letters
across my body, a universe
stood bursting with
sea, struggling to be free yet unable to be—
sleep visited like a resentful friend
and one of them left me moaning
a slow sigh,
a wave of porcelain faith,
and so cold,
the only thing that breathes is me
in an overly patriotic sweater.
there is no reward.
Addie Eliades
The title of this poem that ambitiously includes all twenty-two lines also makes clever use of its title. “Exquisite Corpse” was a word game the French surrealists invented early in the twentieth century. By referencing this game in its title, Addie’s poem gives itself permission to be “surrealistic” in its movements and imagery—which is a clever way of justifying more chaos in the poem.
Peter’s Song
What station is the static on?
It screams, “roll away the stone!”
but a concrete night stands bursting with
sleep, visiting like a resentful friend.
Now dance with it.
The only thing that breathes is you,
in gray folds of storm clouds:
sky, bursting into sea.
Kelly Zanotti
There are many things worth noting about the responses to this assignment, but perhaps the most important is that each student’s rearrangement was in the direction of greater coherence. Note that I never requested that the arrangement aspire to coherence or communication—only that it be “interesting.” And yet every student worked (against real odds) to communicate some cohesive mood or scene, or at least to move toward coherence, or (in the case of the surrealist and REM poems) to justify a high level of disorder. Each and every example represents proof that we possess an active ordering power—something in us that not only actively seeks coherence but has the power to produce it.
RANDOM LINES EXERCISE
Why not experience that power yourself, firsthand? Here is a set of sixteen lines presented in the order I received them from another group of students. Take them and try to make an interesting piece of writing out of them. A final bit of advice: most of my students testify that this exercise seems impossible at the outset, but becomes alive with possibilities as you persevere. If you give yourself an arbitrary time limit for this—say half an hour—it will help to concentrate your ordering imagination. Here are the lines:
your hands bloomed around my heart
the patch of space behind the sun
a soft tongue breaks the bone
and the heat
a small child
wonder why the water returns to earth
brushing their teeth with crystals
the underbelly of a sandcastle
the roads we choose
the city rising up in lights to meet us
but of the epitaph: HERE LIES A WOMAN
we swing
crushed and purple under
some tirade
the kitchen in smoke, sear . . .
they walked there, they
I’ll repeat the rules (in a slightly different format from the ones I described earlier). Your task is to make the most interesting poem you can by rearranging the lines above and using as many of the lines as possible to make this poem. One main rule: YOU CANNOT CHANGE ANY WORDS IN THE LINES or break up a line into two fragments and insert another line between them. NOR CAN YOU ADD ANYTHING to the lines. You will work with the lines as they appear, adhering to the following rules:
1.The resulting poem must use at least nine of the lines (as many more as you wish). You can repeat a line if you wish (as a refrain or incantation), but the poem must have at least nine of the original sixteen lines. It would be interesting to see if you could come up with a poem that uses all the lines, but keep in mind the main criterion: “most interesting.”
2.You can arrange and rearrange the lines in any order you wish. You can make certain specific changes within the lines you’ve been given (but only these changes):
You may change the tenses of any verb into whichever tense you wish (past to present, etc.).
You may change any pronouns you wish (he to she or they or it or we, etc.).
You may punctuate lines in any way you wish (i.e., break up a sentence into two sentences with a period, or change a statement into a question).
You may make a long line into a shorter line by adding line breaks (or make two short lines into a longer one by joining them together), but you may NOT rearrange any words within the line or drop any words from the lines.
You may also supply your own TITLE to the poem.
(Note: If you are in a classroom situation, of course the idea would be to generate right now your own set of random lines, so that this exercise can happen in a more spontaneous and real way.)
VALIDATING SHAKESPEARE’S CLAIM
When you made the random lines into a nine-line poem by rearranging them and altering only verb tenses, pronouns, and punctuation, the lines you worked with didn’t matter to you; they weren’t expressions of your own concerns and experience. They probably didn’t place you at an emotional threshold (though the randomness may have created a certain level of frustration in you, and that itself is a form of threshold). You may even have felt that the lines you were given didn’t permit you to “be yourself” or speak from your own individual perspective. But I suspect that in a way your detachment gave you a kind of freedom—you weren’t anxious about whether the resulting poem communicated something urgent to you or about you personally.
But even granting that these lines didn’t express your personal viewpoint, I still insist that you just demonstrated firsthand that Shakespeare was right: your mind does have a “shaping” power to “body forth.” You rearranged random phrases into coherence. You not only created a unity of language, but you also probably created an imagined speaker and an imagined situation or dramatic context that helped make sense of your “poem.” That’s quite an impressive demonstration that your personal imagination is strong enough to come up with significant and credible coherence, even when it starts from randomness or disorder. And consider that you were told to include at least nine lines; had you been told to use only six or seven, your poem would probably have shown even greater unity and coherence.
The chances are very good that in ordering the chaos of these lines, you sought some ordering principle and quite possibly struggled to make them into what I would consider a lyric-inflected story or a lyric poem with a “ghost” of a narrative situation behind it that helped to hold it together. Perhaps it’s time to consider narrative and lyric inclinations in poems.