Welcome to Poetry Friday, today hosted by Tabatha Yeatts HERE. Thank you, Tabatha for hosting. It’s a cool sunny beautiful day in Upstate New York. I have been thinking, as are many, about the storm in Florida and hope that people who need it find food and shelter and stay safe.
This week I quilted a small table runner for my sister who just moved to San Antonio, Texas. I made it by piecing different prints of fabric in stripes until I liked the way it looked. It was not difficult, but it was fun to arrange the patterns next to one another.
It was like moving words and lines around in a poem. I am currently reading HOW POEMS GET MADE, by James Longenbach, who teaches in Rochester, NY, published in 2018. ( Bear with me. Sometimes I write a blog post so I understand something better. It just might be the case here.)
Trust me, it a lot more challenging reading this heady book than making my little table runner, placing fabric pieces where I want them. But in this book the author showed me, in a concrete example, how the placement of a word in the right place can make a difference in the tone in a poem. I already knew that, but I felt it more clearly after reading his chapter on “tone.”
Longenbach gives us an example to think about, of a simple sentence written three ways. The bold-printed word in each version is to be accentuated.
You said that? You said that? You said that?
We see the same sentence, but the tone of each line is different depending on which word gets the accent. It’s fun to perform these three versions like an actor: horrified, or curious, or in an angry tone.
Now, given that accents can change tone, a poet in the process of writing a poem must decided where to place a word that she wants accentuated. Longenbach gives us the example of a poem by William Carlos Williams to help us think about it. Here are the first two stanzas:
To A Poor Old Woman by William Carlos Williams munching a plum on the street a paperbag of them in her hand They taste good to her They taste good to her. They taste good to her. The rest of the poem can be read Here.
The first line of the second stanza feels satisfying. “They taste good to her.” But the next three lines, through enjambment of the line, we hear the same sentence five syllables differently. In line two, we read the word “good”as accentuated because it’s at the end of the line. In line three the word “taste” is accentuated because of where it appears at the end of the line. In general, a word at the end of a line gets noticed, and I can see it here. It alters the tone of what is being communicated.
I cannot describe it as well as professor Longenbach does, and I’ve greatly simplified the point, I am sure. But I understand perhaps better why enjambment and line endings are such important tools in any poets toolbox.
Just as I could have placed the fabric in my quilt a number of different ways to achieve a certain results. There are different ways to arrange words in a poem to achieve the accent and tone that you seek. I recommend this book if you want more than just the nuts and bolts of writing poetry.
Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!
