Poet's Work: Condensery

My grandmother worked with wool. She raised sheep, and spun their fleece into yarn. She knitted the yarn, and then boiled the knit to shrink and thicken the wool into felt. Felted wool slippers and hats are phenomenally warm, protecting the wearer from piercing northern winters. As a writer, I am more of a wool gatherer, but my process with language is similar to her process with wool.

There is a difference in the language of poetry and prose that can be described by using the word compression. Paul Valery said the language of prose is meant to fall away once meaning is delivered, but this is not so with poetry whose language is meant to recreate the breath, and make the poem new each reading. Reading poetry gives the reader an ear for this, and I recommend reading poetry extensively. There are techniques that poets use to compress the language. 

Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker

Grandfather
   advised me:
          Learn a trade

I learned
   to sit at desk
          and condense

No layoff
   from this
          condensery
 

Condensery is an apt term. The poet must condense the language; in the condensing, the language begins to have more substance.  My grandmother had her copper laundry boiler, a wood stove, and wooden paddles as tools to condense her knitted garments into felt. The poets' tools also allow one to put the language through a process. Figurative language allows a writer to compress language. Metaphor is effective; the writer talks about two things at the same time. Consider this line from the poem, "Questions of Travel" by Elizabeth Bishop.

"And have we room/ for more folded sunsets, still quite warm?"

One word will makes the difference. If the poet had used the word 'blankets' instead of 'sunsets,' then the effect would have been prosaic. Bishop's decision to use sunsets makes the sentence take on more wonder. One can imagine the sunset's colors folded and put away like blankets. Can one take a sunset along, in a suitcase? The sunset suddenly becomes intimate as the blanket on a bed, it has a tactile sense. She did not say blanket, but she has created a physical sense of touch by suggestion. A single word choice made the meaning both intimate and expansive. The compression the poet achieves here suddenly vaults the reader into another space.

Poetry often evokes more than one meaning; Mary Oliver says poetry is language that casts more than one shadow.  If it casts a shadow, then it must have solidity and heft. This solidity and heft comes from the five senses, the perceptions of the body. If it casts a shadow, it could be a thing or a being, like cart or a horse. Interesting possibilities, this intensity of poetry. Each word has a history and a host of associations; the poet considers this.  Sometimes words come out on paper perfectly, but many times revisions help the poet find just the right language.

Here is another example:

Question
by May Swenson:

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide? 

This poem is physically palpable. The form is created by a parallel questioning. The words lend their history and associations to the task; the words are tightly bound together like wool beat into felt.  My house, my horse, my hound. The series of words illuminate the body as place first followed by images of horse and hound.  Speed, beauty, animality.  Hound also invites associations with hunting and baying. Metaphor again. In this spare poem, Swenson also uses sound elements and patterns to compress the poem.  The rhymes are tight: ride and hide, I and sky and lie.  Almost rhymes: quick and thicket. hound and mount and cloud. Alliteration (same consonant sounds) and assonance (same vowel sounds) occur; everything intense.

The form of a poem lends the poet a tool for condensery. Repetition and variation are built in to some forms like the villanelle, pantoum, or sestina. Other forms have strict limits like the haiku, seventeen syllables, or the sonnet, fourteen lines in a certain rhyme scheme. One must compress and cut the language to fit. In addition, poets add tension. Suspense or the use of opposites add tension. Twists. Line breaks and choices about form can also increase the compression.

Robert Lowell, in interviews, said poems must be high tensile objects. He talked about setting up tension in or between the poem's metrics and in the form or content of the poem. For example, a sonnet form sets up an expectation of rhyme. The poem might use blank verse (iambic meter) and instead of rhyme on the end lines place it elsewhere, internally.  

Condensing is perhaps also a process of reduction. One takes away words and phrases, a process Virginia Woolf referred to as ellision. In the taking away, the poet can heighten the effect and create an ambiguity that evokes more meaning. Spareness is often powerful.The stronger the focus, the stronger the poem. Using precise and concrete images adds weight. Staying in metaphor adds focus.

Sometimes I think the form of the poem is a dialectic between language and white space, silence. Dialectics, or the use of opposites, compress. Allusion to other literary work adds weight and meaning.

Add heat. Keep refining. Words are like wool; they have fibers that pull on other fibers. About wool, my grandmother knew about boiling, then ice.  She knew how to take fiber into strand into knit into felt.

Poetry is distilled. From language, the poet makes a tincture or an essence. A poet learns to create a distillery to turn grain into whiskey or potatoes into vodka. 

Perhaps condensery is akin to the ancient science of alchemy and its quest of turning metal into gold. 

Of course, some writers do this is in fiction and essays as well. The writer, Clarice Lispector, created visceral, existential consciousness for the reader via the use of character and setting. Her language is compressed like poetry, compressed to a point of great intensity as if she were at a work bench, cranking the words with a vise. I read her work for its lessons in compressed language as well as for her vision. 

This sentence in her book Stream of Life conveys in just nine words her unique voice. 

"I am before, I am almost, I am never."

This poetic language uses parallel structure, repetition, variation, and sound in a tight form that conveys psychological truth. It embraces opposites.  None of the phrases are subordinated; all are equal.  It is tensile and brilliantly evocative.

Niedecker's poem "Poet's Work" expresses the poet's endless search, the quest for the right words and the right arrangement. It is work that is never done.  

Sources:
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927-1979.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux. c1984.
Lispector, Clarice. The Stream of Life. University of Minnesota Press. c1989.
Alexrod, Steven and Helen Deese, editors. Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry. Cambridge University Press, c1989.
Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Mariner Books. c1994.
Niedecker, Lorine.  Collected Works. University of California Press. c2002. 
Swenson, May   http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177225
Valery, Paul. Selected Writings of Paul Valery. New Directions Press. c1964.

To Punctuate or Not

Sometimes, a poet uses punctuation in a poem and sometimes he or she does not.  To examine the possibilities, I've brought together four poems without punctuation written by respected poets.  In this first vividly realized poem by Lucille Clifton, the line seems to follow the philosophy of "the line is a breath."   The line break can be used in a way that gives the reader a chance to breathe between phrases.   

miss rosie
by Lucille Clifton

when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up

She has used two commas inside two lines, each occurs after the same word, "sitting."  It seems to help Clifton create a parallel structure, although what follows after the word is not exactly parallel. Another poet might be tempted to use commas after the phrases. However, a comma at the end of a line seems to make a harder "end stop." Some poets who do use punctuation avoid a comma at line end because there is already an inherent pause. A line break without a comma adds a level of ambiguity, a slight pause between words that can add extra meanings.   

Other things besides a lack of punctuation are noticeable. Clifton does not capitalize any words except Georgia Rose. She does not capitalize the subject, miss rosie. Neither does she follow the convention of capitalizing the personal pronoun I. One might speculate that she wanted to minimize the "I," downplay the personal narrator in order to indicate that "I" is no more important than "you." The "i" occurs five times however. In such a short poem, five is a lot. One line is just one short syllable:  "or" makes an interesting hinge or pivot point in the poem.

The repeated phrases serve to provide a structure for the narrative:  "...when i watch you..."  "i stand up" clearly communicates respect and honor for the subject of the poem, miss rosie. 

So, why then is Georgia Rose capitalized?  Is a flower, a state flower, more important than the individuals?  The phrase does provide a geographic location for the narrative; the phrase also highlights that the subject's name is rose, miss rosie.  It provides an enduring image of beauty, the ultimate ideal, contrasting with subject's apparent destruction.  Clifton makes very good use of the senses. The smell of too old potato peelings is such a deft use of detail.  The line, "...in old man's shoes with the little toe cut out" is another good detail. She grounds the poem firmly in the body. 

The lack of punctuation seems to present a fragment, or a breathless utterance.  It might indicate the narrator is placing herself equal to miss rosie; perhaps both the narrator and the subject exist outside convention. Perhaps they don't follow the rules, or live beyond them.   Punctuation or the lack of it can provide meaning in this way.  

In the following poem by Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker, the poet also avoids punctuation.  She does however use capitalization as if beginning a new sentence.  Perhaps she meant to signal a new breath or new idea, but not a hard end stop. Not all the lines start with a capitalized word. Niedecker generally used a short line with a tight sound play in the stanzas.   It's a shorter rhythm, almost syncopated.  She was born in 1903 and died in 1970; she was known as an avant garde poet. She was connected to a group of poets called 'objectivists' (the word was first used by Louis Zukovsky). William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth are both considered to be part of this group. 

Paean to Place
Lorine Niedecker

...
I grew in green
slide and slant
     of shore and shade
           Child-time--wade
through weeds

Maples to swing from
Pewee-glissando
    sublime
         slime-
song

Grew riding the river
Books
    at home-pier
         Shelley could steer
as he read


I was the solitary plover
a pencil
     for a wing-gone
From the secret notes
I must tilt

upon the pressure
execute and adjust
      In us sea-air rhythm
  "We live by the urgent wave
of the verse"
...
Her poems have beauty and strength in the choice of word and sound.  Alliteration and assonance cause a pleasurable sound play along with rhyme and near rhyme. The rhymes are in words close to each other and not at the ends of phrases.  With her short lines and tight turns, punctuation may have caused the reader to stop in ways she preferred not to have happen. Her stanzas that are similar in size and line breaks. The use of a capitalized letter is an interesting detail, perhaps a technique that helps the reader find the beginning of a new thought.

In the following poem by the current U.S. Poet Laureate, the reader encounters a capitalized beginning of each line with no punctuation. Without punctuation, all line breaks have roughly the same weight or pause.  One continues reading at the same pace throughout the poem.   Without punctuation, the line seems to end in space, without landing.  It is as if broken off in mid-breath.  

For the Anniversary of My Death
W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

This poem also has the development of consonant vowel sounds that make for a pleasing experience. The poem arrests the reader with its speculation; one always marks the anniversary of one's birth, but the opposite of that, the anniversary of one's death, exists unbeknownst to us. It is a bare shadow that Merwin finds and names.  
  
In the following poem by e.e. cummings, there is no punctuation except for the apostrophe mark and a hyphen. The hyphen is not used in a standard way.  Here, he hyphenates words not usually hyphenated.

Buffalo Bill's
e.e. cummings

Buffalo Bill 's
defunct
            who used to
            ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                        Jesus

he was a handsome man
                                    and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

He does use conventional capitalization for names but not for the personal pronoun I.    e.e. cummings is known for his creative arrangements of the words, spacing or not spacing, stringing together or breaking words apart on a line or across lines. Many poets use the lines and spaces as a form of musical score; the reader can run the words together, read words fast, and then have a long pause for the next line, "Jesus' is far indented, as if hung on the end of the line before it. cummings also avoids using the question mark at the end.  I think this adds an ambiguity.  It begins as a question, but perhaps offers an acerbic comment instead.   By avoiding the punctuation mark, the poet is able to create more ambiguity and therefore more possible meanings. 

Each of these poems would be much different with conventional punctuation. Each poet had internal consistency with his or her approach.  Each used other unusual methods with capitalization or no capitalization; they used spacing in a way that also would affect the breath.

When writing or reading poems, consider the uses that punctuation has. Many poets use punctuation just as it is used in conventional sentences.  Done this way, the writer can guide the reader toward meaning and rhythm.  If the writer chooses not to punctuate, then I think it's important to have or to develop an internal consistency.  Without punctuation, one must consider line breaks and other use of white space in the development of structure and rhythm.

It does seem that an unpunctuated poem is closer to a fragment. In my own poems, a series of unpunctuated poems serve as a fragments of a longer arc that usually is marked off in sections. Initially I used it because some poems arrived in dreams, as a stanza.  I wrote them down just 'as is.'  Later, I began other series that seemed to work better without the conventional stops of punctuation.  This added a breathlessness or a speed to the poem that would not exist otherwise. I would never swear off punctuation; like other elements in poetry, it's best to use or not use this element deliberately.


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