Looking for some opportunities to attend to the turns in your poetry? If so..
On March 23, I’ll lead a workshop focusing on the dialectical argument structure at the Tenth Annual Columbus State Writers Conference in Columbus, OH.
On March 24, I’ll discuss the turn and then lead an extended workshop on submitted poems at the Rhino Poetry Forum Workshop in Evanston, IL.
Over at Iambic Admonit, there is a terrific interview with poet Ned Balbo. Among the smart, insightful comments Balbo makes, he includes this generous appraisal of Structure & Surprise:
“This might be the time to mention the critical anthology Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, edited by Michael Theune, which examines poetic structure through turns of thought or unfolding ideas rather than through rhythm or meter. Particularly incisive are essays by D. A. Powell (‘The Elegy’s Structures’) and Jerry Harp (‘The Mid-Course Turn’). It’s a great place to start moving beyond the tired ‘meter vs. free verse’ controversies.”
This is incredibly kind, and, if I may, perceptive. One of the aims of Structure & Surprise is to emphasize a way of talking about what poems are and do that cuts across poetic types and aesthetics. In “Notes on the New Formalism” (reprinted in Can Poetry Matter? (1992)), Dana Gioia observes,
“I suspect that ten years from now the real debate among poets and concerned critics will not be about poetic form in the narrow technical sense of metrical versus nonmetrical verse. That is already a tired argument, and only the uninformed or biased can fail to recognize that genuine poetry can be created in both modes. How obvious it should be that no technique precludes poetic achievement, just as none automatically assures it (though admittedly some techniques may be more difficult to use at certain moments in history). Soon, I believe, the central debate will focus on form in the wider, more elusive sense of poetic structure. How does a poet best shape words, images, and ideas into meaning? How much compression is needed to transform versified lines–be they metrical or free–into genuine poetry? The important arguments will not be about technique in isolation but about the fundamental aesthetic assumptions of writing and judging poetry.”
Structure & Surprise tries to move this debate–or, perhaps, ongoing discussion–along. Thanks to Ned Balbo for sensing / seeing this connection. Check out one of Mr. Balbo’s own excellent poems (a sonnet, so expect turns!) here.
J. Allyn Rosser reads and appreciates Denise Duhamel’s poem “Old Love Poems” over at the Best American Poetry blog. Rosser especially admires how the poem’s “veerings” seem “at first digressive, but Duhamel always finds, and finely renders, their harmony,” and she makes note of “two moves” in the poem that she “could not have predicted.” It’s a terrific poem, and a fine reading of it, one that focuses on the poem’s thrilling turns. Check out the poem and commentary here.
A nice write-up of the Voltage Poetry site, which features poems with great turns in it–along with discussion of those turns–can be found here.
All Turned Around
Dear Volta,
In the past few years,
you’ve become a huge
part of my life. I think about you
almost constantly these days,
and that absolutely terrifies me. For a
while after we met, I thought
you were trying to avoid me. I felt
like I was constantly searching
for you and had no idea
where to even begin.
Then I started to learn your ways,
and we grew close.
Maybe a little too close.
You started to show up
everywhere, even when I wasn’t
looking for you. Now it seems like
I can’t get away from you
anymore, and I think I really just
need some space.
It’s not that you’re not great,
I just don’t think I can
keep playing your games.
I feel like you’re just
spinning me in circles and
I’m not sure what you
want me to think. You invite
your friends over unannounced
when I think it’s just going
to be the two of us settling in
for a cozy night by the fire. You’ve just
become too unpredictable –
I never know what
you’re going to look like
the next time I see you,
and sometimes you just don’t
make any sense at all.
I’m trying my best to understand
you, but it’s like you just
keep sending me in different directions,
and I can’t take it anymore.
The thing is,
despite all that,
I still need.
I want you.
As much as I complain,
I still look for you constantly –
every time I open a book or go on
a computer, you’re there,
as patient with me as ever.
And when I don’t see you,
everything just seems so
predictable and boring. Every time
I think I just need to get away
from you for a while,
you show me
a brand new way of looking at things
and I remember why
you fascinate me.
You’ve always been there
when I needed you, and you
constantly give me
new things to look forward to.
Finding you
changed the way I see the world,
and I can’t imagine my life
without you anymore.
And, if I’m being honest,
I can’t get enough of your but.
Don’t ever change.
Love, Emily
–by Emily Susina
*
Emily Susina is a senior at Illinois Wesleyan University, majoring in English (with a concentration in writing) and Greek and Roman Studies. She serves an assistant with Voltage Poetry, the online anthology of poems with great turns, and discussion of those poems, co-edited by Kim Addonizio and me. Clearly, the work is getting to her…!
Here is a terrific (and frightening) new elegy inspired by the discussion of the elegy in Structure & Surprise.
Thanks to D. A. Powell for such a fine essay on the elegy; to Patrick Phillips for such a lovely, haunting poem (here is a cool version of it); to Kim Addonizio for her support of the turn (at the retreat, and elsewhere, including teaming up with me to co-edit Voltage Poetry); and, last but not least, to Claudia Mills for her own new, strong poem.
–by Aaron Crippen
*
Aaron Crippen is a poet and educator. He is the translator of Nameless Flowers: Selected Poems of Gu Cheng (George Braziller, 2005), a project for which he received an NEA Literature Fellowship, and for which he received a PEN Texas Literary Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Verse and the Beloit Poetry Journal.
For more on emblem poems, click here.
It’s been my great pleasure over the past few years to be associated with Spoon River Poetry Review–as a reader, and now as the review editor. Spoon River for a long time has been a strong journal, but under the leadership of Kirstin Zona it’s becoming something really special, featuring some truly amazing poems–check out Arielle Greenberg Bywater’s “The Wicker Man,” or Austin Smith’s “Aerial Photograph, Glasser Farm, 1972″–by amazing poets–among the recents: Josh Corey and Linda Gregerson–and some great thinking about contemporary poetry and poetics: each issue, Spoon River features an extended review-essay that tackles an issue in contemporary poetry and considers three to five books of poems in light of that issue–reviewer/essayists include the likes of Andrew Osborn and Joyelle McSweeney. You can read excerpts of these review-essays here.
I also contributed a review-essay a few issues back. ”Raising the Net” is a review-essay that uses Christina Pugh’s ideas about “sonnet thought” to consider the fate of the turn in some contemporary books of sonnets, including The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (a glorious mixed bag), Iteration Nets (in terms of turns: there are none), Nick Demske (interesting, if problematic), andSeverance Songs (pretty great).
I state in “Raising the Net” that “I revise Robert Frost’s idea that writing free verse is like ‘playing tennis with the net down.’ Writing formal sonnets, it turns out, is not too difficult; it’s the writing of sonnets without great turns that’s akin to a netless game. In contrast, crafting sonnets with an eye toward their turns as well as a critical approach that can account for them not only raises the net but also raises the bar on what we expect from sonnets.”
The above is just a teaser to get you to read the whole introduction, which can be found here. And this, of course, is a teaser to get you to explore and enjoy the recently-launched Spoon River Poetry Review website, itself an enticement to get you to subscribe to the journal. And you should: it’s fantastic.
I recently added to this blog’s “Turned onto Turns: Comments on Structure” page the following:
A characteristic of the Petrarchan sonnet is its convention of the “turn,” which normally occurs at the start of line 9, the beginning of the sestet. It is perhaps more accurate to say that the turn occurs somewhere in the white space that separates line 8 from line 9, and that line 9 simply reflects or records it. But wherever we think of it as actually taking place, something very important, something indeed indispensable to the action of the Petrarchan sonnet, happens at the turn: we are presented there with a logical or emotional shift by which the speaker enables himself to take a new or altered or enlarged view of his subject.
The standard way of constructing a Petrarchan sonnet is to project the subject in the first quatrain; to develop or complicate it in the second; then to execute, at the beginning of the sestet, the turn which will open up for solution the problem advanced by the octave, or which will ease the load of idea or emotion borne by the octave, or which will release the pressure accumulated in the octave. The octave and the sestet conduct actions which are analogous to the actions of inhaling and exhaling, or of contraction and release in the muscular system. The one builds up the pressure, the other releases it; and the turn is the dramatic and climactic center of the poem, the place where the intellectual or emotional method of release first becomes clear and possible. From line 9 it is usually plain sailing down to the end of the sestet and the resolution of the experience. If the two parts of the sonnet, although quantitatively unequal, can be said to resemble the two sides of an equation, then the turn is something like an equals sign: it sets into action the relationship between two things, and triggers a total statement. We may even suggest that one of the emotional archetypes of the Petrarchan sonnet structure is the pattern of sexual pressure and release. Surely no sonnet succeeds as a sonnet that does not execute at the turn something analogous to the general kinds of “release” with which the reader’s muscles and nervous system are familiar.
–Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, revised edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1979), pp. 115-116.
I love, of course, that Fussell notes that there is “something indeed indispensable” about the volta in the Petrarchan sonnet, that “[s]urely no sonnet succeeds as a sonnet that does not execute at the turn something analogous to the general kinds of ‘release’ with which the reader’s muscles and nervous system are familiar. In making such claims, Fussell joins other commentators on the sonnet, including Phillis Levin, Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland, and Christina Pugh, who acknowledge the volta’s vital significance.
However, besides its clarity about the value of volta, what I also like about Fussell’s take on the volta is its inability to name exactly what a volta is like, or what exactly it does. In the space of two paragraphs, Fussell states that a volta is like breathing, an equal sign, and sex–three things that are not much like each other… Wonderful! What I like about this multiplicity of analogies is that it correctly identifies the fact that different voltas can, and do, perform very different kinds of duties… Great stuff!
And, of course, this does not apply only to sonnets–it also applies to many other kinds of poems. As Ellen Bryant Voigt points out: “The sonnet’s volta, or ‘turn’…has become an inherent expectation for most short lyric poems.”
Kind words about Structure & Surprise here.
I’m especially thrilled that Joanna Preston senses that the turn can open up new possibilities for poets–there’s no higher praise, in my book.
My thanks to Ms. Preston for her post. Preston herself is a terrific poet–check out the turns in her poems “Half a World” and “A Murder of Crows.”
