On Poetic Structure and Turns
Boland, Eavan. “Discovering the Sonnet.” The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology. Edited by Eavan Boland and Edward Hirsch. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 43-48.
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Ciardi, John. “The Poem in Countermotion.” How Does a Poem Mean? Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959.
One of the great statements about the importance of turns in poems, and the only chapter of a poetry textbook to feature the turn–or, as Ciardi puts it, a poem’s countermotion.
Dante, La Vita Nuova.
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Dennis, Carl. “The Temporal Lyric.” Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play. Ed. Daniel Tobin and Pimone Triplett. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 2008. 236-49.
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Dobyns, Stephen. “Writing the Reader’s Life.” Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.
Eliot, T.S. “Andrew Marvell.” Selected Essays, 1917-1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932.
Graham, Jorie. “Something of Moment.” Ploughshares 27. 4 (Winter 2001-02): 7-9.
Hirshfield, Jane. “Close Reading: Windows.” The Writer’s Chronicle 43.4 (Feb. 2011): 22-30.
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—–. “Poetry and Uncertainty.” The American Poetry Review 34.6 (2005): 63-72.
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Hoagland, Tony. “Altitudes, a Homemade Taxonomy.” Real Sofistikashun Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2006. 1-20.
Hope, A.D. “The Discursive Mode: Reflections on the Ecology of Poetry.” The Cave and the Spring: Essays on Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965.
Jarrell, Randall. “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry.” Georgia Review. 50.4 (1996): 697-713.
One of the early statements on the significance of poetic structure–and one of the fullest and most important discussions of poetic structure. Vital reading.
Kinzie, Mary. “The Rhapsodic Fallacy.” The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet’s Calling. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993.
Lazer, Hank. “Lyricism of the Swerve: The Poetry of Rae Armantrout.” Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2008. 95-126; and American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2002. 27-51.
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. “Volta.”
Rosenthal, M.L. The Poet’s Art. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.
Sacks, Peter. “‘You Only Guide Me by Surprise’: Poetry and the Dolphin’s Turn. Berkeley, CA: The Bancroft Library at The University of California, Berkeley, 2007.
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Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Stillinger, Jack. “Reading Keats’s Plots.” Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 2009. 62-76.
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Theune, Michael. “My Turn from Flow.” A New Leaf (Houston’s Writers in the Schools newsletter) 9.3 (September 2006): 1 and 3.
—–. “The Non-Turning of Recent American Poetry.” Pleiades 26.2 (2006): 141-49.
Available here.
—–. “Poetic Structure and Poetic Form: The Necessary Differentiation.” American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets 32 (Spring 2007): 9-12.
Available here.
—–. “Resistance to The Resistance to Poetry.” Pleiades 25.1 (2005): 120-29.
Available here.
—–. Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns. New York: Teachers & Writers, 2007.
—–. “Structure and Surprise: A New Paradigm for Teaching Poetry.” Teachers and Writers Magazine 37.4 (March/April 2006): 13-14.
Available here.
—–. “Trust the Turn.” Poets on Teaching. Edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2010. 151-2.
Available here.
—–. “Writing Degree ∞ (on Recent Haiku).” Pleiades 28.1 (2008): 137-58.
Available here.
Vendler, Helen. Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002.
Though Vendler does not specifically name the turn as a key feature of poems, the turn is everywhere in this book. See, especially, chapter 4, “Describing Poems,” and, in that chapter, the discussion of “Inner Structural Form” (pp. 119-20).
Voigt, Ellen Bryant. “The Flexible Lyric.” The Flexible Lyric. Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 1999.
Williams, William Carlos. Foreword to Merrill Moore’s Sonnets from New Directions. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1938. 5-6.
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Theune, Michael. “The Quarrelsome Poem.” Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. Edited by Blas Falconer, Beth Martinelli, and Helena Mesa. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. 133-44.
The main essay on this structure.
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Miller, Ruth. The Poetry of Emily Dickinson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1968.
Miller argues that Dickinson was a poet who often argued against the ideas of other thinkers, and prominent among those whom Dickinson challenged were those who interpreted the world as a book (the book of Nature) written by God, including Thomas Browne (in Religio Medici and Christian Morals) and Francis Quarles (in Emblems, Divine and Moral).
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Phillips, Carl. “Association in Poetry.” Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004): 93-112.
While Phillips’s essay is not precisely on the list-with-a-twist structure, it contains many poems that employ this structure, poems included in this blog though sometimes featured in the discussions of some other structures. (As I note on the List-with-a-Twist Structure page, this structure is quite common, and often overlaps with other structures.) Among other poems, Phillips discusses George Herbert’s “Prayer,” James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” (which is included on this blog with “Epiphanic Structure” poems), and Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” (included on this blog in “Voltage!”). Phillips often mentions the “leaps” in these poems, maneuvers in the poems that also could be called turns.
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Two essays from John Hollander’s Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language might be of interest for those interested in the question-and-answer structure: Chapter 2, “Questions of Poetry”; and Chapter 3, “Poetic Answers.” Hollander discusses a number of the poems included under the rubric of this structure.
