A more obscure (to me) and growing enjoyment with poems is to examine how poets handle enjambment. Not so much for me in how they continue an idea from line to line, but in how a single line of a poem can isolate a part of an idea, make it almost into something else entirely that still references the major idea it is part of. Sounds tricky, I know. A good example is Kay Ryan’s poem, “Polish And Balm,” which starts: “Dust develops // from inside // as well as // on top when //objects stop // being used.” Reading just each line alone, we get the pause after dust develops to consider that in isolation. Dust develops, well, that’s true. In our world? As a necessary part of life? Then fold in the next line — “from inside” — and suddenly it’s a commentary on our souls, on our failures. Way cool. I leave it to you to keep reflecting on the added meanings as the lines pile on. Then when you get to the end of the poem (go find it, it’s in her The Best Of It book), and see how she twists all those meanings around into an amazing braid, you think the woman deserves a Nobel. If you’re me you do, anyway.
In the latest New Yorker, Linda Pastan has a poem “Edward Hopper, Untitled” which handles enjambment a bit differently. It starts, “An empty theatre: seats // shrouded in white // like rows of headstones;” In this, rather than the twists of meaning, the cutting off of the lines early seems to me to add to the emptiness, the bleakness of the Hopper painting expressed by the poem. The lines are lonely, cut off from each other. And she does have some powerful lines. “…cliche of loneliness // transformed by brushstroke // into something part paint, // part desperation.”
Robert Pinsky, in “Sayings Of The Old,” on the other hand, has longer lines, in unrhymed tercets (three-line stanzas) that give more of a sense of patience, wisdom reflected on: “The Ibo say, An old man sitting down // can see more things than a young man standing up.” He wants more of the thought contemplated at once, maybe. Though I don’t want to be the object of his line a bit later(!): “One hates the sanctimonious Buddha-goo”
Dennis O’Driscoll, in “The Sunday Game” kind of falls halfway in between these with his six-line stanzas, every other line indented: “How alive, how excitable // they were back then, // when they congregated // in the neighbor’s kitchen…” Kind of like a typewriter from back in the day typing to here, then zooming back to keep typing there, then zooming back… it keeps the poem alive and dynamic, bouncing from place to place. Which poem has a neat, understated ending as well, by the way, with a great deal of the punch coming exactly from the enjambed isolation of the last line.
Peace all of a piece to you.
Thank you on this Remembrance Day to the firefighters, police and soldiers throughout the world who sacrifice so much to take care of us all.
P M F
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