How Expand Content and Scope of a Poem. Jack Myers’ Ideas
Horizontal and Vertical Content in A Poem
When I’m perplexed how to make a poem extend its reach, I remember what Mark Doty once said in a lecture. He believed that many poems fail because the poet isn’t willing to push the poem, to delve into what it’s trying to say, and, as a result, the poem stops short of realizing its potential. He told us to keep pushing a poem, let it sit for a while, then go back, see if there is another angle, another way of finding out what it has to say. The poem who manifests that patience in her poems is Elizabeth Bishop who would often take a ten or more years on one poem. What it allowed her to do is see the poem not just from a new angle but from a different point in her life where, what had happened to her over the tens year span, could find its way into her poems, creating the marvelous detail and nuance that is the hallmark of her poems.
But the question remains, how do you expand? It can’t be just giving it time, although that certainly helps. The deeper question is what you are doing during that time to expand your own ability to flesh out a poem. Some of that is developing, as any artist, the skills and craftmanship to apply to the poem.
One of the best books on craft–I think the best I’ve read–is Jack Myers book on the portable workshop. I recently went back to look at it. Jack had been my advisor in Vermont’s MFA program. He schooled me in ways to cut and refine a poem, in ways to shift my focus, in ways to make sure the language was as exact as it could be, and in ways to expand the content and reach of a poem. When he was working with me, he kept saying that I should pay attention to the vertical and horizontal content of a poem. As a good student, I nodded my head, acknowledging what he said although I admit I had no idea what he was talking about. Nineteen years later, as I reread his book, I have a better sense of what he was talking about. Let me explain this important concept of horizontal and vertical dimensions of content.
Jack Myers’, the author of The Portable Poetry Workshop, describes two categories of poetic content, which is often baffling to new poets and, at first, were confounding to me. I think I can now explain what they mean. Jack Myers says that when you can look at the content of a poem and the ways in which you can extend or elaborate on it, it’s important to distinguish the vertical and horizontal levels of content.
The vertical dimension is the thematic dimension of a poem, what it’s about. For instance, if I were writing a poem about death, the threat of it always being nearby, that would be the theme. I could use almost any image or narrative to characterize that theme. Whatever its content, the poem itself would be about the threat or reality of death. To understand the vertical dimension, it’s best to think of it spatially. The vertical dimension can move downward into the depths of the psyche or upward into the spiritual. It can move into death and depression or into joy and elation. It can speak of hope or of despair. It can range from love to hate, from murderous feelings to compassionate embrace. It’s the dimension of the poem that ties it together thematically as well as emotionally. It’s like a vertical clothes line or flag pole that holds together and salutes different polarities, having love and hate, hope and despair, life and death, embodied in one poem. The vertical speaks to what poem is about. It speaks to the range of what is covered, the spaciousness of a poem. Some poems are tightly fit in a box, each image or pair of images confined by the limits of the receptacle. Other poems sprawl. Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” has a huge vertical range. Mark Doty’s “Mercy on Broadway,” encapsulates an enormous range of themes. Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of The Metro” snugly fits in its precise images. “Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” captures the act of forgiveness in a few stanzas.
But maybe as a way to explain how Myers’ ideas work in my mind, I need to look at a poem I recently wrote. I will look at a poem of mine “Who’s Next?” about death. On the vertical level, it’s primarily about death but it also delves into competition with my brother, of being second best, and of salvation coming unexpectedly from out of nowhere. Yet when I look at the poem itself, how it is told, which is the horizontal level, I’ve used a number of Myers’ elaborating and extending techniques to build up the poem dramatically and to tease out the treat of death by having an ice boy calling to him.
When I wrote the poem, I had a sense that the memory of skating on the river had some potential. Perhaps it was because it was dangerous since those of us who skated there had to avoid soft spots where you could fall in. Since it’s winter and I saw some skaters on ice, I thought that maybe something was there in the river to discover. It might make a good poem. As I wrote it, the first thing that came to mind was trying to keep up with my brother who was a superb skater. But, as I continued to write, I wanted to get to the danger, see if I could pull on that, and, from there, the poem evolved. I was happy with the beginning and much of the middle. However, after I had an initial draft, I was unhappy with the ending which seemed too pat. In my first draft, I stayed in the moment, keeping the poem partially in mind of the boy and of his escape from death. But that seemed too easy and didn’t push the poem where it should go. By the third or forth draft, I was consciously asking, “Where does this poem want to go?” “What is it trying, or wanting, to say?” I tried one ending after another, some fifteen different versions, each failing to bring the poem home, to a place it felt satisfying and pushed beyond what the narrative had, thus far, presented. Finally, I landed on a vertical shift, a radical shift in time, setting the ending after my brother had died, after I no longer even skated, which was some sixty years later. When I did that, the poem resolved itself.
Did I intend to use any of Jack Myers’ techniques in the poem before I wrote it?
No, not really. They came to me as I wrote. But I trusted that if I let the scene unfold and if I included some images that, in turn, I could build on, maybe something would come of it. I first described skating on a river where, when I was a boy, several boys drown by crashing through the ice. That is the horizontal dimension, the content of the poem that contains imagery of ice and threats of falling through and drowning and the theme of death.
The horizontal level is focused on the line, the way a sentence unravels, the syntax, the way words are arranged and appear on the page— how a poem’s theme is evoked though images and exposition. In her book Artful Sentences: Style As Syntax, Virginia Tufte says, “…it is syntax that gives words the power to relate to each other in a sequence, to create rhythms and emphasis, to carry meaning—of whatever kind—as well as glow individually in just the right place.” When writing a poem (it’s certainly true for me) the language of the poem is what carries me forward, looking for what associative connections, what surprises await in the next word, the next line, the next turn. That’s what any novice poet can learn; it’s what can be taught: the way the imagination makes connections between one thing and another, between on experience and another, between an idea and an image, between thought and feeling, between past and present, between internal and external images. But the imagination is like any other faculty—reasoning, feeling, seeing, moving, hearing, tasting—something that must be developed if an artist is to master her craft. Myers gives a roadmap for how to do it, using many of the strategies for elaborating and extending content.
Before discussing what “moves” I use to elaborate and extend the poem as a way to show how they can be used, let me turn to my poem:
Who’s Next?
I hadn’t escaped third grade, unsure of subtracting,
and even more unsure
which way my skates would take me,
wobbling in and out, ankles vexed,
as I followed my big brother,
designed as he was for ice, his blades gripping
the edges, making a sound of a razor
swiped across leather in a barbershop,
his exceeding me with every swish
as if he’d already sped past time,
as I desperately tried
to catch up, calling out, “Wait. Wait,”
while he swerved in and out
along the DuPage River, past cattails,
brown and frayed, gaining more speed,
farther and farther from me
when someone—
Judy or Jane, bigger
and better on blades than we— yelled,
“Don’t skate there. It’s thin ice. A boy drowned.”
But my skates had a will of their own,
were aimed right at the thin watery patch
where a voice beneath
called, “I’m here. Come play with me.”
I saw his eyes
peering up, pleading not to be left alone.
My destiny, had I one,
was sealed: another boy gone
when Jane snatched
my wrist and flung me across the ice
into the reeds on the other side
where I flopped and
my brother stood
over me, laughing, laughing
his head off.
My back to the ice,
I swear I heard the boy beneath me, “It’s
all right. Next time. Next time. . . .”
His voice keeps coming back
as the blades of my skates, hung
on the wall in the garage, rust,
as I’ve come to see,
the next one
wasn’t me—it was my brother
and dare I say?
I no longer care to catch up with him.
When I wanted to elaborate or extend the horizontal dimension, to build on how the poem is told, there are certain “moves” I could make by using description, dialogue, conceits, correspondences, associative leaps, slant imagery (images that rhyme metaphorically), story within a story, substitution, leaping (shifting from level of consciousness, from dream image to realistic image to spiritual realm to metaphorical musings), juxtaposition, jump cuts, simile, extended simile, and personification. Of course, I didn’t use all of these, but I did use many, including dialogue, personification (ice boy as death), associative leaps (razor blades), shifts in consciousness (ice boy), jump cuts (voice coming back), and simile. When I wanted to push the vertical dimension, adding other themes to the poem, making it more complex, not just the story of being rescued, I pushed the vertical level. A death also became a poem about the afterlife and competition with my brother. I used other “moves” to complicate the vertical dimensions of the poem, using many of the same techniques as I did push the horizontal level: associative leaps, figurative comparisons. But with the vertical domain, these techniques lead to new topics, new plot elements to extend a storyline, to add different thoughts about the theme, ones that eventually resolve the poem. They weren’t just used to provide more detail or nuance to existing images. Although the vertical elaboration or extension of a poem can use the same “moves” as the horizontal plane, they serve a different purpose. A conceit can expand into a new theme. Correspondences can lead to different ideas, often juxtaposed against the original theme. Slant imagery can not only extend the existing imagery but can also add new themes, taking the poem into other dimensions and into other topics, extending its reach.
When writing of poem, a poet doesn’t necessarily think “I’ll use a slant image” because, if she is in the flow of the poem, captured by the imagery or narrative or lyrical import of the poem, the language will find its way on the page. But if a poet, as a musician or a visual artist or an athlete or even cook practices the “moves”, becoming familiar of how to extend or elaborate their skills in their craft, she’ll become an expert because she’ll have more to draw on, more to use in the act of crafting their art. As she practices different moves, learns to manipulate what’s one the page, eventually she will discover that the poem will move in very different and exciting ways than it had before she learned the craft. She will be able to push a poem to a new level, filled with nuance and complexity yet shining with clarity and precision. That’s the advantage of knowing how to extend and elaborate on content both horizontally and vertically. That’s what Myers’ book offers. It’s worth a good read.
