Learning How to Shift in Scale in Your Writing
Craft Exercises in Shifting Scale
Poems exist in contrast. How do you make words speak to one another and tell not a commonplace story but one that excites the mind and opens the heart?
One way is to ask certain words or phrases to reach their arms around something unusual, out of the ordinary. Juxtaposition reveals the dualistic nature of our experience. When opposites can be joined together instead of being like Fox News and CNN at in high contrast, the polarities can begin to speak of the unity of experience. The imagination at its best invites us to see our commonalities and the equality of emotions.
Shifted the Scale of Associations
Elizabeth Bishop learned from the metaphysical poets how to bridge from the abstract to the concrete and back again. George Herbert was not only a master craftsman but a magical wordsmith. He often used abstract, theological terms and married them to sensual, concrete adjectives. He introduced divinity through a concrete object or action. By doing so he made the otherwise dry and heady terms become incarnate, flesh, vivid.
Blending the Abstract with the Concrete
Take an abstract noun from one of your poems/prose pieces
Truth
Place a sensual (use of five senses) before the noun such as:
Titillating truth
Vapid truth
Lemony truth
Smoky truth
Now add modifiers/verbs to extend one of them
The titillating truth rubbed against his thigh as if he finally
had found what had eluded him for years
REVERSE THIS
Blending the Concrete with the Abstract
Take a concrete noun (Use the senses: something you can touch, hear, see, taste, smell) such as
Dew
Yucca
Jeans
Tomato
Place an abstract noun next to it as modifier
The divine jeans
Now add verb/modifier and extend it
The divine jeans, a thigh-fit blue, clung to his thighs as if
they’d been ironed to his skin.
Practice Doing These Word Level Shifts:
Shifting from Camera’s Eye to Ecstatic, from Literal to Figurative, and Back
By mixing the different dimensions of words, combining Latinate words (that tend to be abstract) with Anglo-Saxon (that tend to be shorter and more sensual), you heat up your poems. In addition, you can shift from describing something literally to the figurative description of something.
Ellen Bryant Voigt calls the literal description a camera’s eye view of reality. She calls the other way of seeing, which is the domain of poetry, the metaphoric, figurative, ecstatic way of seeing, which is more associative in nature.
By linking them, two dimensions of reality are compared. What we often don’t see as being associated with one another are paired.
This creates new ways of thinking and feeling, new epiphanies about how our world (and experience of our world) has an unseen pattern or unity.
As a poet, it may open new doors to your consciousness about yourself, your world, and others. As Frost said, if you are surprised, then the reader will be surprised. That’s what good poems do: surprise us to a new way of seeing.
From Camera’s Eye to Figurative Association
Describe something as specifically as you can, using adjectives, participles, and even adverbs as if you were a camera moving in close to this scene/object/person.
Camera’s Eye View
The pale purple lilac clusters, seven or eight of them on a stem, swayed
in the early morning wind
Take this description and add a figurative shift, comparing it to something more metaphoric, something smaller or larger, something from another realm, something outside in this case the natural world
Pair with Figurative, Ecstatic Eye View
The pale purple lilac clusters, seven or eight of them on a stem, swayed
in the early morning wind as if some angry housekeeper couldn’t decide where they should be,
Hey, wait. But Don’t Stop There!
Add more literal to the figurative (or even go back to more figurative)
The pale purple lilac clusters, seven or eight of them on a stem, swayed
In the early morning wind as if some angry housekeeper couldn’t decide where they should be, shoving them to one side and another,
cursing under his breath, “This will not do. This will never do.”
Shift in Scale from Small to Large, Close to Far Away, Intimate to Distant
Another way to create tension and liven a poem (or prose piece) is toshift in scale.These associative leaps allow the imagination to explore what if not normally linked together.
Quantum physics, once scientists were able to develop instruments to explore what the tiniest particles do, discovered that, much to their surprise, their findings informed them how the macroscopic elements interact.
In poetry, shifting scale allows us to discover how seemingly disparate elements of our lives and experience can reveal much about how contradictory feelings often are not as contradictory as they seem or, as the case may be, are even more contradictory than we thought.
Shift in Scale
From Big to Miniscule
Think of something in your yard or house. Describe it. Use your senses.
Something Big
The grandfather clock on the wall with its bob swinging back and forth, left, right, hypnotic, steady, reassuring
Pair with Something Small
The grandfather clock on the wall with its bob, encased in glass, swinging back and forth, left, right, hypnotic, steady, reassuring, like the twin finches in the cage, flitting from one perch to another, time and again as if, for them, time was never still, fleeting, on wing.
You can make these connections from near and far, intimate to distant.
For example, going from Intimate to Distant:
His hand rested on my shoulder, firm, heavy, like the dark clouds hovering over the far hills.
Or from Distant to Near
The stream cut through the ravine like a sliver thread in his jacket sleeve.
Practice using different shifts in scale as well as in imagery and in words. At its best, a poem reveals its mystery to you by your being willing to focus your imaginative eye through one lens and then, by shifting your attention, or your kind of attention, to another lens.
Just as a pianist or flutist practice scales on their instrument, if you practice these “moves” from one scale or level to another, you will build your imaginative muscles and find, as you practice these more often, your poems will become more alive and livelier.
