The Art of Making Sentences to Drive a Poem

Jul 9

Syntax as Style in Poetry: The Invisible Craft of an Artful Sentence in Poetry

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Earnest Hemingway

When established poets tell students that they need to pay attention to the different elements of craft—the diction, the image, the meter, the rhythm, the music, and the line breaks—they often overlook one element that is essential to make all the others work. That element is syntax.

A good sentence, if carefully rendered, can make or break a poem.

The Romantic poets who wrote long narrative poems or powerful lyric poems used sentences that energized the poetic lines, often having a sentence trip down the page, skipping from line to line before closing. Contemporary poets, often influenced by the journalistic styles of crisp, short sentences, are more inclined to pack a sentence into a few lines.

But wherever strategy a poet is using—the long cumulative or short declarative sentence, the paratactic or hypotactic syntax (see essay below)—syntax informs what we know, see, and experience in a poem. It is the invisible element of craft.

Poets talk about how a protracted line accommodates more content, facilitates a quicker pace, and allows for a more narrative flow and how a shorter line, often used with lyric poetry, slows down the pace, focuses intensely on word choice, and modulates as well as condenses the language of a poem.

But what is often ignored is how these long or shorter lines are made possible by the sentences that are broken into separate parts. The essential unit of English is the sentence that is comprised and formulated in a predictable pattern—subject, verb, object. When the poem breaks that normal sequence of words, the syntax becomes at once highlighted and disguised by the line breaks. If the sentence breaks in such a way that the normal syntax is interrupted, the words that are disrupted from their natural order stand out like someone wearing only underwear at a formal party. If the breaks fall into familiar shifts in the sentence, they become, as in many of W.S. Merwin’s poems where he uses no punctuation, aids to reading the way word-units move down the page.

Line breaks act as guides to make sense of what the sentence is doing on the page.

As readers and writers of poetry, we focus of most our attention to line breaks—to where a sentence is broken. Such a focus shifts the way we make sense of a sentence. We comprehend it differently because we take it in differently. Instead of reading it, as we do in prose, for its whole meaning, we pay attention to each line and how, by itself, and as part of other lines, the sentence moves down the page. We expect the sentence to act differently. The meaning doesn’t depend on the whole unit. Meaning is revealed in the parts. Line by line, phrase by phrase, even word by word, we discover the meaning of the poem. As the poet Baron Wormser said, reading (and writing) poetry is like “life in the slow lane.”

In a way, reading poetry demands a dramatic shift in our focus on the page. By the way lines are spaced down the page, we are forced to shift from the horizonal movement of the eyes across the page from left to right to reading vertically down the page, line by line. The shift changes how we comprehend language and how we take in a sentence. Breaking the sentence apart forces us to look inside the sentence at its working parts. Like a car mechanic lifting off the top of the engine, we get to look at the pistons and valves and spark plugs and how they, when the engine is working, combine to create power. But in a poem, we are seeing the working parts in action, live, moving up and down the page, driving the poem from line to line.

As a reader, we don’t necessarily notice how the subject has been severed from its verb or how the object has been dislocated from the main clause. We read a line, take it in, then read the next, looking for each to inform us about something that will reveal the meaning of the sentence. But subconsciously, we know that a sentence is fractured. We also sense the breakage has something to do with the meaning. So we read on, noting how the sentence is parsed out, broken up, and ends, and another one will commence somewhere down the page. That is the task of reading as well as writing a poem.

Yet what may be invisible to us, as readers of poetry, is how the sentences and their construction—be they long or short, complex or compound, periodic or cumulative—create a pace and rhythm that, if studied carefully, make all the different elements of a poem work. Equally, as poets, what may be invisible to us is how we can trouble shoot what doesn’t work in our poems by not just perfecting diction, imagery, meter, sound effects, and line breaks, but by paying attention to the nature of our sentences.

For this class, we will focus on how sentence, and the syntax of sentences, can make or break a poem. By looking at how different poets use sentences, vary them, shape them, and break them, we will see what a vital tool they are in our crafting of poems.

GOALS of Getting the Poem Out of a Rut

to learn how to enter a poem using different sentence structures and syntax to create tension and vary the pace and flow
to learn how to use literal and figurative imagination to extend and elaborate in a poem
to refine the use of mid and end of line breaks
to increase the sonic landscape in a poem
to refine the use of juxtaposition in a poem
to increase different cuts and leaps in poems

Poetic Tensions: What are the Verses in Verse?

Ask Each Poem: What Tension is in Your Poem?

Sentence/Line
Short/long lines
Slow/Quick Pace
Meditative/Narrative
Discursive/Lyric

OTHER KINDS OF TENSION:

Title/Opening
Musical/Prosaic
Singing/Saying (lyric v. lower diction)
Concrete/Abstraction
Private/Public
Literal/Figurative language
Clarity/Wildness
Tone/Mood
Adjectives + Noun
Factual/Imaginative
Narrative/lyric
Formal/Free Verse

Four Poetic Temperaments:

WHICH IS YOURS?

Limited Temperaments

Story/Narrative Structure/Form

Unlimited Temperaments

Music/Sound Effects Imagination/Lyric

GET OUR YOUR POEM FOR THIS WEEK. LET’S LOOK AT IT

CHOOSE ONE SENTENCE (SUBJECT/VERB) Write it in journal

Range of Sentence Shapes

One of the paint brushes a poet can use to brighten their poems is to draw on the range of coloration in different sentences. By dabbing short and long, delayed and extended sentences, intermittently in a poem, poems become vibrant, three-dimensional, engaging the eye and ear at once.

What are the basic sentence units? We all know them. But here is a reminder.

Simple/Declarative Sentence (main clause)

subject-verb-object

Example:

Henry approached the field.

Compound Sentence (uses coordinating conjunctions to link, i.e., And, but, for, nor, or, so, and yet)

Subject-verb-object + Subject-Verb-Object

Example:

Henry approached the field, but the sky obscured his view.

Complex Sentence

Dependent/Subordinate, relative, adverbial, conditional clauses + Subject-verb-object

Example:

When Henry approached the field, the sun obscured his view.

These three forms are the standard ways of composing sentences. In the present journalistic style of writing, the simple sentence is the mainstay. Complex and compound are added to spice up the sentence structure, although they can sound pedantic, too formal in some cases. You can, as most professional writers do, complicate the sentence by blending complex-compound with simple-complex in one sentence. The variations are endless.

What types of sentences do you use? Look at your poem. Break it into sentence units. Do you notice a pattern?

But Wait. Before you answer that, there are some more permutations to use of sentences to consider….

FOUR MORE WAYS TO COMPOSE COMPLEX SENTENCES!

These variations are often never taught in school. In fact, they aren’t even taught in most MFA programs. Yet they are the mainstay of creative writing. They give the poet an expansive toolbox to draw on to create variety and subtle variations in his/her writing.

Periodic/left-branching (as with complex sentence, there is a delay of main clause, causing suspense)

Free modifiers/subordinate, relative, adverbial, conditional clause + main clause. The sentence is left-branching, filling in detail before the main clause.

Example:

Before dawn, with the sky a dungeon black, and the moon a sliver, when no one, not even lonesome coyote, made a sound, Henry approached the field.

Cumulative/right-branching (as with complex sentence but this time, elements are added on, extended, fleshing out verbs or objects, branching to the right.

Main Clause + free modifiers, subordinate, dependent, relative, adverbial, conditional clauses

Example:

Henry approached the field where, in the distance, two shattered birches scarred the horizon, and, much further, the sun, bloody red, sank into the fields of wheat as if it were drowning and was sucking the whole earth with it, pulling it down under the waves that enveloped Henry in its dark undertow.

Interrupted/fractured (pause, delay, suspense, using free modifiers)

Subject, interrupter, verb

Subject, verb, interrupter, object

The interrupters can be free-modifiers or subordinate, dependent, relative, adverbial, conditional clauses.

WHAT ARE THESE FREE-MODIFIERS?

THEY ARE YOUR PAINT BRUSHES, YOUR COLORED PENCILS!

Examples of free-modifiers, interrupters/brush strokes/zoom lenses:

Appositive: Henry, the last of the bards, approached the field.

Preposition: Henry, at the fence, approached the field.

Participle phrase: Henry, wiping sweat from his brow, approached the field.

Absolute: Henry, face sweaty, eyes swollen, nose running, approached the field.

Adjective out of Order: Henry, tired and drawn, fed up with life, approached the field.

Example of dependent, relative, adverbial clauses can also interrupt, extend, or elaborate a sentence:

Henry, who carried a book of Wordsworth in one pocket and a gun in the other, approached the field.

Practice these, add them to your repertoire. When you are stuck, when you need to kick a poem out of the starting gate, elaborate, use your paint brushes, add a free modifier using right or left branching sentences. They give quick images to sentence and vary the sentence. They can be your word paint brushes. They can color your writing, make a drab sentence visually exciting. They can be dropped in a sentence to create a left branch, right branch, or intermediate branch sentence. Moreover, they can do it economically. They are free and unencumbered by having to be in one place in a sentence.

In some contexts, some of these could also delay the direct object by inserting them between the verb and direct object.

Examples:

Henry approached with caution the field.

Henry approached, his eyes keenly focused, the field.

Sentence Fragment (speedy, quick take)

Examples:

Henry in the field

The approach to the field.

Henry, the bard.

And that is not all!

Interrogative Sentence: Ask a Question

To change the pace in a poem, an interrogative sentence, can put the brakes on like no other sentence. A poem can be sailing along on the wings of description and smack into a wall with an adeptly placed question that forces the reader to Pause, Think, and Take a breath

before moving on.

Prompt:

Notice what kinds of sentence you tend to write. Using an already written poem, change them. Notice how Oliver, Hoagland and other poets use different types of sentences for different poems to mirror the mood, pace, tone, and emotion that they want to convey. Why do they use one type in one poem? But in another, they use completely different sentences? How do the sentences effect the flow and pace of the poem?

A COMMERCIAL BREAK: For Further Reading, here are some books that go into more depth about syntax:

Syntax As Style or How to Write a Beautiful Sentence

Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphic Press LLC, 2006

This book has been a bible for me. She shows how different types of sentences provide their own dramatical force. She goes from simple sentences to more complex structures, using great writers to show how a periodic right-branching sentence can, by itself, quite separate from the content, can create suspense. She shows how the simple use of verb phrases or noun phrases can build up detail and drama in a sentence. She shows how a cumulative, right-branching sentence can, with the artful use of free modifiers, pack a sentence with information while actively engaging the reader with information. She shows how to use openers and closers in sentences, how to use free modifiers to break up sentences, giving more variety to the prose. You find out how, with parallelism, a sentence can contain the world. You find how sentences are the musical phrases in prose.

Brooks Landon: Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read. New York, A Penguin Group, 2013. On line: A Plume Book

In Landon’s book, building on what Tufte has done, he shows how he taught writers to write well, adding a range of sentences to their writing. He demonstrates how to take flaccid prose and liven it up, using cumulative sentences. He also provides you with exercises to build your sentence muscles.

Harry R. Norden Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999

This very practical book, my second bible on sentence writing, taking the ideas of Tufte and Landon, that shows how to make artful sentences using free modifiers—absolutes (the must for any professional writers), appositives, participle phrases, adjectives out of order—not only gives wonderful writing exercises along with the images and examples to back them up, but also invites you to stretch your sentence muscles. He calls the use of free modifiers as image grammar because, by their nature, they give imagistic vitality to your writing. They are the reservoir that a writer can draw on when a writing instructor tells them to use detail, to show, not tell. The use of free modifiers is the well spring of professional writers.

Jeff Anderson Everyday Editing: Inviting Students to Develop Skill and Craft in Writer’s Workshop. Portland, ME Stenhouse Publishers, 2007

Taking Norden’s ideas, Anderson shows how to develop your sentence muscles by walking you through some exercises, giving examples as he does. Very practical.

Jeff Anderson. Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2005.

His first book opened my eyes to what I could do in my writing as well as how to teach the use of artful sentences to my students.

But There Is Still Something Else to Consider!

The Types of Syntactical Arrangement

Once you have varied sentence as one of your paint brushes, you can add another dimension: varying how the sentences are arranged next to one another.

Paratactic Syntax (para beside + taxis arrange)

In this syntax, the sentences are set side by side without any attempt in the sentence to link one sentence to the other. Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman often use this type of syntax. The connection, if it is made, is something the reader has to do. It is not made explicit.

Example:

Henry approached the field.

Two dead birches struck at the sky like assassins.

A crow settled on one branch.

In the distance, a howl rose and died away.

Hypotactic Syntax (hypo beneath + taxis arrange)

In this syntax, the relation within and between sentences is made explicit by use of subordinating and coordinating conjunctions. This syntax is more discursive, incorporating logical connections to be drawn between one aspect of one sentence and the next and between different sentences. Larry Levis, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Levine, all of whom love long sentences, often weave these sentences into their poems.

Example:

When the crow settled on a branch of the dead birch, Henry approached the field and heard, or thought he heard, in the distance, a howl that rose and fell, and left him feeling as if death were stalking him like an assassin. He had that feeling for years.

His wife warned him, should they divorce (and they did) he was a marked man. Since then, he had a bullseye on his forehead.

Prompt:

Notice how Oliver, Hoagland and other poets mix the syntax, sometimes leaving the reader to connect two disparate sentence and other times provide clear connections by use of subordination.

RESOURCES AND APPENDIX

How Mary Oliver Uses Sentence Variation to Pace her Poems

In this handout, I have taken one of Mary Oliver’s poems and highlighted what she has done with her sentences. Pay attention to how the varied sentences lengths pace the poem. Short sentence clip right along. Long ones allow her to grab more information and ideas and settled into a meditative tone. Also, look how the use of paratactic sentences, one set next to the other, each standing on its own, effects how the pace of the poem. When she uses hypotactic syntax where there is subordination and connective tissue holding the sentence together and also link sentence to sentence, notice how that allows her to be more expansive, incorporating thoughts, feelings, observations, comparisons that the short sentences just cannot do.

I first show the poem as a series of sentences. Then I show it as she broke the sentences into lines.

You will see that the invisible art of writing a poem comes from knowing how to carve the lines. To use an analogy, a good chef knows how to carve the turkey correctly, slicing the sentence in the right place, letting it unfold on its own, and then slicing again, letting another part of it reveal itself. The good carver knows how the make the cuts even so that each line has its own integrity, and each piece can be taken in on its own.

That is what good line breaks do for a poem. Oliver knew how to carve up her lines. You will see that, depending on the poem, the sentences vary widely. Yet she knows what ones will work best for each subject and for the general moods of the poem. I say “moods” because the sentence themselves create their own mood. A short sentence happens quickly. The subject and verb hit the road fast, sprinting out of the gate. A longer sentence, particularly a left-branching periodic one that has modifiers or clauses preceding the main clause, arrive in their own time, lazily evolving, allowing more of a quiet, meditative mood. A right-branching cumulative sentence is like a long road trip on a back country road where you have time to notice the creek and the line of cottonwoods, the horse in the pasture, the farmhouse under an old oak. It builds and draws out an image or thought. Depending on what is happening in a poem, each of these set by themselves or set close to one another will create their own mood that, if you change the sentence structure and syntax, can, in turn, change the mood. Notice how Oliver does this in her poem.

I. FIRST POEM:

Key:

words or phrases are use of parallelism
are main subject and verb of a sentence, main clause
are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses or free modifiers such asprepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases,absolutes, adjectives out of order
: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor

Note:

She uses extensive parallelism throughout this poem, repeating words as well as different free modifiers and adverbial clauses to link the images. She also uses sentences varied in length. She starts off a series of short, declarative ones at the start that tend to hurry the poem, since “he carries…he is gone…I am do happy. . .Seeing what I have…The first words” jams a lot of action quickly into the poem. Then the tone changes. It shifts to a more meditative turn. With that turn, the sentences also change. The last part of the poem where she is wondering, asking “maybe” questions slows down, elongating the sentences that are again packed with repetition of two participial phrases to close to poem.

Circles

In the morning the blue heron is busy stepping, slowly, around the edge of the pond.

He is tall and shining.

His wings, folded against his body, fit so neatly they make of him, when he lifts his shoulders and begins to rise into the air, a great surprise.

Also he carries so lightly the terrible sword beak.

Then he is gone over the trees.

I am so happy to be alive in this world [that] I would like to live forever, but I am content not to.

Seeing what I have seen has filled me, believing what I believe has filled me.

The first words of this page are hardly thought of when the bird circles back over the trees; it floats down like an armful of blue flowers, a bundle of light coming to refresh itself again in the black water, and I think: maybe it is or it isn’t the same bird—maybe it’s the first one’s child, or the child of its child.

What I mean is, our deliverance from Time and the continuance, if we only steward them well, of earthly things.

So maybe it’s myself still standing here, or someone else, like myself hot with the joy of this world, and filled with praise.

Note:

Now that you see the way sentences flow down the page, look at how they are broken up, how the line breaks create more hesitations and syntactical disjunction (busy/stepping; the/pond; they/make) that give the poem a start-stop quality, almost following the eye as it follows the jerky movement of a heron. As the poem develops, however, the lines smooth out as she turns inward, following her own thoughts about what is being seen and not seen. Note the immense variation from quick short to long, extended, complex-compound sentences.

Circles

In the morning the blue heron is busy

stepping, slowly around the edge of the

pond. He is tall and shining. His wings, folded

against his body, fit so neatly they

make of him, when he lifts his shoulders and begins to rise

into the air, a great surprise. Also

he carries so lightly the terrible sword beak. Then

he is gone over the trees.

I am so happy to be alive in this world

I would like to live forever, but I am

content not to. Seeing what I have seen

has filled me, believing what I believe

has filled me.

The first words of this page are

hardly thought of when the bird

circles back over the trees; it floats down

like an armful of blue flowers, a bundle of light

coming to refresh itself again in the black water, and I think:

maybe it is or it isn’t the same bird—maybe it’s

the first one’s child, or the child of its child.

What I mean is, our deliverance from Time

and the continuance, if we only steward them well,

of earthly things. So maybe it’s myself still standing here, or

someone else, like myself hot with the joy of this world, and

filled with praise.

Flame of Appreciation

From the essay “Winter Hours” by Mary Oliver

In the act of writing the poem, I am obedient, and submissive. Insofar as one can, I put aside ego and vanity, and even intention. I listen. What I hear is almost a voice, almost a language. It is a second ocean, rising, singing into one’s ears, or deep inside the ears, whispering in the recesses where one is less oneself than a part of some single indivisible community. Blake spoke of taking dictation. I am no Blake, yet I know the nature of what he meant. Every poet knows it. One learns the craft, and then casts off. One hopes for gifts. One hopes for direction. It is both physical, and spooky. It is intimate, and inapprehensible. Perhaps it is for this reason that the act of first-writing, for me, involves nothing more complicated than paper and pencil. The abilities of a typewriter or computer would not help in this act of slow and deep listening (italics mine). . . .

My work doesn’t document any of the sane or learned arguments for saving, healing, and protecting the earth for our experience. What I write begins and ends with the act of noticing and cherishing, it is neither begins nor ends with the human world. . . .I am forever just going out for a walk and tripping over the root, or the petal, of some trivia, then seeing it as if in second sight, as emblematic. . . .

. . .the world makes a great distinction between kinds of life: human on the one hand, all else on the other. Or it throws everything into two categories: animate, and inanimate. Which are neither distinctions that I care about. The world is made up of cats, and cattle, and fenceposts! A chair is alive. The blue bowl of the pond, and the blue blow on the table, that holds six apples, are all animate, and have spirits. The coat, the paper cli, the shovel, as well as the lively rain-dappled grass, and the thrush singing his gladness, and the rain itself. What are division for, if you look into it, but to lay out stratification—that is, to suggest where an appreciative or not so appreciative response is proper, to each of the many parts of the indivisible world?

What I want to describe in poems is the nudge, the prick of the instant, the flame of appreciation that shoots from my heels to my head when compass grass bends its frilled branches and draws a perfect circle on the cold sand; or when the yellow wasp comes, in fall, to my wrist and then to my plate, to ramble the edges of a smear of honey.

pp 98-110 “Winter Hours” In Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems, Boston: A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999

FLAME OF APPRECIATION:

Below are visuals of two of her last images. What do you see? What do they evoke in you? Describe them in detail. Dwell on them. Look at the fine hairs on the hornet, the circular patterns in the sand, the transparency of the wings, the colors of each. Make notes on the page so you keep visual contact with the images.

Once you have descriptions, listen to the words, what they reveal, and jot down other things, other words—feelings, memories, ideas, fears, losses, beliefs, loves, pains, joys—that come up. No hurry. Let your mind roam. Think of childhood, a moment by a window when the hornet, caught inside, wants out; the walk on the beach by yourself or with someone else, and the wind stirs and the grass signs its name. . . .Go into adulthood. Words someone said. Threats. Should-do’s. Invitations. Encounters. Ecstasy. Let whatever comes up have its place with no need to censor.

Then find a way to blend the two, the wasp and the compass grass, how they speak to one another and to you. Write it out. Let the words show the way.

Dimensions of Form

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The Pacing in the Poems of Tony Hoagland

Learning to pace a poem is an art. Tony Hoagland is a Master of pacing.

Before focusing on any one poem, I want you to look at how in all these poems, Hoagland adjusts the pace of a poem by using different syntax.

Sentence Length

If you glance down this handout, you’ll see how he varies the length of his sentences, sometimes stringing along a number of short ones, then settling down in a long sentence or two, and following those with a combination of long and short sentences. The pattern for each poem varies. But what keeps each poem moving is that the sentence length and variety is set against the line breaks. For the short sentences, the number of line breaks may consist of one or two lines. The longer sentence can gobble up whole stanzas. Take a look at the variety of sentence lengths in Hoagland’s poems. As you can see, they range widely in his poems.

Parallelism

Next, as you review the poems, look at parallelism. To be successful using the longer lines, Hoagland uses extensive parallelism. There are two types, one in which is syntactical. The grammatical units are repeated. The other is verbal where certain words are repeated. By glancing down the page just focusing on words or phrases that are underlined, you can see how often he relies on parallelism to facilitate comprehension and to keep a poem moving. As a reader, once you see a word, phrase, or grammatical unit repeated, you know what to expect and keep looking for more of the same. Such expectation increases the pace of the poem.

Sentence Variety

Next, look at the structure of the sentences. You can construct a sentence by delaying the subject and verb, by breaking up the subject and verb, and by extending the object of a sentence. Look at how his sentences effect the pace of a poem. Look for how many subject/verbs are in a sentence. Look for where they fall in a sentence. The main subject and verb are in Bold. The dependent/subordinate, relative, and adverbial clauses and free modifiers are in italics.

Slower Paced sentences: Periodic sentence. When a sentence has a completely different structure, when the subject and verb are delayed by a cluster of prepositional phrases or adverbial clause coming first, you, as a reader, instinctively slow down, knowing that the sentence is packed with information. Such sentences are like complex intersections where traffic goes more than one way, some turning right, some left, some straight ahead. These sentences, however, can also be a green light if they have extensive use of parallelism. With adept line breaks, they can move right along.
Suspenseful Sentence: Interrupted Sentence. A sentence can create suspense by have the subject and verb split. You know what the subject is but because free modifiers or other grammatical units come between it and the verb, you have to wait to find out what the subject will do.
Quick Sentences: Culminative Sentence. A sentence can also be extended by having free modifiers, relative or adverbial clauses tacked on, filling out the sentences.
Variety of Sentences. Of course, a sentence can be simple, compound, or complex, each of which has its own structure. By looking at the bolded words which are the subject and verbs in a sentence, you can see how Hoagland arranges them in different places that, again, impact the pace of a poem.

Paratactic and Hypotactic syntax. Another aspect of variety in sentence is the actual syntax and how, if the same type of sentences are placed next to one another, what happens to the text. The paratactic sentences are those that make a statement. They don’t have subordination. They aren’t linked sentence to sentence. Each can stand on its own. They don’t necessarily relate to one another like two strangers in a line to buy theater tickets. Hypotactic sentences are connected, one feeds into the other, one related to the previous one. They are often subordinated with causal, temporal, or logical conjunctions (therefore, since, because). One sentence feeds into the other. Note how Hoagland varies these. Sometimes using anaphora, he links a series of sentences. Sometimes he will lay out images one on top of the other with no attempt to explain what the connection between them is. Sometimes he shifts back and forth between the two.

Metaphor and Simile

The last thing to look at, which is the hallmark of a Hoagland poem, is the use of metaphors and similes. He often riffs two or more similes in a row. The similes provide him with a trampoline that he can jump on and leap into another subject, bounce into an entirely different direction. He used to call himself “the king of metaphor” because of how striking his metaphors are and how he used them to open up his poems. But opening up a poem is only half of the art of metaphor. The other half is finding how to bring the metaphor back to the subject of the poem. He leaps, he prowls around in it, but he always returns to what he was initially saying. But what he was saying takes on new form by the metaphor. Look at the number of times in these poems he leaps and returns. Simile and Metaphor are Bold italics.

I. FIRST POEM

Key:

Underlined words or phrases are use of parallelism
Bold are main subject and verb of a sentence
Italics are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses with conjunctions or free modifiers such as prepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases, absolutes, adjectives out of order
Bold italics: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor

Notice: Use of different types of sentences: declarative, interrogative, and different structures: simple, compound, complex, compound-complex

Adam and Eve

I wanted to punch her right in the mouth and that’s the truth.

After all, we had gotten from the station of the flickering glances to the station of the hungry mouths, from the shoreline of skirts and faded jeans to the ocean of unencumbered skin,from the perilous mountaintop of the apartment steps to the sanctified valley of the bed–the candle fluttering upon the dresser top, its little yellow blade sending up its whiff of waxy smoke, and I could smell her readiness like a dank cloud above a field, when at the crucial moment, the all-important moment, the moment standing at attention, she held her milk white hand agitatedlyover the entrance to her body and said No, and my brain burst into flame.

If I couldn’t sink myself in her like a dark spur or dissolve into her like a clod thrown in a river, can I go all the way in the saying, and say I wanted to punch her right in the face?

Am I allowed to say that, that I wanted to punch her right in her soft face?

Or is the saying just another instance of rapaciousness, just another way of doing what I wanted then, by saying it?

Is a man just an animal, and is a woman not an animal?

Is the name of the animal power?

Is it true that the man wishes to see the woman hurt with her own pleasure and the woman wishes to see the expression on the man’s face of someone falling from great height, that the woman thrills with the power of her weakness and the man is astonished by the weakness of his power?

Is the sexual chase a hunt where the animal inside drags the human down into a jungle made of vowels, hormonal undergrowth of sweat and hair, or is this an obsolete idea lodged like a fossil
in the brain of the ape who lives inside the man?

Can the fossil be surgically removed or dissolved, or redesigned so the man can be a human being, like a woman?

Does the woman see the man as a house where she might live in safety, and does the man see the woman as a door through which he might escape the hated prison of himself, and when the door is locked, does he hate the door instead?

Does he learn to hate all doors?

I’ve seen rain turn into snow then back to rain, and I’ve seen making love turn into fucking
then back to making love, and no one covered up their faces out of shame, no one rose and walked into the lonely maw of night.

But where was there, in fact, to go?

Are some things better left unsaid?

Shall I tell you her name?

Can I say it again, that I wanted to punch her right in the face?

Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness.

As long as there is desire, we will not be safe.

Adam and Eve

I wanted to punch her right in the mouth and that’s the truth.

After all, we had gotten from the station of the flickering glances
to the station of the hungry mouths,
from the shoreline of skirts and faded jeans
to the ocean of unencumbered skin,
from the perilous mountaintop of the apartment steps
to the sanctified valley of the bed–

the candle fluttering upon the dresser top, its little yellow blade
sending up its whiff of waxy smoke,
and I could smell her readiness
like a dank cloud above a field,

when at the crucial moment, the all-important moment,
the moment standing at attention,
she held her milk white hand agitatedly
over the entrance to her body and said No,
and my brain burst into flame.

If I couldn’t sink myself in her like a dark spur
or dissolve into her like a clod thrown in a river,
can I go all the way in the saying, and say
I wanted to punch her right in the face?
Am I allowed to say that,
that I wanted to punch her right in her soft face?

Or is the saying just another instance of rapaciousness,
just another way of doing what I wanted then,
by saying it?

Is a man just an animal, and is a woman not an animal?
Is the name of the animal power?
Is it true that the man wishes to see the woman
hurt with her own pleasure

and the woman wishes to see the expression on the man’s face
of someone falling from great height,
that the woman thrills with the power of her weakness
and the man is astonished by the weakness of his power?

Is the sexual chase a hunt where the animal inside
drags the human down
into a jungle made of vowels,
hormonal undergrowth of sweat and hair,

or is this an obsolete idea
lodged like a fossil
in the brain of the ape
who lives inside the man?

Can the fossil be surgically removed
or dissolved, or redesigned
so the man can be a human being, like a woman?

Does the woman see the man as a house
where she might live in safety,
and does the man see the woman as a door
through which he might escape
the hated prison of himself,

and when the door is locked,
does he hate the door instead?
Does he learn to hate all doors?

I’ve seen rain turn into snow then back to rain,
and I’ve seen making love turn into fucking
then back to making love,
and no one covered up their faces out of shame,
no one rose and walked into the lonely maw of night.

But where was there, in fact, to go?
Are some things better left unsaid?
Shall I tell you her name?
Can I say it again,
that I wanted to punch her right in the face?

Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness.
As long as there is desire, we will not be safe.

II SECOND POEM

Key:

Underlined words or phrases are use of parallelism
Bold are main subject and verb of a sentence
Italics are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses or free modifiers such as prepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases, absolutes, adjectives out of order
Bold italics: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor

Dickhead

To whomever taught me the word dickhead, I owe a debt of thanks.

It gave me a way of being in the world of men when I most needed one, when I was pale and scrawny, naked, goosefleshed as a plucked chicken in a supermarket cooler, a poor forked thing stranded in the savage universe of puberty, where wild jockstraps flew across the steamy skies of locker rooms, and everybody fell down laughing at jokes I didn’t understand.

But dickhead was a word as dumb and democratic as a hammer, an object you could pick up in your hand, and swing, saying dickhead this and dickhead that, a song that meant the world was yours enough at least to bang on like a garbage can, and knowing it, and having that beautiful ugliness always cocked and loaded in my mind, protected me and calmed me like a psalm.

Now I have myself become a beautiful ugliness, and my weakness is a fact so well established that it makes me calm, and I am calm enough to be grateful for the lives I never have to live again; but I remember all the bad old days back in the world of men, when everything was serious, mysterious, scary, hairier and bigger than I was; I recall when flesh was what I hated, feared and was excluded from: Hardly knowing what I did, or what would come of it, I made a word my friend.

Dickhead

To whomever taught me the word dickhead,
I owe a debt of thanks.
It gave me a way of being in the world of men
when I most needed one,

when I was pale and scrawny,
naked, goosefleshed
as a plucked chicken

in a supermarket cooler, a poor
forked thing stranded in the savage
universe of puberty, where wild

jockstraps flew across the steamy
skies of locker rooms,
and everybody fell down laughing

at jokes I didn’t understand.
But dickhead was a word as dumb
and democratic as a hammer, an object

you could pick up in your hand,
and swing,
saying dickhead this and dickhead that,

a song that meant the world
was yours enough at least
to bang on like a garbage can,

and knowing it, and having that
beautiful ugliness always
cocked and loaded in my mind,

protected me and calmed me like a psalm.
Now I have myself become
a beautiful ugliness,

and my weakness is a fact
so well established that
it makes me calm,

and I am calm enough
to be grateful for the lives I
never have to live again;

but I remember all the bad old days
back in the world of men,
when everything was serious, mysterious, scary,

hairier and bigger than I was;
I recall when flesh
was what I hated, feared

and was excluded from:
Hardly knowing what I did,
or what would come of it,

I made a word my friend.

III. THIRD POEM

Key:

Underlined words or phrases are use of parallelism
Bold are main subject and verb of a sentence
Italics are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses or free modifiers such as prepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases, absolutes, adjectives out of order
Bold italics: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor

Texaco

The nozzle of the gas pump plunged into the flank of the car like the curved beak of a predatory bird looks like it is drinking or maybe I’m light-headed from the fumes or from the slanted light
of Thursday afternoon.

—Still, it is a powerful moment when I squeeze the trigger of the handle and feel, beneath the stained cement, the deep shudder and convulsion of the gasoline begin its plunging rush in my direction.

Out of the guts of the earth, filtered through sand and blood down the long hose of history towards the very nipple of this moment:—the mechanical ticking of the pump, the sound of my car drinking—filling my tank with a necessary story about the road, how we have to have it to go down; the whole world construed around this singular, solitary act as if I myself had conjured it
from some strange thirst.

Texaco

The nozzle of the gas pump
plunged into the flank of the car
like the curved beak of a predatory bird

looks like it is drinking
or maybe I’m light-headed
from the fumes

or from the slanted light
of Thursday afternoon.
—Still, it is a powerful moment

when I squeeze the trigger of the handle
and feel, beneath the stained cement,
the deep shudder and convulsion

of the gasoline begin
its plunging rush in my direction.
Out of the guts of the earth,

filtered through sand and blood
down the long hose of history
towards the very nipple of this moment:

—the mechanical ticking of the pump,
the sound of my car drinking—
filling my tank with a necessary story

about the road, how we have
to have it to go down;
the whole world construed around

this singular, solitary act
as if I myself had conjured it
from some strange thirst.

IV POEM FOUR

Key:

Underlined words or phrases are use of parallelism
Bold are main subject and verb of a sentence
Italics are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses or free modifiers such as prepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases, absolutes, adjectives out of order
Bold italics: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor

Lie Down with a Man

In those days I thought I had to do everything I was afraid of, so I lay down with a man.

It was one item on a list–sleeping in the graveyard, under the full moon, not looking away from the burned girl’s stricken face, strapping myself into the catapult of some electric blue pill.

It was the seventies, a whole generation of us was more than willing to chainsaw through
the branch that we were sitting on to see what falling felt like–bump bump bump.

Knowing the worse about yourself seemed like self-improvement then, and suffering was adventure.

So I lay down with a man, which I really don’t remember except that it was humorless.

Curtains fluttered in the breeze from the radio’s black grill.

Van Morrison filled up the room like astral aftershave.

I lay my mass of delusions next to his mass of delusions in the dark room where I struggled with the old adversary, myself–in the form, this time, of a body–someplace between heaven and earth, two things I was afraid of.

Lie Down with a Man

In those days I thought I had to
do everything I was afraid of,
so I lay down with a man.

It was one item on a list–
sleeping in the graveyard, under the full moon,
not looking away from the burned girl’s stricken face,
strapping myself into the catapult
of some electric blue pill.

It was the seventies, a whole generation of us
was more than willing to chainsaw through
the branch that we were sitting on
to see what falling felt like–bump bump bump.

Knowing the worse about yourself
seemed like self-improvement then,
and suffering was adventure.

So I lay down with a man,
which I really don’t remember
except that it was humorless.

Curtains fluttered in the breeze
from the radio’s black grill. Van Morrison
filled up the room like astral aftershave.

I lay my mass of delusions
next to his mass of delusions
in the dark room where I struggled
with the old adversary, myself

–in the form, this time, of a body–
someplace between heaven and earth,
two things I was afraid of.

V POEM FIVE

Key:

Underlined words or phrases are use of parallelism
Bold are main subject and verb of a sentence
Italics are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses with different conjunctions or free modifiers such as prepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases, absolutes, adjectives out of order
Bold italics: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor

The Replacement

And across the country I know they are replacing my brother’s brain with the brain of a man; one gesture, one word, one neuron at a time with surgical precision they are teaching him to hook his thumbs into his belt, to iron his mouth as flat as the horizon, and make his eyes reflective as a piece of tin.

It is a kind of cooking the male child undergoes: to toughen him, he is dipped repeatedly in insult–peckerwood, shitbag, faggot, pussy, dicksucker—until spear points will break against his epidermis, until his is impossible to disappoint.

Then he walks out into the street ready for a game of corporate poker with a hard-on for the Dow-Jones like this hormonal language I am flexing like a bicep to show who’s boss.

But I’m not the boss.

And there is nothing I can do to stop it, and would I if I could?

What else is there for him to be except a man?

If they fail, he stumbles through his life like an untied shoe.

If they succeed, he may become something even I can’t love.

Already the photograph I have of him is out of date but in it he is standing by the pool without a shirt: too young, too white, too weak, with feelings he is too inept to hide splashed over his face–goofy, proud, shy, he’s smiling at the camera as if he were under the illusion that someone loved him so well they would not ever ever ever turn him over to the world.

The Replacement

And across the country I know
they are replacing my brother’s brain
with the brain of a man;

one gesture, one word, one neuron at a time
with surgical precision
they are teaching him to hook his thumbs
into his belt, to iron his mouth as flat
as the horizon, and make his eyes
reflective as a piece of tin.

It is a kind of cooking
the male child undergoes:
to toughen him, he is dipped repeatedly
in insult–peckerwood, shitbag, faggot,
pussy, dicksucker–until spear points
will break against his epidermis,
until his is impossible to disappoint.

Then he walks out into the street
ready for a game of corporate poker
with a hard-on for the Dow-Jones
like this hormonal language I am
flexing like a bicep
to show who’s boss.

But I’m not the boss.
And there is nothing I can do to stop it,
and would I if I could?
What else is there for him to be
except a man?
If they fail,
he stumbles through his life
like an untied shoe.
If they succeed, he may become
something even I can’t love.

Already the photograph I have of him
is out of date
but in it he is standing by the pool
without a shirt: too young, too white, too weak,
with feelings he is too inept to hide
splashed over his face–

goofy, proud, shy,
he’s smiling at the camera
as if he were under the illusion
that someone loved him so well
they would not ever ever ever
turn him over to the world.

VI POEM SIX

Key:

Underlined words or phrases are use of parallelism
Bold are main subject and verb of a sentence
Italics are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses with different conjunctions or free modifiers such as prepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases, absolutes, adjectives out of order
Bold italics: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor

Until as conjunction

Why the Young Men Are So Ugly

They have little tractors in their blood and all day the tractors climb up and down inside their arms and legs, their collarbones and heads.

That is why they yell and scream and slam the barbells down into their clanking slots, making the metal ring like sledgehammers on iron, like dungeon prisoners rattling their chains.

That is why they shriek their tires at the stop sign, why they turn the base up on the stereo until it shakes the traffic light, until it dry humps the eardrum of the crossing guard.

Testosterone is a drug, and they say No, No, No until they are overwhelmed and punch their buddy in the face for joy, or make a joke about gravy and bottomless holes to a middle-aged waitress who is gently setting down the plate in front of them.

If they are grotesque, if what they say and do is often nothing more than a kind of psychopathic fart, it is only because of the tractors, the tractors in their blood, revving their engines, chewing up the turf inside their arteries and veins.

It is the testosterone tractor constantly climbing the mudhill of the world and dragging the young man behind it by a chain around his leg.

In the stink and the noise, in the clouds of filthy exhaust is where they live. It is the tractors
that make them what they are.

While they make being a man look like a disease.

Why the Young Men Are So Ugly

They have little tractors in their blood
and all day the tractors climb up and down
inside their arms and legs, their
collarbones and heads.

That is why they yell and scream and slam the barbells
down into their clanking slots,
making the metal ring like sledgehammers on iron,
like dungeon prisoners rattling their chains.

That is why they shriek their tires at the stopsign,
why they turn the base up on the stereo
until it shakes the traffic light, until it
dryhumps the eardrum of the crossing guard.

Testosterone is a drug,
and they say No, No, No until
they are overwhelmed and punch
their buddy in the face for joy,

or make a joke about gravy and bottomless holes
to a middle-aged waitress who is gently
setting down the plate in front of them.

If they are grotesque, if
what they say and do is often nothing more
than a kind of psychopathic fart,

it is only because of the tractors,
the tractors in their blood,
revving their engines, chewing up the turf
inside their arteries and veins
It is the testosterone tractor

constantly climbing the mudhill of the world
and dragging the young man behind it
by a chain around his leg.
In the stink and the noise, in the clouds
of filthy exhaust

is where they live. It is the tractors
that make them
what they are. While they make being a man
look like a disease.

VII POEM SEVEN

Key:

words or phrases are use of parallelism
are main subject and verb of a sentence
are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses with conjunctions or free modifiers such as prepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases, absolutes, adjectives out of order
: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison Whose walls are made of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials, And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is, He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds Of the thick satin quilt of America And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain, or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade, And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night, It was not blood but money That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—, He gasped, “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were Clogging up my heart—And so I perish happily, Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad Would never speak in rhymed couplets, And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes And I think, “I am asleep in America too, And I don’t know how to wake myself either,” And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life: “I was listening to the cries of the past, When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable Or what kind of nightmare it might be When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters And yet it seems to be your own hand Which turns the volume higher?

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped, “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

VIII POEM EIGHT

Key:

Underlined words or phrases are use of parallelism
Bold are main subject and verb of a sentence
Italics are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses or free modifiers such as prepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases, absolutes, adjectives out of order
Bold italics: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor

Rap Music

Twenty-six men trapped in a submarine are pounding on the walls with a metal pipe, shouting they’ll do when they get out.

Or they are rolled up in a rug in the back of a rug truck that has wrecked.

No, it’s the car pulled up next to mine in traffic with the windows rolled down and the sound turned up so loud it puts everything in italics: enough to make the asphalt thump and the little leaves of shrubbery in front of the nice brick houses quake.

I don’t know what‘s going on inside that portable torture chamber, but I have a bad suspicion
there’s a lot of dead white people in there on a street lit by burning police cars where a black man is striking the head of a white one again and again with a brick, then lifting the skull to drink blood from the hole—

But that’s what art is for, isn’t it?

It’s about giving expression to the indignation—it’s for taking the in out of the inhibitchin; so maybe my ears are just a little hysterical or maybe my fear is a little historical and you know, I’d like to form an exploratory committee to investigate that question—and I’d like that committee to produce a documentary called The Sweet Sounds of Afro-American, but all this ugly noise is getting in the way, and what I’m not supposed to say is that Black for me is a country more foreign than China or Vagina, more alarming than going down Niagara on Viagra—and it makes me feel stupid when I get close like a little white dog on the edge of a big dark woods I’m not supposed to look directly into and there’s this pounding noise like a heartbeat full of steroids, like a thousand schizophrenic Shakespeares killing themselves at high volume—this tangled roar that has to be shut up or blown away or sealed off or actually mentioned and entered.

Rap Music

Twenty-six men trapped in a submarine
are pounding on the walls with a metal pipe,
shouting what they’ll do when they get out.
Or they are rolled up in a rug in the back
of a rug truck that has wrecked.

No, it’s the car pulled up next to mine in traffic
with the windows rolled down and the sound turned up
so loud it puts everything in italics: enough to make the asphalt thump
and the little leaves of shrubbery
in front of the nice brick houses quake.

I don’t know what’s going on inside that portable torture chamber,
but I have a bad suspicion
there’s a lot of dead white people in there

on a street lit by burning police cars
where a black man is striking the head of a white one
again and again with a brick,
then lifting the skull to drink blood from the hole—

But that’s what art is for, isn’t it?
It’s about giving expression to the indignation—
it’s for taking the in out of the inhibitchin;
so maybe my ears are just a little hysterical
or maybe my fear is a little historical

and you know, I’d like to form an exploratory committee
to investigate that question—
and I’d like that committee to produce a documentary
called The Sweet Sounds of Afro-American,

but all this ugly noise is getting in the way,
and what I’m not supposed to say
is that Black for me is a country
more foreign than China or Vagina,
more alarming than going down Niagara on Viagra—

and it makes me feel stupid when I get close
like a little white dog on the edge of a big dark woods
I’m not supposed to look directly into

and there’s this pounding noise
like a heartbeat full of steroids,
like a thousand schizophrenic Shakespeares
killing themselves at high volume—

this tangled roar
that has to be shut up or blown away or sealed off
or actually mentioned and entered.

IX POEM NINE

Key:

Underlined words or phrases are use of parallelism
Bold are main subject and verb of a sentence
Italics are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses or free modifiers such as prepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases, absolutes, adjectives out of order
Bold italics: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor

Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet

At this height, Kansas is just a concept, a checkerboard design of wheat and corn no larger than the foldout section of my neighbor’s travel magazine.

At this stage of the journey I would estimate the distance between myself and my own feelings
is roughly the same as the mileage from Seattle to New York, so I can lean back into the upholstered interval between Muzak and lunch, a little bored, a little old and strange.

I remember, as a dreamy backyard kind of kid, tilting up my head to watch those planes engrave the sky in lines so steady and so straight they implied the enormous concentration of good men,
but now my eyes flicker from the in-flight movie to the stewardess’s pantyline, then back into my book, where men throw harpoons at something much bigger and probably better than themselves, wanting to kill it, wanting to see great clouds of blood erupt to prove that they exist.

Imagine being born and growing up, rushing through the world for sixty years at unimaginable speeds.

Imagine a century like a room so large, a corridor so long you could travel for a lifetime
and never find the door, until you had forgotten that such a thing as doors exist.

Better to be on board the Pequod, with a mad one-legged captain living for revenge.

Better to feel the salt wind spitting in your face, to hold your sharpened weapon high,
to see the glisten of the beast beneath the waves.

What a relief it would be to hear someone in the crew cry out like a gull, Oh Captain, Captain!

Where are we going now?

Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet

At this height, Kansas
is just a concept,
a checkerboard design of wheat and corn

no larger than the foldout section
of my neighbor’s travel magazine.
At this stage of the journey

I would estimate the distance
between myself and my own feelings
is roughly the same as the mileage

from Seattle to New York,
so I can lean back into the upholstered interval
between Muzak and lunch,

a little bored, a little old and strange.
I remember, as a dreamy
backyard kind of kid,

tilting up my head to watch
those planes engrave the sky
in lines so steady and so straight

they implied the enormous concentration
of good men,
but now my eyes flicker

from the in-flight movie
to the stewardess’s pantyline,
then back into my book,

where men throw harpoons at something
much bigger and probably
better than themselves,

wanting to kill it,
wanting to see great clouds of blood erupt
to prove that they exist.

Imagine being born and growing up,
rushing through the world for sixty years
at unimaginable speeds.

Imagine a century like a room so large,
a corridor so long
you could travel for a lifetime

and never find the door,
until you had forgotten
that such a thing as doors exist.

Better to be on board the Pequod,
with a mad one-legged captain
living for revenge.

Better to feel the salt wind
spitting in your face,
to hold your sharpened weapon high,

to see the glisten
of the beast beneath the waves.
What a relief it would be

to hear someone in the crew
cry out like a gull,
Oh Captain, Captain!

Where are we going now?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow

David Jauss

October/November 2003

David Jauss

We all have our pet peeves. One of mine is the word flow. In my nearly three decades as a fiction writing teacher, I’ve heard it literally thousands of times. It’s a rare class in which I don’t hear “It flows” or “It doesn’t flow” offered as an explanation of what’s good or bad about a story we’re discussing. What bothers me about the word-beyond the fact that I hear it so often-is that my students generally don’t seem to understand what they mean by it. They intuitively recognize flowing prose when they read it, but they’re not sure what constitutes it. If I ask them what makes a particular sentence or story “flow,” they’ll answer with semisynonyms that are equally vague: “it’s the rhythm,” they’ll say, or “the pace,” “the style.” They can’t really define it.

I’m afraid I can’t either, at least not adequately. My response to flow is undoubtedly as intuitive as theirs. For when we talk about flow we’re talking about an element of writing that is more music than meaning and thus beyond rational explanation-perhaps even beyond language itself. Hence it’s extremely difficult to discuss, much less define or teach.

Difficult, but not impossible. While there is much about the flow of prose that will inevitably remain instinctual, there are some aspects of it that can be discussed, understood, and even practiced. The principal purpose of this essay is to try to make our unconscious understanding of flow conscious, so that those of us who don’t instinctively write flowing prose can practice the skills and strategies involved until they become so habitual they are, for all practical purposes, instinctive.

Let’s begin by looking at a paragraph that-my students and I agree-flows extremely well. It’s the opening paragraph of a story submitted to Ford Madox Ford in 1909, when he was editor of the English Review. According to Ford, the story was sent to him by a schoolteacher from Nottingham who informed him that it had been written by a young, unpublished author who was “too shy to send his work to editors.”1 Ford didn’t expect the story to amount to much, of course, but the moment he finished reading the first paragraph, he laid the story in the basket reserved for accepted manuscripts and announced to his secretary that he had discovered a literary genius-indeed, “a big one.” And that night, he told his dinner companion H.G. Wells the same thing, and Wells passed the word on to people seated at a nearby table. Before the night was out, two publishers had asked Ford for first refusal rights to the young author’s first book.2 All of this happened before the author even knew his work had been submitted to an editor, and it all resulted from a single paragraph. What was it about this paragraph that impressed Ford so much that, without reading a single word further, he accepted the story and judged its unknown author a genius? He points out many of the paragraph’s virtues, but he stresses two in particular that convinced him he could trust the author “for the rest” of the story: the author employs “the right cadence,” Ford says, and “He knows how to construct a paragraph.”3 In my opinion, cadence and paragraph construction are two of the principal things we talk about when we talk about flow. If I’m right, the paragraph’s flow is a major reason-perhaps even the principal reason-Ford recognized genius in it.

Lest this turn into an essay on how to create suspense, let me say now that the then-unknown author of this paragraph is D. H. Lawrence and that it is the opening of “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” his first published story. Here’s the paragraph:

The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full wagons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, out-distanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black wagons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.4

When I show this paragraph to my students, they invariably praise its flow. Even those who complain that the prose is too “descriptive” or “old-fashioned” (words that many students consider synonymous these days, alas) find the flow of this overly descriptive, old-fashioned prose to their liking. When I press them for an explanation of what makes the passage flow, however, I rarely get more than the verbal equivalent of shrugged shoulders. To help clarify for them, and me, what makes Lawrence’s paragraph flow, I offer them a revision that, we all agree, does not flow. I won’t subject you to the entire revision; my point should be painfully obvious after you see how I’ve butchered Lawrence’s first two sentences.

The small locomotive engine came down from Selston. It was Number 4. It clanked and stumbled. It had seven full wagons. It appeared round the corner. It made loud threats of speed. It startled a colt from among the gorse. The gorse still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon. The colt out-distanced the train at a canter.

Awful, isn’t it? But why? My sentences contain the same content as Lawrence’s, and that content is presented in essentially the same order, yet the passage is as stagnant as the afternoon light Lawrence describes. So clearly neither content nor order determines flow. (For further evidence, take a look at Raymond Queaneau’s Exercises in Styles,5 in which he tells the same brief incident 99 times, keeping its content and order intact and changing only the style and, therefore, the flow.) Nor does ease of reading determine flow, since the revision is significantly easier to read than the original-even a grade-schooler could follow it. So what is the essential difference between the two versions? Nothing more, or less, than variety of sentence structure. That sentence structure is related to flow is an obvious point, no doubt, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a writer and a teacher, it’s that when something is obvious, we tend not to pay it sufficient attention. So let’s pay closer attention to the relationship of sentence structure and flow in Lawrence’s paragraph.

There are, of course, four basic types of sentence structure-simple; compound; complex; and compound-complex. But within these four general categories, there are many different types of structure, as the grammarian Virginia Tufte has demonstrated so superbly. In her book Grammar as Style,6 Tufte defines-and illustrates-innumerable ways to structure sentences, using left-, mid-, and right-branching modifiers, balance, repetition, coordination, inversion, apposition, and a vast array of other techniques. Significantly, Lawrence uses all four sentence types in his paragraph, not to mention many of the structural techniques Tufte describes. More importantly, seven of his ten sentences are either complex or compound-complex, the two types that permit most variation in structure. For example, both the fourth and seventh sentences are complex, but one contains five dependent clauses and the other only one.

Because of the variety of sentence structure in the paragraph, Lawrence’s sentences range from six to 62 words. I use only the simple sentence pattern in my revision, however, and so my sentences range-if they can be said to “range” at all-from four to nine words. According to Tufte, “The better the writer, …the more he tends to vary his sentence length. And he does it as dramatically as possible.”7 Since variation of sentence length results from varying sentence structure, ultimately it’s our syntax that determines whether our prose flows or not. As Stephen Dobyns tells us, syntax is like a landscape: if it’s too uniform, as in my revision, our prose will look more like Nebraska than Switzerland.8 A variety of sentence structure-and therefore of sentence length-will give our prose a more flowing and appealing landscape.

But because we don’t think enough about syntax when we read, we don’t think enough about it when we write either. As a result, our work-my own, as well as my students’-tends to rely far too heavily on the two most basic sentence structures, the simple and compound. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either, of course. In fact, the simple sentence is the base structure, the ground note of all prose. We can’t, and shouldn’t, do without it. But it is also the structure with the least possibility for variation in syntax and length since there are no other clauses, dependent or independent, attached to its single independent clause. The compound sentence structure is only slightly more complicated since it merely connects simple sentences with a conjunction. Because these two sentence types so dominate our writing, they prevent our prose from achieving that flowing cadence that marks the best fiction. As Robie Macauley and George Lanning have said, the simple, minimalist style “has its Spartan virtues but it also has its Spartan vices.”9 And chief among those vices is a lack of flow.

Why are the simple and compound sentence types so dominant in our prose today? I asked my students and colleagues this question, and virtually everyone gave me the same answer: it all goes back, they confidently asserted, to the influence of Hemingway. But I disagree: Hemingway’s simplicity is far more a matter of diction than of syntax. Like Lawrence, Hemingway knew how to vary sentence structure so that his paragraphs flow. If you look at random paragraphs from his work, you’ll notice how the simplicity of his diction exists within the context of complex syntax. The opening paragraph of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is a good example.

It was late and every one had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the café knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.10

The prose here is admirably straightforward and clear, but its syntax is by no means simple. All three of these sentences are compound-complex, and no two share the same structure. The number and placement of dependent and independent clauses in each varies significantly; the sentences have two, five, and three independent clauses, respectively, and one, four, and two dependent clauses. And the placement of the dependent clauses varies widely too: the one in the first sentence follows an independent clause whereas three of the four in the second sentence precede independent clauses. And in the third sentence, both dependent clauses are embedded in the middle of independent clauses. Flaubert once said that “The sentences in a book must quiver like the leaves in a forest, all dissimilar in their similarity,”11 and these sentences do exactly that.

I don’t believe for a millisecond that Hemingway was thinking consciously about varying the placement of dependent clauses in these sentences-at least not when he first drafted them. No doubt he was responding to an instinctive sense of what would make the paragraph flow. We, too, should do our best to follow the ebb and flow of our rhythmic instincts, but we should also practice varying the structures and lengths of our sentences as rigorously as concert pianists practice scales, so that we have the skills needed to follow our instincts.

While I don’t think Hemingway can be held accountable for the current dominance of simple sentence patterns, I do think it’s true that many of his followers have tended to use syntax as simple as their master’s diction. This is certainly true of Raymond Carver-or, at least, of Raymond Carver as edited by Gordon Lish (as D. T. Max has revealed,12 Carver’s hyperminimalist style was due largely to Lish’s drastic editing)-and it is also true of many of the writers who were influenced by the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. But the best of Hemingway’s followers use syntax nearly as complexly. Even Carver, once he no longer allowed Lish to edit his work, varied his sentence structure and length considerably more than many of Hemingway’s other disciples (not to mention Carver’s own devotees).Witness the opening paragraph of “Menudo,” whose four sentences use three different structures and vary in length from four words to 35.

I can’t sleep, but when I’m sure my wife Vicky is asleep, I get up and look through our bedroom window, across the street, at Oliver and Amanda’s house. Oliver has been gone for three days, but his wife Amanda is awake. She can’t sleep either. It’s four in the morning, and there’s not a sound outside-no wind, no cars, no moon even-just Oliver and Amanda’s place with the lights on, leaves heaped up under the front windows.13

There’s nothing wrong with simplicity, in short, if it’s only apparent, not actual. The best simple writing is, at its deepest level, the level of structure, complex.

So if we can’t blame the current tendency toward simplicity of syntax on Hemingway’s example, or even on Carver’s, why is it so dominant? It’s not, I’m sure, because we lack the linguistic skills to write more complexly (provided, of course, that we practice those skills). And it’s not, I hope and pray, because we agree with Robert Bly’s ludicrous assertion that “The use of subordinate clauses in sentences reveals the writer’s tendency to fascism.”14 One reason simple syntax dominates our writing, I believe, is that such sentences are just plain easier to write. They take less effort, less thought. Plus, there’s less risk of grammatical mistakes or-a worse crime in these dumbed-down times-of appearing pretentious. To some of us, it seems, writing a compound-complex sentence is about as embarrassing as wearing an ascot to a Garth Brooks concert.

But I suspect the most important reason we overuse simple structures is that we’re excessively afraid of not writing clearly. Often, in the struggle to express a complicated, only half-understood idea or emotion, we sacrifice the truth we’re trying to convey in order to write simply and clearly. As Wright Morris has said, “When we give up what is vague in order to be clear, we may have given up the motive for writing.”15 Donald Barthelme also questions the value, even the possibility, of creating art that is simple and clear. “However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward,” he says, “these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward… he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.”16

So am I-or Morris or Barthelme-advocating the overthrow of English grammar and the production of vague, convoluted prose? Hardly. What we are advocating, however, is a conscious struggle against our natural inclination to simplify, for the sake of clarity and ease of reading, the complex, uncertain ideas and emotions that constitute our experience. And the best way to struggle against this inclination is to struggle against our tendency toward simplicity in syntax. The more we experiment with syntax, then, the more opportunities we give ourselves to discover our thoughts and express what would otherwise either remain vague or be sacrificed in the name of clarity.

Thus, altering our syntax does more than help us write flowing prose; it allows us to get our thoughts off the normal track on which they run. Syntax is nothing if not the very structure of our thought, so if we change the way we think, we can sometimes change what we think. But don’t take my word for it; take Yeats’s. In an introduction to his collected plays, he wrote, “As I altered my syntax I altered my intellect.”17 Morris also believes that changing our syntax changes the way we think. According to him, “syntax shapes the mind… and does our thinking for us. If the words are rearranged, the workings of the mind are modified.”18 And if the words are rearranged, the rhythm of those words is modified, too, of course. According to Robert Hass, it’s this alteration in rhythm, more than the alteration in meaning, which changes our intellect. “New rhythms,” he has said, “are new perceptions.”19 In any case, the more we concentrate on altering our syntax, the more we free ourselves to discover other modes of thought. I’m not sure I’d go as far as Yeats, Morris, and Hass do, though, and assert that changing our syntax actually changes our intellect. Rather, I believe that as we alter our syntax, we discover our intellect-i.e., we find ways to say what we always knew but never knew we knew, our deepest beliefs and feelings. And it just may be that we discover not only the self but the world. Bertrand Russell certainly believed syntax revealed the nature of outer as well as inner reality. He concludes his An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth with these words: “For my part, I believe that, partly by means of study of syntax, we can arrive at considerable knowledge concerning the structure of the world.”20

Given this relationship between syntax, thought, and discovery of both self and world, it shouldn’t be so surprising that some of our greatest writers blossomedwhen they abandoned their native languages to write their work.As Morris says, “In this release from the over-familiar, the apparently exhausted, and immersion into new resources, we may understand better than we did in the past the flowering of a talent like Conrad’s. The new and strange language is part of a new consciousness.”21 Nabokov is another example. He was so dissatisfied with his original Russian version of Lolita that he destroyed it. Only when he began to rewrite the novel in English, he says, did he find the syntax appropriate for the book, the syntax that made the book conform to what he calls “its prefigured contour and color.”22

But just how does syntax do this? How can merely changing the structure of our sentences change how we think and feel? The answer is that syntax is more than mere sentence structure. As Tufte says, “Syntax has direction, not just structure,” and the particular “sequence” of a sentence, its movement in time and space, “generate(s) its own dynamics of feeling.”23 Pascal made this same point in his Pensées: “Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.”24 What alters our consciousness, then, is not so much syntax but the effects-the feelings-evoked by its sequence. As “a stylistic analysis of syntax considered as sequence,”25 Grammar as Style is not your garden-variety grammar textbook; rather, it is an indispensable guide to the ways writers can create different effects through different sentence structures. In the words of Lisa Biggar, it demonstrates that syntax is “a means of delay, suspense, emphasis, focus, direction-in essence, a tool to control the reader’s sensory and emotional experience.”26 One of the things we talk about when we talk about flow, then, is “the sequence of syntax” and the way it generates and controls the dynamics of the reader’s emotional response.

Given that syntax is not just structure but a sequence-a flow-that generates “dynamics of feeling,” it stands to reason that one purpose of syntactical variation is to convey rhythmically the emotion we wish to create in the reader. If we fail to create the appropriate rhythm, we will most likely also fail to convey fully the appropriate emotion-and that can have disastrous effects on the story as a whole. (Hence Truman Capote’s comment, “A story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence.”27) Whether through instinct or conscious labor-or, more likely, a combination of both-the greatest writers skillfully modulate the sequence of their syntax to modulate their readers’ emotions. Lawrence is certainly one writer who had this skill; as Morris has said, in his prose “emotion and syntax seem to be of one substance.”28 In Stuart Dybek’s opinion, this skill is essentially a musical one. “There’s a story,” he says, “and the writer then finds the words that serve as beats and notes to capture the invisible music. And like all music, that soundless thrum, now represented in language…, conveys deep emotion.” As a result, he concludes, every well-written story has “its own interior soundtrack, one that a reader who listens might almost detect.”29

But sometimes the syntax does more than convey the appropriate emotion; sometimes it also rhythmically imitates the very experience it is describing, as when Beethoven imitates a thunderstorm in his “Pastoral” Symphony or when Duke Ellington imitates a train in his “Daybreak Express.” The fourth sentence of the opening of “Odour of Chrysanthemums” is a good example of this sort of “rhythmic mimesis” in fiction. Let’s take a close look at it. (To convey the sentence’s rhythm, at least as I hear it, I’ve put the stressed syllables in capitals, and the most heavily stressed ones in bold.)

The TRUCKS THUMPED HEAVily PAST, ONE by ONE, with SLOW inEVitable MOVEment, as she STOOD INsigNIFicantly TRAPPED beTWEEN the JOLTing BLACK WAGons and the HEDGE; then they CURVED aWAY towards the COPpice where the WITHered OAK LEAVES dropped NOISElessly, while the BIRDS, PULLing at the SCARlet HIPS beSIDE the TRACK, made OFF into the DUSK that had alREADy CREPT into the SPINney.

Both structurally and rhythmically, this sentence divides itself into two almost equal halves, breaking at the semicolon. In the first half, the words rhythmically imitate the jolting rhythm of the passing railway cars. Seven of the first twelve syllables “thump” as heavily as the trucks-and five of those seven abut another stressed syllable, making us read the sentence’s opening very slowly and thus reinforcing the sense of the train’s slowness. (Imagine how different the effect would be if Lawrence had written “ONE after aNOTHer” instead of “ONE by ONE.”) What’s more, the heavy stresses evoke an oppressive mood, helping convey how the woman feels, trapped between the train and the hedge, unable to move. As the trucks fade away, however, so does the thumping rhythm: in the second half of the sentence, the stressed syllables are no longer either as heavy or as clustered, and thus the rhythm imitates the diminishing noise of the train as it gradually disappears, as well as the woman’s sense of relief that she’s no longer trapped. When Ford praised Lawrence’s prose for having “the right cadence,” I suspect he was referring at least in part to its rhythmic mimesis.

While I believe that rhythmic mimesis is one of the things we talk about when we talk about flow, it’s important to recognize that it is not synonymous with flow. It results from the same impulse that creates flow-the impulse to make the sequence of syntax serve as an appropriate “soundtrack” for the story-and therefore it’s a common feature of writing that flows. However, there are situations in which we can achieve rhythmic mimesis only if we avoid a flowing variety of syntax. In the following passage from Light in August, for example, Faulkner uses a sequence of short, choppy sentences to convey the simple, halting thought patterns of Joe Christmas, the novel’s mentally challenged protagonist. There’s just barely enough variety of sentence structure and length here to keep this passage from being as stagnant as my revision of Lawrence’s paragraph.

“Yes,” Joe said. His mouth said it, told the lie. He had not intended to answer at all. He heard his mouth say the word with a kind of shocked astonishment. Then it was too late.30

This passage is rhythmically mimetic but it doesn’t flow. Nevertheless, I consider it successful. However important flow is, it is by no means the only criterion for judging the quality of our prose. As this example illustrates, there are times when flow would actually be detrimental to our fiction, if it were achieved at the expense of appropriateness. If Faulkner had tried to convey Joe Christmas’s simple thoughts with the same flowing prose he uses for the maniacally intellectual thoughts of Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury,31 this passage would fail to convey Joe’s experience and therefore to generate the appropriate response in the reader. Like flow, rhythmic mimesis is an element of good writing, not a condition of it.

Ezra Pound would disagree. In his essay “Vorticism,” he argues that “every emotion and every phase of emotion has some… rhythm-phrase to express it,”32 and that it is the writer’s responsibility to find it. But this is an impossible ideal, if for no other reason than that identical rhythms can, and do, convey opposite meanings. As D. W. Harding says in his study Words into Rhythm,

The idea that rhythms have expressive value will easily be discredited if we take it to mean that a particular rhythm is peculiarly appropriate to one emotion rather than another…. ‘I adore her,’ ‘I abhor her,’ ‘It’s appalling,’ ‘It’s enthralling,’ all these phrases with their diverse emotional value share the same rhythmical form…33

Harding goes on to suggest that although there are no simple one-to-one correspondences between rhythms and ideas or emotions, rhythm can “contribute appreciably” to the meaning of a sentence.34 In other words, while it may not be possible to make every sentence rhythmically mirror its meaning, it is possible to make some of them do so. Tufte makes this same point. Generally speaking, she says, a good sentence is one in which the rhythm and meaning are merely not “at odds with” each other. Sometimes, though, she adds, “the rhythm and sequence of syntax begins to act out the meaning itself” and “the drama of meaning and the drama of syntax coincide perfectly.”35 This perfect coincidence of syntax and meaning, which I’ve been calling “rhythmic mimesis,” and which Pound calls “absolute rhythm,”36 she calls “syntactic symbolism.”37 Whatever we call it, it is the result of the same impulse that engenders flow, the impulse to turn the sequence of syntax into a soundtrack for the story, and as such it is frequently part of what we talk about when we talk about flow. And when the rhythm of the syntax both flows and corresponds perfectly to meaning, the prose approaches poetry.

And it approaches music. Ultimately, I believe, what we talk about when we talk about flow is music. As E.M. Forster says, “In music fiction is likely to find its nearest parallel.”38 Helen Benedict seconds this opinion. “A composer would understand the analogy,” she says. “Each syllable is a note, each word a bar of music, each transition from one word to the next an interval, each sentence a phrase or motif, and so on.”39 As we’ve already seen, Stuart Dybek also understands this analogy, comparing as he does the rhythm of our prose to a soundtrack. Importantly, Dybek stresses that this soundtrack is not an afterthought or some kind of ornamentation but rather an essential part of the writing process itself. “One aspect of prose rhythm that is usually wholly ignored,” he says, “is that a writer attentive to it, even if simply operating instinctively, often hears the rhythm before he writes the words. There is a rhythmic ebb and flow in mind that slightly precedes and certainly participates in the selection of language.”40 Or, to put it in the words of the philosopher Jacques Maritain, the creative process begins with a kind of “musical stir” in the unconscious that precedes “the production of words”41 and is “audible only to the heart,” not the ear.42

I’ve felt this sort of “musical stir” myself (though not nearly as often as I’d like), and so have most writers I’ve talked to. But where does this pre-verbal sense of rhythm come from? I suspect it comes at least in part from the language and music we grow up listening to, from the literature we’ve read, and even from nature-the rhythmical motion of waves, the drumming of rain on a roof, and so forth. But in recent decades, philosophers, linguists, psychoanalysts, and cognitive scientists have developed an intriguing theory that suggests an additional possible origin: they posit that we are all born with a private, innate “language of thought”-a sort of linguistic equivalent of Jung’s “collective unconscious”-which we must translate into whatever public, learned language we speak. (What these thinkers call a “language of thought” Maritain calls the “musical unconscious,”43 a spiritual, innate unconscious whose “primal expression”44 is the “musical stir” that precedes language.) In their view, behind our conscious language is an unconscious one, a proto-language if you will, which has its own semantics and syntax-and rhythm. And for the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the unconscious does more than just contain a language, it is itself “structured like a language.”45 All languages have their origin, he suggests, in the innate syntax of our collective unconscious.

The theorists who posit the existence of a “language of thought” believe we are wrong to think that we think in English or any other known language. As the philosopher Jerry A. Fodor has said, “The obvious… refutation of the claim that (public, learned) languages are the medium of thought is that there are nonverbal organisms that think”46-among them human children. If we need to know English in order to think, how is it that children are capable of thought before they learn the language? And how could they ever learn the language if learning requires the ability to think and thinking requires knowledge of the very language they’re attempting to learn? As Fodor asserts, “you cannot learn a language whose terms express… properties not expressed by the terms of some language you are already able to use.”47 Therefore, like Noam Chomsky and his fellow transformational-generativelinguists, Fodor argues that human beings must bepre-programmed with an innate knowledge of linguistic properties and rules that enables them to transform the syntax of thought into a public language. “W]hat happens when a person understands a sentence,” he says, “must be a translation process basically analogous to what happens when a (computer) ‘understands’… a sentence in its programming language.”48

If writing is indeed the act of translating an innate, unconscious language of thought into a learned, conscious one, it makes sense that we might “hear,” at least on some level, the rhythm of the former language before we translate it into the latter. And it also makes sense that this rhythm might, as Dybek suggests, “participate” in our “selection of language.” Robert Hass seems to agree, for he has said that “rhythm is an idiom of the unconscious.”49 And Rilke expressed a similar belief in the unconscious, irrational source of rhythm. In a letter to Rodin, he says, “To make prose rhythmic, one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood.”50

Whatever the source of the pre-verbal rhythm Dybek talks about, it is important for us to listen to it. And we should listen to the post-verbal rhythm of our prose as well, of course. As Benedict says, if we read our prose out loud, listening attentively to its music, we will hear “that too many sentences of the same length create a monotonous beat; that forced transitions are like the wrong bridge between riffs; that overlong, breathless sentences can be the same as music without rests, those essential silences that are as important for emphasis as the notes themselves.”51 We will hear, in short, where the prose flows, and where it doesn’t.

It’s important to note that when we talk about flow in prose we’re not just talking about the music of a particular sentence or even passage, we’re also talking about the music of the work as a whole-its entire soundtrack. The word flow refers not only to style, then, but also to form, to the rhythmic relationship of sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to scenes, scenes to chapters, and chapters to an entire novel. As the jazz musician and composer Tom Harrell has said, “Form is rhythm on a larger scale.”52

In Aspects of the Novel, Forster discusses at length the formal relationship of a novel’s parts to the whole, and he discusses this relationship in the same terms Harrell does. He says “there appears to be no literary word” for this aspect of fiction, so “we will borrow from music and call it rhythm.”53 In Forster’s view, there are two kinds of rhythm. The first kind is stylistic, the kind we recognize in the syntax of an individual sentence, and we respond to it physically. The second kind is structural, the “syntax” of the work as a whole, and we respond to it less with our bodies than with our minds. “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” Forster says, “… starts with the rhythm ‘diddidy dum,’ which we can all hear and tap to. But the symphony as a whole has also a rhythm-due mainly to the relation between its movements-which some people can hear but no one can tap to.”54 This second kind of rhythm involves the entire structure of the fiction, the way its parts flow together to form the work’s soundtrack. And just as a paragraph will flow if its sentences vary in structure and length, a complete work of fiction will flow if its scenes and chapters vary in structure and length. This kind of rhythm is simultaneously cerebral and emotional, something that makes our mind and soul “tap their feet.” It is this holistic, formal kind of rhythm Dybek is referring to when he says, “Hemingway talks about the need for a writer to hear his way through a story, a fact missed terribly by his many tone-deaf imitators who manage to recreate his mannerisms but miss the underlying rhythmic coherence of his best stories.”55 Underlying rhythmic coherence: that’s another thing we talk about when we talk about flow.

Like Forster and Dybek, Milan Kundera uses musical analogies to talk about the underlying rhythmic coherence of fiction. He says his novels The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being employ “polyphonic” structure and “counterpoint.”56 And when he talks about the rhythmic relationships of a novel’s parts to its whole, he uses the term tempo. Like Benedict, who says tempo is as important to fiction as its content,57 Kundera stresses the significance of this musical element of prose. “Contrasts in tempi are enormously important to me,” he says. “They often figure in my earliest idea of a novel, well before I write it.”58 He goes on to describe the seven sections of his novel Life is Elsewhere as if they were movements in a symphony. Part One, he notes, is moderato, since it has 11 chapters in 71 pages. Part Seven, on the other hand, is presto because it has 23 chapters in just 28 pages.

But the tempo of a section is not determined solely by the relation between its length and the number of chapters it contains. As Kundera says, “tempo is further determined by . . . the relation between the length of a part and the ‘real’ time of the event it describes.”59 For this reason, he labels Part Six, which deals with only a few hours of actual time, as adagio, not presto or prestissimo, even though it has 17 chapters in only 26 pages.

As Benedict, Dybek, Forster, and Kundera all suggest, rhythm, tempo, or flow-whatever we choose to call it-is essentially a holistic issue, one that addresses virtually every aspect of a work of fiction. (E. K. Brown has demonstrated that flow also manifests itself in a writer’s handling of dialogue, character, plot, symbols, and themes. I recommend you read his critical study Rhythm and the Novel60 to see how he applies Forster’s term “rhythm” to these elements of fiction, which are beyond the scope of this essay.) When we talk about flow, then, we’re not only talking about syntax and rhythmic mimesis but also about the tempo and structural proportion of every part of a work in relation both to each other and to the work as a whole. When we first start writing fiction, we focus on the syntax of the sentence but not on the “syntax” of the paragraph. As we progress in our craft, however, we begin to think about structure in larger and larger terms. We begin to vary not only the structure and length of sentences within paragraphs but the structure and length of paragraphs within scenes and the structure and length of scenes within chapters, and so forth. And we try to make the flow of each of these parts rhythmically mimetic, or at least appropriate, to the story’s events and the characters’ states of mind.

When we begin to think about flow on a macro as well as a micro level, we realize that consecutive scenes with the same structure and length have the same monotonous rhythm, only on a larger scale, as consecutive sentences of identical structure and length. It’s possible, then, to write a story that does not flow as a whole though its individual parts do.

An example. Recently, one of my most talented undergraduates turned in a story that was, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, very well written. Several of his classmates praised the flow of his prose, but a couple of them went on to say that the story as a whole didn’t flow. And they were right. So we spent the rest of the class doing an analysis of its structure to try to figure out why the parts didn’t work together.

What we found was this: the story was divided into six scenes, each of which was almost exactly two pages long-the shortest was 1 3/4 pages and the longest was 2 1/3 pages. All six scenes covered approximately the same amount of “real” time as well-about five to ten minutes. The sameness of length made the story’s rhythm seem choppy, almost staccato, and, worse, it implied that each scene was somehow of “equal” importance, when some were clearly more dramatic and life-altering than others.

But the equal length wasn’t the only problem; indeed, it was only a symptom of a deeper problem: the reason the scenes were of relatively the same length was that they had relatively the same structure. Each scene began with a paragraph or two describing either a character or a setting or both, then followed that with several paragraphs of dialogue, then one to two paragraphs of the protagonist’s thoughts, and finally one brief paragraph-sometimes, just a single sentence long-of action. While each individual scene was well written, the effect of six consecutive sections of similar structure and length was oppressive. According to Forster, rhythm requires “repetition plus variation.”61 This student’s story failed to flow because it was, structurally, repetition without variation.

While this story is obviously an extreme example, the problem it illustrates is hardly a rare one. Just as we tend to repeat certain pet sentence structures, so we tend to repeat certain pet scenic structures. We need to remember that scenes have their own kind of syntax-in a way, they, too, can be simple, compound, complex, or compound-complex.

Let’s look now at a story that varies the syntax of its scenes in such a way as to make the story as a whole flow: Tobias Wolff’s “The Chain.” This story consists of a chain of causally connected events, but Wolff doesn’t make the mistake of making each link in the chain uniform. The story is composed of eight sections of differing lengths, structures, and tempos. The sections range in length from less than a page to nearly four pages, and the number of paragraphs per section ranges from two to 49. One might suspect that the shortest section is also the one with the fewest paragraphs, but in fact, that section is almost twice as long as the shortest one, and the shortest one contains more paragraphs than three that are significantly longer. And two sections of relatively equal length have 11 and 49 paragraphs respectively. What Tufte said about the best writers varying sentence length dramatically also applies to the larger units of a fictional work: the best writers-and Wolff is certainly one of our best-vary the syntax of their scenes, sections, chapters, and so forth much as a composer varies the tempo of a symphony’s movements. And they do it for the same reason: to modulate the emotional response of the audience. For just as the sequence of syntax in a sentence “generates its own dynamics of feeling,” so does the sequence of syntax in a scene, section, or chapter.

The first section of Wolff’s story is a masterful example of how the sequence of syntax in a section generates feeling. It consists of two long paragraphs describing a man’s frantic dash down a hill through deep snow to rescue his daughter from an attacking dog. As the man says later in the story, “The whole thing took maybe sixty seconds…. Maybe less. But it went on forever.”62 Wolff manages to convey both the headlong speed of the events-its actual time-and the sense that it “went on forever”-its psychological time-chiefly through the way he handles the syntax of both his sentences and his paragraphs. Here’s the story’s opening section:

Brian Gold was at the top of the hill when the dog attacked. A big black wolf-like animal attached to a chain, it came flying off a back porch and tore through its yard into the park, moving easily in spite of the deep snow, making for Gold’s daughter. He waited for the chain to pull the dog up short; the dog kept coming. Gold plunged down the hill, shouting as he went. Snow and wind deadened his voice. Anna’s sled was almost at the bottom of the slope. Gold had raised the hood of her parka against the needling gusts, and he knew that she could not hear him or see the dog racing toward her. He was conscious of the dog’s speed and of his own dreamy progress, the weight of his gumboots, the clinging trap of crust beneath the new snow. His overcoat flapped at his knees. He screamed one last time as the dog made its lunge, and at that moment Anna flinched away and the dog caught her shoulder instead of her face. Gold was barely halfway down the hill, arms pumping, feet sliding in the boots. He seemed to be running in place, held at a fixed, unbridgeable distance as the dog dragged Anna backwards off the sled, shaking her like a doll. Gold threw himself down the hill helplessly, then the distance vanished and he was there.

The sled was overturned, the snow churned up; the dog had marked this ground as its own. It still had Anna by the shoulder. Gold heard the rage boiling in its gut. He saw the tensed hindquarters and the flattened ears and the red gleam of gum under the wrinkled snout. Anna was on her back, her face bleached and blank, staring at the sky. She had never looked so small. Gold seized the chain and yanked at it, but could get no purchase in the snow. The dog only snarled more fiercely and started shaking Anna again. She didn’t make a sound. He flung himself onto the dog and hooked his arm under its neck and pulled back hard. Still the dog wouldn’t let go. Gold felt its heat and the profound rumble of its will. With his other hand he tried to pry the jaw loose. His gloves turned slippery with drool; he couldn’t get a grip. Gold’s mouth was next to the dog’s ear. He said, “Let go, damn you,” and then he took the ear between his teeth and bit down with everything he had. He heard a yelp and something cracked against his nose, knocking him backwards. When he pushed himself up the dog was running for home, jerking its head from side to side, scattering flecks of blood on the snow.63

The fact that there are only two paragraphs in this section helps convey the headlong quality of the events; we pause only once in our mad dash through the deep, heavy paragraphs. The same sentences, divided into, say, six paragraphs, wouldn’t have nearly the same effect.

Furthermore, many of Wolff’s sentences convey the same headlong hurry that the two long paragraphs do, each clause tumbling downhill after another. (He creates this “downhill” sensation chiefly by ending sentences with a cluster of dependent clauses.) But mixed into these frantic, fast-moving sentences are occasional short sentences, sentences that seem to stop the pell-mell movement of time for one brief instant much like a snapshot, thus conveying the character’s sense that he’s “running in place,” moving as slowly as we do in dreams. Such sentences as “Snow and wind deadened his voice,” “His overcoat flapped at his knees,” and “She didn’t make a sound” force us to pause briefly in the midst of the frenzy. Thanks to these time-stopping sentences, the opening section accomplishes an amazing feat: it conveys both speed and slowness at once.

As brilliant as this section is, if Wolff had followed it with seven sections of similar structure, the story would have failed despite its superb prose and moving content. By varying the syntax of his eight sections expertly, Wolff creates the kind of rhythm that Forster talked about, the kind you can sense but can’t tap your foot to: a rhythm that’s simultaneously cerebral and emotional: in a word, flow.

Flow. As I said at the outset, I’m weary of that vague, all-purpose term. But I think we’re stuck with it. Though I’ve tried for years, I haven’t been able to think of an alternative that contains all of its implications. (Rhythm comes close, but I think rhythm is ultimately more of a characteristic of flow than a synonym for it.) So I’ve concluded that the next best thing to finding a new term is trying to understand the old one better. As I hope I’ve made clear, I believe that when we talk about flow we’re talking about the variation of sentence structure and length; about “the sequence of syntax” and its effects on the reader’s emotional response; about rhythmic mimesis and the way it contributes to those effects; and about the rhythmic relation of the work’s parts to the whole. Thus, if we want to write fiction that flows, we need to explore the syntax of our prose on all levels, from the micro level of the sentence to the macro level of the complete work. We need to develop our sense of a work’s “underlying rhythmic coherence” by developing, first, our sense of our sentences’ rhythmic coherence, then that of our paragraphs, our scenes, our sections, and so forth. The more we explore all these levels of syntax, the more we’ll increase our chances of discovering both our story’s content and our own intellects. And we’ll also increase our chances of creating an “interior soundtrack” for our story, a silent symphony that transcends the events of the story, the denotations and connotations of the words, and moves the reader in ways as mysterious and powerful as music.

AWP

David Jauss’s most recent books are Black Maps (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), a collection of short stories, and You Are Not Here (Fleur-de-Lis Press, 2002), a collection of poems. He teaches at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College.

NOTES

1. Ford Madox Ford, Portraits from Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 70.

2. Ibid, 71.

3. Ibid, 74.

4. D.H. Lawrence, “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” The Complete Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence, Vol. 2. (New York: Viking, 1961), 283.

5. Raymond Queaneau, Exercises in Style, tr. Barbara Wright (New York: New Directions, 1981).

6. Virginia Tufte, Grammar as Style (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).

7. Ibid, 29.

8. Laure-Anne Basselaar, “The Interrogation of Stephen Dobyns,” The Writer’s Chronicle, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Sept. 2001), 46.

9. Robie Macauley and George Lanning, Technique in Fiction, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 73.

10. Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner, 1966), 379.

11. 11. Gustave Flaubert, The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert, tr. and ed. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1953), 174.

12. D.T. Max, “The Carver Chronicles,” The New York Times Magazine (August 9, 1998), 34-56.

13. Raymond Carver, “Menudo,” Where I’m Calling From: New & Selected Stories (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988), 338.

14. Robert Bly, comment during panel on prose poetry at the Associated Writing Programs conference, Washington, D.C., April 1996.

15. Wright Morris, About Fiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 69.

16. Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing,” The Pushcart Prize XI: Best of the Small Presses, ed. Bill Henderson (Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1986), 28.

17. William Butler Yeats, “An Introduction to My Plays,” Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 530.

18. Morris, About Fiction, 67.

19. Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (New York: Ecco P, 1984), 108.

20. Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1940), 347.

21. Morris, About Fiction, 69-70.

22. Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” Lolita (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955), 317.

23. Tufte, Grammar as Style, 8-9.

24. Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1956), 7.

25. Tufte, Grammar as Style, 9.

26. Lisa Biggar, letter to the author, Nov. 17, 2002.

27. Truman Capote, cited in Writers on Writing, ed. Jon Winokur (Philadelphia: Running P, 1990), 294.

28. Morris, About Fiction, 73.

29. Stuart Dybek, “Interview,” Glimmer Train Stories, No. 44 (Fall 2002), 89.

30. William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Random House, 1959), 121.

31. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Random House, 1956).

32. Ezra Pound, “Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review, No. 96 (1914), 463.

33. D.W. Harding, Words into Rhythm: English Speech Rhythm in Verse and Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976), 140.

34. Ibid, 141.

35. Tufte, Grammar as Style, 11.

36. Pound, ibid.

37. Tufte, Grammar as Style, 11.

38. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, 1927), 241.

39. Helen Benedict, “Tone Deaf: Learning to Listen to the Music in Prose,” Poets & Writers (Nov/Dec 2001), 15.

40. Dybek, “Interview,” 89.

41. Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Cleveland: The World Publishing Group, 1954), 205.

42. Ibid, 202.

43. Ibid, 67.

44. Ibid, 203.

45. Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, tr. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981), 262.

46. Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980), 56.

47. Ibid, 61.

48. Ibid, 67.

49. Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures, 113.

50. Rainer Maria Rilke, December 29, 1908, letter to Auguste Rodin, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910, tr. Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1945), 342.

51. Benedict, “Tone Deaf,” 14-15.

52. Tom Harrell, cited in Whitney Balliett, “Tom and Jeru,” The New Yorker (April 15, 1996), 94.

53. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 213.

54. Ibid, 235.

55. Dybek, “Interview,” 89.

56. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 75-77.

57. Benedict, “Tone Deaf,” 14.

58. Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 89.

59. Ibid, 88.

60. E.K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska P, 1978).

61. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 240.

62. Tobias Wolff, “The Chain,” The Night in Question (New York: Knopf, 1996), 132.

63. Ibid, 131-132.

Bruce Spang

bspang4@gmail.com

brucepspang.wordpress.com

Week One Handout: The Sentence as a Hidden Tool of Craft

Topic Page

Syntax as Style Overview 2-3

Goals for Class 4

Poetic Tensions

Four Temperaments 5

Range of Sentence Shapes 6

Simple Compound

Complex 7

Four More Ways to Compose Sentences 8

Interrogative 10

Further Reading: Resources 11

Types of Syntactical Arrangement 12

RESOURCES AND APPENDIX

How Mary Oliver Uses Sentence Variation 14

“Circles,” Mary Oliver 15-16

Essay “Flame of Appreciation,” Mary Oliver 17

Pacing in Hoagland’s Poem 21

Sample Hoagland Poems:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow

David Jauss 50

Syntax as Style in Poetry: The Invisible Craft of an Artful Sentence in Poetry

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Earnest Hemingway

A good sentence, if carefully rendered, can make or break a poem.

Line breaks act as guides to make sense of what the sentence is doing on the page.

GOALS of Getting the Poem Out of a Rut

to learn how to enter a poem using different sentence structures and syntax to create tension and vary the pace and flow
to learn how to use literal and figurative imagination to extend and elaborate in a poem
to refine the use of mid and end of line breaks
to increase the sonic landscape in a poem
to refine the use of juxtaposition in a poem
to increase different cuts and leaps in poems

Poetic Tensions: What are the Verses in Verse?

Ask Each Poem: What Tension is in Your Poem?

Sentence/Line
Short/long lines
Slow/Quick Pace
Meditative/Narrative
Discursive/Lyric

OTHER KINDS OF TENSION:

Title/Opening
Musical/Prosaic
Singing/Saying (lyric v. lower diction)
Concrete/Abstraction
Private/Public
Literal/Figurative language
Clarity/Wildness
Tone/Mood
Adjectives + Noun
Factual/Imaginative
Narrative/lyric
Formal/Free Verse

Four Poetic Temperaments:

WHICH IS YOURS?

Limited Temperaments

Story/Narrative Structure/Form

Unlimited Temperaments

Music/Sound Effects Imagination/Lyric

GET OUR YOUR POEM FOR THIS WEEK. LET’S LOOK AT IT

CHOOSE ONE SENTENCE (SUBJECT/VERB) Write it in journal

Range of Sentence Shapes

What are the basic sentence units? We all know them. But here is a reminder.

Simple/Declarative Sentence (main clause)

subject-verb-object

Example:

Henry approached the field.

Compound Sentence (uses coordinating conjunctions to link, i.e., And, but, for, nor, or, so, and yet)

Subject-verb-object + Subject-Verb-Object

Example:

Henry approached the field, but the sky obscured his view.

Complex Sentence

Dependent/Subordinate, relative, adverbial, conditional clauses + Subject-verb-object

Example:

When Henry approached the field, the sun obscured his view.

What types of sentences do you use? Look at your poem. Break it into sentence units. Do you notice a pattern?

But Wait. Before you answer that, there are some more permutations to use of sentences to consider….

FOUR MORE WAYS TO COMPOSE COMPLEX SENTENCES!

Periodic/left-branching (as with complex sentence, there is a delay of main clause, causing suspense)

Free modifiers/subordinate, relative, adverbial, conditional clause + main clause. The sentence is left-branching, filling in detail before the main clause.

Example:

Before dawn, with the sky a dungeon black, and the moon a sliver, when no one, not even lonesome coyote, made a sound, Henry approached the field.

Cumulative/right-branching (as with complex sentence but this time, elements are added on, extended, fleshing out verbs or objects, branching to the right.

Main Clause + free modifiers, subordinate, dependent, relative, adverbial, conditional clauses

Example:

Interrupted/fractured (pause, delay, suspense, using free modifiers)

Subject, interrupter, verb

Subject, verb, interrupter, object

The interrupters can be free-modifiers or subordinate, dependent, relative, adverbial, conditional clauses.

WHAT ARE THESE FREE-MODIFIERS?

THEY ARE YOUR PAINT BRUSHES, YOUR COLORED PENCILS!

Examples of free-modifiers, interrupters/brush strokes/zoom lenses:

Appositive: Henry, the last of the bards, approached the field.

Preposition: Henry, at the fence, approached the field.

Participle phrase: Henry, wiping sweat from his brow, approached the field.

Absolute: Henry, face sweaty, eyes swollen, nose running, approached the field.

Adjective out of Order: Henry, tired and drawn, fed up with life, approached the field.

Example of dependent, relative, adverbial clauses can also interrupt, extend, or elaborate a sentence:

Henry, who carried a book of Wordsworth in one pocket and a gun in the other, approached the field.

In some contexts, some of these could also delay the direct object by inserting them between the verb and direct object.

Examples:

Henry approached with caution the field.

Henry approached, his eyes keenly focused, the field.

Sentence Fragment (speedy, quick take)

Examples:

Henry in the field

The approach to the field.

Henry, the bard.

And that is not all!

Interrogative Sentence: Ask a Question

before moving on.

Prompt:

A COMMERCIAL BREAK: For Further Reading, here are some books that go into more depth about syntax:

Syntax As Style or How to Write a Beautiful Sentence

Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphic Press LLC, 2006

Brooks Landon: Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read. New York, A Penguin Group, 2013. On line: A Plume Book

Harry R. Norden Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999

Jeff Anderson Everyday Editing: Inviting Students to Develop Skill and Craft in Writer’s Workshop. Portland, ME Stenhouse Publishers, 2007

Taking Norden’s ideas, Anderson shows how to develop your sentence muscles by walking you through some exercises, giving examples as he does. Very practical.

Jeff Anderson. Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2005.

His first book opened my eyes to what I could do in my writing as well as how to teach the use of artful sentences to my students.

But There Is Still Something Else to Consider!

The Types of Syntactical Arrangement

Once you have varied sentence as one of your paint brushes, you can add another dimension: varying how the sentences are arranged next to one another.

Paratactic Syntax (para beside + taxis arrange)

Example:

Henry approached the field.

Two dead birches struck at the sky like assassins.

A crow settled on one branch.

In the distance, a howl rose and died away.

Hypotactic Syntax (hypo beneath + taxis arrange)

Example:

His wife warned him, should they divorce (and they did) he was a marked man. Since then, he had a bullseye on his forehead.

Prompt:

Notice how Oliver, Hoagland and other poets mix the syntax, sometimes leaving the reader to connect two disparate sentence and other times provide clear connections by use of subordination.

RESOURCES AND APPENDIX

How Mary Oliver Uses Sentence Variation to Pace her Poems

I first show the poem as a series of sentences. Then I show it as she broke the sentences into lines.

I. FIRST POEM:

Key:

words or phrases are use of parallelism
are main subject and verb of a sentence, main clause
are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses or free modifiers such as prepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases, absolutes, adjectives out of order
: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor

Note:

Circles

In the morning the blue heron is busy stepping, slowly, around the edge of the pond.

He is tall and shining.

His wings, folded against his body, fit so neatly they make of him, when he lifts his shoulders and begins to rise into the air, a great surprise.

Also he carries so lightly the terrible sword beak.

Then he is gone over the trees.

I am so happy to be alive in this world [that] I would like to live forever, but I am content not to.

Seeing what I have seen has filled me, believing what I believe has filled me.

What I mean is, our deliverance from Time and the continuance, if we only steward them well, of earthly things.

So maybe it’s myself still standing here, or someone else, like myself hot with the joy of this world, and filled with praise.

Note:

Circles

In the morning the blue heron is busy

stepping, slowly around the edge of the

pond. He is tall and shining. His wings, folded

against his body, fit so neatly they

make of him, when he lifts his shoulders and begins to rise

into the air, a great surprise. Also

he carries so lightly the terrible sword beak. Then

he is gone over the trees.

I am so happy to be alive in this world

I would like to live forever, but I am

content not to. Seeing what I have seen

has filled me, believing what I believe

has filled me.

The first words of this page are

hardly thought of when the bird

circles back over the trees; it floats down

like an armful of blue flowers, a bundle of light

coming to refresh itself again in the black water, and I think:

maybe it is or it isn’t the same bird—maybe it’s

the first one’s child, or the child of its child.

What I mean is, our deliverance from Time

and the continuance, if we only steward them well,

of earthly things. So maybe it’s myself still standing here, or

someone else, like myself hot with the joy of this world, and

filled with praise.

Flame of Appreciation

From the essay “Winter Hours” by Mary Oliver

pp 98-110 “Winter Hours” In Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems, Boston: A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999

FLAME OF APPRECIATION:

Then find a way to blend the two, the wasp and the compass grass, how they speak to one another and to you. Write it out. Let the words show the way.

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The Pacing in the Poems of Tony Hoagland

Learning to pace a poem is an art. Tony Hoagland is a Master of pacing.

Before focusing on any one poem, I want you to look at how in all these poems, Hoagland adjusts the pace of a poem by using different syntax.

Sentence Length

Parallelism

Sentence Variety

Slower Paced sentences: Periodic sentence. When a sentence has a completely different structure, when the subject and verb are delayed by a cluster of prepositional phrases or adverbial clause coming first, you, as a reader, instinctively slow down, knowing that the sentence is packed with information. Such sentences are like complex intersections where traffic goes more than one way, some turning right, some left, some straight ahead. These sentences, however, can also be a green light if they have extensive use of parallelism. With adept line breaks, they can move right along.
Suspenseful Sentence: Interrupted Sentence. A sentence can create suspense by have the subject and verb split. You know what the subject is but because free modifiers or other grammatical units come between it and the verb, you have to wait to find out what the subject will do.
Quick Sentences: Culminative Sentence. A sentence can also be extended by having free modifiers, relative or adverbial clauses tacked on, filling out the sentences.
Variety of Sentences. Of course, a sentence can be simple, compound, or complex, each of which has its own structure. By looking at the bolded words which are the subject and verbs in a sentence, you can see how Hoagland arranges them in different places that, again, impact the pace of a poem.

Paratactic and Hypotactic syntax. Another aspect of variety in sentence is the actual syntax and how, if the same type of sentences are placed next to one another, what happens to the text. The paratactic sentences are those that make a statement. They don’t have subordination. They aren’t linked sentence to sentence. Each can stand on its own. They don’t necessarily relate to one another like two strangers in a line to buy theater tickets. Hypotactic sentences are connected, one feeds into the other, one related to the previous one. They are often subordinated with causal, temporal, or logical conjunctions (therefore, since, because). One sentence feeds into the other. Note how Hoagland varies these. Sometimes using anaphora, he links a series of sentences. Sometimes he will lay out images one on top of the other with no attempt to explain what the connection between them is. Sometimes he shifts back and forth between the two.

Metaphor and Simile

I. FIRST POEM

Key:

Underlined words or phrases are use of parallelism
Bold are main subject and verb of a sentence
Italics are subordinate or relative/ adverbial clauses with conjunctions or free modifiers such as prepositional phrases participial phrase, appositives, infinitive phrases, absolutes, adjectives out of order
Bold italics: An analogy, comparison, simile, or metaphor