The ART OF OPENINGS AND CLOSINGS IN POETRY
Types of Openings and Closings
Many poets wonder how best to start and to close a poem. I have culled some of the wisdom of two poets into a document that gives an overview of what a rich array of choices when you begin a poem. As an editor of the Smokey Blue Liteary and Arts Magazine, I find that if the poet doesn’t manage to grab my attention in the first lines, I often set it aside. I call it the two minute rule. I will give the poet about two minutes. If the poem doesn’t grab me in a few minutes, it fails the test. Thinking about openings (and closings) is important. I can attest to that. If a poem doesn’t catch my attention, the next thing I do is go to the end to see if anything happens there. If not, I move to the next poem.
Hope this helps!
from Danusha Lameris’ class “Pathway to Poetry” online workshop and Jack Myers’ The Portable Poetry Workshop. Boston: Wadsworth, 2005)
Exercises:
Keeping a google doc of other people’s beginnings and endings. How do we start one. Let me find out. Designate in notebooks a good beginning for a poem. What kind it is.
Openings:
Key is: Get reader involved in your poem. Surprise them. Demand that they read the next line.
Jack Myers says, “ ‘Making it interesting’ should be, if not an overriding rule, at least a primary consideration when opening a poem. The beginning of a poem, like anything else in life that has the power to grab and hold our attention, should something earn our attention through the effects it creates, the way it is structured, or how and what it says. . . .The opening should have the force of interest that a first impression has when meeting someone new. It might contain suspense, a striking image or juxtaposition, a spring-bound rhetorical or syntactical construction, a compelling insight, a fascinating or outrageous viewpoint or tone, a paradoxical or enigmatic set of ideas, or a conclusive bit of wisdom.” (Ibid, 249)
Danusha Lameris’s Ideas about Openings:
One of the jobs of an opening a poem is to orient a reader so they can get their bearings—the who, what, where, when and, later, why. Readers need to be grounded. Some poets want to let them be mysterious. But Danusha says to “Let the mystery to be mystery and let the facts me facts.” “When handing someone a cup of coffee, give them the handle first,” is quote by William Safford.
The other goal of start is the make it intriguing, inviting a reader in. Do not be afraid of laying out the stakes, don’t hide the reason if the stakes are high.
TYPES OF OPENINGS with examples culled by Jack Myers and Danusha Lameris.
Danusha Lameris’ Types of Openings:
Types and Styles and Openings:
Intriguing Openings:
Samples
Galway Kennell, “Everyone Was in Love”
D.H. Fairchild, “Beauty”
Carolyn Forche, “The Colonel”
Ann Emerson, “ Not the Last”
Outrageous/Startling Statement Opening
Might be a fact and can be disorienting. Going to teach me something. Want to follow statement to see where it leads.
Samples:
Stephen Dunn, “The Routine Things around the House”
Jane Hirshfield, “What Binds Us”
Derick Walcott, “Odd Job, a Bull Terrier”
Susan Feer, “Transubstration”
Kabar “Heritage”
Rhetorical Openings
—fill-in-the-blanks using rhetorical structure of sentence as clothesline from which to hand words or ideas… as if, or if. . .then constructions or elegant phrasing and higher toned language. For Danusha, this poem is addressing someone. Questions asked and asks us to get answer. Inquiring minds want to know.
Examples:
Nadilie dias, “From These Bodies if Not Ours
Mark Doty, “Deep Lane”
Lynn Emanuel, “On Waking After Reading Raoul”
Lines: “These hands if not Gods haven’t they move like river, like light over
Deep Lane “whose black and yellow signature scribbles across page. . .”
“The numbers how many nights have I lain like this . . .”
Ellen Bass, “What Did I Love”
“What did I love about killing the chickens.
Kim Addinizo, “The Numbers”
Edict Opening/ Command—Bossing reader around. as to what to do. They are telling me what to do.
Examples:
Jane Hirshfield, “As a Hammer Speaks to Nail”
Dorian Lux, “Regret Nothing”
Dylan Thomas “And Death Shall have no Dominion. . .”
Jane Hirshfield “When all fails, fail boldly”
Dorian Lux ,“Regret nothing,”
Kabir “Don’t go outside your house to see flower”
Jericho Brown, “Another Elegy”
Line: “Forgive me from taking the tone of a preacher”
“Expect death
Tracy Brimhall, “To reduce likelihood of seduction.” Do not swim. .
Jack Myer Openings:
The Fantastic Opening
Sample:
Robert Long, “Saying One Thing”
Narrative Opening
Orienting Openings
Intrigue openings
Parallel and Balanced and Syntax
Franz Wright, “Certain Tall Buildings”
Camera Shots and angles
Michael Ryan, “TV Room at the Children’s Hospice”
5. The Conclusive opening
W.H. Auden, “Musee des Deauz Arts”
6 .Focus on Subject
Stephen Spender, “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great”
7. Dialogue Opening
A.E. Houseman, “Terrance, This is Stupid Stuff”
8. The Dramatic Situation Opening
Emily Dickenson, poem # 465
9. Contraries Opening
10. The Paradoxical (or Oxymoronic) open
Charles Olson, “Maxiums”
11. Imagistic Opening
Richard Jackson, “A Violation”
12.. The Tonal Opening
Cynthia Huntington, “Breaking”
13. The Comparative Opening
Simile
14. Metaphor
Heather McHugh, “Inflation”
15. The Descriptive Opening
Adrian Louis, “The First of the Month”
16. The Hyperbolic (Exaggerated) Opening
Heather McHugh, “Earthymoving Malediction”
17. The State-Of-Being Opening
Lorna Dee Cervantes, “Colorado Blvd”
II. CLOSINGS
Jack Myers says:
In strong closings we need to feel at once feel at once that they are inevitable yet surprising. The surprise can be in content or in an epiphany. Jack Myers said, a strong ending has “the sense of inevitability (that) isn’t the quality of predictability, but the apprehensive of an order of inner and outer perfected form which our senses of aesthetics, intuition, and logic make us feel when something has been organically and fully completed.” (Ibid, 253)
He describes two types of closings—Eastern and Western Endings
Generally speaking there are two opposite, yin/yang qualities of closure that relate more to a poet’s aesthetic sense and character than to anything technical in nature, although a poem’s subject and theme will have a bearing on the style of closure chosen. One could easily thinking of them as masculine and feminine in character: the active, external, aggressive, linear Western ending; and the receptive, curvilinear, inward-directed Eastern ending. . . .The up-front power and brute force of the. . .Western ending. . .tend to use . . .(a) kind of overtly dramatic ending, often relying on artistic use of hyperbole, overstatement, striking imagery, the clash of ironies, and other devices and rhetorical strategies that lend a sense od drama, impact, and finality to a poem.
WESTERN ENDINGS:
Types of Closings:
Slam Bang Ending
Startle the reader. Ruth Stone, “Curtain”
Focus a Question
End by asking question, focusing on issue brought up in poem. Mark Halliday, “Seventh Hour”
Resolve an Argument
End with proposition, state a fact, conclusion. Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
Offer Final Knowledge
Make peace with tensions in poem. Larry Levis, “Winter Stars”
Enriched Restatement
Make a restatement at different level. Michael Decker, “The Tour Guide”
Self-Revealing
Enunciate the distress with clinch line to close it. Bruce Weigl, “A Romance”
Complete a Trope or controlling metaphor
Take image to its conclusion and pull it out more. Barry Goldensohn, “Post Mortem as angels”
The Ironic Comment
Play on words, using contraries, paradoxes, opposites, duality to convey surprise, revelation, complexity, not just cleaver but insightful too Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall”
The Double Dilemma
Close with double negative, concluding not on up note but downers. Jack Gilbert, “In Dispraise of Poetry”
The Reversal
Shift to opposite of what seeming to be intended in poem. Tomas Transtromer, “Allegro”
The Misdirecting ending
Using the hidden or buried theme in poem, turn away from what is expected Stephen McNally, “Mysteries”
The Throwaway Ending
This begin with promise as if going somewhere but ends undeveloped
The Double Ending
Repeated lines juxtaposed as Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Portrait”
EASTERN ENDINGS
These endings employ the subtler effects of understatement, restraint, nuance, and implication, and are completed in the reader’s mind after the last word in the poem has been read. It reverberates, has a meditative quality. (ibid. 261)
Inward Folding
Forces the reader to partner with poet in completing its content by having to connect up strategically placed implications in the poem, taking a simile earlier in poem as having portent of something unsaid. Naomi Shihah Nye, “Rain”
The Description
By describing something in detail to reveal something about it entirely outside description Kate Daniels, “Bathing”
The Definition
The define or name a condition, state of being, event, or experience by doing so transform it into something else unexpected from the definition. Morton Marcus, “The Moment for Which There is No Name”
The Paradox
Leave with paradox W.S. Merwin, “The Room”
The Symbolic Image
End with a symbolic image that hold psychological, spiritual, emotional, and/or intellectual levels of meaning inside it accompanied by indelible and authentic insight that hold complex image inside it. Michael Ryan, “TV Room at the Children’s Hospice”
The Conclusive Statement
The rhetorical thrust of the closure rings with a sense of finality (as in Slam Bang ending) but because the closure is composed of an implied summary of previous content, some complex insight, a bit of philosophy, and the authority of a final irony, the thought is left unfinished to be reconciled in the readers’ mind. Bruce Weigl, “The Confusion of Planes We Must Wander in Sleep”
The Narrative Spiral
Ends up where began yet occurs at two different levels of consciousness, a Chaplinesque shift in perspective, David Leman, “Perdidia”
The Circular Closure
The return to where poem began, to flashback, but with wisdom or clarity or dark awareness of the truth. Mark Strand, “The Idea”
The Revelatory Plot Point Ending
Ends by supplying a missing, reshaped or revealing piece of plot. Jack Gilbert’s “Married” with the “Long black hair dangled in the dirt.”
In Media Res End
End in the middle of action
Tess Gallagher, “The Hug”
The Leaping Closure
Quick movement from level to level in consciousness and back again without aid of explicit context or transitions James Wright, “Lying on a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”
The Broken-off Ending
An open, non-ending Mark Spencer, “Detenshun”
The Plunging Closure
Abruptly falling down to the thematic “bottom-line” Louis Simpson, “The Ice Cube Maker”
The Repeated Line Closure
Repeat the same words as in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Entrance to New Domain
Shift from idyllic and innocent to new territory William Hathaway, “Oh.Oh.”
Openings of Mary Oliver
In the morning
It shuffles, unhurried,
Across the wet fields
In its black slippers,
In its coal-colored coat
With the white stripe like a river
Running down its spine—
From “A Certain Sharpness in the Morning Air”
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable like
The wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
From “Some Questions Your Might Ask”
“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds. . .
From: “The Buddha’s Last Instruction”
His beak could open a bottle,
and his eyes—when he lifts their soft lids—
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder—
Blake, maybe,
0r the Book of Revelation.
From: “Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard”
Mary Oliver. New and Selected Poems, Volume One (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992)
Openings of Tony Hoagland
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. . .
From: “Dickhead”
If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to help your enemy
the way I got to help my mother
when she was weakened past the point of saying no.
from: “Lucky”
I can’t believe I’m sitting here
in this dark tavern
listening to my old friend boast
about the size of his cock. . .
From” Muy Macho”
Tony Hoagland Donkey Gospel (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1998)
Openings of Ellen Bass
The first time I saw my boyfriend’s penis,
I thought the shaft would be cover with hair
like the grassy knoll of my own sex.
From: “Nakedness”
Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
And reassemble on the table.
From: “When You Return”
“O loveliness. O lucky beauty,
I wanted it and I couldn’t bear it.
When I was a girl, before self-serve gas. . .
From: “Ode to Invisibility”
Elllen Bass. Like a Beggar (Port Townsend, Washington, 2014)
Openings of Christopher Bursk
It even looks dirty, dangling
below the line
like a kid taking a leak
while treading water. . . .
From: “Why a Body is Drawn to Lowercase p”
A man’s fingers had moved across you
taking little tucks
as if fitting you for a costume
of sewing a shadow to you. . .
From: “What a Boy Knows and Doesn’t Know”
His bedroom was filled with gallon jugs
Of urine he wouldn’t let any of his visitors throw away. . .
From: “The Pathetic Fallacy”
Christopher Bursk. The First Inhabitants of Arcadia.( Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006)
Openings Vievee Francis
From “Fallen”
But I was never the light of my father’s eyes, or any
other brother’s (that deep-husked choir, so there
was no height from which to fall. I began here
in the proverbial bottom.
From “Skinned”
There are after all several ways to skin anything. My grandmother knew
most of those ways. She had been skinned herself. . .
From “Inevitability”
There is always a cage at the center, a lockup,,
the place you may wind up no matter
how hard you try to follow the straight and
narrow, there’s a jailer with a key and no occasion. . .
Viveen Francis, Forest Primeval (Evanston: Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University2016)
Openings From Elizabeth Bishop
At four o’clock
in the gun-metal blue dark
we hear the first crow at the first cock
just below
the gun-metal blue window
and immediately there is an echo
off in the distance. . .
From: “Roosters”
Oh, but it is dirty!
–this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful and watch that match!
From: “Filling Station”
Elizabeth Bishop. The Voice of the Poet. (New York: Random House Audiobooks, )
Openings From Frank Bidart
The trick was to give yourself only to what
could not receive what you had to give,
leaving you as you wished, free.
From “You Cannot Rest”
Frank Bidart Watching the Spring Festival. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)
Openings From: Philip Levine
From “Listen Carefully”
( I have included the whole poem since it is one of my favorites!)
My sister rises from our bed hours before dawn.
I smell her first cigarette and fall back asleep
until she sits on the foot of the bed to pull
on her boots. I shouldn’t look, but I do,
knowing she’s still naked from the waist up.
She sees me looking and smiles, musses my hair,
whispers something secret into my ear, something
I can’t tell anyone because it makes no sense.
Hours later I waken in an empty room
smelling of no yesterdays. The sunlight streams
across the foot of the bed, and for a moment
I actually think it’s Saturday, and I’m free.
Let me be frank about this: my older sister
is not smart. I answer all her mail for her,
and on Sundays I even make dinner because
the one cookbook confuses her, although
it claims to be the way to a man’s heart.
She wants to learn the way, she wants
a husband, she tells me, but at twenty-six she’s
beginning to wonder. She makes good money
doing piece work, assembling the cups that cap
the four ends of a cross of a universal joint.
I’ve seen her at work, her face cut with slashes
of grease while with tweezers she positions
the tiny rods faster than you or I could ever,
her eyes fixed behind goggles, her mind God
knows where, roaming over all the errors
she thinks make her life. She doesn’t know why
her men aren’t good to her. I’ve rubbed
hand cream into the bruises on her shoulders,
I’ve seen what they’ve done, I’ve even cried
along with her. By now I believe I know
exactly what you’re thinking. Although I don’t
get home until after one, we sleep
in the same bed every night, unless she’s
not home. If you’re thinking there’s no way
we wouldn’t be driven to each other, no way
we could resist, no way someone as wronged
as my beautiful sister could have a choice
about something so basic, then you’re
the one who’s wrong. You haven’t heard a word.
From: “My Father With a Cigarette Twelve Years Before the Nazis Could Break His Heart”
I remember the room in which he held
a kitchen match and with his thumbnail
commanded it to flame: a brown sofa,
two easy chairs, one covered with flowers,
a black piano no one ever played. . .
From: The Simple Truth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
Openings From B.H. Fairchild
From: “Body and Soul”
Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,
our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling
the facts but mauling the truth. . .
From: The Art of the Lathe (Farmington: Alice James Books, 1998)
Openings From: Timothy Seibles
From: “Commercial Break: Road-Runner, Uneasy”
If I didn’t’’ know better I’d say
the sun never moved ever,
that somebody just pasted it there
and said to hell with it. . .
From “The Case”
White people don’t know they’re white.
Newspaper. Coffee. Gosh-whataday!
From: “Marrow”
I suppose it is too late to say there is a lesson
in the way a woman’s eyes take over an evening,
how her legs move all the tall ships in my blood—
From: Hammerlock (Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1999)
