Reverie Four: lovely as a tree

I had a loathing of Joyce Kilmer instilled in me pretty early on, which probably explains a lot of how I feel about particular sorts of poetry. It wasn’t particularly that his poems sounded too bouncy by half (especially for some of his more “sober” subject matter), or that he was pedantically religious about some of them, or that he was a sell-out in terms of (in my opinion) pandering to what his readership wanted, but rather the combination of all of these things. And of course, few poems are as aggravating to me as “I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree”, which just takes all of it to a whole new level. Jersey’s finest. But you know what, Joyce, I’ll give you a break this time around, solely because I want to borrow that line…

This week: “lovely as a tree“

We’re going to take it a little bit easy this time. This is straight up guided process, and we’re going to think of this organically. There are three ways poems miss out on some of their potential, at least for me: you get a theme notion and plow right in to make a point (while sacrificing craft and form), or you’re so worried about sticking to a particular form that it trumps everything else (even if your meter is perfect), or you have a killer opening/ending, and spend the rest of the poem making up for it. Probably ninety percent of poems are at least somewhat guilty of one of these, to some degree. So, we’re going to grow a poem instead of shaping it.

Even a tree has to begin with a seed. We’re going to use lexical seeds here. Keep your eyes open for the next ten interesting words that cross your path, the ones that stand out. They don’t have to be long or fancy: opossum, ladderback, ascot, lifeline. Short phrases like internal combustion engine and self-sacrificial would be okay too. Mull over them for a while and pick out the one you’d like to grow the most.

Next you have to give it nutrients: soil, water, sunlight, etc. In this case, you need to give it some grammar and structure (to different degrees, depending on your style of writing). Your word/phrase by itself just floats in negative space, perhaps on the screen or the page or just in your brain, so give it some context and paint the surroundings a little bit. Do you want that opossum to be a literal one, or a figurative one (lying sly in the road, playing possum)? Is that ladderback chair an accent or a focus (a lifetime of ladderback chairs sat her up straight)? An important note: don’t make this line the beginning or end of a sentence. You’ll see why in a moment.

Try to get a full line out of it, which will inform the basic line character of the rest of the work. If you have alliteration, certain sounds, a particular meter taking shape, own it. But: even though a tree is strong and durable, it knows how to flex with the wind. We are not going to be married to these line shapes; sonnets are not necessary. Because next, you’re going to grow the trunk, by building more lines around the central one. Try adding one above it, then one below, alternating to swell it into a stanza.

In the morning
she’s stringing pearls on a purple dress. Then,
when the sun starts to fall, she’ll find herself
lying sly in the road, playing possum
until her babies come crawling home. She sings
“Oh Susannah” when they start walking,
one by one. 

(I did that one with the process, and threw two little hooks on the top and bottom, to link with what might come next. Very unintentionally, the lines all ended up in the 10-syllable range otherwise. I tried to do some alliterative pairs, as well as use the same sounds repeatedly: s, sh, p, w, o, for no reason other than the bark patterned itself that way.)

Get that stanza nice and thick with growth rings. You might want the beginnings of a narrative, like I did above, to create a character study or a heroic epic. Maybe you just want a particularly rich description to surround that original seed; maybe you want to hint at deep questions. Either way, this is going to be the centerpiece of your poem. Since such centerpieces are rarely sprung from such humble beginnings, give them the chance to really explore their boundaries.

Because next, you’re going to spread the branches. It’s up to you how many you want to include, but try for at least three. These will be other stanzas, placed either before or after your centerpiece, depending on how you want your reader to scan your poem (branches-up, trunk-down, or all around?) In any case, the branches should be shorter, and form a frame for that meaty stanza.

It didn’t always feel like this, she thinks,
thin fingers curled around a whiskey glass.

…

Mama loves her little lambs, but she can’t shake
her own terrible unreality.
It sticks like a lump of cake in her throat. 

(Clearly, mine is turning into some kind of character sketch with a story under its surface.)

Add as many of these as it takes to feel satisfied: you might stick with a slender sapling, or end up with a strapping sequoia of ten stanzas. How you choose to arrange them is up to you, but make each of those branches solid, as though they could be a short poem of their own.

Finally, we have to add a few jewels, the fruits and flowers to add the final note on the tree. Look through the poem and choose at least five words that you can either add to (with an adjective, adverb, prefix, whatever) or synonymize to make them unique and beautiful. You probably already have some words that you’re proud of in there, as a tree is pretty nice on its own. But you want those flowers to have their own, different kind of beauty. I might turn to switchgrass fingers curled around… or …like a lump of devil’s-food cake in her throat. Give it charm and character.

The most important thing here is to keep your editor to the side. Try not to prune and crop and graft too much, and just let the poem grow into what it will. You don’t have to love it – no tree is ever completely perfect – but appreciate the undertaking of it, and the organic process that creates it. If you’re feeling particularly brave, you could try to chop it down and peel out particular words and phrases (using some kind of cut-up tool), or go in the opposite direction and plant the other nine seeds you came up with. See what happens. Maybe you will discover that you prefer this kind of process to others; at the very least, it gives you new methods and approaches to draw on, hopefully.

Joyce Kilmer, though. Ugh.

Advertisement