Ordinary Genius

There is no way to teach that mysterious, elusive thing that breathes life into a poem, that gives it, literally, inspiration.

Life is complicated. Clichés fail because they don’t reflect truth. They’re easy, and so they lie. As you’ve seen, poets lie in many ways, but good poets don’t mess with life’s complexity.

The line, in poetry, has been called a “unit of attention”; that’s a good definition.

Learn strategies, be stubborn, and wait—pray—for the leap.

It’s impossible to kill a good poem. You won’t ruin your experience of a good poem once you’ve dismantled it. Your appreciation can only increase. You will also find more ideas for your own work.

SWAY

Since I find you will no longer love,

from bar to bar in terror I shall move

past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth

and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,

their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,

suffer the light from the wrestling arena

to fall all over them. And what they say

blends in the tarantellasmic sway

of all of us between the two of these:

harmony and divergence,

their sad story of harmony and divergence,

the story that begins

I did not know who she was

and ends I did not know who she was.

The English, or Shakespearean, sonnet follows this rhyme scheme, or pattern of end rhymes: abab, cdcd, efef, gg. The Italian, also known as the Petrarchan, sonnet is more difficult: abba, abba, cde, cde. (The Italian language has more words that rhyme.)

My life closed twice before its close—

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive

As these that twice befell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

Notice echoes. Rhyme is an obvious echo, one word calling to another. In subtler ways, words can also whisper to each other.

In The Uses of Enchantment, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim said that fairy tales, for children, are psychic journeys—opportunities to confront the fears and intuitions of childhood in a form that’s manageable.