Tag Archives: stanzas

Patterns

I recently finished reading Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison, a series of essays that considers the structure of written narratives in fiction, mostly in novels. Alison’s background context is the Western-developed Aristotelian dramatic arc, that “exposition/rising action/climax/falling action/denouement” plot that generally follows chronologically. She then examines several novels, modern and contemporary ones mostly, that don’t adhere to the classic structure.

I’ve read some of the books she looks at, and have decided to put others she mentions on my to-read list, but mostly what I took away from her text is my own recognition that poets have been varying structures for a very long time. I don’t mean just the patterning difference between, say, a sonnet and a pantoum or free verse but a poem’s narrative structure, its approach to chronology, imagery, argument, world-building, and more. When I was reading, I thought of examples of poems that spiral, meander, make wavelets, are fractal in nature, or explode (to use some of Alison’s terminology).

In particular, the cellular or networked ‘form’ of storytelling seems basic to poetry–each cell a room or stanza, interlocking or sitting nearby with space around each one. The space connects as well as makes gaps, leaves room for reflection and recombined connections and new patterns; sometimes the stanzas float like little blocks on the page (or screen)…interrupting the narrative and enhancing it as well. Poetry’s narrative is often collage-like, and I notice this aspect in some newer novels as well–but I read much more poetry than fiction these days. Maybe it’s time to plunge into more novels again? At any rate, Alison’s book has made me reflect on narratives, lyrical narratives, literary structure. Maybe even the structure of a new manuscript? (I ought to get to work on that.)

If you want a taste of this book, you can read part of her opening chapter, which appeared as an essay in The Paris Review, here. I don’t teach in a classroom anymore, but if I were instructing a creative writing class I might put this book on the reading list.

Reflective spaces

Many years back, I spent awhile researching and pondering the ways time can play out in a poem. I fully intended to spend another couple of years developing theory on space in poetry, but that essay never came about. Life diverted me from literary scholarship and criticism, and that’s alright. I never was very good at scholarship.

The idea, however, returned to me recently in one of those by-the-by moments; I had been writing to a friend about revisions and was re-reading Plath’s Ariel (the version with the facsimile pages and also drafts of the title poem and of “The Swarm”). I noticed that, from her earliest hand-written drafts, Plath chose to write “Ariel” in three-line stanzas–and that was something she did not revise or alter in any of her subsequent drafts.

Interesting. Stanza length happens to be one of the aspects of a draft I am most likely to change when revising. Stanzas being the little rooms of the poem, it seems the spaces between stanzas play, usually, a more than visual role in the best poems…well, that got me thinking about space in the poem and somehow led to thinking what poems offer. Why we read and write them, even in the 21st century.

Explicitly: The poem is a space for reflection. In the space of the poem, a reader can expand perspective or feel resonance, as in a concert hall; or find a mirroring of the reader’s self (reflection); or, in a critical sense, the reader can reflect upon the poem’s topic, context, argument, content, imagery, craft, language, or beauty. The space of the poem urges response and responsiveness. Poems are not rooms built solely by and for the writer but built of the circumstances and for the reader, too.

What poetry means, in terms of reflection, is that the response can be reflective of the reader’s space, as well as the writer’s. I know that I have had different responses/readings of the same poem depending upon the place I was in while reading it (emotional, physical, contextual “place”). Different kinds of mirrors reflect different visual images. The lighting matters. The time of day. The mood. All of those are spaces, metaphorically or actually. Different stanzaic rooms, different poetic rooms–ready for a reader’s exploration.

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