Vroom Vroom, A Pantoum

I've been stuck in the middle of three different poems for weeks. I don't usually have this many poems going at once, and being stuck in such an array of them at the same time is not a pleasant feeling. So much so that I have found myself recently avoiding writing by doing anything but.

So it was time to pull out the big guns: my secret weapon for resistance to writing. And here it is: Form. Yes, that's right. The less I feel like writing, the more constraints I put on the writing. I turn the poem into a puzzle, a problem to solve. I take myself out of my feelings and put myself into my head; it's a distraction. It almost always works.

This week I needed a lot of formal constraints, a lot of distraction, so I went for the pantoum. (Rules for the pantoum can be found here.) Villanelles, sestinas, triolets and sonnets work fine too, in decreasing order of need for formal distraction. But this week I needed the mother of all formal distractions, the pantoum.

Every line in a pantoum is used twice, according to a strict ordering. For example, the second line of the first stanza is the first line of the second stanza, and on an on (see the rules above). The last stanza is especially tricky, since it is made up of two lines from the pentultimate stanza and two lines from the very first stanza, and they have to fit together. Going backwards and making a change here or there means making two changes, and it can get complicated. Very good distraction, don't you think?

Here are a few things that I do to have even more fun with a pantoum, to make the game even more versatile and the poem not quite as repetitive, but still keep the distraction level high.

1) I like to use homophones so that the words sound the same but have different meanings and spellings in the two corresponding lines. For example, this week I used "hear" in one line and "here" in the same line when it was repeated later. It takes a little manipulation to make such different words fit in the same line, but it's all in the name of distraction.

2) I experiment with words that are near rhymes or simply similarly sounding words in the paired lines, instead of directly repeating a line. For example, in this pantoum of mine (first published in the Beloit Poetry Journal, and also in my book The Insomniac's Weather Report,") called "Flood," the fourth line in the second stanza, "who were washed away and never seen again." becomes in the following stanza "who were wished away and never seen again." If you keep many of the key words and maintain the rhythm, you can change quite a lot of words to similar-sounding ones, as in the second line in the third stanza of "Flood", "the thundering churn and thrust of the Broken Arrow River", which recurs as the first line in the fourth stanza as "The wandering Sturm und Drang of the Spoken Sorrow River". Although very few words are directly repeated, it's clear that these are paired lines.

3) I also like to break sentences  in different places in each line, often mid-line, so that the word that ends a sentence in one place becomes the beginning of a sentence in the repeated line. For example, from the poem I worked on this week, the line "is overkill for remembering embers in the snow, balance of fantasy" becomes later "is overkill for remembering. Embers in the snow balance fallacy". Embers is the object in one sentence and the subject in the echoing line.

4) I also add and subtract small words in lines, keeping the bigger, more powerful, attention-getting words. From "Flood," the last line in the pentultimate stanza, "like father’s trombone-emptied basement, like the heart." goes from being a comparison to being full sentences in the final stanza, as "We like father’s trombone-empty basement. We like the heart".

The trouble with the pantoum is that it screams out to be admired for its cleverness. For that reason, writing a pantoum is a lot more fun than reading one.

But that's okay. You don't have to go all the way to the extreme of a pantoum when you are dreading writing. Setting your own arbitrary constraints will do. For example, you might choose to write a poem that is composed entirely of one-syllable words. Or you might mention a color in every stanza. You could even put a bunch of these random constraints on yourself. The point is to distract yourself with rules and constraints, making the poem word play, a way of playing, making it enjoyable to write again.

Alphanumeric Soup

Recently I read a brief review of poet Noah Eli Gordon's new book The Source (Futurepoem Books), in which his process of assembling this particular work by borrowing text from the pages 26 of various books available in the Denver Public Library was described. Why 26? Because that's the number of letters in the alphabet. When I read about this process, a convergence of the alphabet and integers, I immediately put this book on my "to-read" list.

I have never liked the dichotomy of "English majors who can't count" and "math majors who can't read." I myself love letters and numbers equally, and see them as symbols which do roughly analogous work, drawing from me similar emotions. I'm even secretly jealous of synesthetes (people who experience two sensory responses in tandem), in particular those who have grapheme-color synesthesia, in which letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored. Such an individual will see the numeral two always as colored orange, for example, and she will feel that numbers or letters have a kind of personality of their own. (Synesthesia often runs in families, by the way, though individual perceptions of linked sensory responses will not be identical.)

I'm not that lucky. I do have a very strong preference for odd numbers over even numbers (and of course favor prime numbers further). I also confuse and transpose the numerals 4 and 7 with regularity, since those two seem to have very similar characters to me. Furthermore I would like to re-order the alphabet so that the letter H came before the letter G instead of after it, as I have always suspected the extant order to be unnatural. But that's about the extent of my feeling for the personality of letters and numbers. I merely love them indiscriminantly.

Thus I am always pleased to see writers who use letters and numbers together to create their work--Kabbalah-like or not, tending towards numerology or towards statistical analysis, I don't care. Just put numbers with words and I already start to quiver with anticipation.

A few weeks ago I read the late great Inger Christensen's alphabet (New Directions), translated from the Swedish by Susanna Nied (who won the American-Scandanavian PEN Translation Prize for this work). Christensen used two contraints (and I love a good constraint, let alone two), one based on the alphabet and one on numbers. Did I swoon? You know I did.

First, Christensen began each of her fourteen sections with a different letter of the alphabet, in order from A through N, and she kept the occurrence of that letter throughout its section way above the statistical norm.

Second, she used a Fibonacci sequence to structure the number of lines per section. A Fibonacci sequence is one in which each number is the sum of the previous two numbers, with the classical case being: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, etc. Since only the purest stanza can have 0 lines in it, Christensen began with the third number in the classic Fibonacci sequence, so that her first section consists of 1 line, the second section has 2, the third 3, the fourth 5, etc. It gets a little hairy at the end, trying to get the line numbers to total a Fibonnaci number, but by then the pattern is established and deviation from it only emphasizes it. And if that wasn't enough, the stanzas within sections usually consist of a Fibonacci number of lines, often in order (that is, within a given section, the first stanza might have 3 lines, the second stanza 5, the third 8, and so on).

And did I mention the gorgeous use of repetition throughout this long poem? And did I mention the gorgeous use of repetition throughout this long poem?

Here's a final question for you: do you think it's a coincidence that the alphabet has 26 letters and the year has exactly twice that number of weeks? (Insert spooky music in your mind here.)

The Art of Losing Control

When I was a graduate student, one of my roommates, an aeronautical engineer, asked me to have a look at her data, which she was trying to fit to a (nonlinear) curve.

"I'm having boundary problems," she sighed.

I was in the social sciences department, but had had enough higher math so that as long as my roommate reduced her problems to equations, formulae, or statistical analyses, I could comment on them, though I had no idea what they meant in reality. So I gamely had a look at her data.

Another roommate, a chemist, overheard us talking and asked, "What's a boundary problem?"

"Data and functions tend to misbehave, if at all, at the boundaries," I explained.

"Like people," one of my roommates added, and we all cracked up.

In the classic text Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki observed, "To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first, let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them."

So it goes with data, functions, sheep, cows, and people. If you give them enough space, they will contentedly do their own thing; they will be predictable and thus "in control". However, if you want to make something happen, if you want to liven things up by introducing chaos and disarray (so often harbingers of creativity), you merely need to put in a boundary.

This has often been my experience with poetry too. If I want something interesting to happen in a poem, I need a constraint. Or two. Maybe I need to write in a formal structure, such as the villanelle or sonnet, or choose to use only one-syllable words, or never use the letter "e". Sometimes placing limitations on subject matter is useful: I may require myself to interweave the names of the planets in our solar system with the reasons I broke up with a boyfriend of yore (and do I include Pluto or not, since it counted as a planet at the time of the break-up?).

This week, however, I put two seemingly reasonable but interesting constraints on a poem I was working on. For two stanzas, everything went swimmingly. Then, in the third stanza, the poem rolled over and died. Let's skip this part for now, I thought to myself, and went on to the fourth stanza. Still no visible sign of life. What happened, I wondered, to my system of boundary implementation?

Then I remembered the deadening effect of predicatable rhyme: "hour" followed maddeningly, inescapably, by "flower" or "shower." And I remembered the Beat poets, the explosiveness and volatility so evident in their meandering free verse.(Of course, the poet Donald Hall said,"The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.")

Both binding and liberating, that's the essence of a boundary, or of a good boundary anyway. And so, these days I'm thinking that it's more about the art of losing control, than the the science of losing control.