by Gregory Orr

from A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry

Preface

(To a poetic student and friend.) I only seek to put you in rapport. Your own brain, heart, evolution, must not only understand the matter, but largely supply it.
                         Walt Whitman, “After Trying a Certain Book”

I’ve spent my life reading and writing poetry and teaching both the reading and the writing of it. In putting together this book, I asked myself what I would have liked to know when I was a young poet. What would have been useful or interesting to me back then? What could have helped me grow as a poet by deepening my excitement about, appreciation of, and understanding of this curious and compelling art?
           
This small book represents one poet’s informal exploration of language and self in relation to the impulse to write lyric poetry. I think of it as a series of brief provocations presented in the hope that they will lead the young poet or reader toward an active response of his or her own. If it encourages you to write poems, or if it clarifies your personal engagement with and excitement about poetry, then it will have succeeded. Inevitably, this book bears the stamp of my own interests and preoccupations—probably even where I imagine myself to be least personal or biased. I’m not trying to convert anyone to my ideas or preoccupations, but only to share them and to articulate what I find to be wonderful and urgent about poetry. I think it’s preferable for young poets or readers to have a set of ideas and observations to orient them at the outset, rather than muddling their way into something as complex (or simple) as poetry. If any of my ideas strike you as wrong or not true to your experience, that’s fine. You, the reader, are invited to make use of anything that seems worthwhile and to discard the rest. But to do either—to assimilate or reject—is to become what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “an active soul,” and that is essential if you wish to engage poetry.... [pp. 9-10]

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Chapter One:
Poetry Is Both Simple and Complex

In many ways, lyric poetry is the simplest and most obvious thing in the cultural world. You’ll notice that I say “lyric poetry.” I don’t have much to say about epic poetry, or even extended narrative poetry. Lyric poetry is the most basic and omnipresent form of poetry. Not only that, but ever since the romantic period lyric has been the dominant form of poetry in the West. Once you realize that lyric poetry includes popular song, it’s obvious that it is at the center of human emotional life as it seeks expression in words. Who among us could imagine growing up without some form of popular music—songs whose lyrics express the inner life of the self and its responses to the world and to other people? In America, this could be rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop, blues, country, folk, rap, or emo. Why should it matter what kind of music we personally respond to? It all has the same purpose: to dramatize human experience and to emphasize its subjective dimension. Although the lyrics of popular song are poetry—an opinion I find powerfully validated by the recent award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan—language in song is seldom as well organized and carefully constructed as the language of poems written for the page. After all, so much of the energy and emotion of song is carried by melody, instrumentation, and vocal performance. What unites lyric poetry and popular song isn’t the quality of language use, but its expressive purpose.
   

Lyric Poetry: Everywhere and Always

Lyric poetry is the voice of the individual making sense of his or her experience. When I say that lyric is the most basic form of poetry, I mean two things— “everywhere and always.” “Everywhere” refers to the fact that lyric poetry is present in every culture on the planet. No matter where you go, if people are there, then lyric and song are also there. If my blanket claim of “everywhere” is global, then my claim of “always” is historical: lyric poetry and song have been present throughout history in every culture whose writing has been recorded and preserved. There’s also little reason to doubt that it was present in cultures without written languages.

Let me reiterate briefly: the personal lyric exists universally—everywhere and always. Poems about love, or loneliness, or fear, or wonder. Poems about what someone did, or what happened to him, or what she dreams of doing. Sometimes lyric poems don’t use the pronoun I, but they are always expressive of an individual viewpoint—what some imagined person is saying or feeling or doing in the world.

Lyric poetry is present in all times and places because it helps us live by expressing our experience and at the same time moving that experience a bit away from us—to the world of words, where it can be shaped or dramatized into meaning. When writing a poem, we turn our world into words and arrange them into patterns of pleasure or urgency or coherence. This second world created out of words is intensified and structured for expressive gratification. When reading a poem, we enter this second world—one that the poet’s imagination has created to express his or her vision of life and, indirectly, to connect with us.

Humans need lyric poetry. Most of us know that, based on our own experiences of adolescence, when emotions and events threatened to overwhelm us even as time propelled us relentlessly toward biological and cultural adulthood. And many of us still turn to lyric in times of crisis. Even before adolescence, many young people feel the urge to write a poem when a beloved pet dies or death takes someone they know. Not to mention that other great crisis of human experience: romantic love—the urgencies and delicious tribulations of it, the longing to love and to be loved. Who in the throes of first love hasn’t written a poem or wished that he or she could? Maybe, plagued by shyness or confusion, we sought out someone else’s poem to speak for us.

I argue that writing a lyric poem serves two basic functions. One is that it feels good to express what is in us. Who hasn’t at some point experienced the sense of being a separate person isolated from others and yet bursting with emotion? Lyric poets have always claimed that expressing that emotion in words can heal, bringing a transformative sense of release and relief. William Wordsworth put it this way:

To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
   And I again am strong: . . .
                            from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
                            Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807)

Closely related to this expressive function, yet even more important, is the fact that the writing of lyric poems helps to restabilize a self that has been destabilized by experience (inner or outer experience, or both). Lyric helps a poet restabilize by turning a personal experience into words and then applying the ordering principles that poetry and individual imagination abound with. When the poet translates her distress or confusion into words and then orders those words, she achieves what Robert Frost identified as a main goal for poetry: “a momentary stay against confusion.” To put it more positively, the poet actively restabilizes herself through expressive writing. She turns her rich and bewildering world into words with the awareness that lyric poetry’s enormous array of ordering principles will both express her situation and stabilize it.

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It often seems that writing a lyric poem should be easy and gratifying. We all use language, after all. We know that poetry can be composed aloud or written down. Speaking is a natural human activity; most everyone does it. Granted, writing words is a more complicated process, but most of us do that too. Either way, to write poetry might seem to be a simple thing—just “speak out what’s in you.” It would seem that all we have to do is use words and a pen or laptop to write out what’s percolating inside us or to evoke a pleasant or unpleasant memory.

And that’s partly true. Some of the most moving poems and songs use very simple language and seem to speak directly to us. But there’s a paradox here: poetry is both a “simple” use of language and a very complicated one. The reason poetry is so useful for emotional and spiritual expression—and for human survival—is that it is also a rich and complex use of language for creating order. Both the obvious and the subtle orderings of poetry serve to hold words together—to forge them into solid but dynamic structures that contain and channel the chaotic inner and outer experience that we humans seek to express.
   

A Double Awareness: The Presence of Disorder, the Need for Order

Before saying more about the paradox of the simplicity and complexity of lyric poetry, I want to talk about the simplicity and complexity of being a person in the world, since that is at the heart of the impulse to engage with poetry. If we give it a moment’s thought, we realize that being a person in the world brings two awarenesses that can deeply impact us.

First, there is a great deal of disorder in experience. Please understand that I use the word disorder as a conceptual term; it isn’t a moral category. Disorder is neither good nor bad, though it can be either, or even both at the same time. Disorder can take many forms and show many qualities—it can be exhilarating or terrifying, depending on the situation. It can be outside us in the world—think of war, weather, a loved person or creature, traumatic violence, or being lost in a city or a forest. Disorder can be inside our bodies—think of pain or illness. It can be in our minds—think of the fluctuations in emotion that we experience on an almost daily basis, the bad memories or nostalgic longings that disturb us, or the giddy intoxications we sometimes seek. Disorder can also occur when we think of the future and become anxiously aware of the uncertainty of what next week or next year will bring. The examples I’ve just given can be weighted toward happiness as well as negativity—the disorder of romantic love is often highly prized, and daydreams can be the mind’s pleasurable playfulness with the unknown future. Outdoor adventure or sports can be the body’s dynamic encounter with the unpredictable physical world. Whether disorder is experienced as exhilarating or life threatening, it is real. In various forms and degrees, it is undeniably present in our daily lives.

Second, along with the reality of disorder in experience is the equally powerful human need for a sense of order. We value it in social and political situations (we want peace; we want civility and goodwill from neighbors and strangers). But we also crave order in our own lives: we enjoy our private habits immensely, those little rituals that establish reassuring patterns—whether it’s how we brush our teeth or how we arrange our possessions and our rooms. Consider even the cosmic order of nature’s cycles: the predictable rising of the sun and moon, the stable rotation of the stars in the night sky, the recurring circle of the seasons. All these natural patterns have given humans an enduring sense of reassurance from prehistoric times until now.... [pp. 15-19]

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How Poetry Helps Us, How We Help Ourselves through Poetry

Poetry is compelling in a crisis not just because it is concise and immediate, but also because it is superbly designed to handle both aspects of experience: the reality of disorder and the self’s need for some kind of order.

We might wish our lives to be stable and calm, but they aren’t for the most part. (And wouldn’t they be boring if they were too safe, too calm?) It’s in the nature of experience to destabilize us—whether through a crisis of trouble (grief, illness, trauma, divorce, suffering, violent accident) or a crisis of something positive (romantic love, adventure, joy, wonder). Nor does the crisis have to be in the present moment: consider the recollection (re-emergence?) of past trauma, the longings of homesickness or nostalgia, the memories of a loved one who is gone forever. Many people know how these feelings have the power to disturb and destabilize.

Culture offers a number of large ordering schemes to help deal with experiences of disorder. In particular, religions and philosophies offer ordering explanations and beliefs that seek to make sense of our confusing experience and help us through it. But to my thinking, lyric poetry has several major advantages over all other orderings. For one thing, it is adapted to our specific issues and experiences. It emerges from or addresses our lives individually and specifically. When we write a poem (or song), we write the story of our crisis (joyous or grief-filled)—we turn our individual world into words, and then we order those words into an expressive structure. That structure, that poem, is turbulently alive with the disorder that plagues or exalts us, but it also manifests the ordering power of poetry—the ability to compress experience into a small and lively space of language. When I write a poem and turn my world into words, I order those words and thereby order my world. It’s a world I can shape, one in which I dramatize my disorder but also create a patterned structure to contain it. I displace or “translate” my instability into words, and in that second world of the poem I restabilize. I may suffer or be confused in the real world of my life, but in the world of the poem I am able to dramatize my confusion and take control of it—turn it into an expressive but stable thing: a lyric poem.

Doesn’t everyone, at some time, write a poem or at least want to write one? The expressive impulse can grip us when we’re in grief or when we’re in joy. Maybe we don’t actually write a poem because we don’t know how to or don’t feel adequate to express what we’re experiencing; but we may find solace or release in someone else’s poem, as if that person had said it for us. Or maybe we wait a while—maybe we’ll live a bit with our confusion before we can order it. But poetry is there, waiting for us, offering its resources when we’re ready to dramatize our experience and shape it into something fixed and stable, yet pulsing with life. [pp. 22-23]

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Chapter Seven:
Words Coming Alive in Poems

Words, language—that’s what poems are made of. It’s so obvious a fact that we tend to pass over it quickly, which is a very bad idea in relation to poetry. In our everyday lives, we tend to think that language is pretty transparent and user-friendly—we don’t think much about it; we just speak it. We say we read a newspaper or an article on Wikipedia, but often what we’re really doing is skimming it, zipping across the surface of meaning rather than deeply registering language and phrases. And that’s fine for day-to-day purposes, up to and including schoolwork or research. But language in poetry calls for our full attention. Faced with the obviously complex use of language in poetry, it’s easy to become confused and even intimidated.

The raw material of poetry is words, is language. In order to take in the implications of that fact, it might be good to step back from the topic a bit. Let’s imagine for a moment that we wanted to be a painter or a sculptor. We’d learn pretty early on that paintings have traditionally been made out of oil paint applied to canvas or wood panels with brushes or other tools; that the raw material of sculpting is often clay or some kind of rock and tools to work with it. Oil paint, clay, stone—these are the materials of those arts (at least in their traditional terms in the West). It’s hard to imagine a painter who doesn’t have a gut pleasure in fooling around with paint, or a sculptor who doesn’t experience pleasure feeling clay beneath her hands or chiseling away at the surface of stone. Poets, too, are deeply connected to the materiality of language—they love to give their tongues over to the sounds that words make. And I’d advise young poets, shy though they often are, to permit themselves to sound aloud the poems they love and the poems they’re trying to write. Give yourself over to that pleasure of making sounds and rhythms, and know that it is inseparable from poetry’s power to matter to us.
   

Four Categories of Language Use in Poetry

But there’s more than just the pleasure of sound-making, because language is more complex a phenomenon than paint or stone (though I mean no disrespect to painters or sculptors). Let me return to the analogy with a young artist working with pigment. When it comes to painting, there’s color (the hues the artist places on the canvas) and there’s the theory of color. Without understanding color theory, it wouldn’t be possible for a painter to mix all her colors out of a basic few. When I say “color theory,” I don’t mean anything fancy. In fact, the color theory I’m thinking of is so basic that most of us learned it in third grade art class, where the teacher informed us that out of the three primary colors—red, blue, and yellow—we could make three complementary colors (red + blue = purple; blue + yellow = green; yellow + red = orange), and from there on we could further mix and blend to create a huge number of other colors. As I say, this is so basic that it’s almost laughable, and it may seem even highfalutin to call it a theory. But words are as basic a material to a poet as colored pigment is to a painter. Yet we’re never taught a simple, basic “theory of language” that we can use as poets or readers of poetry. So I’d like to propose one—a very basic “theory of language use in poems” that isn’t intended to impress or persuade linguists or academics, but one that I hope will serve to guide poets toward a better and more gratifying sense of the wonder they experience when reading poems or writing them.

For the purposes of this book, I want to set up four categories of language use in poetry: Naming, Singing, Saying, and Imagining. If we come to understand what these four kinds of language use sound and look like and what they can do in a poem, then we’ll have gone a long way toward understanding how poems can so often delight and disturb us in urgent ways. Let me offer brief explanations of each of these terms before considering them at greater length.

Naming refers to the fact that we use specific, agreed-upon words to refer to things in the world. In English, we say “tree” when we want people to direct their attention (either their eyes or their mental attention) to a certain kind of vegetation. We might be standing with someone on a street and say, “Look at the way the wind is thrashing the branches of that tree.” The word tree directs our listener’s (or reader’s) attention toward that object. If you say, standing on the same street, “Look at the way the wind is thrashing the branches of that penguin,” your listener would probably not know where to look, although I’m guessing he would look mostly at your face and possibly step back away from you a little bit until he could figure out whether your odd word choice indicated something odd about you that he hadn’t suspected before. We live in a world full of material objects, and we use words to name them and thereby orient ourselves among them. Likewise, we use language in a naming way to describe actions; for example, the movement of walking is different when it’s named as “stumbling” rather than “striding.” We also have a more limited number of experiences that are mental and emotional rather than physical, but that we also have names for and use in a naming way: “grief” or “regret” or “joy” or “loneliness” and so on.

Singing refers to the fact that words are sounds we make. Not all sounds we make are words, but every word can be a sound, can be pronounced aloud. When words are put together, they create a series of sounds—and when spoken aloud, a rhythm. This aspect of language in poetry is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “musical delight.” He said that a poet had to be born with it, had to experience it as a primary pleasure. Not only must the poet experience this pleasure, but she or he must also have the power to make others experience it: “the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it” (emphasis added).

We don’t always say words aloud. Many people read poems silently to themselves, although they must be making those sounds inside their brains as they read them. But of course, when we sound words out loud, we can become aware of their qualities as sounds—harsh or soft or capable of making patterns such as rhyme or alliteration. Singing has to do with a poet’s awareness of the sounds (and silences) involved in language use and the use of this sound aspect for expressive purposes. Where the Naming aspect of language clearly makes communication between people possible, the Singing aspect has a lot to do with emotional expressiveness and the pleasure we take in sounds and phrases. When I say “Singing,” I don’t actually mean what a person does with melody in a song—it’s not usually that stylized a use of voice—but it’s a metaphor for language that is alive to the pleasures and possibilities of sounds and sound patterns.

Saying refers to the way we use language to make statements and claims about ideas and concepts. Language in a Saying mode can have enormous authority because it gives a sense of real intelligence, conviction, and insight. When someone says something like “Friendship is at the heart of a good marriage,” the listener does her best to bring together those two notions (friendship and good marriage) and test them against her own experience, but she’s also persuaded by the tone of authority and confidence with which those words have been put together. A part of us hungers for and takes pleasure in assertions about experience and human nature that are expressed as ideas or insights. “A coward dies a thousand deaths; a brave man dies only once”—that’s emphatic and worth considering as an idea. (There’s also a bit of Imagining in that statement, since those “thousand deaths” of the coward are probably the imagined deaths the alleged coward undergoes as compared to the brave person who doesn’t waste time imagining what awful thing might happen to him, but simply and bravely acts.) Saying is also complicated by the fact that even though we’re impressed by the authority and confidence of Saying language, we sometimes resist the fact that it calls for us to accept the sayer’s strong opinion. Many of us would rather be the source of Saying language than the person who’s listening to it and yielding to its force.

Imagining refers to the very strange ability that humans have to compare one thing to another thing. I’m referring to metaphors and similes—to figurative language in general. People use metaphors and similes all the time, and we seem to derive pleasure from this kind of language use. “That guy is a trainwreck,” I overheard someone say just a moment ago. Even dead metaphors like the one I just quoted have the power to enliven our daily conversations—how much more exciting it is to encounter the new and unexpected comparisons that poets specialize in.

Naming, Singing, Saying, and Imagining—these are things people do with words, with language. Poets are fascinated by what words can do when arranged into certain patterns and organized for certain purposes. Are we experts or specialists in language use? I don’t know. Not in the way that I think that advertising writers or political speech writers are. We aren’t necessarily specialists in manipulating our readers with different kinds of language. Or, if manipulation is a temptation for anyone who uses language a lot, then I would say that we as poets are partly protected by our sheer love of words. If manipulators of language (and people) use words and phrases to put their listeners under a spell, then poets are people who are themselves under the spell of language. We poets are the first to be spellbound by the magic of language, and if we’re lucky, we pass along that magic to our readers in the form of poems.

Naming, Singing, Saying, Imagining. These four kinds of language use are layered or mixed into poems in varying proportions depending on the poet and the poem, so that what results is the rich complexity of meaning and sound that we recognize as a poem. Different poets emphasize one or another of these powers—they give their loyalty to, or feel excitement about, one or two qualities of language more than the others, perhaps. But no good poet is unaware of all four of these qualities, and many of us use them all in varying proportions in order to make our poems strong. These qualities are not totally separate things, and the terms I’m giving for them are my own, though I hope they’re simple enough to be understandable and useful to someone eager to make words into poems. My presenting these four qualities as distinct aspects of language is a calculated misrepresentation in pursuit of a clearer sense of the wonder of language in poetry. In fact, these qualities can be roughly distinguished from one another; yet in actual language use they aren’t distinct, but mingle and braid and overlap in the rich flow of speech or writing.

I want to make one final thing clear before I begin discussing these four powers of lyric language. They aren’t part of a formula for a sure-fire poem. I’m not saying there’s a recipe for poetry that goes like this: “add one passage of Saying to three lines of Naming and top off with one dollop of Imagining; season with Singing and simmer for three-quarters of an hour in a half-baked brain.” Nor do I think any poet has ever constructed a good poem according to any formula or recipe like that. Here’s my point: I think these four qualities account for some of the marvelous things language does in poems, generating the concentrated power and liveliness that are at the heart of it. If you recognize and respond to the presence of these forces in poems you love, then that recognition will make it easier for you to release similar forces in your own poems. I’m speaking here about intuition and (imitative) love, not analysis. If you can use these qualities analytically to study a poem or write an essay about one, and if they help you to gain insights into the ways the poem works—the way energy manifests and moves through a poem—that’s wonderful. But if these four qualities give you insight into poems you love and inspire you to experiment with making similar language—that’s even better.
   

Naming and Singing: A Basic Duality of Words

I’ve just claimed that words are powerful in a fourfold way in lyric, but I want to approach this fourfold nature by first discussing a primary duality of words that concerns all poetry: Naming and Singing. Most words designate something—some object or action in the world as we know it. Not all words designate or name, but it’s an essential function of language. Likewise, every pronounced word is a sound, a noise we can make. The word bridge is a sound in English, but it also designates an architectural structure—it’s not just a sound. The word bridge on a road sign that says “Warning: Bridge is out” indicates clearly the absence in the world of the thing it names, and a reader of that sign is alerted to a real danger.

Words are often used to point toward things (Naming); words are also sounds (Singing). This is a basic duality of language. It’s sometimes interesting to ask young poets this: If you had to choose, would you choose accurate language (the language of precise naming) or pleasurable and emotionally evocative language? Would you rather write lines that are precise in their naming, or would you rather create lines that are a rich unfolding of sounds and rhythms? Of course, we probably want both in our poetry (though not all poets do), but you can see that the inclination or preference is a real one. A poet could decide to value Singing above Naming, or Naming above Singing—and the poems that result from this preference would be different and distinct. [pp. 153-159]

Note: This book contains numerous exercises, not included here, that carry the ideas into active writing practice.

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About the Author
Gregory Orr is the author of twelve books of poetry, three books about poetry, and a memoir. He lives in Charlottesville and has taught for more than forty years as a professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he founded its MFA program in creative writing.

A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry
W.W. Norton & Company