What's the Most Important Sentence?

Dawn Potter
In many ways, “what’s the most important sentence?” is the linchpin question of the book I've been writing. Individual words, punctuation, and sounds cohere into the grammatical unity of a sentence. Details accumulate among these words and sounds. Lines and stanzas fracture or link burgeoning sentences. The sentences collectively construct characters and images.

Theodore Roethke wrote that “the poem . . . means an entity, a unity has been achieved that transcends by far the organization of the lecture, the essay, even the great speech.” The sentence is key to reaching such poetic unity. It’s a blueprint for working out what and how the poet thinks and feels. It’s a conduit for curiosity, a path into mystery.

But sentences in poetry are not simply blocks of meaning. As I discussed in my chapter about Joe Bolton's poem "In Memory of the Boys of Dexter, Kentucky," they also exist as patterns of sound. A sentence is supple and musical and physical; and more than one poet can recall a childhood moment in which she experienced that viscerality. Carolyn Forché writes:

The world hummed, and my own speech rose above the humming and was measured by it. I didn’t know what metered verse was, but I remember knowing that language rose and fell, and that it occurred most pleasurably in utterances of similar length. One could recite for hours the flow of language in patterns. My early musical and rhythmic training derived from the Latin liturgy, most especially from litany recitations and Gregorian plainsong. Rhythm, however, is of the body, and it was during walks in childhood that I first sensed the relation between breath, phrase, and heart. I spoke to the pounding.

            How does a poet write the kinds of sentences that create a response like Forché’s? The answer is more flexible than you might imagine. Because grammar books tend to treat sentences as recipes requiring precise ingredients, many students think of a sentence as correct or incorrect, not as a personal exploration. In contrast, The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition focuses on the individuality of articulation rather than the rules of the game: “[a sentence is] a series of words complete in itself as the expression of a thought, containing or implying a subject and predicate, and conveying a statement, question, exclamation, or command.”

In other words, sentences comprise a large variety of language patterns, many of which don’t follow official grammar-book prescriptions. So when I talk about sentences in poetry, I’m not celebrating tidy subject-predicate combos and snarling about fragments and comma splices. Rather, I’m thinking about the way in which a poet arranges words to express a thought. In an effective sentence, the arrangement of words is “complete in itself.” That is, the articulation has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In addition, an effective sentence displays a particular pattern of language: “a statement, question, exclamation, or command.”

The variations are as individual as the poets who invent them. For instance, sentences may be identical to lines of poetry, as they are in Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s “Afraid So”:

Is it starting to rain?

Did the check bounce?

Are we out of coffee?

Is this going to hurt?

A sentence can fill up an entire stanza, as it does in Maxine Kumin’s “Rehearsing for the Final Reckoning in Boston”:

During the Berlioz Requiem in Symphony Hall

which takes even longer than extra innings

in big league baseball, this restless Jewish agnostic

waits to be pounced on, jarred by the massive fanfare

of trombones and trumpets assembling now in the second

balcony, left side, right side, and at the rear.

A sentence may cross stanzas, as it does in Alexander Pope’s “Ode on Solitude”:

Blest, who can unconcern’dly find

            Hours, days, and years slide soft away,

In health of body, peace of mind,

                        Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,

            Together mixt; sweet recreation;

And Innocence, which most does please

                        With meditation.

Sentence boundaries may be ambiguous, as they are in Lynn Emmanuel’s “Dressing the Parts”:

So, here we are,

I am a kind of diction

Despite their many differences, all of these examples maintain allegiance to what Forché has called “the flow of language in patterns.” Robert Frost named this flow the “sentence-sound,” defining a sentence as “a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung.” By this, he didn’t mean any random clump of words. “You may string words together without a sentence-sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeves and stretch them without a clothes-line between two trees but—it is bad for the clothes.” Thus, dog buttermilk the in is not a sentence-sound. But rearrange the words as dog in the buttermilk and suddenly “the sound of sense” is “apprehended by the ear.”

[from a draft chapter of The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet (Autumn House Press, 2014)]

Today is my 22nd wedding anniversary. I will spend most of it alone as Tom has gone camping with Paul and James will be working, but that is fine. Wedding anniversaries are something we mostly forget in this family. Birthdays, on the other hand, are high holidays.

Next weekend James will turn 19. Oy.

Oy is a tremendously useful interjection. In fact Yiddish in general is a tremendously useful interjection.

This week I have been reading John Donne's poetry, Joe Bolton's poetry, a biography of Donne, several grammar manuals, Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark, A. S. Byatt's Still Life, Barbara Pym's Some Tame Gazelle, and probably a bunch of other things I can't remember now.

 

Last night's dinner was chicken sauteed with a boatload of chanterelles I found in our woods, followed by ice cream with freshly picked raspberries. Maine summertime food is a reason for being.

Here's a bit from The Song of the Lark:

One morning, as [Thea] was standing upright in the pool, splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still until the water had quite dried upon her flushed skin. The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?

The heat and humidity and thunderstorms have been relentless. It will be a wonderful afternoon to take the cat to the vet, a wonderful morning to bake bread. Blah. On the other hand I picked my first two cherry tomatoes this week, raspberries and cucumbers are coming in, the beet greens and carrots tops flow luxuriously over the black soil, and my kitchen smells like cilantro.

Yesterday's post garnered nearly a hundred readers, a record for this blog. I was expecting an argumentative comment or two, but no one volunteered. I'm not sure what my next step will be with this article pitch. I'm leery of the professional education journals because I don't think or write in that language; but if one of you teachers wanted to take on the project, that would be delightful. I will think about what I should do. But in the meantime I suppose I must turn my thoughts to John Donne, who will feature in the final chapter in the first section of The Conversation.

The Triple Foole

            John Donne

I am two fooles, I know,

For loving, and for saying so

            In whining Poëtry;

But where’s that wiseman, that would not be I,

            If she would not deny?

Then as th’earths inward narrow crooked lanes

Do purge sea waters fretfull salt away,

            I thought, if I could draw my paines,

Through Rimes vexation, I should them allay.

Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,

For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse.

            But when I have done so,

Some man, his art and voice to show,

            Doth Set and sing my paine,

And, by delighting many frees againe

            Griefe, which verse did restraine.

To Love, and Griefe tribute of Verse belongs,

But not of such as pleases when ’tis read,

            Both are increased by such songs:

For both their triumphs so are published,

And I, which was two fooles, do so grow three;

Who are a little wise, the best fooles bee.

Teachers and Poetry and Rejection Letters: A Rant

Every summer, going to the Frost Place fires me up again about teachers and teaching and poetry and the world. So this year, riding that storm of enthusiasm, I pitched an article idea to a major poetry magazine. Here's the email I wrote:

Dear ____: 

I direct the Frost Place Conference on Poetry & Teaching, which draws teachers from all over the continuum (K-12, urban/rural, community college/Ivy League . . . ), and I'm interested in writing a piece about the state of poetry in the classroom--in terms of how teachers are struggling with administrative and political mandates as well as how they are managing to keep it vital within their students and themselves.  

As a bit of background about myself: I have written essays for the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, the Southern Review, etc. I've been associated with the Frost Place conference since 2009, and I work as a visiting writer in the schools. My third book of poetry is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press next spring. My blog has more details about my books and work. 

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Here's the email I received in return:

Dawn, my apologies for the delay in response, but I'm afraid this won't work for me.

Now, like most writers, I have received many hundreds of rejection letters. Most are blanket form letters; some are rude; a few are personal and helpful. This note was neither rote nor rude, yet it still managed to piss me off royally. I've simmered about it for a few days, partly because I've been too busy making pies to think coherently but also because I wanted to make sure that I wasn't simply grouchy about being rejected. That's a major danger with the acceptance-rejection process: it opens a door to a miasma of spite, victimized squealing, and generalized conspiracy-theory gloom that I particularly loathe in both myself and other writers.

But I've come to realize that this rejection is rankling for a different reason. After all, this was an article pitch. I wasn't turned down because my writing didn't attract the editor. I was turned down because the article idea didn't attract the editor. The more I think about this, the more shocked I get.

This particular famous poetry magazine is the organ of a rather well heeled foundation that spends considerable time headlining "education," "young people," "poetry in the schools," "reading resources," etcetera, etcetera. So why would an editor flatly dismiss an essay about poetry and education? As an article writer, I have a reputable-enough vita. The Frost Place is not a fly-by-night outfit: we have a long history of attracting faculty members whose work has appeared in the pages of this esteemed poetry journal, and I have published essays, articles, and poems in journals that are as well esteemed as this one.

In other words, I can't chalk up this rejection to a sulky (1) "the Frost Place is nobody" or (2) "Dawn is nobody." That leaves the subject of the pitch--the teachers--and this is what makes me so angry. If a foundation is going to spend millions of dollars promoting poetry in the schools, it damn well ought to take some time to figure out what's going on in the heads and hearts of the teachers who devote their lives to these students. "I'm afraid this won't work for me" is dismissive, patronizing, even derisive. "Why should these people matter to poets?" is what I hear in that phrase.

The students, spotlit on stage, young and eager, reciting Rita Dove or Emily Dickinson: that is what this foundation adores. And they are lovely; there's no question about that. But how the hell do you think those students manage to climb onto that stage? All the foundation money in the world can't replace the tired middle-aged teacher who, year after year after year, keeps cogitating about how to light a Beowulf fire in his tenth graders. Or the veteran teacher who gives her fifth graders the structure and the freedom to write poems from the point of view of igneous rocks. Or the young ambitious vocational teacher who offers future car mechanics a year-long immersion in love poetry.

I could go on and on about these teachers, and I would have in the article that will not appear in this esteemed poetry journal. Of course I want to be fair about the rejection. Perhaps by "I'm afraid this won't work for me," the editor really meant "We've recently published an article on a very similar topic" or "I'd like to broaden, narrow, or tweak the scope of your proposal." For if I'm correct--if the editor was really saying, "Why should these people matter to poets?"--then something has gone very wrong. The teachers I would have featured in my unacceptable article are fascinating and dedicated and confused and idealistic and doomed. As poets, parents, citizens, and fellow strivers and idealists, we need to celebrate them and support them and listen to them. They are heroic: and by choosing to ignore them, esteemed poetry journal, you have made an ugly and unforgivable mistake.

The Chariot

Dawn Potter

Hooves pounding on bronze; a long, wild, whinnying chorus,

and the horses were airborne, eight enormous wings

beating, swishing, beating. Without warning, wind

crammed a fist into Phaeton’s mouth, jabbed knives

into his nose, his ears. Legs churning, wings flailing,

the steeds cut through cloud, through hissing vapors

that melted under their fiery breath. The driver, careening

from side to side in the clattering chariot, clung to the reins.

His father’s instructions flashed through his mind:

“Hold back the horses.” Phaeton dragged at the reins,

but his wrists were unsteady, his weight was light;

he was a fly compared to the god; and the giddy horses,

unchecked by any master, lunged and galloped.

Traces tangled with reins, the yoke twisted,

a sharp hoof sliced a flank, a spray of bloody foam

whipped Phaeton’s parched eyes.

In a panic, the child threw the whole weight of his rigid body

against the reins, jerking them left, then right,

trying to find the middle road, to guide the plunging horses

into their familiar wheel tracks. But he had no clear idea

of where the road might lie. Beyond the horses’ flaming breath,

he glimpsed cloud and rippled patches of sky, of Dawn

hastily folding her lustrous cloak, and now, to his horror,

bright-zoned Orion leaping away from the hurtling chariot.

Phaeton no longer knew if he gripped the reins.

Terrified of the reeling heavens, of the Crab scuttling crazily

toward the Archer, of the wakened Bear, snarling, furious,

he looked down, far down, at puddle lakes, groves of grass blades,

tine-scratched fields no bigger than eggs.

The heat . . . this unrelenting glare . . .

His fiery crown oppressed him, his knees gave way:

Oh, why had he wished for such a father?

Now his birth seemed worse than nothing.

If only he had been the son of Vulcan,

contentedly chipping nymphs from stone,

mapping Ocean with a chisel, patiently mopping

a mild sweat from his uncrowned brow.

If only that happy boy chasing goats

away from his mother’s grapevine

had never stared into the sky and desired the Sun.

Dazzled, stricken, Phaeton cowered against the chariot floor.

The reins slipped from his fingers and slid away,

falling loosely over the horses’ backs. Now wholly free,

they bolted ahead, then veered to the side, then galloped forward again,

the chariot crashing and buckling in their wake.

High, higher, they raced into the scattering stars and then plunged

wildly toward Earth, and whatever they touched, they destroyed.

Clouds scorched and withered; great Parnassus burst into flame,

and on the mountaintops, snow dissolved to rivers of steam.

In a moment entire forests burned like tinder.

A house, a loom, a woman. Gone.

Cities vanished in walls of fire; even Ocean gaped.

Trapped in a hot waste of sand, the sea nymphs screamed;

Neptune, lifting his trident to heaven, bellowed for aid,

the winds were choked with ash; Earth burned, burned;

and on Olympus Zeus stood watching, in silence.

[forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]

And today: more pies and another scorcher. It seems that pie weather is rather like hay-making weather and tomato-canning weather. But at least I am making this set at home. Tomorrow I'm back up to the farmstand for another strawberry-rhubarb binge, but today's are blueberry and they're going to my friend's birchbark-canoe-making students. Paul helps make lunch for the canoe guys, and I help make pies for them. It's a 2-week class, so we'll have to see how much pie they'll ultimately require.

It is interesting to be on the food-production side of things. Of course I've always been a cook, but this summer is the first time I've ever cooked for groups outside my family circle. People look at a person respectfully when she's standing in a bakery rolling out dough. I suppose that's because they love home-baked goods, but for some reason that reaction surprised me: I guess I assumed that customers would be dismissive and rude. And oddly the farmstand is actually quite an easy place to feel like a poet, though not to invent poems, because people are always interrupting me to get into the knife drawer and help them find a measuring cup and ask if I can bake 6 pies instead of 4 and so on and so on.

This is a late post, and it will also be a brief one. I have been up at the farmstand constructing strawberry-rhubarb pies since 8 a.m., and in a few moments I have to go pick up Paul at work, drive him to a piano lesson, drive him to a soccer game, and this will all take hours to accomplish and it's 90 degrees out there and I am already feeling limp.

Talk to you tomorrow, unless I get melted down for scrap.