Writers: Keep your promises

Though I've been a writer longer than an editor, I too often read instructional text with an editorial eye, noticing flaws most readers would fly past. One paragraph that caught my attention was in Mary Cohn Livingston's book, Poem-Making.

Traditionally English poetry was written for many centuries in a measured cadence that we call meter or metrics. This meter is made up of poetic units called feet. The most common of these feet are the iamb, the trochee, the anapest, and the dactyl. Learning about these feet enables poets to control the cadence of words, to recognize that meter can help the words to convey a particular mood" (p. 72).

When I first read the paragraph, I was surprised that Livingston omitted the comma that belongs after "Traditionally." I was more surprised that she introduced meter, feet, iamb, trochee, anapest, and dactyl without defining those terms. However, though her paragraph broke a basic rule of instructional writing, she gets away with it: The whole paragraph is intended only as an introduction to a set of related concepts (meter, feet, etc.).

It has a flaw, however, that wasn't obvious until I read the paragraph that followed it. The above-quoted paragraph ends with these words: "meter can help the words to convey a particular mood." That's transition wording. After reading it, I expected the next paragraph to discuss how words convey mood. It didn't. Nor did the one after it.

When a writer ends a paragraph with transition wording, she making a promise to readers that they expect she'll fulfill. When the writer fails to fulfill her promise, her credibility drops a notch.

The lesson: Writers make promises with their words. Readers expect those promises to be kept.

Marianne Moore and syllabics

A poet who had a unique way of structuring her poems was Marianne Moore. She enjoyed writing poems in the syllabic style. Syllabic verse involves "having lines based on number of syllables rather than on rhythmical arrangement of stresses or quantities" (WordNet).

One poem in which Moore exercised the use of syllabics is Poetry. Ian Lancashire counted the number of syllables in each line of the five-stanza poem.

Stanza	Line 1	Line 2	Line 3	Line 4	Line 5	Line 6
I	19	22	11	5	8	13
II	19	21	12	5	8	13
III	19	22	[7]	8	5	14
IV	19	22	10	5	8	13
V	19	12	11	5	8	13

Here is the first stanza of Poetry, without the indentations:

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

You can view the indented version here.

The words Moore used and the way she structured them reminds me of e. e. cummings. I love how she ends the first stanza with an indefinite article ("a"), how she indents the lines for effect, and how she continues "hair that can rise" with "if it must," placing the latter three words on a new line, indented.

There is a subtle delicacy to the first stanza, a harmony in which the last four lines' shortened lengths balance the first two lines' longer length. Poetry illustrates the power a poem can have when created by a poetic artisan who can so skillfully brush words upon paper, shaping them into a wondrous mix.

Judson Jerome still lives

In 1980, Judson Jerome's book, The Poet's Handbook, was published. It's still available today. It's lasted on store bookshelves for almost 40 years because, today, poets still use the same artistic tools that were used in 1980.

In the book's first section, titled How to Use This Book, Jerome wrote that "Good poetry ... is metrical writing."

Jerome elaborated: "Metrical means measured. A measure, or predetermined form, forces a poet to put his thoughts into a framework. The framework requires the poet to pick and choose, twist, to manage these contortions with grace. It is the tug-of-war between form and content that makes the art of the poem."

Writing poetry is challenging; it is a tug-of-war. But it's not just a battle between form and content. It's also a battle among the content. The framework alone is not the only thing forcing a poet to pick and choose, to weigh her words. The message the poet wishes to c0nvey also pushes and pulls words on and off the page.

Prose also imposes a framework.

When writing prose, its framework imposes two main restrictions upon you. First, write in sentences. Second, write in paragraphs. Prose writing is thus much less imposing than poetry writing, which can be viewed as an elevated form of prose writing. When writing a poem, its author is taking his prose to a higher level. He's willing to submit to a poetic form's constraints to gain its benefits.

Though poetry and prose differ in the framework they impose, they both depend on the same building material: words.

Given that words underlie all poetic forms, one way to begin a poem is by placing words on a page without attempting to impose any poetic framework upon them. The website textetc.com illustrates that technique by starting with a prose description.

Whittier's words about Maud Muller

Whittier wrote Maud Muller in 1854. In the book, The Complete Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Whittier provided some background information on the poem.

The recollection of some descendants of a Hessian deserter in the Revolutionary war bearing the name of Muller doubtless suggested the somewhat infelicitous title of a New England idyl. The poem had no real foundation in fact, though a hint of it may have been found in recalling an incident, trivial in itself, of a journey on the picturesque Maine seaboard with my sister some years before it was written. We had stopped to rest our tired horse under the shade of an apple-tree, and refresh him with water from a little brook which rippled through the stone wall across the road. A very beautiful young girl in scantest summer attire was at work in the hay-field, and as we talked with her we noticed that she strove to hide her bare feet by raking hay over them, blushing as she did so, through the tan of her cheek and neck.

Listen to Charles M. Johnson recite Maud Muller by clicking the Play button below.