Notes on Craft No. 2: Language

What is language in poem? How do we effectively code it?

I was talking with a poet yesterday and he asked me if a good poem is a good poem because it “means” or because it “sings”? Does a musical poem have to “mean” something? Can a poem just “say” something and not have the vibe of purchased energy about or inside it?

My answer to the poet was a question. (I have learned this from the Gospels, but tell no one.) What do we mean when we say a poem means? What is “meaning” like in a poem?

“I met a traveler from an antique land,” Shelly’s “Ozymandias” begins. (It is one of the poems that are embedded in my life, and it is the only Shelly I have read, what a shame, but what glory, too! We don’t need a lot of stuff, we need few that we can love intensely.) “I met a traveler from an antique land / Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert . . .” (Read the rest of the poem here.)

Does that poem mean something? Yes. And by “mean” here, I am asking if it makes an overarching statement about life, which is not the most important form of meaning, for me, in a poem. But again, yes, it makes a clear statement: that all things crumble, empires, emperors, great men, and great civilizations. Of the man who called himself “king of kings,” of the statue of himself that he commemorated to keep his “works” present throughout time, Shelly says, “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The low and level sands stretch faraway.” The sands of time will outlast great men, just as they outlasted Ozymandias.

So, yes. There is that message. I first heard Ravi Zacharias, I think, reciting this, and it was one of the poems that brought me to literature (alongside “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde). Zacharias favored the poem (and Wilde’s, too), I believe, because of that point that the work makes. He needed the message. But the real persuasion of the poem is not its message, it is how that message has been wrought: “The hand that mocked them, / and the heart that fed.” Sensibly, it should be “the heart that mocked them, and the hand that fed.” But no. Not for Shelly. And the mystery of that shift, that “trick” (although this is too brilliant to be a trick), is a strong point (as in a point on a landscape) in the poem.

For me, other than the overarching statement, the meaning that flashes in a line like “The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed” is where the very stuff of good poetry lies. I am not saying a poem should not be coherent (a poem should be the most coherent structure in existence); I am saying that every line of a poem should have the force of a revelation. It is those minute revelations that make us return to a poem, at least until we come to realize what the major statement is. (But even when we realize the major statement, we return because of minute revelations.)

I read “Prufrock” a lot (out loud)” and yet I cannot tell you I am sure of what it is talking about: the “What” of it. (This was one of the problems readers had with Eliot in the 1920s.) However, I know that I am moved and helped by several moments in that poem, if not all the moments. There is a coherent feeling, the glue of the poem—it keeps the whole thing together—and that coherent feeling is made possible because of the language of the poem: the tone and the pitch of each stanza. “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Those three lines go you. They set the poem in motion. Once you have read those freewheeling words, there is no halting. (A small note: Do you see that the first and second lines end with a monosyllabic word—“I” and “sky”—and the third ends with “table”? Why? In the poem itself, there is a semicolon after the word “table”: the word asks you to pause, it’s a bump that says you need to slow down: “I / sky / table;”—small things like these make great poems.)

The language of a poem—this is our first principle—is motion. I recommend A. R. Ammons’ essay, “Poetry Is Action,” where he begins by saying, “Language is the medium that carries the inscription, but what is inscribed in poetry is action, not language. The body of the ice-skater is only the means to an inscription on ice . . .” He wasn’t particularly good at saying what he wanted to say, but he tried. The statement I quote from him is similar to my own: “Poems don’t say things. They do things,” which I am grateful to Othuke Umukoro for keeping, because I said it during a discussion.

For a poem to do something, it must have the capacity to move. Energy. Force. Motion. The best way to begin a poem is to make sure you find words that will keep it going, so that what you are doing is just selecting and inserting and shaping, directing, or conducting. (When people talk about inspiration, I don’t know what they mean. But for me, inspiration is the dawn of language that has enough charge in it. I am inspired when I am hearing a tune in my head: it is that tune that I fit words to; the tune, when it is good, can move of its own accord. I shape it.) Think of a car. You don’t move a car, you drive it. You should not move a poem. You should drive it. You should find an engine for your poem. Ammons was a genius at motion. He wrote great long poems—Garbage remains one of my favorites. A book-length poem. You cannot write poems that are long unless you have something that runs your poem, some sort of automatic energy inside of it. But Ammons also wrote short poems that are lyrical forces. Take “Hymn” as an example.

That poem begins, “I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth / and go on out” and it keeps rolling. Not a single pause in the poem but the pause of paragraph spacing / stanza breaks. Do you think it is accidental that Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Hymn” by Ammons both have the word “go” in the first few lines? “Let us go then, you and I” and “I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth / and go”—I have not thought of this until this very moment, but Ammons’ poem strongly echoes Eliot’s. And it is not accidental that the word “go” features early in both poems: both poems have engines in them. And the variations of sounds: “you and I”; “If I find you.”

When you consider both poems more closely, you see that it is more than tone, it is what Geoffrey Hill called “pitch.” The poets sequence their words in such a way that to adjust them is to disturb their effectiveness. It is not about choosing “le mot juste” now; it is about rightly placing that right word that you have chosen. This is the mature part of what we talk about when we talk about the language of a poem: We mean not only that you should use the right word (that is the basic level) but that you should make sure to situate the right word in the right place. That is what a good poem is. It is not images, it is the playing of words, the sequencing of painstakingly selected words (words selected for both meaning and sound) in such a way that to adjust them a little is to fail them.

“You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside”

That is the third stanza of Ammons’ poem. Listen to the first line. Pay attention to how it has been configured. “You are everywhere partial and entire.” There is no better way to arrange that. “You are partial and entire and you are everywhere” is like stabbing the line. “You are everywhere, partial and entire” ruins the pitch. Kills it. “You are on the inside of everything and on the outside.” Do you notice that “on the outside” is on the outside of “everything”? Do you see it? Ammons does not say, “You are on the inside and on the outside of everything”—that would be miserable stuff. He says, “You are on the inside of everything and on the outside”—so that “on the outside” comes after “everything.” We are structurally confronted with what we are semantically given. Here is what I mean by the meanings of individual moments in a poem. You must code such moments.

I want to keep going, but, my brothers and sisters, it is not an essay for Essays in Criticism; it is supposed to just be “No. 2” of my notes on craft. But let me add one or two.

I am of the opinion that the strength of the language of a poem has much to do with the verbs the poet uses. Don’t take my word as fact: read Heaney and Ishion Hutchinson and Atsuro Riley (I know I recommend them a lot) and see how richly verbs can bless a poem. It is commonsense. If a poem does not say something but “does” something and a verb is “a doing word”—why, a good way to get a poem to do something has to be having good verbs in your pocket.

And on the heel of that comes another point: Marry the dictionary, Poets. Improve your vocabulary. On X yesterday, I saw a new poem by a Nigerian poet. I read the first line and saw “birds” and I did not bother to keep reading. This person (and many other Nigerian poets) have been using “birds” (they think it is an image) for almost a decade. It is just a laziness of the imagination, which has to do with a vocab bankruptcy. Please leave the birds alone. Learn new words, old words, words no one uses. Again, read Seamus Heaney.

On this note, my famz, this young man must leave you alone. I should find a way to connect my account to this Substack so you can send me money, because this ministry is a serious ministry. I wish I had someone who was doing what I am doing here when I was coming up (I am still up and coming, abeg: no let the person wey go help me run away). There was no one. And that is not to say, “I am triumphant.” Nah. It is to say, I think this is good stuff. Even I am surprised at the quality. If you want to support my ministry, just send an email to me. But also: I will be teaching a three-day poetry workshop in two weeks’ time. It costs 15k (naira, not dollars), and I think it is too cheap. If you would love to sponsor one or two poets, please send me an email. If you would like to register, also send me an email. The proper announcement will be up next week. Thank you. 🔷

*The flier for this entry in the “Notes on Craft” series was designed by Al-Ameen Babawale.