Notes on Craft (No. 3): Clarity and Substance

Some notes on achieving clarity in writing verse.

I attended a poetry workshop taught by Nick Makoha a few years ago. It took place on the Island, and it was put together by LIPFest. I was late. I entered the room and met these faces, all looking at this Ugandan man who, as I remember, was in a polo shirt and a pair of jeans. Because I got there late, I missed a significant part of the program. I did not miss Makoha’s refrain, though. “KLARITY. KLARITY,” he said, which sounded like a bus conductor screaming, “Charity. Charity.”

It was very important advice. And I have tried to adhere to it, at least in my “early” poems. (I quote early because the poems I have written in the past seven years and those to appear in my first two (unwritten) books are all going to be classified as “Early Poems.”) But my work has undergone shifts between 2022 and now. I have changed styles like clothing. Until recently, my work had a very obscure tint to it (it still does).

Four months ago, an editor, rejecting my work, wrote: “Individual lines in these poems were of great power, but I found them, on the whole, overly cloistered within the self and not letting the world that occasioned their expression to break in sufficiently. The result was too much pure feeling isolated from motive and scenario.”

I cherish that receipt, because it is a keen, honest comment on my work. A few days before this email came in, I had received an email from another poet friend who said my work was too obscure.

The problem is that I listen for poetry—I don’t write poetry, I translate sounds on the page. Poems occur to me as tones, as hums, as sweet murmuring sounds in the mind. For this reason, I sometimes talk to myself, translating for myself what I hear, while wrongly believing that others must be able to hear it too. They can’t unless you create a ground for them to stand on. When you are writing anything, you are communicating something.

Language is a tool. (Poets often forget it. They forget to their own damnation: see Hart Crane.) What that means is that a poet cannot use a word how it feels to him. There are times I assume what a word means by how it sounds and it does not mean that at all. I think Auden noted this as a core characteristic of a poet—he delights in words as things before he knows what they mean. The training of a poet has much to do, in my little experience, with learning to preserve something of that quality while adhering to the reality of what each word is and what each word means. The word is not your pet.

In other words, a poet has to use each word with the awareness of the fact that he is using it properly, exactly how it ought to be used. That is where to start when it comes to writing clear poems. Take each word with “bitter seriousness.”

The problem with a poet like Okigbo, for instance, is that he used words how he felt they should be used; and so he wrote a lot of nonsense. (If “nonsense” as a word needs demonstrating, we have passages in Okigbo for great samples.) He was in an amorous relationship with the words he used. They were his mistresses, not his carefully elected tools. And because mistresses are subtle, they work their way up into your mind and put a leash around your neck—the words were his master, too. So, you feel that he uses words, not to say things, but because he fancies them, fancies an image; he wants to feel them up on the page. (One can say the same of several Nigerian poets, see Nonso Njoku.)

What you want is not to be mastered by words but to master words. The best way to look at it is to think of words as beasts you must tame and use to meet a need. They are still beasts, make no mistake about it. Words are fine, miserable, mad beasts. The same way a lion in a circus is a beast. They can still be magnificent and beautiful to behold—and beauty is one of our chief assignments as poets—but, when they are used properly, to make deliberate meaning, they are, as the Psalmist said, “Like pillars sculpted in style.”

On from that. For your own good, write clear sentences. Learn to write clear sentences.

When I was in my teens, I believed that I could make up for the wrinkles in my grammar by using flowery language. This may have contributed to my adoption of poetry as a way of communicating. If I cannot say it in good straightforward English, why, I can say it in another way, using my “imaginative” mind.

Or sometimes not even flowery, just mere re-saying, because I am not sure whether the grammar of the “original” structure of words that came to me is correct. Take a case where I want to say something like this—“Would you mind it if I called you?”—but I am not sure if it is “would” or “will.” I say, “Is it okay if I call you?” Or, “Are you okay with me calling you?”

The problem with that kind of about-turn is that, when it happens in poetry, you often end up with a clunky sentence. Imagine that the writer of the song “If I Were a Rich Man” had tried to manipulate the structure of the tone that came to him because he could not ascertain the correctness of his grammar. As William Logan puts it, “Don’t think you can ignore grammar. You need grammar more than grammar needs you.”

Correct grammar is only half the work of writing good sentences. And you cannot write good poetry if you are a bad writer of prose. In “Poetry in the English Century,” T. S. Eliot had this to say on the matter: “Certain qualities are to be expected of any type of good verse at any time; we may say the qualities which good verse shares with good prose. Hardly any good poet in English has written bad prose; and some English poets have been among the greatest of English prose writers. The finest prose writer of Shakespeare’s time was, I think, Shakespeare himself . . . This is not a sign of versatility but of unity. For there are qualities essential to good prose which are essential to good verse as well; and we may say positively with Mr Ezra Pound, that verse must be at least as well written as prose.”

I have been editing a poetry magazine for some months now—the first thing about 88 percent of the work in the inbox is that it is awful at the level of prose. And the poems I have selected, the poems I have published, have been poems that are good, at least, on the level of prose. Take “Pai Nosso” by Omobolanle Alashe as an example. Nothing is said in that poem that cannot be said in prose, but it is said more tightly—that is what differentiates it from prose. Those two stanzas are powerful, each one nearly buckles with the weight of what it carries, but it doesn’t. Tightness. When I edit for Efiko, I am editing, above all other things, in order to achieve: straightforwardness, forthrightness, precision.

In the same vein, the few poets I consider truly remarkable among contemporary African poets, when I think of their work, I think of their sentences. Think Cheswayo Mphanza (in “Open Casket Double” or “Taste of Cherry”), Gbenga Adeoba (“Leaving Aghadez” and “Threshold”), and Logan February: these are poets who can write, not just poetry.

Perhaps I will do another piece on writing good sentences. But first: make sure that the sentence makes sense. Each sentence in your work should make surface sense. These are the first three lines of Alashe’s poem, “For you, Solace hides herself in old picture books, / with edges that buckle under calloused fingers / and threaten to rip apart.” You don’t know who you is yet, why capitalize “Solace,” but the sentence makes perfect sense.

That a sentence makes sense does not mean it should be easy to read or even direct. The language of poetry is the language of an angle, a posture. The posture of a sentence may not be straightforward, but if the syntax is angled, its syntactic meaning should be clear. Take the first line of A. R. Ammons Sphere, a book-length poem that’s also a book-length sentence: “The sexual basis of all things rare is really apparent.” You don’t know what he is getting at, but you get what he has said. All things have their basis in sex, we know that for sure. But the way it is said is not direct; the behavior of the line is idiosyncratic.

A brief note: A poem desires to be an idiosyncratic word. When it is good, it is a special word—a brave new word. Having said that, the words in a poem have to mean what the words mean, the words cannot be idiosyncratic even though the poem has to be. The structure of the syntax can be odd, but the meaning of the syntax should be even.

Two. If a sentence makes you feel uneasy, agree with it. It needs to be straightened out. Or if a sentence jumps out at you when you are reading your work, as if it is the brightest line in the whole thing—cut it. It is often a bad one. Lines that sound “poetic” are often awful lines. I don’t want to write poetic lines, only people who cannot write poetry write that. I want to write poetry: and in a poem, as I shared with those who were in the last workshop, what is poetic is not individual lines, it is the strange affiliation between the lines. The flashes of resonance that the lines share with each other is what we call poetic.

To write clearly, you also have to have a subject. You cannot pretend a subject. Few contemporary poets have a subject. Very few. They “pretend” a subject, or, more accurately, they “perform” a subject (read the blurbs of books and you will get what I am saying: it is either about the black body or sexuality or war or whatever). Our poetry is in many ways—contemporary poetry is in many ways—performative. No substance to it.

I think I know about three Nigerian poets who are doing, have done, or intend to do a book on the war in Gaza. Is that a subject? I can assure you the books would be awful. Because, in this case, they assume that the news or what they see on social media or how they feel in response to these events is valid enough to make poetry out of.

That is one way people pretend a subject, by latching on to the news. Or by latching on to their grief. Or by latching on to a history they know close to nothing about. Or by writing about yourself. (About the latter, I think is better to tweet about yourself than to poem about yourself. Tweets constrain you at least, and no one reads them seriously. Not poems. There is that quote from Geoffrey Hill: “Expression, not self-expression.”)

What happens when you latch on to the news? You end up writing very clumsily, because what you are writing about you do not know. You don’t know it experientially and you have not read enough on it, and you don’t know it on the level of actual feeling. I used the phrase “actual feeling” in an essay on Clark-Bekederemo. Here is what it means: it is the kind of feeling that has its anchor in truth, though the truth it is anchored in, the poet may not be able to describe. The process of writing poetry, for me, is usually the process of describing the truth that anchors the actual feeling that I am stirred by.

When you pretend a subject, you are beginning with the idea that you know the truth. You think that how you are feeling is the truth. And you are not feeling in actual terms, you are feeling in superficial terms. The feeling that is superficial cannot generate serious poetry. The first title of my review of Oriogun’s last book was “The High Profundities of Sleep.” It is too high-sounding, but it captures, quite well, the problems with the sort of thing he writes: his “profundities” would affect those who are drowsy, not those with their eyes wide open. Mphanza writes somewhere of poets who take “affect as synecdoche for craft.” Poets who lack a subject are always trying to affect, which is a superficial desire.

You cannot write clearly if you are always trying to “affect.” The close sibling of affectation is “impression”—you want to make an impression. Those who have a subject rarely want to make an impression. They want to communicate, as best they can, the truth they cannot reach by logic but which beats for them like their very heart. The path to truth in poetry is feeling. You follow the tactile spool and get to something.

Anything can be your subject, don’t misunderstand me. Even Gaza. But if it would be a real subject for you, it has to move from news to the actual. I would encourage you to read literary journalism (check out John McPhee, Tracy Kidder, Joseph Mitchell). When a literary journalist goes out into “the field,” he rarely knows what he will find. He finds so many things. He must brood over the material to discern his “story.” His story has to be something he feels is at stake in all that heap of talk and notes and records and people. What is at stake for you? What feels at stake? What genuinely feels at stake for you?

There has to be something known and something unknown about a subject. Or, something unresolved, undecided. Keats called it “negative capability”—the quality a man has when he “is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” I prefer the phrase “half knowledge.” Which they say is a dangerous thing. But all a poet really needs is half knowledge. He must compensate for the rest by feeling his way to it, as Frost said, the process is “more felt than thought.” (Let me note that he said this at a time when he was past his forties; he had done a lot of thought.)

To reiterate, you want to write clear and good sentences about the half knowledge you have about a thing, and in writing, you want to follow the spine of your emotion, so as to touch a truth, or, as Frost also said, to “come close” to the truth. It takes cruel work to come close.

Because of space, let me sum up the last points here. Be very hard on—be very cruel to—your sentiments. Avoid abstractions. And, yes, use similes sparingly.

As a little boy growing up in Abeokuta, when the government-controlled public water that came unexpectedly every other week did not come and we ran out, we used to go and fetch water from a well. The well often needed time to grow more water after the stress from roped buckets. If at a time of such stress, or, as it were, distress, you went to the well and drew: you’d carry home water with sediment in it—some of it shiny, some of it mud. You had to let that bucket-water be still and let the sediment float to the bottom. Then you would take a bucket and pour out the better part of the water, careful to not let the curious sediment follow.

I think the same applies to poetry. We are like that well. It is only “at dawn”—metaphor for “in very rare cases”—that we have unstressed water to draw from as artists. Unstressed water is a miracle. If you believe you always have unstressed water, you are not very well. You need to get checked up. Our water—our emotions and the tones that occur through them—is very murky: sentiments are the sediments. You have to be clear-eyed and clearheaded to be able to get the good scoop. So be hard on your sentiments.

I want to share a poem with you. “Slowly the muddy pool.” It’s a traditional Yoruba verse, translated, I think, by Ulli Beier. It is in his African Poetry, but I am quoting it from Senanu and Vincent’s A Selection of African Poetry.

“Slowly the muddy pool becomes a river.

Slowly my mother’s illness becomes her death.

When wood breaks, it can be mended.

But ivory breaks forever.

An egg falls to reveal a messy secret.

My mother went and carried her secret along.

She has gone far—

We look for her in vain.

But when you see the kob antelope on the way to farm,

When you see the kob antelope on the way to the river—

Leave your arrows in the quiver,

And let the dead depart in peace.”

There are transferences in this poem. Something becomes something else. Not only in each line, but from line to line. Just as the muddy pool becomes a river, so has my mother’s illness become her death. And this death, what this death means, is said in terms of other things—her death is “not like” broken wood that can be mended, it is “like” broken ivory; it cannot be restored. The line about a secret is connected to the next line. In line 10, we have a digression, what seems like a digression: “But when you see the kob antelope . . .” The last line tells the kob antelope in terms of another thing: “the dead.”

That is a brilliant way to use similes and metaphors. Without forcing anything, and even without spelling out the relations. The entire poem works by comparison, but it does not force it. Couplet by couplet, the meaning is drawn out. Another important point to note is that this is a poem about grief and it eschews abstraction. It communicates grief in a very particular, concrete way. The language mitigates, so as to deepen, the grieving.

The poem gives the illusion of closure—“let the dead depart in peace”—following a shift from “my mother” to “you.” Grief here is communal; the individual who has lost a loved one lets go, or is asked to let go, as a social affair. It is implied that to do otherwise is violent: that kob antelope, signifying not just the mother but also Nature, would be injured. And to injure Nature is to disrupt the order things; it’s an invitation to chaos.

Look at how complex relations are drawn out in plain language, in seemingly simple juxtapositions, in a poem about death that abstracts nothing but concretizes everything. We should try to write like that. With clear, simple sentences, line by pane-clear line, and yet we should be able to catch something, something substantial, the fin of truth. 🔹

If you enjoyed reading this, you could check out Notes on Craft 1 (“Not Your Mother”) and Notes on Craft 2 (“Language”). You can also support the ministry by sending me money: 8073910618 OPAY Ernest Ogunyemi. If you are only able to send dollars, please send an email: ogunyemiernest@gmail.com. Bless you.