Poetry is not Prose

More poetry is being written, and less poetry is being read than at any other time in history.  Most people who write poetry rarely read poetry.  Does that seem odd to you?  The thing is that most of us do not get poetry.  We had lousy education in poetry by high school English teachers who didn't like, or understand poetry themselves.  For me, poetry is important.  I read poetry every single day of my life.  I have a mailing list of friends that I send a poem to every morning.  

Poetry is not like any other form of writing and its differences have value to us.  If only we can discover that those differences have value and a unique power waiting for us inside every successfully written poem. 

The first point I would make is that poetry is not prose broken up into short lines.  Since most modern poetry does not rhyme a lot of uninformed people assume that if you just put what is written into short lines you have turned prose into poetry presto-chango.

Consider a poem by William Stafford.  First look at it as a prose version of the poem:

I was driving home one night, on an icy mountain road, when I came upon something in the road that turned out to be this dead deer.  I was afraid some driver might come along behind me, maybe not paying attention, get surprised by this large dead animal on the road, and by trying to avoid hitting the deer they might have an accident.  Being the good citizen that I am I got out to push this animal off the road and that is when I noticed it was a female deer and it was pregnant.  I was taken aback by when I discovered that this deer had not been dead long, and I think the unborn fawn was still alive.  I'm not vet, and I was in no position to do anything about all this, so I pushed the deer off the road into the icy river below.

Now look at how Mr. Stafford tells the same story in a poem.

Traveling through the Dark
By William Stafford 

Stanza 1

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
Stanza 2

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car                         5
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

Stanza 3

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason-
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,                             10
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

Stanza 4

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;                                 15
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

Stanza 5

I thought hard for us all-my only swerving-,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

First, notice the title.  The poem's title is:  Traveling through the Dark.  Now what was the speaker of the poem doing?  Literally, the speaker is driving.  The word traveling has certain connotations that are just not found in the word driving.  Traveling is more than just driving.  Traveling implies a journey, a trip.  There is something more significant going on when you travel.  By using the word traveling the poet has send us a message.  This story is not just a story.  There is something more significant going on here.  This story symbolizes the journey of life, not driving home from work.  This is a journey through the dark.  For me, this is a perfect image of my life.  I am on a journey through life and I am in the dark.  I can't see or know everything that is going on around me.  I'm often "in the dark."

First Stanza: "Traveling through the dark I found a deer"

In the first line of the first stanza, ends with the word deer.  By placing the word deer at the end of the first line the poet has positioned the word in a very prominent place in the poem.   It is also a trick.  You see your eye ends line one with the word deer, and then the eye scans back to the beginning of line 2 and there sits the disconcerting word dead.  It is not the common way of wording things.  Most people would say, "I found a dead deer."  That is, after all, what happened isn't it?  By reversing that normal or more common word order the poem now reflects what always happens when we encounter death.  Every death, even coming upon a dead piece of road kill is a little surprise to us.  We are surprised by death.  Death is something we tend to want to ignore and it is always a little startling when we encounter death without expecting it.  

The speaker of this poem tells us he will push the dead animal off the road because another car may come upon this dead animal and be forced to veer, and "to swerve might make more dead."

The last line of the first stanza used alliteration. Alliteration is the repetition of the beginning sound in two or more words, but this is not just any ole alliteration, this is the repetition of the M sound.  An M is harder to say than say the E sound.  You have to use more lip action to say an M word.  The words Might Make More slows the line down when it is read aloud, and this slowing down is exactly what the speaker did when he encountered the dead deer, he slows down.

Second Stanza: "By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car" 

In line 6 (the second line in stanza 2) we have the words,  ". . . the heap, a doe, a recent killing."  Usually when we encounter death the full knowledge of it comes to us in stages.  The speaker in the poem first sees a heap.  Next, the speaker notices that it is a doe.  Finally, the speaker finds that it is not just a doe, it is a recently killed doe.  As he drags her body over to the lip of the canyon, the speaker of the poem realizes that "the deer is large in the belly." This poor doe is pregnant!

Third Stanza: "My fingers touching her side brought me the reason"

Now the speaker knows that  the doe has a fawn inside her, a fawn that is still alive.  How does he know this?  Because:  "her side was warm." 

Perhaps the most interesting trick the poet has pulled is found in stanza 3.  line 11.  Note:  the fawn is:  alive, still, never to be born.

Why did the poet separate out the word still, isolating it between commas?  It wasn't just to force the voice to pause.  By isolating that still the poet has made the line and the language denser.  This fawn is STILL because it is not moving, it is STILL because it is NOT MOVING, and it is also STILL BORN.

The speaker in the poem knows that if he pushes the dead doe over the cliff, he is killing the unborn fawn.  Here we have a conflict.  To save life, the speaker has to take life. :"Beside that mountain road [he] hesitates." Life and death are intertwined, entangled.  The speaker is forced to make a judgment.  Is the death of the unborn fawn less valuable than the life of some driver that may come along later?  Yes. Even knowing that the life of a human is worth more than the life of a fawn (that has no hope of surviving long anyway), the speaker finds this whole situation off-putting, disconcerting, and troubling. 

Fourth Stanza: "The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights"

Some personification is going on here.  The car aims.  A weapon is aimed.  Of course, a car is, at least in this case, a weapon.  It was a car that killed the doe.  The engine purrs.  This is not personification because cats purr, not humans, nevertheless, it is ascribing something to a car that belongs to a living thing.

Whenever I share this poem with teenagers they always want the person in the poem to perform an emergency C-section.  Maybe that is theoretically possible, but it is not likely that anyone in this situation would have the Know-How or the inclination to do something like that.  The C-section option is not an option at all. Because even if he could successfully deliver the fawn, he knows he could not keep it alive.

Fifth Stanza: "I thought hard for us all-my only swerving"

Notice the word swerving in this fifth stanza.  Where have we heard that word before?  Oh, yeah.  Stanza one:  to swerve might make more dead.  He was right.  This, the speakers only personal swerving is indeed making more dead, because when he realized that the doe was with fawn, his straight-forward action was tossed a curve.

This poem is so much more than the prose story I provided at the top of this article.  In poetry words do double duty.  The words selected are picked because they can mean more than one thing.  The place on the line can add to the meaning of the work.  Even punctuation can do more than just punctuate.

Knowing that the poem is dense and that the words are selected with great care makes it something different from prose.  Yes, of course, great prose is poetic, dense, and words are carefully chosen and often the words do double duty, but while it happens with prose, it is suppose to happen all the time in poetry.  That Evelyn Wood speed reader is not going to get all that a poem has to give if he zips through the poem at 100 words per second.

For those wishing to write poetry, it is my hope that this Stafford poem can be an inspiration, setting the bar for what is possible with a carefully constructed poem.