consider what must be happening when we set out to produce a poem

There are no more two distinct brain sides than there are two distinct genders. Why would that surprise anyone who’s ever created anything? from “A Moment’s Thought” by Ellen Bryant Voigt in her excellent collection The Flexible Lyric The recent bicameral (and thoroughly Nietzschean) model—right brain for intuition, emotion, art, and music; left brain for [...]

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New Work Up

I’ve started a new set of pages for my craft essays and poetry reviews, accessed through a new tab at the top of this page. First up are two essays using Scott McCloud’s theory of transitions from Understanding Comics to consider how poems are sequenced in collections. If you like comics or syntax, you’ll probably [...]

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On adjectives

a continuation of my poetic love affair with Ellen Bryant Voigt and because it makes me think, hard, about how language works Nouns are the strongest parts of speech; without nouns, there is no poem, maybe no language: if language points to or names, then the nomen is language. The noun is the source of [...]

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Back to Voigt for more essential craft truth

So I had no idea that Ellen Bryant Voigt would become a major mentor of mine, but I just keep finding her critical/analytical writing to be what I need when I need it. One of my many writing struggles this fall has been using image; my poems have been flat, narrative, discursive, two-dimensional, with not [...]

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muscle and sinew and music, clarity and resonance and power

from The Art of Syntax After one hundred years of free verse invention and mastery, contemporary poets need not focus solely on lineation or fall unthinking into one of the dominant conventions of our time: on the one hand, a “sincere” poem made accessible by predictable simple declarative sentences, all about the same length, chunked [...]

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“But did you MEAN to write it that way?” Two

from The Art of Syntax The making of a poem is not a performance but an adventure, an act of discovery. Most poets of high formal appetite often do perceive, in advance of the concrete materials of the poem, some shape or heft or tone or set of means—what Susanne Langer calls a “formal apprehension.” [...]

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“But did you MEAN to write it that way?” One

from Ellen Voigt The Art of Syntax After detailed analysis of a poem, someone usually asks whether all that has been pointed to—or any of it, for that matter—was intended by the poet. The truthful answer seems weaselly: yes and no. It’s probably not often an authentic poem of “felt though” emerges solely from a [...]

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It’s all about the line

More syntax. And more and more. “I see dead people using syntax.” from chapter 2 of The Art of Syntax, “The Sentence and the Line” …poetry likewise makes use of two often competing rhythmic systems: the rhythm of syntax I have been discussing, which poetry shares with well-made prose, and the rhythm of the line. [...]

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Language nerds only need read: syntax as phrasing

more updates from the world of The Art of Syntax, chapter 1. Grammar controls the function of each word in the sentence and lines it up on one side of a clause or the other: “mask” can a thing (noun) or an action (verb) depending on its usage. Grammar also regulates that usage, and the [...]

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Eight Weeks of Syntax

So the next eight weeks or so of my reading and writing life will be all about syntax. Seriously, truly, deeply about syntax. (quick, why is the latter NOT a fundamental English sentence??). Not just syntax as grammar, though—syntax as order, as counterpoint to the music of meter, as a constant series of choices about [...]

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