by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006
Houdini never gets far from the news. There’s always a movie coming out, or a book, and every other magician has to face comparison to the legendary master. Here the California poet, Kay Ryan, encapsulates the man and says something wise about celebrity.
Houdini
Each escape
involved some art,
some hokum, and
at least a brief
incomprehensible
exchange between
the man and metal
during which the
chains were not
so much broken
as he and they
blended. At the
end of each such
mix he had to
extract himself. It
Was the hardest
part to get right
routinely: breaking
back into the
same Houdini.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Used by permission of the author. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
I pulled this piece from the archives of American Life in Poetry because it’s by Kay Ryan and … well … Kay Ryan pretty much rocks.
Just look at how short those lines are, and how effective they are. What effect do these lines have in terms of the architecture of the poem? Do they slow you down, speed you up, build suspense, make you feel as if your heart is skipping beats?
Wow, that ending is particularly great.
I did notice the weird line breaks, and think they are meant to reinforce the feeling of something being in pieces, that in the end “breaks out” whole. Which is exactly what this does. Loved it.
I achieves something like a shortened breath, or the manner in which we speak when we have shorted breath. Very interesting.
These line breaks slow down my reading, forcing me to creep link-by-link along her chain of sentences — each conventionally or strangely parsed grammatical unit, each phrase of meaning or near-meaning, each twist of thought or perception, each tug of rhythm. In this poem, prose and verse exchange visibility — appear, disappear, re-appear. Kay Ryan has written elsewhere about poetry as the fun of peek-a-boo — the trick, trap, & release of sounds or ideas. In my opinion, many of Kay Ryan’s poems resemble Ars Poetica — as about the nature of poetry itself. The line “involved some art” is telling — to roll-in or coil like the tightly-coiled poems of Emily Dickinson.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
September 28th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Therese, they slow me down, too, which in itself if interesting because we’re taught that short lines speed a poem up. Clearly that’s not always the case.
Therese L. Broderick replied:
September 29th, 2009 at 7:44 am
In his book “The Art of the Poetic Line,” James Longenbach writes that “no particular kind of line has any inevitable relationship to sound or sense; that is, an enjambment does not necessarily speed up the line…” (p. 11). Every element in a poem — including line — reacts in context with everything else. The length of a line reacts in context with syntax, meter, and diction to determine how quickly or slowly it needs to be read. No rule of thumb about poetry applies in every case. I think Seamus Heaney said somewhere that there are no rules in poetry, only effects.
The enjambment pulls you from line to line and there’s a feeling of struggle and movement. It’s really a wonderful poem — especially those last three lines.
I don’t know that the line length affects how I read so much as word choice does, but the look of the thing id definitely in keeping with the subject. I can see the man, suspended.