by David Moolten

The topic of Dana’s inaugural “Workshop Redux” column was specificity — the role specific language plays in making a poem more (or less) successful. The topic of this month’s column is a close relative, embellishment. Here the choice for the writer is how much detail to provide rather than how general or specific to make it. The antipode of embellishment I would call minimalism. I don’t mean minimalism with a capital M, which refers to various artistic movements in which visual art, music, literature etc are stripped of traditionalist elements — a far larger discussion. Rather I limit the term here to simply mean less detail: a sparer approach to words and phrasing.

Minimalism exploits some of the same advantages (and suffers from some of the same drawbacks) as the use of more universal language. With a minimalist approach one often enjoys a stark tone, which can bring with it powerful solemnity. There’s a reason why the “Gettysburg Address” fits on the back of an envelope. Compression tends to be a feature of a minimal style, enhancing both tension and ambiguity, as one can’t explain as much. Moreover, as with formal prosody, the writer is coerced into the cogitation necessary to find the right words to fit in a small space, which fosters not only economy but also precision. Lastly, poems that avoid embellishment tend to flow nimbly, whether through a discursive list of scenes or sub-topics, or an overarching narrative. Since the prime directive in writing is to get the reader to go from Point A (the beginning) to Point B (the end) without deciding in between that the piece isn’t worth the effort, a minimalist approach has the simple-minded though practical advantage of not scaring off one’s audience with a lot of text. Consider the intimidating effect of some of those long descriptive passages in 19th century fiction … .

Embellishment on the other hand allows more latitude and space — a bigger canvas on which to daub, and the freedom to more fully create oneself. Concomitantly, one tends to find more clarity, greater amplitude of emotion, and a more nuanced voice. While a poet can register a certain immediate gravitas with a minimal style, it is often difficult to achieve the intensity of emotion possible with expansive phrasing. Embellishment when effective is like color and detail in a painting, providing the chance for expression both richer and truer to the real world or to the imagined world of the writer. While a terser style allows one to move quickly, and a more embellished piece takes the risk of bogging the reader down, if successful it can be more engrossing, and more transforming.

Which is better? Well, the answer is … it depends (poetry being, unfortunately, full of decisions between equally defensible choices, like those two maxims, look before you leap, and, he who hesitates is lost).

So without further hesitation, let’s look at this month’s poem, “Crucifixion” by Hayden Carruth, and its evil twin, a version of the piece I’ve edited (vandalized) in various not so subtle ways.

Crucifixion

The colors on the hillside have faded,
the fruit trees lost their leaves, the mist
often with us, as today when I gazed into
the orchard, thinking of how I died
and was revived. I saw a cross there
with a man nailed to it, and I said: “Are you
the Christ?” He must have heard, for in his
agony, he nodded. Farther off
I saw another cross with another man
nodding, and another, a legion of crosses
in the trees, each with a nodding figure
nailed to it. I know about death now,
how silent it is, even when the pain
is screaming. Tonight is silent, dark;
And when I looked, I saw nothing, just my own
nodding in the window. It was as if Christ
had nodded to me, and I had nodded back.

Crucifixion

You understand the colors on the hillside have faded,
we have the gray and brown and lavender of late autumn,
the apple and pear trees have lost their leaves, the mist
of November is often with us, especially in the afternoon
and toward evening, as it was today when I sat gazing up into
the orchard for a long time the way I do now,
thinking of how I died last winter and was revived.
And I tell you I saw there a cross with a man nailed
to it, silvery in the mist, and I said to him: “Are you
the Christ?” And he must have heard me for in his
agony, twisted as he was, he nodded his head affirmatively,
up and down, once and twice. And a little way off
I saw another cross with another man nailed to it,
twisting and nodding, and then another and another,
ranks and divisions of crosses straggling like exhausted
legions upward among the misty trees, each cross
with a silvery, writhing, twisting, nodding, naked
figure nailed to it, and some of them were women.
The hill was filled with crucifixion. Should I not be
telling you this? Is it excessive? But I know something
about death now, I know how silent it is, silent, even
when the pain is shrieking and screaming. And tonight
is very silent and very dark. When I looked I saw
nothing out there, only my own reflected head nodding
a little in the window glass. It was as if the Christ
had nodded to me, all those writhing silvery images
on the hillside, and after a while I nodded back to him.

Hayden Carruth (1921 – 2008) was a distinguished American poet and critic. A New Englander and a political radical, Carruth was noted for the range and sympathies of his voice. His poetry is often bucolic but hard-hitting and engaged, confronting both the pragmatic and the existential. His weighty themes include social inequality, war, aging, grief and death.

“Crucifixion” was one of Carruth’s later poems, published in 1990, shortly after a suicide attempt via pills and liquor.

Carruth led a hard life, performing manual labor, often working long hours but insisting on writing nocturnally. He suffered both physical and psychological ailments, including alcoholism, anxiety, depression, tobacco related emphysema and cardiovascular disease, and ultimately the strokes that killed him.

Which version of “Crucifixion” did he write? Hopefully you said the second, or I didn’t do a good enough hack job in the first.

This is one of my favorite Carruth pieces, but let me point out that this is so despite the fact that I’m not religious, and that “Crucifixion” doesn’t resonate with me for any votive aspects it may have. My interpretation tends to suggest Carruth himself is talking here about wholly human suffering. A quote from another of his poems tends to confirm a secular, and even romantic adaptation of religious icons for purposes of consecrating the secular:

Always I was adamant
In my irreligion, and had good reason to be.
Yet prayer is not, I see in old age now,
A matter of doctrine or discipline, but rather
A movement of the natural human mind…
I prayed. Then on paper I wrote
Some of the words I said, which are these poems.

What I experience reading “Crucifixion,” is remarkable composure and dignity, in spite of the autobiographical facts. To suffer is neither erudite nor ignorant, and self-destruction is usually foolish, yet in their aftermath the poem’s meditative perusal of them is wise and benefits from a long life and a social conscience. Despite the deliberate even leisurely diction, and plenitude of detail, I sense the poet’s restraint. The tone is level. The phrase “You understand” is intellectual, conversational.

You understand the colors on the hillside have faded,
we have the gray and brown and lavender of late autumn,
the apple and pear trees have lost their leaves,

He speaks like a guide, a Vermont local to a “flatlander.” He holds back, not out of reticence but for the sake of pacing, his desire to let the story take its time as it tells itself. His details put you in his shoes, but his emotional reserve lets you remain in your own, lets the poem, and his experience, accumulate and stir inside you.

Why should a poem describing this kind of agony exhibit such patience? For me the answer lies in the perception of the sufferer that one’s suffering is endless, whatever its duration. Here Carruth looks back on trials that have lasted decades, but which in aggregate finally became too much to bear in spite of his successes, his admirers. This is why I think he chose the cross with its excruciating public display and private experience — we live among others who witness and even understand our pain, yet can’t begin to feel it (or so we believe). And even a moment of this pain lasts a very long while. Forever doesn’t mean hereafter, but here and now.

the mist
of November is often with us, especially in the afternoon
and toward evening, as it was today when I sat gazing up into
the orchard for a long time the way I do now,
thinking of how I died last winter and was revived.

This poem deserves its embellishments because visual acuity in the sufferer approaches omniscience — every detail in the sick room, every crack in the ceiling, every leaf on the tree blowing in the window glass is evident and noticed. Carruth conveys this persuasively. But the irony he also communicates is that the sufferer observes (as part of his environment) other sufferers in their agony and desolation.

And I tell you I saw there a cross with a man nailed
to it, silvery in the mist, and I said to him: “Are you
the Christ?” And he must have heard me for in his
agony, twisted as he was, he nodded his head affirmatively,
up and down, once and twice. And a little way off
I saw another cross with another man nailed to it,
twisting and nodding, and then another and another,

Every movement is accounted for, not just the nodding, but how many times, and that there is acknowledgment, affirmation. Also ironic is his choice of conceit. For the crowded hillside of crucifixions he uses terms that might have described Roman soldiers:

ranks and divisions of crosses straggling like exhausted
legions upward among the misty trees, each cross
with a silvery, writhing, twisting, nodding, naked
figure nailed to it, and some of them were women.
The hill was filled with crucifixion.

So those who inflict pain are also its recipients, collectively, and in slow solitude.

Finally we reach the core of Carruth’s epiphany, which is his simple statement as a witness, and as a victim. Again, the stylistic embellishments are deserved, essential, because they describe his ambivalence, his stoicism. Pain is something one doesn’t talk about, doesn’t confess. To do so is weak, self-betraying, “excessive.” But he does so, stating the paradox of communal indifference with eloquence reminiscent of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.”

Should I not be
telling you this? Is it excessive? But I know something
about death now, I know how silent it is, silent, even
when the pain is shrieking and screaming. And tonight
is very silent and very dark

Given his proletarian fealties, Carruth intends the poem’s circumstances to be amply extrapolated. This isn’t just a hillside for the despondent, but for anyone who suffers.

Carruth isn’t finished though, because the other half of his revelation about anguish concerns each person’s relative insignificance. Thus the poem arrives at and ends with this still deeper reflection:

When I looked I saw
nothing out there, only my own reflected head nodding
a little in the window glass. It was as if the Christ
had nodded to me, all those writhing silvery images
on the hillside, and after a while I nodded back to him.

This closing embellishment allows Carruth to reveal what mortal anguish looks like once the personal elements are withdrawn, how it is at last accepted, humbly and without drama. After the nadir of his overdose, Carruth recovered, remarried and went on to live and work successfully for nearly twenty years. I wonder if he’d have found the wherewithal to write “Crucifixion” in the way that he did had he merely survived his near-death, and not triumphed over it. Perhaps he wrote this as if he really did die — metaphorically — so that everything that followed came from an inner place of serene comprehension. Perhaps it was this that allowed him to be so liberal with the materials of his experience, and his poetry.

Reprinted from Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 (1992, Copper Canyon Press) with permission of the publisher.

David Moolten’s latest book, Primitive Mood, won the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press. His work has been widely anthologized, and his honors include a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. David is also a physician specializing in transfusion medicine. He writes at Edible Detritus.

by David Moolten

The ambition of this month’s Workshop Redux is to explore the world of line breaks. Why should you, as a poet, use line breaks? Well, the simplest reason is that at some point you run out of paper. In the old days, this meant hitting the chrome bar and making the typewriter carriage return so you could keep writing on the next line and not on the bare typewriter roller, which wouldn’t record your efforts.

Today, line breaks occur automatically and arbitrarily at the right margin of each virtual page according to the setting established in your word processing software. This is how line breaks work in prose, and for the most part no one writes or reads anything into them.

Poets generally choose to break their lines sooner (except in prose poems, where the poet forsakes the poetry of line breaks in favor of other verse elements). Unfortunately, these breaks can sometimes be or at least appear no less arbitrary, especially in so called free verse, earning the derision of poets who write more formally. Ideally, “free verse” poets engineer their line breaks to provide some enhancement to a poem’s rhythm, a slight visual, oral and/or aural pause. This pause tends to heighten the contrast between ending word (and idea) in the first line and the starting word (subsequent idea) in the next line, emphasizing both words and often creating surprise, sometimes through a pun on the last word of the first line. The effect is often more dramatic when a sentence doesn’t end at the end of the line (end stop) but continues onto the next line (enjambment).

In formal poetry there is a set number of beats and/or syllables per line, this number being discretionary, though generally regular and having some connection to the length of the human breath and the attention span of the human ear. The line break comes at the end of this determined length, although formal poets will also try to exploit an end of line pause for the same reasons as “free verse” poets.

This month’s poem was written by James Wright, a poet from the American Midwest who enjoyed an illustrious start in the formal camp and then became an apostate, switching allegiances quite famously in his third book, This Branch Will Not Break. The poem’s title is “A Blessing.” I suspect many of you will have read it before, its fame in no small part having to do with its line breaks. Nevertheless, I’ll first provide you with a version of the poem in which I’ve rescinded the breaks, and further down I’ll give you the opportunity to read the original text.

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows to welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness that we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, for she has walked over to me and nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, her mane falls wild on her forehead, and the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear that is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom.

Interestingly, Wright wrote many prose poems, some quite remarkable. This, however, was not one of them. Should it have been? And if not, did he do “Wright” by it with the line breaks he chose (sorry … )? As an exercise, you can if you wish provide your own line breaks and see how they compare with his. The poem with the author’s line breaks appears below.

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

So let’s look at the line breaks. Ending the first line at “Minnesota” brings us suddenly away from the earmarked and well-mapped path of the unremarkable highway (and Wright’s prior path as a “formal poet”), into the wild fields where there is twilight, darkness yes, but also luminosity, mystery and risk, though of a supple living kind. This twilight bounds though without threat. Ending the line here emphasizes the idea of breaking free and surprises us with the wild twilit grass.

The second line is end-stopped, a complete thought, no reason to go on and possibly burden the line’s delicate breath. Beginning the third line with “And” implies continuation where there is none, creating a kind of in medias res effect — we’re looking at two ponies (and they at us) we didn’t know were there: more surprise, and reassurance. That they are “Indian” ponies has a certain noble outcast resonance, which the enjambment enhances by emphasizing the light effect via “Darkening,” reminding us of the twilight, the risk-taking, and now giving us confrontation, only to take it away via the oxymoronic “with kindness.”

The eyes darken by dilating, because of excitement, here joy, not violent intent. Again an end-stop, the thought over, and the line break so as not to burden the exquisite sound and thought of the line with any more language. The next line ends so as to emphasize “willows” and “welcome,” which heightens the emotion of the scene.

The “to” and other small words like it generally come at the beginning of new lines, rather than the end of old ones, though not always. Syntactical and ubiquitous, they tend to be undramatic and even clumsy at the end of lines, not so much at the beginning, where they are ignored, heightening the effect of subsequent words. Sometimes other prosodic considerations win out and ending a line with “from” or “and” is still artistically desirable.

The next line end-stops and breaks so as to remain small and nimble, in keeping with the poem’s mood and scene. The seventh line reminds us of the separation between highway and living field and emphasizes that word “pasture,” with its suggestion of peaceful rumination, as well as its earthy groundedness. The eighth end-stops on “alone,” underscoring the ponies’ isolation, auguring the loneliness the poem later addresses. The end-stop also lets the dynamic and perfectly descriptive ninth line hit us harder. Ending on “happiness” highlights the innocence and emotion of the moment, and the surprising fact that the human “we” is the source. Again a quick delicate end-stop, allowing the animated and metaphoric power of the eleventh line, “They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other” to hit us whole. End-stopped as well, this allows the marvelously surprising: “There is no loneliness like theirs.”

The ponies are perfect companions to each other; but something is missing, and the affection they show the interloper(s) proves it. The inclusion of line breaks tells us something in a way that prose could not. Again, the delicate thought and musical phrase are complete (why crush it with more language?) thus the end-stop, and another short line. With its quick pulse, suggestion of sudden accommodation (how ponies behave) and of a return to task, “At home once more,” quickly breaks, making us wait to find out what the task is, and setting up the variation of the long line to follow. The task is eating, the lowering of heads implicit, and the flaccid extent and scrunched syllables of the line suggest the luxuriant action. The end-stop allows the radical observation of the next line to wallop us, “I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,” the enjambment keeping the tension and letting us savor the image before continuing.

The next two lines. “For she has walked over to me / and nuzzled my left hand” return to the delicate phrasing and music compatible with the action. The following two lines are more descriptive — the poet face to face with his subject — and are carved out as quick and complete units. Then Wright radically returns to the tactile he only contemplated earlier, “And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear” the palpable materials of the environment taking him over. He ends the line at “ear” because the unit of the line in terms of music and meaning is complete and because he wants to surprise us with the amazing comparison he makes in the next. A girl’s wrist? Wow. Now the poem is also about his own quest for wholeness and intimacy, and we know, we absolutely know he discovered it just as we did.

There’s no reason to go on of course, so the line finishes with an end-stop, and the next line tensely advises us of the epiphany, of the search for and the excitement in discovery, “Suddenly I realize.” Keeping this short heightens the suspense of course: Just what did he realize? What follows in the enjambment is again amazing. “That if I stepped out of my body I would break” offers total surprise for the reader who is also stepping out of expectation, out of the confines of “the body” as it refers to the academy, to poets and poetry as confined by tradition. To step out of one’s body is nothing short of total transcendence and liberation. It’s also incredibly risky. So the enjambment turning on the word “break” focuses everything on this liminal moment of self-annihilation. What follows renders this one of the more notable line breaks in modern American poetry: “into blossom.”

So we are changed. The break doesn’t destroy anything; it’s pure rapture, pure innocent maturity and fecundity. Here is a man no longer galloping from a three-point stance into another man to smash his body in football or war. Here is a man no longer taciturn and muscle-bound from the searing factory floor, who can only push a woman around in drunken frustration, or herd animals towards the slaughterhouse. Here is a man and a poet no longer in the prison of expectation. But for the line breaks, we might not have known.

Reprinted from This Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963) with permission of the publisher.

David Moolten’s latest book, Primitive Mood, won the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press. His work has been widely anthologized, and his honors include a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. David is also a physician specializing in transfusion medicine. He writes at Edible Detritus.