Poetry: Inside out and outside in
everything (?) you need to know about poetry
©S. Ingraham, lightshedder.com

Sense and sound.

Poetry is a creative interaction between the sense and the sound of language—a creative marriage of sense and sound.
Poetry is primarily communication: the poet has something to say.
Poetry is made out of “real” objects and events...is built out of the objects of sensual reality arranged so that they express meaning for the poet and produce meaning for the reader.
Some poetry has a story to tell, the sound is an aid to memory, a thing of beauty in itself, and reinforces the atmospheric elements of the poem (we often think of this as traditional poetry).
Some poetry intentionally allows the reader to experience the same insights and/or feelings as the poet...packages an experience so that the reader makes his or her own discoveries while reading...tricks (in a sense) the reader into an unexpected opening of the mind or heart (we often think of these poems as being modern).
The best traditional poems contain a large element of unexpected insight...and some of the best modern poems also tell a story.

All poetry operates at two levels at once:
There is the outside of the poem and there is the inside of the poem. The outside is the objects and events of physical reality; the inside is thought, feeling, concept, insight, etc.
Poems can be written from the outside in and from inside out.
 
Outside
Inside
what the poet saw/heard/did what the poet felt/what the poet thought
(what the poet imagined) (what the reader is intended to feel or think)
concrete/objective abstract/subjective
sense data/observation feelings/emotions
surface/situation/picture purpose/intent/insight

The key to linking the inside and the outside is often what I call "as/like" thinking. "That's like..." "It was as black as..." Another way to think of it is as "resonance." Things we see or do, things outside of us, cause our brains/minds/memories to resonate, to vibrate in sympathy with them. Like the passing train shakes the floors of your house. Like the struck bell makes the glasses on the table shiver. Like smell of hot chocolate awakens memories of ice skating, wet mittens, cold feet, moonlit nights, and marshmallows. You might think of it as association...the linking of ideas and objects in the mind...but it is often so subtle that it is nothing more than a tremor in the back of the brain, a temptation to remember, a ghost of a word heard long ago and far away. A resonance. As/like thinking.

As/like thinking leads to the building of images: an image is a complex assemblage of sensory impressions that can stand for all kinds of complex ideas, feelings, insights, etc. A beach in the night, two people holding hands silhouette against the track of the rising moon equals love. The structure of the image...which must reflect the real world as accurately as possible*...lends structure to the ideas of the poem, extends the as/like thinking in unexpected and interesting ways, and often leads to insights that would not otherwise have been available. See tricks and tracks below.

*any distortions in the image must be intentional and generally carry meaning of their own: as in irony, satire, parody, etc.

Sense:
compression: the goal of the poet is always to say more, to express more, than the words would otherwise allow, to pack in the meaning, to surprise or delight the reader.

There is more to a poem than meets the eye, more than the ear can hear (in a great poem there is more than the poet knows...more than any one person can know).

There are tricks the poet uses to compress. These tricks also, very often, are the connection between the outside of a poem and the inside. They are the tracks the poet leaves when traveling between the two...clues, keys to open the outside of the poem and let you in.

techniques and devices (tricks, tracks)

  1. simile: she was as beautiful as a summer day, he looked like thunder
  2. metaphor: she is a summer day, he was thunder coming over the hill
  3. imagery: an extended metaphor, the big picture, playing with the expectations of the reader/listener, playing off the reader/listener’s experience of the world to make new connections within the poem
  4. personification: making a thing or and idea act like a human...have a will, make decisions, talk, act, laugh, cry, feel pain, feel joy, etc.
  5. symbolism: making a present object or person stand for a whole group, or a whole way of thinking, or whole way of life, or whole set of emotions, etc.
  6. allusion: making the reader remember other things he or she has read or heard, and using the meaning or context of what is remembered to reinforce or increase the meaning of the poem
  7. intentional omission: leaving out the connecting words or concepts between one thought or image and the next so that the reader has to supply the bridge from his or her own experience and imagination. (this is the biggy!)
  8. creative juxtaposition: placing objects or ideas together that are not normally found in the same context
  9. creative word usage: using words out of their normal context
The poet may use any or all of these tricks in any given poem. Paying close attention to them will get you from the outside of the poem to its inside.

Sound:
all poetry involves the building of a pattern.
pattern serves four purposes for the reader
  1. it is a thing of beauty in itself
  2. it is an aid to memory
  3. it often gives a key or an aid to understanding the inside of the poem
  4. it’s fun!
pattern serves five purposes for the writer
sticking to, or creating the pattern
  1. provides discipline and focus
  2. helps to sort out and choose between all of the possible connections of a thought or feeling
  3. provides an opportunity to encode a key to the inside as above
  4. often leads to unexpected insights (this is the biggy!)
  5. makes writing more fun!
Sound patterns: the poet may use any or all of these patterns and pattern building tools:
patterns of stress, patterns of breath, waves of words
  1. measured meter: counted number of stressed syllables in a predetermined order
  2. open/natural rhythm, the rhythm of the breath as we speak
  3. focused flow: generally, using words linked by similar sounds to reinforce the flow of the language
  4. intentional balance: line against line, phrase against phrase
patterns of links, linked letter sounds, word to word
  1. rhyme: same end sounds...ring, bring, sing, colliding...vowels and constants
  2. internal rhyme: vowel and constant sounds within the word...insider, reside
  3. alliteration: same beginning sounds...fine feathered friends, silly seasons
  4. assonance: same vowel sounds inside the word...coat, roan, row
  5. consonance: same consonant sounds inside word...batter, boating
  6. repetition
  7. onomatopoeia: words that sound like sounds... tintinnabulation, woof, meow
Visual cues and patterns:
  1. lines
  2. stanzas: groups of lines
    3. open field construction
  3. visual pattern (concrete poems)
As with the tricks and tracks of compression, the patterns of the poem provide a bridge between the inside and the outside of the poem.

*open field construction uses placement on the page to substitute, at least in part, for punctuation in giving the reader cues as to how the lines are to be read, how the breath is suppose to fit the words (or the words are supposed to fit the breath).

To read a poem (one way to read a poem):
Read once for the pattern:
wrap your tongue around the poem, let it control your breath, let the flow take you.
Read again for the outside:
What did the poet (or the character in the poem) see, do, or imagine? Don’t be distracted by the language. Get the picture, the situation, clear first.
Read once more (twice more, three more times) for meaning:
What is the poet trying to say; what does the poet want you to feel; what insight does the poet want you to discover? Follow the tracks from the outside of the poem to the inside.
(if it isn’t obvious, if you need clues, take some time to look for the techniques and devices...look for the tricks, even the best poet leaves tracks: look for them in order as above)
Read for the experience:
surrender to the poem, let it take you where it will, let the sound and sense wash over you, become, just for a moment, the poem...you won’t be sorry!

To write a poem:
From the outside in... From the inside out... You must train your ear to hear pattern, and your mind and your tongue to build it. Read a lot of poetry. Listen carefully, especially to your own voice. The patterns are there in the language already. You just have to learn to hear with the ear and follow with the mind and tongue. Dig down to the bones of the language.

 
 

The best poetry completes the circuit.
It throws a million little switches in our minds,
creating pathways for the current where none existed,
teasing out patterns of flashing synapse with rhythm and rhyme,
sinuous sounds, waves of words, cascades of metaphor,
connection rays, converging on image,
exploding out, collapsing, breathing, beating, coalescing,
coincidenting to a point, extending into line,
a lightning flash, mind to mind, me to me.

Not the electricity, but the circuit.
A wire tuned, a resonating coil of connection
tapping the field, the infinite potential, by induction.
The surge from silence to speech,
the click as the circuit closes,
the ah,
the radio burst of voice,
the blast of naked meaning,
utterly other and so ourselves,
strange, startling, homely, right,
we glow in the current, filament bright.

The best poetry completes the circuit.