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and as many contemporary experimental writers are doing.
Voice and Style 121
5. Form: line breaks, stanzas, structure. As with point of view, you
should try out all the various possible arrangements for your poems.
If you always write in one solid stanza, it's time to begin experiment-
ing: couplets, tercets, quatrains. The same for line breaks try some
different ways of doing them. If you always write free verse, try adding
some formal requirements meter or rhyme or some other pattern
you must work with. If you always write in iambic pentameter, break
out into something less structured. Also take a look at whether your
poems as a whole follow a structural pattern do they always end
with an image? With a "punch line"? Try ending with an abstract
statement, or something less conclusive, more open-ended. Maybe
they always circle back to something they began with; if so, make
yourself let yourself write something that keeps going outward.
Get away from starting your lines at the left margin, and use the field
of the page.
6. Imagery. We all have particular words and images that seem to
crop up in the course of our work. You may notice that you fill your
poems with images of mothers, or couples, or animals. A good thing
to look at is the kinds of images you make are they vague and con-
fusing, or sharp and detailed? Do you use too many similes or not
enough? Do you rely on statements "She made me feel so sexy"
to the exclusion of images which might embody some of your
thoughts and ideas? Less common is the opposite problem: image
after image without any abstract statement. Usually, image and state-
ment combine in a poem (though there are memorable exceptions).
Notice what your balance is, and see if you need to strengthen one or
the other.
7. Any other pattern that you perceive. Know your own work. Being
aware of your stylistic strengths and weaknesses will not only help you
to grow, but will help you to deal with criticism from others.
Everyone has certain things they can do well, and other areas that
need work. Maybe you have great details in your poems, but have
trouble making them add up to a coherent whole. If you know this,
you won't feel so defensive when someone says, "This doesn't hold
together." Instead, you'll recognize that again you've run up against
122 THE POET'S COMPANION
your limitations and you'll be grateful for suggestions to help you
overcome them. Maybe you're too literal and linear, and need to
make some associative leaps; the next chapter on dreams and experi-
ments can help lead you away from the logical. Read the symbolist
and surrealist writers, and Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca's Poet
in New York. Read and reread the work of Chilean poet Pablo
Neruda, whose earthy, compassionate verse often contains surrealis-
tic, magical images. Try contemporary writers like Mei-Mei
Berssenbrugge, Ron Silliman, and Leslie Scalapino, who all have
unique and intriguing ways of making poems and read anyone who
doesn't make logical sense to you. Write whatever comes into your
head, without stopping; write down your dreams; let go. If you have
the opposite problem and no one ever understands your poems,
though you think you're communicating something perfectly clear-
ly if your work has been deemed obscure by several readers who are
otherwise astute, intelligent, literate people you may need to focus
on clarity, on what you intend to say and what is being heard by oth-
ers. Of course, we can't always see our own patterns, especially in the
heat of new writing. That's not the time, anyway, for thinking about
these things. But when you're ready to step back and demand the best
from your poem, see if you can regard your work objectively and
invite other readers to help you do that.
There's another aspect of voice to consider: the persona poem.
Persona is Greek for mask; in a persona poem, you pretend to be
someone else. In truth, all poems are in a sense persona poems the
"I" of a first-person poem that seems to be about the poet's true expe-
rience is just as much of a construction as a poem in the voice of a
medieval peasant speaking to us from the dead. In the latter case,
though, we'd never mistake the peasant's voice for the poet's; a per-
sona poem usually announces itself. Such poems are a great way to
stretch your style. You may find you need to change it completely for
the sake of the person you're creating on the page. And a persona
poem can let you explore events and states of being more freely;
masks allow us to shed our ordinary identities. Frank Bidart has writ-
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