In the first-ever episode of the pod, hear poetry professor Stephen Cavitt read “One Scream” and discuss segmented poems.
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Read the transcript below.
Intro
Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and discuss its key technique. In today’s episode, you’ll hear “One Scream” from my book Noctis Terrores, and we’ll talk about segmented poems.
I hope this pod will fill a kind of gap in the poetry world, where we often hear poets talk about their inspiration or maybe their writing habits, but they don’t often break down the techniques behind their own poems. That’s a place I think we can all learn from each other as writers. So here’s “One Scream.”
I.
Twisting awake in a damp field with the coals lukewarm
and 3 a.m. stars scattered like windblown laurel petals,
pink and white. Nighthooves kicking my ribs like always.
I know this dew-soaked sleeping bag, this sheath knife
in the grass. But I’m on some other Earth.
II.
In the morning, over lumpy oatmeal, the kids try
to guess who screamed. I thought a bear bit Jordan.
Old man Bill eyes me as the kids pack their gear.
I would have come to check on you, but you only screamed
once. The Army taught me if there’s only one scream,
it’s either a false alarm, or it’s too late to help.
III.
In the back of a Chevy S-10 under a half shell
with a djembe drum rolling at my feet
and semis rumbling past the rest stop.
4 a.m. and drove into the juniper dawn,
the burnt umber slopes below Flagstaff,
the mushroom cloud of Phoenix smog.
IV.
But walking the Cumberland Plateau,
second growth hardwoods and wintersting,
moonlight smoothed out like a picnic sheet
on the crinkleleaves, wasn’t it beautiful?
Wasn’t it right?
Discuss
A segmented poem is simple. It’s just a poem that’s broken into sections or segments. This one uses Roman numerals. We’ve got I, II, III, and IV. But you could use anything: Arabic numbers. A mini title for each section. Some sort of publishing flourish like asterisks or squiggles. Blank space.
You can do anything that’ll add to the poem but not take away from our focus on the lines themselves. We want the structure to support the body of the poem like a skeleton.
One of my favorite things about segmented poems is that you can take little sections that may not be significant enough on their own and you can stack them together in such a way that you create added meaning or added layers.
So let’s take a look at what these pieces are doing. Here’s the first section: “Twisting awake in a damp field with the coals lukewarm and 3 a.m. stars scattered like windblown laurel petals, pink and white. Night hose kicking my ribs like always. I know this dew-soaked sleeping bag, this sheath knife in the grass, but I’m on some other earth.”
This is like a postcard. It’s one place in time. It’s a single instant. It’s almost coherent enough to be a whole poem on its own, but not quite. There’s something missing. So as we stack the different sections next to each other, we can create a plot arc, or a narrative arc, like you might find in fiction or nonfiction.
Let’s see what section II adds. “In the morning, over lumpy oatmeal, the kids try to guess who screamed. I thought a bear bit Jordan. Old Man Bill eyes me as the kids pack their gear. I would have come to check on you, but you only screamed once. The army taught me, if there’s only one scream, it’s either a false alarm, or it’s too late to help.”
So, if we boil each of these stanzas down to a key idea, the first one is not being at home on the earth, something being wrong. The second one goes, well, is it a false alarm, or is it too late to help? Is it too late to help this guy, our speaker?
And here’s number III: ”In the back of a Chevy S-10 under a half shell with a djembe drum rolling at my feet and semis rumbling past the rest stop. 4 a.m. and drove into the juniper dawn, the burnt umber slopes below Flagstaff, the mushroom cloud of Phoenix smog.”
We’re out west now instead of the Appalachians, but we’ve still got that sense of dislocation in these night terrors. And then section IV makes a kind of turn, like the last line of a haiku.
So IV goes, “But walking the Cumberland Plateau, second growth hardwoods and winter sting, moonlight smoothed out like a picnic sheet on the crinkle leaves, wasn’t it beautiful? Wasn’t it right?”
If you take them together, the four sections establish repetition with variation, alright, so I is waking up with night terrors. II is shame or social repercussions. III is those same night terrors in new locations. And then IV, our speaker begins to find solace in the woods.
And that brings us to that moment of grace or shift or transformation in some way that we usually want to find in a poem. Doesn’t have to be a happy ending, but there’s some kind of shift.
Here, I wrote all these sections over the same couple of days, knowing that they were going to go into this poem. But segmented poems are also a great place to weave in these scraps that you’ve held onto from poem drafts that didn’t work. You can pile them into a longer segmented poem and finally find a home for them, and that’s really, really satisfying.
Let’s hear “One Scream” one more time, and this time, listen for how the sections fit together, and for that idea of repetition and variation.
One Scream
I.
Twisting awake in a damp field with the coals lukewarm
and 3 a.m. stars scattered like windblown laurel petals,
pink and white. Nighthooves kicking my ribs like always.
I know this dew-soaked sleeping bag, this sheath knife
in the grass. But I’m on some other Earth.
II.
In the morning, over lumpy oatmeal, the kids try
to guess who screamed. I thought a bear bit Jordan.
Old man Bill eyes me as the kids pack their gear.
I would have come to check on you, but you only screamed
once. The Army taught me if there’s only one scream,
it’s either a false alarm, or it’s too late to help.
III.
In the back of a Chevy S-10 under a half shell
with a djembe drum rolling at my feet
and semis rumbling past the rest stop.
4 a.m. and drove into the juniper dawn,
the burnt umber slopes below Flagstaff,
the mushroom cloud of Phoenix smog.
IV.
But walking the Cumberland Plateau,
second growth hardwoods and wintersting,
moonlight smoothed out like a picnic sheet
on the crinkleleaves, wasn’t it beautiful?
Wasn’t it right?
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, write a segmented poem. Remember, you can use anything you want to demarcate those sections: Roman numerals, Arabic numerals. You could use colors, you know, one is blue, one is red. You could count backwards, use recipe ingredients, whatever’s true to the poem that you’re working with.
Outro
Thanks so much for listening to the first-ever episode of the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt. Today you heard “One Scream” from my book Noctis Terrores. It’s available now on Kindle Unlimited and at major online booksellers, and there’s a link in the episode description.