Hear poetry professor Stephen Cavitt read “Going Alone” and discuss the ration of imagery to statement in a poem.
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Read the transcript below.
Intro
Welcome to the Poetry Professor podcast with Stephen Cavitt. Every week I read you an original poem, and then we talk about its key technique. In today’s episode, you’ll hear Going Alone from my book Noctis Terrores, and we’ll talk about the ratio of image to statement in a poem. I think this is the most important issue in contemporary poetry, and I can’t wait to share it with you. Here’s…
Going Alone
Above the John Dunn bridge, the Rio Grande sprawls flat and glassy
through basalt canyons. An old man knapping an arrowhead
on the bank tells me the spring behind him is the best water
in New Mexico. Just be careful, he says. When you scoop it out,
sometimes you get a brine shrimp. The canoe twitches upstream,
turning its long flank in the wind like a show pony. By now,
the women I met at the hot springs have climbed the dirt road
to the rim, taking with them the lithe dancer who poured out the names
of desert towns in Spanish–San Cristobal, Tres Piedras–her voice bright
as the red dragonfly that circled the pool on four lace wings.
On her left shoulder, a candle tattoo spilled its thin smoke in the breeze.
It’s hard to get anywhere going alone. The current pushes the bow
of the canoe. I dig the paddle in a rudder stroke, and the ashwood blade
slices the jade water. The hound leans over the gunnels and watches
the ripples that will become the southern border of the United States
of America. For him, this river is the only country there is.
Discussion
Let’s talk about the ratio of image to statement in a poem. So the things that we can hear, see, touch, taste, and smell versus the clearly expressed thoughts and feelings. In my poems, I’m going for a 70/30 or maybe an 80/20 split. I want a lot of image and just a little bit of statement. That’s one of the biggest leaps for my new writers, and it’s probably the biggest difference between Instagram poetry and literary poetry.
If you’re just telling us how you feel, but you’re not really building that sensory world, it’s not a literary poem. If you’re going to build that world and then set me right in the middle of it and let those feelings arise from the moment, now it’s a literary poem.
The first twelve lines of this one are all image. So we start out with, “Above the John Dunn Bridge, the Rio Grande sprawls flat and glassy through basalt canyons. An old man napping in air ahead on the bank tells me the spring behind him is the best water in New Mexico. Just be careful, he says. When you scoop it out, sometimes you get a brine shrimp.”
So that’s the first five lines right there. We’ve got really specific stuff to put you in the scene. The name of the bridge. The river’s name. The type of rock in the canyons, this sensory thing with the old man making an arrowhead, and then this little bit of dialogue, which takes up two lines.
After that we’ve got seven more lines, a little bit about the canoe, and then a lot of lines about the women that the speaker has met at the hot springs. And after all of that, finally, in line number 13, we get the first actual statement, the first philosophical or emotional statement in the whole poem.
And here it is. “It’s hard to get anywhere going alone.” So that’s what’s really at the heart of the poem. That’s the emotion or thought that’s driving the speaker to tell us this whole poem. But we’re not just starting there, we’re working our way there through the tangible world.
After this statement, we’ve got four more lines of image. “The current pushes the bow of the canoe. I dig the paddle in a rudder stroke, and the ash wood blade slices the jade water. The hound leans over the gunwales, and watches the ripples that will become the southern border of the United States of America.”
That last line is half image and half statement. So we’re starting to get a little bit of the bigger picture. The water we’re looking at will become the southern border.
And then the poem closes with what I would call, really, the second full statement of the poem: “For him, this river is the only country there is.” So in this poem, we’ve got only two lines of statement, or maybe two and a half lines of statement, and the rest is all imagery.
It comes out to about an 85/15 split, so even more than my usual 70/30 split that I’m going for. What I’m trying to do, and what I hope you will try to do, is to fire up the mirror neurons of the reader. Make his or her nervous system think, I’m really in this scene. You know, this is actually happening to me.
And then the realizations of the poem arise naturally, rather than us as the writers just handing the feeling and saying, I feel this way, you should feel this way. We want it to come from this tangible world that we’ve placed the reader into.
Let’s hear “Going Alone” one more time, and listen for the balance of image to statement.
Going Alone
Above the John Dunn bridge, the Rio Grande sprawls flat and glassy
through basalt canyons. An old man knapping an arrowhead
on the bank tells me the spring behind him is the best water
in New Mexico. Just be careful, he says. When you scoop it out,
sometimes you get a brine shrimp. The canoe twitches upstream,
turning its long flank in the wind like a show pony. By now,
the women I met at the hot springs have climbed the dirt road
to the rim, taking with them the lithe dancer who poured out the names
of desert towns in Spanish–San Cristobal, Tres Piedras–her voice bright
as the red dragonfly that circled the pool on four lace wings.
On her left shoulder, a candle tattoo spilled its thin smoke in the breeze.
It’s hard to get anywhere going alone. The current pushes the bow
of the canoe. I dig the paddle in a rudder stroke, and the ashwood blade
slices the jade water. The hound leans over the gunnels and watches
the ripples that will become the southern border of the United States
of America. For him, this river is the only country there is.
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, pick a strong moment that you want to write about. It can be a happy moment, a sad moment, a moment of shock, or revelation, or inspiration, or discovery. Just some moment that has some strong umph to it.
Get a sheet of paper, or take a Word document, and create five separate columns, one for each of the five senses. Then fill in those columns for your powerful moment.
When you write your first draft of a poem, work some of those details in. Let yourself have permission to write a statement or two. But shoot for that 70/30 ratio of image to statement.
Closing
Thanks so much for listening to the Poetry Professor Podcast with me, Stephen Cavitt. Today we heard Going Alone from my book Noctis Terrores. It’s available on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major booksellers, and the link’s in the episode description. If you like the poem, I’d love it if you bought a copy. I’ll see you next week.