Listen to poetry professor Stephen Cavitt read “One of These Things is Not Like the Other” and discuss dialogue in poetry.
Contains sexual themes.
Stephen’s poetry collection Noctis Terrores is available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers.
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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.
This season, you’ll hear poems from my book Noctis Terrores. Today, I’ll share “One of These Things is Not Like the Other”, and we’ll talk about dialogue in poetry.
Here’s the poem.
One of These Things is Not Like the Other
“I’m too busy to try again, and you’re always working,” she says.
“We should just hook up.” Even over the crackling cell phone,
I hear her grin, her dimples pale apples too big for her freckled cheeks.
The last time we kissed, on the ballfield, cars whistled by in the dusk.
My heart grew so big it shoved against its dumb, bony cage.
Fitting my arm to her hips, I thought, this is why we try again and again.
We’ve been texting three days—steamy, then sweet—since that petaled dusk.
“Just sex sometimes,” she says. “But definitely not this week. God!
I have so much going on.” She’s painting her nails. She sets the phone
on the counter. It clatters against the nail polish.
“You’re on speaker,” she says. “Can you hear me?
Say something. Stephen, say something.”
Discuss:
I don’t often talk about themes or meaning in poems. That’s for literature classes. In creative writing, we stick to the techniques. But it’s safe to say that the meaning of this poem is, If you’re married, go hug your spouse right now. Go do some couples therapy if you need it. It’s a jungle out there. You do not want to be dating in modern America.
If you’re in a relationship, read the Gottman’s work, the most research-based couples therapy there is. If you’re single, start with the book Attached about relationship attachment styles. I’m rooting for you either way.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about dialogue. We usually think about dialogue in fiction, but dialogue poems are fun too. Let’s run the numbers on this one. This is a 14-line poem. Six of the lines have dialogue, and all 6 of those are just the ex-girlfriend speaking. We never actually hear any dialogue from our speaker himself.
If we take away everything but the dialogue, here’s what she says:
I’m too busy to try again, and you’re always working. We should just hook up. Just sex sometimes, but definitely not this week. God, I have so much going on. You’re on speaker. Can you hear me? Say something. Stephen, say something.
We go back and forth between these dialogue lines, which help to move the plot along–we don’t often talk about plot in poems either, but we can–and then we have his inner reflection, as our speaker thinks about how much more the relationship seems to mean to him. So this dialogue recreates the experience for the audience. I’m hoping that I put you right in the action, so you’re on the other end of the phone, hopefully shocked and disappointed, just like our speaker.
This is one of the most dialogue-y poems in the collection. In episode 35 of the pod, you’ll also hear “Mass Mobilization,” which has a lot of back and forth dialogue between two characters. In the rest of the poems, I sometimes use small dialogue quotes. Out of the 53 poems in Noctis Terrores, 16 of them have some kind of dialogue, and a couple more have song quotes.
Whether you can use just a little bit of dialogue or a lot of it, here are some ideas for how you can pull it off.
- You want the language itself to be crisp. We’re looking for something that’s ten to twenty percent better than how you sound or how the people around you sound in real life. We don’t want any wasted words like um, like, you know, well. We want to have strong, active verbs rather than passive verbs. So passive verbs like is or was, they’re weak. They don’t hit as hard as more active verbs like eats, jumps, spirals. Those are going to have more oomph.
- Choose only powerful quotes. Even if you’re writing a scene that actually happened, you don’t have to stay true to every word that was said. In fact, you don’t have to stay true to it at all. The poem is its own living thing. You can shorten it, just pull the punchy quotes. You can write in something new that was never said. Unless you’re making some sort of claim in a footnote or to your audience that this is a 100 percent true poem, it doesn’t have to be. It’s a poem, not a witness statement, so you get to choose what goes in it.
- The dialogue, like everything else in the poem, should move us towards the inevitable aha moment of this poem. Now, the ah ha moment might happen somewhere in the middle. For me, I think it often happens towards the end. While a poem doesn’t have a plot exactly, it has some breakthrough or some payoff that we’re shooting for, and the dialogue shouldn’t be wasted. It should move us towards that. That’s what I mean by the dialogue moving the plot along. Everything in the poem is building towards some final note.
Let’s hear “One of These Things is Not Like the Other” again, and listen for what the dialogue is doing in this one.
One of These Things is Not Like the Other
“I’m too busy to try again, and you’re always working,” she says.
“We should just hook up.” Even over the crackling cell phone,
I hear her grin, her dimples pale apples too big for her freckled cheeks.
The last time we kissed, on the ballfield, cars whistled by in the dusk.
My heart grew so big it shoved against its dumb, bony cage.
Fitting my arm to her hips, I thought, this is why we try again and again.
We’ve been texting three days—steamy, then sweet—since that petaled dusk.
“Just sex sometimes,” she says. “But definitely not this week. God!
I have so much going on.” She’s painting her nails. She sets the phone
on the counter. It clatters against the nail polish.
“You’re on speaker,” she says. “Can you hear me?
Say something. Stephen, say something.”
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, write a poem that includes snippets of dialogue. It can be from one person, two people, a whole crowd, it’s up to you. Use only crisp word choice, powerful quotes, and move the plot or the aha moment along.
Outro
Thanks so much for listening to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt. This season I’m reading poems from my book Noctis Terrores. It’s available on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major booksellers, and there’s a link in the episode description. You can support the show by picking up a copy.
I’ll see you next week!