The Poetry Professor: Season 1, Episode 8

Listen to poetry professor Stephen Cavitt read “Canyon Vigil” and discuss sentence length.

Explicit rating: contains brief mention of suicidal thoughts.

Stephen’s poetry collection Noctis Terrores is available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers.

Listen to the show on major podcast platforms, including

Read the transcript below.

Intro

Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and then we talk about its key technique.

In today’s episode, you’ll hear “Canyon Vigil” from my book Noctis Terrores, and we’ll talk about sentence length.

Canyon Vigil

Nine Mile Canyon, Utah

I swear there’s a black spot in the Milky Way over Nine Mile Ranch,

a handful of dark patches, like a volcanic reef pushing through cobalt

waves, a gap I didn’t see twenty years ago in the Tennessee hills,

or ten years back when constellations spilled onto the adobe roofs

of Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. I think about alien ships, the expanding universe,

galaxies holding hands for as long as they can. I think I need my eyes checked,

or that I’ve found the door in the sky I was looking for that night above Chattanooga

when I pushed the muzzle of a .38 against my temple and thought, No more,

an impossible blonde girl back in the house and the stars almost to Christmas.

It’s cold in the canyon. The horses sleep shuffle in the barn. The hound snores

under the hammock. Ben Meade, who’s lived 84 years mining gas and coal,

driving cattle between the ruins, beating his Stetson until it sits just right,

sleeps in the big house next to his wife, and I’m standing here in sandals

and a down coat, craning my neck, wondering what held the stars together.

Discuss:

Let’s talk about sentence length and how it shapes our experience of a poem. What do long or short or medium sentences do in our bodies as we read or as we hear poetry?

This poem only has six sentences in it. In fact, the first three long sentences take up about 60-something percent of the poem. So here’s sentence one: “I swear there’s a black spot in the Milky Way over Nine Mile Ranch, a handful of dark patches, like a volcanic reef pushing through cobalt waves, a gap I didn’t see twenty years ago in the Tennessee hills, or ten years back when constellations spilled onto the adobe roofs of Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.”

That first sentence took up about four and a half lines in this prose poem. Sentence number two is going to be almost two lines long, and it goes, “I think about alien ships, the expanding universe, galaxies holding hands for as long as they can.”

And then sentence three gets longer again: “I think I need my eyes checked, or that I found the door in the sky I was looking for that night above Chattanooga when I pushed the muzzle of a 38 against my temple and thought, No more, an impossible blonde girl back in the house and the stars almost to Christmas.”

That line is also about four and a half lines long in this prose poem. Those long sentences give it a letting-it-all-go vibe. Our speaker is pouring it all out on the page.

Next, we have three short sentences, three fairly simple sentences: “It’s cold in the canyon. The horses sleep shuffle in the barn. The hound snores under the hammock.” These short sentences put our feet back on the ground. They give us a breather. The speaker just told us that he thought about killing himself. That’s a pretty deep moment, right? We need a moment of recovery.

Then we pick up momentum again in the last sentence: “Ben Mead, who’s lived 84 years mining gas and coal, driving cattle between the ruins, beating his Stetson until it sits just right, sleeps in the big house next to his wife, and I’m standing here in sandals and a down coat, craning my neck, wondering what held the stars together.”

That’s another sentence that’s about four and a half lines long in the print version. So one thing that’s happening in these longer sentences is a kind of gush or letting it all out, right? Almost a therapy speak.

The other thing that’s happening with these different length sentences is that we’re creating rhythm. In a poem, unlike a song, we don’t have a background band. We don’t have the bass line happening. We don’t have a drummer. So one way that we can create the rhythm that our listeners or readers feel in their bodies is the length of our sentences. That’s setting the rhythm.

It’s fast and wild and running free in these first three sentences, and then it’s more staccato, slowing us down a bit in the middle with the shorter sentences. And then that long, almost run-on sentence at the end is once again getting away from us and taking us somewhere.

I’ll be completely honest with you and tell you that when I teach fiction, I usually tell my students the opposite. I usually tell them that the short sentences are punchier and they grab your attention, and the longer sentences form more of that narrative background.

But, in my prose poems especially, the sentences are doing the opposite. So the long sentences are kind of like a rushing river and the shorter sentences are more of those still pools in between where we can recollect and gather ourselves for a minute.

Let’s hear “Canyon Vigil” one more time, and this time listen for how the different lengths of sentences make you feel. Here’s “Canyon Vigil” out of Nine Mile Canyon, Utah.