The essay for this month’s issue of Plume, “The Sexy Sentence” by the poet and former editor of Green Mountains Review, Neil Shepard, doubles as both a craft and exegetical essay on the “grammatical relations” of syntax and form. In his exploration of just what makes poetic language alluring and even “sexy” in the magic of its verbal relations between subject, verb and object, Shepard explores the sensual relations between syntax and sense, form and verbal music, grammar and eloquence. Citing examples of “memorable speech” in the poetry of Theodor Roethke, Alice Fulton, Robert Hahn, Mary Ann Samyn, and Cathleen Calbert, he examines just how craft and composition complement each other in linguistically organic ways that result in frissons of memorable expression.
–Chard deNiord
THE SEXY SENTENCE
Over the years, as I’ve tried to talk to poetry students about sentence structure and punctuation – syntax and mechanics – I’ve heard the dismissive drumroll of their fingertips on a desktop as they claimed “poetic license” to plunk down commas and fragments and awkward sentence constructions wherever they please. One day, amidst my exasperation, I suddenly recalled – Wasn’t that dismissive student indisputably me back in my rebellious undergraduate years? Many years later, I still love planting commas and fragments, sinuous sentences and awkward ones, in my poems, but I’ve learned to do it with an underlying intention. I’ve learned that part of our inheritance as poets is to work within or against inherited forms and structures, or as Dylan Thomas says in another context, to “sing in our chains like the sea.”
To convince students of the revolutionary nature of grammar, I’ve worked up a craft talk I call “The Sexy Sentence.” Mostly a rhetorical ploy, I admit, to avoid admitting I’ll be talking about the making of sentences. But this is not just about grammar, good or bad. It’s about useful grammar; about grammar working for you; it’s about well-orchestrated sentences helping you and your readers to fully engage the subject matter – whether sex or something else. And if your brilliant sentences make your readers swoon, then all the better. It’s about Robert Creeley’s attractive maxim: “Form is never more than an extension of content.” And Denise Levertov’s alluring revision: “Form is never more than a revelation of content.”
So how do we “reveal” our content? How do we make it a revelation to our readers? This is where form becomes an enormous ally. Since our thoughts are marshalled most often in sentences or, at least, in phrases, our form depends upon our skill with manipulating grammar. Though young poets might cede the province of syntax and mechanics to prose writers, experienced poets claim it for the crucial role it plays in delivering and mirroring a poem’s meaning. And because sentence size, structure and punctuation help create the rhythmic qualities of the poem, they can also contribute, subtly or overtly, to a reader’s visceral sense of the poem’s power.
About this thing called sex – how does it relate to sentence structure, in particular? Let’s start with a single sentence, looking at Theodore Roethke’s poem “Old Florist.”
OLD FLORIST
That hump of a man bunching chrysanthemums
Or pinching back asters, or planting azaleas,
Tamping and stamping dirt into pots –
How he could flick and pick
Rotten leaves or yellowing petals,
Or scoop out a weed close to flourishing roots,
Or make the dust buzz with a light spray,
Or drown a bug in one spit of tobacco juice,
Or fan life into wilted sweet peas with his hat,
Or stand all night watering roses, his feet blue in rubber boots.
As I suggested above, there is just one sentence in “Old Florist.” Why? Although we’re looking at an “old” florist, who has probably lost his own procreative powers, he’s still a generative force for his plants. He’s a bundle of energy, and Roethke has the good grammarian’s sense to match his energetic presence with an active sentence that accelerates and accumulates until it arrives at the one and only period at poem’s end.
Sentences are made of sounds and rhythms, as well as grammatical relations, so it’s worth noting here, briefly, how fully alive the words are in our mouths (all that assonance and alliteration), which makes the verse buzz with activity. As for the grammatical relations, notice the list of verbals in the opening lines (verbs transformed to adjectives, which here modify the noun “man”): bunching, pinching, planting, tamping and stamping. He’s an active guy. He becomes even more active as we shift from verbals to verbs: “he could flick and pick, scoop, make, drown, fan, stand.” Notice the parallel structure of the phrases: in the first three lines, subject-verbal-object, verbal-object, verbal-object, verbal-object; in the last 7 lines, mostly verb-object. Though the “old florist” is full of bustle, he’s orderly about his activities, mirrored by the order of those parallel phrases. We can imagine him making his daily rounds in the greenhouse, generating life (if not in the sexiest of ways).
A single potent sentence isn’t the only indicator of procreative power. Size matters – but not in any stereotypically sexist way. In Robert Hahn’s poem “How Long Has This Been Going On,” sentences range in size from the magisterially complex to the simple declarative.
How Long Has This Been Going On
If, when the blue heron rises on the deeply waving strokes
Of its wings, and glides from one side of the pond to the other,
The moment is over too soon, it is slow enough, for us,
If nothing like Time in the life of the pond, abandoned here
When a glacier withdrew at last to its vast northern silence.
You could see the pond, sunk in its fold of dunes, from the ridge
Where cliff swallows crisscross the path at your feet, if you looked down
Past the quivering, balancing terns, and you could see us
On the beach below, as we were when Laura abruptly arrived,
Distraught as Isabelle Adjani in The Story of Adele H.
She called from England, and caught the next flight, away from her husband
And his “blonde bimbo,” a ménage à trois doomed to be brief.
How could her marriage be over? The sun hung overhead,
Motionless, as she wrote her baffled, voluminous letters.
His answers were composed, her history revised. In the new ending,
The Prince would stay with his true love, and Maggie return to America.
We said good night and left her reading by a lamp on the porch.
The heron had settled down by then with its mate, a constant pair
Who came to the pond each summer, and sailed south in the fall,
Down the coastline, to Florida, until it was time to return.
The largos of their travels were long, if nothing compared with the cycles
When forests burn and the earth is covered in ash and ice,
Which melts into seas, those vast eras which are, for us,
Overwhelming, like a childhood nightmare of an infinite task,
To lift the beach grain by grain to another shore.
We need a measure we can bear, although too soon completed,
Like the few hushed prolonged seconds when the heron rises
And glides to the other side of the pond, and floats back down.
Hahn’s poem teaches us about the effects of sentence length, structure and variety: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentence patterns; periodic and cumulative sentences; intricate patterns of subordination; and so much more. Primarily, he teaches us how decisions about syntax – in this case, embedded structure – can reflect and reveal the poem’s thematic content. Analyzing the syntactic structure of the poem, we might first ask: How many sentences are there in this poem? I won’t spoil it by answering, just yet.
If we track the sentence-length and sentence complexity from start to finish, we notice how the longest sentences mirror the longest time frames (geological time, bird-migration time) and the shorter sentences reference human time, all its self-involved drama, its sex and love and betrayal, occurring, as it were, in a puny piece of earth-time. The two opening sentences, which reflect geological-time (the destructive force of glaciers that scour the earth into kettle ponds) and animal-time (the largos of the herons’ long travels up and down the American coastline), are the longest and most complex, layered with subordinate clause within subordinate clause. The next six sentences (3-8), tracking human-time (the destructive forces of human relationships), are relatively short and simple sentences, not complex at all when compared to the vast eras of geological time. So, in the sexiest part of the poem (about a ménage à trois gone wrong), the sentences are smallest. The final three sentences (9-11), reflecting geological time, are long and complex again.
What is the effect of this syntactic layering? The human drama (3-8) is embedded within the heron drama, which itself is embedded within the geological drama. Consequently, readers feel the interconnectedness between these various worlds and time frames, and they view the human drama (the messiness of love relationships) with more detachment and less importance than they might otherwise have.
As if to punctuate this point further, Hahn describes Laura and her love problems mostly by allusion, which, to my mind, distances us from the main character and reduces our sympathetic response. First, he compares Laura to Isabelle Adjani, a French actress, who played Victor Hugo’s daughter, Adele, in The Story of Adele H, a tale in which her obsessive unrequited love for a military officer leads to her downfall. The next reference to Laura – the ménage à trois between Laura, her husband, and a “blonde bimbo” – alludes to Henry James’ novel The Golden Bowl, set in England, where the main character, Maggie, married to Prince Amerigo, engineers a successful scheme to send the other woman of her husband’s affections back to America. In the “revised” story within Hahn’s poem, Laura herself departs England for America, displaced by the “blonde bimbo” who will stay with her “Prince.”
Although the title “How Long Has This Been Going On” lacks a question mark, it could be construed as both question and judgment, and it casts its answer in a series of concentric rings, with the short sentences of human-time enclosed by a longer bird-time (back to the time of dinosaurs), which itself is enclosed by still longer sentences of earth-time.
If the small size of a sentence diminished sexual matters in the previous poem, let’s see what sentence fragments do to sex in this poem by Mary Ann Samyn, “Laughter, Darkness”:
Laughter, Darkness
– Then, less:
the middle of the end:
something like trains tracks stretching
me in both directions –
the awful whistle.
I could say woman ocean cup
but not quite – ,
And no it did not taste metallic
though once I said so.
Not bittersweet either. Not fur or acrid or sex.
Of course I was hidden:
all the small breakings,
breaking –
Like waves.
Like desire and restraint,
which I remember,
like the sigh between them,
its perfect hurt –
The poem is oblique in its subject matter (as she says, at one point, “Of course I was hidden”), but it seems to be about a series of breakages, perhaps the breaking of a love relationship, certainly a breakage between the moment of laughter and darkness, between restraint and desire. My students have discussed the poem’s considerable resistance to disclosure. On the one hand, they say, the poet offers us images that might be construed as gendered (woman associated, symbolically, with ocean and concave cup) or sexual – “train tracks stretching/ me in both directions”; something that “did not taste metallic/though I once said so” – and then, the poet rejects these offerings: “Not fur or acrid or sex.” Or again, “Of course I was hidden,/ all the small breakings,/breaking.” This flirting at the edge of sense is itself a kind of breakage, and it’s mirrored by the spatial arrangement of the poem, fragments drifting separately amidst the white space of the poem.
At the level of grammar and mechanics, what kinds of breakage does the poet employ? First, in its grammar, the poem imitates breakage, beginning with a series of sentence fragments. In the mid-section of the poem, she alternates between full sentences and fragments, and then ends with a sentence fragment. As for the mechanics of the poem, her punctuation would make Emily Dickinson envious! Lots of em-dashes (some of them strangely placed, and one em-dash followed by a comma!) and colons, both of which create a jaggedness to the poem, an imbalance or fragmentary quality. Thus, both sentence structure and punctuation create the form of this poem and help reinforce and reveal its content of frustrated (broken) desire.
If Maryann Samyn’s poem was about breakage and fragmentation, this next poem, by Cathleen Calbert, is about linkage and the syntax that interweaves its theme:
Jayne Mansfield and Isadora Duncan
Isadora, full of grace, always stylish, also classical,
artistically tossed in the wind one long silken scarf
that wound about the car’s wheel, breaking her neck,
and Jayne, a B version of Monroe, but more overdone
without the underlying tristesse, remained cartoonish
even in death, practically decapitated in an open car:
what lessons can we learn here, my dear? Be careful
of convertibles and accoutrements. If you must die,
as I’m told you must, try not to do so looking ridiculous.
This nine-line poem (three tercets), about sex and style and cars and death, comprises only three sentences. The longest one comes first, sprawling across seven of the poem’s nine lines. Why is the sentence so long, and what does it accomplish? First, it combines the two principals of the poem, Jayne Mansfield and Isadora Duncan, together in one compound-complex sentence; second, it contains the dual actions which lead to their similar deaths, both of them having broken their necks in a car accident; and third, it searches for a mutual lesson to learn from their deaths. Cathleen Calbert is a deeply ironic poet, so the lesson she offers us is not deeply philosophical or morose, but rather chirpily practical, delivered in a clipped, sardonic tone. And the sentences that contain the lesson are short: the first is flatly declarative, “Be careful/of convertibles and accoutrements.” The second is a brief complex sentence, If you must die/[then] try not to do so looking ridiculous.” The middle phrase (“as I’m told you must”) is a qualifier whose sole purpose is to reinforce the ironic, detached tone of the poem.
Back to the long opening sentence: it is long because, at least for Duncan, she dies by having “one long silken scarf/that wound about the car’s wheel”; Cathleen Calbert wants a sentence, a form, that imitates and reveals that action. The sentence is not only long and flowing like the scarf; it’s also sculpted, graceful, and classical, like Isadora Duncan herself, with all of those brief, embedded adjectival phrases in line 1. Then Art (“artistically tossed”) throws out the long scarf, which leads to the abrupt final verbal phrase (“breaking her neck”), imitating the quick neck-snap. The complex sentence sails across a stanza-break, making a compound by the “and” that begins stanza two, and links Duncan to Jayne Mansfield – not a classical artist like Isadora Duncan, but rather, a “cartoonish” “B-movie version” of glamour. But whether the woman is A-grade or B-grade, the same decapitating end awaits them both, and Calbert’s sentence structure reinforces that fact.
This poem also provides a good lesson on sentence variety, especially in its final stanza: it begins with a simple sentence, an interrogative (“what lessons can we learn here, my dear?”); shifts to another simple sentence, an imperative (“be careful/of convertibles and accoutrements”); and ends with a complex declarative sentence, (if this, then that), the opening subordinate clause establishing the hypothesis (“If you must die”), and the closing main clause nailing down the final pronouncement (“try not to do so looking ridiculous”). That’s sentence variety.
I’d like to end this discussion of poetic form – in this case, the poetic powers of grammar and mechanics – by looking at a poem by Alice Fulton, whose own thinking about form in free verse long ago changed the way I thought about poetry. Fulton argued that our recognition of pattern in free verse was limited by our own narrow assumptions of what constituted “form.” Her genius was to discover patterns in free verse that had been overlooked or never before considered. Pattern can exist at any level – from the artful repetition of phoneme (smallest unit of sound) and morpheme (smallest unit of sense), to the patterned deployment of phrase and sentence; from well-orchestrated choices of punctuation or pronoun selection, to grammatical recurrences of asyndeton (omission of conjunctions between words or clauses) or its opposite polysyndeton (repetition of conjunctions between words or clauses), and on and on.
In her free verse poem “Powers of Congress,” Fulton demonstrates how syntax, punctuation, and a few other literary devices can cleave a poem together even as the forces of the universe try to cleave it apart.
Powers of Congress
How the lightstruck trees change sun
to flamepaths: veins, sap, stem, all
on brief loan, set to give all
their spooled, coded heat to stoves called
Resolute: wet steel die-cast
by heat themselves. Tree, beast, bug –
the world-class bit parts in this
world – flit and skid through it; the
powers of congress tax, spend, law
what lives to pure crisp form
then break form’s lock, stock, and hold
on flesh. All night couples pledge
to stay flux, the hit-run stuff
of cracked homes. Men trim their quick
lawns each weekend, trailing power
mowers. Heartslaves, you’ve seen them: wives
with flexed hair, hitched to bored kids,
twiddling in good living rooms,
their twin beds slept in, changed, made.
First, it helps to think of “congress” as a verb rather than a noun, and to consider its root definition: to conjoin, to come (or bring) together. In Fulton’s poem, “the powers of congress” are greater than any legislative body can dictate: the powers of congress are natural powers, conjoining the elements of the world – even as the world seems to move towards its entropic state of fragmentation and decay. If things fall apart, then Fulton discovers a form that can keep things together.
The patterns she employs are several: at the level of syntax, there’s nothing necessarily exceptional in this 19-liner, divided into five sentences. We could say it just successfully resists the fragmentation elicited by its own preponderance of enjambed lines; it keeps its sentences supple and complete. The first sentence conjoins its parts into 5 ½ lines, sailing across several enjambments that unsettle the surface of the poem. The second sentence begins mid-line – after a caesura, which ties it to the first sentence – and then unfolds over another 6½ lines, again featuring a variety of enjambments, ending with a caesura on line 13. After two relatively short sentences (each 2 ½ lines), Fulton concludes with a 4-line sentence, mostly end-stopped, orderly. At the level of syntax, the poem seems to cohere, rather than fragment.
The real “powers of congress” lie more so in punctuation and syntactical arrangement than in specific line-length. Most importantly, let’s look at Fulton’s pattern of punctuation: she employs an unusual number of colons and semi-colons, whose primary function, grammar books remind us, is to join two sentences or phrases. And often, a colon introduces a series (a group of similar things conjoined by commas). This pattern is apparent in Fulton’s poem: “flamepaths: veins, sap, stem, all” and “Heartslaves, you’ve seen them: wives…hair, hitched…kids, twiddling…rooms…”; she extends this feeling of “congress” by em-dashes that function as conjoining parentheses (“Tree, beast, bug—/the world-class bit parts in this/world – flit and skid”).
Syntactically, she employs phrases of triplicates – vein, sap, stem//tree, beast, bug//tax, spend, law//lock, stock, and hold//slept in, changed, made” – that cleave things together. One other ingenious piece of connective tissue occurs with her use of something akin to kennings (in which metaphorical compound-words substitute for common nouns: ocean becomes whale-road; grave becomes earth-hall). So, in Fulton’s poem, we find the following kenning-like phrases: lightstruck, flamepaths, heartslaves, and a couple of hyphenated near-cousins: die-cast; world-class, hit-run. This yoking of two words into one provides a further technique of holding things together.
When we ask how the poem’s form reveals its content, we see that this is a poem about change and flux. In an entropic world where things are constantly dissolving, where “the powers of congress” dictate which things will survive awhile in their “pure crisp form” before the natural forces of decay “break forms’…hold/ on flesh,” Fulton commits herself as witness to that change, both its positive and negative aspects. In the natural world, she sees “how the lightstruck trees change sun to flamepaths” by turning sunlight, finally, into wood, which with a certain amount of human imagination and energy, feeds our woodstoves “called Resolute.” In the human universe, especially in the suburbs, where boredom and dissatisfaction often lead to “cracked homes,” she witnesses small acts of desperation by couples trying to keep things together — husbands trimming their lawns, wives “hitched to bored kids,/twiddling in good living rooms,/ their twin beds slept in, changed, made” – all of which does, in fact, impose some small measure of order on chaos. Through Fulton’s attention to form, she, too, imposes some measure of order on chaos, creating a number of recurring grammatical and lexical patterns that reinforce the effects of a world going asunder, as well as how nature and human nature manage, however tenuously, to bind the world together again.
If I’ve seemed to go slightly astray with my discussion of Fulton’s poem – losing the thematic thread of the sexy sentence – well, it’s because the world (and my enthusiasms) cannot be contained. But perhaps at its largest, all poems are acts of creation, engendered as imaginative constructs, born out of nothing, born each time anew, though they owe so much to what has come before them. And the poems that last are memorable and magisterial in part because of how form marries content, which includes, in the case of the sexy sentence, how sentence structure and punctuation walk down the aisle together to tie the knot.
NOTES:
Theodore Roethke, “Old Florist,” first published in Harper’s Magazine, 1946.
Robert Hahn, “How Long Has This Been Going On,” No Messages (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001, Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize).
Mary Ann Samyn, “Laughter, Darkness,” first published in Green Mountains Review, 2000.
Cathleen Calbert, “Jayne Mansfield and Isadora Duncan,” first published in Green Mountains Review, 2001.
Alice Fulton, “Powers of Congress,” Powers of Congress (David R Godine, 1990)
