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October 24, 2004 Olds discussed three key components of craft - the line, adjectives, and rhythm -- and explained how she uses them and how elements of her character clearly show in each. “When Poetry was Prayer…” Olds clearly makes a distinction between the written line and the aural/oral line, going so far as to describe a tension between them, that the line as it wants to be on the page isn’t related to how it should be read aloud. She described the spoken line as a unit of complete thought, and reminded us that “when poetry was prayer, each line was a whole thing, an entire phrase”. She later generalized that thought with: “As its content appears, so the shape of the container appears”. Following this thought, in her poems the phrases and sentences take on an unconstrained length, seemingly not bound by line breaks and rhythms. So how the written and spoken line work together in Olds’ work is interesting. She counted with her hand as she read a poem and showed (to my satisfaction, at least) that there’s an iambic beat running throughout much of her work – the iambic beat, she says, is “the rhythm of old hymns” she learned along the way. But she rebelled (her word) against the iambic tetrameter of those lyrics, and broke her lines for dramatic effect on the page – to create a visually appealing poem. So the beat and the line, two essential elements of the craft of poetry, serve different masters and are in deliberate tension. Further rebelling, Olds tells us that she consciously avoids end rhyme, but seeks out internal rhyme. She’s using the old tools of her craft, but in a pointedly different manner than she was taught. This shouldn’t be surprising for someone whose poems have been described as “deliberately outrageous”. “Too Literary” In an NPR interview some 20 years ago, Olds said she always needs to “go back and take adjectives out”, that her attempt to describe precisely often leads to sounding “too literary”. So I was a little surprised when she included adjectives as an essential element of craft. Eventually, she did reiterate that old thought, that there are always fewer in the final poem than in the original, but she also reiterated their importance in the art. In another not to the spoken poem, though, she alluded to selection of adjectives for their aural qualities. For example, she stated that if the poem seems to want to have a mellow feel, she’ll avoid “all those consonants”. This fascinates me, this direction of description to create mood. This is beyond the obviousness of onomatopoeia and the playfulness of assonance and alliteration, this is the use of the uttered sound almost as underscore to the scene the poem creates. As I look back over the poems I most love, I see that many of them have this kind of underscoring sound. I wish more of my own poems did also. So many tools, so little time I learned much more from Sharon Olds than I was expecting to. Besides bestowing her thoughts on creating with us, she passionately and energetically drew questions and comments from the audience, making for one of the better experiences I’ve had in the Dodge “Conversations on Craft”. A few other gems we touched on, uttered as only Sharon Olds could: Sometimes you need out a saltshaker of commas to slow the pace down. Find a (poetic) form that feels like freedom and a (verse form) grid that (offers you) comfort: then you have something to build on, something to rebel against.
I left my Conversation with Sharon Olds with my faith in the musical heritage of poetry restored – I sometimes think I’m in a dwindling minority who considers the thesaurus a menu of sound options – and with renewed respect for the role of tension and contrast in a poem. More than the surprise ending or the forced metaphor, every word and every beat in a poem should strain against being predictable, being ordinary.
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