Poet Joy Katz conducted an informal survey, asking for opinions on poems with the best endings^[5]. Most of the titles offered were those poems with full, round endings: “Second Coming,” Eliot’s Prufrock, Thomas’s “Fern Hill.” I turned the question around and asked Joy about her favorite off-balance endings. Katz offered the work of Lorine Niedecker as an example, writing that “Niedecker’s poems are almost perfectly scaled, including the endings. No kabooms, no reaches for posterity.” Here is the second half of a two-part Niedecker poem, “Wartime”:

This poem, in three short stanzas, traces an arc that is familiar enough in poetry: It’s still winter but nearly spring, and one keeps oneself going with the thought of a fully-realized spring (“lupines,” “growing air”). But in tracing that arc, the poem maintains a wintry sobriety, acknowledging that this time of year is a necessary “manure” stage “toward May,” with some interesting sound-mirrorings here (the first syllable of “manure” a more muted version of the word “May”, and the second syllable, “ure”, rhyming obliquely with “toward,” as if to say that dung is the necessary obverse of spring growth). The graceless ending is just one of the ways in which the poem maintains a certain truth, a certain realism both in terms of the world depicted and in terms of the writing process. In the closing two lines, there is not only a move toward May; there is also a shift to command or plea on the other side of the colon: “Give me lupines and a care…”. This swelling of emotion and desire is dramatized by the length of the line, which extends out farther than the other lines in this stanza, yet the welling-up of hope is, in the enjambed final line, attenuated by the short line, “for her growing air.” This short line both rhymes with and matches the length of the prior stanza’s last line (“no objects here”); it also makes good on what that earlier line observes, about the winter landscape devoid of colorful objects such as lupines, about the winter mindset of keeping expectations low (as in “no objective” beyond getting through), as well as about the catalpa tree’s being so bare that the snow, seen as white ghostly garments, passes through its branches without obstacle. To return to Katz’s description of Niedecker’s endings — “no kabooms, no reaching for posterity” — the poem’s muted close registers hope by hoping for hope (“give me [. . .] a care”), refusing to fully invoke the full growth of May, setting its sights instead on that less-palpable, airy process of growing (with a pun on the feminized season’s slow process of “growing hair”). The ending of the poem is, in other words, a stirring rather than a sweep.

The graceless ending is just one of the ways in which the poem maintains a certain truth, a certain realism both in terms of the world depicted and in terms of the writing process. Post-Confessionalism has seen a lot of “mandatory epiphanies” tacked on to the ends of poems, but all too often, these strike me as the poetic version of TV’s “jumping the shark.” Every glance outside one’s window is not accompanied by a swelling soundtrack, nor must every poem resound at the end. Making the closing line a syllable or two short may sometimes be just enough to leave the poem standing on one foot, groping awkwardly for a balance that never arrives. This is what Niedecker’s poem does, and I find myself deeply moved by that imbalance and asymmetry, that sound of one hand clapping. It makes me want to move “toward” something — if only to lean on it, and maybe that something will be the next poem in the volume or the living, breathing person next to me.