One day a few years ago, I ran into my friend, the poet Jeff Oaks, at my neighborhood coffee shop. He was reading a curious-looking hardcover book entitled Monogamy^[1] by Adam Phillips. I’d thought it was a poetry book, but when Jeff passed it over to me, I saw that it wasn’t, not really. It contained disconnected short prose reflections, most of them related to the title theme of “monogamy.” The relationships were sometimes logical, sometimes intuitive; sometimes, there was no apparent relationship to the theme at all. Here’s one that really grabbed my attention, not for what it had to say about monogamy, but for how it put into words an approach to poetry I had been trying to articulate for some time:

More and more, in workshops I’ve been teaching and ones in which I have been getting feedback on my own work, I find myself praising, or at least justifying, what I call the “graceless moment.” When I read this passage in Phillips’ book, I felt validated somehow. How ennobling it all sounds to “have the courage of [one’s] gaucheness.” What wonderful permission to allow poems to, as the French critic Michel Foucault once put it, “show their seams.” But, of course, as soon as one vindicates gaucheness or gracelessness as a value in art, the problem becomes one of execution and evaluation. When is a word choice, odd rhythm, or sticky syntactical clog “productively” graceless, and when is it, simply, “awkward”?

As poets, we learn to fall in love with how language can be pieced together to make something well-wrought, with how it isn’t just a tool for selling something or getting practical work done.

“AWK! AWK!” — that old teacher’s red-penned squawk. When I first started teaching writing nineteen years ago, I avoided marking students’ paper with this guttural admonition. As time has gone on, though, I find myself coming full circle, in the sense that, in certain cases, for various reasons, sometimes that’s pretty much all I can say about an utterance. Sure, I could get technical and try to diagnose what’s causing the awkwardness. I might say, “Too many ‘ly’ adjectives in a row,” or “word choice creates unproductive distractions not related to the poem,” or “excessive sibilance.” And in most practical and literary situations, smoothing out said awkwardness might be just the thing to do.

But do we spend enough time thinking on the other side of that formulation? I mean, do we have enough practice in discussing the merits of awkwardness, the situations when, perhaps, we don’t want the well-wrought urns of our poems to be too well-wrought? Making something beautiful is, of course, the goal in every art. But what defines “beautiful”? What I thought was “beautiful” when I started writing in my teens is very different from my ideas of beauty now (and the same can be said of the Jordache jeans and Candies slides I wore as a college freshman in the late seventies). We often associate beauty with symmetry, roundedness, mellifluousness, completeness. In the beginning of apprenticeship (and even into the journeyman stage) in any art form, it is important to strive for these elements, just as compositional balance and even careful work with perspective are important as foundations for drawing or painting. Maybe this is one of the means by which we learn to fall in love with our materials, in whatever medium: by learning to use them to make a thing of beauty, separate from the random arrangements of the world (which, of course, may be beautiful as well, in their own ways). So, as poets, we learn to fall in love with how language can be pieced together to make something well-wrought, with how it isn’t just a tool for selling something or getting practical work done.

How to Read a Poem
BY Terry Eagleton
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)

As we spend more time in the world, we choose whether or not to permit our sense of the beautiful to expand to include the not-so-beautiful, the lackluster, even the ostensibly ugly. I guess everybody has to do this in some form, make this choice, even when they’re not artists. We have to decide, in the words of The Desiderata, whether we agree that, “with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.” It just makes sense that, as poets, we go on from our beginning stages to make those kinds of decisions in our work. British critic Terry Eagleton faults the English symbolist poet Algernon Charles Swinburne with choosing a conventional beauty of line, word, and rhythm that makes much of his work very graceful but, in the end, rather “narcotic.” Here is a sample of what Eagleton sees as the “worst” of Swinburne:

When Eagleton uses the word “narcotic” here, I think of Muzak. I remember the unsettling feeling I had on hearing a really gritty rock song smoothed out into Muzak while I waited in line at the bank. Another word for “narcotic” often comes up in workshops when rhyme is used well but creates an effect the writer may not want… an effect often described as “sing-songy.” Indeed, “sing-songy” and “narcotic” have their functions, but when you look at some of the most memorable poems, you will often find cracks in these urns.

We have to decide, in the words of The Desiderata, whether we agree that, ‘with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.’

Even John Donne himself (who actually coined the phrase describing a poem as a “well-wrought urn” in his “Canonization”) made room for gracelessness in his work. I’m thinking of Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, where at least two instances of gracelessness can be seen. As early as line 1 — “Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You” — we are introduced to a graceless line break that is repeated in line 12: “Take me to You, imprison me, for I.” In the wake of modernism and e.e. cummings, contemporary readers may not be particularly shocked at lines that break between a subject and a verb. But in terms of syntactical units, this is simply not a normal place to take a breath within a sentence and is therefore not an expected place for a line break. Nowhere else in the sonnet are breaks made without first being “authorized” by the presence of a comma or end-punctuation, except for a break between “bend / your force” at the line 3 enjambment, probably severing the verb from its direct object in order to dramatize the process of bending. A poet writing sonnets in the seventeenth century would certainly be pushing into zones of awkwardness (not to mention critical charges of “cleverness”) in doing so. But that is part of the beauty of John Donne’s work, his willingness to sacrifice flow and perfection to, as it were, a higher power. Here, he is asking God to take him by force, to temper his heart, to wrench him into being a more faithful believer. It’s a very physical poem with lots of hard consonance to underscore the degree of spiritual violence Donne is summoning. Troping himself (or his soul-as-himself) as a town occupied by an ungodly force, the speaker asks God to storm the city walls that enclose his heart, doing whatever — shock and awe? — it takes, even if some infrastructure must be destroyed, to reclaim the town and “make [it] new.” Similarly, these extreme line breaks dramatize the degree to which the speaker recognizes his need for unusual force. The unspoken “backstory” could be that it was the path of least resistance — harmonious going-with-the-flow, a sense of seeming unity between subjects and objects — that led the speaker to be “usurpt” by this ungodly “other” in the first place. Moreover, the extreme line breaks at lines 1 and 12 expose the two pronouns, “I” and “you”, that have been separated because the “enemie” has interposed itself between the believer and his God. These breaks are graceless indeed: they mark the division the speaker aches to heal by the restoration of heavenly grace.

So that is one type of gracelessness, the extreme or asyntactical line break: These are generally breaks between subjects and verbs, between articles or possessive pronouns and their nouns, between prepositions and their objects, modifiers and what they modify. When you see what an awkward line break can add to the meaning and tone of a poem, it makes it all the more important not to just do this willy-nilly. In other words, the graceless line break can be powerful only in a poem where line breaks are generally made carefully. In all too many free-verse poems, lines are broken at the unexpected junctures for no discernible visual, semantic, or auditory purpose — save the sense that the poet is trying to keep line lengths relatively equal (even when the actual metrics of the lines beg to differ). Pick up a journal or anthology, and it won’t take you very long to find examples of this particular type of gracelessness that is probably just plain awkward. For reasons that deserve an essay in themselves,^[3] American poetry of the 1980s is loaded with examples. Better still, look in your own work for examples; I know that I can find plenty of instances in mine, and that, when I do, it’s time to think about why I’m breaking the line there, and what formal and revisionary possibilities that awkwardness might open up. James Longenbach, in The Art of the Poetic Line,^[4] explores this crucial but often-overlooked feature of poetic craft in great detail; with equally great flexibility, he considers the different ways in which line-endings (he doesn’t like the term “line break”) function in poem. Referring to the famous Robert Frost comment about free verse being like “playing tennis with the net down,” Longenbach goes further to state that “writing any kind of poem is more like playing tennis on a court in which the net is in motion at the same time that the ball is in motion” (p. 39). I’ve seen some amazing moves in tennis that didn’t look pretty but won the player the match. Or at least another point for gracelessness.

…the graceless line break can be powerful only in a poem where line breaks are generally made carefully.

Another type of productive gracelessness happens at the level of diction: the seemingly unfortunate word choice — “unfortunate” either because it calls too much attention to itself or because, on the other hand, it is flat. Ezra Pound described poetry as “the right words in the right order,” but sometimes, isn’t it possible for the “right word” to be the wrong word? Let me explain here. Diction, or word choice, is crucial to whether or not a poem works. But the right diction is not always arrived at through conscious control; sometimes, it’s reached through an openness, for better or for worse. This openness involves more than just letting the inner-censor or guard down to let the words come in as you write or revise a poem. In addition, the intellect needs to be asked to step away from the lectern and sit down in the circle with the others — affect, senses, stray scraps of language picked up from God-knows-where — so that the word-choosing process is not as narrow or directed as it is when you’re writing a report, or even an essay like this. All kinds of words show up when you summon this kind of openness; some of them fit, while some of them don’t. Some of them may make you look good as a poet or person; they may your poem palatable. Some of them may be odious, creating unnecessary connotations and noise.

And here’s the thing — sometimes you want those connotations and noise because the presence of such words contributes to some fundamental discomfort or imbalance that you want to create, be it in relation to the thematics of the poem or in relation to the feelings you wish to have your reader experience. Thus, semantic gracelessness appears in many poems ostensibly dealing with the body. While it’s certainly true that poetry about the body can consist of diction that accentuates peak, flow, health, even transcendence — all graceful conditions of the body unburdened by its own materiality —, there are plenty of writing situations in which certain word choices might well intrude on that sort of ideal grace to remind readers of the ultimate clumsiness and fallibility of the body: its stuff, its embarrassing emissions and excrescences, its humbling frailties, and the ways in which we are frequently forced to see that our very own body and its parts are woefully standard-issue and expendable.

stupid hope
BY Jason Shinder
(Graywolf Press, 2009)

The late Jason Shinder’s last book, stupid hope, documents mortality and the failing beauty of the body, with a particular focus on his own ailing body and that of his aged mother. Shinder’s diction frequently lends itself to lyric grace in this collection, which reflects an intention he is all-too-aware he can never completely fulfill: “I want to be lifted above the walls of my cell / But I’m scared I can only be this body // that casts one shadow” (“The Story,” p. 28). These lines very gracefully speak of the perennial Cartesian struggle, preparing for other poems in the book that, of an almost palpable necessity, give in to the non-Romantic version of embodiedness that can only “cast one shadow.” No place, no institution enforces this necessity more than a hospital, and so, in a poem with that word as its title, the diction pocking Shinder’s lines is at turns clinical, at turns scatological:

Much of the diction in the above passage is already understood as socially graceless because it refers to body parts and processes that fall outside of polite conversational parameters; I won’t belabor that point here. Instead, I’d like to focus on what the presence of those words does in relation to other words in the passage. The phrases I’ve marked with italics are traces of a more graceful lyric diction and impulse trying to “lift above the walls” of this particular textual moment, to pull a more reflective thread through the puckered fabric of this “other” diction. Yet these more reflective lyrical notes — specifically, the repetition of the end-word “lonely” — struggle rather than flourish, and in no way are they able to subsume the grittier diction, even if “lonely” would appear to get the last word in these lines of the poem. The phrases beginning with “But” weigh down the impulse to transcend or lift up, both semantically and syntactically: semantically, the do so so by failing to offer concrete images to counter or ameliorate the yuckier ones; syntactically, they do so by being stillborn utterances that never unfurl into full clauses, a sense of futility dramatized by the way in which the transcendent “brave” is juxtaposed with, and canceled out by, the persistent “lonely.”

Words like “brave” and “lonely” gesture toward transcendence (a kind of thematic grace) insofar as they attempt to lift the messy particulars up onto a more universal reflective plane. They are also, because of that universalizing impulse, instances of abstract and flat diction, which leads us to the other extreme of productively graceless diction: the deliberate use of flat diction in the interest of attaining certain effects in a poem. Whenever I work with the Frost standard, “The Road Not Taken,” in introductory literature and writing courses, I’m always amazed at how the poem, because of flat diction and equivocating syntax, lulls readers into not really reading the middle two stanzas of this four-stanza poem; it’s all the more striking when you consider that those two stanzas are crucial to understanding that the poem is not so much an anthem to individualism as it is a wry commentary on how we retrospectively impose significance to even the most muddled of our choices. Here are those two middle stanzas:

After suggesting, to many of my students’ dismay, that the poem isn’t the paean to uniqueness that innumerable high school valedictory addresses claim it is, I ask them why it might have been that Robert Frost would have written so poorly in those stanzas that very few readers can be taxed to read them, given that he obviously knew how to choose powerful words (hence the poster-quotable, soundbyte qualities of the language in the first and last stanzas, which people do read). The diction in those stanzas consists of a mere two images, one of which (“grassy”) is hastily hung between a weak being-verb and a soporific alliteration; the other of which (“leaves no step had trodden black”) is vivid only by dint of its negation. This is certainly not technicolor diction, nor is this diction energized by active verbs or affirmative syntax, as the diction in the first and last stanzas surely are. Further diluting the strength of these middle stanzas are these prosaic equivocating phrases and qualifiers: “as just as fair,” “as having perhaps,” “though as for that,” “really about.” The hemming and hawing of these stanzas has all the gracelessness of a low-rate insurance policy! And for that reason, the gracelessness is productive, for it textually recreates what is essentially the muddle of most of our present moments, in high contrast to the high purpose with which we approach those moments when they still belong to the future (the declarative crispness of stanza one) and the great significance we ascribe to them when they become part of our past (the absolute yet wistful tone of the last stanza).

A third type of gracelessness in poetry has to do with endings. Every four years, when the summer Olympics play out and I indulge my fascination with gymnastics, I find myself saying things in workshops like, “You have to stick the landing.” That sounds good, but what does it mean? Early in our apprenticeship in poetry, sticking the landing often means landing the poem on two solid feet, with full closure, a bit of fireworks or epiphany at the end, a rhythmic blossoming and skipping, followed by a smoothing-out. Indeed, it’s important to close some poems in this full way. Where would poetry be without the closing to Yeats’s “Second Coming” (with all its tympanic prophecy): “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” But some of the most memorable endings land on one foot, off-balance. They close without true closure or without symmetry. The reader is left waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it doesn’t. This is the way the world ends, T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men,” not with a bang but with a whimper, aptly ending the poem on an unstressed syllable. Sometimes our poems should end with a whimper. Modern orchestral music can give us examples here; compared to the pyrotechnics and orgasmic conclusion of a Beethoven piece, modern music often ends, well, anti-climactically.

And why might that be a good thing? There are many possible reasons, and they vary from situation to situation. We can use the old show business slogan in a lot of cases: Leave them wanting more. Or, to be more theoretically sophisticated, we could say that off-balance endings leave the reader with something to contemplate rather than doing all the work for the reader. If 75% of all poetry is rooted in human longing, then it just might make sense for some conclusions not to satisfy. Conclusions are the most-revised parts of any poem. In a first draft, just to get my ideas down, I might build a full conclusion complete with moral, punchline, etc. But conclusions like that often do worse than satisfy: They sate. You know, like too much stuffing on Thanksgiving. Not every day is Thanksgiving. Not every poem should sate at the end.

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.

Graceless moments in poetry are exercises in existential humility and contingency. By deliberately permitting chinks in one’s textual armor, one takes enormous risks as a writer. About a year ago, in a community poetry workshop I led, a poet presented a very moving draft about looking for her mother after her mother’s death. Since the search takes place mostly in dreams, the language in the draft is generally archetypal, with echoes of Lorca, and, at points, surreal. At one point, however, the poem breaks out of tone with this line: “Finally I stood in the vestibule of a childhood home calling “Mom!”^[7] With good reason, it came up that “Mom” (as opposed to the more formal “Mother”) feels a little too informal for a poem whose language, themes, and tone were much more ponderous. Yet I found myself defending it because it does break that ponderous surface to expose the vulnerability of the grieving-adult-turned-searching-child. But there’s a good chance that this will be that line that rubs some editors the wrong way once the poem is sent out. That’s another kind of risk.

Allowing graceless moments into the poem is a risk taken for the sake of authenticity and, at the same time, for the sake of artifice. I’d better explain that, since authenticity and artifice are commonly viewed as antithetical to one another. This is due to another post-confessional legacy: the distrust of artifice. At the same time, experimental poets have voiced their distrust of poetry that tries to sound too natural, rightly arguing that it takes a good deal of artifice to make a poem sound sincere (i.e. to make that epiphany sound as though it emerges organically from that gaze out the kitchen window, a gaze that is formed out of words on a page). Gracelessness can be the instance in a poem where artifice and raw expression meet, grapple, and perhaps even embrace. I like the idea of that, and I think most poets probably do, too, insofar as they like mining the spaces between opposites where the ore of complexity is lodged.

Allowing graceless moments into the poem is a risk taken for the sake of authenticity and, at the same time, for the sake of artifice.

And here, this essay’s evolution affords a nice full-circle sense of closure even as it argues that such closure doesn’t always make for a good poetic experience. The essay began with mention of my friend, Jeff Oaks, who introduced me to the work of Adam Phillips. Now, I talk again with him about “gracelessness” — at the same coffee bar where I first discovered Phillips putting my idea into clear words. Jeff says the concept sounds a lot like the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, an aesthetic that, in acknowledgment of the transcience of life, demands some flaw be incorporated into any work of art. “The crack in everything” comes up, and I start singing a few lines from the Leonard Cohen song, “Anthem,” which probably draws its inspiration from Cohen’s time spent as a Buddhist monk. Then Terrance Hayes stops in for a cup of coffee to go, and he says that it sounds an awful lot like the duende. Yes, both Lorca’s duende and the Japanese wabi-sabi are aesthetic concepts that recognize the importance of fallibility as the necessary shadow to the light to which artistic effort aspires. Gracelessness is the manifestation of that necessary shadow at the level of craft. The examples I give here are only a few ways in which a graceless turn — a gaucherie at that level of line, word choice, or poem ending — can contribute to the overall sensation, upon finishing a poem, that the urn, though cracked, lets the light get in.