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Voices

James S. Torrens, S.J. is America's former poetry editor.

James S. Torrens, S.J.
Our poetry editor reflects on the 2010 crop.
Books
James S. Torrens, S.J.
A native of the city, Louise Gluck visits the countryside in her latest collection of poems.
Poetry
James S. Torrens, S.J.

Simeon, what you’ve been awaiting

Culture
James S. Torrens, S.J.
W. S. Merwin writes about darkness, but also our fugitive but astonishing experiences of light.
Poetry
James S. Torrens, S.J.
A deep bow to the Foley Poetry entrants
Culture
James S. Torrens, S.J.
Some poetry for the soul
Poetry
James S. Torrens, S.J.

Fear not, young woman,

Faith in Focus
James S. Torrens, S.J.
A look back at America's 2008 poetry contest
Books
Edward Hirsch president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foun-dation has contributed mightily to our appreciation of poetry How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry 1999 discourses on all the aspects of poetry drawing widely on what the poets themselves have had to say about it Po
Faith in Focus
James S. Torrens, S.J.
The Foley Poetry contest approaches, with entries accepted between Jan. 1 and March 31. I know how the outpouring of poems will eventually seem like what Robert Frost describes in After Apple Pickingthe rumbling sound of load on load of apples coming in. (The picker admits he is overtired of the great harvest I myself desired.)

What do I want to say now to improve the harvest? Mostly I want to observe, in the face of relaxed habits, that a decent paragraph of prose is not necessarily a poem. Typography can spread out a text attractively on the page, but that doesnt necessarily make it a poem. Besides pleasing visually, the poem should please the ear. Its intelligent design has to include, above all, a discernible music, some evident or subtle way that the words, phrases and lines are knit together for the ear.

This concern for regularities of sound does not rule out flashes of imagination, eloquence, wit and insight, which are the life blood of poems. But it is a reminder of the ears love of pattern, and that poetic artistry lies in elements, small or large, that repeat. In the older English verse, poetic form meant metricsa controlled alternation of stressed and unstressed syllablesand, except for blank verse, rhyme. Even now, songs, hymns, blues couplets and nursery rhymes hew closely to these standards. But for many writers today the fixed forms, like the rhymed quatrain, which Emily Dickinson managed so brilliantly, have become a straitjacket.

There are many alternatives for patterning sound. Consider the psalms. No one who prays the psalms will claim that they rhyme, but in a larger sense they do, strictly. Each line is immediately matched by another of equal length, which says the same thing in other words, or develops the statement, as in this verse of Psalm 107: God changed rivers into desert, / springs of water into thirsty ground. Shifts of thought and alterations of mood are needed to prevent monotony, but the pattern governs strongly. Also a number of psalms have repeated segments, i.e., refrains (e.g., Psalms 42, 43, 46, 67, 80), which function as echoes. Echoing is a great resource for poetry and song, as it is for rhetoric.

In modern poetry skill lies above all in management of the line. The ear has to be good at tying together sounds within the line, whether by alliteration or assonance (similar vowel sound) or by keeping a key word at the end of the line, which is the most emphatic place. In unrhymed poetry, the slight pause to dwell at the end of a line is a key to maintaining rhythm.

Somber though it is, the poem Driving Home by Charles Simic, (The New Yorker, 8/13), is a classic of intelligent design. Here is the first of two stanzas:

Minister of our coming doom,