14 S UNDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2022THE POETAndrew Weatherhead once tweeted, “The best
way to read a poem is to pretend each line is the name of a
horse; so the poem is just a list of horses.” This joke says
something serious about poetry. It calls attention to the line
as a fundamental unit, which in some sense always stands
alone — the next line could always be anything.
When I’m writing a poem, and I get stuck, it’s often be-
cause I’ve forgotten this principle: The next line could al-
ways be anything.The poem has free will; the future in the
poem is not beholden to its past. This is true for any piece of
writing, but poetry seems to foreground those choices,
those leaps outside logic or predictability, as if the possibili-
ties of what comes next are moreinfinite in a poem.
I’ve started thinking of this moment, this chess move
where the poet breaks a line and almost resets the game, as
the lyric decision. How do poets decide what comes next?
How do they make us want to read another line, and an-
other? There has to be a system of coherence to the poem
—even a list of random horses has coherence, via theme —
but it can’t be unsurprising either. A series of lyric decisions
is how we write something between order and chaos.
I’ve noticed a formal trend in poetry toward the double
break, creating white space around each line, as though the
line were its own stanza. You can see examples of this in
Jackie Wang’s “The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us
From the Void,” Sandra Lim’s “The Curious Thing” and Me-
lissa Broder’s “Superdoom,” among other recent books.
This treatment on the page makes the line more quantized.The poem can feel mosaic-like, an arrangement of lines
with implied contingency — it might have been otherwise.
Take the poem “Qualm,” from A SYMMETRY (Norton, 97 pp.,
$26.95), by Ari Banias:Patience. Rage and being told “be patient.”The birds with orange heads and dust-colored bodies
bob on the power lines.The poet explains a patient is “one who suffers.”Beneath the highway underpass, a chair overturned in
the fenced-in weedstoward which a misplaced tenderness arises.There’s reliable pleasure in establishing a pattern and
then breaking it, the way Banias follows three end-stopped
lines with a sentence enjambed over two. But the extra gap
remains. The gaps suggest that connections between ob-
servations and feelings are tenuous — there’s a kind of
Humean doubt in the poem with respect to causation. That
misplaced tenderness is not necessarily caused by the
overturned chair.
The poem continues to collage and accrue impressions,
juxtaposing image (“Where one bright aperture in the
cloud has closed up/ inner tubes and shoes and life vests
flare on the shore”) and statements of fact (“My mother
lives above this beach. She watches them.”) and the poet’s
thinking (“Four old paint drips/ on the windowpane I
look /at, not through”... “The day opens like a com-pact, /mirror on one side/ powder on the other.”). I love
how this method imitates memory and evokes both scene
and mood — a mind in space-time, a person moving
through the day.
In “Fountain,” composed in the same style, Banias de-
scribes the vague, not altogether unpleasant alienation of
an unfamiliar place: “A motorcycle passes, a French police
siren /you say sounds innocuous then we both laugh
sourly. /I hadn’t seen a woman slap a child in some
time. /A truck reversing, and the alarm that continues for
hours one morning./ Porn on a handheld device, its tinny
echo in a room/ with bare floors and very little furniture.”
Again there’s a pattern, and a pattern-breaking: streams of
images and then the poet’s consciousness interjecting,
with a startling insight or question: “Do you just know how
to love another person/ like someone knew to paint those
window frames red?” “I don’t know the word for be-
cause. /So each act is disconnected from another.”
There’s a passage in Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”
that I’ve thought about often since I read it. In his first letter
to the student who had written him for guidance, Rilke pro-
vides the most extraordinarily direct instructions for how
to write a poem:
“As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you
see and feel and love and lose.... Describe your sorrows
and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and
your belief in some kind of beauty — describe all these with
heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express
yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your
dreams, and the objects that you remember.”
There are endless ways to write a poem, but this formula
is timeless and foolproof — describe your sorrows and de-
sires, of course, but let the poem think, too, and furnish it
with Things. The particular mix of objects, ideas and emo-
tions that make up a poem is the readout of all of one’s lyric
decisions.
I thought of Rilke’s advice while reading Chelsea B. Des-
Autels’s A DANGEROUS PLACE (Sarabande, 63 pp., paper, $15.95),
watching her make these decisions. Take the poem “Ghost
Child,” which begins with setting and a belief in beauty: “All
day the sun moved over the rock I sat on./ All day I tried to
think like an elk./ I’d been drinking bad wine/ from a ther-
mos and counting the blades/ on little bluestem.” The
poem snakes between interior and exterior landscape.
“And there’s the bull—/ disappearing into the blackening
sky. /Why did I come here, to get drunk among/ the glade
moss and deer flies?” The breaks in this poem are real rup-
tures: “What kind of body prefers cancer to a child?/ But I
did not want that baby./ The bull has already shed his vel-
vet.” The past interrupts the present, then life re-interrupts
—we can’t leave the present for long.
If any word can come next, any reality can, and a poem is
a site for reversals of expectation, as in “Four Years Later”:
“you’d think almost dying/ would make every minute
count. It doesn’t.” Or in “Broken Portrait”: “During cancer
I pray to an unfamiliar God. I’m the happiest I’ve ever
been.” And later in the same poem: “I married a good man.
He loves me and irons his own shirts. I’m spoiled./ I mean
I am rotting.” I feel battered around by this poem, in a good
way. I sometimes want a poem to abuse me a little, abuse
my trust and shock me, to be quiet and then suddenly loud.
In a poem, as DesAutels writes, there’s “no threshold be-
tween threat and tranquility”; “everything is actually/ ev-
erything else, the stone just kicked/ and whatever comes
next are the same.” 0On Poetry/The Lyric Decision/Elisa GabbertHow poets figure out what comes next.ALEX MERTOELISA GABBERTis the author of five collections of poetry, essays
and criticism, most recently “The Unreality of Memory & Other
Essays.” Her On Poetry columns appear four times a year.