The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

Example 8.10

Amid ships, workmen sprawl

like functions on a still graph,

absorbing late morning like time-

lapse prescriptions...

From ‘Crossing the Bar’ (Schultz 2000, p. 96)

Write a poem (Exercise 2a) which extends metaphor and uses open rather
than closed metaphor. What happens to the focus of the poem when you
write in this way?

Games and systems

In Chapter 1 you experimented with language through word association
and phrase permutation, but there are many other forms of linguistic play.
One of these can be to focus on a particular feature of language, and milk
it for everything it is worth. For example, in Charles Bernstein’s ‘Of Time
and the Line’ the poet plays on meanings of the word ‘line’. This strategy
points the poem in numerous directions in quick succession:

Example 8.11

George Burns likes to insist that he always

takes the straight lines; the cigar in his mouth

is a way of leaving space between the

lines for a laugh. He weaves lines together

by means of a picaresque narrative;

not so Hennie Youngman, whose lines are strict-

ly paratactic. My father pushed a

line of ladies’ dresses—not down the street

in a pushcart but upstairs in a fact’ry

office. My mother has been more concerned

with her hemline. Chairman Mao put forward

Maoist lines, but that’s been abandoned (most-

ly) for the East-West line of malarkey

so popular in these parts.The prestige

of the iambic line has recently

suffered decline, since it’s no longer so

clear who “I” am, much less who you are.When

making a line, better be double sure

what you’re lining in & what you’re lining

out & which side of the line you’re on; the

Postmodern poetry, avant-garde poetics 173