I got in bed last night and I closed my eyes and I lay there and then a powerful urge came over me to cross my eyes. I thought of tragic people like Don Rickles, Red Skelton, people like that. Broken professional entertainers who maybe once had been funny. And now they were in Vegas, on cruise control, using their eye-crossing to allude to their early period of genuine funniness. Or they were dead.
So I crossed my eyes with my eyes closed. And I saw something in the dark: two crescent moons on the outside of my vision, which were the new moons of strain. I could feel my corneal pleasure domes moving, too. And as my eyes reached maximum crossing I felt an interesting blind pain of wrongness. I decided that I should hold on to that.
SO NOW, you're waiting. I've promised something. You're thinking okay, he's said he's going to divulge. Your hope is that I, Paul Chowder, have some things that I know that you don't know because I have been a published poet for a while. And maybe I do know a few things.
One useful tip I can pass on is: Copy poems out. Absolutely top priority. Memorize them if you want to, but the main thing is to copy them out. Get a notebook and a ballpoint pen and copy them out. You will be shocked by how much this helps you. You will see immediate results in your very next poem, I promise.
Another tip is: If you have something to say, say it. Don't save it up. Don't think to yourself, I'm going to build up to the truth I really want to say. Don't think, In this poem, I'm going to be sneaky and start with this other truth over here, and then I'm going to scamper around a little bit over here, and then play with some purple Sculpey over here in the corner, and finally I'll reach the truth at the very end. No, slam it in immediately. It won't work if you hold it in reserve. Begin by saying what you actually care about saying, and the saying of it will guide you to the next line, and the next, and the next. If you need to arrange things differently later, you can do that.
And never think, Oh, heck, I'll write that whole poem later. Never think, First I'll write this poem about my old orange life jacket, so that I'll be more ready to confront the more haunting, daunting reality of this poem here about the treehouse that was rejected by its tree. No. If you do, the bigger theme will rebel and go sour on you. It'll hang there like a forgotten chili pepper on the stem. Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.
Another tip: The term "iambic pentameter" isn't good. It isn't at all good. It's the source of much grief and muddle and some very bad enjambments. Louise Bogan once said that somebody's enjambments gave her the willies, and she's right, they can do that to you. You shudder, reading them. Most iambic-pentameter enjambments are a mistake. That sounds technical but I'm talking about something real- a real problem.
And finally, the really important thing you have to know is: The four-beat line is the soul of English poetry.
PEOPLE ARE GOING to feed you all kinds of oyster crackers about iambic pentameter. They're going to say, Oh ho ho, iambic pentameter! The centrality of the five-stress line! Because "pent" is five in Babylonian, and five is the number of fingers on your hand, and five is the number of slices of American cheese you can eat in one sitting. They're going to talk to you about Chaucer and about blank verse-which is another confusing term-and all this so-called prosody they're going to shovel at you. And sure-fine-you can handle it. You're up to whatever mind-forged shrivelments they're going to dish out that day. But just remember (a) that the word "prosody" isn't an appealing word, and (b) that pentameter came later on. Pentameter is secondary. Pentameter is an import from France. And French is a whole different language. The real basis of English poetry is this walking rhythm right here.
Woops-dropped my Sharpie.
Right here: One-two-three-four. "Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill. We think so then, we thought so still." I think that was the very first poem I heard, "The Pelican Chorus," by Edward Lear. My mom read it to me. God, it was beautiful. Still is. Those singing pelicans. They slapped their feet around on those long bare islands of yellow sand, and they swapped their verb tenses so that then was still and still was then. They were the first to give me the shudder, the shiver, the grieving joy of true poetry-the feeling that something wasn't right, but it was all right that it wasn't right. In fact it was better than if it had been right.
In the middle of the night
Miss Clavel turns on the light
Hear that? Another four-beat line. My mother read that one to me, too. And "Johnny Crow's Garden." And A. A. Milne and his snail and his brick. Milne was a metrical genius. And Dr. Seuss, of course, the great Ted Geisel. Who probably was, if I really want to be truthful and honest-and I do, of course-the poet most important to me until I was about twelve. You remember the little intense guy with the hat on, who's on his stool in the Plexiglas dome, counting the people all over the world who are going to sleep?
And it scans. "Two Biffer-Baum birds are now building their nest." It rhymes-it relies a fair amount on silly proper names, but it rhymes-and it scans perfectly. Dr. Seuss was a stickler for scansion. He was part of a lineage that runs back through Punch and Lear and Gilbert and Sullivan and Lewis Carroll and Barham's Ingoldsby Legends. He uses the four-beat line in the great old way. In fact, I'd say almost all the poems that I heard as a child were classic four-beat lines.
Hell, let's get into it. Where's my Sharpie again? Okay:
See those four numbers? Those are the four beats. Four stresses, as we say in the meter business. Tetrameter. Four. "Tetra" is four. Like Tetris, that computer game where the squares come down relentlessly and overwhelm your mind with their crude geometry and make you peck at the arrow keys like some mindless experimental chicken and hurry and panic and finally you turn your computer off. And you sit there thinking, Why have I just spent an hour watching squares drop down a computer screen?
And his aunt Jobiska made him drink
Lavender water tinged with pink.
That's Lear again. Hear it? You can't help but hear it. Four beats in each line. That's the classic rhythm in poetry, and in songs, four beats. Don't let anyone tell you different.
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme-
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
You've got to admit that's good. That's Kipling. Did you hear what he did? "When Nature in her nakedness defeats us every time." Do you hear how he just drills that line right through your heart muscle? The "nay" of Nature and the "nay" of nakedness just push right through and screw you to the back of your chair. Oh, Rudyard, you were good in the 1890s. You were a nineties man.
But notice there that Kipling's second and fourth lines have a rest. A rest on the fourth beat. Listen for the booms now.