On Questioning Reality

Many great poems are born out of questions. After all, poetry has been interrogating reality since the dawn of language. What does it mean to be human? To be on this Earth? To quote Mary Oliver, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Good poets know how to follow their own lines of poetic inquiry. What cannot be answered in prose can sometimes be answered in poetry—though, of course, a good question leads to more questions. Here’s how poets ask their way into a poem.

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Close Study: “The Hum” by Maggie Smith

Retrieved from New England Review.

This moving, vulnerable poem asks—or, rather, “states”—questions at the heart of our shared human struggle. Anyone who has felt betrayed by the world, alone in their trouble, hopeless, powerless, or dubious about the future can relate to the tension and desperation motivating this poem. What do we do with those emotions?

This poem doesn’t directly answer that question, but it does bring us to ask it. There are a few craft elements that help make this poem so evocative, including:

• Attention to voice and readability.
• Interweaving of images and ideas.
• Play with page space.

Central to “The Hum” is the speaker’s attention to voice. She addresses this directly when she tells the reader not to interpret each sentence as a question, interrogative though it may be. The poem literally tells you how to read it: without rising inflection, without using questions as shields against what is most painful about the world.

The speaker implores you to read “The Hum” as it’s written—only in the declarative mood—which makes the atmosphere of the poem more somber, more intense in its pleading, resigned to the humility of being human but still desperate to find an answer. While most poems don’t tell you directly how to read it, a good poem does bring with it a sense of rhythm and movement that the reader can pick up on in their own private reading.

With this in mind, the poem’s interweaving of ideas and images becomes much more evocative. There are 3 interwoven threads in this poem: the power of questions, the search for meaning and survival, and the endurance of the body/soul. Each stanza typically juxtaposes 2 or 3 of these threads, and each thread is bisected across different stanza breaks. As each stanza explores different configurations of the same themes, it arrives at the “unasked” questions driving the poem forward: what question does your soul ask of you? How is this question driving your life forward? Is your life an answer to that question? If so, what is the answer?

It’s worth noting, here, that “soul” is a rather dangerous word to use in a poem. Soul is a big, abstract word, with a lot of loaded meanings and implications, but the work it does for a poem is often nebulous. It’s a word that tries to profit off of being poetic, rather than contributing to the meaning behind a poem. Be sparse with it. In this poem, the word works, because the speaker isn’t trying to tell you about some universal notion of the soul, she’s telling you about how she experiences her own soul, rooting it in concrete imagery that furthers the poem along.

Lastly, what’s up with the poem’s line breaks? Why is there so much space in front of each tercet’s first two lines? I don’t have a perfect answer for this, though the play with page space certainly makes the poem more evocative. One thing those indentations do is create a sense of space and openness in the poem, almost as if the tercets are floating in empty space, lonelier than if they were simply left-flush. Another thing those indentations do is create additional physical space between the end of one line and the start of the next. Finally, if you read this poem with pauses any time there’s an indentation, the poem takes on a sense of contemplation and heaviness, weighed down by the implications of its own questions.

In your own poetry, ask yourself: what questions does my soul ask of me? How do I answer those questions? Such questioning could create doorways into new poems.

Craft Perspective: “The Scientific Underpinnings of Poetry” by Pattiann Rogers

Read it here, in LitHub.

To be a poet is to be a scientist.

That might seem untrue. Particularly in the 21st century, science and the arts seem to be in opposition: the STEM major and the Humanities major, at odds.

And yet there is a shared spirit of experimentation. A chemist experiments with substances, a biologist with organisms, a poet with language.

At the root of all knowledge making is the art of asking good questions. The scientific method is grounded upon the formulation and testing of hypotheses.

A poem, too, has a hypothesis. Poems interrogate our place in the world, our relationships to one another, our similarities and differences with nature, where we come from and where we’re going, our present moment, our human nature, our purpose, our traumas, our identities, our hopes.

This is true even of poems that don’t ask questions. Take the short poem “Poem” by Langston Hughes:

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began—
I loved my friend.

This simple, earnest poem doesn’t seem to ask anything. What is the hypothesis? What is being tested? Let’s step outside of that framework, and just consider what the poem accomplishes. In as few words as possible, and without even the use of imagery or metaphor, the poem conveys the pain, quiet and self-contained, of losing someone who made your world brighter.

Perhaps those are the questions the poet asked. How can I express what I feel plainly? Without image or artifice? How can I crystalize this pain into language?

Or, perhaps Hughes asked different questions, questions we don’t know, questions floating in his unconscious mind. But, certainly, a poem as beautiful and evocative as this one doesn’t arise without the poet seeking something deep, true, and hard-to-access in language.

Of course, Maggie Smith’s “The Hum” is another great example. It doesn’t even “ask” any questions, technically, and yet the poem is driven by a questioning of our humanity, our endurance in a terrible world, the existence of our souls, and what those souls beckon us to do.

Perhaps Smith gets to the core of poetry: What is it that our souls are asking of us? Perhaps our poems are how we respond to our souls.