A Way with Words

From Bryan White

My daughter writes poetry sometimes, and a few weeks ago, as I was drifting off to sleep, I was thinking about some advice that I gave her years back regarding poetry writing, and I was expanding on it in my head. I find that my thoughts are often addressed to someone I know, things I might say to them later or in circumstances wholly hypothetical, little fantasies where the person in question actually considers my insights valuable. Luckily, these monologues are easy to adapt to a blog post like this, where they can endure in a written, rather than oral, form, where they can be better expressed and preserved, and where, honestly, they might be more appreciated.

Regarding poetry, I told my daughter that a lot of people who write amateur poetry seem to think that the point of poetry is to describe your feelings — to describe them in almost forensic detail, the more gut-churning the terms, the better. I told her that the real point of poetry is to create something with the words that evokes the feelings. This is a more difficult accomplishment.

This is the reason, in my opinion, that a lot of poetry written by teenage girls comes off as moody and full of angst. It isn’t necessarily that these girls are actually moody and full of angst; it’s because they aren’t making the necessary connection with the reader. They’re trying to describe some sort of deep pain and sadness, but all the reader is getting is a sense of someone snarling and sneering in their face, almost challenging them to be the cause of all their misery. It’s off-putting. If someone reads a poem and the impression they walk away with is, “Wow! This person has serious emotional problems,” then the poem is a failure, at least in regards to that particular reader. The same feelings that that poet is trying to express may be long familiar companions to the reader, but they’re not being presented in a way that promotes empathy and understanding. The poet isn’t creating a piece of common ground where they can meet the reader and both experience the emotions together. The poem itself is supposed to be this piece of common ground.

This is further complicated by the fact that many good poems (and song lyrics, I suppose, since I’m mainly going to be drawing on those for examples) also give the impression of someone simply describing their emotions. But if you look more closely, you begin to see that there’s something more going on there.

Take this lyric from the song “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac:

I’ve been afraid of changing

‘cause I built my life around you,

but time makes you bolder,

even children get older,

and I’m getting older too.

On the surface, this just seems like she’s telling you how she feels about something. But what really evokes the emotion is the idea behind it. It’s the idea of someone at the end of a long relationship. They know it’s gone cold. They know it’s over. But the relationship looms so large in their life. It’s the cornerstone of all their choices, a huge part of who they are. And it’s hard to walk away from all that, but you finally get to a point where you have to. She’s not so much describing this idea, as she is speaking from within it, almost like a character, like a voice within the larger drama of her life.

And it’s the humble simplicity of it that makes it so heart-rending as well. She isn’t twisting the emotions in her hands, trying to wring every drop of blood from them. If anything, it’s understated. Passages like this are all the more powerful because they give the audience the impression that they appreciate how deeply these feelings run possibly even more than the writer does. They don’t beat the audience over the head with loud proclamations of pain and torment; they give the audience a quiet space to take their time with their own experience of these emotions, as with a grief.

Probably my favorite example of moving lyrics of this sort is Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” The song is broken into three subjects, clouds, love, and life, and a theme is repeated with each of these subjects. She first writes about the subject from the vantage point of being young, naive, and full of wonder, and then she juxtaposes that with a vantage point of bitterness and disillusionment. And THEN, the really heart-breaking thing, she says that even though she’s had to go through all this sorrow, she feels that’s ultimately she’s learned nothing about these things, and she’s left clinging to whatever scraps of illusion she could salvage from the past.

Rows and flows of angel hair

ice cream castles in the air

and feathered canyons everywhere.

I’ve looked at clouds that way

So you see it. You see the blue skies. You see the girl looking up at the clouds all bright eyed, picturing the childish things she sees there.

But then there’s a turn:

But now they only block the sun.

They rain and they snow on everyone.

So many things I could have done,

but clouds got in my way.

It’s like there’s a fade, and she’s older now, making her way in her life. You see this too.

I’ve looked at clouds

from both sides now

from up and down

and still somehow

it’s cloud illusions that I recall.

I really don’t know clouds

at all.

So this establishes the pattern and it’s crucial. Clouds are used like a tangible metaphor for the pattern itself. I don’t believe that the rest of the song would work if it didn’t start by hooking you with these images of clouds.

She moves on to love:

Moons and Junes and ferris wheels,

the dizzy dancing way that you feel,

as every fairy tale comes real.

I’ve looked at love that way.

These are our crushes, our infatuations, our hopes and fantasies of everything that love could be. It’s this grand, beautiful thing, and she can’t yet conceive of the pain that can come with it.

But again there’s a turn:

But now it’s just another show,

and you leave them laughing when you go,

and if you care, don’t let them know.

Don’t give yourself away.

And here, as with “Landslide” we have the voice speaking from within the idea. She’s isn’t just describing the hurt that she’s experienced; she’s imparting the bitter lesson of guarding one’s heart that’s gained from those hurtful experiences. And we know this lesson. So when she speaks from within that idea, we immediately understand the painful place that the idea comes from.

And we see this again in the last stanza of the last verse:

Oh, but now old friends are acting strange.

They shake their heads and they tell me that I’ve changed.

Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained

in living every day.

Here she doesn’t have to exhume the wreckage of life, cataloging all of its misfortunes in exhausted detail. She only has to let out a sigh from where she languishes adrift on it under endless cloudy skies.