The Body Poetic: Understanding the Anatomy of a Poem  

Chapter Two: The Bones

Welcome to “The Body Poetic: Understanding the Anatomy of a Poem”. I'm your host, u/actualnameislana, and together we will be dissecting a single poem, piece by piece, over the next few weeks. We will be looking at what makes its heart beat, how it stands and walks around on its feet, how it uses its skeletal structure to keep all its parts organized, as well as a ton of other bits and bobs and organs and parts that maybe you didn't even know existed.  Basically we will be pulling all the pieces of a poem apart to see what makes it tick.

If you're joining us for the first time, you may want to start your reading at the beginning. Here are some handy links to the rest of the chapters in this series.

Chapter 1: The Heart  

So, without further ado, gentlemen and gentle-ladies, let's head on over to the x-ray room. Today, we're examining...

The Bones  

A body without bones is like a house without a frame. No matter how well you arrange the furniture inside, the walls will inevitably collapse in on itself and the entire thing will end up a pile of rubble in an empty lot. A poem has bones too, and they work exactly like the frame of a house. The structure you build adds support and strength to the ideas and emotions you arrange inside it.

The body of art that we call “poetry" spans centuries of time, dozens of different genres, and literally hundreds of languages, cultures, and national borders. It would be a gargantuan task to attempt a comprehensive list of all the different poetic structures (from acrostics to haiku to sonnets to villanelles and beyond) that have ever been invented since the dawn of human existence.  So let's not take that approach. Instead, let's start with something simpler.

The Structure

Let's start with the line. The poetic line is the basic building block of all poetry. It's like the bricks you use to lay the foundation of your house. Brick by brick, you create a framework that supports the entire house. No poem exists without at least one poetic line. So the choices a ppet makes about what to include and what to exclude from that line are among the most fundamental artistic choices a poet will make about their poem.

Or, to use another analogy, the poetic line is like each individual bone that makes up your skeleton. Every bone is intricately connected to at least one other bone, and usually two or more through a network of muscle and tendon. A poem is like this too. Each poetic line is a structure in and of itself, and each line connects to at least one other line in the poem, and usually several, using a network of metaphor, allusion, phonoaesthetics, and visual cues.

A line need not be an entire sentence – or even a complete thought. Poets decide how long a line should be based on multiple competing artistic goals such as the speed of reading, end-rhymes, rhythmic considerations, emphasis on certain words, and grouping mechanics. Lines can be a single character long, or several sentences long. They can include parts of two or more sentences, or a tiny sentence fragment. There are no “rules” here that apply to all poems. There are only rules that apply to this poem. The poet decides what those rules are, and what they mean. But the point is that the poetic line is a purposeful grouping. Poets often group words on the same line in order to suggest a subtle connection between them that wouldn't be available by using the rules of standard sentence grammar.

And even more importantly, whatever the artistic reasoning for that decision, be it to emphasize a particular word, control the pace of the reader, or create an end-rhyme, that reason, and the resultant structure that you build, should always support the metatext of the poem. (See Chapter 1: The Heart if you don't know what that means.)

But the line is just the smallest unit of poetic structure. When multiple lines of poetry are grouped together, we call that larger structure a “stanza”. A lot of the “rules” of popular poetic forms like the Sonnet and the Villanelle have to do with what kinds of lines and how many lines may be put into a stanza. Groups of two lines at a time are called a “couplet”. Groups of three are called a “tercet”. And groups of four are called a “quatrain”. There are names for larger groups too like the “quintain” (5), the “sestet” (6), and the “octave” (8) but they are rarer except in very particular fixed poetic forms. In free verse, the poet has (as the name implies) far greater freedom to choose how many lines, and of what type, to group into a stanza. But the resultant grouping is no less important. In free verse, poets often use a stanza break to signal larger changes in mood, perspective, or topic. In this way, the stanza is somewhat similar to the paragraph in standard literature. Similar, but not identical. Unlike a paragraph, stanzas need not always confine themselves to groupings based on subject matter. Many times, multiple subjects are grouped into a single stanza in order to juxtapose their imagery, and subtly suggest a connection that would be unavailable using the standard rules of paragraph construction.

Together, a strong heart and a sturdy skeleton (the metatext and the structure that supports it) can create a framework of interconnected ideas that reach out through your entire poem just like veins and arteries, each one carrying the lifeblood of your poem out to all its various organs (your metaphors, your rhymes, your allusions, your juxtapositions, and more).

By contrast, a poorly designed, or haphazardly assembled structure is unlikely to support your metatext. It's like a pile of mismatched bones thrown into a corner. It's got two right arms, half a spine, no skull, and too many feet. You've managed to jam a femur backwards into an arm socket, and you've somehow got a dog's hip bones instead of human ones. Your structure is a mess. Even if your poem has a strong heart, and you manage to animate such a beast, the best that any such a creature could do is shamble drunkenly about, moaning incoherently. Poetry without structure is flimsy and unlikely to convey its metatext to its readers.

I hope by now it's clear to everyone that even free verse poetry requires structure of some kind – and purposeful structure at that. “Free verse” is a bit of a misnomer in this way. It does not mean “write any old thing and line break wherever you feel like it”. It merely implies a greater freedom to choose among many different artistic considerations when deciding where to put your line breaks and your stanza breaks.  

The Poem

At this moment, I'd like to draw your attention back to our poor little pinned bird in our journal: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Sometime During Eternity” (YouTube link). If you are joining us this week for the first time, I suggest reading the poem through once, and then going back and clicking the above link to listen to a reading of it. And if you're not, I still suggest reading or listening to the poem again to refresh your memory. Here it is, printed in its entirety.

Sometime During Eternity

Sometime during eternity
                                                      some guys show up
and one of them
                     who shows up real late
                                                      is a kind of carpenter
     from some square-type place
                                             like Galilee          and he starts wailing
                                         and claiming he is hip
           to who made heaven
                                      and earth
                                                     and that the cat
                  who really laid it on us
                                                is his Dad
 

         And moreover
            he adds
                        It’s all writ down
                                             on some scroll-type parchments
         which some henchmen
                 leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
               a long time ago
                                      and which you won’t even find
        for a coupla thousand years or so
                                                or at least for
     nineteen hundred and fortyseven
                                                     of them
                           to be exact
                                            and even then
        nobody really believes them
                                                  or me
                                                           for that matter
         You’re hot
                        they tell him
         And they cool him

             They stretch him on the Tree to cool

                            And everybody after that
                                                              is always making models
                                         of this Tree
                                                         with Him hung up
         and always crooning His name
                                    and calling Him to come down
                                and sit in
                                                on their combo
                          as if he is the king cat
                                                             who’s got to blow
                     or they can’t quite make it
 

                     Only he don’t come down
                                                        from His Tree
         Him just hang there
                                      on His Tree
         looking real Petered out
                                         and real cool
                                                            and also
                  according to a roundup
                                                   of late world news
            from the usual unreliable sources

                                                                real dead

The Analysis

So let's ask ourselves some questions about this poem, now that we've had a chance to see its structure on the page, and hear its structure through the audio recording. The first question we will ask ourselves is the simplest one:

“How is this poem structured?”

And the second and third ones are very similar.

“Are there purposeful line breaks/groupings?” and,

“Are there purposeful stanza breaks/groupings?”  

And of course, the answer to both of those questions is “yes”. So let's try to suss out the reasoning behind a few of those lineation choices.

The first thing that I notice about this poem’s lineation is how short each line is. Usually just a few words long, rarely more than about 4 or 5. I think the longest line is 8 words in length, and most of them are very short articles or prepositions – what I think of as ‘filler words’ like “the” and “on”. “They stretch him on the Tree to cool”. Despite this, there is a notable lack of standard punctuation. The text meanders down the page, zigging and zagging back and forth, mimicking the way the narrator's thoughts occur to them. Each line leads convincingly and organically to the next one, creating a stream-of-consciousness sort of feel. There is no sense of large pauses or breaks in the text. It's like the narrator is sharing their intimate thoughts directly to us, unfiltered and uncensored, as they think of them.

And I want you to notice how this organic, intimate, stream-of-consciousness feel adds to the metatext we discussed last week. The narrator themself is unsure about their own opinion of the Jesus story. But they have doubts. This is not a narrator with strong, iron-clad opinions on the subject, but rather a narrator in the middle of an internal debate. The standard way the story of Jesus is presented has left the narrator feeling doubtful about its truth, but at the same time, they have an equal level of suspicion about the motives of those who would claim its falsehood. I would say this isn't an “atheist” Jesus story, but more of an agnostic one. This is a person weighing two, equally untenable positions in their eyes, and finding both a little problematic.

The way the poem is structured creates that sense of doubt – the short, simple thought groupings, the way they control the reader’s pacing through each subsequent new thought, the way it almost feels like the narrator is speaking directly to us as they think out loud and consider each new point...these physical structures in the poem are the framework that the entire house is built on. They imply an uncertain, unsteady, perhaps even flimsy construction of thoughts. These are the poem’s bricks and walls, and this is how it props up its metatext. These are its sturdy framework of bones.  

The Preview

That's all from me for this week, OCPoets. Stay tuned for next week's installment, when we will be examining our patient's Muscles.

Until then, as always…

Write boldly.

Write weirdly.

And write the thing that only you could ever write.

~Lana