The Strange Loops of Paradoxes

M.C. Escher's Drawing Hands

This is a follow-up to our current call for submissions prompt about using paradox and negation in poetry. That prompt was inspired by a quite serious non-fiction book. Douglas Hof     book 

In logic, there are discussions of the "Liar Paradox." If a poet writes, "This sentence is false," it creates a loop where truth leads to falsehood, which in turn leads back to truth. Hof calls this a "strange loop." 

They may not have read the book, but many poets utilize the "strange loop" structure of self-reference and recursion.

Wallace Stevens is perhaps the most notable poet associated with this concept. In poems like "The Comedian as the Letter C," he explores "recursive meta-poetics." His work often features a "supreme fiction" — his term for a poem that tries to step outside of itself to describe the world, only to realize that the description is part of the world it is describing. This creates a loop where the "observer" and the "observed" become indistinguishable. 

Postmodernist John Ashbery's poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" mimics the "tangled hierarchy" of the painting by Parmigianino that it describes. It reflects on the act of reflection itself, with the poet’s voice spiraling through layers of consciousness that often return to the starting point of the gaze.

Randall Jarrell's poem "Eighth Air Force" invokes a poetic version of the liar paradox. By having a character state, "I have lied as I lie now," he creates a logic loop that questions the authenticity of the "I." The statement is true only if it is false, trapping the speaker in a recursive moral knot. 

Lyn Hejinian, in her experimental work "My Life," uses a recursive structure to explore the "consciousness of consciousness." The poem is composed of sections that reference each other and their own construction, effectively building a "self" through a linguistic feedback loop.

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Prompt: Paradox and Negation

Magritte's negative tells us that this is not a pipe. It's a painting.

A paradox is a statement that seems self-contradictory or absurd but reveals a deeper truth. If a poet says, "The child becomes a man," it’s clear, but it’s flat. Using a paradox forces the reader's brain to stall and then restart, which makes the meaning stick. "The child is father of the man," wrote Wordsworth. You stop. You realize this isn't about biology. It's about how our childhood experiences form our adult selves.

If we want to get fancy about it, paradox creates "cognitive dissonance," which is the mental discomfort you feel when you hold two conflicting beliefs, values, behaviors, or ideas at the same time. That tension can push people to change their thinking or justify their actions so things feel consistent again.

Emily Dickinson begins a poem by saying, "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died ."  She takes on the paradox of a living perspective on death.

She begins another poem:

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

There is a paradox and a negation there. In a third poem, she begins with the negative: 

 

It was not Death, for I stood up,

And all the Dead, lie down -

It was not Night, for all the Bells

Put out their Tongues, for Noon.

It was not Frost, for on my Flesh

I felt Siroccos - crawl -

Nor Fire - for just my marble feet

Could keep a Chancel, cool -

Continue reading that poem, and see how she continues with what things are not. Using negatives (no, not, never, un-, without) is a technique often called apophasis, paralepsis, or via negativa. It’s the art of defining something by what it isn't.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot contains the line "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be," which highlights a paradox about identity and purpose, contrasting the speaker's ordinary existence with the grandeur associated with Shakespeare's character. 

Dylan Thomas puts the negation right in the title for "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night."

In W.H. Auden’s "Funeral Blues," he writes: "The stars are not wanted now: put out every one." By "un-making" the world, he shows the vacuum left by grief. Focusing on what is missing makes the "hole" feel more tangible. 

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The poem begins with a series of imperative commands: "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking..." These initial lines suggest a desire to halt the world, to suspend reality in the face of immense loss.

For our March 2026 issue, we are asking for poems that begin in the first line with a paradox or negation (or both) and continue down that path. But note that in our full model poems by Dickinson and Auden, there is a shift in the second half that reveals that "deeper truth" beyond the negation and paradox. You should also attempt that poetic magic trick.

The submission deadline is, as always, the last day of the month - Tuesday, March 31.  

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Lives of the Poets: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, on February 27, 1807. He entered Bowdoin College at the age of 15, and one of his classmates was Nathaniel Hawthorne; the two would remain lifelong friends. When Longfellow graduated, the college gave him a chair in modern languages, and he worked with translations for the rest of his life.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was the most popular American poet of his time, and one of the most famous American poets of all time. It has been said that certain of his poems — the long narratives Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha, most notably — were once read in every literate home in America. 

Like other 19th-century poets, Longfellow is read less these days. He is often relegated to anthologies of American literature used in classrooms. His topics and language sound "old-fashioned" to modern audiences. 

In 1831, he married Mary Potter, and they went on an extended tour of Europe. While they were in the Netherlands, Mary died from complications after a miscarriage. Longfellow was bereft and found solace in reading German poetry, and when he returned to America to teach at Harvard, he began writing poetry of his own. 

He wrote about uniquely American subjects, and he was the first American poet to be taken seriously abroad. His collection Ballads and Other Poems (1841) became wildly popular; it included his poems “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Village Blacksmith.” 

He wrote several popular narrative poems, including the book-length Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). 

A second tragedy in his life occurred when his second wife, Fanny, died when her dress caught fire in 1861. As a way to console himself, he began rereading and then undertaking the first American translation of Dante’s Inferno (1867). 

On this late February afternoon, I reread Longfellow's poem "Afternoon In February," which begins:

The day is ending,
The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.

and I didn't want to go further.

I prefer some of his poems that are less likely to be anthologized, such as "Holidays," which begins:

The holiest of all holidays are those
    Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
    The secret anniversaries of the heart...

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Board Book Poetry

I have sometimes thought of children's books, especially the very simple board books of those pre-reading years, as sounding and sometimes looking like poems. This article on npr.org talks about that idea.

First, an apology. Okay, maybe apology is a bit strong. An admission of being wrong? Anyway, almost a year ago, I wrote to you all about kids’ book author Mac Barnett, who’d just been named the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, and his argument that kids’ books should be seen as up there with the best that literature has to offer. I was, let’s say, open to the argument, but skeptical (in my defense, that oughta be the baseline for reporters!). But then I started reading more and more to my kid and was slowly, more and more convinced towards Barnett’s side. Then, I read Jon Klassen’s new book, Your Truck. It’s the first in a series of board books aimed at super young kids, about things. The titular truck in the book is red. It doesn’t do much. A dog gets in the cab at one point. The language in Your Truck is spare and concise, but it packs an emotional wallop. When you are ready to go, your truck will go and go and go. It will take you as far away from here as you want. But not right now. Not yet.   Reading it reminded the article's author, Andrew Limbong, of the modernist poet Ezra Pound, a poet who gave his poetic principles. One was the “direct treatment of the ‘thing," where all of the emotional impact is woven into something concrete. Klassen told me he didn’t go into this book thinking he’d be writing about a child eventually leaving home when writing a board book about a truck. Those metaphorical considerations are built into the thing itself. Instead, the only question he asked himself when writing was “what’s cool about a truck?”  There’s something about the time and space limitations on books for small kids that lend themselves well to poetic readings. Besides some clear classics like Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon and Brown’s Seven Little Postmen Any children's book that reads like poetry for you?

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org