In a Station of the Metro

An article in The New York Times, "These 20 Words Are Worth a Thousand Pictures," suggests that Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is one of the shortest great poems in English.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; 

Petals on a wet, black bough. 

First published in Poetry Magazine in 1913, these 20 words (counting the title, which is central to the poem’s meaning) find "an echo of serene natural beauty in a hectic modern scene."

A Paris Metro station seen from a train, a bustling crowd in the rain at night, become petals on a flowering tree.

I've always liked this poem. I read it in high school. Later, I learned that Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was not only "a shrewd and cantankerous proponent of literary modernism [and Imagism], determined to shake poetry out of its Romantic and Victorian habits," but also an anti-Semite who embraced fascism, broadcasting pro-Mussolini propaganda on Italian state radio during World War II. After the war, he was charged with treason and confined to a mental hospital in Washington, D.C.

But in 1913...

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Prompt: Letters Never Received

I was teaching Melville's story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," which concludes with the revelation that Bartleby used to be a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington DC. Melville uses this setting as a metaphor for mortal hopelessness, misdirected communication, and loneliness.

I thought I knew of a poem about a dead letter office, but I could not find it. What I stumbled upon was the brief anonymous text here.

I found the letter I never gave you
and wondered if anything
would have changed if I did.
The paper felt lighter than I remember,
like time had taken some of its weight away.
I read it again
and so who I was back then
ready to be honest,
just not brave enough to follow through.

I don't know if it was intended as poetry, but it seemed to be a poem the way it appeared online. And that got me thinking about letters that are never received or never sent.

I thought of Emily Dickinson's letter to the world.

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,--
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

There are a variety of epistolary poems in the form of letters but the ones that interest us this month are ones that never were sent or received. The reasons why vary. Here are a few examples

"Letter to N.Y" by Elizabeth Bishop is a letter you couldn't send.

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you are pursuing:..

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz by Matthew Olzmann:
You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed
for children walking to school?

It is about gun violence and school shootings, and the title and opening lines invoke Miłosz’s poem “Dedication”, both poems attempting to bridge historical atrocities with modern, senseless acts. Who is it addressed to? All of us.

A famous letter poem is Sylvia Plath's "Daddy." This confessional work is about a daughter breaking free from the painful, controlling memory of her dead father (and her husband). Plath uses nursery rhyme rhythms alongside Holocaust and vampire metaphors in her rejection of male control.

Looking at her poem led me to her poet husband, Ted Hughes. His poem about a letter and his correspondence with Sylvia is contained in "The Last Letter." (More about that here)

For our September issue, we are looking for poems that are letters never sent or never received, or poems about letters never sent or received. They might be in the form of a letter, but that is not a requirement.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: AUGUST 31 

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Last Letters: Plath and Hughes

Hughes                                       Plath

In writing our prompt for our September issue about "Letters Never Received," we referenced a very famous letter poem by Sylvia Plath - "Daddy."  This confessional work is about a daughter breaking free from the painful, controlling memory of her dead father (and also her husband). Plath uses nursery rhyme rhythms alongside Holocaust and vampire metaphors. 

That poem might also lead you to look at another poem by her husband, Ted Hughes. His poem, "The Last Letter,' is another poem never sent. 

It is about his correspondence with Sylvia. His poem was withheld from the original 1998 publication of Birthday Letters, but it was discovered in his archive and published posthumously in 2010 by The New Statesman. The poem deals directly with the final physical letter he received from Plath right before her suicide.

It details the final three days of Plath's life and a specific letter.  Sylvia had mailed Hughes a letter that effectively served as a suicide note. However, due to a mailing mishap, the letter arrived early—while she was still alive.

The poem details Hughes rushing to her apartment after reading it. He finds her seemingly fine, and she burns the letter in front of him, leading him to think the danger had passed. He returns to his own flat, only for her to take her life shortly after.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme. That Is a Question.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos was defending major layoffs at his Washington Post, and when asked why, with all his money, he wouldn't just subsidize the paper, he argued payment was a “signal” of relevance. “If people won’t pay for our product, we’re not doing, it’s not a good enough product […] It would be like poetry without rhyming. It’s too easy.”

The analogy was mocked almost immediately, including by a former Washington Post literary critic who imagined Poetry magazine rejecting T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" for insufficient rhyme.

An article at theconversation.com took off from there and reminds us that English loves a rhyme. Because rhyme is so audible, some have decided it must mean the poet is Working Very Hard and Being Serious. Which is funny, because for a very long time nobody could even agree what it was called. In Middle English, "rime" could mean rhyme, but it could also mean meter, or just verse in general. 

And unrhymed poetry?

1. Beowulf. No rhyming couplets about Grendel's bad manners. The Old English poets had a completely different sound system. Heavy stresses, a big dramatic pause in the middle of the line, and lots of alliterative beats like a drummer 
   Rhyme only really moved in after 1066, when the Normans arrived with their Frenchified vowels and their Frenchified taste for everything to match. Rhyme is memorable, teachable, and you can hear it from the back row without really listening. So naturally, it staged a hostile takeover and started pretending it was poetry.
2. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, containing all of Creation and the Fall of Man entirely without rhyme. He even added a passive-aggressive preface explaining why. Rhyme, he said, was "no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse." What bothered Milton wasn't just the ding-dong-ding, but that rhyme tempts you to sound finished before you've actually finished thinking. He calls it the "jingling sound of like endings" and "the troublesome and modern bondage of riming." 
3. Mr. Shakespeare, when he actually needs to get something done, like, say, invent interior consciousness and run a five-act tragedy, he doesn't rhyme. His plays are built in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter. The music comes from the push and pull of the rhythm against the sentence, not from two words kissing at the end of a line. Rhyme is saved for when someone is falling in love, being witty, or about to exit with a flourish.

T.S. Eliot wrote in "Reflections on Vers Libre," that there is “no freedom in art.” No rhyme does not mean no structure. Rhythm, word order, line, repetition, and other devices become more exposed.

I think that writing poetry without concern for rhyme does feel easier at first. Rhyme is a very visible kind of difficulty. Some poets wrestle with it and if you get something that doesn't sound like a greeting card or children's song, you get a dopamine shot of accomplishment. Rhyme tells you when a line is over. It tells you where the next line has to go. It even gives you a cheap way to sound musical when the rest of the line is prose. 

Writing unrhymed (blank verse, or free verse) is hard because you have to build the music out of other things. Poets learn to use the weight of stressed syllables, the length of the sentence against the length of the line, alliteration, vowel echo, the caesura. Many readers can't point to why-this-is-a-poem. It may read to some like broken-up prose that is quietly asking to be put back together. 

Most of the poets who last — O'Hara, Milton, Williams, Bishop — can do both, and they choose the tools for the job.  

 

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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