Poetic Closure

I have an issue with the way many students are taught to write poetry. I think our books and classes are so theoretical and obsessed with what language can do that we forget why we even care in the first place, which is: because we want to make people feel something. Or at least, that’s what I want to do with my poetry.

This is why I dropped out of my MFA program. One of my professors and I got into an argument about this and she was exasperated that I cared so much about the emotion behind a poem. Feeling is not enough, she told me. I disagree. Feeling is everything for me in art, and if it’s not for you, then we’re not the same type of artist. Those who care more about the craft and doing clever things with words and structure may not find this series helpful, but for those who are trying to do what I am trying to do — bring more clarity to the emotions that we feel (instead of more obscurity through our language acrobatics), I hope this series on poetic craft will be helpful to you. I’m still a student and learning as I write, so any of your thoughts would be welcome as well.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how poems end. Actually, that’s a lie, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time because I have a lot of difficulty ending things—poems, essays, reported pieces, relationships (oops, did I just say that?). I’m not sure how to explain it, but I will have lots of momentum at the start and middle of a piece but will sort of peter out by the end. Like someone who always trails off at the end of their sentences. And I’m not too sure why I do this. Is it because I don’t know what I’m trying to say and why I’m writing the thing that I’m writing? Is it because I don’t have the skill to close effectively? Is it because what I’m saying isn’t original, and therefore every way I want to end is cliche and boring? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s a bit of all three.

Here I’m going to look at a few poems that I really love and figure out how they seem to end. Let’s start with the abridged version of a poem I really love:

“On This the 100th Anniversary of the Sinking of the Titanic, We Reconsider the Buoyancy of the Human Heart,”
by Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie

To be honest, I told Titanic, My honey’s leaving town
soon and I’m afraid it’s gonna wreck me, so I dove
down here.

Well come on in, Titanic said, but I’m not sure I’ve got what you’re looking for.

So in I climbed, through a window between two rust
stalactites, and began to pace her great promenade.
(Which should have been awesome, by the
way — walking by the ghosts of all those waving
handkerchiefs — except that I was in that feeling-feeling-sorry
for-yourself state where every hallway is the hallway of
your own wretched mind, every ghost your own ghost,
so I didn’t take a good look around.)

When I got to the Turkish baths, I sat on the edge of a
barnacled tub and watched weird crabs scrabble at my
feet.

I was hoping you’d teach me how to sink, I said. You
who have spent a century underwater with 1500
skeletons in your chest.

I don’t know, said Titanic, I’m kind-of a wreck.

Exactly! I said, Me, too! I’m here to apprentice myself to
wreckage. I’m here to apprentice myself to you! Great
bearded lady, gargantuan ark, you floating hotel. With
enough ballrooms in you to dance with everyone I’ve ever loved.

My heart has an iceberg with its name on it, I told
Titanic, so I need your advice. Tell me, did you see the
iceberg coming?

I did, Titanic said.

And you sailed right into it?

It was love, Titanic said.

And the band just kept playing? And the captain
stayed at the wheel? What did it feel like to swallow
seawater? Tell me, Titanic, how did it feel?

It felt like a hole in my side and then it felt like
plummeting face first into the ice-cold ocean.

She’s a straight talker, the Titanic.

[…]

The trouble with you humans is that you are so
concerned with staying afloat. Go ahead, be gouged
open by love. Gulp that saltwater, sink beneath the
waves. You’re not a boat, you can go under and come
up again, with those big old lungs of yours, those hard
kicking legs.

And your heart, she said, that gargantuan ark, that
floating hotel. Call it Unsinkable, though it is sinkable.
Embark, embark.

There are enough ballrooms in you to dance with
everyone you’ll ever love.

That’s what the Titanic told me this morning, me, lying next to her on the ocean floor.

There are enough ballrooms in you.

My brother (who’s an amazing visual artist) said that the poem felt really sad to him, which goes to show how effective the poem is. It reminded him of someone who is so heartbroken over a lost love and is desperately looking for some sort of closure. And at the end, the Titanic, to whom the speaker is speaking to, gives her that closure. It’s not closure where everything is resolved and everyone is happy, but it’s a sad sort of reassurance that the speaker has the strength to weather many broken hearts. There is also something hopeful about the ending: the Titanic herself is down at the bottom of the ocean all rusty, forgotten and pretty much dead. And yet she speaks of something beautiful and tells the speaker, “There are enough ballrooms in you.”

Now let’s look at how this feeling of peace and reassurance is achieved in this poem. First, it’s not a trite sort of okayness, and it’s not a premature one either. This is a poem that grows and evolves. The speaker wrestles with, learns, and grows throughout her conversation with the Titanic and the Titanic explains to her the complexity of loss, but also of possibility and hope.

What really happens to bring closure to this poem is the repetition of: “There are enough ballrooms in you.” This particular type of repetition is called anaphora, repeating the first few words in a clause or phrase. I think this repetition gives us a calming effect, much like the soothing refrain of a mother calming a child. It also provides emphasis for a message that is quite reassuring.

Rhythmically, while the poem has tended to swell with long, lyrical sentences, this truncated sentence also provides a sense of finality to the poem. In addition, the lines prior to the ending line gathered momentum throughout the poem with more and more repetition: (embark, embark) so it fits that the ending of the poem should also be a repeated line from earlier in the poem.

(I might be wrong, but this rhetorical device feels very familiar to me in contemporary poetry…does anyone know for sure? I feel like, although it is extremely well done here, sometimes this particular rhythm is overdone and poets can have an over-reliance on it.)

Let’s take a look at another poem that doesn’t rely on rhythm to give us a feeling of closure, Gary Soto’s Oranges.

Oranges
by Gary Soto

The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling
At her gloves, face bright
With rouge. I smiled,
Touched her shoulder, and led
Her down the street, across
A used car lot and a line
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted —
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickel in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn’t say anything.
I took the nickel from
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quietly on
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady’s eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what it was all
About. Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl’s hand
in mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

Another one of my absolute favorites. Such clarity in its expression. I can feel exactly what it was like to be that young boy on a winter day, with such hope and innocence. This poem is interesting to think about when thinking of endings because it is so subtly done. I think a common place for many contemporary poets to end this poem would have been after the cashier to his orange (and held them, knowing what it was/About). Maybe followed by another grand sweeping line after that, leaving a lot unsaid. It would certainly have a more dramatic effect than how it currently ends so quietly. Instead, the poem continues, and follows the boy and the girl outside into the winter air, and the poem doesn’t even really end with a significant event. Just a description of a boy peeling an orange. Also, the rhythm of the poem doesn’t really change, which would have been an obvious and easy way to signal the end of the poem. So how does Soto do it?

I argue that it’s partially with his images, and particularly, his use of color. Throughout the poem, the narrator associates the girl with light and brightness: her porch light “burned yellow,” her face was “bright with rouge,” she had a “light in her eyes,” etc. This lightness, contrasted with the cold harshness of winter, is paralleled at the end when the orange is also bright and reflects the joy that the boy feels. It’s an ending that feels earned because the imagery and feelings have built up throughout the poem.

I have to say that I don’t think the poet consciously made this happen, and I argue that poets shouldn’t consciously force metaphors and motifs into their poems. I like to believe (and obviously we won’t ever know), that the metaphors came about naturally…I know from being in love, that the object of your affections can appear to radiate light, and so it’s only natural that this girl and his love and hope all have light-like images. But the sharpness and clarity of them may have been on purpose and I argue that we can do that ourselves by being very clear in our minds about what we want our readers to see (and therefore feel) throughout the poem…whether it’s the light of the girl or the coldness of the winter air. The contrast is very sharp and expertly done…but also so simple and without any flowery language or extraneous details.

Also, while I said earlier that Soto doesn’t really change the rhythm of his poem to end it, I will have to amend and say that he does slightly slow down the poem with his parenthetical use of the commas, “That, from a distance,”. Many poems have a sort of slowing down right before the end of their poem (it feels like taking a breath right before the final note), and this poem is no different.

One last thing that I believe helps make this poem feel like it’s ended: distance. While the rest of the poem is very intimately from the boy’s point of view, the last line is from someone else’s point of view. Well, actually, it’s from the boy’s point of view, imagining someone else’s point of view, but the effect is the same. It’s almost like, if we were watching a movie (and this poem has so many sensory details that it almost could be a movie), the camera suddenly pans out so that we see the boy and girl walking, like an ending scene. (This makes me wonder if we can end a lot of our poems the way some movies end…for instance, some movies actually end the opposite way and focus in on one object…like the end of Inception, for instance. Other movies, like The Dark Knight Rises gives us a montage, etc. etc.)

Let’s look at one more favorite poem before we finish this installment:

Michiko Dead

He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.

Like all the poems we’ve looked at, there’s an emotional closure at the end of this poem—there’s an unease about deep sorrow at the start of this poem, but by the end, there’s a sort of comfort with the sorrow. Which almost makes it sadder. How do we arrive at this comfort with the sorrow formally? In this poem, the ending is neither signaled by rhythm nor is it signaled by distance. Instead, it’s signaled by time. We start in present tense, and then move to “afterward,” and there’s a restlessness throughout the whole poem. The end really begins at the “But now” (cleverly also enjambed) which helps us land the poem in the present, which feels somehow more grounded.

All this discussion of endings reminds me of a passage from Barbara Hernstein’s book Poetic Closure, where she argues that endings require structure. When I first read this, I didn’t know what she meant because it was an abstract idea to me. But after going through the exercise of looking at all my favorite poems, I think I understand what she’s saying. With all these poems, the ending somehow formally plays off a structure (or a pattern) that exists in the rest of the poem. In the Titanic poem, the poet plays off the repetition and lyrical quality of the rest of the poem, while in the Soto poem, he plays off the images and perspectives in the rest of the poem. In the Gilbert poem, he plays off the markers of time in the rest of the poem.

At the end of the day, I still argue that all these formal elements come second to the message or the feeling that the poet would like to convey. If the poet herself has not come to an emotional closure of a sort, then no number of formal elements can create a believable enough illusion of closure for her. These formal elements are only ways that she can convey that emotional closure and the type of formal element she chooses (and it’s apparent that there are several) will depend on the subject matter and the type of closure she’s conveying.

And how does a poet reach that emotional closure? Well, that’s beyond the scope of this post.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree? Disagree? Have more to add? I will probably be writing additional posts that look at other ways that poems end, so please suggest poems for me to look at!