Praise for the Day

The poem Elizabeth Alexander read at President Obama’s inauguration is surprising: it’s written in an almost standard meter. Reading the poem on paper, it’s obvious that all of the lines are about the same length, and most are about the length of a “standard” iambic pentameter line (the kind of meter Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth used). Many of the lines even actually scan as iambic pentameter. Perhaps Alexander felt the occasion deserved a more traditional kind of poem, something more like what most people who’ve read some poetry in their life would recognize.

Her use of a by and large standard line is notable also because many of those who had complained about her choice before the inauguration had probably had in mind, in part, that she used “nonstandard” versification. To most people, free verse sounds like prose with a few random line breaks thrown in, in order to earn the writing the more prestigious label of “poem.” There are two objections here: that the poetry sounds like prose, and that the line breaks are random. The first is really only a matter of taste -- free verse does sound a lot like prose. The second is probably partly a matter of taste as well. But the placement of line breaks in such poetry is not really as anarchic or arbitrary as it seems.

Mary Kinzie, in A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, part of the University of Chicago Press “Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing” (the same series that publishes the academic handbooks Turabian’s “Manual” and The Craft of Research), provides the beginnings of a theory of blank and free verse. Kinzie explains that the line breaks in blank and free verse are not lazy but rather serve a purpose. There is a tension between the fact that the line has ended and the sense that the sentence has not ended. The line is over; but the thought is still incomplete. This produces a sense of forward movement.

I thought of Kinzie’s book when I heard the following lines:

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

but a much better example here is the stanza that comes before that:

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

At the end of the second line, the words, “who said,” seem to go with the marking of some person’s will on the landscape, but then we see that the words actually go with the next line, the simple “need to see what’s on the other side.” The initial sense of the ominous is dissipated immediately.

Kinzie compares writing poetry to charting a way through one‘s own life. I don’t know what Alexander had in mind, but this seems a possibly appropriate interpretation for her poem, for a poem written to memorialize the beginning of our way out of the multiple crises we now face.

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

You're right, there are lines in which it's hard not to hear the pentameter -- though I'm not sure how she decided which ones. (Compare "When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer", where it's the punchline.)

No question she uses enjambed vs. end-stopped decisively. But again you can't hear it when she reads. Some poets (Creeley, I think) treat it consistently as a pause, but she doesn't (or rather, she puts big pauses in everywhere, so you can't distinguish the line-ends.

[Vance Maverick]

Sorry, mangled that last thought. Creeley (like others, I think) always paused at line ends, when reading out loud. Thus, there was an audible effect to correspond to the visual break.

[bianca steele]

Vance,
I was under the impression poets always paused slightly at line ends. I heard Alexander as reading a sequence of very short lines, which is what I’d expected to hear, and was surprised when I saw the printed text. I suppose it’s possible she read very slowly in order to counteract the effect of echoes up and down the Mall. I don’t know whether an analysis assuming Alexander uses enjambment in the way Mary Kinzie describes would ultimately work out.