Ambiguity vs. Confusion in Poetry

Poets are notorious for using ambiguous language. Some ambiguity can be extremely resonant, and it can add complexity. But some lack of clarity is just confusing and puts off the reader. What is the difference between ambiguity that expands language to include multiple possible meanings, and lack of clarity that is just plain obscure? 

Since we’re talking about ambiguity, it’s not surprising that the line between ambiguity and confusion is blurred. A couple of examples can help distinguish between these two types of ambiguity. I’m going to use an early and a later poem by the writer Jorie Graham as examples of these two different kinds of ambiguity.

Poet Jorie Graham

The first example is from Jorie Graham’s early book Erosion, published in 1983. One poem I admire in that collection is “Scirocco,” named after a hot wind that blows from the Sahara Desert to southern Europe. The poem takes place in the apartment in Rome, Italy, that the poet John Keats lived in around 1821, not long before he died at age 26. Describing the view from Keats’ residence, Graham writes:

Outside his window

you can hear the scirocco

working 

the invisible.

Now, I have no idea what it means to be “working / the invisible,” but that’s a beautiful phrase with many echoes. It could mean the literal sound of a wind that moves air or foliage we can’t see, or possibly the activity of a spiritual reality beyond the experience of our senses. The wording is ambiguous but in an extremely evocative way. Graham goes on from there:

Every dry leaf of ivy

Is fingered,

refingered. Who is

the nervous spirit

of this world

that must go over and over

what it already knows,

what is it

so hot and dry

that’s looking through us,

by us,

for its answer?

Again, a lot of the language Graham uses here is not crystal clear. That includes “the nervous spirit” that is “fingering” the ivy (I love the verb “fingering”!). But just the addition of the adjective “nervous” before the noun “spirit” gives us an original and vivid description of a restless wind, and also a seeking, transcendent presence. The lack of clarity in this passage is extremely purposeful and useful, because it sets up the idea that there is a spooky reality even more evanescent than a hot wind, one that links human experience to the things of this world. That spirit is not only “looking through us,” it is looking “by us, / for its answer.”

In Jorie Graham’s entire poem, “Scirocco,” ambiguity paradoxically serves a very specific purpose. The purpose is to suggest there is a metaphysical link between human consciousness and the things of the world, an expansion of a theme in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

Contrast that with a poem from later in Jorie Graham’s career, “The Visible World,” from her book Materialism, published a decade later in 1993. The poem begins

I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface

                                                        breaks

into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts.

If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck,

I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender

maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises.

Diggers, forgetters… A series of successive instances…

Frames of reference moving…

Say what? The ambiguities come so fast and furious here, I have a hard time even knowing where we are, and what I’m supposed to be visualizing or feeling. Starting with the opening sentence, “I dig my hands into the absolute,” I’m unsure if this is an actual, physical reality or a metaphorical realm. As soon as I start thinking there is something I can grab onto, such as hands digging in the soil, the poet pulls the ground out from under me and has the hands “making and unmaking promises.” What promises? I don’t feel the poem ever answers that question. Yes, indeed, there are “Frames of reference moving”, But not much else I can relate to, only “A series of successive instances…”

To me, this latter poem is an example of confusion, rather than useful ambiguity. It could very well be that I’m too impatient and too literal, that I’m missing the whole point of how Jorie Graham’s style developed. Still, I can’t decode possible, alternate readings that vibrate with meaning. This poem consists only of fragments for me, and the poet has not included enough matching edges to make me want to fit the pieces together. 

If I had to define the difference between ambiguity and confusion in poetry, it would be this: ambiguity allows for multiple understandings that each resonate deeply with meaning. Confusion leads the reader down multiple burrows that don’t connect in meaningful ways.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Interview with Poet Linda Pastan

This installment of Advice for Writers is an interview with one of my favorite poets, Linda Pastan. Linda Pastan's many awards include the Maurice English Award, the Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumni Award, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. The former poet laureate of Maryland, she is the author of fourteen books of poetry—the latest of which, Insomnia, won the Towson University Prize for Literature.

Q.: Who were your teachers, mentors, or role models? What were the most useful or lasting lessons you learned from them?

Linda Pastan: My only teachers, mentors, and role models were the poets I read in books. As an only child growing up in New York City, I lived far from my school in a kind of isolation, books were my company, and luckily my parents had an extensive library. (I did work for one semester, in graduate school, with the poet J.V. Cunningham.  It was a one-on-one “class” during which he assigned me various forms, and so I learned the rules before learning to break them.) The lasting lesson I learned from reading Dickinson, Keats, Auden, et al., was to be unsatisfied with what I was writing; to try and try harder!!

Linda Pastan

Q. How has the situation of women poets changed since you began writing seriously in the 1960s?

LP: When I first started sending poems out to magazines, I considered using initials so that the editors wouldn’t know I was a woman. Women were not published nearly as much, and they were hardly reviewed at all. That has certainly changed. On the other hand it still seems to be the case that when male poets write about domestic things—marriage, children, etc.—they receive serious praise, but women poets writing on the same subject are more often condescended to.

Q. Do you enjoy reading your poems to an audience? What is the difference for you between publishing your poems and reading them out loud to people?

LP: To me, the poem on the page is what matters most. Some poets read their work out loud well. Others, T.S. Eliot, for example, read them terribly. It doesn’t really matter to me. But I do enjoy reading to an audience. It helps me to realize that there are real people out there, actually reading my work.

Q. You’ve written a lot about families, marriage, and parenthood. How do you approach writing about topics that are so familiar and close to home that it’s hard to get distance on them?   

LP: I don’t think a poet should aim for achieving distance from a subject. The point is to get up close.

Linda Pastan’s most recent book of poems is Insomnia

Q. Do you see yourself as a Jewish writer? How does Jewish tradition and/or Jewish literary tradition shape your work and your voice as a writer? 

LP: I am Jewish, and I am a writer. And I do use Jewish imagery in many of my poems, imagery I learned from Orthodox grandparents. And I love writing on Biblical subjects, particularly  the book of Genesis. But I don’t consider myself a “Jewish Writer,” just a writer who happens to be Jewish.

Q. When you compiled your book Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, did you rewrite any of the earlier poems? If so, what were you looking to change or improve? 

LP: I think it was Auden who said poems are never finished, merely abandoned. I keep making small revisions on poems, even after they have been published in magazines and then books. And I am still making changes to various poems in the margins of my copy of Carnival Evening.

More information on Linda Pastan's most recent book of poems, Insomnia.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 2: Ending a Poem with a Resonant Image

For me, one of the most effective ways to achieve closure in a poem is to end with a resonant image.

The temptation when you are ending a poem is to try to tie up every loose end. You want to tell the reader exactly what it is that you’re trying to say, what you’ve been building up to for the entire poem. That strategy is very likely to put the reader off. Why? Because no one likes being lectured to. Least of all, fans of poetry. The chances are, if you’ve written the entire poem with a particular emotion or idea in mind, the reader has gotten the message by the time the poem is almost done.

So, don’t end a poem by hitting the reader over the head. Instead, expand the horizons the poem has explored. Finish with an image that lingers in the reader’s thoughts and echoes other elements in the poem. Ending with a particularly vivid and haunting image changes the tone so that the poem has closure at the end.

The best way to explain this is to give an example. The classic instance of this is John Keats’s sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Basically, the speaker of this poem is saying that he’s read a lot about Homer’s Greece, but he never really got it till he read George Chapman’s translation of The Odyssey. Now he understands the beauty and majesty of Homer’s poetry and the world he describes.

John Keats

But instead of saying that flat out, in the poem’s sestet, or final six lines, Keats gives us two seemingly unrelated images. The first is an astronomer discovering a new planet when it “swims” into view (you gotta love that verb, “swim”!). The second is the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, leading an exploratory party to a cliff in Panama, where for the first time, Europeans gazed on the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, from the Americas.

More than any didactic conclusion, these two images give a sense of the incredible wonder that Keats felt when he read Chapman’s translation of Homer. That last image, of the ocean that was undreamed of by Cortés and his men, just rolls on and on in the mind, like a long chord, as vast and inspiring as the Pacific.

What provides the closure here is that we have switched from Homer to another realm, but one that vibrates with Keats’ feelings about discovering Chapman’s version of The Odyssey. The poem has shifted, but is still in the mode of awe, in fact, deeper in that mode because of the resonant image. The image Keats chooses is so much more expansive than someone sitting in a library reading a translation from ancient Greek. The image also reflects on how amazing a reading experience can actually be.

One contemporary poet who has mastered the art of ending on a resonant image is Joseph Millar. Millar has a way of finding a final image that engages the reader, brings together threads in the poem, but opens the door to deeper emotion or contemplation. 

Joseph Millar

In his poem “Labor Day,” for instance, Millar describes all the ways that labor is not being done on that holiday. The speaker is celebrating all those who have earned a day off because of their hard work. Instead of winding up with this theme, though, he ends with a cinematic image that encapsulates and expands the poem’s ideas and emotions:

the tuna boats rest on their tie-up lines

turning a little, this way and that.

This last image is a symbol of Labor Day itself, with the boats docked and not in use (and you know tuna boats see some serious fishing!). But that image also lets in another range of ideas and emotions, because of the restlessness of the boats in the water. This motion might suggest that Labor Day may be a time of repose, but it also highlights unresolved issues about those who work with their hands, and those who manage or profit from their labor.

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 1, Part 3, Part 4

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Using Poetic Forms, Part 2: The Sonnet

Probably the most popular poetic form in English is the sonnet. It’s a form that goes back many centuries. Invented in Sicily in the 13^th century by Giacomo da Lentini, the sonnet caught fire and became enormously popular in Italy and then throughout Western Europe in the subsequent centuries. In most European languages, the sonnet has fourteen lines of twelve syllables each. Only in English does it have ten syllables in iambic pentameter. In English the most famous sonneteer is, of course, Shakespeare, but he was far from the first or the last to popularize the form in that language.

When to use the sonnet form

A sonnet usually has a volta (from the Italian word for “turn”), traditionally after the eighth line. This indicates a switch from what is laid out in the first eight lines, to a different mode or state of mind. So the sonnet is like an argument that has a decisive shift two-thirds of the way through.

A sonnet begins with exposition, and then reaches a conclusion. Or a sonnet starts with a problem, and works toward resolution. It has to be a situation that can be spelled out and resolved in 120 syllables, which isn’t a lot of verbiage, so an extremely complicated premise isn’t going to work. The topic of a sonnet also has to lend itself to the argument, counter-argument format, though that is less important in more recent sonnets, such as the poems of Marilyn Hacker, which tend to be more narrative.

Here’s a sonnet that seems to me almost a perfect embodiment of the form, John Keats’s great poem, “Bright Star”:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

The first eight lines, called the octave, present a model of constancy, using diction that is full of distance, coolness, and religiosity: “lone,” “aloft,” “watching,” “Eremite (hermit),” “priestlike,” “pure,” “ablution,” “mask,” “snow,” “mountains,” “moors.” Everything suggests the opposite of heat or passion. The rhymes are tight and unwavering: art-apart, night-Eremite, task-mask. At least until the last word of the octave, or first eight lines. These first eight lines spell out the argument or the problem—the speaker yearns for the fidelity of the star. The star is a perfect image of loyalty, particularly the pole star or North Star that stays in one place in the sky, but it’s also remote and untouched, which makes it an incomplete role model for lovers.

In the sestet, the last six lines, Keats gives us the counter-argument, making it clear from the first word—“No”—that he’s going to show us the exact opposite of that cold version of constancy. The contrary is the extremely close, warm, and intimate image of the speaker lying with his head on his lover’s chest. He feels the motion of her breath as her chest rises and falls. This is as far as you can get from the distant, cold-hearted star. And yet the speaker hopes to combine this time-bound passion with the constancy of the star: “yet still stedfast.”  Interestingly, this bodily version of love could lead to something even more immortal than the star: “And so live ever,” but it can also lead to mortality: “or else swoon to death.”

One thing Keats shows us in “Bright Star” is that the sonnet can take in everything from passion to metaphysics in just fourteen lines. It's a great form to play out an argument you're having with yourself or another person, but not a violent argument, more like differing viewpoints. The form can also portray a moment of intense closeness. Oddly, Keats addresses the poem to the star, using the intimate “thou” form. The poet speaks of his beloved in the more distant third person. But hey, this was 1819. I think this was about as sexy as you could get in England at that time—and then some.

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 


Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 6: Endings

On what note do you end a book of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction? With a crescendo, like a classical symphony? One famous example of that is the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, where Molly Bloom’s soliloquy goes on in an eight-page, nonstop sentence and ends in breathless affirmations.

Or do you finish with a quiet image that lingers, leaving the reader to ponder:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies    

When a new planet swims into his ken;  

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes    

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men 

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—    

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

—John Keats, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”

Ending with a stunning image—“Silent, upon a peak in Darien”—can sometimes be more effective than a crescendo, since it’s understated and allows the reader to measure and experience the full impact of the ending.

But how you end a book depends entirely on what comes before the finale, and how the last act fits organically with the rest of the book. A book is a living organism. You can’t change one thing without affecting each morsel of the text. The ending has to fit with the rest of the book or it will feel manipulative or tacked on.

I once made an attempt to write a young adult novel. I was having real problems with the ending, but I couldn’t identify the problem. I showed my draft to one of the experts in the field, Marilyn Sachs, award-winning author of more than 30 books, including Veronica Ganz and The Bear’s House. One thing Marilyn told me is that you should never try to tie up all the loose ends when you conclude a book. Life is messy. Any denouement that neatly packages all the unsolved questions feels artificial.

In general, the ending has to be different from the rest of the book. If everything is the same at the end of a book, the reader feels as if there is no story, nothing learned or gained. If the middle of the book is wracked with doubt, the ending could well be calm and/or resolved. If the world the book depicts is full of certainty and self-assurance, the ending might involve questioning. If the book is about pain and loss and mourning, the ending often conveys a sense of grounding and renewal. If the story involves childhood innocence, then experience and maturity and wisdom could be the gateway at the end.

In thinking about books that consist of shorter pieces—poems, short stories, or essays—the impact of the last piece is not as important as that of the best piece. The nature of a collection of shorter pieces is that they tend to stand alone. For that reason, the most enduring thing about a book of that sort is not the closing note, but the most memorable note. The exception would be the collection where the final piece is the best piece. Does anyone remember what the last story is in Raymond Carver’s book Cathedral? But you probably do remember the title story, because it’s such an amazing piece. Do you remember the last poem of Mary Oliver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection American Primitive? Most likely no, but you might remember “In Blackwater Woods,” the poem in the collection that lives on, retyped by countless fans on their websites and shared from person to person, with its stunning final lines.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer