Repeating a word or two in the last line of a poem is often used as a way of emphasising the ending and telling the reader that they can stop. Such tasks are never complete, but cyclical and ever renewing. Though there is a kind of satisfaction in making things clean, I refuse to do the vacuuming when you are out, my dearĮven though it is infinitely quicker without a toddler. Here’s Australian poet and writer Tess Pearson with a pantoum on housework called Household Ripening The circular journey set up in these forms suggest emotion and memory and perhaps obsession, rather than narrative moving towards a resolution. There are a number of poetic forms such as the villanelle (see Sarah’s Dverse sessionin 2018), the ghazal (see Gay Reiser-Cannon’s session in 2019) and the pantoum ( Samuel Peralta’s hosting of Dverse in 2012) which repeat and loop. ‘Groomed on a die- /t of hunger, we end too soon.’ 3.
In 2010 (some fifty years later) Hayes is saying that some things have changed but also some things haven’t. Brookes’ poem from 1960 was about despair and violence for young African-American men. This isn’t Hayes showing us how clever he is, he is saying something. In the 1991 chapter, ‘the poet at twenty’, the endings are enjambed, run-on, hyphenated or broken words. His rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin. Used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing Hayes was born in 1971, so the first chapter is, if you like, ‘the poet at ten’ - see how the lines end in a straightforward way.ĭa promised to leave me everything: the shovel we Notice the two ‘chapters’ in Hayes’ poem: the first in 1981 and the second ten years later. (De hosted a session here at the pub back in 2016 on the Golden Shovel). Some of you may have read African-American poet Terrance Hayes’ A Golden Shovel – a poem where Hayes quotes Gwendolyn Brookes’ 24 word poem ‘ We Real Cool’ by using each of her words as the last word of each of his 24 lines (twice!). Does this create ambiguity or change the tone of the poem? Back in 2018, Björn hosted a Dverse session on enjambment– where lines run on beyond the line endings. Notice how he plays with line endings and line breaks to create double meanings: ‘we opposed them but not //enough…’ or ‘our great country of money, we (forgive us) // lived happily…’Īs an exercise, pick one of your own poems and try shifting where you place the ends of your lines. Our great country of money, we (forgive us) In the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, Of a disastrous reign in the house of money I took a chair outside and watched the sun. Was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. Here’s Ukraine-born US poet Ilya Kaminsky from his book Deaf Republic.Īnd when they bombed other people’s houses, we So, the end of a line is important both to how the poem sounds (take a breath) and also how the poem appears on the page. The end also creates a visual cue and (usually) a right margin – which may be ragged or in the case of concrete or shape poetry form a deliberate shape (Gay Reiser-Cannon hosted a Dverse session back in 2011 on concrete poetry).
So where should the end of the line go? Typically, the line end signals a pause or a breath. Verse is cast in sentences and lines, while prose flows continuously.
It’s the thing that differentiates verse from prose (apologies to all those prose poets out there). endings and beginnings – verse forms that loop and repeat.endings as quotations like The Golden Shovel form – where one poem quotes another.Tonight we have a seasonal buffet of five delicious (though low-fat) things about about endings: Hi poets Peter here from Australia with your last MTB for the year and your last Dverse post for 2020 (what a year it’s been ! ). Since we’re going to be away for a wee while, tonight we’re talking about endings.