Robert Fanning and the Poet’s Ear

I’ve been talking about doing a review of Robert Fanning’s work for quite awhile now. Given my other commitments and the length of time this has dragged on for, perhaps “lamenting” or “whining” would prove a better substitute for “talking” in the first sentence.

So – what’s taken so long? Well, I started that review and at some point realized that I was writing to poets and literati, not the general readership. Meaning, I was, if you’ll permit a political analogy, writing to try to win over some “swing” readers who might occupy the intermediate spaces between various aesthetic camps. A lot of my review seemed jargony to me, and I wondered how much my law student/defender/idle reader audience would follow it. So I threw it out and began again.

An old colleague, CE Chaffin, argues that poetry has become like fencing – everyone knows what fencing is, evidences some residual respect towards fencing/fencers, but they really don't know what’s going on when they actually watch it. Thus the engaged audience for fencing is really only other fencers, or people who have at least dabbled in fencing, or people who have friends and family who fence.

He may be right, but I will burn my time up in this world as I choose. And right now I’m asking myself, “Can I write a review of Fanning’s book in a way that might open the door for someone who does not normally read poetry?” It’s a good challenge.

Hence, what follows: half demystifying primer, half review, hopefully more than half-accessible for the curious. It’s long, I know, but I’ll try to do right by you, dear reader. Pour yourself a cup of coffee, ignore the turkey in the fridge (or nibble) and take your time. Quibble, disagree, ponder, comment if you wish. If you’ve never spent time with poetry, or have been intimidated by poetry, I believe the experience will be worth it.

**

What I Have Panned

First off, the gap between the person who breathes and eats poetry and the average novel reader is both narrow and deep. The leap is actually quite small, yet terrifying to some.

For example, the first thing that a poet notices about Robert Fanning’s work is Fanning’s tremendous ear. But while I can write “Fanning has a great ear” in earnest, I’m not sure that such a statement means all that much to the average reader. (“A great ear? Um. . .great! So what?”)

Well, I’d like to discuss what that means, and in a sense, what follows is entirely about that. Quite simply, “Fanning has a great ear” means that Fanning makes use of the whole range of naturally occurring English sounds and harnesses them to reinforce and color “what the poem says.” There are no false notes in his work, no squawks on the level of sound. The “subjects” of the poems, what they “say” and “mean,” matters. And every syllable of the poem honors that importance.

Which sounds nice ‘n all, but what does my saying that that mean? How does one “hear” this in an actual poem? And why is that an accomplishment at all? Why is it even interesting? Those are tougher questions.

To address those questions, I’d like to take you through a discussion of “sonics.”  I use the term sonics as a shorthand for the sonic effects a poem uses, basically the sounds of words, and the rhythms those sounds make. My perspective is that of the working poet, and hopefully our discussion will provide context for what it is that Free Verse poets try to do. Then we’ll take a very close look at one of Fanning’s poems, Green Stephania. This poem provides a good illustration of just what Fanning does in practice. It’s also a good example of much of his oeuvre (body-of-work).

“Sonics” - Sound in English Poetry (and in General)

Poetry is pretty flexible and there are a number of ways to write it. A good “big tent” definition of Poetry is “more-ordered prose.”  Coleridge enjoined us, “remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry: that is prose, words in their best order; poetry, the best words in the best order.”

You’ll notice that Coleridge’s definition is relative – that no hard and fast lines are drawn. He does that out of necessity, not laziness. But while “best words in the best order” may sound easy, we’ll soon get to why that’s a tall order indeed.

Often fledgling poets (and readers) think the way to write good poetry is to adopt a “poetic vocabulary” (best words) or to use classical forms (best order), which rely on accentual syllabic meter and patterned end-rhyme.  (Think “sonnet” – I won’t include an example). But classical form, chocked full of luminous words, does not by itself make poetry.

To gain some historical perspective on that, I’d like to point out that in a fit of cultural inferiority (and head-bashing politics) following the Norman Invasion,  English poetry began aping the forms of the continent’s dominant languages – French, Spanish, Italian. (Think “sonnet.”) The problem with this is that English is a Germanic language, which is, among other things, light on end rhyme, while the others are Romance languages and are pretty damn heavy on rhyme due to the way they conjugate. The result of using these classical forms in English is often odd, strained, and pretty far removed from the way plain folks talk. Sometimes, of course, it’s absolutely wonderful, but the basic problems are that a) the system used for “making” poetry arose in other languages and so b) the absolutely wonderful stuff has a sense of ordered *strangeness* to it. You know this kind of poetry in English when you hear it, because it sounds, fundamentally, a bit strained, a bit different, a bit weird. (How that culturally inherited desire for weird-sounding-ness grounds itself out in today’s poetry is another story.)

Prior to the invasion, the English were doing just-fine-thank-you-very-much with a system called “Alliterative Verse,” (think “Beowulf”) which relies on alliteration (the repetition of the initial sounds of words) to tie lines of poetry together and did not “count” syllables as strictly. An example, William Langland's “Piers Plowman,” written in the 14^th century:

A feir feld full of folk || fond I þer bitwene,
Of alle maner of men, || þe mene and þe riche,
Worchinge and wandringe || as þe world askeþ.

Among them I found a fair field full of people
All manner of men, the poor and the rich
Working and wandering as the world requires. 

You’ll note (in translation) this seems decidedly non-tortured language, which is nonetheless ordered and addresses important subjects. Even for the 14^th century.  It seems much more like Free Verse in the sense that you don’t have a de-dah, de-dah, de-dah, de-dah, de-dah, rockinghorse rhythm or a heavy clanging end-rhyme you find in classical poetry.

However there is a lot of sound packed in there. Let’s just to look for alliteration (the initial consonantal sounds of words).

Among them I found a fair field full of people
All manner of men, the poor and the rich
Working and wandering as the world requires.

There’s hardly a significant word (I exclude of/and/the) that does not have a matching sound close at hand. You can easily hear them, grouped together and reinforcing each other, if you say it aloud.

I point this out because this kind of “clustering” or “ordering” of sound is important in Free Verse, and it’s important in the types of poetry that naturally grew out of the English language itself.

Free Verse

Skipping ahead (a bit, ahem) for our purposes, “Free Verse” came fully to life in the late 19^th century (although it had some precursors and Blank Verse certainly eased its birth) and became extremely popular in the 20^th century, where it was, by the end of the century, the dominant mode of poetical composition in English. (Whitman, Eliot, Pound, Cummings, et. al., including our own Robert Fanning).

Free Verse is verse free of externally imposed form, free of syllabic constraints on individual lines, and free of the requirement to end those lines with a predictable pattern of sound (rhyme). (Go back to the Continent you. . .continentals!)

“Free Verse” most certainly does not mean “Anything goes and we’ll just call it poetry.” The poet still has a responsibility to order her language, to choose the best words and place them in the best order to create:

1. a harmonious aural experience as such and
2. a rigorous statement of being/testimony (both emotionally and intellectually) as such and
3. have both 1) Sound and 2) Sense work in combination with each other.

Working in Free Verse, the poet has a ton of options available to her, but they’re all constrained by this basic premise.

• If the poem sounds bad, it sounds bad.
• If the poem does not make sense at all levels, it does not make sense.
• If it sounds good but does not make sense, it’s just mouth-candy or an intricate doily of sound.
• If it sounds like crap but is a good testament then you’re more in the realm of prose than you are poetry. (Perhaps even *very* good prose, which encapsualtes an important thing/idea/testament/experience but prose all the same.)

Some thoughts on why it’s difficult to write good free verse:

First off, it’s hard to create mouth-candy, just by itself. 

Second, even when completely ignoring the sound of words, it’s hard to create a statement that matters, that is emotionally and intellectually transparent to the reader, that educates, informs, entertains, soothes, and inspires. Just plain hard. That’s why some of us still listen to MLK’s speeches and marvel over them. In their sincerity, importance, urgency, and truthfulness, they approach poetry. In their rhythm and rhetoric, they approach poetry.

So it’s particularly difficult for the poet to master Sound and Sense at the same time, in every line of a single poem, without unduly favoring one over the other. This is in no small part because Sound and Sense are sometimes exclusionary. The best sounding word in a line might not carry the precise connotations the poet wants. Or the exactly perfect meaning-word might sound as awkward as a mid-solo squawk by an otherwise smoothly gliding sax.

This exclusionary tension is the fundamental barrier to writing good poetry. It’s why, Randall Jarrell, in his essay “Bad Poets” marveled over the fact that so many intelligent, moral, upright, interesting, educated, fascinating and experienced persons (often a good deal more so than many of the poets) simply could not write poetry to save their lives. They become slaves to form over content, or content over form. (Of course, if your mastery of either is poor, you’re that much the worse off.  And yes, Jarrell was talking about other things as well.)

As I wrote above, Fanning has a great ear – he makes use of the whole range of naturally occurring English sounds and harnesses them to reinforce and color “what the poem says.” Also – he makes no false steps. It seems weird to compliment someone for not making any mistakes. Think of how seldom we do that in any other kind of review – movies, music, etc. But in Free Verse it’s important, and the next section explains why.

 

What Not to Do – the Small Writ Large

Now, all of the above seems (or should seem) like a pretty tall order. Say something important, say it well, even if the language will really fight you, word by word.

But it’s even tougher than that – there are consequences to the absolute freedom to use whichever words you want, in whichever order you want, with whichever sounds you want, and to go on for as long or as short as you want.

These consequences are that the perfect free verse poem can neither be too long or too short, or contain any images/ideas that work against the poem, or contain any jarring language or ideas or sections.

This does not mean that individual free verse poems cannot be very long or very short, challenging, subversive, or jarring *as a whole* or *selectively, by design, to effect* with in a poem. But it does mean that *given* your subject and the choices that you make as you write, that once you’re committed to something in the poem, it will begin to “order” your choices for you. Some poems, given subject and sound, need to be short. Some need to be long.

Another way of saying this is that Part A and part C of the poem will dictate what Part B is. If part B works, great. If part B fails, the poem fails.

Poets, given their anarchistic tendencies, will often try to rebel against this sort of statement – but usually they’re rebelling against a false understanding of what makes a good poem. They’ll produce a poem that has a smooth sounding part A, a smooth sounding part C, and a jarring Part B. But the question isn’t whether or not you *can* do that (of course you can do that – you can do nearly anything). The question is whether or not you’ve done it in a way that works. And there are ways that work, and ways that don’t.

You’ll notice my description of this process is abstract. That’s because so much depends on the particular things that the poet chooses to do. It boils down to issues of what the subject is, what the poet’s take on the subject is, what the narrative voice is, what the sonic effects actually *are.* You have to evaluate each poem on its own merits.

Often, fledgling (or simply bad) poets willfully try to make something fit in a poem. They have an image they can’t let go of. They want to say something in a certain way for reasons external to the actual composition of the poem. Regardless of their intellectual/emotional motivations, their selection does not “fit” in the poem. By forcing it in, they’re lying to themselves – about how the world is, about what the language allows. Their results are unconvincing.

Fanning’s results are convincing. His poems seem, as the poets say, “inevitable.” This is high praise among poets. It means that from the first line on there’s nothing that makes us say, “Hey, you know what, I just don’t buy this.” There’s nothing that makes us say, “It seems wrong – these don’t seem like real people with real concerns and real tragedies and joys.”

To turn back to Coleridge’s way of expressing this, when reading, we “willingly suspend our disbelief.” We trust the poem, we follow it through to the end.  It may seem like damning with faint praise to say this, but when I say Fanning makes “no false steps” it’s like saying, “I was totally caught up in the film. As if it were real.”  Intellectual and emotional engagement like that cannot result from the audience being tricked into something – it results from a well told, deeply human story.

 

Dead Ears? (Chicken/Egg)

OK – we’ll stick with the negative for a brief moment longer, because I want to show the contemporary background that Fanning’s poems work against.

Reading poems silently on the page is rather like reading a play silently on the page.  Compare reading a play silently to seeing it performed (or performing it yourself). It’s an altogether different sensory experience that *always* misses some nuances of piece.

(As an aside, for people interested in the reading aloud v. reading silently issue, there’s a whole analysis of that which turns on early Christian spirituality favoring, for many reasons, silent reading, while the pagan Roman favored reading aloud - many had private “reading rooms” in their houses where they would shut the door and read aloud).

(As another aside, this opens up the reader-respnse box and the various theories of meaning/misreading.  Many discussions get bogged down in this, so I'm going to sidestep questions of the "validity" of certain readings and simply focus on the fact that actually making your lips and tongue move, that actually hearing poetry spoken across time, is fundamentally different than a quick and silent scan with your optical organs.  While I want to sound casual, I don't want to sound too lackidasical in my assertions, so I should point out that from a neuro-biological perspective, different sensory stimulation results in substantively different reactions.)

However, all this aside, it’s safe to say that today most people read silently. That you, dear reader, are in fact, reading this silently right now. If we don’t want to end up killing each other on busses and in libraries, silent reading is a fine way to approach your newspaper, and I completely applaud it for such.

But the standard approach of “reading silently” is rather important to keep in mind, given that the most common charge against bad and mediocre Free Verse “poets” is that they have “no ear” – they go for Sense over Sound.  In fact, much otherwise good free verse is simply flat – it does not avail itself of the full sonic range of English, which can be a gloriously musical language.

This dead ear syndrome is probably in part a function of fledgling poets and the general readership not reading aloud, not savoring the poems as they were meant to be: spoken and heard. Bad habits die hard and are expressed in subsequent poetry.  It always frightens me when someone who begins graduate level work in poetry has never read a poem (any poem, not even one of their own) aloud.

In any event, regardless of what causes it, you get a lot of people writing “flat” poems which pull down the bar, which make poetry more about Sense than Sound, which blur the accomplishments of the poets who really use sound well. 

And of course, the general readership kind of glosses over half of what the great poets do, which is to subtly balance the sounds of a poem without sounding like a clanging gong.

 

Sound!

So. How do good poets actually do all this stuff I’ve been talking about? What do they look at? How do they make poems that aren’t flat?

Basically it works like this. English has a limited group of sounds. Some of those sounds work well together; they’re little families of sound and our mouths shape all the members of that family in similar ways.  However, the families of sound don’t always get along. Also, each family has something it’s good at and something it’s bad at, given our inherited language. The example I always use is when you’re trying to make a soothing, murmuring stream of noise (to quiet a frightened child?), you don’t use harsh popping words, or high hissing sounds. Granted, we can fudge how we say things a bit, but the basic things that kinds of sounds are associated with are pretty fixed.

Smart poets (of all stripes) use these sounds at every turn to reinforce the meaning and the rhythms of the poem.

I’ll show you what they are – there’s a lot of science to this in the service of art. I think that’s kind of comforting actually.

The science is called phonology, and it makes use of a lot of odd looking symbols from the international phonetic alphabet. You tend to see them in dictionary pronunciation guides, just after the words. Phonology uses a lot of complicated terms to break down a whole spectrum of sound into tiny parts. However, there’s a bit of argument in the field – for example, major figures will disagree on the number of discrete sounds that English has. The argument ranges from 40 to 60, although for our purposes there are about 24 consonant sounds and 23 vowel sounds. You’ll notice right away that there are more sounds than there are letters.  I'll talk about the implications of that as we go.

I’m not going to launch into a deep discussion of sounds in English, because the more subtle implications of that, while interesting and complex for poets, are beyond the scope of our discussion today.

(For example, sonic analysis becomes very complicated when dealing with multiple regional pronunciations. For the practicing poet, this means that some sounds will more strongly “match” if read in various accents, e.g., “cot” and “caught” which are pronounced the same by some English speakers. But far from passing normative judgment on such matters, the poet must be aware of and effectively use such variations in their work, when appropriate. And we must evaluate the poems of others accordingly. Frost wrote in a regional accent, as did Warren, as does Walcott, as does Heaney.  Told you we had a hard job.)

But to get a handle on what good poets like Fanning do, let’s look at a simplified but robust system of sound.

The smallest unit of discrete sound for our purposes is the “phoneme.” It’s smaller than a syllable, and you can think of it as the sound of each letter. The chart shows the English Language phonemes.

Consonantal Sound

I’d like to give you a standard linguistic scheme for grouping consonantal sounds based on how they’re made. (Seeing that they’re made the same way by the mouth, the noises end up sounding similar, hence, little families of sounds.)

Plosive Sounds

A plosive sound (think “explosion”) is made when air stops and then “pops” forth. /p/ is a /p/losive sound. We can generate this kind of sound several ways (lips, palate, tongue). It’s not really important for our purposes to know just how they’re made, but there are 3 basic groupings of plosive sounds. Try them aloud and you’ll see that they pretty much sound “close” to each other.

/p/ and /b/ (pronounce it “puh” and “buh” with the P and B emphasized and the “uh” sound much softer)

/t/ and /d/

/k/ and /g/

If you pair these up, you get what I call “slant alliteration” – sort of like “slant rhyme” or almost rhyme. A poet can use this to create a subtle “joining” effect.

From Fanning’s Green Stephania – “/k/old /g/lass” as opposed to, say, “icy glass.”

Plosive sounds tend to be a bit “harsher” or “popping” than other sounds, and the poet will usually not use them when she wants to create a soothing or murmuring effect.

Nasal Sounds

A nasal sound (nose) is made when air runs out of the nose. I know it sounds weird, but pinch your nose when you say the following and you’ll hear the difference (conversely, one can make any of the plosive sounds with your nose pinched shut.)

/m/ and /n/ and /ng/ (the last one is the final sound in the word “long”)

Nasal sounds are softer than plosive sounds – they tend to vibrate a bit more and can lean toward “murmuring” noises.

Frictive Sounds

A frictive sound (think “friction” or “hissing”) is made when you restrict the passage of air and more or less hiss.

/v/ and /f/

/s/ and /z/

/sh/ and /th/

also the /j/ sound in “judge”

also /h/, which isn’t so much hissing as “huffing” or making a frictive sound deeper in your throat.

Frictive sounds can run the range from outright hissing (“sassy”) to a kind of warmer “breathy” sound “hot thought”. They can be some of the most noticeable sounds since they’re pitched a bit higher and tend to carry when spoken.

And that’s it for the major divisions. It should be kind of obvious that many of them (say ‘em aloud) can be “grouped” into similar sounding bunches, which, if selected carefully, can reinforce the more obvious types of sonic effects in the poem (repeated sounds – assonance, rhyme, etc.)

Some minor and interesting ones for the curious:

Glides which kind of glide into the vowel sound – the /w/ and /j/ from “woo” and “you”.

Aproximants which are almost but not quite frictives – the /l/ and /r/ sound from “lunk’ and “run” .

 

Vowel Sounds

Vowels have a pitch. Smart poets use this pitch, just like they use connotations of the various consonant sounds. This means they align sounds and choose them depending on the context of the poem. High sounds might be light and energetic, low sounds might be rumbly and slower and soothing. (That’s just the most *general* kind of example – clever readers will have guessed that the ultimate sonic effects in the poems depends on all the sounds in all the words.)

It’s important to remember we’re talking about the actual sounds – not the letters on the page which are mere symbols for the sound. The letter “A” is used for different sounds: “bail”, “bat”, “bate”, “was”, “part”, “liar”, “bare” – if all these “a” sounded the same, we’d have a string of good assonance just by changing consonants (bat, bad, hat, has, cat, cad, sat, sap, mat, mash, flat, flask, pat, pad.)

Here’s a quick and dirty breakdown of Vowel pitch from high to low frequency. (From Nim’s “Western Wind.”) Say them aloud (or just say the final sounds without the “B”) and you’ll hear your voice dropping in pitch. Again, this is a general scale:

Bee
Bay
Buy
Bit
Bet
Bat
Bird
Bud
Bar
Bough
Boy
Bought
Book
Bone
Boo

 
So, in general then:

E
I
A
O
U

**

I’ll talk about the rest as we go. Let’s look at that poem by Robert Fanning.  For non-poetry readers, don’t be intimidated by the lines – we’ll talk about them in a bit. Just read it aloud as though they pretty much weren’t there. As an FYI, each line ends with a line break and the paragraph like chunks are called stanzas. Think of them as paragraphs and you’ll be fine.

GREEN STEPHANIA by Robert Fanning

A full wood, wet bark
shower, the fresh drenched
trees, the leaves lush heavy,
so consequently, Stephania.

Stephania, curled finger ferns
unfurl and burst. Loose spores
string through mist and nestle.
Moss tufts rub.
Rain slapped leaves, Stephania,
spring and drip on our deep
sogged glade, our soaked sunk roots.

Me and Stephania.
In a hiding place our slick lips sore
from pressing together.
Stephania, seaweed breath,
burrs in your tangling curls,
soiled nails and knees, giggling.
Eden, Stephania. The smell of dirt.
I never want to leave the world.

Through the streaming wash
of rain, through the windows
and pale curtains, our mothers ache.
Their bedrooms flicker with blue TV.
Scent of biscuits, chimney smoke, tea.
Our fathers cup their hands
against the cold glass panes
and look out.

It is dusk, Stephania.
No-one knows where we are.

I’m sorry it took us so long to get to the poem itself. If you read this aloud, I’m sure you caught a lot of the sounds in the poem. (We’ll talk about sense in a minute, since “what the poem is about” is pretty obvious, and since sound is overlooked.)

You also probably noticed that the sentences that make up the poem weren’t really “prosy” – that they seemed a bit different than those you’d find in the passage of a novel.  In fact, let’s pretend that this was a novel passage by taking out those 32 line breaks:

GREEN STEPHANIA by Robert Fanning

A full wood, wet bark shower, the fresh drenched trees, the leaves lush heavy, so consequently, Stephania. Stephania, curled finger ferns unfurl and burst. Loose spores string through mist and nestle. Moss tufts rub. Rain slapped leaves, Stephania, spring and drip on our deep sogged glade, our soaked sunk roots. Me and Stephania. In a hiding place our slick lips sore from pressing together. Stephania, seaweed breath, burrs in your tangling curls, soiled nails and knees, giggling. Eden, Stephania. The smell of dirt. I never want to leave the world.  Through the streaming wash of rain, through the windows and pale curtains, our mothers ache. Their bedrooms flicker with blue TV. Scent of biscuits, chimney smoke, tea. Our fathers cup their hands against the cold glass panes and look out.  It is dusk, Stephania. No-one knows where we are.

Looks a lot denser without the line breaks, doesn’t it? One of the things that line breaks do is space out the poem, make it more manageable on the page or in your mouth. If we leave the stanzas in it looks easier, but still full, dense, packed language. The line breaks make it easier still, dividing those dense sentences into easier chunks for bite sized speaking.

GREEN STEPHANIA by Robert Fanning

A full wood, wet bark
shower, the fresh drenched
trees, the leaves lush heavy,
so consequently, Stephania.

Stephania, curled finger ferns
unfurl and burst. Loose spores
string through mist and nestle.
Moss tufts rub.
Rain slapped leaves, Stephania,
spring and drip on our deep
sogged glade, our soaked sunk roots.

Me and Stephania.
In a hiding place our slick lips sore
from pressing together.
Stephania, seaweed breath,
burrs in your tangling curls,
soiled nails and knees, giggling.
Eden, Stephania. The smell of dirt.
I never want to leave the world.

Through the streaming wash
of rain, through the windows
and pale curtains, our mothers ache.
Their bedrooms flicker with blue TV.
Scent of biscuits, chimney smoke, tea.
Our fathers cup their hands
against the cold glass panes
and look out.

It is dusk, Stephania.
No-one knows where we are.

Fanning is a master of the line break. In some ways the two wrestling giants of a poem are the sentence and the line – meaning that you have to reconcile the two. You'll notice that Fanning runs his sentences over line breaks (meaning that some sentences are longer than lines).  He also has some lines that are single sentences.  He also has some lines that contain more than one sentence.  He also has one line that contain multiple complete sentences.  This has a lot of implications for rhythm, which we'll touch on later, but for the moment, I'll give you this key which will help you for 90% of poems:

Usually, when you read line breaks, you don’t have a full-stop sentence-like pause at the end of the line, but you do put in a small kind of “half comma” pause, and add a bit of stress to the last word.  A line break =s a comma. 

Remember when you were just learning to write, and you wanted to emphasize words by putting commas after them?  I mean, people talked with pauses, and commas indicated pauses, so it's logical that kids everywhere try to sprinkle their early works with commas to "show off" certain words, to make pauses in the sentences.  Well, that's *exactly* what's going on here with line breaks. 

So those last words are important, and Fanning, like the best poets, makes them into a kind of telegraphic mini-poem of their own: 

bark
drenched
heavy
Stephania

ferns
spores
nestle
rub
Stephania
deep
roots

Stephania
sore
together
breath
curls
giggling
dirt
world

wash
windows
ache
TV
tea
hands
panes
out

Stephania
are

If you read only that you could make a decent guess at what the poem was about. That’s focus.

 

Consonantal Sound in the Poem

But I promised that I’d talk more about sound in the poem itself, and I’d like to do that before sense.  There are a lot of ways we can map out sound in the poem. If I was sitting next to you, I’d read the poem over and over, emphasizing certain sounds, calling your attention to others, then we’d read it again to feel how all those elements come together. But I’m not, so I’ll do it with color on the page and trust you to follow.

One of the things that “hides” sound when you’re reading on the page is the fact that those phonemes (chart above) rely on a relatively smaller number of letters to indicate what they are.  So, the letter “C” can make either a K sound or an S sound. When I was in school we called them Hard and Soft sounds. Y can make an I or E sound, Z usually makes an S sound, and so on.

So if we spell the words in the poem a bit differently, then color them, you might be able to “see” the sounds on the page better.  To just focus on a few sounds:

A full wood, wet bark
shower, the fresh drenshed
trees, the leaves lush heavy,
so konsequently, Stefania.
 
Stefania, kurled finger ferns
unfurl and burst. Loose spores
string through mist and nestle.
Moss tufts rub.
Rain slapped leaves, Stefania,
spring and drip on our deep
sogged glade, our soaked sunk roots.
 
Me and Stefania.
in a hiding plase our slik lips sore
from pressing together.
Stefania, seaweed breath,
burrs in your tangling kurls,
soiled nails and knees, giggling.
Eden, Stefania. The smell of dirt.
I never want to leave the world.
 
Through the streaming wash
of rain, through the windows
and pale kurtains, our mothers ake.
Their bedrooms flikker with blue TV.
Sent of biskuits, chimney smoke, tea.
Our fathers kup their hands
against the kold glass panes
and look out.
 
It is dusk, Stefania.
No-one knows where we are.

I like doing this kind of thing for poetry students (and for you, dear reader) for several reasons. I think it shows up the concentrations of different kids of sounds rather well. Overall, there are a lot of F and S sounds, but not so many K and G sounds (you’ll notice they’re all not *precisely* the same K sounds – more on that in a sec.) Those K and G sounds are clustered in the next to last stanza, which is not random.

I’ll use this example of K/G and F/S sounds throughout the rest of the review. Don’t get caught up on rhyme or anything yet, just focus on the fact that the K/G sounds are from the same plosive family (see above) as are the F/S frictive sounds.

 

Sound that makes Sense

Remember when I was talking about how a poet had to use sound and sense together? Well, it’s really hard to talk about one without the other – that’s because the reason why you use one depends on what the other is doing at the same time. 

To slip into “sense” for a second, it’s pretty obvious that the poet wants to set up a contrast between the Edenic communion of the children and the normal domestic life of the parents. The poem’s making a judgment, making a comment, and the word choice helps it along, both in the sense of the words and how those words sound.

When the poet turns to the parents, he wants to set up a contrast between the “world” of the children and the “world” of the parents. So he uses images that are directly opposed to the connotations of the first half of the poem. Instead of warmth, lushness, and organicism, he gives us “cold glass panes,” lit from within by the blue light of TV. Immediately we get a shift - cold glass panes are different from the warm ferns.

Now Fanning could have written something like “unyielding dead windows” and conveyed a similiar contrast, but it would not have been nearly as satisfying.  The reason why is that Kold Glass Panes also sounds sonically different from the proceeding lines. It’s harsher, Kolder. This is an example of using sound intelligently in the service of sense.

I know I haven’t discussed this (yet), but it also has that same patterning of stress which has hitherto been used to show these warm organic images; that patterning is a subtle sonic “clue” that a direct line runs between the two – that the poet is explicitly drawing a contrast. Lastly, there’s the echo of a pun in “panes/pains” - it’s appropriate that the parents cold glass bound lives (something like an aquarium tank) be hinted at as “painful” – this is a further contrast to the warm time spent with Stephania.

So, in addition to the “primary” level of sense (i.e., what the poem is saying, or what the poem is about), you’ve got all these secondary sonic/associative threads pulling for the sense of the poem, instead of throwing up white noise (flat poetry) or, worse actively pushing against it (inept poetry). 

** 

Rhythm

With that kind of touchstone (the K/G example) in mind, of the sounds of the words reinforcing their sense, let’s look up at the poem again. I’m sure you’ve noticed that there’s a kind of arc to it. Imagine the poem lying on its side, as though it were sheet music, with the top of the poem at the left hand side of the page. You have all these low soft blue warm words, then a cluster of high hard red ones, then the poem closes down.

The sounds (and their senses) take place over time. Each sound is judged in context, based on what came before, what came after, and how the entire poem is shaped. If Fanning had randomly used those harsh K sounds in the middle of his describing Stephania, we’d notice, on some level, and wonder what was wrong. However, when he does use them in the poem, they enter at the right time, given the overall length of the poem, and thus function both thematically (meaning sound reinforces sense) and rhythmically (meaning that sound “sits well” in the whole poem, given what’s before and after).

We’ve been talking about “sonics” and “sound” as pretty much the sounds of the actual words. But the temporal element creates another important sonic quality, which is rhythm.

There are a lot of words used to describe rhythm. For example the lines might have rhythm: 

i WANT to SEE a BALL fly BY
i WANT to SEE it IN the SKY

Or a many lines might have a rhythm, or the whole poem might have a rhythm composed of many sub-rhythms. Some of the words used to separate the different types of rhythms are: meter, cadence, pacing, flow, rhythm. They’re often (except for meter) used kind of interchangeably.

You actually know this already. The easiest way to think about this is music, or, rather, sung lyrics. Think of rap. You can make patterns of stress by how you say the words. You can repeat that pattern and change the words. That’s one of the basic ideas. 

As an aside, in poetry (and here’s one of those side-bits that people find controversial) the rhythm has to arise from the sounds of the words themselves. That means you don’t impose an artificial set of rhythms on words (like you do in music), but you choose words which, when they are spoken more or less “naturally,” produce that rhythm. Basically what that means is that song lyrics aren’t poetry. Tell your friends – start a fight. If you’ve never heard a song and are asked to read the lyrics aloud (try it) they’re often flat. When a musician sings them, and puts them through their artificial paces, they can be wonderful – but that’s a wonderful song and not a wonderful poem. (I don’t meant to suggest that musicians can’t write poetry (because many do), or that some lyrics aren’t really great (because many are), but simply that what generates the rhythm of what’s said differs.)

**

Buzz off you Greekies!

Now, it’s important to talk about and understand rhythm, just as it’s important to talk about the sounds of words.

However, the system that’s been in place until recently isn’t very good at that (I’ll get into why in a bit). This bad system is the system of “classical scansion.” If you’re not a student of literature you’ll recognize it as that Iambic Pentameter stuff. Nothing frightens the non-poet as much as those confusing Latin labels for meter.

Well, as you may know, I enjoy blowing holes in privileged and obscure discourse. So I’ll try to do that here.

First, the problem with Classical Scansion.

To begin, you might (dimly) remember what I said about the Norman invasion of England – about how the English started aping continental forms? (Actually, it’s a bit more complicated, as it always is, but this is close enough for us). Well, the Continentals had their own aping going on – they looked to the classical world, the Greeks and the Romans for cues on how they ought to write literature. This resulted in some pretty absurd things. For example, the French had a theory of theatrical unities (time, space, and subject) which were derived from Aristotle. Aristotle was basically saying – “Keep your tragedies focused, reasonably limited in time, clearly located in space, and don’t confuse the audience with completely unnecessary tangents.” The French (17^th century) turned these into hard and fast rules, meaning the stage was a single room in which all the action took place over a period of 24 hours and there could be no sub plots. Ben Johnson and others followed suit, and it took a reckless playwright named Billy Shakespeare to definitively break with those rules (although he’d later be derided for it by figures like Alexander Pope.)

There’s actually quite a long list of the absurdities that classicism has wrought in the minds of the dogmatic. One of those is the “classical” way of scanning poetry. “Scansion,” BTW, is just a way that you analyze (or “scan”) how rhythm and stress works in poetry.

Basically, via the Continental classicists, the English poets adpoted a system of talking about the rhythms in their poetry that was designed for Greek. In particular, the Greeks used their system to measure the *length* of their syllables, and not their *stress*. A (durationally) short syllable can be stressed, or a (durationally) long syllable could be less stressed – they’re two completely independent things, and neither bore much resemblence to the concerns of the "native" poetics of English.

While classical scansion is a way of *analyzing* the meter of poems, it’s also proscriptive. Meaning that good poems were seen to be written “in form” – and in a way that conformed to the expectations of that evaluating system. 

The upshot of all this is that in classical prosidy, you have poets using a mistranslated and non-native system of composition.  It made for some fantasticly good poems.  But it also is what it is, and one of the unfortunate effects of this often byzantine system is that the man on the street has no interest in, or patience for, it.

But you’ll remember that English can also aspire to different poetical models. For example, in the beginning of this I wrote about alliterative verse and gave you that little example from, William Langland's “Piers Plowman”:

Among them I found a fair field full of people
All manner of men, the poor and the rich
Working and wandering as the world requires.

Well, classical scansion isn’t at all concerned with those initial sounds. Which is not to say that classical English poets didn’t use such devices, but rather that what tied a poem together for them was a very strict patterning of stressed and unstressed syllables which did not arise naturally from the English language itself.  I also don’t want to suggest that contemporary poets (Fanning in particular) are unconcerned with the rhythms of stressed and unstressed syllables in their poetry. However, I do want to suggest that there are less confusing ways of listening to what the sounds of a poem does than trying to cram it into an odd system that requires you to learn esoteric terms and then translate the results anyway.

So - I’m not going to bore you with counting syllables, nor am I going to argue over which syllables are stressed, and which are not, nor am I going to argue with how one ought to divide those syllables into regular subgroupings. Instead I’d like to talk about sound and stress as we say and hear them. I’m going to dive into the title for a second to make some basic points about how we hear sound and stress. Don’t give up – it’s a short plunge.

Hold Your Breath!

We begin with the title “Green Stephania” – a color modifying a woman’s name. BTW “Stephania” is pronounced “Ste-fawn-ya”/“Ste-phon-ya” where the middle syllable rhymes with “gone” not “tan”.

It seems lyric, perhaps reminding of us of Lorca’s poetry, perhaps not. We can discuss the sonic elements in the title as a microcosm of the poem as a whole.

The first word “Green” is one syllable – one could say, in the classic sense, it is stressed. Meaning that compared to other syllables nearby, this one carries a certain weight – it’s said with a little more emphasis, which generally means it takes a bit longer to say and the pauses bracketing it are bit longer.

Now “Ste-fawn-ya” is a bit different as it’s said “ste-FAWN-ya”. Relative to the other syllables, the middle one is stressed.

For a brief aside on classical scansion, we’d probably say the line was in Trochaic Dimeter:

GREEN ste | FAWN ya

But classic scansion is a rather weak tool if just left at that: the smallest unit of sound is not “a syllable”. Therefore “each green leaves ease” despite having four syllables, is an entirely different oral/aural beast than “imp ting tip pit” which also has four syllables.  Say them aloud and you’ll hear what I mean. One is slow and languid (almost hypnotic) and draws on those easy sounding vowels and consonants that flow into each other, the other is four sounds that pop out of your mouth like pop!corn.

When said, we actually do something which might be written like “GrEENe-steFAWNya” where we have two dominant stresses (the EEN in “green” and the “FAWN” in “stephania”). The whole phrase can come out in something of a single word since the slight trailing ‘e’ of “green” links up with the soft “es” which begins “stephania”.

Try it aloud – “GrEENe-steFAWNya”. It’s possible, but when we try to say it in one word, we know that there are pauses in there we’re missing. When we pause, it’s usually here – “Greene – stefawn–ya”, with the pause between “greene” and “stefawn” being longer than the pause between “fan” and “ya”. Now, there is an actual pause between “fan” and “ya” since your mouth can’t make the /n/ and the /y/ glide into each other the way it can approximately do with the end of “green” and the beginning of “ste”. Right now we’re talking about duration and silence (or pauses). For example- we’re considering each “sound” (eg. we can draw out the “ee” sound slightly to emphasize “green”) rather than looking at false sonic units, like “the word” and “the syllable”.

In terms of rhyme or correlating sound, “fawn” and “ya” are lightly correlating sounds, as are “greene” and “ste”. If we were to abstract them out we could map them as:

A-aBb
GrEENe-steFAWNya.

Another way of looking at the pause between the words “Green” and “Stephania” is to note that there’s a sonic “bridge” over the pause, that the “soft” end of “Green” suggests a slight glide into the soft beginning of “Stephania”, that the lightly correlating sounds favor each other in a way that “Saffron Kite” would not (but “Saffron nail” would.)

Granted, these are all subtle points, but they are valid ones. The poet chose a damn good set of words for his title, and indeed, the entire poem.

**

Coming Up For Air

OK – that bit with the title may have lost me a few readers, but I want you hearty souls that remain to pat yourselves on the back. The rest is much easier.

If you look at the poem again, you’ll probably “see” or remember the consonantal sounds we pointed out earlier – the Fs(ounds) and Ss as opposed to the Ks and Gs.  And of course, some of them are “hidden” on the page because they’re spelt differently than they sound. For example, “ache” as opposed to “aKe.”

Well, it turns out that the vowels are hard at work too.

A full wood, wet bark
shower, the fresh drenched
trees, the leaves lush heavy,
so consequently, Stephania.

And so on.

To bring them all together using an example in the very next stanza, I’m sure if you say it aloud you can notice that “curled finger ferns/unfurl and burst” has an awful lot going on it. Consonant sounds (finger ferns), vowel sounds (curled unfurl burst), the rhythms of the sounds that glide into each other (fernsunfurl), and the rhythms of the sounds that set up strong pauses between themselves (unfurl and | Burst). I probably don’t need to explain the nascent sexuality in the image itself, but I want to point out that while just the image of this finger fern extending itself and bursting forth its spores is a potent one, it’s made more potent by the low sexy “ur” sounds, the soft whispering “f” sounds, the sexual rhythm of their gliding together then slightly pausing and bursting. Sound and sense, ladies and gentleman, sound and sense.

And of course, the remarkable thing is that a) there are no false steps *while* b) nearly every line of the poem works as hard as the one we just looked at.

So you don’t have to scroll up, here’s the poem again. I trust you with it.  

GREEN STEPHANIA by Robert Fanning

A full wood, wet bark
shower, the fresh drenched
trees, the leaves lush heavy,
so consequently, Stephania.

Stephania, curled finger ferns
unfurl and burst. Loose spores
string through mist and nestle.
Moss tufts rub.
Rain slapped leaves, Stephania,
spring and drip on our deep
sogged glade, our soaked sunk roots.

Me and Stephania.
In a hiding place our slick lips sore
from pressing together.
Stephania, seaweed breath,
burrs in your tangling curls,
soiled nails and knees, giggling.
Eden, Stephania. The smell of dirt.
I never want to leave the world.

Through the streaming wash
of rain, through the windows
and pale curtains, our mothers ache.
Their bedrooms flicker with blue TV.
Scent of biscuits, chimney smoke, tea.
Our fathers cup their hands
against the cold glass panes
and look out.

It is dusk, Stephania.
No-one knows where we are.

 

**

Stress and Rhythm

So we’ve talked a bit about Sound (consonantal/vowel) and a bit about Rhythm (how stress falls in bunches of words), and now I’d like to give you a few definitions (if you’d like) regarding correlating sounds.

Rhythm occurs when stress is repeated across time, and, of course, anything “sonic” can be repeated. For example:

Stress – single stresses can be repeated to create a pattern of stress.
Pauses – pauses of equal or differing duration can be repeated to create a pattern.
Sound – any of the phonemes or any combinations of phonemes can be repeated to make patterns.

Repetition of sound can occur anywhere in words, beginning middle, end – any phoneme, stressed or unstressed. Our basic 40-60 phoneme sounds can be corralled, ordered, sorted, to produce patterns which a) are pleasing and b) add to the poem by reinforcing the sense. Generally sound has a greater “value” (i.e. is more noticeable) if it occurs on a “stress”, if it occurs after a pause, or if it gains “weight’ by being part of a scheme of repetition.

We’ve looked at how some of these sounds lace the poem together. But another good example of each of these is the “refrain” from Green Stephania. In poetry, a refrain is any element that’s repeated throughout the poem. The name “Stephania” is the refrain in Green Stephania – Fanning uses it seven times.

Now some readers would look at “Stephania” and see a bunch of characters on the page. It gets silently docketed as “intellectual” material. But, hopefully, by this point, you and I know that when when we say “Ste-FAWN-ya” we know that certain things are getting used over and over again. For example: 

Stress – “FAWN”
Pauses – (not really in the refrain – but there will be a pause after and before the word “Stephania”)
Sound – Three “basic” sounds; Ste, FAWN, and ya.

These exact same sounds occur again and again. Fanning can use these sounds to tie in any of the following “similar sounding” words into the poem. They don’t have to be “exact matches”:

Ste – press, heavy, wet, nestle, breath, etc.
FAWN – want, con(sequently), sogged, etc.
Ya – want, sogged, etc.

Which brings us to rhyme.  Rhyme is the repetition of similar sounds.

When repetition of a consonantal phoneme, occurs we call it consonance or “consonantal rhyme”

• When consonance occurs at the beginning of words we call it alliteration or “begginng rhyme”
• When consonance occurs at the end of the word we have no classical term for it (except for “consonance”).
• When consonance occurs in the middle of the word we have no classical term for it (except for “consonance”).

When repetition of a vowel phoneme, occurs we call it assonance or “vowel rhyme”

• When assonance occurs at the beginning of a word we call it (again) alliteration or “head rhyme”
• When assonance occurs at the end of the word we have no classical term for it (except for “assonance”).
• When assonance occurs in the middle of the word we have no classical term for it (except for      “assonance”).

When the final vowel sounds (and any subsequent consonant sounds) (AWK!) of two words “match” they’re said to rhyme (in classical terms).

There are varying degrees of rhyme in classical terms, stretching from the tail of the word towards the snout. When more than one vowel sound before the final vowel sound rhymes, the rhyme is considered “more perfect”. If the rhyming sounds do not match perfectly, but fall in the same general “group” of sounds, the words are said to have slant rhyme.

Take a look at that phoneme chart above. “B” and “D” sounds might be used to make slant rhyme – the mouth makes them the same way. “S” and “NG” sounds could not be used to make slant rhyme – the mouth shapes them in a completely different way.) Classical terminology also notes the position of rhyme in the line.

• Head rhyme is “rhyme” (not      consonance or assonance) at the beginning of the line.
• End rhyme is “rhyme” (not consonance or assonance) at the end of      the line.
• Internal rhyme is “rhyme” (not consonance or assonance) in the middle      of the line.

Many poets consider a word completely rhyming with another word as repetition not rhyme. However, when the sounds of a word completely match up, there is a classical term: perfect rhyme. Not only that, but consider “meet” – “meat”. Two different words, exact same sound. They “rhyme”. (The reason I take any sort of stance on the repetition/rhyme debate is a reflection of my basic theories on sound, which begins with simply noting all sonic correlation.)

As with so much else from classical prosidy, these terms are useful but limiting. What if we made a poem with assonance at the beginning and end of each line? Surely, this is no less difficult then end-rhyme and when read aloud the sonic effect may well be far more noticeable (that is to say, greater). However, I’m convinced that the lack of accepted terminology “blinds” most working poets to these kind of possibilities. Think about all that sound you discovered in Green Stephania – were we to attempt to use classical terminology for it, we’d lose well over half of the sonic effects in the poem. Well over half the artistry.

Sound in poetry is best measured phoneme by phoneme. Any time you use an approximate system (classical scansion) or read silently, you miss (are deaf to) large chunks of a poem’s sound. We even train ourselves not to “hear” certain very common sounds, like the “schwa” (“uh” sound in “the”) or the “s” sound (excessive s’s (certainly some of Swinburne’s) are called sibilance) . I hope you all caught that the use of “x” and “c” above is a prime example of heavy sound being invisible on the page?

**

Sense

Sense usually gets the first cut, so I decided to put it after sound. In many ways Fanning’s poetry embodies a philosophy for poetry that I think makes good sense. The poems strive to be transparent yet complex. We shouldn’t wonder “what’s going on” or “what is the poet trying to say” as we read. Instead we should understand what the poet is saying and turn our attention to whether we agree with the poet or not, and what the implications of the poem are. Thus the poem becomes, in a sense, a medium, although not a discardable one. Unlike many puzzle-poems which get you to return to them in an effort to understand, Fanning’s poetry lays out the truths of the world as seen from a humanistic perspective. We return to this type of poem because we understand what it's about, and further, because the poem is not simplisticly judgemental; instead the poem hones and focuses our attention on something we, in essence, already know a lot about.

So with that rather large and bold claim in mind, I’d like to walk through the poem. What I’m doing is called exegesis, which means “to draw the meaning out of” a text. It’s less a science and more an art form, and it’s what most English majors spend their time doing. Poets do it also, but often from a “craft” perspective, which means we focus on the choices the poet has made in the poem and how the poem would be made better or worse by different choices/formulations. This kind of analysis assumes a backround “factual” exegesis which we rely upon to make our changes. I won’t be proposing any changes to the poem, but I will attempt to point out both what I think works from a craft perspective, and thus why I think the poem “means” so competently.

 

GREEN STEPHANIA by Robert Fanning

First off we begin with the title. There’s a kind of a joining of disparate elements. Stephania is a woman’s name, and this woman is green. Perhaps “Stepahnia” is a thing that’s named after a particular woman – a ship or something. Regardless, it’s not too mysterious or confusing after we read the poem.

A full wood, wet bark
shower, the fresh drenched
trees, the leaves lush heavy,
so consequently, Stephania.

I love what happens in these first four lines. Fanning begins by painting a picture of woods in rain. The woods are full, the wet bark the result of a fresh and recent shower. The leaves are lush and heavy – thus, it’s late spring or summer. The sounds of the words are clean and fresh – watery and rushing almost (fresh, drenched, leaves, lush).

By splitting “wet bark/shower,” Fanning is able to both imply that the bark is wet (introducing wetness in the first line) and yet avoid a more prosaic formulation, such as “bark wet from a shower.” There’s no impediment to understanding in his syntax (the order of words in a sentence) and he’s able to score a number of sonic effects without sounding bizarre, overly formal, or clipped.

And then to turn from the three lush lines to “so consequently, Stephania” is masterful. First off, “consequently” is a word that runs against what’s happened thus far. It’s more Latinate and has four syllables. It’s also the first kind of non-sensory abstraction we have in the poem. Prior to it everything is organic, but “consequently” functions as a kind of enormous equal sign (“=”). It equates Stephania with all this green lushness. Or it indicates that she is “of” this, that she is the inevitable result of the woods filling up with water. We should understand the title at this point, at least in part – Green Stephania.

In terms of reader "trust" - there's nothing here that too far beyond the pale.  No bizarre assertions, no juxtapositions for the sake of crazy images, nothing at all like that.  The poem is mysterious in places, but not does not try to bamboozle us.  I want to keep reading it to find out why the poet brought this to my attention, to hear what he's going to do with it. 

As another thumb-nail indicator of excellence and economy – the poem could end here, and it would still be a remarkable statement honoring Stephania. But the poem goes on, as do we.

Stephania, curled finger ferns
unfurl and burst. Loose spores
string through mist and nestle.
Moss tufts rub.
Rain slapped leaves, Stephania,
spring and drip on our deep
sogged glade, our soaked sunk roots.

The poem bridges the final word of the last line to the first word of the next line. “Stephania” is spoken twice. It’s hard to tell if the narrator is directly addressing Stephania at this point. If so, there’s a kind of Coleridgian “conducting” going on, where the narrator is showing Stephania these important things and we're kind of "overhearing" what he's saying to her. But the tone is modulated (both here and in the next stanza) so that Stephania also functions as a refrain, as a sort of equation with this natural world. Thus she’s both “present” and evoked. A lot of poets are down with “ambiguity” in their works, which usually means sloppiness. Here that ambiguity in address is harnessed – if the reader blindly stumbles down either path, so much the better for the poem. If the reader apprehends both, neither is a problem.

By beginning with the very sexual image of the finger ferns unfurling and bursting, we’re immediately clued in to the nature of the relationship between Stephania and the narrator. It’s certainly sensual, most likely sexual. In fact, the remainder of the stanza is lush, ripe, with a kind of spring like sexuality – the ferns, moss, spores, glade. They’re all indicative of newness, and yet they’re some of the oldest life forms on our planet. Again, this kind of selection isn’t accidental. Sometimes exegesis gets too wild, too insistent, too clever, but I think this type of reading does not stray too far from the poem’s expressed intent.

There’s also a tremendous identification with place going on here. Stephania and the narrator share the glade, the roots. There’s a kind of primal power here, and this is even before we get to the poem’s challenging complications.

Me and Stephania.
In a hiding place our slick lips sore
from pressing together.
Stephania, seaweed breath,
burrs in your tangling curls,
soiled nails and knees, giggling.
Eden, Stephania. The smell of dirt.
I never want to leave the world.

Something interesting happens in the above stanza. The age of the narrator and Stephania regresses remarkably. Both the somewhat childish syntax of “Me and Stephania,” and the phrases “Hiding place,” “soiled knees,” and “giggling” all strongly suggest childhood or adolescence. Americans are both very sexual and very repressed insofar as child-sexuality goes; many states criminalize sexual contact between two persons based on their age. Thus the poem is somewhat daring in its suggesting the age of the two people is very young. That the poem uses “Eden” further complicates matters. This is the happy world before the Fall, before the knowledge of good and evil. And yet it’s an oddly modulated knowledge, not quite innocent – for in the last line the speaker recognizes the possibility of this world passing away, both as a season, and, (I think not too far a stretch) with age.

In a way the poem stands for idealized young love, nascent or actualized sexuality. Certainly there’s sexual exploration, with the kissing, and certainly there’s a full sensual appreciation of Stephania’s breath, the burrs in her hair, and her giggling. There’s also a touching kind of specificity in the images – that her breath smells like seaweed. Not the most flattering thing one could write, but more truthful and tender for it, evoking salt and green warmth.

In terms of rhythms, the poem has been drawing a number of strong parallels. In the first stanza, it was the wet wood equaling Stephania. In the second, Stephania was further tied to the sensual world. When the word “Stephania” next appears, she is tied to “me,” the narrator. The time after that she is equated with herself – her seaweed breath, the burrs. And finally, Eden itself.

Fanning’s careful to avoid pedestrian “triads” (formulation of three clauses). He generally varies between four items and two. In fact, if you read just this stanza, the sentences introduce two elements, then two, four, two, one, one.

BTW, the regularity of the last line is iambic, a kind of summation, in a way, after the two short sentences that proceed it.

Again, the poem could end here and be remarkable, but Fanning pushes it further.

Through the streaming wash
of rain, through the windows
and pale curtains, our mothers ache.
Their bedrooms flicker with blue TV.
Scent of biscuits, chimney smoke, tea.
Our fathers cup their hands
against the cold glass panes
and look out.

In this stanza, the “eye” of the poem focuses on the parents of the narrator and Stephania. There’s a remarkable amount of work that’s done by formulating both sets of parents as “our mothers” and “our fathers.” Not only does this link both the narrator’s parents and Stephania’s parents as similar types, but the plural also allows us to read them as standing in for an older generation. And the even though the picture that it paints must be non-Edenic, there is warmth and comfort in the biscuits, chimney smoke, and tea.  However this comfort is ancillary to the overall paleness, the blueness, the coldness that the stanza introduces. The parents are shown to be aware (perhaps?) of their children’s absence, but it only sparks the fathers to peer out their windows without turning off their televisions. There seems to be little corresponding warmth between the parents. Instead of passion and freshness, we have domesticity. Instead of innocent(?) excitement we have the implied commercials of the day.

This characterization of the parents is not cartoonish, yet it’s far from bland. Or, perhaps I should say it’s their very blandness, faithfully rendered with small comforts, which condemns them in relation to the world of the children.

And yet the children must return to this world, as Fanning acknowledges:

It is dusk, Stephania.
No-one knows where we are.

Those last lines are remarkably packed with meaning. Dusk, while working on the “primary level” of “what is going on” (i.e., it’s getting late) also functions to let us know that whatever the narrator and Stephania are experiencing, it’s drawing to a close. And the last line is sort of sad, grim even. Perhaps the speaker himself does not know where he is, or where Stephania is. . .it’s certainly a closing down, an ending of things.  It's also certainly ironic, for even if the parents knew where the narrator and Stephania were, or could see what they were doing, the internal perceptions of the parents, their judgments, might be radically different from the children's own understandings.  "No-one knows where we are," also means, in the context of the poem, that no-one knows who we are, or what we've experienced.  And yet, one of the touching sub-ironies is that we all know exactly what's going on, that most of us can remember young and adolescent passion.

**

So, on the “primary” level of the poem, two children or young people explore their feelings for each other in the woods near their houses. They’ve probably known each other for a while, given that the glade and the roots are “theirs.” Things have changed between them, which is new and exciting and fulfilling. And yet there seems to be some knowledge (forshadowed even in the use of the word “Eden”) by the narrator. The world they have left and must return to is shown with a balanced eye, and compared to the passion and excitement of the children, it’s somewhat sterile. Not uncaring, perhaps, nor entirely uncomforting, but all the more accurate a picture for it. The poem ends by balancing us in the moment.

In the broadest sense, or the simplest sense, this is what “the poem’s about.” But the purpose of reading poetry like this is not simply to marvel over the economy of language, or narrative, in that so much information, such an accurate portrait of a complicated moment in the development of several lives, can be done in a mere 139(!) words. No, the poem allows us to go beyond itself, to make our own inquiries as to what it’s about. It invites us to imagine and remember and project.  We may think of similar experiences we’ve had as young people, as friends, as parents, as grandparents. There are social implications that run the boundries of childhood sexuality, emotional/intellectual/moral development, biblical ponderings (is this sin?), and just how we ought to react to such things. How ought we to react to such things? I leave that to you.

(For if the poem has done it’s work well and fairly, which I think it has, we ask this question instead of “is the poem for real, could that really happen, do people really feel that way?”)

In talking about a single poem, I hope to give you, dear reader, the key to others. There’s more here than what we were able to get to today, of course. But hopefully the craft is in service to understanding, and thus somewhat transparent anyway.

I’d urge you to order Robert Fanning’s new collection. This was just one poem – there are many more, each made with the same care and attention, each made, not for him, but for you.

 

Comments

[riposte]

I decided I wanted a hard copy of this; these 33 pages...
Good thing I'm at work.

[chris borreca]

thank you very much for this. wish i had read this 35 years ago.

[Scoplaw]

Thanks, I'm glad it's been useful to read. That makes it worthwhile to write.