Pragmatic approaches to difficult texts

	like	don't like
understand	my good stuff	my bad stuff
don't understand	Bach	?

"I don't get it" is a reaction I have when reading some works. I may still like them, so I could fill in the first column of the table on the right. I think there are pieces that I understand and (hence) don't like, but is it fair to dislike a piece that you don't understand? Would one dislike a piece merely because it's in a language you don't understand? And yet, in other situations "I don't like" versus "I don't understand" seems too artificial a distinction, a politically-correct attempt to blame oneself rather than the writer - is disliking always the result of failed (inappropriate) understanding? I doubt it.

Amongst the options when facing something you don't get are

• Trying to understand it
• Accepting that you won't be able to understand it - a blindspot
• Believing that the work is bad because you don't understand it, though it may still be interesting
• Pretending to like it (fortunately, you can say you like a piece without needed to convince people that you understand it)

I'll look at those options in more detail here, bringing together some articles I've posted elsewhere, mostly dealing with poetry.

Trying to understand

I don't suspend disbelief very willingly. I like to stay close to the text. If there's something I don't understand I don't like pretending it's not there, skimming over it until I find something I do understand. When evaluating a poem I don't edit away the inconvenient mysteries. I'm prepared to blame the poet, even call their bluff. Consequently I struggle with some poetry, and read books that attempt to explain it to me. Amongst the books that analyse poems are

• 52 ways of looking at a poem (Ruth Padel). Contemporary poems explained for the benefit of intelligent laypeople. The material derives from newspaper articles. I like it.
• The poem and the journey (Ruth Padel). More of the same. Poems by Prynne etc.
• Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne (N.H.Reeve and Richard Kerridge). The deep end. See also J H Prynne and difficulty from Arduity.

Where these sometimes fail for me is even when they can decode a difficult phrase, they don't explain why a simpler phrase wasn't used instead, or why a more obvious interpretation is discounted.

I also read theory and articles, mostly to shake me out of my habits -

• Close calls with nonsense (Stephen Burt). An unpreachy look at the factors and fashions involved with recent North American poetry.
• How to write a poem (John Redmond) A book for beginners that provides building blocks more in keeping with contemporary poetry - a Jori Graham poem is successfully discussed
• Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed (Mary Klages)
• next word, better word (Stephen Dobyns). Includes in-depth analysis of poetry and prose, showing how some older methods of analysis still have a place.
• Problems and poetics of the nonaristotelian novel (Leonard Orr). A reminder that harmony and unity aren't unquestionable delights.
• Arduity: Clarifying difficult poetry A site with articles that help to ease the pain of supposedly difficult poetry

Occasionally I write articles to help me collect together what I've learnt

• Difficulty and obscurity in poetry
• Poetry and communication

Then there's the poetry itself. Sometimes I just give up. Elsewhen I write about the problems I have with particular books, trying to provide details about where my gaps in understanding are. The posts below are amongst my most popular, as if readers enjoy watching me expose my ignorance -

• Best British Poetry 2011 (edited by Roddy Lumsden)
• School of forgery (Jon Stone)
• All the rooms of uncle's head (Tony Williams)

I suspect some of my troubles are caused by my lack of awareness of factors that affected the poet, though becoming aware of these factors doesn't always solve everything

• Maybe there are unknown aims that compromise my view of the poem. If I only see this drawing as a rabbit looking left I might criticise the execution, not realising that it's a duck looking right too. If I then notice the duck and point out that the duck's not very good either, the artist might respond by saying that accuracy of either image isn't the point. And they'd be right, but if accuracy doesn't matter one way or the other, the artist might just as well be more accurate in order to placate people who judge by measuring the realism. Or is the artist's technique lacking? (it's my drawing, and mine certainly is. Is this better?). A poem, like a picture, can do more than demonstrate an idea - it can also fulfil other aims. The criticisms of the piece might still be valid even if the critic missed the "main point" - why should the main point be the only one?
• Maybe the poem's constrained by a form that's hard to notice (it's an acrostic, or an N+7 piece, for example).
• Maybe the poem's a reaction to something - the poet's previous style, or a prevailing fashion. This might explain the poem (and its historical or personal importance), but doesn't justify its contemporary value as a poem. An old poem rebelling against end-rhyme loses much of its force nowadays. Besides, there are good and less good ways of reacting, however worthy the cause.

Blindspots

"You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are even worse" - Tolstoy to Chekhov

"Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Bertolt Brecht, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me" - Nabokov

The "I don't like it" vs "I don't get it" distinction is hard to assess. Which predispositions and situations make people say one rather than the other, and what motives and consequences might there be? It depends on the context.

• Social situation - In the tutor/pupil situation perhaps it's easier for the tutor to say "I don't like it" and the pupil to say "I don't get it". In judges' reports you might not often see lines quoted that the judge admits to not understanding. Of course contestants are happy to accept that judges have preferences, but if they have unadvertised biases it's more awkward. Perhaps judges should be more upfront about their blindspots beforehand, or return the entry fees of poems that they feel unqualified to judge :-). As a ploy they might be prepared to say that a particular poem is "good of its type" but then dismiss that type for reasons they don't explain.
• The Artist - it's easier to admit to blindspots about some artists than others. Stockhausen, Larkin, Prynne, and Olds are fair game. However a dislike or incomprehension of Neruda might be viewed with more suspicion. Perhaps there are poets for whom the only acceptable reason for disliking them is that you don't understand them - to know them is to love them, though they may be difficult to get to know. Shakespeare? Geoffrey Hill?

In practise the distinction might just be another way of saying something else - whether you'd bother re-reading the work, for example. Maybe "I don't get it" can mean "I don't like it but famous people do, so I'm inadequate".

There are some poets' work I find easy to like but hard to love (Glyn Maxwell maybe). There are poems I'd rather read about than read (Les Murray's maybe). If I understand and like a poem I may not agree with it (it may be a Political poem, for example) but that's a different matter.

Attitudes to Blindspots

I heard Philip Hensher (novelist and reviewer) being interviewed recently, saying that he didn't get Ian McEwan's work and hence didn't review it. I think he said he was happy to accept that people had blind spots - big ones even. But perhaps he doesn't really like McEwan's novels. Such meta-judgements are going to be error-prone though. I'm not keen on Olson. I'd go so far to say that I think he's more important than good, that I don't have a blindspot as far as he's concerned. Whereas I think there's more to Heaney than meets my eye.

Moreso than judges, magazine editors can afford to have blindspots - they're what give their magazines character. Practising writers perhaps have the most license. Even so there may be repercussions. Nabokov said - "[music] I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds". With the benefit of medical advances we'd tend to label this as a medical condition, a handicap. But Nabokov's admission didn't affect his work's reception. Larkin's dislike of modern jazz is treated more as a personality defect, though some people read aesthetic limitations into it. I prefer even "Frankie goes to Hollywood" to Mozart. Ok, so I like some JS Bach, Barber's Adagio, Bartok's quartets, but surely my statement exposes a lack of taste.

de gustibus non disputandum - but career poets had better not advertise too many of their poetry blindspots if they want to judge competitions, or if they don't want to discourage people coming to their workshops.

Covering up blindspots

Whether the blindspot's related to emotion, empathy or intellect there may be remedies. Firstly there may be an underlying perception problem - if you're totally colourblind you're not going to be able to respond to blue or even "blue". Readers won't see syllabics unless they count the syllables, and some readers don't listen to the sound of the words. Sometimes these perceptual deficits are due to inattention and can be remedied.

But the problems may lie deeper. Psychology tests nowadays can reveal all kinds of individual quirks in our visual and language processing. The effects show up in contrived laboratory conditions. In everyday life we manage to compensate for them - e.g. the face-blind pay more attention to gait, clothes, etc. It's not surprising that poetry would reveal individual differences in apprehension. I think my poetry appreciation is a patchwork of blindspots - from poem to poem or even from line to line. I approach texts with a mishmash of innate and learnt behaviours, but usually act as if the unevenness is all in the text.

Each of our eyes compensates for the blindspot of the other in most situations. How can one compensate for aesthetic blindspots? Give a computer enough examples of so-called good and bad art (in a limited field) and pattern-matching software can often judge future examples pretty well (though it may not be able to give explanations). You can train yourself in the same way - working by analogy and general principles. In poetry, where there's a wide range of tastes anyway, it's not too hard to bluff one's way through one genre or facet of poetry, especially if you've acquired credibility in other genres. Indeed, opinions by newcomers and outsiders might prove valuable. If I were to judge Mr World I might well make a less controversial decision than if I were judging Miss World - fewer hormones and idiosyncrasies get in the way, and I'd use more general principles and cliches/archetypes.

Learning from bad writing

I read small-press literary magazines, online writing forums and go to writers meetings. Not all that I read or see at those venues is publishable. Bad or not, I think there's much to be learnt from it. Equally I think one can sometimes learn much about a well-known writer by considering their less successful works, where their techniques, quirks and habits are sometimes laid bare.

Those who only read good work are leaving themselves vulnerable to charlatans, or to people who can imitate what sells. Bad work gives you a better appreciation of what is easy and hard to do, and helps you to calibrate your appreciation of supposedly better works. Bad work might be excellent in some respects - plot for example - but fatally flawed in another. It may be patchy - should a work be judged by its worst passages or its best? In "Reading like a writer" Francine Prose notes that "At lazy moments, F.Scott Fitzgerald could resort to strings of clichés".

Pretending to like a text

There are many reasons why people might say they like a poem, but if someone says they like a poem of yours, think twice before asking them why - it's likely to be embarrassing for both of you. The odds are that inter-personal expectations of behaviour affect what people say more than the desire for aesthetic authenticity. This isn't easy to prove, but if everyone who said they liked a poem read the book that the poem came from (or even bought it) the world would be a very different place.

How much does the public - or even poetry audiences - understand about poems? Maybe less than is generally assumed

• Jon Stone wrote on his blog "I'm still not sure, when I look around at poetry audiences, how many really notice or care about texture or music, and how many are jonesing for their next hit of clarity"
• Wayne Burrows in his Thumbscrew article suggests that "'Most people', quite simply, don’t know about poetry".
• Housman wrote "I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry".
• Harold Munro wrote "The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true".
• In the Rialto they said that "During a recent research project into reading habits conducted at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, a cross-section of the public nominated poetry to be the most annoying category of book currently published .... after a sustained period of reading poems, thirty six complained of headaches or migraine, twenty-seven suffered indigestion, and two became argumentative resulting in violent exchange .... eighty-two of the hundred people tested did fall asleep for prolonged periods at some point during their reading of poetry"

If anything, I think that experienced poetry-readers (even reviewers and judges) have more reason to dissemble. If they don't understand/like something that for career, personal or reputation reasons they feel they should praise (e.g. Rilke's poems), what else can they do?

A combination of ambiguous statements and use of the Forer effect can effectively mask blind spots and inconvenient opinions (the Forer effect - used by fortune tellers - is when a person who's described in a phrase that could be applied to many people, think that it's especially applicable to themselves). How about "A sensitive, controlled writer"? Or a writer "with understated insight"? Suggesting that a work has "subtle irony" (or subtle anything, because "subtle" can mean "just a bit of") is safe, as is "deceptively deep" or "repays rereading". Then there are the unfalsifiable phrases that one might find in wine reviews - "muscular yet silky".

Can fakery be detected? It's not as simple as that. For a start, some people think that any use of the intellect rather than the heart is "faking it". Also one can begin by faking it then end up loving it. But if poets on R4's Saturday Review or BBC2's Review Night say that some Art Exhibition's "Extraordinary" (inarticulate gushing being a common enough strategy to cover ignorance) it would be interesting to see if they subsequently go to similar exhibitions. Maybe. Maybe eventually it's possible reach the stage when one can say (as amateurs also do) "I like all sorts of poetry as long as it's good" and be believed, but it's hard work.

Adapting short texts for the market

When texts are short, the poetry and prose categories can merge. So why bother trying to categorize? Once people other than the author are involved, there are several reasons - e.g.

• Editors of anthologies and specialist magazines need to draw a line somewhere
• Writers submitting to certain magazines need to specify whether their submission is poetry or prose. What type of work does the author want the submission to be printed amongst? Magazines often demarcate, though Arts Council "New Writing" anthologies sometimes had a "Texts" section for unclassified works, and "The New Yorker" used to have "Casuals" and "Shouts and Murmers".
• Readers may benefit from knowing which reading strategies to initially adopt, and which expectations to develop.

Categories

The classifications are more fine-grained than just "Prose" and "Poetry". There are Haibun (combining prose and haiku), anecdotes, vignettes, contes, short-shorts, microfiction, Flash, ketai fiction, Twitter lit, prose poems, found poems, etc. The existence of line-breaks usually suffices as a marker of poetry, though some free verse, shorn of its line-breaks, might easily fit into these prose categories. Some forms are defined by word-count. For some others, definitions abound. Here are a few -

• Flash - The Bridport Prize's web site suggests that Flash "contains the classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, obstacles or complications and resolution. However unlike the case with a traditional short story, the word length often forces some of these elements to remain unwritten: hinted at or implied in the written storyline". They impose a 250-word limit.
• Prose poetry - In "This Line Is Not For Turning", a prose poetry anthology she edited, Jane Monson provides a description of the prose-poem "at its most disciplined" - "no more than a page, preferably half of one, focussed, dense, justified, with an intuitive grasp of a good story and narrative, a keen eye for unusual and surprising detail and images relative to that story, and a sharp ear for delivering elegant, witty, clear and subtly surreal pieces of conversation and brief occurrences, incidents or happenings". She goes on to write that her anthology "focuses and captures a particular style; which shares in tone, pithiness and brevity the best traits of 'flash fiction', 'micro fiction', 'sudden prose', and the 'short short story' rather than the strengths and weaknesses of 'free verse', 'blank verse' and 'poetic prose'"
• Prose poetry - In Summer 2012's "Poetry Review", Carrie Etter wrote "While some poets and critics insist that we must resist defining prose poetry for it to retain its subversive genre-blurring character, I find some basic distinctions crucial for its appreciation ... a prose poem develops without 'going' anywhere"

Magazines like Sudden Prose ("Prose Poetry and Short-Short Stories) and Double Room (seeks to "explore the intersection of poetry and fiction") seem to accept the overlap. The 2 denominations occupy similar terrains though they have different histories and look in different directions. Calling a piece a prose poem is still making a statement -

• "Prose Poetry is some of the funniest—and strangest—writing you’ll find anywhere. It lends itself to the comic, and the absurd. Maybe humor is easier to convey in a sentence than in a line break. … Flash Fiction is something else, as it’s about character (and change), and it’s therefore more difficult to pull off in such a short space" - Brett at Bark.
• "Flash fiction focuses on story (whether that be character or plot or place or time). Prose poetry focuses on image and/or emotion" - Chris (Bellingham Review)
• "In spite of the prose poem’s history of breaking rules and redefining itself ..." - Bruce Holland Rogers (flash fiction online).

Market trends

I think the current short-text literary arena is currently dominated by 3 overlapping terms

• Poetry - the dominant term; so much so that in the late 1900s a short text had to be made into a poem to have much of a chance of publication. In the age of relaxed free verse, inserting regular line-breaks often sufficed to create a "poem". A text labelled as such carries some of the weight traditionally associated with the term, and is most likely to be read beside other poetry. It needn't have plot or character, nor need it be written in sentences, though it frequently has all of these properties.
• Flash Fiction - a fairly recent and popular term for a cluster of genres that have been around for a long time. Derived from the short story, it's expected to have plot and character (though the proportions may vary), and is likely to be read beside other (perhaps much longer) fiction. Venues now exist for such work - in dedicated magazines, but also magazines in general are more likely to accept short texts nowadays. Specialist outlets impose word-count limits (from 250 to 1000 words).
• Prose poetry - Initially a rebellion against the rhyme/meter of Formalism, then later a challenge to the one remaining obvious feature of poetry - the line-break. Shorn of its rebel image, it retains its feel of being different - though examples appear in many collections and magazines, there are rarely more than 2 or 3 examples per publication. It's likely to appear beside other poetry. Sometimes the only prose-like feature it possesses is the layout, but more often it's in sentences, and can (or even should, according to some practitioners) have narrative impetus.

The popularity and increasing acceptance of Flash (and to a lesser extent of prose poetry) should mean that fewer texts have gratuitous line-breaks nowadays, but understandably, progress is slow. Re-classification of texts previously published as poetry would help change the climate. When creating his poetry anthology, Yeats used a fragment of Pater's prose. Even pieces as long as Carolyn Forché's "The Colonel" have appeared in both poetry and Flash anthologies. In Monson's prose poetry anthology, someone contributed part of their novel. I think the distinctions between micro-fiction and prose-poetry are rather in the eye of the beholder, and the prose-poetry/free-verse distinction can be merely the result of typing habits or previous adaptions for markets.

Adaptions

Given these fuzzy theoretic definitions and the fluidity of the market, it's tempting for writers to add/remove line-breaks, add/remove punchlines, or add/remove connections in order to make a text more appealing to particular outlets. For some styles (those using surrealism, perhaps) I don't think any artistic integrity is lost by doing this. Given the variation in word-count limits it's also worth having more than one version of stories. When texts are adapted, more genre decision might be necessary. When line-breaks are removed from poetry, one of two effects are likely -

• More narrative might be added (i.e. more prose features added)
• The text might appear rather flat, so to compensate the content may become more surreal/imagistic, less linear (i.e. more poetry features added).

When shortening prose, several things can happen. The result might be

• A sketch - same proportions as a story
• A slice (just the sounds, maybe, or a moment in time without back-story)
• A fable (a genre that allows omissions)
• Selected extracts - an interesting set-up followed quickly by a punchline rather than by character development.
• A prose form - a shopping list, an application form, a questionnaire, etc.
• More obscurity (on the grounds that readers can re-read)
• More intensity or extremes

I think that a piece in a form is often printed in poetry sections of magazines even if its content isn't poetic - "forms" and "short texts" both tend to be associated with poetry. So shortened prose can end up in a poetry venue.

Series

The distinction between short and long texts is challenged by series. In Time Lines: few lines and fewer George Szirtes looks at Twitter, pointing out that Jennifer Egan's novella, Black Box is told all in tweets. Similarly, microfictions can be strung into a sequence.

See also

• Short Fiction
• Flash
• Poetry or prose?
• Prose poems
• a list of Flash outlets

Poetry and Communication

The two nouns in the title sometimes thread through fractious discussions. Both terms are rather slippery, and depend in turn on notions like Meaning, Language and Understanding, discussion of which can easily hijack the debate. Also once failure of communication becomes an issue so does blame, arrogance, incompetence, and fraudulence. Here I'm going to restrict myself to mentioning just a few points, some borrowed from my other articles.

Language

Language is used for many purposes other than information transfer. It's sometimes a replacement for pictures in order to record. People talk to themselves, cry out in pain, pray, chant, seduce, and tell jokes. Language can perform the role that nit-picking performs in a troop of apes. It can establish and reinforce power hierarchies.

Does poetry have as wide a range? I don't see why not. For instance, it's used to help people remember how many days are in each month, and to release emotion when a princess dies. Much of the time it's only read by the poet, if that (John Stuart Mill wrote that "eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard"). That other people read the poem may be incidental - after all, a person playing a round of golf needn't be watched for the activity to be worthwhile.

Understanding

I heard an educationalist suggest that the word should be banned in the educational world because it has too many meanings. Can you play tennis? Do you understand tennis (the quantum mechanical reasons why balls bounce)? Can you add numbers? Do you understand 1+1=2? (remember that Bertrand Russell in Principia Mathematica took a few hundred pages to establish it). Do you understand Mondrian? Can you hence explain a Mondrian to someone who dislikes him? Do you understand melody or how much your lover misses you? Some poems might start as if they can be understood the way a novel can, but end up like a Mondrian.

Wittgenstein wrote that "We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other". How can one test understanding? And when understanding merges into appreciation, how can one know if someone likes a work?

Meaning and poetry

For some people a poem needs to be paraphrasable to have a meaning, and the poet knows what the meaning is. Others feel that neither the reader nor the author need "understand" the text for it to be considered effective

• "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood", T. S. Eliot
• "The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be ... to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him" T.S. Eliot
• "Four major thinkers, Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud, gave grounds for the belief that the artist often does not know what he is doing", William Empson

Communication

If understanding/appreciation is hard to assess, it's harder still to assess a communication's success.

It's common for readers to believe that a writer knows what s/he means and puts it into words so that others can learn what s/he knows. The simplest signal-processing-based diagram to represent this is

   author -> text -> reader

or

   author -> sound -> listener 

In the text-mediated version especially, there is no direct contact between author and audience. At best the message will arrive undamaged, but noise in the communications channel is always a risk.

This is the model appropriate for learning facts from an encyclopedia, but poetry often plays a different language game. The simplistic model above can be developed to model more complex situations in several ways.

• The message is usually in a code of sorts (a protocol or language). Conversion to and from this code may be inexact or at least difficult
• The diagram is "New Criticism" in its purest form. In practise the author works within a context (era, country, gender, lifestyle) and the reader within another. The reader may or may not be aware of the author's context, which can lead to misunderstandings
• Sometimes extra stages are added, the author creating a narrator who's producing words for an implied addressee
• The situation where the reading happens is significant, and should be included in the schema. Found poetry (and the Art equivalent) works because of this
• "Even if a poet is pragmatically dedicated to transmitting a message, the temporal delay involved in preparing an artifact (poem as message) plunges the activity into a perceptual realm distinct from the intersubjective circuit of a communications environment", Jed Rasula, "Syncopations"

The signal processing metaphor breaks down for poems where the "noise" (the words, the medium) is part of the message. Rather than signal processing, game theory has been used to model the poet/reader relationship

• "the reading process can be represented as a one-sided bargaining process of imperfect information [with] mutual interdependence (reflexivity), fixed order of play, one-sidedness of the communicative process, possibility of limited pre-play communication (e.g. by means of publishing, advertising, generic conventions), inability to make side-payments or binding agreements", "The Role of Game Theory in Literature Studies", Peter Swirski in "Empirical Approaches to Literature"

Seeing all this scope for errors it's easy to forget that most of the time communication works just fine when it's intended. Poetry presents (often deliberately) greater problems than usual, exploiting these problems - "If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear", Valéry,

Deliberate difficulty

Sometimes authors are trying to communicate something difficult in the easiest way possible, or they feel that an initial difficulty makes eventual understanding more likely, or they believe that a poem's "meaning" is constructed by the reader (the poet's intentions being irrelevant), or the text is a product of the society and so society generates and consumes meaning, the poet being a mere conduit. Authors may want to produce work that should be approached partly like a Rorschach blot, a riddle, or a melody. Even if an author's aim is to conventionally communicate, there are several reasons why they might make texts in some way "difficult".

• Recent work by Oppenheimer has shown that texts in a font that was hard to read were better understood by students
• "the problem of the poet, if he is to produce work which forces his readers to experience real perception, is how to make recognition difficult and perception inevitable. The poem should give an immediate impression of having a 'message' function, in order to achieve unity, but not more than an impression need be provided at the most accessible 'levels' of the poem", "Poetic Truth", Skelton
• "One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most 'intellectual' piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?", Geoffrey Hill
• "The relationship between an artist and reality is always an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can only approach that reality by indirect means", Richard Wilbur
• "The general public ... has set up a criterion of its own, one by which every form of contemporary art is condemned. This criterion is, in the case of music, melody; in the case of painting, representation; in the case of poetry, clarity. In each case one simple aspect is made the test of a complicated whole, becomes a sort of loyalty oath for the work of art. ... instead of having to perceive, to enter, and to interpret those new worlds which new works of art are, the public can notice at a glance whether or not these pay lip-service to its own 'principles'", Randall Jarrell
• In poetry, unlike in other forms of discourse, obscurity might be an aesthetic principle; indeed, poetic discourse enjoys a special privilege: it may run counter to the fundamental requirement of language, namely communicability, and may infringe some of the basic rules of language. ... It is able to depart from the requirements of coherence, cohesion and consistency with ideas expressed in the text, or indeed with external knowledge. It does not establish any information known both to the originator and to the recipient that would ensure a grasp of the information that follows (see Clark and Clark, 1977). It will frequently depart from the literal sense of the words that it uses and endow them with new meanings. And despite all this, simply because it is a poem, it will be perceived as a significant text (Iris Yaron-Leconte)
• For the person who reads a poem, obscurity is one of the elements that create 'magic'. Unlike in the case of non-poetic obscure texts, the fact that understanding is deferred is part of the aesthetics of obscurity and this in itself is thus linked to the experience that the poet seeks to create for the reader (Iris Yaron-Leconte)

John Ashbury and communication

In an interview in The Spectator in Feb 2013, John Ashbury made some points that seem amenable to the signal-processing metaphor

• "After listening to a piece of music we often feel a sense of satisfaction and understanding. Poetry aims for this as well, but it's limited by what the words mean, whereas in music, the message is exact and intelligible but without being paraphrasable like language"
• "On the one hand I have always felt the most important thing that a writer should do is to write something that people will understand. But I also want to write poetry that expresses my usually tangled thoughts without condescending to a reader. "

I'm not convinced that "in music, the message is exact and intelligible". I can't even think of how one could in general test whether this is so (other than with program music). However, I can appreciate that sometimes the literal meaning of individual words can interfere with the poem's intended meaning. The second comment is one that I imagine most writers would agree with, but of course it depends who the people are and in what sense they understand. Elsewhere, Ashbery has said "I'm ... mildly distressed at not being able to give a satisfactory account of my work because in certain moods this inability seems like a limit to my powers of invention. After all, if I can invent poetry, why can't I invent the meaning?", so I'm unsure quite what he means.

Rothko and communication

It's interesting to consider Mark Rothko's views on how his Art communicated. He wrote that "The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions ... the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom".

In this phase he seemed to feel that there were right and wrong ways to approach his work. I'm not convinced by the rigour of his tests on his communication successes, though his statements about technique show that the "signal processing" metaphor can be applied to non-figurative work. He was aware of some reasons for misunderstandings -

• "Since my pictures are large, colorful, and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls"
• "We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth"

Extracts from a Facebook discussion

All the above is a prequel to commenting on some Facebook points made in Feb 2013. I'll categorize the comments (not the writers) along mainstream/non-mainstream (NMS) lines

• Comments that either side could have made
  Once the necessity of communication is reduced, and the definition of "communication" widened, there's common ground.
  • Clare Pollard - I do feel that if your main aim is to communicate, and communicate something difficult, then you have a moral obligation to clarity - If I have trouble understanding a writer when they're trying to communicate something relatively simple, I distrust their more "difficult" work. I realise that this can be viewed as somewhat analogous to rejecting a Turner Prizewinner for their inability to draw perfect freehand circles.
  • Angela Topping - A good poem will communicate to people in different ways at different times on different levels. A bad poem will stink whether it communicates or not
  • Angela Topping - Communication in the sense of being at oneness - communion - would be more accurate for a poem
  • Jon Stone - NMS poetry isn't intended to be noncommunicative - it's intended to communicate different things through a different way. But surely you've got to give people more of a hand up
• Non-mainstream comments
  There's a tendency to devalue communication as commonly understood, with a greater emphasis on letting readers share the (true?) experience of the poem's writing
  • Tim Cumming - If you've got something really important to say, you're generally going to use forms of 'communication' other than a poem. Poem does something else. You experience a poem, ... It MAY evoke a message of 'communication' but that's not its primary purpose
  • Steven Waling - 'communication' isn't just about 'getting your point across' or 'giving information.' Abstract art 'communicates' but you can't say what it's about; the same with lots of poetry. Dull poetry wallows in communication; it doesn't have anything else to attract us, I feel. Poets also aren't just communicators, they're also explorers

See Also

• Difficulty and obscurity in poetry
• The scale of meaning

Poetry competitions

Are poetry competitions worth the effort?

They can be. There's more than just luck involved - the same names turn up time after time in short-lists. Winning a big competition is good for your reputation (no favouritism involved) and can make non-poets take you seriously. Also there's money to be made - although there may be many entries, the majority are no-hopers giving their money away. Looking at it purely numerically, you've a better chance of winning a reasonable prize than being accepted by a reasonable magazine, and unlike magazine submissions there's a clear cut-off date after which you can send your poem elsewhere. Some competitions offer book publication as the prize - one of the few ways for new poets to get published nowadays.

Of course, luck is a factor -

• "When we were judging [The Booker] we tried three different voting systems and each time a different winner emerged", Rowan Pelling, the Observer, March 9, 2008
• When Stand ran a poetry competition in 1995 with 2 judges, the judges didn't agree with or respect each others opinion, so there were 2 lists of prizewinners.

Is there such a genre as "the competition poem"?

Some people say so.

• In Assent 65/2 D.A.Prince has a review of Robert Seatter's "Writing King Kong" in which she says "He's left behind much of the excitable display of virtuosity characterising his first collection, with its reassuring basketful of competition winners, and built on the strengths of his second book to produce a relatively quieter collection, more secure and confident. It's as though he no longer needs the morale-boosting success in competitions; he has reached his mature style, and has the assurance to trust his own instincts as to what works best in fitting these poems together".
• "A 'competition poem' is different. It has to stand on its own feet. It can have no relation to the poet’s other work because the judges don’t know who the poet is. The poet has to believe that this poem is worth thousands of pounds, and because of that the poem has to be not only well-crafted and original, it also has to be startling" (Kurt Heinzelman and Ian McMillan, 2009 Cardiff International Poetry Competition)

Judges are looking for excuses to reject poems so avoid obvious errors and obvious subject matter. Also have a strong start/end, don't be obscure and don't take too many risks - a great line won't in itself win a competition though a bad line will lose one. Poems with obvious technical skill seem to do quite well though they don't often win.

Matthew Sweeney in a judge's report wrote "We felt that the main prizewinners should touch on ... the big issues of death and love", but I don't think all competitions are judged like that. It's best to avoid hackneyed subjects. It might also be a good idea to avoid dealing with recent big events - too many other poets might have chosen the same topic.

Winning competitions can be like applying for a job. The first stage is more to do with avoiding errors in order to get in the short-list. The second stage is where depth is revealed. The poetry style's affected accordingly.

Who judges?

Sometimes a judge won't be famous for writing poetry - A.L.Kennedy has been a poetry judge, for example. Usually however, established mainstream poets judge. They're often full time writers or tutors, not necessarily knowledgeable about many types of poetry. But they've a keen eye for bad examples of the types of poetry they understand - bad poems might be rejected in 10 seconds. When there's more than one judge, don't expect a surprise winner.

If the entry form says "Final Judge: ..." (or even if it doesn't!) the named judge will only see a short-list of poems selected by people who are usually nameless.

Is it worth reading up on the judge(s)?

If you're going to send in something that's a little unusual it's worth knowing what sort of poetry the judges don't like (they may not appreciate L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, for example, however good it is). Don't assume however that they only like the sort of stuff they write.

When Wendy Cope judged the 2013 Bridport competition she wrote "Although I’m known for using traditional forms, I am not prejudiced against poems that don’t rhyme or scan, as long as they are good. If you do use a traditional form, you’ll need to get the metre right. Judging previous competitions, I’ve found that the most important quality is authenticity of voice – that is to say I’m put off if the poet seems to be using a special voice for poetry, rather than just being her/himself.". At least entrants would know where they stood after reading that.

Who wins?

Knowns and unknowns.

• Sam Gardiner had a poem rejected 5 times by magazines before it won the National Poetry Competition
• Jo Shapcott has won the National Poetry Competition twice!

In the US there's a problem with judges selecting the work of [ex]students (even in anonymous competitions). Some competitions over there now stipulate that related students can't win. I wonder how much this has happened in the UK?

Who gets the profits?

Sometimes a writers group, a charity, or a magazine. Sometimes there are no profits - the competition is sponsored or funded by an endowment. But do think about where the money goes.

Which competitions should I enter?

See the lists produced by the National Poetry Library - http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/competitions/. Beware of covert exploitation - a £1 entry fee deserves a £100 first prize, a £3 entry fee deserves at least a £500 first prize. And if the judges aren't named, don't bother entering. Here are some of the bigger UK competitions -

• June - The Bridport Prize (£5000 1st prize)
• October - the Poetry Business competition (£1000 of prizes + publication for a booklet), the Poetry Society competition (£5000 1st prize, about 6000 entries)
• December - The Cardiff Poetry Competition (£5000 of prizes)

See also

• Poetry Prize Culture and the Aberdeen Angus (Peter Riley)
• Helena Nelson's write-up of how she judged
• Blowing on the Dice: On Competition Mentality(Kirsten Irving)

Repetition in Jon Stone's "School of Forgery"

Jon Stone frequently uses repetition - within and between his poems. His poems also repeat phrases from other sources. Repetition's a technique I rarely use, so I thought I'd use his School of Forgery book to examine the effect.

Repetition

Various technical terms are described on the Wikipedia page on rhetorical repetition (Anaphora - repetition at the start of lines, Epistrophe - repetition at the end of each clause, etc). The list of effects below comes from Al Filreis' Repetition page and elsewhere.

• Sound/ritual - "Primitive religious chants from all cultures show repetition developing into cadence and song" (Filreis)
• Providing structure - "a refrain, which serves to set off or divide narrative into segments, as in ballads, or, in lyric poetry, to indicate shifts or developments of emotion. Such repetitions may serve as commentary, a static point against which the rest of the poem develops, or it may be simply a pleasing sound pattern to fill out a form." (Filreis)
• Unifying - "As a unifying device, independent of conventional metrics, repetition is found extensively in free verse, where parallelism (repetition of a grammar pattern) reinforced by the recurrence of actual words and phrases governs the rhythm which helps to distinguish free verse from prose" (Filreis)
• Emphasis of the succeeding phrase - "Sometimes the effect of a repeated phrase in a poem will be to emphasize a development or change by means of the contrast in the words following the identical phrases" (Filreis)
• Indicating closure - the final line being a repetition of the first or penultimate line
• Generating expectation - which can lead to surprize
• Backtracking - an indication that a path of enquiry has ended (failed), that one has to go back and try again
• Habitualisation - In "Flesh and Blood Repetition and Obscurity in Gothic Poetry" (Sara Deniz Akant, Wesleyan University) it's suggested that a way of making the strange familiar is to repeat it - "poetic repetition does not aim to provide the reader with a resolving grasp on something that is obscure, but rather to make its inherent obscurity a continual source of his pleasure."
• Sheer pleasure - In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" Freud wrote that "repetition, the re-experiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure."
• Contrasting with change - Repetition is part of the "same/different" binary that drives narrative. Narrative is between repetition (where the text is the same) and random juxtaposition (where there's no repetition). Narrative keeps some things the same (the context, the characters, etc) while changing something else. The longer the sequence where the division between mutable and non-mutable remains stable, the more likely the sequence will be considered as narrative - foreground against background.

Monet and Warhol are amongst the artists who have produced series of similar works. Monet's paintings of haystacks and Rouen cathedral emphasise the differences. Warhol's repetitions sometimes dilute the image's meaning.

There are attendant risks. As with many rhetorical devices (but especially those used by preachers and politicians) repetition can evoke distrust in readers. Beginners use much repetition - once end-rhyme is rejected it's one of the easier ways to sound poetic, to carry on when you've run out of things to say. It might be merely verbose, unnecessary - first-draft scaffolding. It's used by people who used to write short poems but now want to write longer ones - each repetition is like a new start. It can give fragments spurious unity - the repeated pegs on a clothes line of imagery. It's a way to induce trance. It can degenerate into sing-song echolalia. Or it can be plain boring.

Users

In Lexical Repetition in American Poetry Alan H Pope points out that repetition is commonly used. In "Ariel", Plath uses reiteration in 23 of the 40 poems. In Stevens' "Harmonium" at least 26 poems use repetition (6 begin and end with the same line/stanza). Stevens' longer poems (and some of Eliot's) repeat a central argument or statement (each time with perhaps a different, more complete understanding). Poets with oratory styles - Ginsburg in "Howl" for example - exploit repetition.

Helen Dunmore's Glad of these times uses it. It's also used by less mainstream poets - see for example "We needed coffee but ..." by Matthew Welton (Carcanet, 2009)

School of Forgery

Jon Stone's book doesn't include standard forms where there's word repetition (sestina, villanelle), so the expectation/surprise aspect is missing. He doesn't seem to be a theory-purist - word-repetition is used in many different situations.

• "Dojinshiworld" is 7 xaxa stanzas, 4 of them beginning with "We came to".
• "The Mark" is in couplets, the line-endings being "emotion's/emotion", "absence/absence)", "hoodwink/something", "hiding/emotion", "something/emotion".
• Each line of "Mustard" ends with an anagram of mustard.
• Successive stanzas of "Send in the Mink" begin "Send in the mink", "Send in the savage mink", "Send in the unsuitable mink"
• The "Near Extremes" poems on p.3, 13, 20, and 29 are related by repetition - the first line of each is "Where I came from it's the other way round". They all have 2 5-lined stanzas
• The "Swallow" poems on p.12, 19, 28, and 35 all have on their first lines "know of nothing beyond the". They all have 5 3-lined stanzas.
• "The Year Long Dress Rehearsal" and "All Year Dress Rehearsal" have similar first lines - "I'm going to be mad - my first major role" and "I'm going to be sorrowful - my first big part"
• 4 of the 5 pairs of lines in "III. Hurricane Polymar" are of the form "With a *** ***, Detective Takeshi,/ you become a futuristic ***."
• 4 of the 7 lines in "Far Dancing and ..." (part II) begin "I cure her,"
• 4 consecutive lines of "The Laughing Body" begin "They want to drink breast"
• In "Second-Hand Kite Feathers" (part II) the 1st line of all 10 aabxb stanzas is "Very highly recommended"
• In "Adcock Modulations" each part has 2 stanzas of 4 lines. The 1st stanza begins with "They" and the 2nd with "But s/he"
• All 7 shaped poems begin with "in which"
• On p.72 is a shape poem where John Steed's umbrella is created from 11 repetitions of the word "to".
• "The Year Long Dress Rehearsal" has 4 consecutive lines of the form "Your ... kill(s) me" and 3 consecutive lines that begin with "That ticking which is my". There's more (incidental?) patterned repetition - line 1 from the top and bottom both end with the word "role". Line 3 from the top and bottom both have the word "lines".

The layouts are standard. They use black text, one font-face, little italics, no bulletmarks, only 1 gap in a line (p.46) and no indentation (except for p.44-45 which has continuation lines, and the shape poems), so the words have to do extra work. The following shows some options that can be used when there's parallelism. I think Jon Stone prefers the form in the first column/row.

I love you for the way you never doubt me. I love you for a hundred thousand reasons.	I love you for the way you never doubt me. I love you for a hundred thousand reasons.
I love you for 1) the way you never doubt me; 2) a hundred thousand reasons.	I love you for the way you never doubt me a hundred thousand reasons

It's presumably not coincidence that 3 of the "Swallow" poems immediately precede "Near Extremes" poems, and that one of each sequence is unattached, but I can't see the purpose. Anyway, why weren't the "Swallow" poems put together, making them stanzas of a single poem, or a series of variations? It's done elsewhere in the book.

At times repetition helps hold these poems together (when there's little else that does). The repetition is never percussive, never has a [mock-] Churchillian charge. It helps provide structure, and may perform habitualisation. In pieces like "Second-Hand Kite Feathers" there may be a Warholian effect. Sometimes it helps emphasise the succeeding phrases, but in poems like "III. Hurricane Polymar" I don't get it at all.

As an experiment one could try removing repetition from some of these poems and adding repetition to some poems that currently lack it. These, and the originals, could then be tried out on new readers.

Al Filreis points out that "Allusion or quoting is a special case of repetition". Jon Stone uses that case too.

Choosing between sound and sense

When readers engage with a poem, they pump in effort and attention. Where does that energy go? Usually it seeps out as paraphrasable meaning and emotion, having soaked up through the words. Sometimes the words are less permeable, so the reader might need to do some fracking - initiating small, controlled explosions under the surface to release the content.

But suppose that route to the surface is blocked - where does the thwarted energy go? Readers might simply give up, cutting their losses. Alternatively, attention might spread sideways, focusing on the language, so that sound is given the role of generating meaning - not the same type of meaning obtainable through paraphrase, more the effect of a musical phrase (from now on I'll use "meaning" and "music" to distinguish the 2 effects). This "music" is often present as a secondary effect in paraphrasable poetry. Take for example the following from Eliot's "Prufrock"

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells

This has a clear enough prosaic meaning. Sonically it's dense too. As well as being a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter, the interplay of the S sounds against the T sounds creates a rich texture. This isn't mimetic - the S sound isn't the wind, or sadness. As in music, the rhythmic variation of 2 contrasting tones generates an effect which is abstract, ready in this case to be infused by what's nearby.

Suppose meaning were partly suppressed - trivialised perhaps? Suppose Eliot had written

The restless knight's old mum might ask the belles "will sawdust restore ants and destroy smells?"

Where would the reader look for meaning then? I suspect the music might encourage them work harder to find an obscure meaning, though I don't expect them to feel compensated. The sonic texture adds intensity and memorability, but if the meaning doesn't live up to its billing, the result can be comic.

Poets can disrupt the reader's search for meaning in other ways. Brian Reed (2007) introduced the term "attenuated hypotaxis" to describe a sequence of "tenuously interconnected" clauses and phrases "possessing some relation of subordination to another element", but with the connections blurred, "inhibit[ing] the formation of clear, neat, larger units". In this type of poem readers are more likely to feel the music - maybe something like Bernstein's

Casts across otherwise unavailable fields. Makes plain. Ruffled. Is trying to alleviate his false: invalidate. Yet all is "to live out" by shut belief, the various, simply succeeds which.

The suppression might be more radical than this. Here's part of a poem by Susan Howe

amulet     instruction      tribulation winged      joy      parent      sackcloth      ash den      sealed      ascent      flee

The next step might be Sound poetry. Severed from representation, the poem has to become more self-sufficient. But what incentive will lead the reader away from meaning, especially since, as the Eliot example shows, words can have both meaning and music. Purist concentration on one aspect has artistic worth as an experiment, but does it work as literature? Perhaps representational vs abstract art's an analogy. Perhaps a song's lyrics and music provide another analogy - bland lyrics can become intense given a good melody. Put intense words and music together and you often get less than the sum of its parts.

Some poets assert the primacy of music.

• "To [Elizabeth Bishop], the images and the music of the lines were primary. If we comprehended the sound, eventually we would understand the sense" (Dana Gioia)
• "Bunting would say that you should hear the 'meaning' of the poetry purely in the sound ... Word patterns which may at first appear dense and complicated on the page become articulated and clarified, resonating across the poems' structure. The subtleties and echoes of language which hold a poem together are revealed by the process of sounding it" (Richard Caddel)
• Eliot wrote that "The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be ... to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him"

Though music and meaning can be closely coupled, there are benefits in assuming independence -

• "A statistical analysis which shows that sound effects in Pope are likely to coincide with lexical meanings whereas in Donne there is a discordance, probably intentional, between phonetic effects and semantic units (George Steiner)
• "The remarkable result of Valéry's treatment of sound and sense as consciously separated variables is that it allows the semantic components of the poem to take on structural value and the structural values of the poem to take part in a semantic or signifying action in turn" (C. Crow)

Should the poet draw attention to the sounds? If they don't, will the reader (even subconsciously) notice them? If the meaning is strong, they might not. Received forms at least alert the reader to attend to sounds. Some forms impinge on meaning, emphasising certain words; others offer opportunities for surprise. In "Reader's Strategies in Comprehending Poetic Discourse", P.Begemann suggests that "Patterns immediately recognised could possibly influence meaning construction from the very start, thus gaining an 'autonomous' semantic function, whereas others may be chronologically and semantically subordinate to lexical meanings". Factors affecting obviousness of a pattern include "distance between equivalent sounds; frequency; degree of similarity; size of repeated segment; stress/unstress; statistical frequency of repeated sound; lexical category (function words vs content words); position (on line); stylistic convergence (parallel patterns on other textual levels"

It's not so much that sound and sense compete for the readers' attention, more that one aspect might (perhaps because it's dominant at the start) eclipse the other. Sometimes sound or sense has to be compromised for the sake of the other, though if one is completely absent, readers might not consider the result a poem. If the reader only notices the flaws without appreciating what has benefitted as a consequence, they're not getting the maximum from the poem.

From Words to Flash

These are notes for running a workshop

This evening I hope to illustrate that there's more to sentences than might first appear. Like stories, they can have tension and resolution, pacing and surprise. Getting a sentence right can take a long time but it's worth it - if an editor sees a bad sentence in the first paragraph, your script is likely to go straight in the SAE. We're going to look at words first, then try to calibrate our sensibilities by looking at good and bad sentences, then we'll try to assess some sentences before trying to write our own. At the end we might get as far as writing little stories.

As we'll see later, people disagree about the goodness of sentences. I'm going to focus more on form than content; I'm not going to highlight sentences for their wisdom.

Words

However complex the sentences, they're always made up of words, so we'll start by sensitizing ourselves to the building blocks though we're not going to focus on individual words today.

Ex 1 What are your favorite words (you may like them for their meaning or merely their sound). What are your least favorite words.

Dylan Thomas liked "drome". Some people don't like "garaged" or "to medal"

In poetry books you'll sometime see provocative lists of forbidden words ("shards", "gossamer", "fester", "frond", "lambent","shimmer" etc) but of course, it's not that easy. They say of weeds that they're only flowers in the wrong place. One might say a similar thing about unpopular words.

One way to try to improve a sentence is to replace some of the words by more interesting ones mined from a thesaurus - replacing "red" by "vermillion", "road" by "thoroughfare", "bird" by "lesser spotted warbler" etc. Alas, a sentence full of pretty words might not be pretty. One misplaced word, however interesting, might destroy a sentence.

Today I'm going to work on the assumption that "if you look after the sentences the words will look after themselves". If you want to see how tackle a sentence word by word, take a look at Jim Murdoch's blog where Jim Murdoch tells us how he spent 3.5 hours trying to get a sentence right, or look at the University of Rouen's collection of Flaubert's scripts

Sentences

Now we're going to study some sentences. First we'll look at the extremes

Bad sentences?

Ex 2 - Can you improve these sentences? Do any make you wince?

1. Having pitched the tents, the horses were fed and watered
2. Before describing what happened, the background to these events must be understood
3. What a beautiful sky, she thought to herself as she ran slowly along the narrow road.
4. More than one person lives in this house.
5. On holiday her car got scratched.
6. On a late winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
7. She wore a dress the same color as her eyes her father brought her from San Francisco
8. Craig stared into the mirror and squinted his eyes, for a moment he could almost see his brother staring back at him.
9. There were less people there than I'd expected.
10. Abstracting the face of the student from the file, the probationer took it to his superior.
11. He and his group swelled in number.

There's an old joke - "I know a man with a wooden leg called Jim". "What's the name of his other leg?". 1 and 2 are from "A Student's Guide to Writing" (Gordon Taylor). 6 is by Norman Mailer - first line of "Harlot's Ghost". 7 is from "Star" by Danielle Steel. The last two are from "The Afghan" by Frederick Forsyth

Good sentences?

Joseph Epstein chose this as the best first sentence in literature - "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Anna Karenina, Tolstoy). Fish's "How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One" (HarperCollins, 2011) doesn't mention this. He suggests that you use good sentences as models.

Ex 3: Study 2 of Fish's favorites "And I shall go on talking in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars." (Joyce) "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (Fitzgerald).

Here's one response to the Fitzgerald sentence: I love how it's so tantalizingly close to iambic pentameter - 5 iambs followed by 4 and 1/2.The cadence carries the reader forward in the first phrase with four staccato syllables. The choppiness of the second phrase brings the current's restraint to life, interrupting the flow of the sentence. The final phrase glides easily, but the missing twentieth syllable leaves the reader anticipating more. One can imagine the novel's last sentence repeating endlessly, beginning again where it left off. And of course that's the point. The art of the sentence is in its structure as much as its words.

How to study sentences

I think the quality of a sentence isn't as objective as the previous comments imply. Let's evaluate some sentences, learn how to talk about sentences. Punctuation is important, so we'll consider that too.

Ex 4 Punctuate and study this - It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

With this and similar exercises supply it without punctuation and get them to guess the author and add punctuation. This the first sentence of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"

This dates from a time when books were often read out. Punctuation indicated where to pause, rather than indicating logical structure.

Ex 5 Punctuate and study this - When they entered the room, he was very dead, maybe three or four days dead, since no one at the hotel had seen him around for some time

It's by Margot McCamley and it comes from Writing Magazine, May 2012. They have an "Under the Microscope" feature where they study the first 300 words of a novel.

Here are some suggestions by James McCreet

• Start with "He was very dead when they entered the room ..."
• "The sentence as it stands cannot use a comma before maybe"
• "quite halting and convoluted. This final clause overloads it with information when it needs to have impact and focus"

Ex 6 Punctuate and study - The April day was soft and bright, and poor Dencombe, happy in the conceit of reasserted strength, stood in the garden of the hotel, comparing, with a deliberation in which, however, there was still something of langour, the attractions of easy strolls

It's the first sentence of Henry James' "The Middle Years"

Note that there are lots of opposites. Here are some notes about it from "next word, better word" by Stephen Dobyns (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

• "James used these commas to call attention to important words, used them in fact as line breaks are often used in poetry", p.129
• "begins with an independent clause; the tone is straightforward and somewhat optimistic ... Rhythmically, we notice the clause is four iambs, which contributes to its lightness.", p.129
• "The second independent clause has seven commas, which ensures no consistent rhythm can be established. This rhythmic disruption, as it were, arises directly from the word "poor" ... Dencombe is "poor" because of his health, but also because he is deceived.", p.129
• "The modifying phrase between the subject, Dencombe, and the verb, "stood," the following dependent clause and string of prepositional phrases create tension by delaying verbs and direct objects, but they also in their progression and rhythm imitate the languor of Dencombe's thought [which] leads to a slightly humorous direct object", p.129
• "As with a classic Latinate sentence, James's second independent clause accumulates meaning until it reaches its most important words.", p.130
• "James's sentence keeps us from being able to anticipate its direction and controls the speed at which we read it, while the word "poor" provides us with suspense enough to care about that direction", p.130

Ex 7 Punctuate and study this sentence - There was a little stoop of humility as she passed through the door, into the larger but darker library beyond, a hint of frailty, an affectation of bearing more than her fifty-nine years, a slight bewildered totter among the grandeur that her daughter now had to pretend to take for granted.

From "The Stranger's Child", Alan Hollinghurst

Here are some notes - "humility" has rather quickly elided into "affectation," and the point of view has shifted by the end of the sentence, and the physical movement through the rooms accompanies a gradual inner movement that progresses through four parallel clauses, each of which, though legato, suggests a slightly different take on things

Note how these sentences have a shape - they have tension and release, the form of the sentence emulates the mood. They flow. But try this

Ex 8 Punctuate and study this sentence - Oddly enough, she was one of the most thoroughgoing sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (more an exercise in punctuation). If you have the time, try this

Ex 9 Punctuate and study this sentence - No, I don't know them," he said, but instead of vouchsafing so simple a piece of information, so very unremarkable a reply, in the natural conversational tone which would have been appropriate to it, he enunciated it with special emphasis on each word, leaning forward, nodding his head, with at once the vehemence which a man imparts, in order to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some strange accident of fortune) and the grandiloquence of a man who, finding himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation, chooses to proclaim it openly in order to convince his hearers that the confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, is in fact easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation itself--in this case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family--might very well have been not forced on, but actually willed by him, might arise from some family tradition, some moral principle or mystical vow which expressly forbade his seeking their society.

Proust. Translation by C.K.Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.

Sentence length

These sentences are growing longer. Is there any limit?

• Jeet Thayil’s debut novel Narcopolis (ManBooker-shortlisted in 2012) begins with a 5 page sentence
• "The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (5 pages)
• Molly's soliloquy in "Ulysses"
• Jonathan Coe's novel "The Rotters' Club" (2001) ends with a 33-page sentence (13,955 words)
• Ed Parks' novel "Personal Days" ends with a sentence over 16,000 words long.
• "Dancing Lessons" (Hrabal) is a single 117 page sentence
• "The Gates of Paradise" (Jerzy Andrzejewski, 1960) consists of two sentences, the first 158-pages long and the final one 5 words.

Writing sentences

We get into habits when writing sentences. The next exercise strives to break those habits by varying structure while keeping the words the same.

Ex 10 Use the all the following phrases in 1st person, past tense sentences. No embellishments - just stick to the given information. "Jim", "purple armchair", "blow his tea cool" (or "blowing his tea cool", or "the better to blow his tea cool"), "talking" (or "talked"), "Arabella", " resigned amusement on her face" or ("an expression of resigned amusement on Arabella's face"), "walked into the room" (or "walking into the room"), "I saw". First write the sentence that comes most naturally to you, then try some variations

Adapted from an Emma Darwin blot post. Get people to produce sentences, then discuss the ones below

Here are some of the alternatives you could have produced. Which is best?

1. I walked into the room and saw that Jim had sat down in the purple armchair, the better to blow his tea cool and talk to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.
2. Walking into the room I saw that Arabella, with an expression of resigned amusement on her face, was being talked to by Jim, who had sat down in the purple armchair the better to blow his tea cool.
3. Arabella had an expression of resigned amusement on her face, as I saw when I walked into the room, and was talking to Jim, who was blowing his tea cool as he sat in the purple armchair.
4. Jim was sitting down in the purple armchair and talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face while she watched him blowing his tea cool, as I saw when I walked into the room.
5. The resigned amusement on Arabella's face, as I saw when I walked into the room, was caused by watching Jim sitting in the purple armchair blowing his tea cool and talking to her.
6. Talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face as I saw when I walked into the room, and blowing his tea cool, was Jim, who was sitting in the purple armchair.
7. Sitting in the purple armchair I saw Jim, who was blowing his tea cool, and the resigned amusement on Arabella's face as he talked to her which I saw when I walked into the room.
8. Sitting in the purple armchair and talking to Arabella was Jim, blowing his tea cool, and I saw when I walked into the room that she had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.
9. Blowing his tea cool as he sat in the purple armchair was Jim, and I saw as I walked into the room that he was talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.

Emma Darwin suggests that A good basic principle is to stick with the order in which your view-point-character perceives things, which is likely to be 1) in this example. 4) is an example of what I call 'zig-zagging', which starts a little way in and then jumps back to the beginning. Would your narrator take more notice of Jim or Arabella? Would s/he observe their emotion along with their action, as in 5), or only after a general survey of the room, as in 1)? 7) is a mess.

If you were allowed to use any words in this sentence, how might you write it? Perhaps you could hint that there's something about the situation that surprizes the narrator.

Short Fiction

If you go through each sentence in a story of yours, generating a list of alternatives and assessing them, it might take a while. Maybe it's time to consider shorter forms. There are many to choose from - memoes, recipes, adverts, anecdotes, lists, vignettes, shopping lists, etc. More recently there's "ketai fiction" (to fit in a text message), "Twitter Lit" (to fit Twitter's 140 character feed), etc. There used to be markets for these genres (fillers, Readers Digest). In his collection "This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You" (Bloomsbury, 2012), Jon McGregor has 2 stories that are fewer than 15 words long. Markets are re-emerging. Let's first try an easy genre.

6 word stories

How many words do you need for a story? 6 might be enough. Examples include

• For sale: baby shoes, never worn - Hemingway
• Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer? - Eileen Gunn
• Longed for him. Got him. Shit. - Margaret Atwood

Ex 11 Write some 6 word stories

Flash

What is Flash? According to the Bridport competition it's a maximum of 250 words that "contains the classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, obstacles or complications and resolution. However unlike the case with a traditional short story, the word length often forces some of these elements to remain unwritten: hinted at or implied in the written storyline." It overlaps free-form poetry at one extreme, and short stories at the other. Pieces like Forché's "The Colonel" have appeared both in Flash and poetry anthologies. Often the limit's more than 250 words - 1000 is common.

Here are 2 from the web

• Bedtime Story
  "Careful honey, it's loaded," he said re-entering the bedroom.
  Her back rested against the headboard. "This for your wife?"
  "No. Too chancy. I'm hiring a professional."
  "How about me?"
  He smirked. "Cute. But who'd be dumb enough to hire a lady hit man?"
  She wet her lips, sighting along the barrel. "Your wife."
  (Jeffrey Whitmore)
• The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door... (Fredric Brown)

Ex 12 Put people in pairs. Get them to think up a scenario where someone has to explain an awkward situation. Get them to write an Abcedarian, each person writing alternate sentences - begin the first sentence with A, the second with B and so on.

Impro comedians can do this on the spot

Conclusions

We've looked at individual words and how their energy can be harnessed in a carefully punctuated sentence. The structure conveys its own meaning, like a bass-line mood accompaniment to the melody of the words' meaning. Not all readers will notice this bass-line, but they'll feel it, and some editors will look out for it.

We've looked at what to avoid and emulate, how length and clause order can be varied. What next? As an exercise, print out a story of yours one sentence per paragraph and consider each sentence in isolation. Are they of similar length? Do they all have a subject-verb-object structure? After labouring so long over so few words, you may no longer have the stamina to write 3000 word stories. Don't worry - shorter stories will do!

• When a competition maximum word limit in 3000, don't forget that a 500 word story might win.
• You might be able to get your piece accepted as a prose-poem.

Finally - if nothing else, get the key sentences right!

Some URLs

• sixwordstories and narrative magazine's 6-word stories
• about long sentences
• about sentences
• a long sentence
• one-sentence stories
• a list of Flash outlets, sorted by word-length

With help from John Riley, Janice D. Soderling et al.