“They shut me up in Prose –
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet –
Because they liked me “still”   –“ Emily Dickinson, Poem 445

Recently, a colleague gave me feedback on a poem in progress, telling me that, in a few places, the words were more like prose than poetry. I agreed, but before I revised the poem, I wanted to understand what makes words poetic. So I began my exploration by thinking about Rob Cowen’s lovely book, Common Ground, in which he describes what we lose as we expand townships by developing wild land for housing and roads.

“The edge-land is overpowering at times. Consolatory, cold, late afternoons before rain are painted a beautiful duck-egg blue and pink and sweetened with drifting woodsmoke. Rooks blow across the narrow aperture of my vision like the wind-blown ash.” 

To me, these words are poetic. They insist on being read aloud, savored. The internal rhymes and near-rhymes are soothing: rain, painted; beautiful, blue; rooks, blow, narrow; vision, wind. The repeated consonants – consolatory, cold; painted, pink; sweetened, woodsmoke, rooks, across – force us to stop, take a breath, think about meaning, envision the scene. Their syllabic forms trip the tongue. Their vowels open our mouths and minds.

And yet, this is not a poem. Why? Consider this stanza from William Carlos Williams’ poem, To a Poor Old Woman:

“They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her”

Clearly, the old woman’s plums taste good to her. But the line breaks and repetition emphasize just how good they taste. By using only one punctuation mark – the period in the middle of line three – Williams forces us to look more carefully at the words and their arrangement. Each line emphasizes a different aspect of the eating: she is eating, the plums are good, and she is enjoying the taste. The form forces us to consider and savor every aspect of plum-eating, to want a plum for ourselves. Often, prose tells us how we should feel. But poetry makes us feel things. Reading Williams’ poem, we can feel a smooth plum in hand, see its color, sense the juice dribbling, taste the sweet richness.

Adrienne Rich describes how poetry uses various techniques to transform the mundane to the magnificent:

“Take that old, material utensil, language, found all about you, blank with familiarity, smeared with daily use, and make it into something that means more than it says. What poetry is made of is so old, so familiar, that it’s easy to forget that it’s not just the words, but polyrhythmic sounds, speech in its first endeavors (every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome), prismatic meanings lit by each others’ light, stained by each others’ shadows. In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones of language take on colors that disappear when you sieve them up out of the streambed and try to sort them out.” Adrienne Rich, "Someone Is Writing a Poem" from What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, 1993

Think back to the poems that have touched you, have stayed in the back of your mind for years. Each of us has them; they feel like reliable friends, there when we need them. Sometimes they insert themselves suddenly in our thought-streams, singing or shouting to emphasize a feeling, to strengthen it. That echo of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “This is the forest primeval…” as we walk in the woods, smell the sap, feel the pine needles yield softly. Or the awe on a morning when sunrise infuses the sky with pinks, grays and blues:

“…nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs…” Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur

These memorable lines have a cadence that helps us recall them. They flow in very particular ways, using meter, rhyme (or lack of it), syllabic structure, word softness or harshness to build and release tension, to speed us up, slow us down. “Part of the movement among the words belongs to sound—the guttural, the liquid, the choppy, the drawn-out, the breathy, the visceral, the downlight.” (Adrienne Rich) Our mouths, eyes and ears are orchestral instruments, played by poetic techniques to produce sounds, ideas and feelings. 

As writers, we also add dimension and texture by placing words on the page in various ways, and by using punctuation to control speed (as Dickinson often did). We use forms, such as sonnets and sestinas, to emphasize and remind. We use a word’s etymology to convey both meaning and change, and to reach out to a reader’s experience. “Part of the force field, the charge, is the working history of the words themselves, how someone has known them, used them, doubted and relied on them in a life.” (Adrienne Rich)

Good prose, like Cowen’s, Michael Cunningham’s fiction, Robert Massie’s biographies, delights us. But poetry does more. “It’s as if the words themselves have magnetic charges; they veer together or in polarity, they swerve against each other.” (Adrienne Rich) Prose intrigues us, challenges us, encourages us to think differently. Poetry takes us to a richer place. It engages us, sweeps us up and into a different world. It amplifies what we know how to feel: “feelings that defy language.” (Tracy K. Smith) Poetry enables us to feel more, feel differently. Poetry dances and sings, invites us to join in, puts its hand on the small of our back to comfort, soothe, remind and guide.

SHARI LAWRENCE PFLEEGER returned to her long-time passion for poetry after a long career in technology development, research and policy. Her poems reflect both natural and constructed worlds, often describing interactions with family and friends. A Ripon Poetry Festival prize winner, her poems have been published in several literary magazines and in four anthologies of Yorkshire poetry. Her book of Yorkshire sonnets, published in collaboration with photographer Jannett Klinke, was launched in October 2021 at the fourth Ripon Poetry Festival. Shari is a board member for Alice James Books, a place of belonging for poets who inspire change. She lives, writes and rides her bicycle in Washington, D.C.