To continue on our examination of life through an analysis of poetic order…
Poetic order comes about by the presence of “centers” that exist within a text, whose presence and structure breathes wholeness and life into any given part of the poem.
An understanding of these centers cross-pollinated with personal values, beliefs, and activities may be useful in the designing of one’s life with a greater sense of peace, order, and aliveness.
The Essence of a Center
Centers, if I am to butcher Gabriel’s definition, are places of focus within a text which:
- does not require specified boundaries or definitions
- is created by certain configurations of other centers
- find their meaning through their relationships with other centres within the same work
- generate life, intensity, and wholeness in a poem through said relationships.
Which also means that such centers “die” or lose their power when incorrectly positioned in relation to other centers, or when they are of no help to other centers.
In other words, a center is any place that attracts attention in a poem.
Thus, there can be (and should be, Gabriel argues) at different levels of scale within a poem, such as:
- good sounds
- good stresses
- good words
- good lines
- good syntax
- good images
- good stanzas
- good poem
Aspects of a Strong Center
A strong center, then, has the force of attraction and direction, much like a gravitational force – it pulls other centers towards itself, drawing your attention to its importance and position within the work. Sometimes such centers would be repeated with alternating centers (or, put more simply, with some variation in context and pattern, but not in focus).
Other aspects of centers should also be mentioned:
Boundaries refer to things that separates a center from other centers and that focuses attention on the center. The interesting bit comes when we realize boundaries are themselves made of centers – line breaks, syntactic bridge, unstresses. They are found anywhere throughout a poem.
Positive space is when a center moves outwards, spreading life around it instead of imploding on itself. When an image resonates with the rest of the poem, that is positive space. When the many connotations of a word fits with its surrounding centers, that word has positive space. This demonstrates, according to Gabriel, the concept of life unfolding in the poem before us – the antithesis of a dying one.
“Good shape” is how a center that’s beautiful by itself can be described – one of a pair of words that fit beautifully together that’s also beautiful on its own, for example. Good shapes also come about when it is made up of centers that have good shapes, or is reinforced by such centers.
Prosody refers to the study of local symmetries. Applied to centers, this means every center ought to have a sort of echo nearby, found inside another center. A repeated similar stress pattern is one example of local symmetry (though form and metre are not necessary to create such symmetry). Gabriel explains their power thus: “Symmetries make us feel there is a recurring pattern in the poem, and a pattern is an indication of universality. And so a poem with local symmetries seems like it represents a class of occurrences that we should pay attention to.” Echoes represent another form of symmetry, although it goes beyond it: “Without echoes, each part of a poem will feel stuck on, obscure, random, or pasted in.” In other words, a sort of repetition of thought without simply repeating.
Deep interlock means that centers are difficult to pull apart. When each center derives power from each other, the centers each contribute to the overall “point” or center of the work, and it becomes impossible to remove any one center without diminishing the work as a whole. This concept is also described as Ambiguity, where each center is also part of other centers, and the force that draws us into a center also draws us out of it into another. Due to this sort of interconnectedness, distangling a center from its surroundings can be hard (thus highlighting the importance of boundaries as noted above). It’s also possible for a poem to be oversized – this means some centers are weak and are not contributing enough to the other centers and the overall poem, which means they are not, cannot be interlocked deeply into the poem, and should be removed.
Contrast – “Without contrast there is nothing,” Gabriel says. Stress/unstress is a basic contrast found in most poems; but so are phrases and word images that go against the grain of the work, places of strong rhyme and then loose rhyme, or a rhythmic pattern to provide contrast to a strongly varied one. Contrast is also brought out when a place or an idea is approached and explored closely, while another is only hinted at, or when there are moments of deep, quiet stillness within a poem full of boisterous life. Contrast is nothing without Gradients, however, because no line, no poem stays in one place. Each time a lyric moment or an idea is being introduced, the best way to approach it is by shading it, building upon it, inviting the reader into understanding naturally. Otherwise, the reader must jump abruptly from point to point, having a blank environment to accustom themselves to as quickly as they could before being plunked into another.
Roughness, as is found present in the best of poems is best described as “imperfect perfection” – a phrase that has now become hollow and cliché, yet is worth embracing as even an ideal. Christopher Alexander says it best: “In our time, many of us have been taught to strive for an insane perfection that means
nothing. To get wholeness, you must try instead to strive for this kind of perfection, where
things that don’t matter are left rough and unimportant, and the things that really matter are
given deep attention. This is a perfection that seems imperfect. But it is a far deeper thing.”
In the next post, we shall explore how all this relates to life.
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Read the first part of the “A Living Poem” series.