How small an alteration do I have to make to destroy the effect of your poem? Naturally, the test alteration has to be something a lesser, or less judicious, poet might make, if blessed with the same poem. Most (but not, alas, all) poems can be thrown off by substituting every word that begins with s with cabbage or performing some other absurd operation. Ruinability is tested not by the drastic alteration but the subtle one. To interrogate a poem’s ruinability is not to accuse it of fragility. It is, rather, a practical way of asking: How perfect is this work of art?
Let me make clear, first of all, that perfection and power are not necessarily synonymous. Shakespeare’s plays are more power than perfection. That is why they are cut in performance. Ben Jonson, when told that Shakespeare never blotted a line, famously remarked, “Would he had blotted a thousand”—a fine reflection on Shakespeare’s helter-skelter pursuit of poetic power. (The remark says a lot about the classically learned Jonson, too—whose plays never did as well as Shakespeare’s, but whose perfect lyrics won him a “Tribe of Ben.”) Ginsburg’s Howl and that prose poem on whaling by Herman Melville are similarly impervious to the subtle, destructive tinkering I will discuss below.
Between the poetry of perfection and the poetry of power, the poetry of power is preferable. The linguistic nuances on which poetic perfection depends change rapidly with the language and with taste. A “perfect” lyric by Ben Jonson might seem a little dated and stiff to a 21st century reader, as opposed to the miracle of fluidity and grace it seemed to his contemporaries; meanwhile, a knotty, metrically rough number by John Donne stops striking readers as sloppy and impenetrable (Ben Jonson’s opinion of Donne) and starts seeming flat-out brilliant (Eliot’s).
Then, once in a while, you find a poet who attains power through perfection. Such a poet was Robert Frost; such a poet is, in our own day, A. E. Stallings. The proof lies in the utter ruinability of her poems. Consider the poem that leads off the February 2012 issue of Poetry magazine, “Momentary.”
A. E. Stallings: “Momentary”
I never glimpse her but she goes
Who had been basking in the sun,
Her links of chain mail one by one
Aglint with pewter, bronze and rose.
I never see her lying coiled
Atop the garden step, or under
A dark leaf, unless I blunder
And by some motion she is foiled.
Too late I notice as she passes
Zither of chromatic scale—
I only ever see her tail
Quicksilver into tall grasses.
I know her only by her flowing,
By her glamour disappearing
Into shadow as I’m nearing—
I only recognize her going.
Source: Poetry (February 2012).
The principle of ruinability extends to the title. Try some other reasonably appropriate titles. “The Moment” makes the poem, as a whole, too allegorical. Ah yes, you think within a line or two; she’s talking about a snake, and the snake is the moment. If this direct connection is made as the poem is begun as opposed to a few stanzas down, or on a rereading—as soon as the initial confusion vanishes, and the poem enacts, from first to last, a straightforward metaphor—some crucial poetic mystery is lost. What we see at work here is negative capability, that Keatsian comfort around uncertainty. (Even if it is, as here, a calculated uncertainty.) Calling this poem “The Snake” would err the other way and make the poem one-dimensionally descriptive. No, “Momentary” is just right. “Momentary” is perfect. It drops the hint just where you will find it. It is this side obfuscation, that side obviousness.
Refraining from using the word “moment” or specifying the creature in the text of the poem is of a piece with the strategy of the title. The use of the unsaid to create a solveable mystery is the most dangerous operation in poetry. You can accidentally mystify, or you can end up seeming coy. When mystery does work, it is the most ruinable effect in poetry. Its power depends on the balance between information granted and information withheld. Akin to the riddle, it is the ideal vehicle for a power-through-perfection poet like Stallings.
The sequence of phrases in each verse sentence, too, is eminently ruinable. The first three, notice, begin with words that imply missing something, not being in time for something: never, never, too late. “Too late I notice as she passes,” far from being an inversion for the sake of rhyme (what would be wrong with that, anyway?), reverses the timing of events—she passes; I notice; I am too late—in order to embody the meaning. The sentence begins with the speaker being too late and makes sure to delay the appearance of what is noticed until the next line. (That sly phonetic morph of “slither” into “zither” nicely brings out the pun on “scales.”) Any one of those phrases, if altered in its placement, squanders something significant.
More ruinability: The personification of the moment as female. To make the moment an “it” or a “he” would impoverish the poem further, not least by failing to interlock with the “feminine” rhymes. As a general rule, poetic personifications should be female—even something usually thought of as masculine, like, say, Violence. “Violence puts on its brass knuckles” is dull. “Violence puts on his brass knuckles” is obvious, almost cliche. “Violence puts on her brass knuckles” is goddamned pay-per-view. The mind demands a back story to explain that phrase.
How many stanzas? One less, and this poem would probably seem a bit slight. One more, and its substantiality would contrast with the elusiveness of its premise. The poem would cease to reflect the “momentary” nature of its subject. It would overstay its own welcome, as it were. More ruinability. Four quatrains are just right.
The choice of a more regular meter adds to this poem’s ruinability. Let us not forget that regular meter is itself a potential poem-ruiner, if used poorly. Stallings works in rhymed syllabic lines as well, and it is a testament to her skill (and to the magic of rhyme) that those poems, though devoid of regularity, still retain a great deal of ruinability. This one in particular gains ruinability, like a Frost poem, from its clearly defined meter.
As a side note, if you click in the same issue to Albert Goldbarth’s poem “Keats’s Phrase,” you will find a perfectly powerful poem that does not achieve its power through this kind of ruinable perfection. Minor variations in that text would not destroy its effects, much as the minor variants in extant texts of King Lear don’t diminish its tragic force.
That is because the playwright Shakespeare, like Goldbarth, writes a verse that is talk first and song second. Shakespeare the sonneteer reversed the prioritization; what sets Frost above other American formalists is that he alone attained both, simultaneously and in equal measure.
Looking through the rest of this issue of Poetry, you will find, towards the end of the poetry section, an archival poem from 1936: It may be an accident, but this Frost poem uses the quatrain as well. If this wasn’t an accident, the editors of that journal are to be commended—good eye! They have, intentionally or unintentionally, bookended their poetry selection with the most ruinable American poet of our century and the most ruinable American poet of the prior one. Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, and A. E. Stallings, though all very different poets by nature, cluster side by side on the mental bookshelf. They constitute a golden lineage in American poetry. One must remind oneself that their poems are, like all other poems, an arbitrary sequence of words. All three compose poems that possess, even on the first reading, the inevitability of something you have read and memorized long ago—and yet, in spite of that, never fail to surprise. This is the paradoxical combination that defines, if not The Good Poem, then at least this aspect of one kind of good poetry: Ruinability.