If it’s good to look, might it be better still to look again? That’s my hope—and I’ve been betting my writing life on that hope all year. I wrote about Lewis Carroll’s “Mad Gardener’s Song” form, and my obsession with the form, a couple of months ago; the obsession has only grown. I may be at that dangerous point where I can connect any random thought or topic to my feelings about the six-line stanza. So, to continue yesterday’s attempt to reflect on scientific and poetic practice, I’d like to propose the “Mad Gardener’s Song” stanza as the perfect distillation of the scientific method: hypothesis, further investigation, and conclusion.
We can use the final of Carroll’s nine Gardener’s stanzas as an example:
He thought he saw an Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
“A fact so dread,” he faintly said,
“Extinguishes all hope!”
The first two lines form the hypothesis; the next two lines investigate that hypothesis (and show it to be wrong); the final two lines offer a conclusion. And because it’s Carroll (and because Carroll was preternaturally great), we get the added pleasure of that internal rhyme in the fifth line, and the even greater pleasure of “faintly said” being offset by the exclamation point. And of course the greatest pleasure is the distance the poem travels: from Pope to Soap to (no) hope.
Having written several hundred of these stanzas throughout the year (in the laboratory of my semi-finished basement), I’ve discovered things about the form through a process of trial and error. For instance: Rather than imagining the stanza to alternate between lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, it’s better to think of the whole thing as three lines of iambic heptameter. That way, you can begin, if you like, with a nine-syllable line, and then you can jump-start the next line with an opening stress:
He thought he saw a Herd of Cattle
Grazing on his lawn:
He looked again, and found it was
A Phaser set to “On.”
“We’re seeing more and more of this,
With Sarah Brady gone.”
You can also eliminate the dialogue tag, as in the above example. And you can play with the idea of how active the narrator is:
He thought he saw a High-school Hoodlum
Trash his Neighbor’s Yard:
He looked again, and found it was—
Just say it, man. “It’s hard.
I saw my life, reviewed by God.
He had it single-starred.”
You can add a title that tamps down the comic expectations:
Mad Oh My God
He thought he saw a One-Eyed Jack
Go wilding through the night:
He looked again, and found it was
His Dream of Being Right.
“It turns out not to mean a thing,”
He texted Barry White.
And you can upend the template altogether:
Mad System Down
He thought he saw a Panicked Face
Upon a Panicked Neck:
He looked again, and found it was
Umm . . . nothing. Wait a sec.
He thought he saw a Panicked Face
Upon a Panicked Neck.
You can write about illness, or ’70s baseball stars, or parenthood, or mass murder. The basement hasn’t been my laboratory; the form itself is a laboratory.
The Garden
He thought he saw a Cancer Cell
Divide itself in Two:
He looked again, and found it was
A note from Vida Blue.
“You can’t go back in time,” it read.
So brief. So sad. So true.
He thought he saw the Singing Moon
Reflected on the Water:
He looked again, and found it was
His eighteen-month-old Daughter.
“I’m not sure she can swim,” he said;
“Perhaps a Druid taught her.”
He thought he saw a Charleston Church
Exploding in the night:
He looked again, and found it was
Just that, in black and white.
“A coward’s at the wheel,” he said,
And held his children tight.