In February and March I addressed good openings for almost any kind of writing here at the FWA blog. Now, we come to the more difficult bit for most of us. Once you’ve invited your readers in, what are you going to serve them? Stale crackers and old cheese are just not going to cut it. I’ve done a bit of research on this, as well as a lot of thinking. (When I can unfreeze the little gray cells this winter.) Someone lost in the depths of Google will find a number of articles about writing the saggy middle sections of fiction. But there’s practically nothing on writing the middles of poems. (If you find something, do let me know.) Why is that? It’s just as hard—maybe more so in some cases. (Just, hopefully, not as time consuming as writing the middle 80% of a novel!)
The promise of the premise
Despite the fact that we’re going to limit ourselves to poetry in this posting, it all comes down to that popular saying: the promise of the premise. (This phrase was first used, I believe, by screenwriter Blake Snyder in his well-regarded book Save the Cat about screen writing.) Essentially, how you reeled your reader in—or grabbed him/her/them—will determine what you do next. Are you going to fulfill the promise you made at the beginning?
If you’ve used an interesting scientific fact as bait, you’ll need to prove, disprove, raise questions about, compare & contrast that fact, or look at the history of that fact, etc. What I’m saying is the reader will expect you to feel around in the gestalt of your opening cast (Sticking with the fishing metaphor, here.) to come up with a middle. If you began your poem as a command, you’ve got to tell the reader why you made that command. Or, if you start in a friendly open-armed sort of way but you are headed toward a harsh turn, then the steps along the way ought to be clear.
Sure, it’s okay to wade through tangents—wherever your thoughts lead. Many contemporary poems do. But the starting point for a tangent ought to be able to be sussed out so it makes some kind of sense. Your reader will want to be able to untangle the lines of a poem that start with trout fishing and end up considering the architecture of Denmark.
How much middle is needed
That said, how much of a middle do you need? If you’re writing to a form, such as a sonnet, it’s there for you. Many standardized forms require a specific number of lines. Some do not. And free verse poems can be any length. But do be wary of tiring your reader! Anything much more than a page can grow wearisome unless the poem is broken up into numbered/titled subsections—poems within a poem, or within a larger poetic structure.
If you’re out to prove a point, convert someone’s thinking, or open up a new intellectual/emotional vista for a reader you will probably need more than one image, comparison, fact, rumination, or mini story in the middle. And these are usually divided up into stanzas, but not always. Of course, like everything I’m saying here, there are exceptions. There are some very short poems that only need one hard-hitting middle beat to work, and work well. It comes down to intention.
Do you intend to give your readers an emotional hit over the head as soon as you’ve gotten them into your poem? (Ouch!) This may sound a bit harsh, for it can leave your readers reeling. But it’s also good—they’ll not forget your poem for some time. A poem with a short middle that has always stayed with me is the poem without a title by Langston Hughes. There’s simply nothing more that needs to be said—short and emotionally powerful.
I loved my friend
He went away from me
There’s nothing more to say
The poem ends
Soft as it began-
I loved my friend
And here’s a poem of mine from my RPLA winning collection When You Get Here. In it, I have only one image in the middle—that fistful of sticks. My opening is intimate, friendly, imagistic—the brown slip of boy. The final two-line stanza is the ending. (We’ll be talking about endings later.) The poem is short and sweet, as is the child. My poem would lose much of its impact if I had carried on describing the gift, the boy, or the receiver in more detail.
The Gift
~for Cal
Brown
slip of boy
come bringing
that fistful
of sticks.
Catkins
in first blush.
Middles head somewhere
I also need to mention that a middle is headed somewhere. A lot of poets start poems not knowing where they’re headed—at least many of the poets I know, do this. It’s a way of wandering around until a theme is found. (These poems are often the result of prompts, or automatic writing.) The theme may not always be clear in the first, second, or twentieth draft. But, hopefully, the theme emerges. So, you do not need to know your final destination ahead of time. But it does help, especially if it’s a narrative poem. In that case you need only tell the pertinent bits—the parts that express more than what’s on the page—that reflect character, or emotion, or raise questions.
To sum up
What does all this meandering around the idea of middles tell us?
- Basically, there’s no hard and fast rules for middles of poems.
- Once you’ve enticed readers in, you need to meet their expectations by fulfilling the promise of your premise. (Or, at least, leave your readers with more questions about the subject than when they first read your opening.)
- You do not need to know where you’re headed in the first few drafts—you can often discover what should be in the middle by floundering.
Finally, I have to mention endings. (My next installment will be on endings.) As I said, middles are headed somewhere—toward endings. Some poems have circular middles that come back to their openings. That can feel very satisfying for the reader. But hold that thought … we will come to the endings of poems in a future post.
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