Noelle Kocot: Making Every Word Count

The reader’s experience of a poem can be affected by its line-lengths. In general, the shorter a poem’s overall line-length, the more a reader will need to slow down their processing of the poem.

 First some examples, then we’ll explore why this might be the case.

     The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner   (Randall Jarrell)

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

(from Randall Jarrell: Selected Poems, edited by William H. Pritchard.

    New York, 1990: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, page 12)

Here we see a fairly constant visual length to the lines, and when read aloud, each line takes the same noticeable time to say.  So the lines have a palpable presence, whether visual or aural. Another feature of this poem is that each phrase or thought finishes at the end of the physical line. The technical term for this is end-stopped lines, because the end of the thought coincides with the end of the printed line.

Here’s another example of long lines: the opening stanza of C. K. Williams’s poem Ice as originally printed in his Collected Poems.

Ice   (C. K. Williams)

That astonishing thing that happens when you crack a needle-awl into a

block of ice:

the way a perfect section through it crazes into gleaming fault-lines, frac-

tures, facets;

dazzling silvery deltas that in one too-quick-to-capture instant madly

complicate the cosmos with its innards.

Radiant now with spines and spikes, aggressive barbs of glittering light, a

treasure hoard of light,

when you stab it again it comes apart in nearly equal segments, both

faces grainy, gnawed at, dull.

(from C. K. Williams: Collected Poems. New York, 1990: Farrar, Straus

    and Giroux, page 487)

The poem’s lines are so capacious that when printed in a book, a given line needs to wrap around before the next one begins. Once again, the lines are end-stopped: the end of a thought coincides with the end of each line (ignoring those wrap-arounds from physical printing constraints).

Let’s now move toward the other end of the line-length spectrum. Here is the first section of another C.K. Williams poem.  

     Night   (C. K. Williams)

     1.

Somehow a light plane          

coming in low at three

in the morning to a local airstrip

hits a complex of tones

in its growl so I hear mingled

with it a peal of church bells,

swelling in and out

of auditability, arrhythmic,

but rich and insistent, then,

though I try to hold them,

they dissolve, fade away;

only that monochrome

drone bores on

alone through the dark.

  

(from C. K. Williams: Collected Poems. New York, 1990: Farrar, Straus

    and Giroux, page 608)

The lines here are noticeably shorter and each contains three major beats. Unlike the previous examples, this poem’s lines are not always end-stopped: sometimes a phrase flows immediately into the following line (a feature called enjambment).

Here’s what Williams did not write:

            Somehow a light plane coming in low at three in the morning to a local airstrip

            hits a complex of tones in its growl

            so I hear mingled with it a peal of church bells

swelling in and out of auditability, arrhythmic, but rich and insistent,

then, though I try to hold them,

they dissolve, fade away;

only their monochrome drone bores on alone through the dark.

By staging the event as three-beat lines, the original version takes the reader more time to physically process what’s printed on the page. This enables an inherently short event to expand in perceived duration so that the poem’s various facets have more of an opportunity to register with the reader.

             

What might account for this slowing down of time and focus?

Culturally, we are accustomed to lots of information residing in a horizontal line—think of the typically wide paragraphs in books, magazines, emails, etc. So when a poem has a short overall line-length, the pace of information disclosure is noticeably slower. In addition, we are used to visually gleaning as much information as we can from each horizontal line, rather than incrementally building our understanding as we move vertically through a series of short lines.

We will now consider two extreme examples of this “line-length controls the reader’s processing of a poem” phenomenon. Both of them come from the book Phantom Pains of Madness (2016) by Noelle Kocot (KOH-cut). Each of its poems is structured as a series of single-word lines which are capitalized, and each poem is un-punctuated. First, here is Kocot’s poem “In Sickness”.

Look

At

How

That

Juice   

Squeezes

Itself  

Into

That

Glass              

Over   

There          

And

How

We                  

Indulge

In

Our

Caresses

Until               

The

Train

Helps 

Us                

To                   

Rest

By

Simply

Speeding

Off                   

Without

Us

                   

(“In Sickness” from Phantom Pains of Madness by Noelle Kocot. Seattle and New York,      2016: Wave Books, pages 94-95)

Given the poem’s architectural constraints, no single line (word) is privileged. And because we are in effect reading the poem one word at a time, we are constructing an ongoing provisional understanding of the poem which is subject to elaboration and/or correction as we proceed. Visually speaking, the poem makes each word count.

Ignoring for now the poem’s title “In Sickness”, the reader is initially asked to focus on some juice which squeezes itself (surprise!) into a glass, rather than by some human being’s involvement. This is our provisional understanding. But given the non-appearance of a human agent, the verb “squeeze” might mean that the juice fits within a narrow confined space (“let me squeeze into these new shoes”), rather than a piece of fruit being compressed to release its juice.  At any rate, the glass is “Over   There” at some remove, rather than being right here.

Continuing: “And   How   We (who?)   Indulge (surprise!)   In   Our   Caresses (surprise!)” until something else happens—“The   “Train   Helps   Us (surprise!)” to do something, namely, “Rest (surprise!)” because the train speeds off  “Without   Us (surprise!)” .

             

How does this unexpected state of affairs relate to the poem’s title “In Sickness”? Is the speaker sharing some events while in a state of physical and/or psychological sickness? Or does the sickness somehow stem from the train “Simply   Speeding   Off   Without   Us” and leaving “Us” (never identified) behind? Unlike arithmetic, there is no one correct answer, and the poem leaves open various alternatives for the reader. These possibilities are available because the reader experiences the universe of the poem word-by-word, as an ongoing understanding gets created.

Another significant aspect of the poem’s restrictive architecture: because each line is a single word, the reader may notice that some words are longer than others. Most are single syllables, although some of them have two syllables (Itself, Indulge, Speeding, Without). There’s only one instance of a three-syllable word (Caresses). The focus on individual words of noticeably different length allows the poem to subtly employ different levels of emphasis, which in turn drives the instances of surprise which we’ve noted above.

In particular, it is the visually longer words which are unexpected, given the poem’s deliberately slow-paced revelation of facts. Consider the following details, in which I’ve italicized specific words:

“(Look   At   How   That   Juice)  Squeezes   Itself” . . .  (How   We)   Indulge   (In   Our)   Caresses   (Until   The   Train   Helps   Us   To   Rest   By)   Simply   Speeding   (Off)   Without   (Us)”.

Now suppose the poem were re-lineated as follows:

Look at how the juice squeezes itself

into the glass over there

and how we indulge in our caresses

until the train helps us to rest

by simply speeding off without us

In this variant (which does not preserve the original’s capitalizations), much of the surprise has evaporated because the reader’s eyes are taking in a wide clump of words in each line. The ingredients of the poem are not released over time in the same discovery-laden manner as in the original.

Having examined the first item in our Noelle Kocot poem-pair, we now turn to a poem which presents the slow-pacing reader with an additional challenge: to become a co-creator. Let’s first visually scan the entire poem, then return to give it a closer reading.

                 ( ___ )

            The

            Day

            Starts

            Out

            Like

            A

            ( ___ )

            For

            Breakfast

            We

            Have   

            ( ___ )

            And

            For

            Lunch

            We

Have

            ( ___ )

            The

            Inchoate

            Jesting

            Tongue

            Survives

            Like

            The

            Truth

            That

            Churns

            In

            Our

            Stomachs

            Doubt

            And

            ( ___ )

            Fill

            Our

            Awareness

            No

            We

            Are

            Not

            Buried

            In

            Our

            Graves

            But

            The

            Fish

            Still

            Stinks

            Like

            ( ___ )

            A

            Future

            Full

            Of

            Holes

            The

            Intonations

            Of

            Hair

            Sweeping

            The

            Grass

            We

            Are

            ( ___ )

            Like

            The

            Word

            ( ___ )

            Swaying

            On

            Its

            Precious

            Stem

(from Phantom Pains of Madness by Noelle Kocot. Seattle and New York, 2016:

Wave Books, pages 54-57)

The first thing we notice is that the title and several words within the body of the poem are not fully specified: “( ___ )”.

Those “fill-in-the-blank” words are possibly nouns, possibly not. The title could be any single word. And there is variety in the seven blanks within the poem’s body:

·         Blanks #1-3 and #5 are sentence-final

·         Blank #4 is the first noun of a compound subject: “Doubt   And   ( ___ )”

·         Blank #6 is an equation—“We    Are   ( ___ )”—which is a more semantically open possibility. Is the non-specified word a noun (say, soldiers) or an adjective (say, independent)?

·         Blank #7 “Like   The   Word   (___)” could be any part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, whatever).

So we are working here with different flavors of indeterminacy.

Given the reader-supplied missing words, what might the title be? That can only be determined once the reader traverses the entire poem and mentally fills in those blanks. So the title gets determined retrospectively, unlike the usual situation in which a poem’s title appears at the top and sets the stage for the body of the poem. 

The tantalizing implication here is that the poem is never experienced the same twice: each traversal will involve a different set of user-supplied values, and thus a different notion of a user-supplied title. The choice of this particular poem’s structure enlarges the number of possibilities, rather than limiting it.

Looking next at the length of the single words which do appear, we find once again that the longer words involve a sense of surprise. The following schematic highlights some of those unexpected words (italicized):

. . . The   Inchoate   Jesting   Tongue   Survives . . . And   ( ___ )   Fills   Our   Awareness  

. . . The   Intonations   of   Hair   Sweeping  The   Grass

. . . Like   The   Word   ( ___ )   Swaying   On   Its   Precious   Stem

Lest we think that Kocot’s one-word-per-line poetic technique is applicable only to longer poems, let’s look at a “bonus poem”: the final one to appear in Kocot’s book, entitled “Opportunity” —

A

Light

Green

Bug

Hopping

From

Word

Into

Sun

(“Opportunity” from Phantom Pains of Madness by Noelle Kocot. Seattle and New York,

 2016: Wave Books, page 120)

This particular poem’s brief images have a haiku-like feeling. It also has a layout on the page similar to that of a native Japanese haiku, which is traditionally written in a single vertical line of 17 metric pulses (Kanji ideograms plus Hiragana grammatical markers), as opposed to the English-language haiku tradition of three lines with 5-7-5 syllables, respectively.

As in Kocot’s longer poems above, the “single-word line” technique in this brief poem allows for a slowed-down pace of information disclosure. The visually longest word (Hopping) sits at the exact center of the poem. And we encounter surprise when we reach “Word” and “Sun”: the bug hops from a conceptual construct (Word) into physical reality—“Sun” meaning either sunlight itself or jumping up to the actual physical object in the sky.

Once again, Kocot’s approach to a poem’s architecture makes each word count.