The Importance of Precise Language
and Clear Syntax in Creating Mystery

When reading a poem, we want to feel that we are in good hands, that the poet knows exactly what she or he is promising the reader. This is never more true than when a poem wants to be mysterious or to create an environment that contradicts the natural laws of our experience. We take pleasure in yielding to a poem's underlying, matter-of-fact, logical narrative, even though we know that certain details in it are wildly incredible. This is not unlike the pleasurable tension we feel between a forward-driving, steady beat in a piece of music, while the melody stretches and relaxes above it with its syncopations.

Here is a poem by William Carpenter, entitled "Girl Writing a Letter." First, read the poem a few times to become familiar with it. Then, read it again, noting how the poem lures the reader into a surprising world, anticipating his or her every hesitation with very adept "moves" that sound like perfectly logical explanations, underpinned by a syntax of simple, declarative sentences.

* * * * * *

GIRL WRITING A LETTER
by William Carpenter

A thief drives to the museum in his black van. The night
watchman says Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow.
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard's ear.
I haven't got all evening, he says, I need some art.
Art is for pleasure, the guard says, not possession, you can't
something, and then the duct tape is going across his mouth.
Don't worry, the thief says, we're both on the same side.
He finds the Dutch Masters and goes right for a Vermeer:
"Girl Writing a Letter." The thief knows what he's doing.
He has a Ph.D. He slices the canvas on one edge from
the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the
square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor.
The girl doesn't hear this, she's too absorbed in writing
her letter, she doesn't notice him until too late. He's
in the picture. He's already seated at the harpsichord.
He's playing the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti,
which once made her heart beat till it passed the harpsichord
and raced ahead and waited for the music to catch up.
She's worked on this letter for three hundred and twenty years.
Now a man's here, and though he's dressed in some weird clothes,
he's playing the harpsichord for her, for her alone, there's no one
else alive in the museum. The man she was writing to is dead --
time to stop thinking about him -- the artist who painted her is dead.
She should be dead herself, only she has an ear for music
and a heart that's running up the staircase of the Gardner Museum
with a man she's only known for a few minutes, but it's
true, it feels like her whole life. So when the thief
hands her the knife and says you slice the paintings out
of their frames, you roll them up, she does it; when he says
you put another strip of duct tape over the guard's mouth
so he'll stop talking about aesthetics, she tapes him, and when
the thief puts her behind the wheel and says, drive, baby,
the night is ours, it is the Girl Writing a Letter who steers
the black van on to the westbound ramp for Storrow Drive
and then to the Mass Pike, it's the Girl Writing a Letter who
drives eighty miles an hour headed west into a country
that's not even discovered yet, with a known criminal, a van
full of old masters and nowhere to go but down, but for the
Girl Writing a Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer
in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.

* * * * * *
The poem opens in a fairly believable way ("A thief drives to the museum in his black van." Of course, by telling us it's "a thief," rather than simply "A man," Carpenter sets up the humor of the night watchman's unwitting reply, " Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow." Carpenter makes each statement a little more outrageous than the one before, raising the bar higher and higher in the poem's demand for plausible explanations, so that the fun and, to some extent, the form of the poem becomes a game of self-imposed problems and adroit answers. When the poem's narrator tells us that the thief "finds the Dutch masters and goes right for a Vermeer", he is quick to say that "the thief knows what he's doing. / He has a Ph.D." And when the thief "slices the canvas on one edge from / the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the / square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor," he explains that the girl doesn't hear this because "she's too absorbed in writing / her letter." No wonder, then, that the thief is able to slip into the painting, seat himself at the harpsichord, and begin playing "the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti! I'm certainly willing to buy it!

And here's a brief prose poem by Russell Edson:

* * * * * *
Oh My God, I'll Never Get Home
by Russell Edson

A piece of a man had broken off in a road. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. As he stopped to pick up another piece he came apart at the waist.
His bottom half was still standing. He walked over on his elbows and grabbed the seat of his pants and said, legs go home.
But as they were going along his head fell off. His head yelled, legs stop.
And then one of his knees came apart. But meanwhile his heart had dropped out of his trunk.
As his head screamed, legs turn around, his tongue fell out.
Oh my God, he thought, I'll never get home.

* * * * * *

Suggestions for Writing

1. Try writing a poem that blends the ordinary world with a magical or surrealistic world. For example, the speaker or narrator might go to see a movie and end up walking into it. Or, suppose the speaker in your poem fell asleep with the radio on and dreamed he was talking with the man in the commercial. Let your imagination surprise you. Then, use vivid details and matter-of-fact tone to give the poem a believable quality.

2. Write a prose poem that immediately places the reader in another world. Russell Edson is particularly good at this. Here's how a few of his poems begin:

“A scientist has a test tube full of sheep. He wonders if he should try to shrink a pasture for them."

“A man had been married to a woman’s high-heeled shoe for seven years.”

"You haven’t finished your ape, said mother to father, who had monkey hair and blood on his whiskers."

To learn more about Russell Edson's craft and to read more of his work, I highly recommend an essay by Sara Manguso, entitled "Why the Reader of Good Prose Poems is Never Sad," which you can find in the on-line journal, The Believer, at
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200403/?read=article_manguso.

If you would like to share your poem with visitors to the Montgomery County Poet web site, please e-mail them to Montcopoet@verizon.net by February 15 for posting on the E-Calliope blog..

Thanks. And have fun!

David Simpson
2007 Montgomery County Poet Laureate