The late William Matthews once wrote a poem with the title "Premature Ejaculation," which begins as follows:  "I'm sorry this poem's already finished.”
 
And that, of course, is how he ends it, too, thus neatly illustrating two ways in which poems can resemble jokes.  First, a good lyric poem normally begins preparing its ending right from the beginning, even if not obviously so.  That's just good dramatic sense:  the briefer the poem, the less tolerance for any meandering.  In the case of "Premature Ejaculation," we go from set-up to punch line so swiftly that there's no way to distinguish the two, really.  This confusion between start and end is of course the whole point (see his title), and perhaps our pleasure as readers has to do with our surprise at being momentarily fooled by something so obvious. 
 
Which leads us to a second resemblance between jokes and lyric poems:  both tend to depend upon some contrast, tension, conflict, or incongruity.  Poet Robert Morgan has noted that "the art of the lyric is a process of distortion and accuracy, making the little big, the vast minute, the far near, the familiar strange.”  This sort of contrast goes by many names and exists in various modes, including such things as the traditional turn of thought, or volta, between octave and sestet in a Petrarchan sonnet.  In rough terms, the principle at work is the same as in a joke's punch line:  some shift occurs, often involving a surprise. 
 
The simplest kind of lyric closure to describe may be that which is common to both poems and jokes, both of which frequently depend upon simple verbal dislocation, wit and wordplay, sudden reversal of expectations.  In its purest form, I am thinking of effects like the classic (if violent) vaudeville bit:
 
          Q:  Would you hit a man with a child?
          A:  No, I'd hit him with a brick.
 
That's pretty compact, as jokes go.  But connoisseurs of economy in jokes would be hard pressed to top this three word slogan, a vegetarian bumper sticker I once spotted in Raleigh, North Carolina:  "Meat is dead." 
 
I've often thought that surprise may be the best succinct definition of poetry possible.  Nor am I particularly uncomfortable associating poems with vaudeville routines.  After all, there is a most respectable genre of lyric, the epigram, which in terms of structure is hard to distinguish from a joke in any essential way.  Consider this quatrain from Emily Dickinson:
 
          "Faith" is a fine invention
          When Gentlemen can see
          But Microscopes  are prudent
          In an Emergency       
 
Dickinson endlessly reminds me of the virtues of closure-by-surprise, and in the process demonstrates how brevity can be complex.  For this perfectly mordant epigram addresses many subjects at once:  for instance, it's about science and religion; faith and doubt and associated hypocrisies; the Nineteenth Century religion of progress through improved technology; and the way language conceals as much as it reveals such things.  In fact, it contains so many layers that any analysis will quickly overwhelm its four little lines.  In terms of closure, I hope it's easy to see how each word here, from the gently swaddled-in-quotes "Faith" to the surprise and aptness of the final "Emergency," contributes to the effect.  And the poem is entirely seamless, its ending clearly present in its opening.  Its success is mostly a matter of that almost undiscussable quality, tone, a circumstance common to jokes as well.  I would doubt that this poem could be successfully translated.
 
Even "Premature Ejaculation," which I would not make large claims for, nonetheless strikes me as a serious joke, by which I mean one with ramifications.  Surely it's needless to point out that the anxiety inherent in the title is not merely sexual in origin, given the ancient association by male poets of pen and penis.  This poet, in classic humorous fashion, is issuing a self-assured jest at his own expense, mocking his own prowess, his tendency to spill his ink too carelessly upon the page.  In this small joke about sexual timing, the poet is of course thinking of both poetic and humorous rhythms as well.
 
Or am I over-reading this silly little one-liner?  Probably, and thus making my own feeble joke about English professors and their supposed proclivities for such readings.  Yet if you suspect there is a grain of truth in these speculations, along with the humor, then you already agree with my central point.  Poems, like jokes, must spring their endings with great firmness and economy, but the best endings reverberate beyond the moment.  A great joke gets a laugh even when re-told.  A great poem invites re-reading, and managing the closure seems fundamental to this re-readability. 
 
Yet W. B. Yeats once described the ending of a good poem as clicking shut like the lid of a well-made box, which suggests not re-readability but finality.  In contrast, I am tempted to describe it as the opening of such a box;  the sound I listen for is the sense of widening possibility, surprise leading to ambiguity, even uncertainty--rather than any convergence of meanings to one.  Do I dare disagree with Yeats?  I don't think I need to.  For his analogy works well to describe the rhythms, sound, and syntax of the poem, which do need to achieve some sense of finality.  At the same time, what I am seeking (and Yeats splendidly achieves in his own poems) is some thematic reverberation that provokes speculation beyond the moment of the poem.
 
So one way to describe lyric closure is as a contrast or tension between sound and sense, or style and content.  Specifically, good closure often depends on verbal authority doing the work of convincingly resolving the poem's syntax, rhythms, diction, and so forth, while the ideas or feelings continue to reverberate.  This tension is rather like a reverse of the tension created by a good linebreak, wherein the syntax strains forward while the linebreak enforces a rhythmic pause.  In good closure, the syntax necessarily halts (even if the poem ends, like many of Dickinson's, with a dash) while the meaning resonates, pushes beyond.
 
In this spirit, and in despair at concluding this tiny survey of the unsurveyable fields of closure, I’ll conclude with the late William Stafford's sturdy and delicate lyric, "Ask Me."  Stafford is the absolute master of the kind of closure I most admire--in which a poem comes to embody its own criticism.  Barbara Herrnstein Smith in her book Poetic Closure devotes a chapter to this sort of poem, which she calls "anti-closural" and finds particularly characteristic of the twentieth century.  The end of Stafford's poem, then, is certainly of its times:  in it we find the tension or ambivalence of life in dynamic struggle with finalities of sound and syntax.
 
This poem also strikes me as a good one with which to conclude, since its theme, as I understand it, revolves around a firm though oblique argument against coming to reductive or spurious conclusions.
 
          Some time when the river is ice ask me
          mistakes I have made.  Ask me whether
          what I have done is my life.  Others
          have come in their slow way into
          my thought, and some have tried to help
          or to hurt:  ask me what difference
          their strongest love or hate has made.
 
          I will listen to what you say.
          You and I can turn and look
          at the silent river and wait.  We know
          the current is there, hidden; and there
          are comings and goings from miles away
          that hold the stillness exactly before us.
          What the river says, that is what I say.      
 
 
I trust that it's not necessary by this point to say much about this lyric.  It does strikes me that the last line is an answer to the questions posed, and a good one; maybe the only one possible.  To that extent, Stafford manages to question our powers of articulating matters of deepest concern even as he successfully dramatizes the feeling of inarticulateness.  But "what the river says" is also an apt symbol for the way many lyrics achieve closure:  like a river expressing no single notion, but embodying momentum, grace, power, or what have you.  This river is both static (iced over) and fluent (still flowing), just as the lyric manages to conclude by not concluding. 
 
There are other modes of lyric closure, certainly; my little survey is not meant to be comprehensive.  But here with the close of my essay upon me, I will confess my own preference, if it isn’t already obvious.  Poems that end on an unambiguously final note--many moral epigrams, for instance, or poems of political agitation--ultimately are often less re-readable for me than those that express the power of mixed feelings running, like a "silent river," through anyone's life. ​

​© 2017 David Graham