I am mostly a self-taught poet. I read a lot of William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, and the Chinese masters as a young man, and learned much of what I know about poetry from them. I played with the haiku until I broke it. When I was asked to do a presentation on poetry for a writers' conference some years ago, I relied on what I'd learned from these "mentors" and offered my audience what I call The Five Elements of Poetry. I was speaking about lyric poetry, which is the poetry that interests me, focused as it is on the two great themes of the lyric, love and loss. After that hour-long talk, one of those in attendance told me that she'd never heard poetry talked about the way I had been explaining it. I couldn't tell if that was meant as a compliment or not, yet I stand by those five elements and have taught several courses using them as the basis for discussing the work of several poets who are important to me.

What are these five elements of poetry? They are: measure, architecture, image, leap, and mystery. In addition, I always emphasize that "condensation" is necessary because poetry is "heightened" speech, language compressed to its best juice; and we always talk about "sound texture," because in the best poems the sound of it supports whatever else the poem is doing. Here, though, I'll focus on the five elements.

Our daughter was not very old when she asked, "Dad, why do they call it free verse when you tap your foot?" Good question -- rhythm is much more essential to making the poem what it is than is the case with prose. The roots of poetry go back to the first of us who pounded a club on a hollow log. Verse is called verse because the lines of a poem turn the way a ploughman turns when he comes to the end of the field. It is this use of measure which marks one key difference between poetry and prose (leaving aside for another time any discussion of prose poetry). Traditionally, we are taught iambic pentameter and such, the poetic foot and the number of feet per line, etc. The four most usual poetic feet in English are: March time -- BOOM-chick and its reverse, chick-BOOM; and Waltz time -- BOOM-chick-chick and its reverse, chick-chick-BOOM. How many of us, I wonder, are aware of how closely related Emily Dickinson's poetics is to the church hymns she knew?

Traditional meters are not the only way to measure a line, however. One might simply count a consistent number of stresses per line, regardless of the number of off-beats. Or, as I myself often do, you may simply count the number of syllables per line regardless of the number of stresses -- not to the point of the intricate syllabic patterns used by Marianne Moore, perhaps, but the principle is the same. Indeed, in my own pursuit of William Carlos Williams' "American idiom" I have discerned what I call a 2:2:1 shape in our natural speech, where the first two lines have the same (even) number of syllables, and the third line has half that many; it can be scaled up to 4:4:2, 6:6:3, 8:8:4, or farther. Gerard Manley Hopkins had his notion of "sprung rhythm" (which requires someone wiser than I am to explain). Allen Ginsberg frequently used "breath" to measure his lines, and often ventured into the poetics of the Psalms where parallelism is key to the shape of the lines, such as this from the Psalms: "But let judgment run down as waters, / and righteousness as a mighty stream." The Chinese masters, writing in an ideogrammatic language, were essentially measuring based on the number of words (ideograms) in the line, which typically meant five or seven noun/verbs to the line. The Greeks and Romans, using what is called "quantitative meter," doesn't count stresses, but long vowel sounds, such as in "Arma virumque cano, / Troiae qui primus ab oris." The measure of the line in Anglo-Saxon poetry often consisted of two beats (stresses), a caesura, and two more beats. Finally, the lines of much other modern free verse use recurring "syntactical units," breaking the line at a period, a comma, or other natural places to pause.

In poetry, the point is not so much HOW we measure the line, but THAT we measure it, that the line breaks. Poetry is not prose broken into lines, unless those lines are measured, which can happen; my series "Letters Home" consists of poems chiseled from my wife's great-great-grandfather's letters to his wife during the Civil War, such as this one (his words, my arrangement): "I find / the more // a man / has here, // the worse / it is: // the more / he has // to pack: / it is // useless / for us // to make / ourselves // the mules." (I call this his Robert Creeley poem.) Of course, there is a lot more to be said about measure -- e.g. the nature of line breaks and stanza breaks, and more, but this should suffice for now.

"Architecture," the way I use the term, is about how the poem is structured to do what it is doing. Structure is not necessarily "form" in the traditional sense. While the sonnet may be fourteen lines of iambic pentameter and is typically divided into eight lines and six lines or twelve lines and two lines, the architecture of the sonnet is defined by the turn that occurs between the eighth and ninth lines or between the twelfth and the thirteenth. The haiku has that same architecture -- there is typically a turn between the second and third lines. In the well-made poem, the architecture supports the thrust of the poem. If you are familiar with James Wright's wonderful poem, "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," you may recognize its architecture as something like a syllogism: A is like B, B is like C, therefore A is like C; or in this case, A is true, B is true, therefore C is true. Because the Polacks & Negroes and night watchmen, Because the proud fathers & their women, Therefore, their sons do this galloping terribly against each other's bodies. The architecture of Jane Kenyon's wonderful "Let Evening Come" depends on its parallelisms and their movement: let the light, let the cricket, let evening, let the dew, let the stars, let the fox, let the wind, let the shed, let it, let evening come; the eye moves from the light of late afternoon to the darkness inside the shed, from natural processes to "God does not leave us comfortless," and we arrive at the weight of the final "so let evening come." You may not know that "Let Evening Come" was written after Kenyon learned she would be dying of cancer, but the movement from the light of late afternoon to the darkness inside the shed certainly hints at something of the sort. The architecture of Kenyon's "In the Nursing Home," about her mother-in-law's failing health, is shaped by its central metaphor, that of a horse grazing in a field that is made smaller and smaller each night, where the "grass / is dust, and the creekbed's dry." The turn here is like that of an English sonnet, which occurs at the final couplet while remaining consistent with the central metaphor: "Master, come with your light / halter. Come and bring her in." A good poet will want to let the material of the poem inform its architecture: not everything will fit the structure of a sonnet or of a haiku, nor should we want it to. We want the poem to tell us how it should be shaped.

What is an image? It is a picture of some part of the world which comes to us through one of our senses, most often sight, but the other senses as well. We perceive some thing in the world and record it. Being a poet is a matter of paying attention, of seeing, of discerning pattern, finding difference and sameness. The image allows us to show, not tell. (And, for the record, I agree with William Carlos Williams' admonition: "No ideas but in things.") Yet a carefully selected image can speak beyond itself. In this regard, I think of my own little poem: "The lonely / trees of / Nebraska // wave to every / passerby." I could take you to Nebraska and show you those trees and you too would see the emptiness the image suggests. A well-chosen, well-placed image assists the architecture in making the poem's argument without the need to explain. The challenge for us, of course is to see what we see, not what we think we see, and to record it truly. We need to recognize the greater thing that what we see is part of. (Even the Great Attractor in our universe, we find now, is being pulled by something greater.) The poet's use of the image needs to speak of what it is, and not of what the poet thinks about it. It needs to be more like notes in a travel journal than like a diary entry. Well-placed, the image becomes something more than the thing itself, which is how metaphor wants to happen, and beyond that, it is where symbol might finally present itself. In this regard, I think of another one of my short Nebraska poems, one which speaks of the same hard emptiness as my poem about trees, above: "Sign says: Travel / at your own risk. // Even the horses / have turned // tail to the wind." Image: I think of these lines from the long-poem "Lake Superior" by Lorine Niedecker: "In every part of every living thing / is stuff that once was rock // In blood the minerals / of the rock."

As with Basho's famous frog poem, in a good poem something must leap. Basho's poem can be summarized: "Water / frog // splash." With his "In a Station of the Metro," Ezra Pound showed us this leap: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough." For me, the leap is where the poem becomes a poem, the place where the poem opens out and touches the universe. It is in the leap that something amazing happens. James Wright's lovely little poem, "Outside Fargo," is illustrative: the architecture is somewhat like that of an English sonnet, with a "turn" or leap between the third last line and the second last line, moving us from what is "out there" -- railroad yard, a match being struck, the wind, horses and the silo's shadow, a lurch of the boxcar door, a man saying good evening -- to "in here" --"I nod as I write good evening, lonely / And sick for home." Or again, from James Wright, in "A Blessing" we have twenty-one lines describing his meeting with some ponies along the highway, one whose long ear "is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist," then, SUDDENLY, "Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom." THAT is a leap. The leap in Jane Kenyon's "Let Evening Come" is from "air in the lung" to "God does not leave us / comfortless...." The progression of the poem is from the things of this world to something much, much larger. The leap in her poem "In the Nursing Home" is the movement from the metaphorical description of the old woman's condition (as a horse in a pasture that is growing steadily smaller) to what is essentially a prayer: "Master, come with your light / halter...."

Ah, mystery. Isn't that the point of it? I believe it was Emily Dickinson who said you know it's a poem when it takes the top of your head off. The poem makes its leap and opens into mystery. I think encountering mystery is at the heart of what the poet does. So why is the term so seldom seen in discussions of poetry? Why isn't it spoken of more? A quick check of five references on my bookshelf is revealing: there is no mention of mystery in the indices of Harvey Gross's Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, James W. Kirkland & F. David Sanders' Poetry: Sight and Insight, Frances Mayes' The Discovery of Poetry, Kim Addonizio & Dorianne Laux's The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, and Mary Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry. Even in Carl Phillips' wonderful book of essays, My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing, none of the essays is titled "Mystery." About the closest he comes is one called "Silence." Some have suggested that those who make a living talking about poetry may not want to get caught up in something spiritual or mystical; but if we're talking about poetry, lyric poetry, how can it NOT be mystical? Mystery, in Middle English "mystic presence" and related to "mystic," brings apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect (that is, beyond reasoning and understanding objectively), beyond our normal understanding. The leap in the poem brings us there.

Mystery is related to the fact that each thing lives in two places -- first, in the world of our senses; and, second, in some place beyond the direct grasp of our senses where we see the glow of each thing from within itself (and not that which we would impose on it) and the luminous tendrils reaching out between and among things. Metaphor: because one thing can be like another, therefore mystery. Mystery: because the world is coming apart and we have need to hold it together, because the universe is random and we need to see pattern, because there is so much we don't understand and we want to. The best poems take us there, take the tops of our heads off. Think of James Wright, "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" where he can see the bronze butterfly, hear the cowbells in the distance, observe the chicken hawk overhead, and -- BOOM -- he realizes "I have wasted my life."

Certainly it's true that measure, architecture, image, leap, and mystery, my Five Elements of Poetry, are not the only ones. Certainly there are other ways to talk about the things I've touched on here. I wouldn't suggest that this is all there is to poetry, but understanding these elements, I think, gives us a pretty good foundation.