Tad Richards'
INFORMAL
tad@tadrichards.com / tadrichards.com
No.31 - February 2024
Tired Words, Working Words


Tired words are words that have been used too often, or are too generic, or too vague, to bring any working energy with them into a poem. Working words are the other kind -- words that have a spark of life, that bring a piece of their world with them into the poem. There's no hard and fast rule about what makes a tired word, or a working word. And there are some words that are neutral -- tired in some contexts, working in others. Let's look at some words in a couple of poems -- two by beginning students, two by Billy Collins. I first made up this chart for an undergraduate creative writing class, and I’ve lost the student poems, but that’s probably just as well. They were early efforts, the kind that are a little embarrassing when you look back at them a few years later, but we all have to start someplace, and they did trigger these thoughts. I've separated the words in the poems by parts of speech. The table on the left are the words in the student poems, the table on the right Billy Collins.
NOUNS VERBS MODIFIERS   NOUNS VERBS MODIFIERS
agony arcs beauty chants chuckle cold death dreams eternity face feeling funeral heat language laughter moonlight peace sea shadows silence sun thoughts water way wind woman blow come dying falling hides lies mar meets misting sailing saying screaming settling shining sings sitting soaring think undermining whisper airy asunder balanced bitter cruelest delicate elaborate endless finally frantic frosty gently incomplete most softly sublime sweet tumultuous utterly   Atlantic beach bench bottoms calendar crowd drawings ears exhaust pipe feet fish garage holiday mechanic murkiness pinup sound Spain surface tools wall water waterspouts wave weight whales appearing checking clear disappearing feel hammering holding imagine look make out ringing sleep stepping thinking try wait walking dense first local rocking shifting
SOME STATISTICS:
Ratios Student list Collins list
Nouns-modifiers 26-19 26-5
Concrete-abstract nouns 12-14 22-4
Simple present/past tense verbs-participles 9-12 8-9
Transitive-intransitive verbs 7-14 7-10
Sensory vs quality modifiers 2-17 5-0
I made up these mini-concordances to see what I would find, and I found no significant differences in the verbs -- the students use a few more participles than Collins does, and a few more intransitive verbs, but I can’t draw anything of significance from that. The real eye-openers are in the nouns and modifiers. A friend of mine -- a businessman, not a poet, but someone attuned to language -- once told me that if you need to use a modifier with a noun, you’re using the wrong noun. That's austere. Still, look at the difference. The student poems have nearly a one-to-one ratio of nouns to modifiers. The Collins poems have a ratio of five to one. Billy Collins is not the only touchstone in poetry, and certainly it's not always true that abstract nouns are going to be tired words and concrete nouns are going to be working words. Still, as Damon Runyon once said, “The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.” Don't count on there being much energy left in that abstract noun. And look at the difference here -- more than half of the student nouns were abstract; less than one-sixth of the Collins nouns. Let’s move on to modifiers. Every part of speech is in the language for a reason, and each has its place. Still, there are modifiers and modifiers. A sensory modifier tells you how something appears to the senses; a quality modifier tries to describe some ineffable quality about the thing-- which tells (rather than shows you) how the poet feels about the thing. Almost all the student modifiers are quality. The few Collins modifiers are all sensory. I can’t give you the student poems, but here are the Billy Collins poems--I only used the first few lines of “Pinup,” to give approximately the same word count as in the student poems. Walking Across the Atlantic I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach before stepping onto the first wave. Soon I am walking across the Atlantic thinking about Spain, checking for whales, waterspouts. I feel the water holding up my shifting weight. Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface. But for now I try to imagine what this must look like to the fish below, the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing. Pinup The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense that you cannot make out the calendar of pinup drawings on the wall above a bench of tools. Your ears are ringing with the sound of the mechanic hammering on your exhaust pipe… Let's look at a couple more examples (admittedly, sometimes my categorizations are arbitrary). Ozymandias I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed, And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. —Percy Bysshe Shelley
NOUNS VERBS MODIFIERS
CONCRETE ACTIVE/SIMPLE SENSORY
traveler land legs stone desert sand visage frown lip sneer sculptor hand heart pedestal words name Ozymandias King Kings Nothing wreck sands met said Stand lies Tell read survive mocked fed appear Look despair remains stretch antique Two vast trunkless Half sunk shattered wrinkled colossal boundless bare lone level
ABSTRACT OR VAGUE COMPOUND/PASSIVE/ VERB "TO BE" QUALITY
command passions things works decay stamped is cold well lifeless Mighty
However… In poetry as elsewhere, rules are made to be broken. Look at the life and fire Allen Ginsberg breathes into these words: Howl I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
NOUNS VERBS MODIFIERS
CONCRETE ACTIVE/SIMPLE SENSORY
streets fix tatters cold-water flats saw sat starving naked Negro hollow-eyed
ABSTRACT OR VAGUE COMPOUND/PASSIVE/ VERB "TO BE" QUALITY
minds generation madness hipsters dawn connection dynamo machinery night poverty darkness tops cities jazz destroyed dragging looking burning smoking floating contemplating best hysterical angry angelheaded ancient heavenly starry high supernatural
The screenwriter Albert Goldman (The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), in a book about writing for movies, makes what he says is his most important point: when it comes to the question of what makes a successful movie, nobody knows anything. That’s probably equally true of every art form, certainly including poetry. So how is it that Allen Ginsberg is able to break all of my rules, and write a masterpiece? That’s easy. These aren’t rules. They’re ways of approaching the writing of a poem, and they are good ways—I know, because I made them up. But there are more ways to the woods than one. Or, as Robbie Robertson said in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “You take what you need and you leave the rest.”
©2024 Tad Richards
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