Essay Questions

How does Swenson transform grammar in “Ornamental Sketches with Verbs” to lend depth and substance to its title?

As expected, this poem relies heavily upon verb use. One example is the number of different lines that break with conventional grammatical construction by commencing with a verb. What is perhaps most interesting and certainly most creative about the connection between poetry aesthetics and the grammatical foundation of language, however, is how so many of the verbs in the poem are derived from words that traditionally operate as nouns. Among the examples:

“hairs the gutters with brindled light,

helmets cars and boys on bikes

…

flamingos all the pigeons,

…

and fire-escapes to Orleans balconies.”

“A Nosty Fright” transposing letters to make much of it humorous nonsense. The brilliance is that this fun reading experience still tells an intelligible narrative. What story is told?

The opening line of this poem sets the stage for everything that follows after:

“The roldengod and the soneyhuckle,

the sack-eyed blusan and the wistle theed”

But this is no “Jabberwocky” or mere exercise in the manipulating sound. While the words themselves may be nonsense, an actual thread of events are easily enough translated without the need for an entire code book written by a doctoral candidate. Among the incidents which take place include a chipmunk which gets caught inside cobweb and thereupon set out to sea by the winds of storm. He is saved by a grasshopper and two become friends until parting on the windowsill of a house where a witch lives. As it turns out, the poem takes place on a cold, frosty Halloween night echoing with the sounds of chains and curses of goblins.

What makes “How Everything Happens” an example of what Swenson insists is an “iconograph” rather than the “concrete poem” with which they are so often confused?

A concrete poem is technically any in which the arrangement of the verse serves to illustrate its content. For instance, a poem about a whale would be arranged to physically resemble a whale. Or, a bit more abstractly, a poem of defiance might take the form of a person’s hands and fingers making a well-known vulgar gesture. Typically, there is a tactile and unambiguous relationship between content and form that would be almost immediately recognizable even before reading the content. “How Everything Happens” offers a visual image, however, that is not immediately recognizable as anything in particular except perhaps some sort of abstract geometrical design. Unlike a typical concrete poem, one must actually read the words before one can begin to understand the meaning of its strange formatting. It turns out that each individual line is a visual representation of its simple declarative assertion and each individual line contributes to conceptual unification of its theme about, well, the processes involved in how everything happens.