We are delighted to share this guest post by Madeleine Wurzburger which explores the theme of animals in poetry and makes reference to her poem 'Boast' from Only a Few are Looking at the Sky at the Right Moment.

The humid snout is perfect!

Animal as guiding light is a well-used trope. But other writers tap into our darker, primeval selves. Humans are also animals and we live more truthfully when listening to those instincts: ‘do not forget/to be animal, fit and sinuous,/torrid in violence, wanting everything here/on earth...’ Quasimodo tells us in ‘Only if Love Should Pierce You’. More humorously (but with bite), Erich Kästner reminds us that for all our technological advances and pretensions, we are ‘still the same old monkeys.’ (‘The Development of Mankind’)

Animals are a supreme example of how to seize the moment. Never is this clearer than in Hermann Hesse’s ‘A Swarm of Gnats’; the whole astonishing poem glitters with the life-force of the insects ‘carousing’ against death. It’s the last dance before the apocalypse, and the gnats out-perform any decadent royal court: ‘Whole kingdoms, sunk into ruin,/...Have never known of so fierce a dancing.’ Surely Zaffar Kunial had this in mind when he wrote in ‘Early Draft’: ‘Gnats/ were storming through the grass, swerving death, jittery/ for wisdom.’ Nobody better than short-lived insects to tell us that ‘life passes in a smudge.’ Miroslav Holub’s fly might witness the  whole brutal battle of Crécy, apparently impervious to death though the violence is all around, but she, too, is gone in a moment: ‘And thus it was/that she was eaten by a swift/fleeing/from the fires of Estrées.’ (‘The Fly’).

That vulnerability means human care and protection is vital. Sharon Olds hopes her bee, after being rescued from a city pavement, put into a floral hankie and shaken out of a taxi window, will ‘hear/and feel huge rushes of tread and wind/like flight, like the bee-god’s escape.’ Freedom is always uncertain. In Christopher Reid’s ‘Fly’ ‘a gap of air/waits, but this has/not yet been vouchsafed to the fly.’ It is always ourselves that we hope to rescue, that we pity; uncertain whether we will be ‘vouchsafed’ liberty or captivity; life or death. James Wright’s brown cricket is luckier than some, protected by the poet’s shadow that is sent back ‘to stand guard’ while the poet himself remains ‘shadowless/At the small golden door of your body till you wake/In a book that is shining.’ (‘Poems To A Brown Cricket’). Here, human is friend and guardian. Vigilance is necessary; an understanding between animal and human can always be begun: in ‘Birds, at Random’ Jacques Prévert writes ‘I learned very late to love birds/...we understand each other’. The connection seems reciprocal but it is the birds who ‘set an example/...the example of the heart of birds/the light of birds.’ Perhaps the most extraordinary depiction of tenderness towards animals is in Jon Silkin’s ‘Caring for Animals’. Why should we care for ‘small animals/with bitter eyes’ he asks, and answers ‘Yet the animals, our ghosts, need tending to./Take in the whipped cat and the blinded owl;’ by doing so, we learn love for each other. In fact, we are these damaged, put-upon creatures; lashing out at ourselves and fellow humans. At our best, we might aspire to the symbiotic relationship between bull and nightjar in José Watanabe’s ‘The Arrangement’: beast and bird enjoy ‘a vast tenderness’ that we could do well to copy.

More familiarly, humans are pointlessly destructive. Man’s cruelty to animals is a kind of cliched sub-heading of poetry: William Blake’s ‘hunted hare’,‘starv’d’ dog and ‘wanton Boy that kills the Fly’ ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (though Blake presents a strong sense of outrage and implied comeuppance for such behaviour). This same cruelty is shown when we tamper with the earth’s fragile ecosystem, the ‘quivering green music of animals’ (Natalie Diaz’s ‘Wolf OR-7’). Such poems, speaking out against injustices inflicted on any kind of life, are not afraid to carry a strong moral message. By our casual destruction of animals and their habitats, we destroy ourselves and our planet. David Harsent mourns the hen harrier, a bird on the verge of extinction, and here shot before she can breed: ‘her skydance went for nothing.’ (‘Bowland Beth’). If we are talking about ‘extinction’ poems (and how can that be ignored in our current age?) there are plenty. Poets have been facing reality for decades. W.S.Merwin in ‘For A Coming Extinction’ (1967), ‘Gray whale/Now that we are sending you to The End/...’ and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in ‘The End of the Owls’ (2002) both consider the possible extinction of certain species with a mix of anger, sadness and bewilderment. Paul Farley in ‘For the House Sparrow, in Decline’ misses how the sparrow ‘once supplied/the incidental music of our lives.’ Our obliviousness is part of the problem. Jorie Graham reminds us that ‘we live beneath the geese/as if beneath the passage of time’ in ‘The Geese’ but most of us are too busy to notice; finely-tuning our senses in order to locate our place in the natural world, suggest these poets, would be a start.

Even the demise of an individual animal erodes us. In Jon Silkin’s ‘Death of a Bird’ the burial of the bird means that in the poet’s mind ‘a space is taken away.’ W.S Merwin’s life is inextricably bound up with his visiting fox; something that man and fox were together ends when the fox is ‘no longer anything’ and words must find their own place in ‘the silence after the animals.’ (‘Vixen’)
 
Birds have a special significance for poets. Wings, feathers, birdsong, flight offer irresistible metaphors for human endeavour, hope (‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers - /That perches in the soul -’, Emily Dickinson), freedom, joy, the brevity of life (Bede’s sparrow in the meadhall, used by Gillian Allnutt among others). It would be tempting to venture into Emily Dickinson’s strange and magical birdworld (or Dickinson’s world generally) but for now, Finnish poet Gösta Ågren’s aphoristic ‘Life and death are wings of the same bird.’ (‘Thesis’) tells us all we need to know.

I am spoilt for choice in picking a single animal that is meaningful for poets. Possibly every kind of creature, real and mythical, has made its way into somebody’s work. Hares are popular (mystical). Birds, as mentioned, have everything to say about life. Sheep seem to inspire humour and are often found grazing (sorry) in children’s poetry (’Sheep Don’t Go to School’, Sándor Weöres). But it is the horse that seems the most emblematic and magical (’All horses are spells’, Camargues, David Morley). The mysterious creatures emerging from mist in Rutger Kopland’s ‘Horses’ who have ‘come out of a past,/hesitated, and turned back into it’; the animals in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘The Horses of Meaning’ who foretell our (possibly dark) future: ‘Let their hooves print the next bit of the story/...Can this be the end of their flight?’ Pablo Neruda will not forget ‘the light of the horses’ (‘Horses’); James Wright’s encounter with two Indian ponies provokes an ecstatic, out-of-body experience: ‘Suddenly I realise/That if I stepped out of my body I would break/Into blossom.’ ‘(A blessing’). Robert Wrigley’s gelding allows a kiss ‘so that I could smell/the long way his breath had come from the rain/and the sun, the lungs and the heart,/from a world that meant no harm.’ (‘Kissing a Horse’). David Morley’s Camargues offer even more succour, becoming shelter for humans: ‘Some horses are caves.../You can walk inside horses/and sense their walls trembling around you.’ Somehow, this seems possible. More than magical, these horses are ‘myth’ that we can ‘catch...on horseback.’ (‘Camargues’). Morley prefixes the poem with a line from Les Murray: ‘I will wake up in a world that hooves have led to.’ If horses are dark and mysterious, they also lead us to light; the implication is that we can get there if we travel with these animals, catching their backs ‘like luck.’

Let’s hold on, imitate and wonder while we can.

A list has a pleasingly predictable form. It names things, and arranges these things on the page in a way that’s helpful. Words have their own space, can be ranked from first to last, from least important to important; there can be groupings and trajectories or no particular order. Lists contain what’s essential, often without the framework of grammar. They can be ticked, crossed off, thrown away. I found the one pictured on the street. It is functional but it could point to a story or many stories. Or not. It satisfies in its simplicity and in the simple connection it creates between writer and reader.
 
Within poems, lists of gorgeous words or lists of synonyms can be problematic. Each word needs to earn its place and if it doesn’t, the writer can be accused of indulgence, simply grandstanding a knowledge of synonyms or exuding a love of words themselves, for their own sakes but for little else but done well, lists generate their own energy with a forward movement which can be exhilarating for the reader.
 
The master of the poetic list is Walt Whitman. The whole of 'Leaves of Grass' is just one great list made of lots of little lists. It’s easy to suspect him of indulgence. You can feel that there are too many words. But then, that’s part of his point, and anyway it’s not the list itself but how the list of lists resolves that matters most:

The lists in the first two lines here create momentum and the resolution is a journey into outer space. The “circled and circled” indicates that you’re heading somewhere else; that odd “we two have” reaches too far, is drawn back to “We have” and the rest that follows heads at speed into the unknown. What does “voided” mean here? Who knows, but it’s the vehicle that’s takes us somewhere beyond where we might have thought we were heading.
 
A rush, an exuberance, a surfeit is part of the list poem. If you don’t like feeling overwhelmed, don’t read it, because once you’ve committed, you know you’re in for a certain kind of ride. You know the formal territory - the form brings along its good friend repetition, which, if handled well, can be soothing or exciting. But there’s also tension from the beginning: what does the writer have to say which requires a list, which implies a lot of something? Can the writer sustain it? Will the list get bogged down in its own sameness or will the weight of the list help the poem to take off? How much of it can you take? How will it end? A functional list, say a shopping list, doesn’t have a conclusion but a poem which is a list is racing towards revelation. It wants to be going somewhere, to a certain ending. The end of a list poem can be its best feature and the rest of it, the run up, needs to be carefully paced. And it doesn’t need to have, like Whitman’s lists, the noise of an engine. Madeleine Wurzberger’s 'The Keeping' takes us back to the Middle Ages and moves towards it’s ending with the grace of a gliding bird:

The movement here is a forward motion that folds back on itself, the last line an extension of all that came before but also a tucking in. The endings of list poems need to be conclusive but the ending isn’t everything. Linda France, in 'A Hundred Ways to Know Our Place', uses the “ways of” form, (notably employed by William Carlos Williams in his 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird'), to interrogate a single idea from a number of different, and formally different, angles. Here the voices of Victorian women echo through Ridley Hall in Northumberland, each entry shining a light on a different facet of the conventions and constraints of womanhood at a particular moment:

In all of these poems I like the balance of repetition and variation, within the line and from line to line, the sudden trip or skip or burst of surprise when you don’t expect it, usually when you’ve been lulled, and the ending, which in each is like that moment when the wheels of a plane lift from the runway and you know that something seemingly too heavy for flight has been so carefully constructed that it can defy gravity.
 
*
 
I wrote 'Summon the Object', a list poem, as an exercise in looking while walking through the street market in Deptford one Saturday morning. I wanted to really look, and to name everything I saw in plain language, without embellishment. On one level, it’s a straightforward things-you-see-in-a-market poem. I’m not sure it takes flight under its own volition – maybe a few attempts to head skyward in the sense that God keeps interjecting as the ordinary gets on with itself.
 
But this turned out to be the last Saturday before lockdown and there’s a sense of impending change, which I don’t think I consciously wrote in, it was just there, in the looking. And if the poem does achieve any kind of transcendence, I think this might be delivered by the context, some of which is in the poem, though presented, at the time, as no more important than anything else.
 
It began as a straightforward one-line-after-the-other list poem, then I put it in prose-poetry-like stanzas, then it settled into this final form, which I think I stole from my reading of either Ocean Vuong or Mary Jean Chan. Which is a reminder that if you don’t really know what you’re doing, it can help to look over the shoulder of someone who does.

If you’re writing formal verse, the shape of the poem is dictated by the form you have chosen. When writing free verse, where to make verse breaks is one of the choices you make for yourself and, before you are confident in your own voice, you might go through a series of drafts, making different choices about verse breaks, trying to anticipate the effect of each decision on the reader. There’s a lot of guesswork – what does it mean if a break a stanza here, or there or not at all? How do I want it to read?
 
Established poets, who know what they and other poets are about, can help.

Mark Doty, writing about Whitman (What is the Grass, Walt Whitman in My Life, Jonathan Cape 2020), argues that the relationship Whitman sets up with his reader is as much a function of the way the poem appears on the page as it is in the direct address, the language he uses or the subject matter.
 
“Having been a printer myself,” Whitman told Horace Traubel, “I have what may be called an anticipatory eye – know pretty well as I write how a thing will turn up in the type – appear – take form.” Whitman set the first dozen pages or so of his first edition in type himself, and this section (Section 6, “an inquiry into the nature of grass”) was among those pages. You can feel the hand of the printer in them: the physical arrangement of the words on the page mirrors the movement of thought. Each proffered possibility gets its own stanza: a single image is presented, considered, set down. In the white space of silence between stanzas the poet seems to be gathering himself, feeling his way towards his next assertion. The mind pauses, dwells, prepares to speak … In Whitman’s hands … the blank space between stanzas seems athrum with possibility; we pause and watch thought loom up out of silence.”
 
Doty, in discussion with Sharon Olds, and reflecting on his own work, suggests that form can work in counterpoint to the subject in the poem, adding layers of meaning:

“I love stanzas, partly because … my grandmother was a quilt maker and she liked arranging things in patterns and so you make these structures out of triangles and squares and something happens as you vary them. There’s something about stanzas - it’s a wonderful way about making a pattern which exists on top of whatever the content of the poem is so that you get one pattern on top of another …”
 
This remark was in response to an assertion by Sharon Olds that she has “an allergy to stanzas”. Asked how the structure of her work developed over the years, she says,
 
“My lines didn’t change in that they’ve always been 4 beat lines. I’m a formalist. My verse looks free because it ends up with a ragged appearance that in its formal appearance is kind of a fireworks-like look on the page or a tree with branches or a person with many arms. Four beats per line with variations. The biggest change that became conscious maybe three books ago is to have them all in one clump - what’s it called stichic? – there, formal words for it. I call it a clump. I think of it as a torso, an intact torso. Having been raised on Christian hymns, I have an allergy to stanzas and that torso with an irregular side - it just makes me - when I look at the poem I feel right about it, and at the beginning - I had the four beat lines - I had really the rhythm and the meter but I didn’t know the look I wanted yet.”

Olds talks frequently about the amount of work she puts into the shaping of her poems, a degree of control which might seem at odds with the way she describes the first draft, coming to her, or even through her, as an automatic writing process:

“I think one of the reasons that I write is that in the concentration - then similes come into the  poem through my writing arm and my pen - I don’t make them up - they just occur from the brain I guess and into the page … something happens then from the unconscious and I never know what it’s going to be …”
 
The final draft of Olds’ poems which make it to print (she confesses to writing “a lot” and to throwing most of it away) retains that sense of automatic flow despite the fact that the poems have been “worked”.
 
So what can we learn from Doty, Whitman and Olds about the stanza? That where to make a break is in “your anticipatory eye”; that you have an instinct for “how a thing … will appear”; that patterning can add a layer of meaning, which is with or against, under or over the content and that you need to discover “the look” you want. I imagine those instincts become more accessible the more you publish and get feedback from readers. As Frank O’Hara famously said, “You go on your nerve.” He’s right, but for some of us that isn’t as easy as he makes it sound. As Olds suggests, it can take time to know what you’re looking for.
 
By way of example, I’ll end this post with versions of a short poem that took more work than any of the longer, seemingly more complex poems in All of it, where it appears. The fourth version is the final version and, as you can see, very similar to the first, though with less dramatic punctuation. I had to twist it out of shape to know what shape I wanted. Maybe this is true for all poets or maybe, as you become more familiar with your “anticipatory eye”, your “nerve”, you can afford to skip a few drafts before you understand the poem to be complete.
 
Version 1: Sparrowhawk Over Raja Tomb
 
My mother in a camel coat beside my father 
laughing - now only sunlight, a pavement -
she seemed weightless - on the edge
of a joke my father had made -
the light alive - all of it -
 
Version 2: Sparrowhawk Over Raja Tomb
 
My mother laughing
now only sunlit pavement
weightless
on the edge of a joke my father made
the light alive - all of it
 
Version 3: Sparrowhawk
 
My mother
laughing now
only sunlit
pavement on
the edge of a
joke my
father made
the light alive
- all of it
 
Version 4: Sparrowhawk
 
A photograph of my mother in a camel coat
beside my father laughing.
She seems weightless,
on the edge of a joke my father made,
the light alive, all of it.