The Star-Dappled Puddle: Reflecting on Poetic Practice

The night is violet moonless—

a creamy banquet of pirouetting stars

dapples a hilltop puddle.

Plunging my head into the placid water,

I hope to taste the light.

Writing poetry is not harder than prose fiction, but it is a different kind of hard. Fiction is an adventure to a distant land, planned out with charts and graphs and pages of notes. Though it’s not a rigidly rationalist process, it requires stolid discipline if it’s going to be neither inane nor incoherent. Poetry is plunging one’s head into that star-dappled puddle. It’s feverous and fantastical, pulsating with a mix of painterly precision and demoniac intensity. While more constrained formally, poetry depends more on the sonic and connotative qualities of the words themselves outside their straightforward, utilitarian meaning. If I write “violet” instead of “purple” in prose, that choice is not insignificant, but it does not by itself substantially affect the tone and atmosphere of the piece. In poetry, however, “violet” implies a more vibrant and elevated valence than the more quotidian, even oafish, “purple.” Every word in good poetry, even the more ostensibly straightforward and monosyllabic, has a specific intensity derived from sound, context, and the poem’s overall form. Even that form by virtue of its constraints transforms the relationships between words, imbuing these relationships with a different and subtler significance than would exist in a typical sentence.

Prose in my experience requires comprehensive planning in order to seem free and spontaneous. The reader should not see your underlying structure, though there inevitably is an underlying structure. Every story is really a thousand little stories, each one culminating in a single choice a character makes or an action they take. Think about each of these stories in isolation—contour them with elegant descriptions. Then link them together so that each organically leads into the next, like a hundred thousand stills played at twenty-four frames a second to create the illusion of motion. Whether this planning is done at the moment of writing the story or long before, it remains a rigorous process. Without it, the story has no shape or form. A story would be just a random series of images and events.

Not everyone thinks about the process to this extent, and there are times when thinking about the process too directly can cause mental paralysis. Once you reach the stage of basic unconscious competence in writing, you can afford to not constantly think about the organizational process, but you shouldn’t forget that this process exists. What we call composing a story is really making a thousand snap decisions about how a story should be planned and organized. Writing is not like running, wherein every step exists somewhat autonomously of the others, aside from long-term effects on your physical stamina. Writing is more like chess. Every step innately involves planning the next step, for every choice impacts the choices that will be available later. Entire paragraphs and even pages sometimes have to be rewritten not because of artistic defects, but because they depict actions and scenarios that contradict the choices characters eventually need to make for the narrative to be coherent. In prose, there is a clear progression from plot point A to character reaction B to character choice C, and while it might not follow the same rules of reasoning that apply in a philosophy class or even while writing a piece of literary criticism, it nonetheless follows a basic causal chain. Writers who write more spontaneously might not intellectualize the process to the same degree, but the basic process still exists.

Prose remains more tied to ordinary reality, and because our everyday experience tends to observe simple rules of causality, prose does as well. Even fantasy and fabulist stories become intelligible as taking place in a world like ours if they follow intelligible causal chains. Conversely, if I want to make even a story that takes place in an ostensibly mundane world feel strange, I can disrupt those causal links. For instance, if a company says it will give a prize to its best salesperson, but then defines “best” to mean the one who sold the third-most, that instantly becomes odd. Poetry is less rooted in these causal links. If I removed the first chapter of Anna Karenina and placed it at the end, the effect would be disorienting and disruptive. Conversely, if I took the first stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium” and placed it at the end, the general effect of the poem would not be greatly changed.

Granted, this difference is not absolute, and there are countless exceptions. The entire point of Frost’s disquieting, oft-misunderstood “The Road Not Taken” is muddled, for instance, if the last stanza does not come last. Still, the different relationships poetry and prose have to causality speaks to a more fundamental difference between the two forms. While prose can be gauzy and lyrical, it remains tied to the ordinary way in which people speak and interact. While poetry can mimic ordinary speech, its form and style typically associate it more with a separate, elevated register more closely aligned with myth and ritual. This is not the only reason why epics from the Iliad to the Ramayana were written in poetry, but it is a contributing reason.

Poetry depends on a buried spark that unlocks hidden qualities in words and phrases through their sound and arrangement. There’s a half-mad fervor to it that relies on a burst of artistic vision extending beyond the conditions of mundane reality, even contradicting those conditions. While poetry draws connections, these connections can be strange and elliptical, relying on form and subtle implications. A poet must be able to dive into that star-dappled puddle and earnestly believe, if only for a manic instant, that they can taste the light. Wherever that ecstatic, yearning wonderment comes from, it is not the result of crafting precise causal links.

Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in Manhattan. His work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, 365 Tomorrows, and Columbia University's Quarto. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative fiction publication Orion’s Belt. His YouTube channel has received over 1.6 million views.