{"id":195,"date":"2022-09-19T19:14:44","date_gmt":"2022-09-19T19:14:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/?p=195"},"modified":"2022-09-19T19:14:44","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T19:14:44","slug":"some-thoughts-on-writing-throughlines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/?p=195","title":{"rendered":"Some Thoughts on Writing: Throughlines"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have come to believe that there is nothing inherently poetic about a particular place. The commonplaces, or loci communes if you want to get fancy with it, that poets return to so often (having coffee, working in the garden, walking in the woods, funerals) seem to me to simply be times in which the poet has a guaranteed moment for quiet reflection.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve\u00a0written before\u00a0of inhabiting a mindset<\/a> that allows you to see (and to note down) these instances when you\u00a0encounter\u00a0poetic moments in your daily life.\u00a0Here, I want to further dispel the illusion that you\u00a0have to\u00a0put yourself into nature or drama\u00a0in order to\u00a0find poetry from the world around you.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me\u2014and again the caveat: incoming personal opinion from a far-from-expert\u2014the way in which we draw meaning from the day-to-day and siphon it through poetry into concrete form is via the throughline. So, what\u2019s a throughline?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A practical definition might go as follows: throughlines are the narrative pathways that form the spine of a poem and onto which we attach our observations in order to give the poem form and meaning. Without a throughline, poems are either amalgams of disparate thoughts or amorphous blobs of abstraction. Neither pastiche nor blob is particularly aesthetically pleasing for me, and though you can certainly slap some random words on paper and call it poetry, you\u2019ll find yourself in the same boat as a child with fingerpaints (i.e. you\u2019ve got the tools, but you lack the awareness).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order for a poem to have meaning for an audience beyond the poet, there needs to be some semblance of structure so that a reader can overlay their own perspectives, experiences, and histories onto the poet\u2019s work. I like to think of it as a tent. The poet gets the whole mess out of the bag\u2014which is always too small\u2014and lays it all out on the ground, sets up the poles, hammers in the pegs, dusts off the hands and waits for the reader to bring their own canvas to drape over the thing. Will it be yellow or red or camouflage? Will it have fancy nets and zippers or be simple weathered tarpaulin? Well, that\u2019s up to the reader.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most successful poems provide a framework or throughline that allows for multiple interpretations. If you\u2019ve ever taken a writing class, you may have heard this described as \u201cshow, don\u2019t tell.\u201d It\u2019s the salient if overused point that you need to let the reader draw their own conclusions about the poem rather than beating them over the head with your intended interpretation. Strong poems use their throughlines to let the reader enter the poet\u2019s world as seamlessly as possible, and then once they\u2019re in there, to think whatever they want rather than be told what to think.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my opinion, developing a strong throughline is the hardest part of writing poetry. It\u2019s also usually the last thing that I discover in the process. If I\u2019ve been active in transcription and noted the small moments, observations, thoughts, etc.\u00a0which populate my notes, then I already have the poles for my tent.\u00a0But unlike my concept of extrapolation, which I wrote about here<\/a>, that asks you to take an item or items and stretch them out until you find the drama or novelty that turns an idea into a narrative,\u00a0a throughline instead finds the common thread between poetic moments and weaves them together into recognizable shape.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem with finding the throughline, though, is that the common thread isn\u2019t always obvious or even sensible. What ties together a bird striking a window, a phone call from your mother, and the just-browned skin of an apple left overlong in a bowl? No clue. And because I don\u2019t know how these poetic moments are tied together, I can\u2019t write this poem. Yet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hardest part of discovering a throughline is being patient. In order to see what the connections between isolated events might be, there is no better tactic than waiting. And that can be hard to do. We see a bird strike a window and we think, \u201cDang! I gotta sit down and write this poem right now.\u201d And you should! I will never tell you not to follow the muse. What I would advise, though, is to remember that whatever you\u2019ve just come up with is a draft. And a draft, by definition, is a work-in-progress.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With patience, throughlines suggest themselves as possible pathways through a poem that you can overlay onto your transcriptions (those small moments of poetry) to make meaning from mess.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An example? Sure thing.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was working on a poem recently, but it was resisting my efforts to turn it into a draft that made sense to anyone but me. Essentially, I had a nice first image of watering someone else’s flowers, and a context to overlay onto it thanks to some extrapolation (What if the person was watering her lover\u2019s flowers? What if the lover was away with his own family at the time?) and the line \u201cstill life\u201d penciled onto the page. So, I made a note and then left it for a month. Last week, I was out running in the corn when I saw this piece of tire that I thought was a snake\u2014full disclosure: I jumped and hooted like a scared child\u2014and it pulled me back to the memory of the tenacious little snake in my old garden that was never afraid to have a go at my shoes.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I’m thinking, okay, we’ve got a controlling metaphor with the snake being an obvious parallel to the lover, and the weird feeling of fear\/anticipation of being around something that might bite you, plus the nice image of thinking you find a corpse and being wrong. “Still Life” came in as the last line and doubled nicely for a title because the poem sort of paints a still life of a moment, but it gains additional meaning when you read the poem. It\u2019s not published yet, but I\u2019ll post a link here when it finds a home. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I guess all this is to say that patience bears fruit when you’re dealing with a poem. Don’t worry about being in “poetic physical spaces” because they probably don’t exist. Instead, try to keep the poem in your mind as you go through your day so that you can start generating connections between lived experience and the throughline of a poem. Usually, when you find it, the poem writing goes from arduous to smooth, and suddenly you\u2019ve got a draft you\u2019re proud of. What a neat thing.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have come to believe that there is nothing inherently poetic about a particular place. The commonplaces, or loci communes if you want to get fancy with it, that poets return to so oftenContinue readingSome Thoughts on Writing: Throughlines<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[53],"tags":[77,64,14,4,48,76,51,46],"class_list":["post-195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-craft","tag-extrapolation","tag-garrett-stack","tag-poetry","tag-some-thoughts-on-writing","tag-thoughline","tag-transcription","tag-writing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":196,"href":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions\/196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garrettstack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}