Grammar in poetry

Although my conversation with Karen Holmberg on poetry went into several aspects, she honed in on three topcs: the subject, the verb, and the object.

Out of the three, the verb dominated the conversation. She finds many beginning writers only think of adjectives having the ability to describe, therefore lacking in verb usage, namely in variety. She said many people will use "ran" instead of words like "bolted" or "scrambled" which can add not only a superficial benefit but a deeper meaning as well. Such as if you wrote, "I ran through the kitchen," it could be better, "I scrambled through the kitchen." This time the verb scramble is associated with egg cooking because of the word kitchen.

She mentioned many LANGUAGE poets actually play with the language and gave two examples. The first, many LANGUAGE poets will play with the verb and make it predicate a non-traditional subject. Her example was, "The Tennis shoe [subject] smelled [verb] the flower." In this sense we have an inanimate object (or subject in this case) that doesn't have the capacity to physically smell another object, such as a human or animal can smell a flower. The other way LANGUAGE poets play with verbs is by giving you choices with the verbs. An example would be, "I ran/danced/conjugated through the kitchen." This forces the reader to choose which action happened, depending on the reader one to all three actions can happen.

Next she talked about the subject and its power. The usage of first person such as, I, is very different from the third person, you. When the poet writes I it forces the reader to become, or see things as, the narrator. But when the poet uses you it’s like the reader is reading a letter or diary. The you becomes much more powerful in this sense, as if the writer is directly writing towards the reader. Even within first person it can be different, such as I is different from we. The use of we makes both the reader and writer one. It makes both of them look at the poem from a similar, if not the same, view. An entirely different emotion is found.

Lastly, she mentioned the object of the poem is ethically charged. The reason it is ethically charged is it may be the object in a grammatical sense, but it is the subject of the poem. “How do we treat the subject?” becomes the stasis theory. The reasoning is, if it is an inanimate object no one really cares or makes a fuss about it, but if a person is the object/subject then they question, “How did you treat the subject… is it true… is their a truer way to say it, etc.”

Outside of these three main topics she went into the importance of being grammatically correct, or being prescriptively correct. She said poetry allows you to do what you want grammatically, but if you can still follow the prescriptive guidelines than your work can be that much stronger. She said, “I think all poets are trying to make [prescriptive] grammar as flexible as possible.”