We too might

By Randy Koch

The most recent issue of Poets & Writers Magazine contains an article about how James Frey overcame his addictions and started writing: “‘I had a long criminal history, I had a drug and alcohol history, I wasn't going to get a job at a bank or get into law school. I just wanted to find something I could do that would make me feel good about myself.'” After rehab in Hazelden and five years of writing mostly unsuccessful screenplays -- at least two of which he characterized as “‘just awful'” -- he decided to try memoir in order “to tell the story of his recovery.” He realized, however, that, like many of the writers he admires -- Rimbaud, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bukowski -- he lacked formal training, so, like them, he decided to teach himself to write and to find his own voice. The result? The best-selling A Million Little Pieces (Talese/Doubleday, 2003) and his more recent My Friend Leonard (Riverhead, 2005), both of which focus on his experience during and after recovery. While I'm anxious to read Frey's rehab-to-riches story, I'm more interested in speculating about how he taught himself to write.

If we're lucky, we all go through some form of treatment and rehabilitation. Mine began about 25 years ago when my brothers and I forced Dad, who drank heavily for as long as I could remember, into Project Turnabout in Granite Falls , Minnesota . Even though he quit drinking and I began to see my own life and drinking far differently, real change didn't occur for another six or seven years. Finally, when I was nearly 30, I moved to Mankato , 70 miles east of my hometown, and went back to college. There I quickly realized -- among other things -- that a degree isn't a sign of having completed one's education but instead of having learned how to learn. During my formal training in college I acquired some important skills, but the difficult task of learning to write and to work like a writer had only just begun. In order to accomplish both, I began and, over the next 14 years, continued to do a variety of things: I read hundreds of poems, short stories, novels, and books on writing; taught composition and creative writing classes; subscribed to publications like Poets & Writers, Byline, and The AWP Chronicle; joined writer response groups; and imitated -- both consciously and unconsciously -- the work of authors I admired and respected, what I suspect James Frey did as he taught himself to write.

I don't mean that I copied or plagiarized and then passed the work off as my own. Instead, I used it to learn by trying to do what another writer did without saying what the other writer said. Mimicking another's moves is a particularly effective way to learn to read like a writer and to see someone else's work from the inside, just as a golfer tries to copy Tiger's swing or a tennis player imitates Venus's backhand. However, for writers, it's more than just using “number 2 pencils” and writing “in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages” like poet Richard Hugo or rising “before others are awake[, . . . getting] pen and paper, tak[ing] a glance out the window . . . , and wait[ing]” like William Stafford. Imitating means examining someone's writing for meaning, identifying the most distinctive formal features, and then trying to do what the writer has done, all with the intent of learning how to write.

The following poem by W. F. Bolton appealed to me the first time I read it several years ago, and I felt then as I do now that it had something to teach me:

Might We Too?

-after listening to John Coltrane

We who have lived for song

Yet never ourselves sung,

Never mastered the string, the horn.

Made a living apart from the voice

Within us.

We who have sat in hopeless admiration,

As lookers-on,

Stood at the high office window

Watching the hobo cross his tracks,

Sling himself into a passing boxcar

With the agility of the acrobat.

Or disappear among the underslung shadows,

Riding the rails into dangerous night.

Is it talent or persistence?

Might we too have done that?

Rolled the miles off, over ties -- bars

And riffs of gorgeous flight?

One of the things I love about this poem is how in the first stanza the persona expresses regret about songs unsung and music unplayed despite the possibility that inside each of us is the ability to do so. This is surprisingly and concretely brought out by comparing “the hobo” to “the acrobat” and implying that if only we had tried like Coltrane to create music, we too might have soared on “riffs of gorgeous flight.” This is what Bolton has done, and by trying to imitate it, I might learn, line by line, how he accomplished this.

It's important to remember that a poem contains structural features that are both different from and similar to those of prose. Just as prose is divided into paragraphs, poems are often broken into stanzas. Bolton's, of course, is arranged in two stanzas, so my imitation will also contain two. Since his first stanza consists of 13 lines and the second of four, so shall mine. Similarly, because line length and turns are fundamental to a poem's pace and appearance, whether in free verse or forms, I'll try to imitate this as well. For example, since lines two, six, seven, nine, and 12 each end with a comma, lines two, six, seven, nine, and 12 of my imitation will also end with a comma. Since lines one and two each contain six syllables, my imitation of those two lines will also each contain six syllables. And because Bolton's poem contains occasional end slant rhymes, such as “song” and “sung” at the end of lines one and two and “tracks” and “acrobat” at the end of lines nine and 11, my imitation should also contain slant end rhymes at these points. Finally, the simplicity or complexity of language used has a great bearing on the poem's formality; in order for my imitation to sound like Bolton's poem, which contains only seven words of three or more syllables, mine should also contain mostly simple one- and two-syllable words.

How to begin then? Since Bolton points out that the poem occurred “after listening to John Coltrane,” I'll choose one of the other senses to admire the performance of someone else. Baseball season is in full swing, so who better to take as inspiration than outfielder and long-ball hitter Ken Griffey, Jr.? Out of deference to Bolton, I'll retain the title and start like this:

Might We Too?

-after watching Ken Griffey, Jr.

While I could have changed the pronoun “we” to “I” or “you,” I kept the plural because it has a more inclusive effect, involving the reader in the question in the title and second stanza and in the observations of the rest of the poem.

Next, I'll start with the first two lines since they contain a logical connection -- the contrast between the thing done in line 1 and the thing not done in line 2 -- and because a comma sets off these two lines from the remainder of the thought in lines 3-5. Again, as much as possible, I intend to match Bolton's poem line for line, syllable for syllable, and comma for comma, while only changing the content. Here, then, like Bolton's first two lines, in which he introduces a musical element, is my imitation containing a baseball element:

We who have dreamed of long

Balls but never yet swung,

I admit I've simply copied Bolton's first three words, but from here on out (with occasional minor exceptions) everything is mine. Notice, too, that the slant rhyme of the original poem -- “song” and “sung” -- has been duplicated here with “long” and “swung.” Imitations don't always work out this neatly, but in this case the language fit both my meaning and Bolton's form.

Since the next line ends with a period and because it must work grammatically and logically with the first two lines, I'll work on it by itself. While I keep the word “Never,” and end the line with a period, I add an extra syllable and change the verb. Just as Bolton listed two details associated with music, I introduce two details associated with hitting a baseball:

Never perfected the swing, the stride.

In line four, the gist of Bolton's four-syllable “Made a living” is mimicked with “Worked at our jobs” while “the voice” needed for the “song” is replaced with a quality needed for driving a baseball deep:

Worked at our jobs aside from the strength

Inside us.

Line six is the start of a new sentence and a new context, one in which the plural persona “we” is now observing not Bolton's Coltrane but instead Griffey, Jr.:

We who have watched the effortless perfection,

As admirers,

My imitation contains the same number of syllables as the original, but rather than offering, like Bolton, two conditions of those sitting -- first “in hopeless admiration” and second “As lookers-on” -- mine gives the object of the watching -- Griffey's “effortless perfection” -- and the perspective of the watcher -- “As admirers.” These lines constitute the transition to the new subject of the persona's observation who is eventually associated with Coltrane, his original subject. However, unlike Bolton's persona who “Stood at the high office window” to observe “the hobo,” my persona

Leaned outside the welder's dark shop

Watching him strike blue light from rods,

I settled on this comparison primarily because I knew that just as Bolton, in the last two lines of the poem, made the leap from hobo back to musician, I had to link whomever I chose back to the baseball player. Since the last line of Bolton's poem made me think of the flight -- or arc -- of a baseball, it wasn't a difficult leap from there to arc welder.

Bolton's next two lines then describe the hobo as having “the agility of the acrobat.” In my imitation the comparison is, of course, different, the persona watching, instead, the welder

Bend his masked face to the seam of iron

With the tenderness of a calligrapher.

And just as a hobo “[r]iding the rails” disappears into the night, so too the welder vanishes into the abrupt darkness when he stops the bead by lifting the welding rod's blue star from its iron target:

Or vanished with the simple raising of a hand,

Disappearing in the sudden darkness.

This brings us to the second stanza, which consists of three questions. My imitation of the first question is one syllable shorter than Bolton's and changes the two abstractions considered possible sources of Cotrane's and the hobo's ability to perform artfully from “Is it talent or persistence?” to

Is it genius or resolve?

The second question I duplicate, however, primarily because it echoes the title:

Might we too have done that?

But I also retained it because the referent of the pronoun “that” is in the next two lines -- the last of the poem -- so that the implication is, “Might we too have”

Formed the iron in fluid curves -- arcs

And lines of graceful flight?

Bolton's final two lines, “Rolled the miles off, over ties -- bars / And riffs of gorgeous flight,” refers to the “passing boxcar” in which the hobo now rides, the dash suggesting a comparison between the “ties” holding the tracks together and the “bars” dividing a staff into measures. Likewise, in my imitation, the “fluid curves” produced by a skilled welder are compared to the “arcs / And line[drive]s of [the] graceful flight” of a baseball.

Now, let's see how it all fits together. Here, then, is my completed imitation of Bolton's poem:

Might We Too?

-after watching Ken Griffey, Jr.

We who have lived for long

Balls but never yet swung,

Never perfected the swing, the stride.

Worked at our jobs aside from the strength

Inside us.

We who have watched the effortless perfection,

As admirers,

Leaned outside the welder's dark shop

Watching him strike blue light from rods,

Bend his masked face to the seam of iron

With the tenderness of a calligrapher.

Or vanished with the simple raising of a hand,

Disappearing in the sudden darkness.

Is it genius or resolve?

Might we too have done that?

Formed the iron in fluid curves -- arcs

And lines of graceful flight?

I now hear some internal rhyme -- “stride,” “aside,” and “Inside” in lines three through five -- that isn't present in Bolton's version. However, grammatically both poems are very similar, and the syllabic meter of the two poems, is nearly identical; of the 17 lines in the poem, only three differ: in line three Bolton has eight syllables and I have nine, in line 14 he has eight and I have seven, and in line 16 he has eight and I have nine. Obviously, an exercise like this reinforces several things I've learned over the years -- the importance of sound and form and their connection to content in a good poem -- but it also showed me new things about Bolton's poem, things I hadn't noticed on the first three or four readings.

Of course, this exercise doesn't only apply to poetry. Prose writers can do the same thing to practice and get insights into writing description or dialogue, making stylistic choices about diction and sentence structure, maintaining a consistent narrative point of view, etc. However, regardless of genre and of how pleased you might be with your imitation of another writer's work, remember that what you produce should not be submitted for publication. The goal of imitation is to learn what other writers put on the page and how they say what they say so that we can make better decisions and have more options for our own writing. This is an exercise, an opportunity to learn from writers whose work we admire without taking a class or flying to a writers conference on Michigan's Upper Peninsula in the middle of the summer, or suffering through five years of bad screenplays like James Frey before finding a way that we too might teach ourselves to write.

Works Cited

Bolton, W. F. “Might We Too?” Poetry, Aug. 1998: 253.

Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. New York: Norton, 1979.

Nester, Daniel. “The Transformation of James Frey.” Poets & Writers, July/Aug. 2005: 30-34.

Stafford, William. “A Way of Writing.” Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1978. 17-20.

(Randy Koch teaches English at Texas A&M International University and is director of the Writing Center at TAMIU.)