The Senses - and The Garden of Panic

Part of what I'm getting at here, of course, is the old adage that a poem should show and not tell - that to tell the reader what to think is easy, and therefore lazy, but to show that reader what to think (to get the reader, as it were, to finish writing the poem - as a teenage girl said to me in a workshop in Guernsey) is a bit more difficult to do. But not that difficult.

The easiest way to get this across is by looking at poems that do this, and the poem I most frequently use is Theodore Roethke's 'My Papa's Waltz':

The whiskey on your breath 
Could make a small boy dizzy; 
But I hung on like death: 
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans 
Slid from the kitchen shelf, 
My mother's countenance 
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist 
Was battered on one knuckle; 
At every step you missed 
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head 
With a palm caked hard by dirt, 
Then waltzed me off to bed 
Still clinging to your shirt.

Just look at how the senses are being used there. The smell of 'The whiskey on your breath', the sound of the pans sliding 'from the kitchen shelf, the feel of 'My right ear scraped a buckle' and 'You beat time on my head / With a palm caked hard by dirt' and even '.. I hung on like death', and the visual sense represented by 'My mother's countenance! Could not unfrown itself' - and by the whole filmic dance that the poem describes. 

Only the sense of taste is missing, although one might argue that the taste of whiskey is still in the father's mouth. At any rate, the evidence of these senses together go a long way towards creating the vivid, dramatic quality of the poem, and are responsible for its clarity and complete lack of vagueness. 

The poem is imbued, of course, with strong human emotions - the mixture of fear and love in the boy, the anxiety or anger in the mother, but nowhere are any of these abstract terms used. The poet knows that the concrete images he's chosen, with the help of the senses, will show the abstract emotions, and he doesn't have to step in and tell the reader. 

An exercise I use, in combination with this poem, that forces people to incorporate the evidence of their senses into an imagined situation is one I call The Garden of Panic. 

This exercise involves handing round two envelopes, one containing slips of paper with the names of domestic locations, and the other containing abstract words. Each participant takes one slip blind from each envelope. They might get 'garden' and 'panic', or 'bedroom' and 'madness', or 'wardrobe' and 'lust' etc. I then ask them to write about the Garden of Panic, or the Bedroom of Madness, or the Wardrobe of Lust, showing the panic, the madness or the lust in the details they choose, without ever resorting to abstract language. 

I remind them that this is an imagined situation - that the garden, bedroom, or wardrobe is not their usual garden, bedroom or wardrobe. I encourage them to ask themselves what would be going on in a garden to make the person in it feel panic - what would they see, hear, feel (tactilly), taste or smell. Nowhere are they allowed to mention directly the word 'panic', though if they've done their job right, the reader should be able to make a fair guess. The word 'garden' may be used, but the writer mustn't assume that it's enough to use the word and leave it at that - I encourage them to convey the garden by putting into the poem a few details one would encounter in a garden.

© Matthew Sweeney 

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