How Fences and Frames Shape a Poem
Last week I visited a friend on her farm in Kentucky. We hiked across a few empty pastures and made our way down to the almost-frozen creek, pausing to watch a red-tailed hawk and to explore an abandoned barn and an old cellar. My dog was thrilled and frustrated by a pair of wild turkeys taking flight. Then we walked back along the wire fence, following it to the road. It was a cold day, but very beautiful in an austere Midwestern winter sort of way.
As I drove home, I found myself thinking about the empty barn—how my friend plans to reuse the beams and planks in a future construction, how the view through the barn doorway framed the hillside and the creek and concentrated my attention on them—and about the fence, which my dog kept slipping through while my friend and I treated it as a natural end point to our walk.
And then I found myself thinking about the structures that shape a writing practice (all the structures—formal choices like rhyme, schedules or habits that drive a writer to work at a particular time of day, choices of subject matter, and tools—like a journal or a laptop—that subtly encourage or discourage different modes of writing). I thought about how sometimes these structures can be a concentrating force that presses the poem towards new movements and discoveries, while at other times, these structures feel more like arbitrary guardrails thrown up to limit the poem’s movement and to keep the writer from feeling exposed or being startled.
By the time I reached home, I’d started to divide these structures into two categories:
Frames help hold the work up so we can see it more clearly. They help the writer (and later the reader) to discern what the poem is about, where its center rests, AND to set aside all the stuff outside the poem. They might contain and productively compress the work. On some level, frames are intentionally chosen limits—in the way that my friend and I chose to walk into the frame of the barn and look out through the door. But they are limits that invite free play within their borders. For example, I’ve created a frame in my daily routine by always sitting down at my desk to write from 6:30 to 7:00 AM, but without any definite goal so that I can be surprised by what arises.
Fences are unintentional (or at least unexamined) limits that choke the draft. They hold back discovery and movement. Sometimes they hold back discovery by being too wide and vague (a poem about Nature in the abstract probably isn’t going to speak as powerfully as a poem about a particular encounter with a particular owl). Fences make it harder for the reader and writer to explore the world of the poem and see the work clearly. For example, my tendency to stop a poem when I hit the one-page mark is a fence that discourages me from discovering what might happen if I kept writing or if I compressed the poem down to a page.
The catch is that these categories are fluid. They depend on the writer’s temperament and the poem’s subject matter. One writer’s fence might be another writer’s frame. And one poem’s frame might be another poem’s fence. The trick is for each of us to figure out which is which on any given day or for any given project.
