Gian Paolo Dulbecco © 2022
tHE POET’S MOVESET
by W. Todd Kaneko
I RECENTLY WATCHED an interview with Becky Lynch, one of the most popular and most accomplished performers in modern pro wrestling. In her conversation with Stone Cold Steve Austin, Lynch talked about how, as a beginner, she was focused on how to do lots of cool moves and didn’t know enough about how to actually wrestle a match. How when a wrestler is first starting out, they are often just stringing moves together, when in reality it’s the story of the match that’s most important. Naturally, this got me thinking about poetry.
A wrestler can’t wrestle a match without knowing moves, and the cooler the moves the wrestler can do, the cooler the match they can have, right? Maybe you don’t like wrestling, so translate this to dance: a dancer learns dance moves, and the more impressive and varied the moves, the more impressive and varied their dances can be. The more scales and licks a guitar player knows, the better guitar solos they can play. And so on. In poetry, too—moves are the nuts and bolts of the art form and the more nuts and bolts the poet has, the greater variety of poems they can build.
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I first encountered Jim Simmerman’s “Twenty Little Poetry Projects” in the book The Practice of Poetry, edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. It’s a cool exercise (easily found online with a quick search) comprised of twenty poetry tasks for a writer to complete. Simmerman says he created the exercise by listing “a lot of little sillinesses” he saw happening in poems. These sillinesses are really moves that any and every poet can do, like “1. Begin the poem with a metaphor” or “9. Use a piece of false cause-and-effect logic.” Simple prompts like these ask the poet to make the poem do stuff that poems do.
By following the exercise step by step, any poet can use “Twenty Little Poetry Projects” as a blueprint for an original poem. It’s a fun exercise to do for yourself or with students, but while it’s easy to go through it and do the moves, it’s much more difficult to get a good poem out of it—the real and unstated challenge of the exercise is to figure out how to make the moves actually work for the poem.
Another way to look at “Twenty Little Poetry Projects” is as a menu of possible moves to use in a poem, moves that a poet might not have considered on their own. Simmerman says: “6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem,” and “12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.” Moves like these force the poet out of the topics and logical structures they have set for themselves, imposing moments of surprise for the writer as the poem appears on the page.
Or take something like “8. Use a phrase from a language other than English”—how might this be used in a poem by a writer who doesn’t speak a language other than English? Or how might this singular move be expanded into a rhetorical pattern the poet might use to drive the poem?
A poet doesn’t have to use all twenty of Simmerman’s projects for the exercise to be helpful—the exercise is as useful piecemeal as it is whole because sometimes all a poet needs is something to do, and once they have something to do, things can get complicated in ways that can be good for a poem.
“Twenty Little Poetry Projects” is great in that it brings the act of writing a poem out of the romantic notion that a writer needs great inspiration to make poems, out of the myth that there are arcane secrets to writing poetry that only people like Keats, Plath, and Shakespeare knew. Exercises like Simmerman’s bring poetry writing—and creative writing in general—down to earth for writers of all levels of experience.
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Outside of things like rhyming or making similes, many beginning writers don’t have a handle on the many kinds of moves a poet might make in a poem. They might have read some poems and are maybe working off of instincts or copying other poets’ metaphors, and telling them to “go write a poem” doesn’t give them much to work with, any more than “go wrestle a match” does for someone who isn’t a wrestler. Let’s be real: it’s near impossible to teach someone how to be creative or to accept poetry as a habit of mind without some more specific guidance.
Beginning poets are often the opposites of beginning wrestlers in that they are so focused on making poetry, they miss the moves at work in the poems they read. They miss the opportunities to make moves in their poems because so much of their experience with poetry has been with poetry as literature to be studied and not poetry as a thing anyone can cobble together on the page. Where the wrestler might work for the moves and the high spots, the poet is often working for the poem without enough moves to make the poem happen.
It’s not just beginning writers who don’t know their moves—most seasoned poets don’t really think of their poems in terms of their moves either. Regardless of level of experience, playing with new moves in a poem offers the poet a shot at better understanding how those mechanisms make the texts work. And whether or not the poems are working, there will at least be explicit moments where the writer can point to a move and consider how well it was executed, how it might have been executed better, and how they might use it in the future. It’s this kind of focused reflection on specific decisions that can create for a writer clarity about how poems work—and help them better imagine the possibilities for poetry both in the writing process, as well as out in the world.
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Becky Lynch is known for three signature moves: the Manhandle Slam, the Dis-Arm-Her, and the Bexploder Suplex. These are three important parts of her moveset, the wide array of moves she knows how to do. There is more to her moveset too, of course—armbars, dropkicks, diving legdrops—these standard moves are just as important as her signature ones because a good wrestling match is the story of a fight and the moves are the tools Lynch and other wrestlers use to tell that story in the ring.
It’s obvious that by giving the moves names, the announcers can easily tell the story of the match to the audience; but also, it allows the wrestlers a better handle on how they can work together to tell the story of the match. Lynch can say to her opponent mid-match: “Bexploder Suplex!” and that person knows to prepare to be thrown backwards to the canvas. And knowing these moves by name makes for more imaginative uses of the move (Bexploder off the top rope, Bexploder through a flaming table, Bexploder into a floor full of thumbtacks).
So, too, can the writer give names to the moves they encounter in a text to better familiarize themselves with how to use those moves. My colleague at Grand Valley University, writer and poet Chris Haven, developed a class that focuses on teaching style and technique for writers, and one of the things that class does is to come up with names for new techniques students find in a text. We can look at “Twenty Little Poetry Projects” for examples of the kinds of new moves that are usable and claimable by a writer. Beginning a poem with a metaphor, for example—we might call this a “First Sunrise” or a “Metaphorical Opening” or a “Morning Wink.” Any time we can identify and describe a move, we can use it in our own poems. The name helps us remember it and claim it for our own movesets.
Another example: Matthew Gavin Frank’s poem “Parts of a Feather” (available online at Verse Daily) is composed of lyrical couplets that make sharp, efficient use of enjambed lines throughout. In the middle of the poem, he ends a couplet with two words: “Your mother.” The next couplet ends its first line with the phrase “She was too big.” When viewed vertically, these lines make a joke about your mother, a joke that is not part of the poem’s narrative at all. Maybe you like the joke or you don’t, but the point is that the enjambments create meaning outside of the workings of the sentences or even the stanzas—it’s a kind of vertical creation of meaning that a poet can copy for their own use. I call this move “Your Mama Sits Around the Line Break,” a name that reminds me of how Frank used it in his poem.
I love this move and sometimes, when I am writing a poem and am not sure where the poem is heading, I look to see if there is a place to do a “Your Mama Sits Around the Line Break”—not to make a joke about anyone’s mother, but to see where the clauses at the ends of the lines might work to make meaning. It’s part of my moveset now, even though I learned it from Frank’s poem.
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Jim Simmerman’s “Moon Go Away, I Don’t Love You No More” is a lovely poem that he wrote following his own exercise. But the moves in “Twenty Little Poetry Projects” are his moves—it makes sense that Simmerman can make good use of them. At the same time, I’ve read many poems that seem to go through the motions of Simmerman’s exercise, which for me is kind of like watching a wrestling match that is overly choreographed—it resembles an artificial sequence of moves more than a complete, organic whole. They aren’t necessarily bad poems, but they use Simmerman’s moveset without enough of anything else. Maybe it’s because I know the exercise, or maybe it’s because I’m too picky about what I like in poetry (and wrestling, for that matter).
But this doesn’t mean that poets haven’t used Simmerman’s moves to make their own awesome poems. Lee Ann Roripaugh’s poem “Crows Who Try to be Cormorants Drown,” follows Simmerman’s exercise while mixing in some of Roripaugh’s own moves: long sentences, rhetorical questions, an allusion to a Japanese folk tale, among others. Similarly, Jenifer Browne Lawrence’s poem “Source” is built in five prosaic stanzas that challenge the reader throughout with imaginative, disjunctive leaps and the extended metaphor of peeling and washing. When these poems are placed side by side with “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” it’s easy and fun to see how it’s not simply the moves that make the poem go—it’s how the moves make sense in the poems’ overall rhetorical structures. These poems succeed with the exercise because these poets have incorporated Simmerman’s moves into their own movesets, imbuing each task with new rhetorical purposes and fresh new meanings.
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Poets have their own movesets, whether or not they recognize them as such. Some poets might see their moves as ticks or habits or crutches, while others might have several moves they like to choose from to get a poem started. Some poets might try to steer away from these things with the idea that they are weaknesses that make us bad poets, things that distract a writer from some kind of pure essence of poetry. It makes more sense to me for poets to embrace these moves of ours, thinking of them less as weaknesses and more as arrows in the quivers we wear when we sit down and take aim at the page—or as wrestling moves we can use to win the match. And often, the better we know our movesets, the less we think about the moves as we write poems.
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Try these activities to help you discover and develop your moveset:
1) Take one of Simmerman’s projects from his “Twenty Little Poetry Projects” exercise and start a new poem by using that as the last move. Now that you have the poem’s finish, what moves do you know that will get you to the poem’s end in a way that will make that finish meaningful?
2) Look through some of your favorite poetry books or at your favorite poems online. Read the poems, but focus on the moves that the poets make in their poems. It doesn’t matter if they are the poets’ signature moves or if they are moves you’ve seen before—what moves do you see in the poems? What moves do you like and want to claim for your own moveset? Write a poem that uses some of those moves.
3) Read through some of your own poems, looking for your moveset. What moves do you use? What moves do you like? What moves would you rather not do again? Make a list of these and name them so you can keep track of them. Then write a new poem using your moves with an eye toward how they work together.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of the poetry books This Is How the Bone Sings and The Dead Wrestler Elegies. He is co-author with Amorak Huey of the poetry chapbook Slash / Slash and Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, The Normal School, Barrelhouse, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, the American Academy of Poets Poem-A-Day, and elsewhere. A Kundiman Fellow, he lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he teaches at Grand Valley State University.