Writing questions in poetry has a history from as early as Dante, to 16^th Century (Shakespeare) prolific in modernism and in today’s post-modernism/ contemporary writing. In post-modernism, the poem is a surface to play with, to question values, political or social notions or to simply be irreverent. The modernist poet T.S. Eliot incorporated questions in The Waste Land (with added notes) to direct us back to the original source. ‘Frisch weht der Wind/ Der Meimat zu/ Mein Irisch Kind/ Wo Weilest du?’ (The sailor’s song from Wagner’s opera – Tristan and Isolde). W.S. Merwin (1927-2019 ), an American political poet, uses the question in his poem Some Last Questions to create his own agenda concerning the role of man in war. A question, therefore, can be used solely for effect with no answer expected. By its implication that the answer is obvious, it is a means of achieving an emphasis stronger than a direct statement. Further, a questioning poem is not meant to be completely opaque and difficult. It’s not a Language poem, but we also don’t want it to be completely clear. There should be some mystery about the meaning, there should be some ambiguity, some inventiveness to keep the reader guessing!

Rhetorical questions, mostly used in speeches and in poetry, are questions that do not expect an answer. They are usually questions that make a reader think about a point, or a question that is obvious where the poet has asked it to make a point.

Examples of Rhetorical questions: If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you do it too? The answer is an obvious ‘no!’ A more direct answer might be “Are you kidding?” which has now become a figure of speech.

How am I supposed to live without you? The answer is designed to convey the importance of the audience in the speaker’s life.

‘If you / prick us do we not bleed?’ (from The Merchant of Venice Act III, Scene I, lines 60-61) The answer is an obvious ‘yes’. This conveys to the reader the fact that the speaker is obviously human.

Answering a question in poetry It appears questions can be answered in more than one way in poetry and in doing so, they provide ambiguity. It is similar to what Wallace Stevens once said, “It’s not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.” Therefore, ambiguity exists in answering question poems to bring different understandings of a single object, phrase or image. At the heart of this poetry, is the heart of metaphor, and therefore the poem becomes richer if its images and meanings are open to interpretation. Why do poets want a poem to more or less puzzle the reader? The answer to that question might be that the poet wants the reader to come back to the poem a few times to decide what it means.

On Finding an Old Passport Photograph

John Mateer

Who is that angelic child? Who is that angry angel
in the passport photograph of yourself, John?
Is he the spirit who was duped into taking your name,
the free spirit who escaped through a hole
in the kindergarten fence to cheerfully amble home?
The boy who looked across the railway tracks
to see a grinning tsotsi drag a finger across his throat?
The child-migrant losing his boomerang in a Canadian sky?
The future poet who, holed-up inside his cupboard
listening to the whispering of his words, would refute all images?
Who is that angel? Where is that child angry
in the passport photograph of yourself, John? (c)

 tsotsi = a young, black gangster in South Africa

Questions about Wasps

Each morning, a wasp starts out as a lone traveller
heading into the garden, its hind legs dangling and
trailing in the wind. These moments are an eloquent

gesture of nature, the wasp on a journey into nectar,
jazzing up noisy wings, talkative as the bumble bee
already in the Fuchsia. There are many questions you

might want to ask, yet the only one you do know is
that wasps sting, especially late summer if you have
a fly swat or rolled newspaper in your hand.

Yet you’re curious about this eager garden traveller, like
a fly-in miner, flying out. Is he copying the tiger with
all those stripes on his back? Is he the bee’s rival, as he

hovers in mimicry? Is it to camouflage pincers in wax flowers
or to fool the bumble bee into thinking he is one of him?
And why does this busy wasp follow from petal to stamen,

and stamen again, and not the other way around? What about
his paper-mache home, is that in the roof? Is he building
a colony of one hundred wasps, damaging the beams?

You guess that wasps are designed to make you think. So,
wondering about that loud buzzing noise as he backs out of
a bud, is he imitating the operatic bee who comes out singing?

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Poetic form is more flexible in modernist and post-modernist poetry, and continues to be less structured than in previous literary eras. Many modern poets avoid recognisable structures or forms, and write in free verse. Some regard for basic formal structures of poetry will be found in even the best free verse, however much such structures may appear to have been ignored. Similarly, in the best poetry written in classic styles there will be departures from strict form for emphasis or effect.

Among major structural elements used in poetry are the line, the stanza or verse paragraph, and larger combinations of stanzas or lines such as cantos (I sing). Also sometimes used are broader visual presentations of words and calligraphy. These basic units of poetic form are often combined into larger structures, called poetic forms or poetic modes, as in the sonnet or haiku.

Lines and stanzas
Lines of poems are often organized into stanzas, which are denominated by the number of lines included. Thus a collection of two lines is a *couplet (or distich), three lines a triplet (or tercet), four lines a quatrain, five lines a quintain (or cinquain), six lines a sestet, and eight lines an octet. These lines may or may not relate to each other by rhyme or rhythm. For example, a couplet may be two lines with identical metres which rhyme or two lines held together by a common metre alone. Stanzas often have related couplets or triplets within them.

With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the mass-produced visual presentations of their work. Visual elements have become an important part of the poet’s toolbox, and many poets have sought to use visual presentation for a wide range of purposes. Some Modernist poets have made the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page an integral part of the poem’s composition. At times, this complements the poem’s rhythm through visual caesuras of various lengths, or creates juxtapositions so as to accentuate meaning, ambiguity or irony, or simply to create an aesthetically pleasing form. In its most extreme form, this can lead to concrete poetry or asemic writing. (caesura = denotes an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse).

Modern Forms
Blank Verse should not be confused with free verse which has no definite metre. Blank verse is simply unrhymed verse with a regular metre. Metre is the name of the regular system of the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. One of the easiest ways to remember this system is to think in terms of TUM-ti, or ti-TUM. e.g “We reQUIRE running WATer and BATHtubs and SHOWers.”

Free Verse: The main feature of free verse is that traditional rhythm is abandoned. The regular line rhythm based on metre is replaced by the natural rhythms and cadences of ordinary speech, so that the flow of the verse rises and falls at random as do the poet’s thoughts and emotions. Rhyme is also frequently abandoned but other poetic devices such as alliteration, assonance etc., are generally retained.

Variations of form
*The Couplet
The following poem is commonly called an Ezra Pound couplet. Pound’s couplet gives a glimpse of something deeper about life. Compares two images and one illuminates the other. It gives an exact image of a moment. No rhyme, no metre, few words. Lines are a 14/7 syllable count.  It also rhymes and therefore is a heroic couplet.

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd,
Petals on a wet, black bough

The Dress   
        Robert Adamson
There is a dress left hanging its fabric
still bright it remains where she left it

at the far corner of the bedroom
in the white wardrobe

each day I open it and look
nothing changes it hangs there crisp

with light she wore it
a few times last spring and has left

not knowing the meanings I would draw
from her casual act

I tell friends it is the dress once
worn by a woman who was killed in

a traffic accident and it was left forgotten
the night she hurried to her death

it is an evening dress make of silk
a pale blue coloured by a print on the skirt

of an abstract wing in darker blue
styled for a young woman

in an almost classic pattern except for its high
bust line and the sudden waist

I have not touched it since the last time
she wore it nobody has touched it

since the night she stopped being
my wife the night

I wanted to kill her lover in the panic
of losing what I had come to think of as love (c)

A Writing Exercise for You: From the following images create your couplet. You can write as many as you wish. They do not necessarily have to rhyme. eg. Raking the sand; Collecting shells; A goldfish; Figs in a bucket; Cars on the freeway; A rock slide; A whale on the shore; Cottons in a box, A coastline, Rocky mountain, A bicycle. The following samples are similar to an Ezra Pound couplet.

A bunny stamping its foot
A child waiting at the bus stop

A cat in a fish bowl
A child locked in her room

 A squirrel skydiving
 My life in free fall

Students collecting their lunches
Elephants in a stampede

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