Finding a balance between meaning and song in a poem, while still considering syntax and form, presents a poet with a challenge often broached through an attempt at formal poetry. Formal poems, like sonnets and villanelles, force the poet to consider the song of a poem equally with the meaning and exposition. Take nursery rhymes for instance. Few of us actually question the nonsensical meaning of some of them, because we find the rhyming appealing. The brilliance of this often ignored form lies in their sacrifice of deep meaning and narration for the song and rhythmic sound of a poem when spoken aloud.
Often, when presented with a free verse poem that reads as prose, poets will attempt to create song with an abundance of present participles and gerunds. Why? Because repetitions of “ing”ing sound can quite simply make a poem sing. But it can be viewed as a cheap tool. If I don’t have a sense of the song of a poem as I read it to myself or aloud, I realize if I throw an “ing” in here and there, suddenly it’s musically and sonically a masterpiece. But what has been sacrificed in terms of it being a poem and not a song? Is it a better piece of literature as a poem as opposed to a piece of prose?
How much is too much?
Not all poems need to “sing” necessarily. It depends on what impact you want a poem to have for a reader. But many poets agree that if song is not an element of your writing, why is it a poem instead of a prose story? Is it line breaks that make a poem? In that case you could take any piece of prose and turn it into a poem by giving it line breaks. Now, adding line breaks AND streaming down the language to its bare minimum needed for meaning is another story. Or playing with the visible structure of the lines with indents and unusual spacing can also improve on a piece of prose that wants to be a poem. The question in this case is always how does a poem better divulge what the writer is trying to say. Does singing assist in the process of revelation?
“Ing” verbs always create a spondaic or dactylic rhythm, which means it’s nearly impossible to emphasize the final syllable of a gerund or present participle. If one is attempting an iambic rhythm, which mimics the standard flow of the English language and makes it easier to read and understand, a gerund or present participle can help facilitate this. Present participles also add an element of immediacy to a poem, affirming a sense of "happening now." Many readers enjoy this aspect of poetry as it contrasts with the usual narrative common to prose where the writer describes something that has happened in the past. So, poets can overuse these kinds of words in their work. How much is too much?
Aside from creating song and natural speech rhythms, overuse of present participles as “passive” voices can slow down a poem by actually removing the immediacy of the activity. For example:
Nursery rhymes are singing
So why all this wringing
of old ideas
to which we are clinging?
as opposed to:
Nursery rhymes sing.
So why wring
the old ideas
to which we cling?
Ok… no masterpiece here, but certainly applicable. The second example maintains the rhyme scheme. However, the end of the lines now punch, rather than ending on an offbeat. The active “wring/ the old ideas” has a stronger effect than “this wringing/ of old ideas.”
This doesn’t mean a poet should go through their poems and remove all “ing”s.
Gerunds differ from present participles, but also equally as alluring to a poet attempting song. In the above example “singing” and “clinging” are present participles, but “wringing” is a gerund, because it has turned the verb “to wring” into a noun — “wringing.” When they unnecessarily creep into my poetry, I find them a somewhat more difficult correction to make, because it requires me to restructure the sentence in a way that may no longer seem “poetic.” But ah… this is one of the joys of poetry — taking an inordinate amount of time on one word in a line, which most prose writers cannot. When I do take this time on a poem, I am always happier with the result than if I let it slide.
This doesn’t mean a poet should go through their poems and remove all “ing”s. Sometimes the sound, rhythm and meaning of a present participle creates a desired effect in a poem. With that in mind, I’ll end with an example of one of my own short poems, “Fly Balls,” first published in The Write Launch in Spring of 2020. Notice the increased use of gerunds and present participles in the last stanza, but how they actually rhythmically support the poem and flesh out its immediacy of the moment that could not be better achieved without them.
Fly Balls
I was never very good at sensing the trajectory of high fliers
and in fact once caught a fly ball with my eye socket
ending my dalliance with baseball.
How quickly I healed, but today
bones are liable to shatter
Bruises from brazen encounters linger. I still
fear that flying hard ball, myself out in left field, looking up,
balancing an awkwardly oversized mitt, with the bright sun
of a good life blinding me from what’s to come.