RUMINATION: The first-line test
So you’ve heard of the Page 69 test now for longer books, where you try that page to see if you’d like to buy the book.
Poetry sometimes has a tougher standard. I read the following jewel on a poetic line workshop description by Dick Allen — a notion I’ve heard throughout most of my adult life, and I do and don’t believe it more now than ever, so my ambivalence endures:
“Dirty little secret: for most editors, the poem’s first line determines whether or not they toss the poem or read on.”
Let’s put a couple of first lines to the test, just firing them off here out of any context except for knowing that they are first lines of poems. Then we’ll post a couple of complete short poems, with all their lines intact:
Robert Frost’s “An Old Man’s Winter Night”
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Kenneth Patchen’s “The Artist’s Duty”
So it is the duty of the artist to discourage all traces of shame
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Robert Creeley keeps his poem “I Know a Man” zipping along by the force of the first line:
I Know a Man
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,–John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
– Robert Creeley
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and here’s a short poem that builds all that it has from the foundation of its first line:
And the days are not full enough
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass
– Ezra Pound
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What do you think?
