Mike Young
January 12th, 2010 / 6:39 pm
Craft Notes

Moves in Contemporary Poetry

Way back in the comments on Danika Stegeman’s poem “Panacea,” a discussion started about “moves” in contemporary poetry, and I mentioned that I’d seen the poet Elisa Gabbert start pretty awesome discussions about “moves” on her own blog and on the Ploughshares blog. Then she posted the following comment: “Hi Mike, I have definitely talked about moves before, moves I like and moves I don’t like and my own signature moves, but haven’t made a real list, certainly not a comprehensive list, certainly not the DEFINITIVE list. Let me know if you want to collaborate on a list of moves for HTMLGiant.”

Well, I thought that sounded like a terrific idea. So here it is, our stab at cataloging 41 popular moves in “contemporary poetry,” an exercise that’s fraught with peril, what with the competing definitions, camps, roles, and processes of “contemporary poetry,” the nebulousness of calling something a “move,” the inevitable non-definitiveness of such a list, and so on, but hey: dancing is fraught with peril too, and no one’s managed to stop me from doing that. So here we go. 41 moves. With mildly related pictures! In no particular order! Please argue and add in the comments. Many thanks to Elisa Gabbert for the bulk of the work on this list.

1) Exposed revision

Example: Alice Fulton’s “About Face“:

At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It’s intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.
1b) Variation: Revision by way of “I mean”
Example: “Confession” by Suzanne Wise:

I can only imagine
how hard it must be for you
to believe me. I mean, to hold
blame. I mean, to be you.

2) Starting a line with the final clause from a previous line’s sentence and finishing it with a single short and often fragmentary sentence.

Example: Jack Gilbert’s “Searching for Pittsburgh”:

The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers. The authority of them.

3) Abstract epistolary: Using “Dear [abstraction or common object]” in the title or first line.

Examples: Countless. Dear Body: by Dan Machlin, “Dear Final Journey,” by Lynn Emanuel, which begins, “Dear Noose, Dear Necktie, Dear Cravat”


4) The “blank of blank” construction
Examples:

From “Marriage Proposal” by Sarah Messer: “I want to be trapped by the cage of your ribs”

From “Synchronized Swimming” by Angela Sorby: “How did decay work its way into the theater of water”
From “I want you to see me” by Kate Greenstreet: “Red and blue and the white of my transparency”

5) Use of “etc.”
Examples:
From “Mezzotint for A” by Ben Lerner: “My better half had left me so I wrote her hemi- / stiches in the half-light of my halfway house, etc.”

Jessica Fjeld’s On Animate Life: Its Profligacy, Organ Meats, Etc.

6) Verbing a noun or other nonverb
Examples:

From “[when you touch down upon this earth.little reindeers"] by D.A. Powell: “little reindeers / hoofing murderously”

From Scape by Joshua Harmon: “perceiving only how vertigo / secretaries me into the office”

7) Ending a question with a period
Examples:

From Farrah Field’s “Things Are Starting to Look Up Again”: “Is it possible / to completely cover someone’s body with semen.”

From C.D. Wright’s “Scratch Music”: “How many threads have I broken with my teeth.”

8) Ending a non-rhyming poem on a rhyme

Examples: “What He Thought” by Heather McHugh
And poetry—
(we’d all
put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on
softly)—
poetry is what
he thought, but did not say.
9) The reversal of size, expectation, etc.
Example: “Ready-Made Bouquet” by Dean Young
The despair
of loving may lead to long plane rides with
little leg room, may lead to a penis full
of fish, a burning chicken, a room filled
with a single, pink rose. Funny, how
we think of it as a giant rose,
not a tiny room.

10) Description or declaration by way of posing a question and then answering it
Examples:

From “Brazilian Groom: Dream No. 1″ by Kathleen Rooney: “The window? Open. / The curtains? Flung wide.”

From “Panopticon” by Brenda Shaughnessy:

My bedroom window can be seen from the viewing deck
of the World Trade Center. I’ve seen it.
What I saw?
My roommate experimenting with my vibrator.


11) The “the new X” construction
Example: From “Snow” by David Berman: “Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.”

12) Comparing something to itself
Example: “At Peter Pan Mini Golf After the Wedding of Rebecca and Brian, Or Any Binary System” by Dan Boehl:
I could say this guy was like Spicoli,
or I could say this guy was like Sean Penn,
and both would be wrong because really
this guy is like a guy that works weekends
for the family mini-golf business.

13) Extreme (ironic) egotism
Examples:

From “My Ravine” by Dan Chiasson: “How will you know what my poem is like / until you’ve gone down my ravine”

From “Vermont” by Dan Chiasson: “I was the west / once. I was paradise.”

From “Why I Am White” by Mathias Svalina: “I wasn’t going to tell you about my boats, / but now I want to tell you about my boats.”

14) Explicit references to poems, especially the poem in question
Example: From “The Vandals” by Alan Michael Parker: “In the poem about the vandals, the vandals / Back their Dodge 4 x 4 up to the door”

15) Mention of a forest animal
Example: From “Only So Much Fits in a Petri Dish” by Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina:

When the tree climbs down its bark, I follow
seedlings buried in cake. I’ve hidden the sin in roofing,
de-veined by a plum falling from the child’s hand.

A wolf of her own.

16) Use of casual hedges like “sort of” and “kind of/kinda”
Example: From “Kasmir” by Jon Leon: “I’m sort of in a dunebuggy”


17) Humorous use of ecstatic “O”
Examples:

From “On Old Ideas” by Dorothea Lasky: “O the lovely bankteller, like a moose he / Rode my spirit quite outside my clothes”

From “John Albertson in the Summer Sun” by Dorothea Lasky: “O John Albertson, you are so summery / In the summer sun.”

18) The very long title
Example: Many from Tao Lin’s You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am, e.g. “book reviewers always praise books as ‘life-affirming’ because the more humans there are on earth the better”

19) Poetic allusion as joke

Examples:

From “As If To Say” by Chris Nealon: “I seriously have a mind of winter”
From “Sheer Commerce” by Phillip Byron Oakes: “Grecian urn your / pay”

20) Surprise re-framing of an utterance

Examples:

From “Gone Before” by Dobby Gibson: “Sadness, though your beard may be fake, / your anonymity is quite real, / whispered the dying man to his nurse”

From “Running Away Jam” by Jason Bredle: “I wish I could take a microphone everywhere I go so everyone / would hear me / is how I began a letter to my parents”

21) Verbs as reasons for linebreaks

Examples:

From “Homecoming” by Dorianne Laux: “At the high school football game, the boys / stroke their new muscles”
From “Vehicle” by Heather Christle: “… Man / in the dining car, stop eavesdropping / on children talking about balloons.”

22) Fake proper names

Example: From “Governors on Sominex” by David Berman: “They’d closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings”

23) Moving the poem forward by associating one word with an unrelated word that sounds similar

Examples:

From “Social Life” by Alice George: “I’ve / got the wrong end of the stick or maybe // it’s the way I’m holding it, the way it’s sharp. / The shtick of the party, the excuse of it”

From “Hounds Begin to Howl” by Clay Matthews: “Like calling people meat. Meat, meat, meat. / It’s a might, might, might and I don’t know.”

24) An often campy obsession with science/sci-fi terminology

Example: From “Side Effects” by Dean Young: “… but his experiments / at the cyclotron don’t amount to much dark matter”

25) Self-aware naivete of tone and diction

Example: From “The Crowds Cheered As Gloom Galloped Away” by Matthea Harvey: “Everyone was happier. But where did the sadness go? People wanted to know. They didn’t want it collecting in their elbows or knees then popping up later.”

26) The act of identification as an opportunity for humor

Example: From “Poems About Trees” by K. Silem Mohammad: “the products he’s hawking have names on them like KABOOM”

27) The throwaway pun

Example: From “Play It Again, Salmonella” by Jeffrey McDaniel: “I’m a card-carrying member of a canceled party.”

28) “Scare” quotes

Example: From “Let’s Say” by Bob Perelman: “A page is being beaten / back across the face of ‘things.’”

29) Stacking up of ten-dollar words
Example: From “Within This Book, Called Marguerite” by Marjorie Welish: “As time separates us / from the evaporating architectonics to sweeten mythopoetic / substances, you start to count heroically, / hurled down upon a profile of an as yet / unrevealed know-how.”

30) Breaking a line so as to stack a repeated word on top of itself
Examples: From “November Elegy” by Mary Jo Bang:

November is more of the usual
November

From “She Remembers His Hat” by Mary Jo Bang:

And what you do–the syntax
Of inaction versus the syntax
Of deliberate action

From “Small on Sunday” by Jennifer Knox:

We woke up under an overpass on I-90
(at least the underside looked like I-90)

From “Autobiographia” by Karl Parker:

consider this more like drawing
a picture of someone drawing


31) Ending a poem with a question
Example: From “Evelyn’s Kitchen” by Shafer Hall (last stanza):

What roiling ritual is this?
What does this dance mean?
What are the shapes that I know?


32) Embedding a fragment of a quote

Example: From “Nothing Moving” by Hazel McClure:

“nothing but blue
skies” all gone, thick wool,
wintered rotten logs.

33) Including a brand name in a list
Example: From “Poems for Everyone” by Matt Shears: “Cocktails, little forgotten disasters, Lunesta®.”

34) Clipping or altering a cliche
Example: From “While You Were Watching Richard Harris” by Ben Mazer: “Simple patter, nothing to write home.”

35) Correcting a cliche
Example: From “Autobiographia” by Karl Parker: “life is scared. Dogs only rarely eat other dogs”

36) Definition or description by negation

Examples:

From “Situation in Yellow” by Stephanie Anderson: “She does not take paper / clips or protractors.”

From “This Is Not About Pears” by Matthew Hittinger: “whole sections left white, not blank, / but the white where light lifts form / into pears (even though this is not / about pears).”

From “Lessons in Stalking” by Michele Battiste: “Caveat: This is not a charted series of locations. This is not some coded spygame—pubescent, discarded, outgrown. This is not about getting close or being loved.”

37) Compound nonce words

Examples:

From “Autobiographia” by Karl Parker: “That was prettymuch the story of my life”

From “Grand Central Terminal” by Darcie Dennigan: “1913, the girlghost died here in a gas explosion”

38) Polysemy: Language deliberately meaning multiple things at once

Example: From Scape by Joshua Harmon: “to balance my bicycle and my checking account”

39) Parataxis: Pairing nebulously related things/utterances

Example: From “Sunset Debris” by Ron Silliman: “Can you smell rain? Will you use bleach? What is a fretless bass?”

40) Illogical causation

Example: From “Cryptozoology” by Sabrina Orah Mark: “Walter B. was so relieved he slept in his boots.”

41) Ending with an end (e.g., fade to black, death, credits, Fin“)

Example: From “Bleeding Hearts” by Harryette Mullen: “Where I live’s a wren shack. Pull back. / Show wreck. Black fade.”

Tags: , ,

102 Comments

  1. brian foley

      Our bag of tricks, exposed!

      reply

      jean luc picard

        don’t you think it’s all a bit like naming our gods. who cares. if you know how the contemporary fools who think themselves better than doctors or rousseau or jean luc picard get by publishing good, not great, work, then you’ll do well for yourself; you certainly don’t need this list. in fact, we all already know. let’s get back to it, shall we.

        on the other hand, i really do like this rather abbreviated little compendium, and i’m glad someone’s compiling it and, more importantly, working on it outside the mind. nice site, as well.

        bravo and may god manhandle every last one of you.

        reply

  2. Noah

      I really like this. I am going to reread it now.

      reply

  3. Sean

      Wow, this is badass! Going to settle in with it…

      reply

  4. sasha fletcher

      2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13 [i don't mean it ironically sometimes only hyperbolically but i generally mean it in some sort of real and unironic way], 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 25, 26, 31, 34, 36, 38, 39

      reply

      sasha fletcher

        i guess i do use 30, i just don’t use line breaks. i will have runs of sentences that begin with the same word or phrase.

        reply

        Kate

          “Our next reader has a novella and a chapbook coming out, both with titles longer than most theses.”

          reply

  5. Paul

      This is great!

      Hopefully no one referenced in the examples snipe you out.

      “He knows our secrets! Now he must pay . . . ”

      hehe

      reply

  6. Clay Matthews
  7. Nate

      Using the title as the first line, or having it lead into the poem is another fun move I like.
      Example by John Ashbery:

      “The Favor of a Reply

      is requested.” That’s where it began–

      reply

      Mike Young

  8. Daniel Romo
  9. Blake Butler

      totally killer. i like that number 30 is also a tactic used in thug rap.

      i would add that when referring to food, it’s often dainty or scenty or lavish ornamental things more for sound that use, never just common things people actually eat, and almost always appears in lists.

      reply

      Mike Young

        ha, yes, this is a good one, i wrote a poem about this.

        reply

      Elisa

        For sure. And mentioning booze in any capacity is an easy way to curry favor with rebellious youth.

        reply

  10. Amber

      I love this. So well done! Just finished The Anthologist and this is like a nice big piece of pie after the meal.

      reply

      Amber

        Also, I like how many of these work for prose as well. For example, I use 23 all the time to move the story forward.

        reply

  11. audri

      these are great
      i need to incorporate #24 more often
      maybe write a poem about the tardis

      reply

      Katie

        There do need to be more Tardis poems in the world…

        reply

  12. Matt Cozart

      That’s what parataxis is?

      Now I know.

      Thanks!

      reply

  13. mimi

      This is really, really great.

      reply

  14. Kevin

      I found this very helpful. Thanks guys.

      reply

  15. Kyle Minor

      God bless you, Elisa Gabbert

      reply

  16. Christopher Higgs

      Wow! Awesome! Thanks Mike & Danika & Elisa. I will certainly use this in the classroom.

      reply

      Mink

        Yeah, I’m trying to figure a way to bring this to my thesis class in two weeks without seeming douchey

        reply

  17. Mike Meginnis

      I like this as a huge, weird poem in itself.

      reply

  18. Josh

      Called out twice by Elisa Gabbert! I am getting her back in the next New England Review.

      #1, for me, always recalls a poem from Michael Davidson’s The Prose of Fact:

      “Tonight is closer than we thought (he meant to write ‘colder’ but moved closer to the heater instead)…”

      reply

      Mike Young

        Hahaha that’s a great line!

        reply

  19. Stu
  20. Sampson Starkweather

      E,

      you forgot the one that makes Matt Rass go crazy, the line by line deletion of a word to change the meaning each time move, usually ending a poem, which would be something like:

      never sell your self short
      never sell your self
      never sell your
      never sell
      never

      Also the over use of “face” is a big one i hear at brooklyn hipster readings all the time, especially used twice, like “face of your face” or something.

      i’m not sure if definition by a negative is the same as the use of the negative like in a declarative sentence stating something that didn’t happen: “No one yelled shit down a river”

      or the Tao Lin move, to follow a declarative sentence, especially a bold statement by, I think

      the James Tate repetition of he said, she said a million times move

      the place tons of first names without telling us who they are (even though we all know they are probably the poet’s quasi-famous poet friends) throughout your poems, i think Hogland has a whole book like that, What Narcissism Means to Me (or the lone initial in place of a name move, you know to create “mystery”) (or the use of one’s own name constantly, Ben Mirov pimps this move pretty sweetly)

      jack spicer references

      the random scientific fact dropped in (probably found in the back of Harpers Magazine, that’s where i get mine)

      the so and so-shaped cloud or other noun, with the so and so being something unexpected like Barack Obama or scrotum (actually “scrotum-shaped could” would be pretty good)

      lists in 3s, and the use of “all”, especially describing something with words you’d never normally use like “the sky went all cadmium, pith and permafrost”

      the same title for a bunch of poems (usually a series), like Julia has All My Friends In High School Are Dead for like 20 poems, which sounds pretty cool coming out of her voice one after the other

      although i’m not sure some of these are moves per say, like the blank of blank construction is just a metaphor, Lorca is the master of that particular construction, and ending a question with a period is just how you write a rhetorical question, that sort of thing…

      i fuckin’ love that dan boehl poem, is that in Work?

      reply

      Mike Young

        i am guilty of the “face” and “name” thing

        that would be a good title

        I AM GUILTY OF THE FACE AND NAME THING

        reply

      Elisa

        Ha ha, Chris Tonelli HATES the “it was all blah and blah” move.

        The DB poem is from Work, yes.

        Blank of Blank isn’t necessarily a metaphor, like if you take the phrase “light bulb” and make it “bulb of light” that’s not necessarily a metaphor, you just changed the syntax and made it sound poemy and aggrandized.

        Anyway great additions! Steve Schroeder added a bunch more here:

        http://thefrenchexit.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-poetry-moves.html

        reply

        Matt Cozart

          my favorite blank of blank is “swan of bees”, from a poem written by one of kenneth koch’s grade school students in “wishes, lies, and dreams: teaching children to write poetry”. the kid meant to write “swarm of bees”. there’s a whole chapter of poems made of this type of line:

          http://tinyurl.com/yzyxud7

          reply

          Elisa

            OMG. “I would like to have a boat of kittens.” I really would.

          mimi

            Sweet.
            I like “A letter made of words.”
            Because a letter is made of words, and a word is made of letters.

        ce.

          haha. Tonelli would hate me. i love the “all blah, blah” move.

          boat of kittens = my dad would hate.

          reply

      Chris Tonelli

        dude, me and sarah bartlett have a whole chapbook called MULE-SHAPED CLOUD! now i feel like douche-shaped cloud. thanks a lot SAM!

        reply

      lnorton

        …also related to description by negative, Gizzi’s anti-simile: “Snow unlike glass, glass unlike a corpse/Moon unlike a torso boldly colored in” (“Caption,” from Artificial Heart)

        for an excellent apotheosis of #28, Aaron Kunin at Realpolitik: http://www.realpoetik.org/2009/12/aaron-kunin.html

        reply

      Ross Brighton

        all the poems in Catherine Meng’s TONIGHTS THE NIGHT are called TONIGHTS THE NIGHT

        reply

  21. alan

      Let me be the twentieth-or-so person to say: great post.

      reply

      alan

        So what if anything can we gather from this compilation?

        Is it a handy toolbag for the working poet? A list of cliches to be avoided?

        reply

        Elisa

          I’d say moves are to be used wisely and deliberately. Don’t let them become tics. And try to cultivate some signature moves — don’t just gimp Tao Lin’s, for example.

          reply

          alan

            I’m sure that’s good advice.

            Actually, one of the things I liked about this post was its neutral presentation, but at the same time I felt the need to interrogate that.

            I also liked the move of calling figures “moves.”

        Matt Cozart

          i would say it’s pretty much a largely unavoidable toolbag. incidentally, cliches aren’t the worst thing in the world. except when they are. but not when they aren’t.

          reply

          ce.

            strangely enough, “largely unavoidable toolbag” was my nickname in college.

        mike young

          yep, that’s the million dollar question, alan, and definitely something we consciously avoided taking a stance on.

          i’d say elisa’s advice is sound, and i’d also say that form is untranscendable, and one of the presentational flaws of contemporary poetry in the modes referenced by this list—

          and, let’s be honest, the modes referenced do not comprise the entirety of the contemporary poetic genre but sit instead in some pretty specific bowling alleys

          —is the oft-mystical attitude toward process, borne no doubt a little bit out of the gaggery of “self-expression” as a viable “creative writing” notion and a little bit out of misunderstanding how nerves actually work while agreeing with o’hara’s “just go on your nerve”

          note, those last two points are my opinions and not necessarily elisa’s, and are also kind of random etc.

          aka free verse is never free, rinse and repeat, etc. not a new notion, but always fun to hack at

          reply

  22. Roxane Gay

      This is exceptional work. Fiction writers use some of these movies too. I’m going to reread this now.

      reply

  23. Lily Hoang

      awesome post. parataxis is an amazing word & trick!

      reply

  24. Stacie Williams

      Brilliant! Bookmarked, printed, shared. Thanks.

      reply

  25. claybanes

      Thanks for making me happy the rest of the week. We thank. [The weary we]

      reply

  26. LEE

      I love this so much.

      Maybe it’s a subset of the “blank of blank” construction, but what about the “science word of abstraction” phenomenon? The calculus of love, the archaeology of my grief, quantum of solace, etc. etc. etc.

      reply

      Elisa

        Oh, totally! It’s a subset. Calculus of love. Ha.

        reply

  27. Amy McDaniel

      This is a great poem with so much of #32. It is so sad. It makes me feel ashamed, but I do feel challenged to come up with new moves. So thanks. One annoying quibble…isn’t #38 an example of zeugma, not periphrasis, in that no single word has a double meaning, but that “balance” applies to the two words in different senses?

      reply

      Elisa

        I didn’t think that was the best example, actually. Probably the title of Josh Harmon’s book, SCAPE, is itself a better example of polysemy.

        reply

        mike young

          yeah, polysemy the way i understand it is hard to define in the way we were doing the list.. i just glanced at a txt file called “good poetry” and found clay matthews’s “instructions to my old, dead friend” which has this couplet:

          “This is what we leave behind when we wear / straw hats.”

          and this isn’t the best example, but the line break there enables me to read “wear” as meaning “clothing wear” and “wear down” at the same time, and that’s the idea i think of when i think of polysemy

          reply

  28. Eric Anderson

      One of my favorite examples of #11 is Heather Christle’s Gloria Evaluates the New Desert: “The new desert magnetizes blood / The new desert bangs me like a man.”

      reply

  29. ce.

      Due to busy-ness, I’ve had to click, “Mark as Unread” in my Reader for the past few days, hoping to have some real down time to read this for real. I’m glad I did. Great list.

      reply

  30. Oooh, new poem in the works « Inky
  31. Ana Bozicevic

      OK, I gotta say that that room-sized rose in 9. is from this painting by magritte:
      http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_u7ryccJN3ZQ/Sr-ehXdF67I/AAAAAAAAAHU/iLdZEeyCMGc/s400/magritte-rose.jpg
      so let’s call this move too: describe images from paintings when they beat what you can come up with then and there, ie get all ekphrastic on your poem. for once the reader and you will have the same image in your heads.

      reply

      Trey

        In fact, much of the rest of that poem by Young references Magritte paintings, and I think maybe he opens the poem mentioning visiting a Magritte exhibit.

        reply

      jon

        that’s one of my favorite poems. and the whole poem is magrittes, and the title “Ready-Made Bouquet” is a Magritte. Awesome poem.

        reply

  32. Kat
  33. Jennifer
  34. Slush Readers of the World: Forgive Me » Fringe Magazine

      [...] soul-crushing but less snarky listing of the “moves” in contemporary poetry over at <HTMLGIANT>. This list comes complete with examples from contemporary poetry and points out the banality of [...]

  35. David Grove

      Great fun. Countless other examples of these moves flooded my mind. “And the rat? The rat is radiant” (William Matthews). “attic of heaven” (Charles Wright). “The New Chinese Fiction” (James Tate). “Who gives a shit about pansies freak’d with jet” (Michael Ryan). So many others. Thanks.

      reply

  36. Joel Lewis

      Well, at least t he “dead animal” move –so popular in 60s & 70s MFA-style poetry — this is the grandady of the genre , lampooned by Ra Armatrout directly & indirectly by the LP group in their writings:

      Traveling Through The Dark

      Traveling through the dark I found a deer
      dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
      It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
      that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

      By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
      and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
      she had stiffened already, almost cold.
      I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

      My fingers touching her side brought me the reason–
      her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
      alive, still, never to be born.
      Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

      The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
      under the hood purred the steady engine.
      I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
      around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

      I thought hard for us all–my only swerving–,
      then pushed her over the edge into the river.

      William Stafford

      reply

  37. Michael Theune

      Terrific! Hilarious and revealing–

      reply

  38. Angelo

      This was funny, interesting and revealing, but it was also mortifying and kind of gross. Poets really aren’t any more than a bag of tricks? :(

      reply

  39. graywyvern

      Robot X., eat your heart out.

      I have, of course, hundreds more of these, available to any reader who sends me a crisp bill & a self-addressed envelope.

      Or you could just steal them from my log–like the REAL PROS!!!

      m.

      reply

  40. Robert Andrew
  41. Mitch

      A lot of these aren’t contemporary at all. And aren’t most of them just cliches? Overall though, good observations. I would add: whole poems built around the construct of praise this or that; sestinas with sestina as one of the repeating words; and the melodramatic use of “this world” (as opposed to which other world?).

      reply

  42. Cheryl

      This is great. Laughing at myself first thing this morning.

      reply

  43. CB

      Now what am I supposed to do, you fucking jagoff.Thanks a lot.

      reply

  44. Justin Evans

      but those damn rednecks working in the courthouse they learn one fucking word longer than Deuteronomy and they keep on using it every chance they get

      —-Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I love You

      reply

  45. Susan

      Terrific, fun list.

      reply

  46. jon

      It’s important to call attention to current tools. that’s how we make new ones.

      reply

  47. Gabrielle Bryden

      This is an excellent list – quite an effort I can imagine. By the way in reference to previous comments I have a tardis poem, well a tardis reference in my ‘Cartoon Life’ (on my blog) and more would be good – ha,ha.

      reply

  48. Hila Ratzabi

      Here is one trend that drives me CRAZY – the use of the word “specific,” “exact,” “particular,” before a noun. This is all over the place in contemporary poetry and it is a direct result of our well-intentioned MFA professors encouraging us to “be specific.” However, using the word “specific” (or any synonym thereof) doesn’t count as actually being specific. Some of our most beloved poets do it, and I find that it rarely does the work the poet intended it to…. There are countless examples of this…. I’ve been hoping to find a place to express that little rant, and finally, here is that place! Thanks, guys!

      reply

      Lincoln

        That’s the exact problem I was gonna talk about! It is a specific trend coming from particular MFAs, I think.

        reply

        ZZIIPPPPPP

          Specifically, those exact MFAs concerned with the particular.

          reply

          ZZIIPPPPPP

            Specifically, those particular MFAs concerned with the exact.

          ZZIIPPPPPP

            Those MFAs specifically exacting the particular?

          ZZIIPPPPPP

            Exactly! The specific particulars escape me.

        Lincoln

          That is a particularly exacting specific, zziippppp

          reply

      asta mouf

        dear ms. ratzabi,

        there are more poets in this country than any other, with more mfa programs than any other. let the idiots who can’t figure out whether a word intended to connote specificity does or doesn’t actually connote specificity wallow in the tormented, uneducated, fecal-laden prison they’ve prepared for themselves–may they gallop into the gazelle herd of the mfa for fear of the lion like the useless mammalian pack animals they are.

        reply

  49. Poetry 101 « altering labyrinth

      [...] 1) u gotta know tha moves, [...]

  50. Stephen Lloyd Webber

      Great post. Super great.

      reply

  51. corky

      Parataxis is just the repetition of declarative sentences in a parallel series. So, not what’s defined here.

      reply

      mike young

        That is one grammatical definition. It’s been co-opted to mean many things, including the definition above. Strictly, all the Greek means is “the act of placing side by side.” In talking about poetry, it’s often used to mean a disjunctive side-by-side pairing of images/phrases/utterances. Often for the purpose of making the reader’s brain do the gymnastics of connecting these things which suggest syntactical connection and “dissuggest” cognitive connection.

        reply

  52. Real Fake Flowers | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review

      [...] first poem in Karl Parker’s debut collection, Personationskin—three times on a list of 41 “moves” in contemporary poetry (commonly encountered techniques or maneuvers). It was the only poem of his I had read so far, or I [...]

  53. Mike Young
  54. jean luc picard

      don’t you think it’s all a bit like naming our gods. who cares. if you know how the contemporary fools who think themselves better than doctors or rousseau or jean luc picard get by publishing good, not great, work, then you’ll do well for yourself; you certainly don’t need this list. in fact, we all already know. let’s get back to it, shall we.

      on the other hand, i really do like this rather abbreviated little compendium, and i’m glad someone’s compiling it and, more importantly, working on it outside the mind. nice site, as well.

      bravo and may god damn every last one of you.

      reply

  55. Thomas Brady
  56. ‘Is it possible / to completely cover someone’s body with semen.’ « A Normal Blog

      [...] In the meantime, go complete all 41 moves of contemporary poetry. [...]

  57. FREEDOM! « Mikigfreetheword's Blog

      [...] Here is an interesting blog on techniques in contemporary poetry by some poets with a few more tricks up their sleeves. Leave a Comment [...]

  58. HTMLGIANT / Your Own. Personal. Cliché.

      [...] personal cliché is evidently closely related to the concept of moves but I emphatically do not think moves are equivalent to clichés. A move may be used only once or [...]

  59. poem for day #17 (or i should just say “poem #17″) « may i have a word with you?

      [...] NaPoWriMo — by evie9 @ 6:37 pm Tags: poem-a-day poem in which i use at least 13 of the 41 “moves in contemporary poetry” identified by elisa gabbert and mike young, in no particular [...]

  60. ‘Is it possible / to completely cover someone’s body with semen.’ | One Other

      [...] In the meantime, go complete all the 41 moves in contemporary poetry. [...]

  61. Jonn

      The functional shift is not new. It’s been a part of the English language’s versatility since Christopher Marlow.

      reply

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