The Sunday Poem: Paring Away

Doing something a little bit different again. I have posted this poem before, but I wanted to talk a little bit about taking things away, since I was so recently on the topic of adding things in. And for those of you who don’t usually read the Sunday Poems, this one actually has game design relevance!

The first draft of a poem is sometimes little more than a phrase. “She wore a smile like a sundress.” “If we are what we eat, then dogs are kibble.” Sometimes, I actually compose brief poems entirely in my head, because the exigencies of memory force cutting to the bone and phrases that stick. “It’s not tick tock. More like a tack chalk tick chalk take chalk talk chalk” came to mind as I listened to a clock before falling asleep. Honoring all the clichés, evanescing like cottony candy, like cotton itself, soft twists torqued, tangled, aloft with imagined wild dragons”, recited over and over to myself on a plane trip, until I got a cocktail napkin on which to scribble it down.

Sometimes the opposite occurs, and you have to instead carve the poem out of the words that enclose it and hedge it in. The first draft of “African Clawed Frog” looked like this:

Something about the skin, leathery loose,
colored nutmeg, speckled and haggish,
looks like plastic. But somewhere inside this frog,
inside this suit that wears big webbed feet,
muscles move and contract and pale blood
pumps past sodden lungs.
After all, when you sit
on the commuter train and watch all the people
reading their newspapers and smoking their cigs
and tapping their feet to faulty rhythms,
you tell yourself they aren’t dolls, aren’t
what they look like, have something inside the mask
fastened at the ears with spirit gum. The young guy,
the one with the corduroy jacket — who wears corduroy
these days anyway? — he’s eyeing the secretary
with the blue skirt with ruffled hem, she’s eyeing
him back with something like annoyance, something
like hunger.
The frog has got to be real, right?
Plastic things just don’t move that fast, drink
quite so deep of instinct, wear claws with such pride.
The frog, when he moves to get what he wants,
that slip between waters disturbing nothing,
that gulp releasing precious air, is as real
as all the mathematics of nature, as engineering,
as the makeup on the secretary’s face,
as swagger and sly glances. He is fast, merciless,
and does what he is programmed to do,
like the secretary who looks away, the guy who laughs.

I think the word is “flabby.”

If you compare to the final version, you’ll see that much was accomplished by simply removing words:

Something about the skin, leathery loose,
colored nutmeg, speckled and haggish,
looks like plastic. But somewhere inside this frog,
inside this suit that wears big webbed feet,
muscles move and contract and pale blood
pumps past sodden lungs.
After all, when you sit
on the commuter train and watch all the people
reading their newspapers and smoking their cigs
and tapping their feet to faulty rhythms,
you tell yourself they aren’t dolls, aren’t
what they look like, have something inside the mask
fastened at the ears with spirit gum. The young guy,
the one with the corduroy jacket — who wears corduroy
these days anyway? — he’s eyeing the secretary
with the blue skirt with ruffled hem, she’s eyeing
him back with something like annoyance, something
like hunger.
The frog has got to be real, right?
Plastic things just don’t move that fast, drink
quite so deep of instinct, wear claws with such pride.
The frog, when he moves to get what he wants,
that slip between waters disturbing nothing,
that gulp releasing precious air, is as real
as all the mathematics of nature, as engineering,
as the makeup on the secretary’s face,
as swagger and sly glances. He is fast, merciless,
and does what he is programmed to do,
like the secretary who looks away, the guy who laughs.

All the that and as and especially and can go. Parallelism in the phrases is nice, but not when it’s in the ancillary words rather than the actual thing. Move out of passive voice and into something immediate; why is there an invisible observer, why distance from the action? “You tell yourself they aren’t dolls” — that’s telegraphing the poem’s intent. Out it goes. Given that we’re talking about evolutionary mechanics and the machinery of nature, do we need to even personalize the people? Can the guy just be a corduroy jacket and the girl a ruffled hem?

What’s left?

skin, leathery loose,
nutmeg, speckled and haggish,
looks plastic. this frog,

muscles contract and pale blood
pumps past sodden lungs.

on the commuter train people
read their newspapers smok their cigs
tap their feet to faulty rhythms,
mask
fastened at the ears with spirit gum. young corduroy jacket eyeing the secretary
with the blue skirt with ruffled hem, she’s eyeing
him back like annoyance,
like hunger.

Plastic things don’t move fast, drink
deep of instinct, wear claws with pride.
The frog, when he moves to get what he wants,
slip between waters disturbing nothing,
gulp releasing precious air, the mathematics of nature
the makeup on the secretary’s face,
swagger and sly glances. He is fast,
does programmed to do,
like the secretary who looks away, the guy who laughs.

Then the last step, which is both a conceit and a structural thing. Once the text above was extracted, the stories of the frog and the people aren’t evenly matched. They clump: too little people here, too much frog there. So I took the verses and intertwined them, like DNA, so that every verse swings from one to the other. And the poem was just about done.

Skin leathery loose, nutmeg
speckled and haggish—he looks plastic—
this frog’s muscles contract, push,
and pale blood pumps past sodden lungs.

On a commuter train, people read
newspapers, smoke their cigs, tap
feet to faulty rhythms, masks
fastened at ears with spirit gum.

African clawed frog: but plastic
doesn’t move fast, drink deep of
instinct, proudly wear claws. That frog,
he moves to get what he wants.

On the train, a young corduroy jacket,
blue jeans, eyeing a secretary whose hem
is ruffled, red skirt, her eyeing him
with a look like annoyance, like hunger—

The frog slips between waters, disturbs
nothing, gulps, releases precious
air—the mathematics of it are
natural: the makeup on her face,

his swagger and sly glances—he’s fast,
that frog, he does as he’s programmed,
like the secretary who looks away,
the young man who laughs—
                                                  some frog!

Sometimes, you start with a functioning barebones thing that needs the bells and whistles added. But more often, you start with something in the world that needs to be reduced down to the barebones, so that then you can add the selected details correctly. In poetry or in game design, we’re usually presented with our perceptions, which are big and complicated and tangled. Finding that barebones phrase or idea, like cutting the excess wordage out of this poem, is the first step in almost any ideation. Then you get to the stage of dressing it back up, which is an act of focusing that idea once everything irrelevant has been stripped away. The new elements are in service of the intent.

Often when players present ideas for games, they come to you with the world in hand, and say that is what they want. They rarely know to trim away the brambles and find the core thing at its heart. Just as often, they will describe all the dressing and none of the core, like trying to draw a person well without thinking of bones and muscles underneath skin, only looking at makeup and clothing. Neither will get you a game, and neither will get you a poem.

Either way, what people tend to call “talent” is the ability to look at a situation, a scenario, a block of text, a landscape, and pull out one of the many essential things that are likely in it, and bring it into stark relief. When we speak of a given artist’s “theme” we often mean that they tend to see the same underlying essences in things, over and over again, as if everything in the world was always purple, at its core. You read enough Poe and you know he was haunted by the inevitability of death, seeing it in smiles, in parties, in flocks of birds, in houses…

The sorts of essences you can find will likely be different for every medium you work in. In games, the essences will tend to be structural, mathematical, models of relationships between elements. In poetry, we speak of this as being analogy, and indeed too rigid an analogy, as this poem has, can be considered a flaw, rendering it mostly a trifle.

Either one is about causing a shift in perspective in the person interacting with the new construct, forcing them to see the world in a different way. The hope is that ever after, when they look at houses, a landscape, a party, a flock of birds, a person, they will see the play of muscles underneath, they will see past the brambles, and forever after the world will have a hint of purple.