Implication As A Poetic Device

In Ars Poetica on 30 October 2009

I love love love this poem by Karen Finneyfrock. Instead of dominating the poem with a conceit that takes up the entire poem, and instead of spelling out the logical connection from image to image, she instead relies on a device similar to what rhetoricians call an enthymeme — the poem’s internal logic relies heavily on knowing that readers and listeners will draw the visual comparisons between the similar shapes of the various objects — lightbulbs, eggs, diamonds, coal mines, human brains, hearts and lungs, etc. We move easily from one image to another because Finneyfrock has done an excellent job crafting a tone that makes it easy for us to follow the conceptual leaps. The poem also (brilliantly) teaches us how to read/interpret it, so that, for example, when the speaker is overtly drawing a comparison between a human brain and a coal mine, one cannot help but internally draw a comparison between the brain and the other mentioned hollow objects whose structure determines their function (eggs, lightbulbs, diamonds.) She gets the benefit of all of these by only making one, and at the end of the poem, when she repeats the beginning, we find ourselves at the center of a node of networked metaphors that resonate with each other without explicitly being evoked, a sort of conceptual harmonics. Since the poem is also about a process (the way pressure forces carbon from one allotrope to another) it’s interesting to note that the poem’s rhetoric and structure end up behaving like that transition: from the loose molecular structure of coal to the tight, fixed, but beautiful crystalline structure of a diamond.

Sometimes it’s in what a poet choose not to say that is most important.