For my analysis, I chose to compare the poem "Outward Bound," by Hamish Whyte with Colin Dunning's two poems, "Cluster" and "Icon."
When I first read this assignment, I was a little unsure what poems I would write about this time around, given that the list of options was the same as that for our first analysis of an example. I was fairly certain I had already chosen what was in my mind the "best" option, or at least the one I best understood. When I reviewed (re-reviewed?) my options, however, I was excited to find much more meaning in Whyte's "Outward Bound" than I had last time, seeing the poem as a much more artistic and intricate piece than what had originally seemed a jumble of letters. After settling on this piece for my first choice, my second seemed almost immedately clear.
I decided to compare these two (or rather, three) pieces on the basis that they have a fairly large commonality (that is, they are both derived from a single line of text [or a word], within which much more is embedded), while still having some clear formal differences.
"Outward Bound" consists of what is essentially a single line from Emily Dickenson: "There is no frigate like a book." Using this pre-arrangement of letters, however, the author is able to create a considerable thirty-seven line poem, merely by deleting the letters not needed for that particular phrase. For instance, phrases as dissimilar as "is fate like" and "take the risk" coexist in this lines, otherwise hidden until Whyte deleted the unnecessary clutter surrounding. (What is most interesting, is that the reader does not realize that the other words and letters from the original Dickenson line are clutter until they see what Whyte has done.)
Similarly, in "Cluster," Dunning has the syllables "con" and "tion" bookending "stella" and, below it, "centra" (thereby forming either the word "constellation" or "concentration," depending on how you view it). In "Icon," he does the same thing, only with "bl" and "ck" on either side of alternately "a" and "o" ("black" versus "block"). In these pieces, too, the reader is shown the many different options inherent in a set of letters, even as few as five.
I think this notion of possibility is something both Whyte and Dunning wished to convey in these pieces. Using only thirteen letters, over half of which are matched in the same formation, one can create words as different as "constellation" and "concentration." (Or, similarly, given only five letters, four of which are the same, we get "black" and "block.") In this way, readers are shown just how much of a difference one letter can make. It reinforces the idea of the power of language, the power of sounds. In the same way, given only one short line of poetry (only seven words, twenty-five letters in total), an argument to get caught up in the world of a book, to let it carry you away to a new place, can be found in its arrangement of letters, an argument that one wouldn't even notice unless it was formatted as Whyte has done. All three of these poems encourage the reader to read more closely, to think about the potential contained in each word, each syllable, each individual letter. There is so much one can do with so little.
At the same time, these poets' pieces are not identical. Whyte chose to focus on a phrase, while Dunning's poems were even simpler – containing only two words. I think the poets made these choices because of the more specific focuses they wanted to consider in their overlying themes.
In "Cluster" and "Icon" we have two pairs of words juxtaposed with each other for contrast. I think Dunning chose to arrange his poems in this experimental way because it emphasizes the similarities and the differences between the two words all at once, without having to provide a written explanation of why they are both similar and dissimilar. Both words in each poem share many letters with each other; however, they are not the same idea. In "Icon," I felt like the two ideas being contrasted, "black" and "block," are very fundamentally different. "Black" is a very abstract idea, a colour, while blocks are about as concrete a noun as you can get (some even being made of concrete). I appreciated the way Dunning exposed that the difference of a single letter can lead to something very concrete to become very intangible. At the same time, these words can be used very much together – it is very possible to have a black block. In "Cluster," on the other hand, I feel almost as if Dunning is emphasizing the similarities over the differences. Obviously, the words "constellation" and "concentration" are fairly alike in spelling, and although they are somewhat different ideas, I feel as if their pairing, especially in the context of this poem's format, stresses the way they can be used in conjunction with one another. One must concentrate to pick out the constellations in the night sky. Similarly, one must concentrate to find the hidden meanings and possibilities inherent in words and letters. In this way, I feel as if "Cluster" best emphasizes the theme of possibility I mentioned earlier.
I feel as if the reason Whyte chose to work with an entire line of poetry, as opposed to a single word like Dunning, was because he wished to emphasize the possibility inherent in poetic structures more complex than merely a single word. Interestingly enough, the line of poetry he chose to manipulate was not even his own, but Emily Dickinson's. This seems to reinforce for me the idea of finding power and significance in preexisting literature that one may have missed the first time (just as I missed the significance of this poem the first time I glanced at it). Of course, Whyte does not make this search particularly easy, even when he has taken measures to show the reader the potential in these lines. While he has deleted the unneccessary letters, he does not shift them together (or, in some cases, add the necessary spaces between letters), partially to show the reader where he is deriving these letters from, but probably also to show how reading into words takes a certain degree of effort. The first time I looked at this poem, it seemed like a bunch of gibberish to me and I was a little daunted by its form. Now I not only am able to read the text without much difficulty, but I also understand the purpose for writing it the way it is. Upon having the inner meaning of the text revealed to me, I felt a certain degree of satisfaction I would not had it been easier to decipher; referring back to Dunning, I had to concentrate to get to the underlying meanings, but it was very much worth it.
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