How to Make the Unsaid the Most Powerful Part of Your Writing

Hello dear subscribers,

I hope this finds you well and that you’re navigating these turbulent weeks with both grace and determination. It’s been one thing after another out there, and I know the feeling of being unsure whether to double down on one’s own work or give yourself over to the news—feeling, as citizens, a responsibility to it. For me, last week’s rabbit hole was the new tranche of Epstein files. But more on that another time. (I think I’ll be writing about Epstein and what the files show us soon.)

For this week’s Craft Talk, I want to talk about a technique that interests me as both a poet and an essayist: the deliberate use of what’s left out, left unsaid, or left unexplained to create meaning; the white space between sections. We often talk about the fragment, but I like to focus on what is happening in what is not there rather than what is. Fragments, after all, work only because they are effectively making juxtapositions. I’ve talked in previous posts about distrusting certain kinds of fragmentary writing that feel like what they really want is more sustained thought and connection. But here, let’s build out some of the ideas I’ve touched on before about when writing built on gaps really shines: the moment when a writer places two things next to each other and trusts the reader to feel the charge between them. (By the way, this technique and post should be helpful even if you tend to write sustained, synthesized nonfiction or essays; everyone can benefit from understanding how image and restraint work.)

Much craft advice focuses on what to put in: how to build scenes, how to develop character, how to construct an argument. But some of the most powerful writing I know gets its force from what the writer chose not to say—if and when that not-saying can become legible on the page. Let’s look at how that happens.

Consider Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” one of the most famous short poems in English and a poem that helped kickstart the literary movement known as Imagism, which still shapes contemporary English language poetry today. (Pound was, it must be said, both an influential poet and editor and and an anti-Semite; he was jailed by the United States for broadcasting pro-fascist, anti-semitic, treasonous content in Italy during World War II.) One of the things Imagism did was to move the idea of an “image” to the center of writing. When I ask my students what an image really is, they often struggle to say. It was Pound who came up with the best definition:

An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term “complex” rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application.

It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.

Imagism is in a sense the first step toward the dominance in our time of the contemporary image-based lyric as well as, in prose, the fragment and the lyric essay. It is the moment when English-language literature decided—or realized—that juxtaposing images could make a kind of argument, one without filler or pedantry. To understand how we got from Imagism to where we are today, you have to know that Imagism grew out of a distaste for—an exhaustion with—nineteenth-century poetry in meter. Lots of iambic pentameter, tetrameter, and whatnot. A few things happened at once: many of the advances in metered verse that could have been made had been made (see Milton, blank verse, etc). The late nineteenth century happened to be a time of many not-great poets. And the Victorians loved ornament, which crept into poetry too—so metrical verse started to seem padded out, decorative. Hence the famous Modernist anthology of bad verse, The Stuffed Owl, which makes for fun reading.

In response to lines like Alfred Austin’s “When with staid mothers’ milk and sunshine warmed, / The pasture’s frisky innocents bucked up,” Ezra Pound called for poets to “make it new.” By which he made: make it more direct; make it less told, more enacted. He issued a few directives about how to write a poem in a 1913 essay for the newly launched Poetry magazine called “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” (This is where you can find the above definition of an image, too.) In it he famously wrote, “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” He also articulated the ethos by which workshops still operate: “Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.” And: “Go in fear of abstractions.” Pound took this to an extreme, noting, “Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.”

Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.

Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

But back to his famous poem “In a Station of the Metro,” which can be used as a kind of touchstone for the work of writing the gap. The poem was originally thirty-something lines. But Pound wanted to live by his own rules. He reread it and realized the whole poem could be found in just two lines:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

These two lines have no verb connecting them. No “like” or “as.” The faces are not compared to petals—they are simply placed beside them, separated by a colon and a line break.Think how different the poem would be if it said, “The apparition of these faces in the crowd / are like petals on a wet, black bough.” To add a simile would be to subordinate the image to the people moving through the underground station. At the time, Pound and other modernists wanted poetry to realize there was no such thing as non-poetic language or subjects. Apollinaire had been scorned for writing about the Eiffel Tower, which had itself been scorned as ugly. Artists wanted to move from the pastoral frisky innocents to crowds, urbanity, subway stations. Here, the poem makes the image of the petals as real within the poem as the faces themselves. (One note: The colon, which appeared in its original Poetry publication, does suggest a way to read the poem with the second line as subordinate to the first, but Pound changed that colon to a semi-colon upon book publication, making the relationship more subtle, more enacted.) The modernists wanted to say that words can make reality—do make reality—as much as they describe it. Perception and world are both given primacy. The gap is where the poem’s meaning lives. You, the reader, complete it. Indeed, as Pound wrote in A Don’ts:

When Shakespeare talks of the ‘Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

This is what I mean by the gap, or juxtaposition, as a source for making meaning. But the technique isn’t limited to poetry. “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams, that other influential modernist, said. It is the engine behind some of the most exciting prose being written today, and can be a tool to use in your own drafts: More on that below the paywall.