Like an artist assembling a collage or a film editor splicing scenes, poets build tension, friction, surprise and meaning through juxtaposition. By putting things side-by-side without explanation, we invite the reader into the poem to consider the relationship. This can create a sense of paradox, incongruity, fragmentation, disjunction, tension, or epiphany. In addition to being flexible in the effect it creates; juxtaposition is also flexible in its form. It can operate at the level of diction, syntax, detail, image, rhythm, shape, and idea. Juxtaposition is a strategy that invites readers to engage, to participate in the poem. And juxtaposition reflects the push and pull, the complexity of our actual lives.
I’ve always loved what Pablo Picasso said: “What a sad fate for a painter who loves blondes, but who refrains from putting them in his picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit! What misery for a painter who hates apples to be obliged to use them all the time because they go with the cloth! I put everything I love in my pictures. So much the worse for the things, they have only to arrange themselves with one another.” [Pablo Picasso, quoted by Richard Friedenthal in Letters of the Great Artists – from Blake to Pollock (Thames & Hudson, 1963)]
And a thought from Jane Hirshfield from her book Ten Windows: “Cognitive and creative discoveries are made in much the same way as much of biological life is: by acts of generative recombination. Disparate elements are brought together to see if they might make a viable new whole… Creative epiphany is much the same: a knowledge won against the patterns of predictable thought, feeling, or phrase.
“Surprise, then, is epiphany’s first flavor. It is the emotion by which we register shifted knowledge, in a poem, in a life.” [Jane Hirshfield, “Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise,” Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015)]
I’m going to turn now to a poem of mine, so that I can give an example of the genesis of a poem that relies heavily on juxtaposition. We know that it’s not enough to tell “what happened.” We have to find the poem in the experience. Sometimes that takes me years of failed attempts, but in this case the muse had mercy and it only took a few months.
Laundry
The baby’s dragged the sheets to the kitchen
and now she’s stuffing them in the washer,
one hand lifting a wad of yellow cotton,
the other reaching down for more and more. Breathing heavy,
she’s feeding vast swathes by the armful,
bent halfway into the mouth of the machine,
a strip of skin exposed where her shirt’s ridden up,
an edge of diaper sticking out of her pants.
Who can watch a child and not feel fear
like static in the background or a tinnitus you try to ignore.
This morning in the Times, I saw the galaxy LEDA 2046648—
each spiral arm distinct and bright against the dark ink. Light
from a billion years ago, just as the first
multicellular life emerged on Earth.
What are the not-quite-two-years of this intent creature
in the sweep of time? Her quadriceps and scapula,
the alveoli of her lungs, twenty-seven bones of her hand
that evolved from the fin of an ancient fish.
And her scribbly hair sticking up from her first pony tail.
When she was in her mother’s body,
the California fires turned the air a smoky topaz
and the sun glowed orange on the kitchen wall.
Last month the floodwaters rose and seeped under the door.
But still, there must be time for this, to watch her—
hands deep into the doing, she’s wedded
to the things of this world.
When she stands, her sleeve slips down
and she pushes it up like any woman at work.
By Ellen Bass. First published in The New Yorker (May 2024)
Okay, let’s take it from the top and look at the way juxtaposition works here. And afterward I’ll share some of the process of writing the poem:
Laundry
So this opening section is all description of the action of the baby. Eight lines of description in two long sentences. The power of this poem is in the action and that’s firmly established before we move on to other thoughts.
The baby’s dragged the sheets to the kitchen
and now she’s stuffing them in the washer,
one hand lifting a wad of yellow cotton,
the other reaching down for more and more. Breathing heavy,
she’s feeding vast swathes by the armful,
bent halfway into the mouth of the machine,
a strip of skin exposed where her shirt’s ridden up,
an edge of diaper sticking out of her pants.
And then we make a leap from the scene in the kitchen with the laundry to the speaker’s feelings about this scene:
Who can watch a child and not feel fear
like static in the background or a tinnitus you try to ignore.
Now we have the juxtapositions of love and fear and of knowledge and innocence. And the beginning of the juxtaposition of woman and baby, which in the final image of the poem, is going to merge when the baby pushes up her sleeve like any woman at work.
This background static is the underlying, omnipresent awareness of environmental collapse and the general background noise in the world and in our minds, and also the background static from the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background radiation.
So when we take the next leap to the LEDA galaxy, there’s been a subtle foreshadowing of the cosmic realm.
Next we go back in time just a few hours to the morning paper, and that also takes us back a billion years ago. One of the juxtapositions in this poem is in the realm of time.
This morning in the Times, I saw the galaxy LEDA 2046648—
each spiral arm distinct and bright against the dark ink. Light
from a billion years ago, just as the first
multicellular life emerged on Earth.
So we have a galaxy juxtaposed with a kitchen. And then this question that juxtaposes the baby’s not-quite two years with a billion years.
What are the not-quite-two years of this intent creature
in the sweep of time?
Now we go into the body of the child. We were just in the body of the galaxy and then the first multicellular bodies and out of all that evolution comes the body of the child.
Her quadriceps and scapula,
the alveoli of her lungs, twenty-seven bones of her hand
that evolved from the fin of an ancient fish.
So we keep juxtaposing: the hand of the child/the fin of the fish.
And her scribbly hair sticking up from her first pony tail.
The poem is also juxtaposing diction here. Scientific language of LEDA 2046648, multicellular life, scapula and alveoli all juxtaposed with “her scribbly hair sticking up from her first pony tail.”
Then we leap back into the more recent past (more recent than a billion years ago) to before the baby was born and we move into the particular reason for the fear: the climate crisis and, specifically the way it’s impacted this family personally. When we’re talking about big concerns it’s usually important that we find some way to move from the generic, the abstract, to something specific enough that we can feel it.
When she was in her mother’s body,
the California fires turned the air a smoky topaz
and the sun glowed orange on the kitchen wall.
Last month the floodwaters rose and seeped under the door.
And then, juxtaposed with the fear, a refusal to miss out on the present.
But still, there must be time for this, to watch her—
hands deep into the doing, she’s wedded
to the things of this world.
When she stands, her sleeve slips down
and she pushes it up like any woman at work.
I’ll just mention that this is a poem that ends on an image. It’s conclusion is But still, there must be time for this, but ending with that statement would close the poem down more tightly. Instead, it makes that statement and then reflects on it and describes the child again—the action of the child—pushing up her sleeve and ends with like any woman at work. The child is joined to all the women of the world. She’s going to take her place in the world. And there’s going to be plenty of work to do. Although we don’t know how she will face this challenge when she’s an adult, for now, at least, she pushes up her sleeve and gets down to work. So there’s an implicit hope that she has the strength and will to keep at the work of the world.
I want to talk a little about the making of this poem just to give you a sense of how one person—me—worked to create juxtaposition. I have about fifteen drafts of this poem, but I’m only including a couple which I hope will give a pretty good idea of the progression.
Here’s the first one, started February 14, 2023. I started with pieces. I didn’t know how they would fit together, but I had two basic pieces to begin with: the action of the baby loading the washer and the image of the LEDA galaxy that I’d read about in the Times. You might start a poem with more pieces than this, but even two gives you a way to avoid staying on the same note. As Richard Hugo says in his famous book, The Triggering Town, “There are a few people who become more interesting the longer they stay on a single subject. But most people are like me, I find. The longer they talk about one subject, the duller they get.” [Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (W. W. Norton & Company, 1979)]
It may be tedious to read this first version word for word, so you can just glance over it. But I include it to show how messy a first draft can be and also because there’s a phrase I want to call attention to:
First Draft of the poem that became “Laundry”
February 14, 2023
One by one, the baby’s dragged the sheets to the kitchen,
and now she’s stuffing them in the washer, one hand
lifting a big wad of yellow cotton, the other reaching
down for more and more. She’s feeding the vast swathes
by the armful, piling it up like the drapery in some lesser
Rubens or Carravagio, an exuberance of superfluous
abundance. She’s bent over, diaper sticking up, breathing heavy.
Her knees are bent. She’s wearing a shirt with woodland
animals playing on it, but she’s not playing.
The pattern on the child’s shirt isn’t, ultimately, important in the poem, but in my first drafts I try to keep all the doors and windows open for anything to enter and it turns out that by describing the child’s shirt I get to the woodland animals playing, which leads me to say the child’s not playing—that this is actual work she’s doing–which leads to the last word of the poem! That’s why we say that it’s in the act of writing that you discover the poem.
When the sleeve
slips down over her hand, she pushes it up and keeps on
I’m told that a baby at two is, pound for pound,
the strongest she’ll ever be. She’s doing the work
of learning to be a human in this family in California in 2023
when we still have washers and water gushes into machines.
Who can watch a child and not feel dread?
With every great handful she gathers, the cloth drapes and folds,
the light catching it, the dark folds, the yellow is golden,
her hair is a sticking up like a pony tail, but the elastic is gone
when she leans over there’s
only at the end when she goes to close the door does she look up with a smile of accomplishment
pants with the effort and with the excitement there’s so much of it
when her shirt lifts up, there’s a band of bare skin and the diaper sticks out of her pants
I could tell you how anyone who loves a child always has dread in the background, static in the background
today I won’t think about her future and all that could befall her that dread that slashes the night like a siren, red
No, there has to be some time just to watch her little arms pull that great wad of gold, her breath panting,
her stuffed up nose, she’s beyond joy, beyond fun, she’s deep into something we could call doing, the doing-ness, the joy of making, satisfaction, accomplishment.
she lifts her arm and shakes her sleeve down, this is the artist at work, the
This morning in the times, the Leda galaxy was a brightness
against the dark ink, light that shone from it a billion
years ago. When the early multicellular organisms emerged on Earth.
What are the two years of this one creature in the swath of that?
It slashes the night.
She’s wedded to the things of this world
You can see that much of what the poem needs is already there in the first draft. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case with my poems, but obviously it’s a big help when it is.
With this poem, I then made quite a few more drafts. I won’t drag you through them all. But in the next draft I’m including here you can see there’s more coherence even visually. It’s no longer in tatters. The galaxy LEDA is woven into the poem now, for example. And evolution, specifically the evolution of her body, is introduced, as well as the specifics about the local wildfires and floods that take the generic dread to specific causes and the way this speaker and the baby, have experienced it firsthand.
Another Draft of the poem that became “Laundry”
The baby dragged the sheets to the kitchen, one by one,
and now she’s stuffing them in the washer,
one hand lifting a wad of yellow cotton, the other reaching down
for more and more. She’s feeding vast swathes
by the armful, gathering it up like the drapery in some lesser
Rubens or Caravaggio. An exuberance of superfluous abundance.
Breathing heavy,
she’s bent halfway into the mouth of the washer,
a strip of caramel skin exposed where her shirt’s ridden up,
an edge of diaper sticking out of her pants.
It’s Santa Cruz circa 2023 when we still have water
gushing into machines. Who can watch a child and not feel fear
like static in the background, like a tinnitus you try to ignore.
This morning in the Times, I saw the galaxy LEDA 2046648—
each spiral arm distinct and bright against the dark ink. Light
from a billion years ago, just as the first
multicellular life emerged on Earth.
What are the not-quite-two-years of this intent creature
in the sweep of time? Her quadriceps and scapula,
the alveoli of her lungs, the 27 bones of her hand
that evolved from the fin of an ancient fish.
And her scribbly hair sticking up from her first pony tail.
When she was in her mother’s body,
the California fires turned the air a smoky topaz
and the sun glowed orange on the kitchen wall.
Last month the floodwaters rose.
But still, there must be time for this, to watch her
as she pulls and pushes the gleaming expanse of the material world.
And as a poet once wrote, the yes is taking over.
Hands deep into the doing, she’s wedded
to the things of this world.
When she stands, her sleeve slips down
and she pushes it back up like any woman at work.
I want to mention the Rubens or Caravaggio lines which leave the poem in the final draft. I spent a good few hours looking at their paintings and I loved the sound of them, but when I showed this draft to my friend, the brilliant poet, Frank X. Gaspar, he said “the language I think moves the attention away from the baby…I’m just taken with the focus on the baby’s action and how it makes the poem live. The skin, the shirt, the diaper sticking out of her pants…I see her so viscerally.” Immediately I knew he was right. Detail has to be both vivid and essential and this was not only not essential, as Frank said, it moved the attention away from what was.
My hope is that walking through the way this poem uses juxtaposition might be encouraging and also instructive—to see how it’s possible to start with a first draft that has a lot of what it needs, but is still pretty ragged, and then begin to give it shape, to add more in, to take some out, and then consider chronology, essential versus non-essential detail, sound, music, and all the other elements of the craft.
In closing, a final thought from the critic Robert Shattuck:
“Juxtaposition, with its surprises and intimacy of form, brings the spectator closer than ever before to the abruptness of creative process…” [Robert Shattuck, quoted in Tony Hoagland, “Fragment, Juxtaposition, and Completeness,” Real Sofistikashun (Graywolf Press, 2006)]
Ellen Bass has published nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Among her awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. With Florence Howe, she co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (Doubleday, 1973), and she co-authored the groundbreaking, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz jails. She teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program and offers online Living Room Craft Talks at ellenbass.com.