Pacing, Part 3: Pacing for Poets

I’m going to give two explanations of what pacing is, one for poet-types and one for engineer-types.  This is an arbitrary split, and you’ll probably need both perspectives at some point.

For poets:

Pacing is how you start sneaking poetry into fiction, without the heightened sense of language that might tip your hand to the reader that you’re being poetic.

Buffalo Bill ’s

defunct

               who used to

               ride a watersmooth-silver

                                                                  stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

                                                                                                     Jesus

he was a handsome man

                                                  and what i want to know is

how do you like your blue-eyed boy

Mister Death

If you look at any given poem by e.e. cummings, for example, you can see that on every level, the poet makes choices such that the form of the poem–almost literally the appearance of the words on the page–reflects the content of the poem.

In fiction, this is called pacing.  In commercial fiction, you break fewer “rules” than you would here, but the spirit is the same.

Although it led the way to the twenty-first century, Moscow maintained the Victorian habit of traveling on iron wheels.  Kievsky Station, which was near the foreign ghetto and Brezhnev’s own apartment, pointed to the Ukraine. Belorussia Station, a short walk from the Kremlin, was where Stalin boarded the Czar’s train from Potsdam and, afterward, where Khrushchev and then Brezhnev boarded their special trains for Eastern Europe to inspect their satellites or to launch détente.  Rizhsky Station took you to the Baltic states.  Kursky Station suggested suntanned vacations on the Black Sea.  From the small Sabelovsky and Paveletsky stations no one worthwhile traveled–only commuters or hordes of farmers as dusty as potatoes.  Most impressive by far were Leningrad, Yaroslavl and Kazan station, the three giants of Komsomol Square, and the strangest of these was Kazan Station, whose Tartar tower capped a gateway that might take you thousands of kilometers to the deserts of Afghanistan, to the siding of a Ural prison camp, or all the way across two continents to the shore of the Pacific.

At 6 a.m. inside Kazan Station, entire Turkman families lay head to feet on benches.  Babies with felt skullcaps nestled on soft bundles. Soldiers leaned slackly against the wall in a sleep to tangibly deep that the heroic mosaics of the ceiling overhead could have been their communal dream.  Bronze fixtures glowed dully.  At the one refreshment stand open, a girl in a rabbit-skin coat confided in Pasha Pavlovich.

This is from Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith, set in about 1981, the year it was published.  In other words, after the widespread use of the airplane.  The main character is a blunt detective type–and could be expected not to use the Oxford comma.

The first paragraph, all about where the trains go, is longer than the second, which is about people.  The first paragraph reflects how the POV character, the detective, is supposed to see Communist Russia; the second reflects how he sees the world around him when he’s not being monitored.  This is mainly effected by the pacing of the respective paragraphs.  More on that in a bit.

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