Dialogue in Poetry

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “The City” by C. P. Cavafy

• Divinations

• Prompt

• Archive

Freewrite

Think of a question or conflict you are having with yourself lately. Something you are unable to resolve within yourself. It can be something simple, like should I go to bed early?, or something more serious, like Should I quit my job and become a sheepherder?

Freewrite a dialogue between these two parts. You might even assign a character to each side of this internal debate: your heart vs your head, your body vs your soul, etc.

Just set down the arguments and ideas that each side of you contains. Writing them out alone might give you a sense of clarity.

Poem: “The City” by C. P. Cavafy

Retrieved here. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.

Divinations

Ok, I admit it. That second stanza made me laugh out loud.

C. P. Cavafy is typically considered the most famous Greek poet of the 20th century. His oeuvre isn't especially large, and his poetry wasn't published in book form until after his death in 1933, but he leaves a legacy that is surprisingly rich, a voice surprisingly modern for its time. He also openly wrote about his experiences as a gay man in turn-of-the-century Alexandria, Egypt.

I love this poem precisely for its structure, and because I think dialogue in poetry is an understudied technique. Did this conversation actually happen between Cavafy and a friend? For one thing, it's a moot question, because the poem matters more than its factual reality. But there are many possibilities. This conversation might be between:

• Two friends

• Cavafy and himself

• The speaker and an invented person

• The speaker and a bunch of different people, boiled down into a single "you"

Etc. I personally like to think the speaker is addressing himself in this poem, but the fact that this poem occurs without any context, and yet is richly populated with the facts of someone's life, someone's city, makes for an interesting tension.

Let's look at the two component stanzas:

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.” 

Again, I find this use of dialogue in poetry delightfully strange. It goes without saying that art doesn't have to faithfully transcribe reality; it also goes without saying that most people do not speak in line breaks. (Sorry, Shakespeare.) So I find that the quotation marks in this poem generate a surprising amount of tension for me. We treat quotation marks as an attempt at faithful transcription, but I am hard pressed to find any person, living or dead, who casually speaks the phrase "my heart lies buried like something dead." Or maybe I've been having the wrong kinds of conversations with my friends. 

But then, that's how prose writers think about dialogue. In the same way that poetry frees language to accomplish new things, it also frees language's constituent parts. In other words, this is not a faithful transcription of an actual conversation, but a faithful transcription of the soul, if you'll allow me that abstraction.

With that lens, it is much easier to take seriously bit of dialogue in poetry. The speaker isn't hanging out in a bar being excessively sentimental or overwrought. If anything, the speaker isn't speaking from a concrete location, but rather from every corner of the city from which they want to disappear.

This makes the second stanza all the more interesting:

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Interesting, first, because the response is not in quotation marks. This leads me further to believe that this poem is a conversation with the self: the poem can better highlight an internal duality taking place, perhaps a conversation between the head (quoted) and heart (not). Also, while I try to refrain from seeing poems as inherently autobiographical, Cavafy often wrote about his own experiences being a gay man in Alexandria, the city he was born in, died in, and spent much of his life in. So this straining against the city only makes sense.

What a tough love stanza, huh? But I kind of love its intensity. I think that, when the land you inhabit shapes you, it becomes an extension of your body. Its scars are your scars; its streets a roadmap of your own sins. You can leave a place, but it doesn't leave you. The city that inhabits this speaker's subject inhabits them everywhere they go, and thus, destroyed anywhere, becomes destroyed everywhere.

Who hasn't wanted to change their lives by running away from where they live? Cavafy knew: the agony is not necessarily one of place, but one of self, which follows us everywhere we go.

Prompt

Write a poem that explores, at least partially through dialogue, two more opposing sides of an argument. Use dialogue to strike at the heart of something, and to expand or complicate the voice of the poem itself.

If you want to be concise, try writing this poem in the form of a sonnet, which often offers an argument, counterargument, and resolution.

Archive

Check out our full archive of prompts at the Poemancer website!