Searching for Stakes in Poetry: The Electricity, The Bristle, The ‘So What?’
The staff at Split Lip Magazine have a very active Slack where we talk about everything from submissions to editing to staff victories to book recs to snacks. Sometimes we take turns asking a Monday morning question about writing, craft, or the creative life. Last week our EIC asked a question that provoked a lot of fascinating replies. We’ve been pondering the topic ever since and thought the larger Split Lip FAM of readers, submitters, and contributors might be interested in the conversation too. So we are posting it here to our blog. We hope you get something out of the discussion, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the question as well. Please send your comments to us on Twitter, Bluesky, or Instagram!
Question from Maureen Langloss: I’ve been spending a lot of time reading poetry submissions in our queue recently, and I notice many of you comment that a poem “lacks stakes.” I have a good sense of what this means in the context of fiction, but I’m curious what you poets consider stakes to mean. How do stakes apply to poetry? And how do you build stakes in your own work?
Replies:
Bleah Patterson: This is an amazing question that I think is helpful to think about and articulate. I think a poem can be fun to read and still have stakes. I don’t think it necessarily means it’s heavy. However, I think it means it’s resonant, unique, puts things into a new perspective. Rather than being a bit cliché, or saying something in a way we’ve all heard a lot before. Stakes for me means that there’s something to gain or lose, there’s a sense of learning something new, a new experience or a new reconciliation! In my own work, I think I try to do this with metaphor … if we can see and feel something in a way we never had before, it might raise the stakes of something—even cliché, even silly—anew.
Maureen: This is a great answer, Bleah! I especially love: stakes for me means that there’s something to gain or lose.
Ruth LeFaive: YES, Bleah and Maureen, “gain or lose” resonated for me too!
SG Huerta: I think some type of transformation or discovery has to happen in a poem for there to be stakes, whether it be big or small. When writing, I can sense a poem isn’t done if I don’t feel that moment of discovery. In a less vibey poetry answer, when reading in the memoir queue, it’s a little easier to pinpoint the stakes. Why do I care about this particular moment happening to this particular narrator, who is a complete stranger? What have they done with the language to make the reader care (or not care)?
Rita Mookerjee: LOL my team knows me way too well, I always reject low stakes work. My philosophy is that all good poems have high stakes. Many people will misunderstand this to mean that poetry must be about death, war, trauma, etc., but stakes can be deeply nuanced in poetry, veiled even. Take, for example, the Abbie Kiefer poem we published about the quilt on “Antiques Roadshow.” On the surface, it’s a rumination on a mundane object. Beneath the surface lives a commentary on US economics, class, gender norms, domesticity, home, kinship ties, and belonging. Sophisticated poems offer their stakes in ways that leave residue in your mind. This is why I hate most classic literature. British literature in particular has very low stakes. The cultural moment for pretty meditations on trees because they’re pretty is over. Raise the damn stakes!
Lucie Pereira: I’ve had English teachers who referred to the “so what?” of a piece; that’s what I think of as the stakes. When it comes to poetry, I might rephrase the “so what?” question as, “Does this piece have something to say that is larger than itself?”
Megan Neville: Years ago I was in a workshop taught by Solmaz Sharif, & she said, “Do your poems know that you will die?” That has stuck with me. It’s a definitive dividing line between poems that have stakes & poems that don’t.
Also, Lucie, your response makes me SO HAPPY bc I’m an English teacher, & I say “So what?” to my students more than any other phrase. Glad to know it’s not just dissipating out into the void!
Rita: WOW! SS is so brilliant, tysm, Megan, for sharing that. It’s so beautiful and brutal.
Avery Yoder-Wells: Oh this is so interesting!! I’ve been seeing those stakes notes [in our submissions queue] too. I always saw them on pieces that felt too…impersonal? The emotions never quite hit, for reasons that could be hard to explain.
I know a fair bit about fiction’s stakes (if you choose one action, what are the consequences? if you don’t, what are the consequences?) so I think without realizing I applied that logic to the turn or shift of a poem? ’cause I often approach poems looking for some shift that makes me end in a different place than I started. So for me maybe “stakes” are about the potential energy for that eventual act of change. What does the poem want to do or be? What change is bristling inside of it? And why did it start at a distance from what it becomes in the end—what is it afraid of?
Rita: BRISTLE!!! If more profs could see what Avery knows, we would have such beautiful art.
Nicole Byrne: Fully echoing the “so what?” here, as that’s what often jumps to my mind as well. Fearlessness is also something I associate with poems with high stakes. A comment I tend to write often is “feels like I’m being held at arm’s length,” which is basically my shorthand for I feel like this poem COULD have high/higher stakes, but that the writer/poem is afraid to face them at this time.
Daniel Garcia: Thanks for posing this question, Maureen; I’ve been thinking about it for hours!! Others have said this in ways better than I will, and this is a bit of a leap that I’ll do my best to neatly tie together, but a thing I come back to often when I’m thinking about stakes within poems is actually a concept within essays/creative nonfiction that I refer to as insight. I’m glossing over things, but basically, insight is the “what do I want to say about this thing/experience” factor; the moment of wisdom that’s been gleaned after reflecting on the thing/experience. Obviously, a poem doesn’t necessarily have to come away with a sense of wisdom or whatever, though I suppose many poems do such a thing (there’s so much overlap between poems and essays lol), but insight, imo, is tied to a discovery inside the work; an unveiling of sorts. The stakes are, I think, one of the things that help the reader get to the insight, to the thing a poem wants to say about itself.
Jennifer S. Cheng has a line I return to often: “We are, if anything, in tension.” And I don’t necessarily mean tension in the way we think of it (as in, say, narrative prose; material, concrete conflict), but the undercurrent that propels the piece forward, the electricity; the thing that keeps the lights on as the poem discusses/works through things. The occasion, you know? The “so what?” factor that was mentioned earlier, yes, but I think, at least for me, it’s the enticing thing, the thing which keeps drawing my eye back in again and again. Almost like the throughline but not quite. A loose kind of metaphysical transit in which language is the operative vehicle. This is getting too metaphorical, but maybe what I’m saying is, the stakes are where the possibility inside the work li[v]es, the upcoming forecast—cloudy with a chance of transformation.