Craft: Surprise

Bly, Dickinson, Armstrong/Hines, Keizan, Szymborska, "Home," "Scott Joplin"

One measure of a poem’s strength and effectiveness is to what degree it surprises. Poetry makes its meaning by balancing limits and possibilities, and when this balance is stretched, thwarted, pushed, or tightened, the surprise changes.

Carol Bly, the short story writer and essayist, uses surprise as the gulf separating the beginning writer from the expe…