Craft Exercise: Switching Places

With a look at 'How it will end' by Denise Duhamel

A slightly longer poem today, and one who’s length is rich with depth. In poetry there’s a lot of conversation and advice around condensing lines and description so a poem becomes concentrated with images and meaning, no words or space that aren’t actively doing hard work for the poem as a whole unit of meaning or exploration. This can be difficult to sustain over longer pieces, but Duhamel does it well here, using the length to her advantage for worldbuilding and bringing the reader into both the action and conversation as it plays out across the poems layers. I’d be interested to see how long her original drafts were, whether they grew in length as she discovered what needed adding or diminished as that concision was whittled in.

This poem is immersive, keeping you actively engaged through each of the progressions of its four main characters: the speaker and her husband, and the lifeguard and his girlfriend. Part of this, I think, is that just like the speaker and her husband we’re enjoying the opportunity to eavesdrop, we want to sit on the bench and see how it will end as well. Duhamel’s opening two lines place us directly into a scene (in medias res for those who’ve also studied prose) ‘We’re walking on the boardwalk / but stop when we see a lifeguard and his girlfriend’. The ‘We’ is both immediate and inclusive, even though it’s the speaker and her husband in that moment it’s also us, the readers, we are the ‘we’, we are walking on the boardwalk too. The language here is wonderfully simple, Duhamel isn’t dressing it up with extra observations about the boardwalk or the weather or anything anyone’s wearing, there are few adjectives, metaphors, or similes, just plain direct language that brings us straight into a world. This is maintained throughout, a dexterity of action-description that’s almost more akin to storytelling. None of the sentences are overly long or complex, and notice how each line is a unit of sense, even when there’s enjambment. It’s an exercise in precision: each description is precise, unambiguous, which is important given the switch that takes place.

Read the poem carefully, when are the speaker and her husband no longer talking only about the lifeguard and his girlfriend, can you pinpoint the exact moment?

I was introduced to this poem some years ago while taking a poetry class in the States and it’s stuck with me since. Our focus then was on the use of dialogue and speech marks in poems, and I want to explore that here because a huge element of this poem’s strength lies in its dialogue. I think speech in poems can be a really powerful enrichment tool when done well; it gives the option of adding layers through the inclusion of input from a secondary consciousness (one beyond the poet or speaker), and whether this is in juxtaposition with another element of the poem or in accord it adds depth and complexity.

In Duhamel’s poem the dialogue is not only seamless but integral, and she uses it beautifully to enact the place switching that makes this such a multi-faceted piece, because it’s through listening in on the speaker and her husband’s conversation - a conversation we’d never normally be able to hear - that we understand more deeply the reality of their inner world. Hearing this and realising at some point it’s stopped being about the lifeguard and his girlfriend and become about the speaker and her husband incites a feeling of stillness, of having uncovered something secret, something that not just we the readers weren’t supposed to see but that perhaps the couple themselves hadn’t wanted to look at. Imagine this were told in a different way. Duhamel could have written the poem from the speaker’s singular perspective, providing some inner monologue that arose in conjunction with detailed image description of witnessing the lifeguard and his girlfriend, and perhaps some memory allusions to recent arguments she’s had with her husband. This would be a very different poem. It could be equally as wonderful, equally as powerful, but it would be so in a different way. There’s a quality of truth in how the couple begin by witnessing the argument, how they recognise something in it and want to engage with it, how through the process of discussing it they find themselves in it and then become embroiled in it, that speaks to reality. People hide truths from themselves all the time, and here is a moment of realisation: they recognise themselves. This recognition of the self in something seen beyond the self can be a powerful tool for self-realisation, allowing us to confront things we’ve perhaps been avoiding. When the lifeguard and his girlfriend make up and disappear the speaker and her husband are left in the uncomfortable light of their own knowing, the aloneness of that final line places them in consciousness of themselves, what they can no longer project onto someone else but must face in themselves. The question hanging at the end is ‘will they do so?’

The last thing I’d like to touch on briefly is how the space afforded by the length of this poem allows us to cross a vast amount of time. During the literal time of the poem two arguments take place and we are allowed to sit within them over the course of several lines, but in understanding the depth and breadth of the speaker and her husband’s argument we are also being invited into a much wider timescape. Their argument has been taking place, in one form or another, for far longer than the 20 or 30 minutes they’re sat on the boardwalk, perhaps spanning years. This increased timeline affords the poem an even greater depth, and the speaker and her husband’s realisation an even greater weight. The lifeguard and his girlfriend’s argument occurred and then passed, we are given the impression neither are holding onto the angst but have dropped it in favour of love and forgiveness. How much have the speaker and her husband held on to over the years? What can they drop, what will they continue to carry?

How It Will End
Denise Duhamel

We’re walking on the boardwalk
but stop when we see a lifeguard and his girlfriend
fighting. We can’t hear what they’re saying,
but it is as good as a movie. We sit on a bench to find out
how it will end. I can tell by her body language
he’s done something really bad. She stands at the bottom
of the ramp that leads to his hut. He tries to walk halfway down
to meet her, but she keeps signalling don’t come closer.
My husband says, “Boy, he’s sure in for it,”
and I say, “He deserves whatever’s coming to him.”
My husband thinks the lifeguard’s cheated, but I think
she’s sick of him only working part time
or maybe he forgot to put the rent in the mail.
The lifeguard tries to reach out
and she holds her hand like Diana Ross
when she performed “Stop in the Name of Love.”
The red flag that slaps against his station means strong currents.
“She has to just get it out of her system,”
my husband laughs, but I’m not laughing.
I start to coach the girl to leave her no-good lifeguard,
but my husband predicts she’ll never leave.
I’m angry at him for seeing glee in their situation
and say, “That’s your problem—you think every fight
is funny. You never take her seriously,” and he says,
“You never even give the guy a chance and you’re always nagging,
so how can he tell the real issues from the nitpicking?”
and I say, “She doesn’t nitpick!” and he says, “Oh really?
Maybe he should start recording her tirades,” and I say,
“Maybe he should help out more,” and he says,
“Maybe she should be more supportive,” and I say,
“Do you mean supportive or do you mean support him?”
and my husband says that he’s doing the best he can,
that’s he’s a lifeguard for Christ’s sake, and I say
that her job is much harder, that she’s a waitress
who works nights carrying heavy trays and is hit on all the time
by creepy tourists and he just sits there most days napping
and listening to “Power 96” and then ooh
he gets to be the big hero blowing his whistle
and running into the water to save beach bunnies who flatter him,
and my husband says it’s not as though she’s Miss Innocence
and what about the way she flirts, giving free refills
when her boss isn’t looking or cutting extra large pieces of pie
to get bigger tips, oh no she wouldn’t do that because she’s a saint
and he’s the devil, and I say, “I don’t know why you can’t just admit
he’s a jerk,” and my husband says, “I don’t know why you can’t admit
she’s a killjoy,” and then out of the blue the couple is making up.
The red flag flutters, then hangs limp.
She has her arms around his neck and is crying into his shoulder.
He whisks her up into his hut. We look around, but no one is watching us.

Craft Exercises