Taking a “Turn”: what a turn is and why your poems need one
This article is for: Beginners and Intermediate poets
Sometimes in my feedback to poets, whether that’s in Poetry Parlor or in my one-on-one work, I talk about adding “an extra dimension” to a poem.
Which roughly means, adding something to a poem so that it has more than one level, and makes readers think, imagine, and feel in ways that they might not have expected when they first entered the poem.
Or to put it another way, the poem does more than just follow one track or idea in much the same way throughout.
Instead it changes somewhere, and surprises its readers.
Adding these extra elements to a poem that previously had one main focus or direction tends to make it richer, deeper, and more satisfying—for you, as well as for the reader!
And one great way to do that in any poem is to add what’s called a “turn.”
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What is a turn?
“Turn” is one piece of poetic terminology that actually makes ordinary sense! Because:
A “turn” is any significant shift in direction within a poem.
(And before we go any further, I’ll just note that another word for a turn is a “volta.” This usually applies more to sonnets, but it’s the same thing.)
Turns can take many forms. Sometimes you’ll see them more narrowly defined as a change of thought or emotion, but I think of them as any place where the reader registers a really significant alteration.
So, turns can happen when the poem changes:
Thought or idea
Topic
Feeling/Mood
Voice
Style of imagery
“Strategy” (I’ll explain this later)
Form.
As we’ll see soon, turns can occur anywhere in a poem, but they are especially common in endings.
Indeed, many poem endings only work because they are turns!
A change of direction can be a great way to introduce something that resolves the problems and ideas introduced earlier in a poem, and signal to the reader that they should expect things to wrap up soon.
In fact, I’d be astonished if you yourself haven’t written several poems that use turns to make their endings work. Any poem that ends with a surprise, or a new thought, ends with a turn.
But as I said, they can also occur anywhere; and they don’t all have to be about a new idea.
So for the rest of this article, I want to show you how a few poets use turns, to give you some idea of the range of possibilities for your own poetry.
Turn and turn about: Louise Glück
I’m starting with a poem that seems to me to be made of turns.
The poem is “The Past,” from Faithful and Virtuous Night, which won the US National Book award for poetry in 2014, and which I highly recommend.
I’m going to quote bits of it, but you can read the whole poem here.
For the first two stanzas, this poem appears to be a nice but unexciting descriptive piece about seeing a “Small light in the sky” through “two pine boughs,” whose “fine needles” are “etched” onto the sky.
It’s well done—I particularly like the image “high, feathery heaven”—but not earth-shattering. Had Glück continued doing this depiction of nature, the poem might have ended up as a pleasant, skilled, but relatively ordinary evocation of the natural world.
However, Glück does not do ordinary!
So already at stanza 3 she introduces a turn.
First, she begins the stanza with “Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine.”
You might ask, How is this a turn? The rest of the stanza still talks about trees, which were in stanzas 1 and 2, so isn’t it the same thing?
But I’d say it is a turn for two reasons:
First, she introduces us, the reader, into the scene.
Did you notice that “Smell the air” is a command? She’s telling someone to take a big sniff—and there’s no one else in the poem, so she means us—you! In the first two stanzas, you were given no idea you were meant to be in this place yourself, seeing and hearing it directly.
So this is a change, and a surprise—definitely what I’d call a turn.
Second, in this stanza the poem changes its form and syntax, and hence its voice.
In stanzas 1 and 2, Glück uses fairly short lines with precise description of individual details. This gives an impression of almost pedantic desire to capture and record the scene minutely.
But in stanza 3, the lines are noticeable longer, and moreover all much the same length, and the sentence correspondingly expands to become more wordy, more conversational, in the way it describes the smell and sound: “like the sound of the wind in a movie,” for example.
So the poem begins to read differently—faster, more fluid. And this makes us hear a different voice—someone more open and more casual seems to be speaking than in the first two stanzas.
All of these are also changes, and also therefore part of the turn.
And Glück is not done yet.
Arguably, both stanza 4 and stanza 5 are also themselves mini-turns:
Stanza 4 starts with an abrupt shift: “Shadows moving.” This is not only a much shorter sentence than we were in as we read stanza 3, but also taking us to a new topic: from sound back to vision. Then there’s another relatively short sentence afterward, apparently confirming the alteration in syntax and voice…
…Except that at the end of stanza 4, the sentence again expands and begins to flow, getting ready for the same trick to happen at the start of stanza 5: another change of gear back to a very short sentence, and another shift from sound to sight.
So she has “turned” us three times already!
I think the effect of this is to bring us deeper into the experience of being “in” the scene, as we seem to experience a mind noticing something in the world around it (like the shadows), then wandering off somewhat (to the longer sentences), then snapping back to a focus on the scene again.
And she’s still got more…
Stanza 5 appears to stop messing us up, by being consistent at last—going back to the shorter lines and more finicky details of stanzas 1 and 2.
But then Glück hits us with a big double whammy.
Stanza 6 comes as a shock, when the speaker suddenly quotes herself.
The first line reads, “Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine”— exactly the same as the first line of stanza 2, only this time, in italics!
This is unexpected, and is what I’d call a turn of strategy: a tool or approach coming into the poem that hasn’t been used before.
As if that’s not enough by itself, we then get yet another turn in stanza 7.
Here we learn that the words in italics, were actually us hearing “my mother’s voice”—i.e. the speaker’s mother, who was not present in the poem before now, and whom we had no earthly reason to think we might be hearing when we first read stanza 6!
So the poem seems to expand in time, as the single, precise moment that we started in reaches backwards to encompass memories of an older generation—and moreover, to make us feel we’re sharing those memories, that we never had!
This is what I mean by turns adding dimensions!
Glück’s poem, that looked a little pedestrian to start with, has now suddenly become profound and moving in a way that I personally find astonishing. All thanks to its turns, which first of all brought us into the moment, and then took us into the memories.
And that’s not even counting the turns at the ending…
Where she does it to us again: in the space of a line, that intense moment of memory sharing is pulled away from us, as the mother’s voice becomes “only the sound the trees make”…
And then there’s the mysterious couplet, that introduces for the first time the idea of “passing through nothing.” On one level, this surely refers to the mother, who is presumably dead; but on another level, I find this unresolvably mysterious, and yet also very satisfying. It has nothing to do with the rest of the poem, and yet somehow it’s the perfect place to land.
And notice how easy it would have been for Glück to leave out that final turn.
Most of us, including me, would surely have stopped at:
or is it only the sound the trees make
when the air passes through them
which I think is an OK ending, but not a brilliant one. Glück, however, knew better—and skills like that, folks, are why she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020!
And this poem is a great lesson in how multiple turns can be quite spectacular.
Two more turns
That took a while, so I shall quickly add two more examples.
A turn to end: Philip Larkin
Larkin’s poem “The Winter Palace” is an example of a turn used to create an ending. But what makes it interesting, I think, is that the turn is a change not of ideas, but of tone and imagery. (The whole poem is here.)
The poem starts sardonically, and with an almost provocative determination to sound nothing like “poetry”:
Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.
The language is colloquial, and even the rhymes seem almost accidental. Moreover, there are almost no images, other than conventional ones like “cold shoulder.”
For five of the poem’s six stanzas, this continues, right down to
It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.
The turn comes in the final stanza, where that tone and lack of imagery change.
The topic doesn’t alter: the poem ends with the logical conclusion of its main idea, about losing knowledge in later life. But the voice suddenly sounds sober, serious, sad, and we get the poem’s only real image, the mind that “fold[s] into itself”:
Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.
This final image of complete blankness, taken with the falling cadences of both lines, “turns” the poem into a profundity that it had previously eschewed, and gives it an extra dimension.
A mysterious turn: Elizabeth Bishop
Lastly, a very quick mention of Bishop’s brilliant poem, “The Moose.” This one is long, but you can read it here. If you’ve never read it, I envy you—go look it up now!
Then come back when you’re done, because I’m going to spoil it…
One of the things I find fascinating about “The Moose” is the final turn.
The poem is a long, brilliant (did I mention it’s brilliant?) evocation of a bus journey among small towns and villages on the coast neat Boston. Most of the time it gives (brilliantly!) the physical details of the trip. One turn comes when the topic shifts to “a gentle, auditory, / slow hallucination,” where the passengers half-imagine and half-dream that they hear the voices of their parents and grandparents. This turn gives the poem emotional depth, as the speaker uses it to ruminate (brilliantly, of course) on the nature of life and death.
But the main turn of the poem is the moose of the title, which appears on the road in front of the bus, causing it to stop.
The moose is clearly important: the poem is titled after it, and it gets six whole stanzas to itself. And the moose is clearly a turn, since it unexpectedly changes the topic of the poem, as well as shaking the passengers on the bus out of their reverie.
But why does the moose matter? The ending doesn’t say.
The bus simply drives off, leaving “a dim/smell of moose, an acrid / smell of gasoline.”
I’ve spent years in awe of this poem, and I still don’t know what the moose means. And perhaps this is part of what keeps me coming back to it:
The turn tells me that there is some significance to the moose, but the poem also preserves its enigma, and hence its fascination.
Next Steps: Your “Turn”!
Use the turn to enliven a flat poem.
First, you need good mental readiness. So do a little freewriting or clustering—just to get your mind used to linking ideas together in unexpected ways.
Choose a poem of yours that is not taking off. One that you’re convinced ought to work great, but just isn’t yet.
Print it out.
Read the poem slowly. As you do so, look for places where what you’ve written in the poem jogs some other topic or idea into your mind.
Maybe this is a memory, a person, or a fantasy. Or maybe it’s something else!
Whatever it is, jot it down in the margin of the poem, next to what made you think of it.Choose a small number of these extra topics, and expand them.
Make some notes on it, or even better, freewite on it.Now introduce something new into the poem.
Using your notes and ideas, make the poem go in a new direction at some point—or maybe more than one!
These new ideas are your “turns.”
