'Very Quietly, an Aside'

Reporters and their editors have always fetishized what’s known in the trade as the lede – the opening sentence or paragraph of a news story. The idea is to quickly grab the reader’s attention and, with luck, hold on to it. Subtlety is discouraged in journalism. There’s much competition among reporters to craft clever, catchy ledes. Some are paralyzed and unable to proceed with the rest of the story until they have come up with a good one. 

In 1985 I was hired by the Hearst-owned, now long-defunct Knickerbocker News, the p.m. paper in Albany, N.Y., to cover the cops-and-courts beat. One of the first stories I wrote was based on an interview with Sharon Komlos, an advocate for crime victims. The lede: “Sharon Komlos’ eyes are bright and blue and plastic.” In 1980, Komlos had been abducted, raped and shot in the head. The bullet left her blind and she wore prosthetic eyes. My editors loved it, played it as the banner story on A-1, and assured me I would survive my probation. In retrospect, it’s a little embarrassing, too cute for the subject matter.

 

Much attention is paid to the ledes of novels – “Call me Ishmael,” et al. – but I hadn’t thought much about the opening lines of poems. Howard Moss did, in the first in a series of columns he wrote for The American Poetry Review, in 1978:

 

“In my case, the first line of a poem is crucial and is usually the given thing that comes out of the blue without conscious maneuvering, when the mind is released from the habitual. Most often it comes when I am in motion, when no fixed mooring allows habit to keep from consciousness what the imagination may be evoking. I mean ‘motion’ literally: in subways, taxis, cars, buses, trains, planes, ships and in dreams, for I take dreams to be forms of transportation.”

 

Moss doesn’t fetishize the ledes of poems. In fact, he seems to shun the showy, self-regarding sort of lede:

 

“What does a first line do? It can seem to do nothing, be deceptive, like the beginnings of novels that are quiet, that do not arrest the attention very much, in which the lulling voice lures the reader on with a children's story told to a tea table, very quietly, an aside.”

 

[Howard Moss was born on this date, January 22, in 1922 and died in 1987 at age sixty-five after serving as poetry editor of The New Yorker for almost forty years. Also born on January 22 were Walter Raleigh (1552), Francis Bacon (1561), John Donne (1573) and Lord Byron (1788).]