The Hammer Test

The Hammer Test: What Happens When a Poem Rings Hollow?

“I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.”

That’s a saying often attributed to John Ashbery. He never actually said it except when quoting the poet Robert Duncan, who offered the words in praise of Ashbery’s poem Spring Day:

“I have read your poem and I tapped it all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.”

Ashbery understood Duncan to mean that the poem held together with structural integrity – each part doing its work, nothing ornamental or weak. Ashbery went on to say that this solidity did not contradict the sense of spaciousness other readers found in the poem. A poem, he suggested, could be both fully “filled in” and still allow room for readerly interpretation.

The metaphor comes from the railway. Before electronic diagnostics, railway workers tested the integrity of carriage wheels and engine parts by tapping them with hammers. A cracked wheel or bearing would emit a different sound – deadened, off-pitch. The ear was the judge of fitness.

When I think of Duncan’s “hammer test” and apply it to a poem, I’m not thinking about surface smoothness or polish. I’m thinking of weight-bearing honesty. 

Does the poem ring true when tapped? Or does it betray a hollow place – a false note, a cloying sentiment, a factual untruth? Something borrowed, ill-fitting, emotionally insincere, or performative?

In commemorative poetry, where emotion meets history, hollow places matter more than ever.

I came across a commemorative poem recently – well-intentioned but weakened by precisely these faults. It was about airmen buried in a war cemetery. Under the tap of the hammer, the hollowness began to show. I’m not going to name the poem or the poet because for all its faults it’s a lot better than all the poems I have published (none).

Factual Errors That Undermine Authority

First, the poet gets the name of the plane wrong. He says the entire crew of three lie side by side and names a bomber which anyone with a passing knowledge of WW2 aircraft would know is incorrect. This is not a minor detail – it’s a different plane entirely, with a smaller crew, a different operational role, and a different symbolic weight in the British war imagination.

The misidentification is a petty detail, but why get something wrong that is so easily checked? It suggests the poet didn’t take the time to confirm the most basic facts about these men.

The poet calls the cemetery ‘unvisited’. It’s a CWGC site: meticulously maintained, routinely honoured. This isn’t poetic license – it’s just lazy. The poet conjures isolation because it suits the mood, not because it reflects reality.

The poem refers to their mothers of the English shires. This strikes a nice sentimental tone to go with other hackneyed atmospheric details of the poem. A little research would have honored the particularity of these men and their families. Instead, we’re offered a cliché of sacrifice – an off-the-shelf version of Englishness, not the specific lives of three young airmen.

I know all this because the poem provided sufficient specificity to check the actual record – the names of the fliers, their graves, their parents, home towns, the cemetery, their service record, and airfield base in Norfolk, as well as the account of that final flight. It’s a simple thing these days to check that level of detail. 

Virtue Posing, Borrowed Sentiment, and Hollow Places

These factual slips signal a deeper flaw: the tone of borrowed grief that feels secondhand. We are given gestures of remembrance -but not the felt weight of mourning.

It’s not that the poet doesn’t mean well. It’s that the emotion has been pre-shaped by tired tropes that recycle the language and experience of others. 

There’s also a telling contrast at the end of the poem. It shares the headstone inscription on one of the graves.

It is simple, heartfelt, and it cuts deeper than anything else in the poem. The words belong to a grieving parent. In the context of the poem’s earlier missteps – the wrong plane, the wrong locations, the falsely sentimental tone – they read like a voice of truth breaking through. They are moving precisely because they are personal, and grounded. The grief has weight. It does not perform.

Factual precision is not pedantry in such a context – it is respect.

Wheeltappers and Testers

Duncan’s metaphor – tapping a poem like a railway worker taps a wheel – belongs to a specific world. Wheeltappers were railwaymen whose job was to check for internal faults. A cracked wheel gives off a duller tone than a sound one. If you’ve ever watched old railway footage, you’ll have seen them with their long-handled hammers walking the length of the train tapping as they go.

This led me on a delightful side trip to the world of steam when anyone who travelled by train could see the wheeltapper at work on the station sidings and tracks. I’ll save that for the next post. 

The Metaphor

The  work of the wheeltapper is mostly obsolete now, overtaken by technology. But the metaphor survives.

Like the wheel of a train, a poem should be solid all through – no cracks, no bluff, no borrowed weight.

And that’s what the hammer test demands of poetry: not elegance or performance, but truth. 

So, back to Ashbery. Does Spring Day hold up under pressure as Duncan claimed? It’s a poem of meander and mood, yes – but is its structure sound? Are there any false notes or unnecessary flourishes? Read it and judge for yourself.

The only version I found online is at The Paris Review, partly behind a paywall—and it includes a typo in line 9 (“form” instead of “from”). That’s not a hollow place, just a copyeditor’s slip.

Fortunately, the original version appears in The Double Dream of Spring, which is available through the Open Library. You can read it there or here and decide for yourself whether it passes the hammer test.

And then this morning the Daily Poem from The Paris Review delivered this by Joe Brainard to my mailbox. 

The Outer Banks

   Those silly seagulls up in the sky over there remind me of

   A particular local postcard of many seagulls in the sky that
could go on and on forever were it not for the edges

   Reminds me of a particular Southampton postcard of a
seagull soaring high: the only Southampton postcard
simplistic enough to be commanding enough to survive the
horrors of photo-chrome technicolor

   Reminds me of you—Jimmy—out in Southampton in the
big Porter house in your little room of many books it takes
game board strategy to relocate now, as then

   Until recovering the wild flowers on the wall paper peeling
off the long narrow corridor that leads right up to your door

It is not closed
Upon your window of green
“In” from the yard
Of the sick tree
In so many paintings
By Fairfield Porter

   That was the summer of … not knowing how many years
ago is just how it ought to be remembered, if just because it is.

Out trekking up South Main Street
You are:
A pair of thick white legs
Sporting Bermuda shorts
(Of a most unusual length)
And plain blue sneakers so “you”
They are.

   That was the summer of Campari and
Sodas … remember?

Out trekking up South Main Street
In the pattern of the leaves
From the shade of the trees
That align South Main Street
Most daily is us:
Trekking up South Main Street
On our way to the drug store
With all the sunglasses
On racks that whirl so fast
Where you got your newspapers from
Where I got magazines from
Where we both got our seagull postcards from
To send to each other, mostly
When in the future(s) apart.

   And remember the store on the corner with all those plain
—(the kind of plain you pay for)—English sweaters of every
imaginable color that—surely—any respectable movie star
would have a whole walk-in closet full of, that we bought a
few from too?

Or if but two
Baby blue, I see for you
And raspberry sherbet, for me
(Easier to buy than to wear)
Especially when thrown over the shoulders
Like “they” did
With no socks on
In Italian loafers
(If money can buy such nice ankles: where?)
With sunglasses up in their hair?

“Ah, the good old days!”

If gobbled then—digested now.
(Clarified by time—romanticized by mind)
For today’s re-past re-visited.

Out along these outer banks
Of North Carolina for no reason what-so-ever
Except “ocean.”

Featured image: 1930s Greetings from Southampton Long Island New York NY Seagulls Linen Postcard