second ending

When the poem ends on an expected note, try adding just one more line but one that comes to rest at a slight angle to what was said before.

Example from the ending of Al Purdy’s “"The Last Picture in the World”:

            almost sculpture
   except that it's alive
   brooding immobile permanent
   for half an hour
   a blue heron
   and it occurs to me
   that if I were to die at this moment
   that picture would accompany me
   wherever I am going
   for part of the way

Notice how easily the poet may have settled for the ending “wherever I am going,” but the addition of the phrase “for part of the way,” undercuts the certainty and leaves the poem in a less measurable state.

slight angle to universe

They turn and see a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe…He may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve, a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. Sometimes the sentence is finished in the street, sometimes the traffic murders it, sometimes it lasts into the flat. It deals with the tricky behavior of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or George Eliot, or with the dialects of the interior of a Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet…

E. M. Forster’s description of C. P. Cavafy, related in Marguerite Yourcenar’s “A Critical Introduction to Cavafy,” The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984)

odd angle

Critic, see it slant.

perspective

The commonplace observed closely from an odd angle.