Turn! Turn! Turn!

On Writing and Teaching the Volta

A version of this essay was first presented at the 2026 AWP Conference as part of the panel, “Twist!: New Directions for Teaching Poetic Turns.”

Elizabeth Bishop famously said, “there’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet.” Honestly, I agree. Arranging words into various rhythms and patterns to reveal your innermost feelings is a luxury that feels almost absurd. And if you’re like me, writing rhymes about your dead father, you certainly aren’t playing it safe.

When I first began writing, I resisted this “embarrassment” by approaching poetry strictly as a series of craft choices, a puzzle to be solved. As a formalist poet who loves sonnets more than I love most people, I found the volta especially intriguing. Volta, the Italian word for “turn,” is defined as the turn of thought, argument, or tone. Crucial to sonnets (usually appearing in their final couplet or quatrain), it is the shift that surprises the reader. While I still insist that any effective poem, in any form, inevitably includes a volta, I’ve since realized that declaring it either an emotional strategy or a structural one is misguided. The two, whether we like it or not, intertwine.

The volta is when a poem stops protecting the speaker from what they already know. It isn’t an unpredictable confession or epiphany but the moment the poem’s journey reaches its intended end—surprising but earned, intense but rewarding. And yes, it can be really embarrassing.

In 2019, I was an MFA Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. For workshop, I once brought in a three-page disaster of a piece where the speaker describes everything except what she truly feels. During discussion, a friend blurted out, “Just say it already!” She was right. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to “just say it.” Poems, like life, resist uncomfortable admissions. That’s why the turn matters: it’s resistance giving way to revelation.

Take Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130.” Often taught as a primer in anti-Petrarchan realism, it’s also a master class in voltas that surprise and delight:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

For the first twelve lines, “Sonnet 130” is a litany of insults. Then, we get a mic drop of a couplet: the admission that, despite his beloved’s less than perfect qualities, the speaker is madly in love. This volta is deft because once the initial jolt wears off, we realize the sonnet’s conclusion makes perfect sense. The poem’s subject wouldn’t be the speaker’s mistress if he didn’t desire her, nor would she be the subject of the poem.

There’s a common misconception, especially among new poets, that a turn has to deliver a “gotcha!” moment. Most turns, though, are gradual, more like a winding road than a U-turn. A sonnet’s structure resembles a session with a skilled therapist: you arrive with a strict time limit—just fourteen lines—to explore the problem. You start noticing patterns (the rhymes), and if you drift (free verse), the form’s rigid rules drag you back on course. The volta is the therapist’s dreaded breakthrough question: “Well… do you think you feel that way because…?” or “But what if…?” This turn—the psychological pivot—is when the palpable unease must be addressed. Basically, it’s the elephant in the poem.

So where does pedagogy come in? In my teaching, I’ve observed that many students want to be seen but also want to hide. They perform on social media, but in the classroom, they often hesitate to speak to classmates. Similarly, their poems want to move but remain tethered, anxious about revealing too much.

One strategy I use is helping students locate what I call the poem’s “emotional center of gravity.” (I hear them groaning as I write this.) The emotional center of gravity is not the poem’s subject, but the lurking tension—a repeated image, a syntactic pattern, or a lingering phrase. Once we identify it, the poem becomes ready to face the consequences of that emotional investment.

Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” illustrates this beautifully:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. 

The turn’s casual delivery is devastating. Bishop seamlessly moves the reader from mundane examples of loss to the heaviness of grief. The poem’s structure mirrors its emotional arc: each stanza builds, rehearses, and accumulates before culminating in the final stanza. Because the “joking voice” is only slightly more intense than in the previous 15 lines, the final quatrain isn’t jarring; it is the speaker finally forcing herself (“Write it!”) to articulate what she’s thought all along.

The following exercises can help you or your students craft powerful voltas:

• The Protection Drop: Write a poem where the speaker seems totally “normal” for at least the first half. Then let one thing slip—maybe a brutally honest thought or a hidden fear. Afterwards, vanish. Poem over. Students love it because it’s a fantasy on paper: say something messy and leave, making the poem—and reader—deal with the wreckage.

• The Concessional Trap: Begin with a concessional opening—“It’s true that…,” “Of course…,” “Obviously…” After spending the first half agreeing, let certainty waver. Introduce a word or phrase like “actually” or “on the other hand.” The turn complicates the message, though it never contradicts it. It simply displays that reaching a destination can include detours.

• The Elsewhere Jump: This one is inspired by Linda Gregerson’s idea of “moving forward by going elsewhere.” Draft a poem until it feels complete, then delete the last third. (I never tell students in advance that they will delete anything!) From that point forward, make a change to the poem—such as a different tone, a different setting, or a different stance.
  

  Finally, my favorite:

• The Unlikable Turn: At least halfway through the poem, the speaker makes a questionable choice or reveals an honest feeling or belief that makes them less appealing. Avoid overexplaining—usually, the decision or feeling speaks for itself. Ironically, the readiness to be unlikeable tends to make the speaker more human and compelling.

Voltas prove that poetry, and life, are messy. When we embrace nuance and contradiction, we stop fearing and start embracing the turn. That willingness to remove the armor? That’s how great poets are made.

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Alexis Sears is the author of Out of Order, winner of the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and the Poetry by the Sea Book Award: Best Book of 2022, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize nominee. Her work appears in Best American Poetry and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Kenyon Review, she earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BA in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Southern California.