Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : long poems (label : subject/long poems).
I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)
Related topics (there are many others):
American poetry, Dante, narrative, numerology, Stubborn Grew...
Showing posts with label WC Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WC Williams. Show all posts
5.24.2007
6.14.2005
Still reading the terrific book by Stephen Prickett, Words and The Word.
Following the various blog themes - lambasts of Poetry, calls for a new review locus (good idea). (Didn't Gary S. have that idea too?)
Often feel disconnected... realize how difficult it must be, sometimes, to get into my various hobbyhorses, hereabouts. Well, WCW said dissonance is where it becomes interesting (bad paraphrase of something in Paterson).
Following the various blog themes - lambasts of Poetry, calls for a new review locus (good idea). (Didn't Gary S. have that idea too?)
Often feel disconnected... realize how difficult it must be, sometimes, to get into my various hobbyhorses, hereabouts. Well, WCW said dissonance is where it becomes interesting (bad paraphrase of something in Paterson).
10.24.2004
The only & great battle in American art has always been between originality & tradition.
Maybe because America (USA) was the most successful & 1st really self-liberated colony.
This is probably why poetry in America has had so many problems. It wants to best the masters of the past, and at the same time it also wants to sing from the beginning of Time, from the veritable New World.
Thus we have TSE and WCW.
Stevens was probably the most intelligent & subtle of the 20th-cent Am. poets, because he took Keats as his model. Keats was the one who found a balance - an equilibrium - between tradition & origination; Keats was the one who bested Milton, not through Vision (Blake) & not through Wisdom (Wordsworth) but through sheer Lyric (music). & Keats wasn't even American!
Eliot was even more intelligent & subtle; but then Eliot was a professional literary man. Stevens was just an amateur.
Maybe because America (USA) was the most successful & 1st really self-liberated colony.
This is probably why poetry in America has had so many problems. It wants to best the masters of the past, and at the same time it also wants to sing from the beginning of Time, from the veritable New World.
Thus we have TSE and WCW.
Stevens was probably the most intelligent & subtle of the 20th-cent Am. poets, because he took Keats as his model. Keats was the one who found a balance - an equilibrium - between tradition & origination; Keats was the one who bested Milton, not through Vision (Blake) & not through Wisdom (Wordsworth) but through sheer Lyric (music). & Keats wasn't even American!
Eliot was even more intelligent & subtle; but then Eliot was a professional literary man. Stevens was just an amateur.
8.17.2004
Charles Olson started working on poetry after he dropped out of his job as apparatchik for Democratic Party, right? Or something like that. With a sense of disillusionment.
Someone could do a history poem (in Olson & WCW vein) based on investigations & juxtapositions of "democracy" as global phenomenon, as a project of states & multinational groupings - "democracy in Middle East/Asia/Africa/South America" etc. - juxtaposed, that is, with historical roots in New England local politics (sovereignty of the people out of village town meetings). What it all means to have a superpower on a democracy mission compared to the felt reality of actual civic life (what that used to mean, what it amounts to now).
(Been reading de Tocqueville lately.)
I might even try doing this myself, if you don't get there first.
Someone could do a history poem (in Olson & WCW vein) based on investigations & juxtapositions of "democracy" as global phenomenon, as a project of states & multinational groupings - "democracy in Middle East/Asia/Africa/South America" etc. - juxtaposed, that is, with historical roots in New England local politics (sovereignty of the people out of village town meetings). What it all means to have a superpower on a democracy mission compared to the felt reality of actual civic life (what that used to mean, what it amounts to now).
(Been reading de Tocqueville lately.)
I might even try doing this myself, if you don't get there first.
7.20.2004
Kent's take on the effect of WCW/Rakosi-style prosody (in his essay linked here yesterday) is the opposite of Mike's & New Formalist theory. Kent says that the unpredictability of same creates the possibility of clearer poetic perception, less mediated by ego or tradition. NF theory, as Mike has described it, holds that the metrical patterns & their variations help create the conditions for meaning to emerge.
These are basic 20th-cent. positions on the difference between free verse & metrical form. Pound sought to "break the pentameter", pushed for ideograms/imagism. Stevens, I think, used rhythm - with both free & metrical bases - as one facet of his own musicality (which also employs phonic values, repetition, fantastic vocabulary, and other means toward this end).
The idea that poetry fulfills its function by reflecting natural & divine order by means of measure & harmony is very olde. It hasn't gone away, either - witness the various theories promoting iambic pentameter as based on biology and natural form (cf. - for fun - Sir Thomas Browne's Garden of Cyrus for the prevalence of the number "5" in nature).
The general critical take on Modernism, though - reflected in Kent's analysis of Stevens - has been that this intellectual/artistic era had no faith in overarching order or natural harmony : rather, art imposed its autonomous orders as a guard or protest against the violence & chaos "outside".
So the free-verse/postmodern/(Taoist, Kent?) position faults metrical formalism on two counts: its idealism and its traditionalism. The idealism layers over nature with an imposed order; the traditionalism blocks innovation & new perception.
How to get beyond these (rather worn-out) dichotomies?
Rather than arguing that "there is no such thing as free verse", say : all verse is free.
How so? Verse is free in the sense that the poetic word can function as both music and anti-music, as order and disruption. Poetry can be song, but it is not only or necessarily song. Poetry can be the closest thing to a curse, or to silence itself.
I would say that the activity of the poet is essentially an orientation toward harmony. But harmony operates on more than one level : there is an intellectual as well as a sensible harmony, and sometimes the former counters, opposes, negates the latter; sometimes sensible harmony is configured ironically to veil a very different intellectual substance. Intellectual harmony is logical, reasonable, ethical : it may have formal or mathematical or aesthetic aspects - but these elements may be at work to break superficial or oppressive "harmonies" of "nature". It may be subversive in this sense.
Order, pattern, harmony - the interwoven wheels and forms and numbers of time & nature are irreducible facts. We take physical pleasure - perhaps even physical health - in the octave and the circle of fifths and the pythagorean triangle & the shapes and colors of leaves & sky & fresh air. But when Stevens, say, writes that "poetry is the sanction of life," I don't think he's granting poetry such prestige simply because of its ability to mimic or model the physical harmonies of nature. The freedom of the poet to find and articulate intellectual harmony - another name for it might be justice - functions at the active, living center of the purely aesthetic or natural harmonies.
So these general notions of the poet's role have some implications for prosody, perhaps. The sovereign freedom of the poetic word moves toward musical harmony or against it, at will.
The general ground I'm trying to sketch out here, though, doesn't support the arguments of the free verse wing any more than it does the New Formalist. I repeat my comment posted yesterday: the argument that WCW/Rakosi style imagism or impressionism allows nature or reality access to the poem, in a way that a more rhythmically-patterned prosody (such as some of Stevens') does not, avoids the whole issue of pattern and regularity and form in nature. The coherences of formal repetition in poetry can represent the fantastically interwoven coherences of natural ecology: the subsuming of line to stanza to poem can mirror the overlay of forces and powers which move through time and space, and also the overlay of themes and meanings which the poet wants to emphasize or interlace. These patterns have at least as much reality as the contingent perceptions of the romantic imagist.
These are basic 20th-cent. positions on the difference between free verse & metrical form. Pound sought to "break the pentameter", pushed for ideograms/imagism. Stevens, I think, used rhythm - with both free & metrical bases - as one facet of his own musicality (which also employs phonic values, repetition, fantastic vocabulary, and other means toward this end).
The idea that poetry fulfills its function by reflecting natural & divine order by means of measure & harmony is very olde. It hasn't gone away, either - witness the various theories promoting iambic pentameter as based on biology and natural form (cf. - for fun - Sir Thomas Browne's Garden of Cyrus for the prevalence of the number "5" in nature).
The general critical take on Modernism, though - reflected in Kent's analysis of Stevens - has been that this intellectual/artistic era had no faith in overarching order or natural harmony : rather, art imposed its autonomous orders as a guard or protest against the violence & chaos "outside".
So the free-verse/postmodern/(Taoist, Kent?) position faults metrical formalism on two counts: its idealism and its traditionalism. The idealism layers over nature with an imposed order; the traditionalism blocks innovation & new perception.
How to get beyond these (rather worn-out) dichotomies?
Rather than arguing that "there is no such thing as free verse", say : all verse is free.
How so? Verse is free in the sense that the poetic word can function as both music and anti-music, as order and disruption. Poetry can be song, but it is not only or necessarily song. Poetry can be the closest thing to a curse, or to silence itself.
I would say that the activity of the poet is essentially an orientation toward harmony. But harmony operates on more than one level : there is an intellectual as well as a sensible harmony, and sometimes the former counters, opposes, negates the latter; sometimes sensible harmony is configured ironically to veil a very different intellectual substance. Intellectual harmony is logical, reasonable, ethical : it may have formal or mathematical or aesthetic aspects - but these elements may be at work to break superficial or oppressive "harmonies" of "nature". It may be subversive in this sense.
Order, pattern, harmony - the interwoven wheels and forms and numbers of time & nature are irreducible facts. We take physical pleasure - perhaps even physical health - in the octave and the circle of fifths and the pythagorean triangle & the shapes and colors of leaves & sky & fresh air. But when Stevens, say, writes that "poetry is the sanction of life," I don't think he's granting poetry such prestige simply because of its ability to mimic or model the physical harmonies of nature. The freedom of the poet to find and articulate intellectual harmony - another name for it might be justice - functions at the active, living center of the purely aesthetic or natural harmonies.
So these general notions of the poet's role have some implications for prosody, perhaps. The sovereign freedom of the poetic word moves toward musical harmony or against it, at will.
The general ground I'm trying to sketch out here, though, doesn't support the arguments of the free verse wing any more than it does the New Formalist. I repeat my comment posted yesterday: the argument that WCW/Rakosi style imagism or impressionism allows nature or reality access to the poem, in a way that a more rhythmically-patterned prosody (such as some of Stevens') does not, avoids the whole issue of pattern and regularity and form in nature. The coherences of formal repetition in poetry can represent the fantastically interwoven coherences of natural ecology: the subsuming of line to stanza to poem can mirror the overlay of forces and powers which move through time and space, and also the overlay of themes and meanings which the poet wants to emphasize or interlace. These patterns have at least as much reality as the contingent perceptions of the romantic imagist.
2.18.2004
Curious affinities. I've never felt particularly affined with William Carlos Williams, but his long poem Paterson is echoed in my longy one in a couple places... first of all in his focus on Bruegel, & in particular the nativity painting (Adoration of the Kings), secondly in his poem's concluding focus on the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters Museum, in NY: I discovered in NY this weekend that one of the garden courts at the Cloisters is filled with statuary from Guillem-le-Desert, a remote monastery near Narbonne, in southern France. This monastery was founded by knight-turned-monk-become-saint Guillem de Gellone, or Guillem d'Orange, a hero in the cycle of early French chansons de geste, and one of my remote ancestors (one of Charlemagne's relatives and lieutenants, he is considered by at least one historian to be a descendant of Jews from Baghdad). Guillem figures strongly at the close of Forth of July; his saint's day coincides with the burial in RI of William Blackstone (5/28), the date on which the poem was finished.
Someday when I get my head together I will write an essay about the tradition of the long poem beginning with Whitman in relation to the notion of continuum, going back to the endless ring-structure of the Homeric cycles. Continuum and closure as two symbiotic principles, representing the traditional joining of "heaven & earth" or time & eternity, in the continuous Now of the poem. The unity of these two principles which the long poem, or Whitman's continuous single life-poem, represents.
Someday when I get my head together I will write an essay about the tradition of the long poem beginning with Whitman in relation to the notion of continuum, going back to the endless ring-structure of the Homeric cycles. Continuum and closure as two symbiotic principles, representing the traditional joining of "heaven & earth" or time & eternity, in the continuous Now of the poem. The unity of these two principles which the long poem, or Whitman's continuous single life-poem, represents.
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