This unknown recommends Oblivion, a book of essays by Donald Justice (publ. in 1998). Should be a benchmark, lighthouse, guidebook.
In an essay on metrics, he debunks the notion that meters have some kind of organic basis (breathing, circadian rhythms, etc.). He offers a very persuasive (to me) interpretation of the paradoxical (subsidiary, understated) role they play, in the process of hammering together a memorious art work.
In a subtle essay on Baudelaire and "sincerity", written in 1957, he undermines the rationale for confessionalism - just a few years before that movement burst on the scene.
In an essay on Stevens' meters, he gives a sparkling mini-course on the "Imagist moment", followed by a discerning analysis of the pentameter background in Stevens, & what he did with it.
I'm loving this book.
Showing posts with label metrics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metrics. Show all posts
4.21.2006
2.02.2005
[Decided to take this out of the wee comment box & post it here:]
I would like to add, that all this is not to say that there isn't musicality & performative strangeness in free verse & prose poetry, too.
But there is something ancient, powerful & uncanny in a line of verse. "The lion sleeps on its paws./It can kill a man." Prose poetry & all the music of poetry stems historically from verse measure itself, the limping foot of Dionysius.
I would like to add, that all this is not to say that there isn't musicality & performative strangeness in free verse & prose poetry, too.
But there is something ancient, powerful & uncanny in a line of verse. "The lion sleeps on its paws./It can kill a man." Prose poetry & all the music of poetry stems historically from verse measure itself, the limping foot of Dionysius.
10.22.2004
Schtick (impersonations) perhaps a sub-kitty of parody. & parody a big part of imitation, of listening & re-doing. Getting this from study of Russian metrical forms, how they migrate & transmogrify through particular poems (Michael Wachtel, Development of Russian Verse, Cambridge UP 1998). (Looking at how painters take from other painters illuminates what poets do, sometimes.)
I don't agree with Rasula, here (today). We are not simply a-swim in language. Feel very strongly about the pre-verbalized gesture, the motive, which in-forms & flavors the actual compost. & this has to do with theme & purpose, which are trans-literary (in the sense I suggested a couple days ago speaking of "cultural politics"). But I like the last paragraph & its question in Hotel post of today.
I don't agree with Rasula, here (today). We are not simply a-swim in language. Feel very strongly about the pre-verbalized gesture, the motive, which in-forms & flavors the actual compost. & this has to do with theme & purpose, which are trans-literary (in the sense I suggested a couple days ago speaking of "cultural politics"). But I like the last paragraph & its question in Hotel post of today.
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.
7.16.2004
My two half-beats toward the prosody discussion:
read an interesting book once by David Keppel-Jones, The Strict Metrical Tradition. Focusing only on iambic pentameter, he describes very specific innovations, starting with Spenser, through Matthew Arnold, which made it the powerful mode it was.
But every era in language & poetry develops its own approaches to rhythm. I don't think the special pleading for form or freedom really helps much. The formalists have done a service by keeping the issue alive at all; but it seems like there may be a fundamental misprision in taking prosodic analysis (which is always belated) and applying it prescriptively to the craft itself. Even the particular innovations outlined by Keppel-Jones grew out of a specific literary milieu, which is not our milieu today.
I have no problem with Mike's promotion of accentual-syllabic practice; if he can help bring it back into circulation, all power to him. But the claims that it is better than free verse, that free verse can't express meaning as well (because it doesn't have a pattern against which to project variations) - this seems needlessly categorical. A milieu that supports both approaches is the one most able to generate new rhythmic discoveries and capabilities.
In my own poetry, I've counted beats and not counted beats; I've worked within set patterns (both given forms & ones I've invented), and not. Everyone has their own distinctive feel for rhythm. When I think of how I work, it seems to me that I revise a poem intuitively until it has a requisite smoothness or "elegance" according to my own standards; I focus on sound values per se and on the symbolic (mathematical) values of line-count and stanza forms, while at the same time aiming for a rhythm which is not clumsy, jarring, perfunctory or seemingly random. What I dislike more than almost anything in the poetry I read, is the sort of casual lineation - line-breaks which simply chop up the sentence any old way. This lazy practice makes for very dull reading. Rhyme, for me, adds interest and tension to line-breaks.
read an interesting book once by David Keppel-Jones, The Strict Metrical Tradition. Focusing only on iambic pentameter, he describes very specific innovations, starting with Spenser, through Matthew Arnold, which made it the powerful mode it was.
But every era in language & poetry develops its own approaches to rhythm. I don't think the special pleading for form or freedom really helps much. The formalists have done a service by keeping the issue alive at all; but it seems like there may be a fundamental misprision in taking prosodic analysis (which is always belated) and applying it prescriptively to the craft itself. Even the particular innovations outlined by Keppel-Jones grew out of a specific literary milieu, which is not our milieu today.
I have no problem with Mike's promotion of accentual-syllabic practice; if he can help bring it back into circulation, all power to him. But the claims that it is better than free verse, that free verse can't express meaning as well (because it doesn't have a pattern against which to project variations) - this seems needlessly categorical. A milieu that supports both approaches is the one most able to generate new rhythmic discoveries and capabilities.
In my own poetry, I've counted beats and not counted beats; I've worked within set patterns (both given forms & ones I've invented), and not. Everyone has their own distinctive feel for rhythm. When I think of how I work, it seems to me that I revise a poem intuitively until it has a requisite smoothness or "elegance" according to my own standards; I focus on sound values per se and on the symbolic (mathematical) values of line-count and stanza forms, while at the same time aiming for a rhythm which is not clumsy, jarring, perfunctory or seemingly random. What I dislike more than almost anything in the poetry I read, is the sort of casual lineation - line-breaks which simply chop up the sentence any old way. This lazy practice makes for very dull reading. Rhyme, for me, adds interest and tension to line-breaks.
6.11.2004
poleRon's complex counter-polemic (in post of today, 6.11) to the New Formalist polemics of Steele & Schreiber, attacks the latter's oversimplifications of literary history and 20th-century practice. However, the elaborate model of prosody Ron builds & defends here (via Zukofsky et al.), combining language/music/speech/writing, etc. in different permutations, serves to obscure one basic point made by Schreiber:
"Phrasing in music works in relation to the beat, not as a substitute for it."
This is a legitimate criticism - offered perhaps most strongly (& originally) by Robert Frost - to the Poundian nostrum of "composition by musical phrase". The correlation of meter & phrase, or speech pattern, is not simply part of the toolbox of optional traditionalist techniques. It is a basic aspect of poetry, and as such, serves as a kind of grounding for creative experiments of all kinds. To deny or minimize this both rules out vast fields of poetic enterprise, past and future, and distorts the evidence of 20th-cent. literary history.
The synthesis of rhythm and phrasing is one element of the overall harmonics to which composition aspires. It can be found in some of the most memorable passages of Pound & Eliot (Annie Finch's "ghost of meter", for example in the contrast of pentameter lines with trochaic beat of parts of the Cantos, or the hidden metrical forms planted in Four Quartets). The same synthesis was worked out more thoroughly and paradigmatically, if not always successfully, by Hart Crane. Crane again and again trumps these distinctions between free & metrical verse, between modernist innovation and traditional forms. Wallace Stevens, too, in his own less emphatic way, melded pentameter & free verse.
Setting up the New Formalist agitators as straw men with which to thump Quietude & plump Post-Avant is itself a polemic which tends to box, pigeonhole & truncate contemporary understanding of technical possibility.
[p.s. ...& then, moreover, what would Yeats say?]
"Phrasing in music works in relation to the beat, not as a substitute for it."
This is a legitimate criticism - offered perhaps most strongly (& originally) by Robert Frost - to the Poundian nostrum of "composition by musical phrase". The correlation of meter & phrase, or speech pattern, is not simply part of the toolbox of optional traditionalist techniques. It is a basic aspect of poetry, and as such, serves as a kind of grounding for creative experiments of all kinds. To deny or minimize this both rules out vast fields of poetic enterprise, past and future, and distorts the evidence of 20th-cent. literary history.
The synthesis of rhythm and phrasing is one element of the overall harmonics to which composition aspires. It can be found in some of the most memorable passages of Pound & Eliot (Annie Finch's "ghost of meter", for example in the contrast of pentameter lines with trochaic beat of parts of the Cantos, or the hidden metrical forms planted in Four Quartets). The same synthesis was worked out more thoroughly and paradigmatically, if not always successfully, by Hart Crane. Crane again and again trumps these distinctions between free & metrical verse, between modernist innovation and traditional forms. Wallace Stevens, too, in his own less emphatic way, melded pentameter & free verse.
Setting up the New Formalist agitators as straw men with which to thump Quietude & plump Post-Avant is itself a polemic which tends to box, pigeonhole & truncate contemporary understanding of technical possibility.
[p.s. ...& then, moreover, what would Yeats say?]
6.01.2003
2.04.2003
Jonathan, Kasey & Mike have been talking about meter & rhythm. Recommend an interesting study:
The Strict Metrical Tradition, by David Keppel-Jones. The author attributes the amazing success of iambic pentameter to just a few technical innovations: basically, by maintaining a strict syllable count (with the exception of feminine endings & elided syllables), and combining that with 3 "radical variations" (as opposed to the simple substitution of a weak for a strong syllable (pyrrhic) or the substitution of a strong for a weak (spondee)) - these being, first, the inversion of an iambic foot (/~ instead of ~/) - but used in specific, controlled places in the line - and the 2nd and 3rd what he terms the "minor ionic" & the "second epitrite" respectively. These two are measured in sections of 4 syllables: ~~// (minor ionic) and /~// (2nd epitrite) - and are also located in specific places on the line (usually at the beginnings of lines). Most of the book is taken up in explaining the rhythmic implications of these innovations & a detailed historical survey running from Spenser & Sidney to the Victorians.
One of the general lessons to be drawn from this kind of study is the symbiosis between "strict order" & "radical variation" - the variations are effective because we are, necessarily due to the meter, attuned to very slight stress emphases.
The Strict Metrical Tradition, by David Keppel-Jones. The author attributes the amazing success of iambic pentameter to just a few technical innovations: basically, by maintaining a strict syllable count (with the exception of feminine endings & elided syllables), and combining that with 3 "radical variations" (as opposed to the simple substitution of a weak for a strong syllable (pyrrhic) or the substitution of a strong for a weak (spondee)) - these being, first, the inversion of an iambic foot (/~ instead of ~/) - but used in specific, controlled places in the line - and the 2nd and 3rd what he terms the "minor ionic" & the "second epitrite" respectively. These two are measured in sections of 4 syllables: ~~// (minor ionic) and /~// (2nd epitrite) - and are also located in specific places on the line (usually at the beginnings of lines). Most of the book is taken up in explaining the rhythmic implications of these innovations & a detailed historical survey running from Spenser & Sidney to the Victorians.
One of the general lessons to be drawn from this kind of study is the symbiosis between "strict order" & "radical variation" - the variations are effective because we are, necessarily due to the meter, attuned to very slight stress emphases.
1.29.2003
Some helpful "rants" from Jonathan today on formalism. I like what he says about Pound's metronome. "The sequence of the musical phrase" would mean a rhythm & tempo not dominated by the fixity of the metronome.
But a more sophisticated use of traditional form & metrics must be represented by poets outside the camps of "early" New Formalism! I just don't know where they are.
& O critics, O reviewers: show me the wheels within wheels!!
The Wheel of (Virgilian) Form: how the innate primal perennial poetic IMPULSE emerges as lyric receptivity; didactic forthright argument; epic vision.
The Wheel of Metaform: how the impulse circles around, from ephebic formal imitation, to mature absorption of experience, to the recapitulation of these experiential metaforms in original, inward form.
"Sounds really German to me, von Heinrich", quoth Socrates.
Well, Socky, I'm looking for a paradigm. I'm weary of the promos for pomo innovative elliptics; I'm weary of threadbare surfing attention to traditional means. Bring your reviews to the table & we will evaluate them in Russian translation.
But a more sophisticated use of traditional form & metrics must be represented by poets outside the camps of "early" New Formalism! I just don't know where they are.
& O critics, O reviewers: show me the wheels within wheels!!
The Wheel of (Virgilian) Form: how the innate primal perennial poetic IMPULSE emerges as lyric receptivity; didactic forthright argument; epic vision.
The Wheel of Metaform: how the impulse circles around, from ephebic formal imitation, to mature absorption of experience, to the recapitulation of these experiential metaforms in original, inward form.
"Sounds really German to me, von Heinrich", quoth Socrates.
Well, Socky, I'm looking for a paradigm. I'm weary of the promos for pomo innovative elliptics; I'm weary of threadbare surfing attention to traditional means. Bring your reviews to the table & we will evaluate them in Russian translation.
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