Jordan sez: "I wonder (I'm always wondering, call it a character flaw) whether Ron's p-A/SoQ distinction isn't at bottom about prosody and diction."
I think it's about trying to define what is especially "American" in poetry in English (& implicitly identifying what is "American" with what is lively, contemporary, etc. in English poetry worldwide - a globalization-effect).
It's agonistic/dialectical - defining what is by comparison with what, supposedly is not (SoQ is not really American, except as some kind of effete remnant of colonial imitation, or ersatz product of a stodgy, artificial pecking-order/system).
Such pigeonholes are convenient for making snap judgements. But I think they continually bump up against uncategorizable examples.
Trying to examine some of the distinctive qualities of modern & contemporary American poetry could be a very interesting project, an aspect of some kind of larger project of cultural self-awareness & reflection (where have we come from? how does this surface in our writing today?). However, it would be better to try to ground such in a more disinterested framework of literary values. In Ron's framework, there is already a body of progressive/oppositional/approved poetry, and the effort involves matching & absorbing ever more & new examples & products to the existing model of value. It's a kind of collective self-promotion. The binary/agonistic/sports model facilitates this process of self-congratulation : there's always a negative shadow which sets off our shining lights.
By contrast, what I mean by a "disinterested framework of values" would involve comparisons and investigations of contemporary work within a much broader field : ie. world literature.
Showing posts with label prosody. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prosody. Show all posts
7.28.2005
7.19.2004
Kent's essay, noted below, links prosody to what was perhaps the main divide in 20th-cent. American poetries - bigger than that between "raw vs. cooked" or "New American vs. New Critical" (at least before the advent of deconstruction and langpo, anyway) : the divide between symbolist/"idealist" and objectivist/"realist" (Stevens/Crane/Eliot vs. Williams/Pound/Zukofsky, for example).
The divide represents a sort of inherent conundrum of thought & perception. B.J. Leggett's book Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory argues that Stevens actually played both sides, pondering & negotiating his way around issues of imagination & reality. His skill in doing so registered in the fascination, controversy, sheer volume of criticism of same.
I'm always jealous of this kind of well-organized well-informed essay. But leaning as I do toward the Stevens end of the spectrum, I guess, I have a few quibbles. There's a value judgement being made: the line which includes Rakosi is supposed to represent a humbler, more active/passive, more direct apprehension of "things as they is"; Stevens' mode is seen as imposing a priori categories of interpretation on experience.
A problem with this analysis arises, though, when you grant the possibility that reality itself and the things of reality display order, logos, Dike, Tao. Then the self-reflexive and circling "prosodies" - the rhythmic patterns which Kent describes so succinctly - may be understood as poetry's function or capability to evoke or represent such a situation of "realities-within-Logos". And this may be, ultimately, at least as realist as the more indicative particulars of the WC Williams vein.
The divide represents a sort of inherent conundrum of thought & perception. B.J. Leggett's book Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory argues that Stevens actually played both sides, pondering & negotiating his way around issues of imagination & reality. His skill in doing so registered in the fascination, controversy, sheer volume of criticism of same.
I'm always jealous of this kind of well-organized well-informed essay. But leaning as I do toward the Stevens end of the spectrum, I guess, I have a few quibbles. There's a value judgement being made: the line which includes Rakosi is supposed to represent a humbler, more active/passive, more direct apprehension of "things as they is"; Stevens' mode is seen as imposing a priori categories of interpretation on experience.
A problem with this analysis arises, though, when you grant the possibility that reality itself and the things of reality display order, logos, Dike, Tao. Then the self-reflexive and circling "prosodies" - the rhythmic patterns which Kent describes so succinctly - may be understood as poetry's function or capability to evoke or represent such a situation of "realities-within-Logos". And this may be, ultimately, at least as realist as the more indicative particulars of the WC Williams vein.
7.16.2004
& speaking of prosody, if you want to know why Herman Melville was one of the greatest - or at least one of the most technically-adept and ingenious - writers in English of the 19th-century, take a look at Viola Sachs' book Game of Creation. Despite its eccentricities, Sachs's book makes it pretty clear that Melville's prosody in Moby-Dick involved a level of organization which is nothing short of astounding. We are talking about symbolic values of syllable-count, numerology, esoteric sound-meaning & etymology, which rival or outdo Joyce. The book is an immense cipher, a deeply-coded array. Here is a prosody not based on strictly rhythmic pattern/variation, which nevertheless encrypts layer upon layer of meanings. Such a "prose" prosody could also find applications in "free" verse.
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?]
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