These days people think technique (rhyme, stanzas, etc.) is some kind of statement in the style wars, some kind of personal attack on somebody else's style, some kind of catological brandifery, an elitist's rebuff, an affront to ill-educated, resentful yokels...

Technique only becomes useful after the artist has left it behind... I mean what you see as some marvel of virtuosity is really just a side-doodle of some other irreducible motivation, the whale beneath the surface...

Once you start talking about technique, or the obvious elements of style, 9 times out of 10 either you don't get it or the work itself is a bore. A reference to technique is of value only when resolving some very specific conundrum in a particular passage... To repeat, people gab about vapid elements of style in order to praise or bash things they either don't bother to understand or which aren't worth reading in the first place...

If the surface elements of style are working at all properly they enfold themselves conveniently & modestly in larger motions of thematic and affective import - ars est celare artem, as I useta say, "the art is in hiding art"...

...a difficult thing to discuss intelligently, I'll agree with Daniel Green there. Still not satisfied with my own remarks. Big mistake to focus narrowly on the "seriousness" of poetry, to forget about the ways that it delights & pleases & diverts with comedy & elegance & wit & all. This IS a kind of medicine we're talking about.

& yet poetry, no two ways about it, challenges its audience. For the same reason that more people watch TV than go to the ballet. It is a refined & intense form of art. But I will let my original arguments stand, I think. The poetry that does win for itself a large, lasting readership, is that through which the poet has stepped beyond the workshop and the technicalities : the poetry that applies its technique to expand - following the steps of the poet him- or herself, pushing the boundaries of the game, struggling to re-present the most fateful commitments of conscience, the most devoted, sustained explorations of consciousness.

Emily Dickinson : "My circuit is circumference -"

The Tribune in the Woods on prose versus versus. Responding to Laura Carter on lines & line-breaks.

My two cents: a line-break is a break in the sentence flow. If you break the line where there is no natural pause in the sentence, you emphasize the break: you juxtapose the "natural", ordinary flow of a sentence with the artifice of the poem.

This may be a way to heighten the intensity, by creating kind of a special, demarcated space. But "unnatural" breaks, after a while - especially if the actual sentences are not all that interesting - become simply annoying, or emphatically boring.

I usually like to "work with" the line-break. I use it to try to give more music (rhythm) to the sentence. I use odd or "unnatural" line-breaks rarely, & in conjunction with a particular meaning the sentence is conveying. What I like about line-breaks is that in addition to adding rhythm to the sentence with a pause, they also fortify the rhythmic unity of the individual lines. So these 2 things - the unity of the line & the rhythm of the break - work together.

But my aim & my practice is to get to the point where I don't have to think about this stuff. Because I'm really more interested in the overall momentum, and in the coalescence of a larger content or argument as a whole. Make it natural, make it flow. Then the real original content & diction will appear, almost magically, on its own.

This is probably the most conventional approach to these issues. But perhaps there's some advantage to developing a kind of natural, thoughtless practice, one which fits your own thoughtless nature. Natural, anyway, for thoughtless people like me. Painstaking poets will take a more painstaking approach.

p.s. this issue is complicated by the fact that a "natural" line-length does not always correspond with a "natural"-sounding break. This is where rhyme comes in very handy. Rhyme adds a 3rd layer of interest, like from a new direction, to (1) rhythmic unity of line and (2) rhythmic interest of the break. Rhyme is like the mortar used by masons, except you have to imagine a mason who erects some fantastic structure which follows the inclination of the mortar rather than the structure of the bricks.

take a look at the poem posted here on 10.24 ("Wind").

this is someone who grasps what form is for. to strain out wasted breath. to emphasize the music. reminds me of the exercises a singer performs, with voice & diaphragm - to purge slack noise, the untrained amateurish quavering, the dross. she has a very refined ear.

follow-up thought to previous...

Each literary work does reflect a particular emotional tenor - or an amalgam of several. And there are plenty of works in which the writer's very labor at craft crowds out the subject or impression he or she is attempting to convey, so that the emotional tenor and/or the tone of the writing itself come across as shallow. The author shows his/her hand.

This is one of the implications of a certain rubric I'm fond of repeating : ars est celare artem (art conceals its art).

Didacticism of the Moderns (Pound, Eliot). Contemporary poets inherited from them the notion that experiment & technique are something separable and to be acquired. I think earlier poets considered these things something you learn in your apprenticeship & don't talk about too much.

Why? Because in the older sense of style, the aim was a holistic impression - a seamless unity of voice, manner, technique, subject. The complex becomes simple and the simple is complex; the poem resolves itself into a singleness, a unified impression, a whole.

Why I'm attracted to poets like Stevens & Crane, who are sceptical about the idea that technique + novelty = originality.

Interesting notes (as usual) over at Hotel Point. I had been thinking vaguely somewhere in the same general area this morning.

That is, about how poetry is an art of modulated speech flow. Something like learning to play the flute or another instrument. There's a level of diction, meter, rhyme, etc., just as there's a level of technique with the instrument. Then there's another level combining fitness & invention, which is maybe somewhat similar to composition. (I know what I'm talking about, having studied piano from age 6.)

(Obviously these are not new ideas - just basic ideas.)

Maybe it's the notions of fitness (these days, anyway) that vary more than any of the other factors (from poet to poet).

Inching Along

I'd like to continue the speculations on future poetics begun a few days ago. I don't have time today for more than a couple brief notes.

I think I've made some progress, but there's a need for more interrogation.

First, I've suggested how a sense of living tradition could be built on a notion of active reading/affinity - grounded in love, which undergirds a different attitude toward the origins, identity and presence of the poetic voice (different from major strains of postmodern theory and writing).

Such an approach opens up the possibility that literary style and technique might be generated not solely by the chronological succession of the New, or a deterministic notion of innovation, but by anachronistic connections of affinity (what Mandelstam describes as the "opening of the Bergsonian fan" across widely separated eras).

Secondly, and related to this, I've characterized the "poetic word itself" in (Mandelstamian) Acmeist fashion, as the crossing of two strands: time & eternity, nature and grace, such that poetry is the emanation of harmony, or the evidence of the harmonization, of these two spheres.

Yet this theoretical framework is incomplete, and as such it short-changes poetry. How so?

By forcing poetry to bear the burden of what is basically a metaphysical doctrine, one inhibits poetry's freedom, to some extent. Poetry needs to be free in its autonomy, in its capability to be whatever it wants to be. And yet I don't want to surrender the theoretical grounding which this description of the duplex nature of the poetic word provides. How am I going to resolve this?

Let's say that this notion of the Word as grounded in anachronistic affinity is the vertical axis of a broader definition. When we described Modernism as a literary effort to "catch up" with the zeitgeist, we were overly abstract, since we neglected to focus on the "how" (how this was accomplished).

How this was done involved what we might call an effort of circumference. Let's make this the horizontal axis of our poetics. What do we mean by circumference? The modernist innovations in style & technique - grounded to a great extent in poets like Browning and Whitman - vastly expanded the range of both subject-matter and level of diction. Whitman, in a sense, can be understood as Dickinson's coeval : what Dickinson achieved in the realm of compression and metaphysical verticality, Whitman accomplished in the realm of horizontal breadth and openness, of descriptive capaciousness, of literary magnanimity.

What were the modernist and postmodernist long poems, but experiments in capaciousness, in extending the range of what poetry could include? No wonder that, over the last 50 years, the squabbles between traditionalists and experimentalists have been so divisive and continuous: contemporary inclusiveness clashes sharply with longstanding concepts of traditional poetic technique.

Every poet has to find their own center of gravity or path through these differing perspectives. Inclusiveness, taken as a kind of stylistic absolute, leads eventually to a condition of no-style (anything can be called a poem). Tradition, taken as an absolute, leaves no room for either originality or genuine change.

So perhaps we approach a theory of the poem as something autonomous, self-creating, self-defining; open to both empirical and metaphysical meaning & interpretation, but only in the sense of something possible, potential, discoverable (rather than being defined by a higher or exterior meaning). The poem is evidence of creative labor - labor which in itself is a kind of freedom from prior definitions & orientations.

With such an undefined definition, have we come full circle? Are we back where we started, with nothing to show for it? I hope not... For me, anyway, that vertical axis opens at least a possible path beyond both modern & postmodern, while the horizontal axis allows poetry to build on the capacious circumference of its accomplishments.

Sometimes I've been criticized for my repetitive definitive assertive assertions about what "poetry is". But in today's literary climate, a return to basic first principles might be a healthy thing.

The confusion in avant-garde oppositional circles seems to be what it's always been : a displacement of the most basic aspects of poetic making with technical novelty. Imitation, as practiced in all the thousands of MFA programs etc., is castigated as not only unnecessary but as positively bad (The "School of Quietude" polemic is only the latest in a long line); what is put in its place are rotating models of literary rebellion or idiosyncrasy, as if rebellion & idiosyncrasy themselves were the substance of art and poetics. This is the fundamental mistake.

The contempt for imitation reveals an underlying misreading, an erasure of past poetries and their replacement with an a-historical continual revolution. But past poetries will not go away, will not be shunted aside; what the various idioms of futurism reveal, more than anything else, is aesthetic impoverishment and the debasement of literary values.

The oppositionalists read Whitman or Dickinson, for example, as utterly sui generis, geniuses from nowhere, whose lack or displacement of any lineage whatsoever then becomes a model for authenticity. But the activity of poetic making came before them; their technical achievements are a secondary effect of the intensity of their poetic thought, not simply stepping-stones in some kind of diachronic procession of unconventional literary progress or revolution. Literature does not simply "add on" to some "advances" in a linear progression : it wavers over time, swayed by individual authors whose insight & capability allow them to counter whatever rhetorical excesses or inauthenticities overshadow their times.

The basic character of poetic making has never changed. It is a verbal response to reality, a narrative ordering of experience, keyed to harmony (in both its musical and its logical or thematic senses). Praise come naturally to this activity; lyric ardor unites the perception of, and the desire for, what is beautiful; elegy and mourning express its loss; the logic of truth places beauty in a moral context; irony and denunciation are its negative image, its complementary shadow. The technique displayed in the working-out of this activity is secondary, the way Coleridgean fancy is secondary to imagination : poiesis itself is inherent talent, capability, a natural artfulness which emanates technique, rather than proceeding from it.

The great narrative of human experience is illegible without the first perception of the over-arching shape of the narrations which are already there. This is a hard thing to explain, but it gets to the root of the distinction between classicism and revolutionary modernism, or acmeism and futurism. The acmeist, for example, enters into a dialogue which is already ongoing : what this reflects is an aesthetic receptivity - beginning in childhood - to the natural continuity of human expression with time and nature. We learn the beauty of language and songs and stories at our mother's knees; our own artistic endeavors take place in the context of pre-existing beautiful sounds (other poems, other stories, other narrative orders). The world is shaped by the great narratives that preceded us : literature is not merely demystification, a purely negative critical activity of disaffection or disillusionment : it is also a sharing in the delightful apprehension of a stable and recurrent beauty or an underlying order.

This kind of classicism gives rise to those personal canons of aesthetic fitness and rightness which spur the poet to make something likewise, something both new and fitting : something right for the time and place. The great models of the past also challenge the poet to reach beyond the petty, the minor, the vulgar, the repetitive, to make something genuine, authentic and aesthetically meaningful in the clearest terms, for the widest, most disinterested audience.

We don't have this notion of "lasting monument" at the forefront of techne these days, though it's deep in the traditional "mysteries".

Reading Rykwert on break. More interesting stuff from Aristotle & Plato's Sophist.

Thinks the term poiesis might have changed in late 7th cent. BC when poets started charging for their services & refining their techne (the main purpose being to create a monument to fame more lasting than marble - not their own fame, but their patron's - cf. Pindar). Poiesis before meant "making" more generally.

Distinctions between acquisitive techne - hunting, fishing, fighting - and productive techne - agriculture, shipbuilding, architecture, etc. Also distinctions between productive mimesis (the carpenter builds this table based on the concept "table") and imitative mimesis (the painter paints a copy of carpenter's "this" table).

acquisitive techne = rhetoric, sophism ?
productive techne = poiesis ?

(tendencies or sharp distinctions?)