[Lewis Turco]

De Villo Sloan was an undergraduate student at S.U.N.Y. at Potsdam when he wrote "A Portrait of the Day." The primary technique he used was prolepsis, the expansion of a general statement, particularizing it and giving further information regarding it. This is how the poet began his portrait:

Morning, afternoon, and evening
A portrait of the day should be simple.


Simple, like the opening statement. The reader has too little information yet, on the typographical level, to know whether this is going to be a prose mode or verse mode poem — what appears on the page, however, looks like a couplet; moreover, it seems to scan loosely. The second strophe helps to a degree:

Green morning, brown afternoon, and black evening
A portrait of the day should be simple.


Sloan's method begins to come clear — he has added a few adjectives to modify the nouns in his initial sequence. He is going to modify and amplify. It is also possible to begin to see this will not be a metrical poem. Some might call it "free verse" at this stage, but as ought by now to be apparent, free verse is merely a mask-term for prose, though in strophe three it still appears that Sloan is using a couplet unit:

With morning's green, afternoon's brown, and evening's black,
a portrait of the day should be very simple.


But Sloan has dropped the conventional capital A of his second line now, and what the reader has is clearly prose:

With morning's green painted on the edges of the day, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, and evening's black dispersed across the colors, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame, should be very simple.

Another technique Sloan used was incremental repetition; that is, changing a repeating unit slightly each time it appears: grammatically, each strophe was one sentence. There was line-phrasing in the first three stanzas, but the reader was not confused when it was dropped because at this point the poem was so frankly a prose poem, and the phrases were so long, that there was no sense of a premise abandoned, especially since the poem's rhythms did not derive from phrasing, but from repetitions and parallel structures:

With morning's green painted around the edges of the day, creating the impression of sunlight through curtained windows and clothes on hardwood floors, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, intermixing on the edges with green, turning the morning face to brownsad afternoon, and evening's black dispersed across the colors, reminding the observer that the absence of light will prevail, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame to complement its wild design, should be very simple.

This poem is a clear example of the premise that subject and form cannot be divorced from one another, nor can one be ignored except at the expense of the other. The two things are one thing — language is the poem, and Sloan evidently learned the lesson young. Here is the last stanza of "A Portrait of the Day":

With morning's green painted around the edges of the day, creating an impression of sunlight through curtained windows and clothes on hardwood floors, that digresses into hues of minutes and hours, through lacquered halls and coffee, through artbooks and palettes searching for colors and symbols, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, intermixing on the edges with green, turning the morning face to brownsad afternoon, trying to find the spot where green ends and brown begins, following in the footsteps of one who went before, through tea and conversation, throwing flowers at a singer's feet, beginning to see that this job is not so easy, and evening's black dispersed across the colors reminding the observer that the absence of light will prevail, that sees the day changing in degrees like the colors of the spectrum from radiating green to blackdeath, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame, carved in a way that would complement such a wild piece, that would firmly transfix the images of a day upon the wall for all to see, should be very simple.

Successful prose poems like this one derive their cadences from grammatical structures — line-by-line phrasing, such as Sloan began with; sentences in parallel construction, as throughout this poem; strophic paragraphs, and so on. "A Portrait of the Day" is uniquely structured; Sloan invented his own grammatical prosody, but that prosodic structure is clear. So is the poem; therefore, it is dense and rich.

The critic can merely quibble with "A Portrait of the Day." Only here and there, in single words and an occasional phrase that slips from one level of diction to another, can one point to flaws. For instance, the clause in strophe 6, "this job is not so easy," and the word wild in "such a wild piece," are not in keeping with the sophisticated level of diction of the rest of the poem. The same might be said of the epithetic compound "blackdeath," which seems too theatrical for the meditative air of this work.


[This message has been edited by Lewis Turco (edited April 11, 2008).]

[Janice D. Soderling]

This was so interesting. Thank you so much.

[Lewis Turco]

Here is the whole poem without the intervening commentary:


A PORTRAIT OF THE DAY
By De Villo Sloan

Morning, afternoon, and evening
A portrait of the day should be simple.

Green morning, brown afternoon, and black evening
A portrait of the day should be simple.

With morning's green, afternoon's brown, and evening's black,
a portrait of the day should be very simple.

With morning's green painted on the edges of the day, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, and evening's black dispersed across the colors, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame, should be very simple.

With morning's green painted around the edges of the day, creating the impression of sunlight through curtained windows and clothes on hardwood floors, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, intermixing on the edges with green, turning the morning face to brownsad afternoon, and evening's black dispersed across the colors, reminding the observer that the absence of light will prevail, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame to complement its wild design, should be very simple.

With morning's green painted around the edges of the day, creating an impression of sunlight through curtained windows and clothes on hardwood floors, that digresses into hues of minutes and hours, through lacquered halls and coffee, through artbooks and palettes searching for colors and symbols, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, intermixing on the edges with green, turning the morning face to brownsad afternoon, trying to find the spot where green ends and brown begins, following in the footsteps of one who went before, through tea and conversation, throwing flowers at a singer's feet, beginning to see that this job is not so easy, and evening's black dispersed across the colors reminding the observer that the absence of light will prevail, that sees the day changing in degrees like the colors of the spectrum from radiating green to blackdeath, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame, carved in a way that would complement such a wild piece, that would firmly transfix the images of a day upon the wall for all to see, should be very simple.

[annie nance]

I think one thing that makes this poem so successful and cohesive is that Sloan's "thesis" statement and the form he chose (is form the right word?) suit each other perfectly. His rhythmic couplet morphs itself into a long and very complex event... so nicely paralelling what happens as a day wears on. The potential for a simple, ordinary day is there every morning but layers of meaning and complications and circumstances develop, surrounding and overtaking it, and what should be simple, simply ain't - just like the poem itself.

Thanks Lew, for sharing a wonderful poem. As far as drills and amusements go, you've set the bar pretty high!

annie

[This message has been edited by annie nance (edited April 11, 2008).]

[Lewis Turco]

Your remarks, Annie, are right on target. Yes, he DID invent a form as well as a "prosody," a system for saying what he wanted to say. When I first saw this poem many years ago in an undergraduate magazine it blew me away.

But as to setting the bar high: I was suggesting that there are lots of ways to invent systems, all you have to do is "think outside the box." And remember, the person who wrote that poem was an undergraduate student! Here is another idea:

Russell Salamon was also a student at Fenn College — now Cleveland State University — during the early 1960s when he developed the grammatic prosody called "parenthetics." His showcase for these poems, a chapbook titled Parent[hetical Pop]piesappeared in 1964, the year of his graduation, from the Renegade Press of Cleveland. When Russell came into my office in Fenn Tower and showed me how his parenthetical system worked, I told him I thought it was ingenious, but that it was too complicated to become a popular prosody. I was partly wrong, for although one can't strictly call it popular, I have seen other poems written in the system since, by more than one poet, and I have introduced it to many people in many situations, in particular at the Philadelphia Writers' Conference in June of 1993. Many find it challenging and interesting.

In his poem "She," Salamon began by taking parentheses themselves as his center:

().

He then took a sentence, "my hands cup her cup," broke it after the subject, and inserted the set of parens into the break:

my hands () cup her cup.

This is a metaphor: my hands are a set of parentheses. Next, a second sentence: "all parentheses in which I am warm drizzle-rain inside her," thus:

All parentheses in which I am
[my hands () cup her cup]
warm drizzle-rain inside her.

And a third, "sizzling on snowscapes of her skin, her face, her arms, her thighs, forests full of soundless flowers waited once unseen, translucid; she carries rain constellations to fill flute basins where" with some changed punctuation and a bit of typographical dispersion, appears this way:

sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.
Her face, her arms, her thighs,
all parentheses in which I am
[my hands () cup her cup]
warm drizzle-rain inside her.
Forests full of soundless flowers
waited once unseen, translucid.
She carries rain constellations
to fill flute basins where

And finally, "My finger touch dis[s]olves into a shiverlong echo of rains; we wash our morning faces off." This is the completed poem:

My finger touch dissolves
into a shiverlong echo of rains/
sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.
(Her face, her arms, her thighs,
all parentheses in which I am
[my hands () cup her cup]
warm drizzle-rain inside her.
Forests full of soundless flowers
waited once unseen, translucid.
She carries rain constellations
to fill f lute basins where
/we wash our morning faces off

The split between f and lute in the penultimate line appears as it was originally printed in Parent[hetical Pop]pies; it may or may not be a typographical error. I prefer to think of it as deliberate or, at worst, serendipitous.



[This message has been edited by Lewis Turco (edited April 12, 2008).]

[annie nance]

OK Lew, is it just me, or is that Salamon poem downright sexy?

It may take me awhile, because lately I haven't been able to write anything except silly smart-ass rhyming poems, but I'm going to try to rise to the challenge. I think it's fascinating.

annie

Hey this is going to sound dumb, but what's your favorite poem?




[This message has been edited by annie nance (edited April 14, 2008).]

[Lewis Turco]

Annie,

You'd do better just asking me what are my 100 favorite poems, and I might not be able to boil it down to that. When I'm reading a poem I love, THAT's my favorite poem right at the moment. When I read Sloan's poem in that undergrad magazine THAT was my favorite poem, and it's still in the top 100.

And Russell Salamon's poem sure is sexy. By the way, I'm still in touch with both these poets after all these decades, though I haven't heard from Sloan lately. Last I heard, he was an administrator at Wells College.

Lew

[annie nance]

Well, Lew, that's a fair answer for sure. I guess I was just curious because so many people here have referred to your Book of Forms, which I'd never heard of (being the non-literary type that I am), and then you gave these two wonderful poems of invented forms, that you obviously love. I guess I was wondering if you lean more toward established forms, which I asssumed is what your book is about, or toward these invented ones. I think I've only written one poem in an actual form - a sestina - and not a very good one, although maybe not horrible for an amateur. I wanted to try it after I read one by Elizabeth Bishop.

Anyway, I'm still working on my own invented form. Hey is it really a form if the form is only ever used on one poem?

annie

[This message has been edited by annie nance (edited April 14, 2008).]

[Lewis Turco]

Hey is it really a form if the form is only ever used on one poem?

Yes, of course it is. Anything written has a form.

As to whether I lean to "formal" or "experimental" work: I am interested in anything that's built of language. Both these poems, by DeVillo Sloan and Russell Salamon, are in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, which covers both prose poems and verse poems. I have seen people say of my book that it doesn't cover "free verse." That's because in the book I call "free verse" poems "prose poems," though if you look up "free verse" you will be cross-referenced to "prose." Both the Sloan and Salamon poems are prose poems, though they are built on different systems.

If you'll recall, I said that the Sloan poem was built on expanding a basic sentence each time the sentence was repeated. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could wed prolepsis with a classical verse form, Sapphics. This is what I came up with. Be sure to identify the basic sentence (the first two lines) that is expanded throughout the poem, just like Sloan's prose poem. Sapphic meters go DUM da DUM da DUM da da DUM da DUM da three lines in a row, and the fourth line of the quatrain stanza is DUM da da DUM da:

SAPPHIC STANZAS IN FALLING MEASURES
"One may sooner fall than rise."

Now the frost is falling in all our gardens;
Fall has rimed itself with the call of autumn.
Now that frost, in crystals and webs, is falling
Out of the dawn in

All our gardens, summer has fallen out of
Rime in crystals, webs, and the dawn in voices
Calling on the westerly winds of changing
Weathers and climates.

Now the frost — in tentative webs and crystals
Falling from the dawning to all our gardens
Vined and gourded — has rimed itself with autumn
Calls of the fliers

Gliding on the westerlies. Changing weathers
Send our northern sojourners on their searches
After other climates, for now that autumn
Falls in a rime of

Crystal webs on all of our summer gardens
Vined and gourded, riming itself with sounding
Calls of fliers gliding upon the western
Winds in these changing

Weathers, dawns will shatter in all our climates:
South, the flocks of sojourners fall and settle
Out of early light in a hoarfrost made of
Springtime and summer.

[annie nance]

Hi Lew,

Interesting post, especially what you said about free verse. And I thought free verse was poetry that didn't rhyme or have regular meter, but still looks like poetry - with the strategic line breaks, enjambments, non standard punctuation, etc. And I tought prose poems were written just like a regular paragraph but making use of poetic elements like strong imagery and metaphor and all that jazz. Most of the poems I write are what I call free verse, but I've never thought of them as prose poems. So is this a matter of debate among real poets? And by real I mean published. haha

I never heard of sapphics and I had to look up prolepsis. I feel like I'm getting a tuition-free graduate course here!

As for your poem, I think it is very beautiful. What stands out to me are the sounds of the words themselves, like falling autumns and gourded gardens - I love that! But I think my ear is not so sensitive to metrics except the most obvious like iambic pentameter or tetrameter. If you had not pointed out the meter, I don't think I would have noticed it and would have just thought it was free verse. Maybe not, but is metrics something you grew into? I kind of get the feeling (around the eratosphere anyway) that "good" poets sort of graduate to meterics, and that free verse is easier or less developed or something, but I would hate to say that out loud and insult all the free verse people.

annie