[Tom]

Paul Lake has an interesting article on
Contemporary Poetry Review

If not read already, here is the link;


http://www.cprw.com/Lake/ShapeofPoetry.htm

[Tim Murphy]

I'd like to thank Tom for posting a link to this luminously illuminating essay over at Accomplished Members, where it's gotten scandalously few hits. I hope all of you will read it. It is a failing of our poetry that poets are so ignorant of science, a charge that cannot be leveled at Professor Lake.

[graywyvern]

i'm glad to see someone else seeing a resemblance
between "emergent order" & the poetic process (or
one of them). certainly this makes more practical
sense than "strange attractors", for example...it
only remains to be added, that sometimes one wantsto tamper with the organic unfoldment.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

The problem with Paul Lake's essay is that he refuses to define "emergent order" by any means other than how it can "best" be accomplished via sound. He goes partway and declares it "whole fact" to support his personal aesthetic stance.

--Curtis.



[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited February 21, 2002).]

[Paul Lake]

Curtis, you'd better take another look at "The Shape of Poetry." Although I do spend a lot of time talking about emergent order as it applies to meter and sound, I also talk about it in relation to syntax, theme, overall form, and even metaphysics--as well as in various patterns in nature.

I take on these issues in even greater detail in a forthcoming essay in Southwest Review called "The Enchanted Loom."

Paul Lake

[Roger Slater]

I just read the article, and it is indeed fascinating and provides much food for thought, but I did find its ultimate argument about the basic inferiority of free verse to be a departure from the rigorous logic of the science being discussed. Even the ultimate conclusion was stated as something of a fudge, claiming that "most" free verse doesn't measure up to the "best" of formal verse --when of course "most" formal verse doesn't measure up to the "best" free verse. We ought to compare best with best, I think, and not best with most.

As Wilbur himself acknowledges in the article's quote, the process of composition that he describes is probably quite similar to the process experienced by writers of free verse, and the movement from chaos to order that the poet experiences as the poem moves forward can be accomplished even without counting stresses and weaving things together with rhyme. These are good techniques, and they certainly do perform powerful functions, but to say so doesn't prove that they are exclusively suited to the task.

Plus, I question the whole logical concept of saying that a certain kind of poem is "better" because it can be analogized to natural processes. Even if chaos inevitably develops into order in nature, I don't see why this means that order is the way to go or that formal poetry is the best expression of the natural process.

And though Wilbur points out that he doesn't decide what form the poem will take until he gets a few lines into writing it, this is all very well and good from Wilbur's perspective, but from the reader's perspective the poem is already an accomplished fact on the page. If it's a sonnet, the reader looks down and sees another sonnet and knows it is a set form and experiences "order" from the beginning. Wilbur might go from order to chaos in composing it, but the reader starts with order. It might have been chaotic and formless as he poured it in the bottle, but it has the bottle's shape when it's set on the table before the reader.

In nature, despite the tendency of chaos to fall into some kind of order, we also have clouds and breezes and weather that no one can ever seem to predict, and we have chaotic markets and economies, and we have movements and cults and superstition, and we have snowflakes and waves, etc. I could just as easily look to these things and write a defense of free verse over form and base it on an affinity with the natural world. I choose not to do that, however, since I think that formal verse and free verse each have their own ways of displaying the mind at work and how a human consciousness tries to find meaning and order from confusion and chaos.

In short, I found the article to be extremely intelligent and provocative, but ultimately it was sort of a legal brief that attempts to construct an argument to justify a preference, yet the "argument" is really just a pretty nice "metaphor" and not the logical formulation it seems to be claiming.

[Tim Murphy]

First of all to Curtis: Should not a poet and scholar employ his logic and persuasive powers to advance his claims for the aesthetic values to which he has dedicated his life? Second to Roger: Waves and winds are infinitely changeable, as are the patterns of stress in the iambic or accentual line, but they have a grand order to which poetry responds. When a cold front blows through North Dakota, a south wind will follow. When they blow through the British Virgin Islands, cross seas chop up on the Drake Channel. Not unlike the turn in an Italian Sonnet. I know two free verse poems by heart, The Red Wheelbarrow, and At A Station in the Metro. You've no time to hear the metered poetry I have by heart.

[Paul Lake]

Roger, You raise some good points. Next month on the same website--Contemporary Poetry Review--there will be a second article entitled "Disorderly Orders: Free Verse, Chaos, and the Tradition," which is a sequel to "The Shape of Poetry." This second essay will make clear my ideas about free verse.

As to what makes order and form a virtue in poetry, only think of their opposites--chaos and entropy. While it's true that randomness and entropy are also found in nature and are therefore natural, that doesn't make them interesting. The static on your tv isn't as orderly and interesting as watching Shakespeare in Love on HBO. Clouds exhibit a pretty low level order of order, so while they're often beautful blowing about on a breezey day, they're not as complex or as beautiful as mother interacting with her child, a structure of sorts that operates on some many different levels we can get lost in and amazed by its beauty and complexity.

Paul Lake

[Roger Slater]

Tim, I'll grant you that meter and rhyme make things a lot easier to memorize, but that's certainly not the test of quality or intrinsic value. I cannot close my eyes and eiditically picture a Rembrandt, and I cannot listen to Beethoven's quartets in my mind's ear, but they are great works of art nonetheless. It may be hard for me to memorize "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" but I'm as certain of its greatness as I am of a Rembrandt or a Beethoven quartet.

Don't get me wrong. I was not speaking out against formal verse in any way, and I'm a genuine and passionate lover of formal verse. I don't "prefer" free verse at all. But I know with every fiber of my aesthetic being (the same being that makes me revere the likes of Wilbur and Frost) that I have encountered great poetry in free verse that is just as complicated, nuanced and profound as the great poetry of sonnets or villanelles. It seems rather strange to suggest that the experience was less real because such poems are harder to memorize.

And I never suggested that clouds and breezes don't follow any kind of laws or don't reflect order as well as infinite variety. But "free" verse isn't free of order, and it's not chaotic....it's not free of the world, or of a relationship to human thought or emotion, but it's free of the formal constraints that inform the metrical orthodoxy.

But my points about the article were not necessarily to disagree with the conclusions but to point out that (in my opinion) the article took the pose of somehow "proving" something based on "scientific principles when in fact all it did was develop a metaphor. I also pointed out, apropos the Wilbur quote, that the article seems to muddy the distinction between chaos-to-order in terms of composition and chaos-to-order in terms of the experience of the reader confronted with a finished poem.

PS--
I see that I cross-posted with Paul.

[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited February 22, 2002).]

[Clive Watkins]

Hello, Paul!

It seems to me that what your excellent article offers is a new account of metre by analogy with some recent ideas from the realms of science and mathematics - and an illuminating analogy it is, suggesting alternative ways of thinking about "numbers") than those afforded by earlier analogies (form as a containing shape, for instance, or biological or organic processes as understood by thinkers in earlier ages).

I look forward to reading the second article to which you refer.

Clive Watkins