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This thread has twisted and turned its way through some interesting territory, yet still we connect back pretty clearly to the original issue. What makes that little ditty a poem, let alone a great poem? Who says?
Well, some words are stretchier than others. Lincoln supposedly asked someone, "How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?" The person answered, "Five," to which Lincoln replied, "No, four: calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one." But almost any word turns out to have fuzzy boundaries, especially if someone sets out to find them. That's part of what I think Williams was up to. I don't think it's a terribly interesting enterprise, but it has led others to some interesting speculations. In other cases I think poets have truly found new things in the fuzzy boundaries. Whitman did, I think, even though he kept thinking he was finding stuff there long after he had pretty mined the lode. Long ago I had a copy of "Moby Dick" that included a bunch of articles and essays on the text, among them some savage early reviews. As a critic I often think of those reviews and wonder if I would have been insightful enough to recognize genius working outside my preconceived boundaries. The answer is, Probably not. On the other hand, I take comfort in knowing that most of the time there's no genius to recognize in the boundary busters, merely incompetence or pretentiousness. RPW |
Whether it's written in traditional meter or a received form or it's written as free verse, poetry's generally recognized as different from prose because of the crafting of the line. Prose, clearly, conforms to the width of the page. Poetry does not. Poetry demands controlled lines. They're called lines of verse (either metered or free) because they reach a point then turn. What happens at the turn, where it can consistently surprise and delight, is what make makes the difference between poetry and prose.
Verse comes from Latin, where I believe it means, among other things, the turn that the plow makes at the end of a furrow, an act of controlling a line, in this case the furrows of a field. Heaney's collected, Opened Ground, refers to ground furrowed. I have a friend, the poet, Tino Villanueva, makes only this distinction: "It's either poetry or it's not." Bob |
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Thanks for answering my question. I wonder how adequate it is though -- in several ways. 1) It doesn't seem to be a sufficient condition of poetry. Consider mnemonic devices in metrical and rhymed verse -- or even the clever little song that They Might Be Giants remade a few years back (from some 50s science film) The sun is a mass of incandescant gas A gigantic nuclear furnace... Are these poetry? If not, it seems easy to imagine some equally non-poetic lineated prose -- even cleverly lineated (as cleverly lineated as the above song is rhymed) that just isn't poetry. But maybe the line is at least a necessary condition? Well, some people believe that there is such a thing as a prose poem (a poem written in prose-paragraphs). If they're right then it isn't even a necessary condition. You could deny these things the status of poetry, but once you've tossed out meter and rhyme as inessential, why stick at the line? The insufficiency of rhyme and meter for poetry suggested the possibility that poetry might be an aim identifiable separately from meter and rhyme, which might be achievable by means other than meter and rhyme. The same reasoning would apply to lines. If lineated prose can be 'poetic', why can't unlineated prose be equally poetic? 3) Very often in free verse (and sometimes in formal verse) the line is a purely typographical entity -- I don't just mean that this or that line is so strongly enjambed that you don't hear it as an entity -- I mean that, if you were not reading the poem yourself you would have no sense how it was divided into lines -- or even that it was divided into lines at all. Does this purely typographical sense of 'line' really produce anything that can really be called 'verse', let alone 'poetry'? Are not poetry and verse essentially auditory phenomena? If the line is essential to verse or poetry, mustn't the line be (as a general thing) an audible unit? The answer about line might be a good beginning, but for the above reasons, I don't think it's the end of the discussion. |
I think's it's fascinating to question what poetry is and isn't, and to explore what makes individual poems work, and how the devices available to the poet accomplish what they do. That's not only fun, but necessary: it's the writer's version of "the examined life." But sometimes, at gatherings where that kind of subject is discussed with pas-sionate certainty, I feel like spider at an arachnologists' convention, especially when the talk shifts from the quali-ties that seem to give certain webs their flexibility and tensile strength, to rival "recipes" for the perfect silk and the right design required by the quintessential web, the one web worthy of the name.
Every poet is, of course, both spider and arachnologist, especially those of us who are or have been teachers too. It's our business to qualify, quantify, count and otherwise split hairs, because that's how learning happens. But it's good to remember that the arachnologist came later, after the spider had caught his eye by spinning webs. He watches and analyzes and records what the spider does, and I value his work--or mine, when I'm being my own arachnologist during the process of repeated revision. He observes that some webs resist weather and support weight better than others, and tries to dtermine why. But it's the spider that makes the web, out of its own body, in response to some necessity it can't define, in keeping with laws not fully written down anywhere and ultimately--especially if the web is a poe--probably not codifiable. I guess I'm driving at something at the core of poetry that is intuitive, irreducible and indefinable. It has more to do with pleasing the ear than the eye; imagination is involved, especially the ability to sense similarities and think in metaphor. It involves communication that is more immediate than ordinary speech, even when it's indirect, and maybe precisely because it's indirect. It says more than the language itself seems to be saying, through the manipulation of sound and images. All of what's been mentioned--the line and its "turn," rhyme and meter, all the other devices we have--are ways to create that indirection and also get around it, as if the poet wanted to say and not say at the same time. For me, that kind of immediate but indirect speech is the core "requirement" in poetry, rather than the use of any specific selection of the available sound or eye devices, although I certainly have preferences as to what I enjoy reading and writing. Now I've probably annoyed everybody. |
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Although I've so far been speaking of necessary and sufficient conditions, I suspect that your strategy of dealing with poetry as a 'fuzzy' concept is probably right (saying that it is MORE about pleasing the ear than the eye etc.) Perhaps it's useful to see language as a continuum and to map all of language in several dimensions -- the more it depends on metaphor, the more it strives (successfully)for beauty of sound, the more it strives for compression and memorability, the more poetic such language is. The more its function is simply expository, the more prose-like it is. It may be useful for some purposes to draw very sharp lines between poetry and prose, but sharp lines of this sort are usually essentially arbitrary -- while the broader distinctions or dimensions are fuzzier, but more objective. Sometimes people describe a passage in a novel or short story as "poetry". If the novel is not in verse, is it better to regard this as a metaphorical use of 'poetry' -- but maybe we should regard it as a literal application of the concept of poetry? |
Well, I see no one is much interested
in W. S. Merwin--and perhaps that's not such a bad thing. Any prose--n.b., Rhina--wonderful prose replete with metaphor and snap and imagination and subtle in its tones and transcendent in its beauty, etc., etc., can be turned after, oh, say, every fourth accented syllable (if you wish to imitate accentual verse) or just anywhere you like--after altogether randomly selected syllables (if you wish to imitate free verse). What defense would anyone then have against the assertion that this newly lineated material and free verse are identical--which would amount to saying that free verse is prose? Q.E.D. I do not claim that people who write the free verse that Rhina and others admire are somehow not to be included, welcomed, or whatever, into some special circle of metrical saints. As I now say for what I hope is the last time, making clear distinctions may not make certain people feel happy (and in fact may annoy the hell out of them), but it need not. This is Steele's distinction when he says that people either write in meter or they don't. No sweat off anybody's back need roll. I am amazed that in all this set-to no one seems to have brought up those favorite arguments about poetry being about "making" in the Aristotelian sense, the etymological sense, of the word (the Scottish "makars"), or Sidney's comments about neither rhyming nor keeping of numbers making poetry, or Emerson's comment (constantly reiterated by Hollander) about a "meter-making" argument being necessary for the creation of true poetry, or Dr. Johnson's comment about verse alone not being poetry (going out into the Strand and meeting a man with a hat in his hand--though I believe someone above in one of the threads mentioned something about versifying a laundry list or something). These are only a handful of the people presenting basic elements of the discussion that been going on here, and with whom, I hope it is now clear, my arguments mean I must sometimes actually agree--oops, forgot Lewis Turco's comments in his intro to his forms book that poetry is a genre, not a technically-defined linguistically--marked entity. But the argument to authority may make sense at times and at other times not. I.e., maybe Sidney could be...wrong? As to homely or domestic metaphors, Rhina is a genius at them, spiders or not. But here's a hamhanded and even homelier one of my own: you can't make ordinary table salt without sodium. To get to NaCl, you need Na. And that sodium is certainly necessary, but also certainly NOT sufficient. So literary objects created in meter and then stored on shelves as they await the undying admiration of the public may indeed be lousy "poems"--stinkers made up of only sodium, so to speak. But by the same token, trying to substitute plutonium or gold or helium (not really feasible, given their valences, no?) for the sodium and claiming that you can now salt your food would be a ... I'm going to call it a mistake--a mistake in definition, which after all is only the attempt to know what really goes into table salt. Some people may be ticked off that their attempts to substitute some other element are not being accepted as workable plans to create salt, but I mean them no harm. And if you really think that poetry is some idefinable quality found in certain linguistic constructions (Randall Jarrell is constantly claiming in his essays that if you don't agree with him, well then you must be someone who wants to boil infants to eat them--i.e., how could you possibly not see that the indefinable glory he's talking about at that monment is the sine qua non of true poetry), then there's nothing I can do to counter your argument because you see "poetry" in motion or in the split end's diving one-handed catch, or "pure poetry" in the way a carpenter handles a nail gun, etc., etc. If that's your position and you really believe that, well then, talking in a reasoned and principled and logical way about what elements of sound or syntax or intonation constitute necessary ingredients in a poem is an utterly hopeless cause. You have already defined your conclusion in such a way that no logical argument can address it. At that point, there's nothing anybody could do to help clarify the discussion. |
Well, I see no one is much interested
in W. S. Merwin--and perhaps that's not such a bad thing. Any prose--n.b., Rhina--wonderful prose replete with metaphor and snap and imagination and subtle in its tones and transcendent in its beauty, etc., etc., can be turned after, oh, say, every fourth accented syllable (if you wish to imitate accentual verse) or just anywhere you like--after altogether randomly selected syllables (if you wish to imitate free verse). What defense would anyone then have against the assertion that this newly lineated material and free verse are identical--which would amount to saying that free verse is prose? Q.E.D. I do not claim that people who write the free verse that Rhina and others admire are somehow not to be included, welcomed, or whatever, into some special circle of metrical saints. As I now say for what I hope is the last time, making clear distinctions may not make certain people feel happy (and in fact may annoy the hell out of them), but it need not. This is Steele's distinction when he says that people either write in meter or they don't. No sweat off anybody's back need roll. I am amazed that in all this set-to no one seems to have brought up those favorite arguments about poetry being about "making" in the Aristotelian sense, the etymological sense, of the word (the Scottish "makars"), or Sidney's comments about neither rhyming nor keeping of numbers making poetry, or Emerson's comment (constantly reiterated by Hollander) about a "meter-making" argument being necessary for the creation of true poetry, or Dr. Johnson's comment about verse alone not being poetry (going out into the Strand and meeting a man with a hat in his hand--though I believe someone above in one of the threads mentioned something about versifying a laundry list or something). These are only a handful of the people presenting basic elements of the discussion that been going on here, and with whom, I hope it is now clear, my arguments mean I must sometimes actually agree--oops, forgot Lewis Turco's comments in his intro to his forms book that poetry is a genre, not a technically-defined linguistically--marked entity. But the argument to authority may make sense at times and at other times not. I.e., maybe Sidney could be...wrong? As to homely or domestic metaphors, Rhina is a genius at them, spiders or not. But here's a hamhanded and even homelier one of my own: you can't make ordinary table salt without sodium. To get to NaCl, you need Na. And that sodium is certainly necessary, but also certainly NOT sufficient. So literary objects created in meter and then stored on shelves as they await the undying admiration of the public may indeed be lousy "poems"--stinkers made up of only sodium, so to speak. But by the same token, trying to substitute plutonium or gold or helium (not really feasible, given their valences, no?) for the sodium and claiming that you can now salt your food would be a ... I'm going to call it a mistake--a mistake in definition, which after all is only the attempt to know what really goes into table salt. Some people may be ticked off that their attempts to substitute some other element are not being accepted as workable plans to create salt, but I mean them no harm. And if you really think that poetry is some idefinable quality found in certain linguistic constructions (Randall Jarrell is constantly claiming in his essays that if you don't agree with him, well then you must be someone who wants to boil infants to eat them--i.e., how could you possibly not see that the indefinable glory he's talking about at that monment is the sine qua non of true poetry), then there's nothing I can do to counter your argument because you see "poetry" in motion or in the split end's diving one-handed catch, or "pure poetry" in the way a carpenter handles a nail gun, etc., etc. If that's your position and you really believe that, well then, talking in a reasoned and principled and logical way about what elements of sound or syntax or intonation constitute necessary ingredients in a poem is an utterly hopeless cause. You have already defined your conclusion in such a way that no logical argument can address it. At that point, there's nothing anybody could do to help clarify the discussion. |
[quote]Originally posted by ChrisW:
"Does this purely typographical sense of 'line' really produce anything that can really be called 'verse', let alone 'poetry'?" No, certainly not "purely typographical." Have you ever heard a man say that a woman has "nice lines"? Remember I said that their turns should surprise and delight. That goes quite beyond mere typography. Think of the "nice lines" of a graphic artist: they're more than geometric. "Are not poetry and verse essentially auditory phenomena?" Yes, and you should hear "nice lines." "If the line is essential to verse or poetry, mustn't the line be (as a general thing) an audible unit?" Absolutely. "The answer about line might be a good beginning...." That's what I meant it to be, a fundamental separator. One of the basic conditions of poetry. I also meant it to make it somewhat easier to distinguish free verse, where "nice lines" are more difficult to successfully construct. "I don't think it's the end of the discussion." I hardly think it will, but I agree with Rhina that drawing a line in the sand is silly, unless, of course, it's a nice line. Bob |
One thing seems certain: This would make bad prose:
Sonnets by past masters are difficult to make into good prose by removing their lineation, often because the sentences are extremely long--1, 2, or maybe three sentences total in some poems--requiring lineation to keep from meandering in a way which would obfuscate the meaning or at least make the reading difficult, the rhymes are even more glaring as prose, and their syntactical development extends beyond what we typically require in our prose. Because Len's poem uses meter and rhyme, these things come through in the above variation and make the prose seem rather contrived and maybe trite, dull and monotonous in delivery as prose, whereas there's a certain charm in the original version. Suppose the rhyme and meter were altered along with punctuation to compensate for line breaks/meaning, in the effort to bring this closer to typical prose; would anything "poetic" remain? Then there's "Anabasis (I)" by Merwin: Interesting, I call "Anabasis (I)" a metrical poem, but it has more variation in its meter than Len's poem, and the rhymes are not so often exact rhymes, so the prose version is not as dull and monotonous in its rhythm and sound. But, there are the long, long sentences...The two poems appear to invoke the same experience of being in a "ghost town," although Len's seems to be addressing an actual ghost town and the speaker's contemplation of it and other things in relation to it, whereas Merwin's poem appears to be addressing the feelings of such a juxtaposition via a metaphorical "ghost town." Len's is metaphorical, too--certainly--but uses concrete imagery to give an idea of an actual town, whereas Merwin's language by its concrete imagery builds the metaphor via a "fantasy" or ghost-image of a possible town. Merwin goes further toward addressing the "reality" of the juxtaposition--it's a longer poem, after all--by assembling more of the ghosts, more of the concrete images associated with the town, and by interweaving their connections, than Len does with his shorter poem. Len's poem, in fact, presents the scenario rather abruptly, but with that all-important last line leaves much to the reader's imagination. The prose version of Merwin's poem makes for a more luxurious read because of its many images, but those long lines and constantly changing images/perspectives tend to make the reading difficult, possibly obfuscating the meaning if read as prose. The shorter lines in the original allow an easier approach toward meaning by isolating images and ideas into digestible chunks, which are then meant to be assembled into an over-all meaning. I had originally read Merwin's poem with the belief that the "we" mentioned signified two "living" persons at the edge of this ghostly place, but the "you" which is introduced much later in the poem appears to be a hailing to those ghosts by the speaker. The poem addresses the speaker's interaction with those metaphorical ghosts, isolating the places at which they intersect and separate--primarily the separation, but even the separation is a kind of interaction: although the speaker ultimately expresses his belief that the separation is fundamental and permanent, the speaker also acknowledges the influence of those ghosts. What Merwin's metaphor is exactly describing is up for debate, I suppose, although I tend to read it as a hailing back toward past masters of poetry. It might be the hailing of a lover to his ex, or any other past influence, such is the structure of the metaphor--But what he's addressing is the particular process or modality of influence/separation between distinct fundaments through the separation of time and philosophies. Merely because the metaphor is inexact is not detrimental, for this very fact. Len's poem also doesn't address directly why there's nothing "wrong" with wanting to keep the windows open, but this is one of its strengths. When I spoke of "structures" in previous posts, I perhaps obfuscated the references. There is the physical structure--lineation--and there is the structuring of the ideas, of metaphors and images, of voice (rhetoric, musing, declarative, etc.), of sound, etc. Formalist verse has as one advantage a very discernible physical structure via metrics and rhyme scheme, but as stated before, a metrical/rhyming structure does not make a poem work on its own, nor even does it make a "poem," in my opinion. The worst free verse generally has a very linear, direct, declarative structure (albeit, often with a dismal metaphorical or sound structure and seemingly random line breaks) which--although technically feasible--doesn't always produce good poetry. The best of both metrical and free verse weaves those webs of which Rhina spoke by use of any or all of these structures. Free verse requires form in the same way that metrical verse requires form. Merwin's poem--which as I said seems metrical to me--utilizes complex metaphors along with a delivery which superficially appears to meander, as his structuring of the poem. (Notwithstanding the physical structure of quatrains and rhyme/off-rhyme.) --I imagine ghosts to weave in and out of focus, sharper now and fuzzy later, and our interaction with them to be confounded for this very reason. A curious note: Xenophon's original <u>Anabasis (I)</u> opens with a lengthy description of Cyrus marching to war against his brother, Artaxerxes, during which for a time he moved from town to town along the river Meander. I'm not sure that Merwin expanded the metaphor of war between the brothers, but I think that it is likely. --Curtis. [This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 07, 2002).] |
Curtis,
I think I followed all that except perhaps for the part about the fundament. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif Now that you've paid me the compliment of hauling out one of my perhaps less-than-overwhelming efforts (although I do thank you, I look at this--metrical--verbal object and say, "Oh well, it's OK, but certainly nothing special. Just a kind of wistful goof on Frost.), I feel obliged to say that once again I believe we're basically agreeing here. On the Merwin, for example, I readily admit to his use of meter in this and just about all the other poems in his first two books, which I am at the moment in the process of re-reading. As you say, lots of rhyme and slant rhyme, too. What troubled me about poems like "Anabasis" (either I or II) was that no amount of working through Xenophon or St. John Perse was helping me to even a basic understanding of them! Where was the at least surface coherence? That's why I emphasized the sentence kernels, the appositives, the participially untethered phrases and so on. As far as I can tell, the 22-24-year-old Merwin had at best a pretentious 23-year-old's tenuous grasp of grammar. One can never know what pronoun is doing what and so on. This makes it triply difficult to figure out the general project, whatever that may be. I have a pretty decent understanding of Merwin's politics, personal history, etc., but almost none of that helps here, despite your heroic efforts. Who indeed could say with any certainty what these mysterioso (and metrical!) musings were about? Deep image came later, right, and symboliste vaporings 50 years earlier? Beats me. As to your comments about lineation, meter, and prose, and what kinds of sentences tend to develop out of the matrices of meter as opposed to those of prose, I again believe we're pretty much in agreement. Now, if everyone else is as worn out on this discussion as I 'm beginning to feel, I think I'll take a little vacation from the thread. That's a long and anfractuous trip to make from that wheelbarrow, as Richard Wakefield said. Oh, and apologies for having double-posted the same reply. Simple typo compounded by doubt. |
I'm thankful to everybody who's taken part in this discussion: it's been both delightful and instructive.
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Wow what a thread. I guess everyone's sick of it by now so I can sneak in my 2 cents unnoticed.
it seems to me that meter is fundamental to poetry, but not in a way that disqualifies free verse from being poetry. It also seems to me that "free verse" is a perhaps dubious category in that it tends to blur distinctions between kinds of free verse. Whitman, for example, is arguably a very metrical poet, in that he frees metrical rhythm from the confines of repetitive forms and launches it on the ebb and flow of thought & feeling. His verse typically rises & falls to & from powerfully iambic or dactylic rhythms. This represents the liberation or extension of a certain rhetorical resource present in traditional formal verse. Modernist free verse, on the other hand, is typically (not exclusively, of course) anti-rhetorical, implicitly distrusting rhetorical devices, including all the devices of traditional formal verse, as being manipulative or mechanical. It attempts to bring language back to life by stripping it of all pretensions, ulterior motives, prefabricated forms. This, too, at a certain phase of the creative cycle, is a necessary & good thing to do, and has the potential of producing great art. It's still in a dialectical relation to form & meter -- its meaning to a significant degree resides in its flatness, unmetricality, etc. -- and in that (crucial) sense it's not just prose with line breaks. One problem of course is that this particular phase is all too easily imitated & quickly becomes the kool-aid formula for instant poetry by adolescents of all ages. But God never promised there wouldn't be a preponderance of bad poetry. Anyway, the contemporary knowing practitioner, rather than aligning himself or herself ideologically with "formalism" or "free verse," will employ both, thereby interiorizing the creative dialectic that has played itself out in the tradition. Tacitly, implicitly, the two poles are necessary to each other and keep each other honest, or at least try to (for it's not easy to maintain honesty). Now, as far as Williams's wheelbarrow poem is concerned... it is, I think, exemplary, if you know how to take it. The phrase "so much depends" has a kind of metasignificance in that it points to the importance of context, in a paradoxical or negative way, in that the assertion that so much depends on the wheelbarrow conspicuously lacks supporting context. The reader is cunningly asked to supply the context that explains why so much depends on the wheelbarrow, etc. The reader, of course, is not in possession of this context, and so is presented with the peculiar intensity of a contextless significant. A simple, elegant little poem, which has come to seem pretentious only from being dragged (ironically enough) into large ideological contexts for which it was never intended. |
AE, amen to such sanity.
------------------ Ralph |
I like The Red Wheelbarrow because, rather than attempting to elevate "lineated prose," I think its author is elevating the red wheelbarrow.
I.e., we as poets so often use hyperbolic language and structures to present the mundane; whereas the supposedly "mundane" is really the actual. This goes back to Plato's argument against poets in <u>The Republic</u>, chapter X, although the "actual" here is still one place removed from Plato's "divine." Perhaps WCW wanted us to move nearer that divine. Then there's the concretism involved: http://pages.prodigy.net/cweeks/redwheelbarrow.jpg Dunno, makes it a little bit more interesting. --Curtis. [This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 08, 2002).] |
Right Curtis: It's the game. WCW gives you all these details but not the context. So, as I said in my original post, the reader has to contextualize it for him or herself. It's why I think that poem will last and why it has become far more infamous than the plum poem or the cat climbed down poem.
AE: I'd give you a buck for your 2 cents. I thought it made enormous sense. But, like Rhina said (so if you are reading this, Rhina, thank you--your post made me feel incredibly validated), I don't tend to make this enormous distinction between free and metered verse. I read both, I write both, I love both. Whatever works. [This message has been edited by nyctom (edited January 09, 2002).] |
Great discussion. I wish we free versers discussed our craft half this much over on our mastery board. I have a couple thoughts of my own to offer, for what they're worth...
Somewhere the question, "What makes a poem, and who decides?" was explicitly raised. Of course, the politically correct answer is that there is no right answer. Nonetheless, some poems have an audience of ten, and some have an audience of 10,000 or more. So what we define as poetry is inevitably going to be influenced by what gets published and reprinted and taught in schools. That's the problem, as I see it, with the Williams' poem and with free verse in general. I could not possibly have stumbled across TRW and deemed it a little gem. I was exposed to it as GREAT POETRY from the first time I read it. It's nearly impossible to seperate it from its reputation. Personally, I think Pound's is a far better Imagist poem: In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. With regard to free verse in general, much of what gets published and prized these days is dreadful. Formalists only need to reach as far as the "Best American Poetry" anthologies to make some really strong arguments against FV. There must be at least five writers for every person who reads poetry, so there's no shortage of material available to publishers. Yet the same dull crap keeps being published and winning awards. (No offence intended to anyone here whose work has appeared in this series. Those of you whose names I recognize are all formalists, so it's not your work I'm talking about.) As I see it, one of the major problems is a shift away from craft and toward the sanctity of experience and emotion. It's all about the poet, the poet, the poet. Writing for the reader is a secondary consideration. Could I, a woman, really say that Adrienne Rich is a terrible poet without being accused of being a traitor to my sex? I had to write a lit analysis paper this semester on one of her poems. I duly noted all the poetic devices I was expected to find, and wrote down the effects they were supposed to produce. In reality, though, I didn't see a single device used effectively. What I did see was the 'profundity of woman' elucidated in a post-modern, pseudo-poetic, more-authentic-than-thou voice, and I told my professor so. Fortunately, she admired my boldness, but I'm sure there are lots of profs who would not tolerate such dissension. As I understand it, the first experiments with open form were done because certain poets felt that poetry could be much more than what was possible using the old forms. Contemporary poets seem to have latched on to one element, the stripping away of conventions, without striving toward anything new to replace those conventions, if only temporarily, for one poem, or one book, or one decade, as fitting. I believe the best poetry is yet to be written. I'd love to learn meter and closed forms, but my ultimate goal, and what I'd love to see far more other poets doing, is to take that knowledge and create something entirely new out of it. I think Eliot did a wonderful job of it, but that was half a century ago. The ball's been dropped. Who is going to pick it up? It seems as though you, Tom and Curtis, are striving in this direction. I hope to see more from both of you over on FV. Ginger [This message has been edited by ginger (edited January 12, 2002).] |
Ginger,
Seems like I couldn't stay away on my "vacation" for more than five days! Interesting post. Just thought I'd mention that when Pound's (canonical?) imagist piece was first published, it actually appeared like this: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough (Please cut me a little slack here, since I'm doing this from memory.) Looks like "projective verse," n o? |
Len,
Unfortunately, I'm unfamiliar with the concept of "projective verse." Having started college a bit later than most at 26, I'm only in my third year of undergraduate study. I still have much to learn. I took a look at an excerpt from Olsen's essay, which I found on the web, but I'm having difficulty making out the difference between his definitions and the goal of the Imagists which, as it was explained to me, was to "capture an emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time." I'd love take to classes that explore these matters in-depth, but they are difficult to find. I'm taking a writing workshop next semester, but it seems mostly geared toward the absolute beginner (What's an Iamb? 101). The only course being offered that focuses on reading poetry is an upper-level seminar entitled, "Contemporary American Poetry." It is described as follows: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Jorie Graham, C.K. Williams. Each poet provides a “take” on the world that is like no other and brings into view what we realize we had never seen with such clarity before. Each extends the possibilities for poetry. The topics are infinite but here are a few: the “play” between immersion in experience and suspension above it, the decline of the oracular, the desire for and constraints on visionary moments, new exchanges with nature, language “offering evidence of what is there before us” (C.K. Williams), the many ways that we evade, come to terms with, need consolation for difficult knowledge. To me this sound like just the sort of thing I griped about in my previous post. I hope I'll have a wider selection of courses when I reach graduate school, but that seems a bit late to take the first step beyond basic poetry appreciation. I've gone on long enough. Thanks for pointing me in a direction I was previously unaware existed. Hopefully I'll find time this semester to do some extracurricular reading on the subject. Ginger [This message has been edited by ginger (edited January 14, 2002).] |
Ginger, loud applause to you for not being intimidated into pretending to find sometone's poetry better than you really find it, simply because the truth might expose you to a charge of "disloyalty" to some group or school or thought or social attitude! We all need more of that kind of honesty, if poetry is going to be more than agit-prop. The fact that a poem is feminist, or an argument for X legislation, which you favor, or speaks in the voice of Y group, which happens to be your own, dos not make it good--or bad either, for that matter. It needs to be judged as poetry, as an artifact either well or badly made, quite apart from its intent or the loyalties it espouses. Good for your teacher, too.
|
Ginger,
My apologies, but I had typed the Pound lines to show that originally they appeared with large [spaces] between words (randomly chosen, as far as I can tell): Blah blah blah [1/2" space ] blah blah [space] blah Is that any clearer? Basically, that's what "projective" verse tried to do, to show pauses, length of pauses, etc. Hope that's clearer. |
I just landed back in this and wanted to point out that Charles Olson was less interested in pauses in Projective Verse than in breaths or breath units. He's also building on an essay of Williams's that leads to the idea of the variable foot--Williams uses the phrase "relative measure." Both of these alternative prosodies become nonsensical when you really look at them. They are to poetic measure what Yeats's symbols were to philsophy--they were essentially private systems, or pseudo-systems, that allowed poets to write in ways they felt were appropriate. They could not really be systematized or imitated.
To this day, no one really knows what Projective Verse actually means--it's as relative as the ways we breathe in given circumstances--and the same is true of the variable foot. Now, as one who believes that free verse is a viable technique rarely used with urgency or skill, I would say that one part of it is the acceptance that one is going against units of measure understood in accentual, syllabic, or accentual-syllabic terms. One is feeling one's way toward the definition of the line and the line break, sorting out rhythm by other means, including rhetorical means, with rhetorical units working in or against the lines. This is far, far from prose, which simply organizes grammar and rhetoric in sentences and paragraphs and gives no heed to lines or line breaks. Therefore Len's earlier implication that Whitman was prose struck me as erroneous--at least in many cases I could point to, if not all of his poems. To admit in free verse that one is working in lines but against measure seems to me rather important, and both Olson and Williams were unable to admit such a thing. Williams praised John Haines's free verse because it felt more intentional than the usual stuff that gets printed, and there I think he came closer to the kind of compact that differentiates verse from prose. CK Williams, for example, rarely seems intended in his lines and line breaks any more, and therefore seems to me much more like a prose writer than, say, Whitman. I would, however, say that all of these definitions of verse are insufficient in a definition of poetry. Though few prose poems seem to me to have the poetic in them, I have certainly found the poetic in prose. In other words, formal definitions alone will always be insufficient to define the term, if indeed it ever finds a definition. By the same token, spiritual or soulful definitions will always be lacking, because poems more often than not set themselves apart from prose by being composed in lines, whether measured or unmeasured. It seems sensible to me to say that our definitions are doomed to wander between these poles, always inviting agreement and objection. This line began with a question about WC Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," which is at least a controversial little piece of writing. Sometimes I think it utterly obnoxious and want to kick it across a room, but sometimes I'm glad the little bastard exists and causes people to question their assumtpions about what is possible in the art. This is useful, because otherwise we could fall into the sort of Georgian lethargy that made the free verse revoltuion seem so important and tenable in the first place. Useful, but not necessarily good poetry. I go back to my original statements about the "poem," here. Let me end by saying simply that I am a reader who wants to be surprised and enlightened and transported, and those things have happened to me when reading many different kinds of writing. The fact that writing in meter is more memorable than writing in not-meter causes me to lean toward meter. But we're also a culture in which some reading pleasures are less memorable than others while remaining kinds of pleasure. I'm unwilling to dictate the sort of absolute laws that would narrow the scope of my pleasure, even while I must admit that most of what I read in verse of any sort bores me to tears. [This message has been edited by David Mason (edited January 15, 2002).] |
David: I agree with you about the immeasureable breadth of poetry. I believe the world is bigger than any theory or definition of it, and even relatively small parts of the world resist formulation. That's not to say -- as you clearly don't mean to -- that definitions and formulas are useless, only that they're always provisional. So, like you, I appreciate the challenge that "The Red Wheelbarrow" presents, even if I don't much like the poem itself. If it is a poem... Oh, Lord, here we go again.
RPW |
I think it's obvious that the Red Wheelbarrow is a "poem." What else is it? Of course, there are people who think that the word "poem" implies quality, such that there can't be any such thing as a "bad poem" because either it's a poem, and therefore good, or it's bad and therefore not a poem.
There's a difference, though, between recognizing what something is and recognizing what we like. Edsels are cars, Britney Spears makes music. I don't want to drive or listen to either. Enough very smart and literate people who can certainly claim to know as much about poetry as the rest of us have admired Williams' poem and thought enough about it and discussed it enough that here we are still discussing it decades after the fact. Is it just a mass hallucination? And, if so, does that mean it's not a poem? As to the "what is poetry" discussion, and how it relates to free verse versus meter, etc., I also think it's rather absurd to say that only one camp can claim to be "poetry." To make an analogy, what is love? Is it how a parent feels for his child? Or is it how a spouse feels for a spouse? A citizen feels for his country? Is it love only if it doesn't bend with the remover to remove? Is it love if it passes? Is it love if it's selfish? There are all sorts of love, and we could have a fierce argument about which kind of love is best or most satisfying, but it would be silly for a parent to argue that what a friend feels for a friend isn't love, or what a nun feels for God isn't love, etc., because only a parent's love is supreme. By the same token, I think, poetry is almost as complex as love and certainly has complex facets and aspects that we would be foolish to claim are found only in the cloisters we each have chosen to dwell in. Why the need to define away what we don't prefer, to exclude it from the club? Okay, sure. William Carlos Williams was a hack, didn't think about poetry as deeply as I did and probably didn't have any appreciation for great literature or insight into how literature is created. It was all just marketing, marketing that happened to take in some of the finest critics of his day. But I wonder why my own bad poetry doesn't get mistaken for the real thing the way his did? Why was his badness so much more interesting than the extreme competence of so many others? |
Roger -
I agree with a lot of what you say; but here's the question that keeps nagging at me. How do you define a good poem? Is it one that follows the rules exactly, or is it good because it breaks the rules in an interesting way? Is it good because it expresses something simply and clearly, or because it leaves you with a sense of mystery, of a depth you can't quite fathom? Is it beautiful (define beauty?) I ask this because TRW is a simple poem, showing a simple image in clear language that can't possibly be "misuderstood": which is one definition of good. Questions of good or bad are inevitably mixed in with subjectivity, with personal taste and with what society now or in the past has called good. Whether there is, or is not, an objectively "good" or "bad" poetry is a moot point: is African art better or worse than Greek? Is the level of skill more important than the level of feeling in a poem? I'm pretty sure I know a good or bad poem when I see one; I'm also pretty sure that someone somewhere will think my opinion nonesense. ------------------ Steve Waling |
Originally posted by Curtis Gale Weeks:
To a Certain Civilian, Walt Whitman I dedicate the citation of this poem to Len, suspecting its warm reception. The things I detest about New Formalism are summarized very well by the above poem by Walt Whitman. New Formalism is at its worst when it attempts to codify thought processes for a community. I equate this tendency to religious fundamentalism, racial fundamentalism, and every other form of fundamentalism.--C. What Curtis had to say was much longer than this but I only have a short point to make. I dont think Curtis quite reads what Whitman is saying above. One of our founding fathers said (forgive me, I can't remember who) "Patriotism is the last refuguee of a scoundral." All that Whitman does above is "wrap himself and his poetry in the flag." True patriots will love his work! Whitman practically calls his "critic" an effeminate coward. (This written either doing or just after by far the bloodiest war in American history.) I dont think Curtis realizes it but Whatman's poem actually examples exactly the type of thing he accuses New Formalism of doing. ewrgall [This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited January 25, 2002).] |
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
Dr Samuel Johnson, citizen of Lichfield in the United Kingdom: 7th April 1775 (Boswell) Clive Watkins |
Oi, do I have the energy to go through this again?
Or is it The Subject That Cannot Die? Totally random responses then: About twenty years ago, there was a bit of a trend in hip typographic and design circles to set a lot of ad copy and even textbook prose "rag right"-- a locution I'm sure everyone sees the "poetic" aptness of immediately. Whole chapters of what would ordinarily have been set as justified (even left and right margins) type ended up with even left margins and irregular right ones. (Exactly like the paragraph above) By Dave's definition of Whitman's line as non-prosaic, could I not infuse that paragraph with some metaphor and more interesting diction, set it with new line endings that played tricks with the meaning (imitative fallacy stuff) or broke up the usual conversationally-expected grammatical units ("enjambment yields high twisted energy that goes against the line ending" arguments) and be said to be doing the same thing Whitman was doing? Dave himself says that Olson (and, I agree, Williams--"variable foot" my sweet Aunt Fannie) were simply inventing private systems no one else could recognize. Chris Beyers, in his just-out book "The History of Free Verse," says almost exactly the same thing. Dave, I also agree with you that people like C. K. Williams don't seem to care much of anything about their so-called lines except that they be very, very, very long. A whole bunch of people like the latter Williams--Charles Wright, etc.--could be included in this group. Since I'm obviously failing miserably at making this distinction, I'm going to try just one last time: like Dave, I find most of ANYthing I read, whether its authors call it prose or poetry, awful. I see NO special advantage to meter and/or rhyme if the poem is dreadful. At the same time, I genuinely admire good prose. Some of my best friends, etc., etc. ... By making this distinction I do NO HARM to anyone writing good prose. But if the definitions for poetry are to include the "spiritually elevated" or almost-transcendentally subjective ("it lifts my soul; ergo, poetry"), then I believe we really do lose a modest but useful distinction. Apparently some people think that if you can't be called a poet you drop in some imagined hierarchy of the written arts. Perhaps. But it was Wilbur (at a reading three or four years ago) who said (I paraphrase), "Many people cannot write verse. There is no harm in their not doing so." I've forgotten some of the other points folks made above, but I mean them no disrespect by bowing out at this juncture with the perhaps peculiar observation that I like much of Dave's work and dislike almost all of Whitman's. Go figure. Oops--I forgot: Whitman began his literary forays into verse by writing in meter and rhyme...very badly. |
[quote]Originally posted by ewrgall:
What Curtis had to say was much longer than this but I only have a short point to make. I dont think Curtis quite reads what Whitman is saying above. One of our founding fathers said (forgive me, I can't remember who) "Patriotism is the last refuguee of a scoundral." All that Whitman does above is "wrap himself and his poetry in the flag." True patriots will love his work! Whitman practically calls his "critic" an effeminate coward. (This written either doing or just after by far the bloodiest war in American history.) I dont think Curtis realizes it but Whatman's poem actually examples exactly the type of thing he accuses New Formalism of doing. ewrgall ewrgall, We must come from different planets, you and I. I'm sure that most civilians--or, at least those who cared to think about their country--were quite patriotic when Whitman penned this poem. If he is distancing himself from them, he's patriotic? Yes, but he was patriotic in his own way. His reference to the war, the drum-corps, the officer's funeral, are metaphorical statements about the qualitative nature of his muse/inspiration/emotion...They're not "wrapping himself in the flag." Where is "flag" or "country" mentioned in this poem? I think you're stretching the bounds of comprehension, arcing into whimsy to support your position. Any school of poetry which claims that it alone--through its chosen methods--creates "poetry," while excluding every other possible method, is fundamentalist in the worst way. Even though Whitman is condescending in this poem, the target of his condescension isn't much different than the target of some New Formalist thought: that pop music (Jewel, for instance) isn't good poetry: "piano-tunes" and "peaceful and languishing rhymes." At the same time, Whitman is speaking for himself, for his own methodology, and not for a "school." The fact that he felt he needed to do so is surely a sign that some other opponent--the "you" of this poem, if the word is taken to its extreme--had fundamentalized the notion of what is and what isn't poetry; namely, those makers/lovers of piano-tunes. Curtis. Also:BANNED POST during times of war, civilians will often continue to celebrate holidays, hold festivals, etc., while soldiers are still out on the battlefield fighting the battles and dying. Whitman's contrasting of the civilians' wishing for "peaceful and languishing rhymes" and the images of soldiers and war are possibly a cry for reality in poetry vs. the romantic tendencies which continued to warp the poetry of his time--metrical verse and free verse issues aside, he was probably intending this contrast over all others. (With the added nod that, yes, he didn't rhyme his poetry.) [This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 26, 2002).] |
Williams's humble wheel barrow has hauled us all a long ways. One good indication that a thread has attenuated past any earthly use is that the title no longer suggests anything about the contents. To anyone who feels this thread has led to interesting but disparate topics, I suggest that you start new threads, either here our on whatver forum seems appropriate.
Richard |
Not to enter the fray or anything, and apologies for pro-longing the life of this thread, but was re-reading some Wendy Copy today. I had forgotten about this gem, which struck me as very apropos:
So Much Depends 'And Another thing: I gave in far too easily over William Carlos Williams.' I can't remember what you said about him. Was it thumbs down or the big hurrah? When it comes to William Carlos Williams, I've no idea what your opinions are. I argued with you? That seems most unlikely. I may have looked attentive for a while. I've searched my head for William Carlos Williams And there is very little in the file. I'll fight with you about important issues Like who should buy the bread or clean the sink But when it comes to William Carlos Williams, Dearest, I really don't mind what you think. Yes, mutter darkly, 'Well, perhaps you ought to,' And fire offensive weapons from those eyes. When it comes to William Carlos Williams, It won't do any good. I will not rise. |
Alicia: Delightful and, best of all, faithful to its perspective. If we get more like this, by all means let's keep the thread going and going.
Richard |
Indeed a delightful piece of writing. But is it transcendental enough or spiritually elevating enough to be considered a "poem" and not just rhyming prose that follows a metrical pattern?
Just a thought. Tom |
Here's a perspective on TRW that no one's mentioned yet. It's from Robert Wallace & Michelle Boisseu's "Writing Poems" (required reading this semester). In the book, TRW is presented as a "picture poem." Say the authors,
"Each stanza seems to show a miniature wheelbarrow in side view, with the longer first line suggesting the handle. If so, the radically enjambed line-turn may give us an oral image of the wheel." It comes complete with a diagram that shows students how to 'see' the various parts of the wheelbarrow in William's lines. You guys see it, right!? http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif In defense of those who have ripped Williams apart here, I think he set him self up for the ripping, by himself putting forth his own definitions for poetry and prose. The following is from Spring and All (in Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, Volume One eds. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris): "...prose has to do with the fact of an emotion; poetry has to do with the dynamization of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination. prose: statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectual states, data of all sorts--technical expositions, jargon, of all sorts--fictional and other-- poetry: new form dealt with as a reality in itself. The form of prose is the accuracy of its subject matter--how best to expose the multiform phases of its material the form of poetry is related to the movement of the imagination revealed in words--or whatever it may be-- the cleavage is complete Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect? The cleavage goes through all the phases of experience. It is the jump from prose to the process of imagination that is the next great leap of the intelligence--from the simulations of present experience to the facts of the imagaination-- the greatest characteristic of the present age is that it is stale--stale as literature-- To enter a new world, and have there freedom of movement and newness. I mean that there will always be prose painting, representative work, clever as may be in revealing new phases of emotional research presented on the surface. But the jump from that to Cezanne or back to certain of the primitives is the impossible. The primitives are not back in some remote age--they are not BEHIND experience. Work which bridges the gap between the rigidities of vulgar experience and the imagination is rare. It is new, immediate--It is so because it is actual, always real. It is experience dynamized into reality. Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself--sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity..." I don't wholly disagree with what he has to say, but I do think that by saying it, he invites readers to challenge his work. And I don't think that's a bad thing. Ginger |
Oh, you just have to love a good argument about WCW. There's a reason he shares initials with World Championship Wrestling.
Yes. I do feel "The Red Wheelbarrow" is a poem. I used to think it a terrible poem; now I merely think it a boring one. Why is it a poem? Because as a poem, it is complete. No, he doesn't tell you what depends on the scene, but it's a complete thought. It's not prose. Being written in complete sentences (well, complete sentence) does not turn something into prose. The entire thing, the whole damned thing, is self-contained in one sentence. You may not be impressed with what the sentence says, heck, you may even argue that it doesn't say anything, but it is complete. It isn't missing the rest of it. It doesn't need a short story tacked on to the opening sentence. It isn't an essay. It isn't a short story. It isn't a novel. It is neither fiction nor non-fiction. It is not part of a larger whole. It is not made up of smaller fragments. It is a poem. And I still don't like it. Julie |
A newcomer weighs in long after sensible people have concluded that the discussion was over and done with.
There are some canonical poems that deserve to be laughed off the stage (my first nominee would be "The Emperor of Ice Cream"), but WCW's red wheel barrow poem is not one of them. At the heart of the poem, I see a Westernized version of an Eastern poetic sensibility. Basho does not say, "So much depends upon the sound of a frog jumping into an old pond." Issa does not say, "So much depends upon this peony in my garden." But that is the implicit message of every short poem that directs the reader's attention to a moment of here-and-now communion with the natural world. The frog is just the frog, the pond just the pond, the flower just the flower, the wheelbarrow just the wheelbarrow, the rain just the rain, the chickens just the chickens. But in the moment that the poet observes any one (or any combination) of these mere realities, comprehends its universe-in-a-grain-of-sand significance, and finds the words to convey that moment of realization to the reader. . . . Ah, in that moment, so much depends upon that moment. |
Chris:
It's good to see this thread brought back into view. The conversation has really become a discussion about what makes a poem a poem, about who gets to say what's a poem, and maybe about how willing we are to take a chance on looking foolish for being taken in by a sham poem. I disagree about "The Emperor of Ice Cream." That's one of a handful of Stevens's poems that speaks right to me. But I agree, sort of, about "The Red Wheel Barrow." It seems to me to be about both the interconnectedness of things and the insurmountable thinginess of things: just a wheel barrow, yes, but everything, in being merely what it is, depends in a sense upon everything else's being merely what IT is... No ideas but in things, as WCW said. The problem for me is that the poem works conceptually but not viscerally, or not much. "The Emperor of Ice Cream" makes me feel things as well as think about things. "The Red Wheel Barrow," for me, is almost all thought. RPW |
The "poet" of "The Red Wheelbarrow" isn't worthy to shine the shoes of "The Emperor of Ice Cream."
|
I put "The Red Wheelbarrow" into a special category all of its own.
I call it a "That's Not A Poem! Poem" because whenever I teach it, people say, "but that can't be a poem!" It shakes people who have fixed ideas as to what a poem is or can up to be told that this short, not terribly interesting sentence, is a poem. It sometimes shakes them up so much that from then on their poetry changes, often for the better because they stop looking for self-conciously "poetic" subject matter and start looking around them for material. I still think "no ideas but in things" is damned good advice for a poet, though only if you don't take it the way a fundamentalist takes the first chapter of Genesis (ie, literally.) I've caused some great discussions in class by introducing this poem. Of course it's not the greatest poem on the planet, but boy is it good at causing an arguement! ------------------ Steve Waling |
So much depends upon an ability to distinguish between the virtuous simplicity of Williams and the skimble-skamble showboating of Stevens. "Love calls us to the things of this world," says Richard Wilbur. Might Williams, seen in that light, be wheeling a great love poem in his red barrow? As for the monarch of frozen treats, here's a bit of rudeness that I published a while ago.
THE EMPEROR OF BIRTHDAY CAKE Call the plump, periphrastic one, The insurance executive, The poet as the letter P, Roller of big cigars as the letter C. Let be be befuddled by fake, The only emperor is the emperor of birthday cake. Bid him whip curdled words for philosophy soufflé, Purvey 10¢ ideas in $12 packages, Author of “Thirteen Ways Of Saying Give Me a Break.” The only emperor is the emperor of birthday cake. |
Alas....
Clive Watkins |
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