I s'pose Fred's tool-kit would have to be right...but perhaps we haven't arrived at the point yet? In both metrical and non-metrical verse, expression often springs from different line-lengths-- short lines/long lines-- and in change-ups in the rhythms.

Any decent poem creates an evolving paradigm-- an emerging pattern-- that cannot be complete until the poem concludes...else it isn't a very good poem.

[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited June 24, 2004).]

Fred,

I think those three groupings have much merit. I note how they overlap with old Ezra Pound's three famous terms: phanopoeia, melopoeia, & logopoeia. That sounds like a pedigree.

I assume that when we say FV we are excluding syllabics--otherwise we might want to add "measure" or "number" to the toolkit.

Hell, we might want to add it anyway, since (it seems to me) that the toolkit for lineation in FV is a subset of the lineation used for "measured" (metrical/syllabic) verse. The idea with FV is that it doesn't use a counting measure, it takes some other basis (often, as you point out, sound, sight, idea).

The interesting cases, I think, are the ones where these three groups of tools are brought to bear simultaneously; but the most useful cases for understanding the contents of each group might be examples where just one factor predominantly determines lineation.

I'm thinking of Ginsberg's lines in "Howl" for the cognitive element (each line is like a little paragraph), and of cummings's lines in the poem sometimes known as "a leaf falling" for the visual. I admit that I am stumped for an example of lines broken almost solely for the sake of sound which are nonetheless non-metrical.

That makes the sonic grouping the most interesting, to me, for purposes of discussion of FV lineation. How does one break lines by sound without access to a counting measure? By rhyme, perhaps?

One other thought--a question, really. Does the cognitive grouping you mention include methods of lineation based on grammar (including parts of speech, e.g., a poem that chooses to break a lines at every article)? Perhaps you can expand on what you see each of these groups including.

--CS

Clay wrote: "That makes the sonic grouping the most interesting, to me, for purposes of discussion of FV lineation. How does one break lines by sound without access to a counting measure? By rhyme, perhaps?"

Well, I'll share how I do it. I read a sequence of lines aloud, and I look for a characteristic I call "fluidity".

Thus, as far as lineation, some line breaks can be construed as promoting fluidity and others as either neutral or inhibiting fluidity.

Fred

Fred,

Yup, I think that's how, in practice, we all do it. I wonder if there's a way to talk about fluidity in terms that are less subjective though. Not entirely objective--that seems impossible--but maybe that hinges less on having read massive swathes of the English canon. Because right now, that massive reading seems to be the only way to discover how to detect fluidity. I wonder how an absolute beginner does it--a stupid question, I guess, since I should just be able to remember to when I didn't know meter from mutter and extrapolate from there. But it seems hard to recall. I guess fluidity is one of those things where, "if you have to ask, you'll never know," but it's frustrating to talk about it in those terms. For me at least. Do you think it's helpful for building the toolkit if we try to get more of an abstracted or definitive sense of what fluidity is?

Seems to me that knowing how to modulate it is pretty much the big secret to FV lineation.

--CS

Clay,
I think that fluidity cannot, ultimately, be divorced from metrics. We are, after all, speaking of a sonic flow that tends to fall short of formal verse, yet exceeds in its structure the often arhythmic nature of prose.

To say (and you are not saying this, but some may) that this would make FV a bastard child of formal verse is, however, wrong-headed, in that (and Curtis was delving into this, above) if one looks into the common wellspring of all verse one sees that its origins may be in a native rhythmic aspect inherent to speech itself, perhaps combined with an additional rhythmic component that derives from speech that is intended to have special meaning. If, for example, in a flow of conversation, I want to say something with added gravity, something that I especially want you to hear, or remember, I may voice my words with a more rhythmic cadence than the choppy movement of casual speech.

One might posit a fractal model, in which the rhythms of FV have a specific, mathematically quantifiable "looseness" from a formal underlying structure -- and for the analytically prococious, this may be the way to go -- but for our purposes here, it may be that the following guidelines apply --

(1) If the rhythmic structure of a series of lines has no underlying rhythmic (I prefer this to "metrical") form, in other words if it is a rhythmic jumble, we may consider the lines prosaic, and assume that, unless such prosiness is intended to achieve a prescribed effect, that the lines are less than they could be if they had more musicality.

(2) A writer of FV should be able to scan the lines and point out the underlying rhythmic form, as well as define the particular variances from that form, though I do not think this needs to be done with precision. To some degree, as mentioned in the previous post, this can be done spontaneously by invoking a standard of fluidity.

Much in the same way that a poet scans a series of lines for assonance, consonance and alliteration -- and reworks the lines to keep this internal rhyme above some self--imposed threshhold, but below the point where a reader might say "this is just bad rhyme" -- this same poet scans those same lines for rhythm, looking to keep the phrasing above the level where it seems a jumble, but below the level where it is judged to be corrupt metered verse.

Anyway, much more to say, but I need to get back to being the village ogre.

Fred

Fred,

Much to think about here, and not enough time, but I may be off Erato for the weekend, so wanted to throw this out there.

You say: I think that's exactly backwards.

As you note, "if one looks into the common wellspring of all verse one sees that its origins may be in a native rhythmic aspect inherent to speech itself, perhaps combined with an additional rhythmic component that derives from speech that is intended to have special meaning." That would seem to indicate that "fluidity" (I think we are using this as loosely synonymous with "euphonous rhythm") precedes meter. Also, we need to think of what we mean by meter: today's Anglophone accentual-syllabic meter seem to have little to do with, say, classical quantitive meters, and neither has much to do with medieval accentual meters.

I don't mean to belabor this, or pretend to be giving a history lesson to folks who no doubt already know all this. All I mean to indicate is that I think that "fluidity" probably, and rhythm certainly, are in fact totally distinct from metrics. That we habitually wed them says more about literary history than prosodic theory (though I realize that bifurcating those is a maneuver that many will see as a sophistry).

My two cents, only! Gotta go back to being the ogre around these parts. But let me ask you a parting question. You say: If, as you seem to imply, the organization of rhythm in FV is different only in degree, not in kind, from that in metrical verse or prose, why bother lineating at all? Can't rhythms be organized without appeal to the line?

Yes, I think it's a trick question, but I'm interested to see the response. I think it's quite close to the heart of questions about FV lineation, especially.

--CS

[This message has been edited by Clay Stockton (edited June 25, 2004).]

Clay,

One could ignore FV lineation altogether, if all the lines above and below any line in question were rhythmically isomorphic. But then, one would have to assume there were no collateral reasons for breaking a line at such-and-such a place. No visual justification. No logical or rhetorical justication.

But, in fact, we can not assume that the lines above and below any given line are rhythmically isomorphic. The poet may wish to accelerate or retard the pace of the lines, may wish to make one mellifluous and another harsh and guttural, may wish to fill one with caesura and have another spoken without the slightest pause. Thus, breaks need to be made at places that respect these intents.

And, as indicated above, all of this occurs simultaneously with visual and logical-rhetorical-syntactic factors. In other words, the decision of where to break a line involves tradeoffs along three dimensions.

Now THAT is an interesting question. What if rhythmically a line best breaks at point A, but visually the break looks best at B, and yet rhetorically the line takes a generous turn at point C? How would one engineer this kind of balancing act?

More food for thought . . .

Perhaps the following will get this discussion up and running again.

I've co-hosted an open-mic poetry reading here in San Diego for more than four years. Just last month, I wearied of the job and decided to return to "civilian life".

During my tenure, I've heard maybe five-hundred, a thousand, different poets; and most of them read their poems way too fast, so that -- if the poem had any complexity or density to it -- the words got way ahead of the processing that went on in the listener's head. Rhyming poems excepted, only rarely did these readers pause at line's end. It was as if they were reading prose-poems, or simply prose.

I do wonder: Is it in the nature of our fast-paced modern world for people to move so fast, and pause so seldom?

I ask this in part because I've been re-reading John Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean? Toward the end of the volume (p. 995) he says "a poem is one part against another across a silence" -- italics his.

The overwhelming majority of these read-aloud poems had silences only before the poem began, after the poem was over and at those points when, due to physiological constraints, the reader was compelled to take a breath.

In brief, as far as these poets were concerned, and many rhyming poems excepted, the whole matter of lineation was irrelevant.

Fred

A few odds-n-ends:

Rose,

I’m not sure that a procedural question such as this can be answered definitively. Do different FV poets work differently when composing poems? I’m intrigued by the question, because I suspect that much of what we see on the page (or screen)—that is, the end products—would make a lot more sense if we knew how the poet went about composing the poem’s lines/-breaks.

I have a preference or two. When I write, I generally have opposing ideas/images/statements in mind while I’m writing, and I “plan” breaks so that these oppositions will fall into separate lines. I shouldn’t even call them “oppositions,” because sometimes they support one another or expand one another; but then again, they’re put into “opposing” lines, or isolated separately, in a kind of balance or tug-of-war. I’m always conscious of the next line when I’m working on a line; I always keep in mind how these ideas should flow from one to the next. However, I don’t always know exactly where the break should occur when I am beginning a line, though by the time I’ve reached it, I generally know.

Then comes the re-vision, which is sometimes as soon as I’ve decided on a break or have completed the next line. I go back and look at it, sometimes toy with different breaks half-heartedly, to see if maybe I can make it better. I often plod in this manner, taking a long time to move on to the next turns in the poem. (In fact, whether writing prose or poetry, I plod. I’ve spent hours on a paragraph before writing the next, or a full day on a page if I’m writing fiction [which is rarely, lately]—though, usually not quite so long on these paragraphs posted to Erato.)

The problem for me is the feeling I always have that the syntax and grammar, the words, are so interlinked with the line-unit(s) and the interaction of line-units, a shift in a break often necessitates the changing of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, etc.: adding, subtracting, modifying other elements. I am very suspicious of the notion of writing sentences first and then trying to break them into poetry. That seems like a lottery or random blasting in a quarry. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that those who do compose in sentences first, then look for breaks, are probably the very same people who write 90% of the crappy FV poetry being written. [Actually, I’m not sure that some of those FVers know that that’s what they’re doing. I’m sure many of them think in “lines,” but those lines also happen to be of the very same type of construction one finds in prose: broken at the expected places, the linebreaks aren’t verse-turns so much as continuations of an already established development in the argument. This’ll probably need to be examined further.]
____________

Fred & Clay,

When the topic turns to sound, I turn belligerent, so you’ll have to excuse the tone of the following if it seems to dismiss too easily the points you’ve made to this point between you.

Oh, I’ll be on some of the same ground. Like Clay, I distrust the term “fluidity” for its abstract nature. A load of commentary by various critics & scholars supports the very useful term “dissonance,” which probably ought to be considered just as important to the construction of FV lines as “fluidity.” But these two terms can be taken in various ways to mean various things. I’d rather we focused on 1) how sound interacts with meaning, and 2) various sound effects which might shape the tone of a poem regardless of their influence on the meanings. This is a broad subject perhaps not limited to the line, though if you want we can focus on these as they relate (strictly) to “the line.”

Many commentators on poetry overemphasize the importance of sound in poetry. Now I am surely a heretic, for saying so. I’ll go partway to meet those commentators, but not the full way, by making a distinction between the romantic notions and the authentic realities of sound-in-poetry:

There are those who swoon at subjective experiences of the sounds in poems, usually in a manner such as “Ooooo, I like the sounds you’ve used!” Substitute for “sounds”: fluidity, dissonance, assonance, consonance, rhythm, slant-rhyme, and rhyme. We can hardly keep from romanticizing poetry on the basis that it has “cool sounds,” but we’ll be hard-pressed to identify which sounds are appropriate for a poem before the accolades are given. Just try making rules. I suppose we might target an audience that has already responded favorably to a given set of sounds by using those sounds again—and this might have a practical effect on them in real-time—but we would be foolish to assume that any construction of ours will always succeed because “Poetry is about Sound!” Besides, there are also those philistines and saints who are not so easily seduced by pretty sounds.

Perhaps most of the time, such praise as the simplistic “Ooooo, I like the sounds you’ve used!”, is really about the way the sounds interact with the meanings of the poem. Our understanding of our language is greatly shaped by the various sounds it creates. On the one hand, this is good for poetry, since we can modify sound patterns to emphasize (draw notice to) certain meanings or nuances; on the other hand, all spoken language has sound, and therefore no uttered poem is devoid of it. I am fairly disturbed at the notion that meter and rhythm are important—beautiful!—for their sounds. Maybe I’m biased, since even with meter, 90% of my enjoyment comes from the way the meter influences the meanings/nuances. Patterns of stresses do not seem to me to be particularly pleasing in and of themselves, sonically, because 1) all spoken language has these stresses, making the very reality of “stress” an extraordinarily common experience, and 2) organized patterns of stress, systems of beats, can only be experienced over a longish duration, and my poor mind can’t “hear” that far in the past—i.e., for a pattern to be experienced, the duration of a pattern must be sufficiently long to create that pattern, and I am only hearing the most recent stresses/beats of the pattern—and 3) these stresses, these beats, are nothing more than a greater intensity, usually of duration and changes in pitch. The music I actually hear is mostly in the consonants and vowels—assonance & consonance & even dissonance—rather than in the beating itself. Therefore, the meanings that are woven in such a manner are my primary interest, though sounds are attached to the meanings being woven. Curiously enough, by my reckoning the actual patterns woven are so various as to be nearly infinite in number, because it is the weaving of the particular consonant and vowel sounds (which are stressed), and combinations of these, and not mere intensity that is being woven; the words we have in our language are so numerous.

I’ve tipped into overtime, here; my apologies. I do think we can discuss the sound of “the line” in a better fashion than via abstractions alone, though I doubt any guidelines can be drawn on the subject. We might have examples, the delineation of a few broad and widely applicable strategies, but little more.

___________

JM,

A lot of what Paul Lake has said about metrical verse makes sense for FV as well, but as I recall, his essay was greatly biased against FV, in fact claiming the superiority of metrical verse. Perhaps I am thinking of another essay.

This paragraph of yours is especially significant, imo:

<dir>Generally, it seems like an issue of fine-tuning...and in fact, Mr. Lake calls it "the continuous fine-tuning of feedback" in his review noted above (and my apologies to him if I abuse, or otherwise quote out of context...it is truly a superb article). So the measure of FV lineation involves the fine-tuning of feedback...patterning emerges, and the poet adjusts the tape, shortening or lengthening each line, and readjusting each again as subsequent lines are tuned.</dir>
That tends to describe the way I go about creating lines in FV. I mentioned above, to Rose, the idea that the constituent parts of a line are often so interrelated that a change in a break almost always necessitates a change in one or more other aspects of the line: this is hardly different from the way that metricists must often change at least one other feature of a line when exchanging a word—to preserve the meter or the tone or the sense or all three. Many potential strange attractors per line.

I do think that many metricists—besides the masters (who really do know what they’re doing)—actually believe that the meter determines the line; whereas, I think the meter sets a limit, but the words, phrases, syntax, grammar, and other lines in a poem determine the line. The metrical poet has great freedom; but, a limit — which limit he also part-chooses, since multiple metrical paradigms (meters), line lengths, stanza patterns, and rhyme schemes exist from which to choose.

One problem of our discussion, here in this thread that Fred has started, is that some participants or potential participants might think we are searching for A Rule the way they think that metricists follow A Rule for constructing the lines. Nothing can be further from the truth, in both cases. IMO.



[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited June 27, 2004).]

I’ve been thinking that maybe we ought to use examples from published poetry to put these abstract ideas we’ve been trading into focus.

<u>On the subject of “verse-turns”</u>

The concept struck home with me when I began to look closely at E.St.V.Millay’s sonnets. I suppose I’d always been aware of the turns without putting a name to them; but I’ve always considered Millay’s sonnets to be on par with Shakespeare’s, and I wanted to understand what I liked so much about the developmental processes she used. Shakespeare is so often held up as an example, I felt little inclination, at the time, to delve into the processes he used. Millay, on the other hand, is an interesting example because she used an idiom that was, even at that time, a bit idiosyncratic for being archaic. I’d always wondered 1) why she wrote in that idiom, and 2) what she used to transcend the limitations of using such an idiom. A problem with analyzing exactly the verse-turns evolves from the fact that, from one line to the next, the turns are in many ways different because the things being said in each line are on different subjects, each with different developments, so a demarcation of exactly how the argument has turned from line to line is often quite poem-specific & lines-specific. I could not apply “A Rule” to every linebreak she used, but I found a general tendency which made them fit together: the Verse-Turn.

Because the turns can from one level be said to be unique to each set of lines and to each poem, an explanation of how the argument of a poem turns would require a lengthy analysis of the whole poem. As a shortcut for pointing at Millay’s verse-turns—indeed, at the turns used by many past masters of metrical poetry—I’d suggest taking a heavy, blank sheet of white paper, covering all but the first line of a poem, and reading that line & “guessing” where that line is leading, where the poem is leading, before moving the sheet down to reveal the next line; follow the process for each line. One problem with this process is the very fact that so many of the poems from the canon (define “canon” how you will), are so well known to us, we already know where the lines are heading: The arguments are already engraved into our memories, so the guesswork is removed; it is not blind. Another problem arises in our consideration of poems which are entirely new to us: none of us is psychic, so most poems—all but the very worst—are likely to introduce elements we could not have foreseen. Between these two extremes, however, we have a cognitive faculty able to predict and distinguish tendencies in the argument, from the lines, and thence judge the manner in which the lines strain against each other or develop each other to form a larger argument. That is, beyond the lines judged singly, a larger shape is taking place in the coordination of lines as a poem develops; so when we move that sheet of paper down (in our exercise), we are not just judging where the bottommost revealed line is heading, but we’re judging where all the revealed lines are heading, together.

In critiques, I have used the phrase, “train of thought,” when discussing lines/-breaks. The verse-turns, rather than merely setting up opposing ideas/images into neatly aligned pairs to be carefully weighed and balanced, would be the way that the thought (our thought) has been trained through a combination of stopping-points and “steerings” to follow a specific path through a poem, though we may not know at the get-go—or even at any given stopping-point or steering—where the train will stop.

To use an example which might be unknown to many participants of this thread, I’ll turn to a short poem by a poet I rarely read, for a simulation of the paper exercise. This is a poem from an anthology of poems—and, I hope that though it’s from an anthology, the poem isn’t already engraved in memories—that has some interesting verse-turns: Jack Gilbert’s “To See if Something Comes Next.” I have some doubt that everyone will experience the lines & turns in exactly the same way I experience them, but I’ll steam ahead with brief explanations of how I experience those things, in the hopes that I might draw a better focus on how I believe good verse-turns work.


<dir>To See if Something Comes Next

There is nothing there at the top of the valley.</dir>

Here, we’re given a setting with a combination of a fairly abstract notion, “nothing,” and a phrase that points to a concrete reality, “top of the valley.” We might expect that the poet will go on to tell us, via the same type of direct statement, how the top of the valley contains nothing. Taking the line at its face-value, we might be picturing a barren wasteland—think, Mordor—and a forthcoming extension of such an image by images of barrenness, emptiness, bleakness, as the communication develops the significance of such barrenness: Our understanding has been trained onto this barren valley-top.

<dir> <FONT >There is nothing there at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell</FONT f></dir>

But now we know that it’s not absolute nothingness. The juxtaposition of the two lines creates the question, “What is the nothingness?” because images of sky, morning, silence, and the dry smell have filled in the picture of the valley-top with richer colors and smells than we would have imagined by the end of L1. We might even expect (as I expected) that the dry smell is some dead foliage—now that we know the nothingness is not absolute, we begin to picture a more likely valley-top and begin to wonder what barrenness the poet intends. Our understanding has been trained not only onto the real valley-top, but on the paradox created between these fuller descriptions and the poet’s assertion of a present nothingness.

<dir> <FONT >There is nothing there at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.</FONT f></dir>

No, there is no foliage, fallen or otherwise. These are the hard elements on the valley-top. This might be like Mordor, after all, where life doesn’t grow.

<dir> <FONT >There is nothing there at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally and the sound of roosters </FONT f></dir>

But there is life, goats and roosters. Though the hard realities of the valley-top are becoming clearer, we still don’t know the barrenness the poet intended from the first line. Even this life is thin: goats occasionally, and only the sound of roosters. That sound, however, must be coming from somewhere, so we might imagine that this valley-top is not quite so isolated as previously imagined.

<dir> <FONT >There is nothing there at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead </FONT f></dir>

Now we have a human presence, to go with the goats and roosters, but also death. The barrenness might not be an actual barrenness—the valley-top might not be nearly barren, after all—but the nothingness from L1 might be relative to this man’s experience of the valley-top. Thus far, the descriptions of valley-top are distant-seeming, fairly abstract, as if the things which fill the valley-top do not bear greatly on that “nothing” previously mentioned. These things, in fact, might be that “dead” with which he lives, though they are suggestive of life; even in this line, he is living in “bright heat,” which is not normally associated with death—but for him, and for the length of this line only (not considering the previous lines), the location might seem like hell, and the dead are the many co-occupants.

<dir> <FONT >There is nothing there at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something </FONT f></dir>

No, no, he has only two partners on the valley-top: a dead woman, and purity. Finally, we are given a fairly clear picture of the nothing on the valley-top.

The final phrase of this last line is a bit ambiguous: does it refer to him, or to those goats and the roosters? Probably, to him. He has the dead woman and purity, but the previous lines have, in one strong thread, shown that L1’s “nothing” is anything but pure. There is a corresponding paradox in this last line, since “[dead] woman and purity” is one absolute assertion which we might easily combine into a harmonious reality, but yet he’s searching, Trying to see if something..., so we may doubt that purity. This “something” should point at the intended thrust of L1’s “nothing.” We expect, though, (I expect) that the nothingness turns on the fact of the absence of this woman.

<dir> <FONT >There is nothing there at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.</FONT f></dir>

Well, no, now we may have a different idea of the nothingness mentioned early in the poem: not the valley-top, not the lack of the woman, not even the lack (or presence?) of some abstract purity, but a sustainable action, motivation. The nothingness isn’t so dependent on the presence or absence of things, but on the flow of time. The “something” from the previous line is not present now; hence, nothingness, now.

Again, the final phrase twists the preceding “[if something /] comes next.” He’s wondering about his future actions/reactions-to-something-of-which-he’s-not-certain. The present lack of this something causes him to question his capacity to move, or to live (active verb; not “to be alive.”)

<dir> <FONT >There is nothing there at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh: Whenever </FONT f></dir>

This turn is quite extraordinary. We have gone from an assumption that the “nothing” is related to a lack of activity, but this line uses a description of activity, “he thinks,” to continue the poem—perhaps harking back to the “trying to see” which was a description of activity. We are beginning to realize that this man is not fully self-aware; we are given a behind-the-scenes overview which he doesn’t share. (He wonders if he's stalled, but he's currently active: thinking, wondering, trying to see.) Plus, we have leapt from a consideration of the things on the valley-top — sunlight, goats, etc., and the man and “dead woman” — to a thing entirely unassociated with any valley-top: the Noh. At the same time, we are shown by this leap that his mind is far from the valley-top. (It is on the Noh, for the duration of this line.)

We also have the subtle, “Noh: Whenever,” which is suggestive of “no-when/not-ever.” But we don’t know where this is going.

<dir> <FONT >There is nothing there at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh: Whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next</FONT f></dir>

The introduction of the Noh, by addressing a script and actor, returns the focus onto the man’s understanding that his relationship to the aforementioned valley-top is quite distant from his comprehensions. The reality of that location is now a stage, a pseudo-environment. The man is aware of his being an “actor;” and the mention of a scripting of action is a subtle acknowledgement that he's aware of the something / comes next & whether he has stalled dialectic. He is waiting for something in a present nothingness, and he knows it. He also suspects that whatever he does next will be significant, since it may (but may not?) rely on what the script “says.” He has a choice to make?

<dir> <FONT >There is nothing there at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh: Whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still, he is dancing.</FONT f></dir>

No, no, he’s not about to make an active choice to do something, he’s beginning to wonder if he can’t help but be active. The present nothingness is something, maybe: though he feels powerless, lacking motivation, he’s nonetheless dancing—even if he is only following a script he didn’t intend/write.

This line’s combination of “stand[ing] still” and “dancing” mirrors the rest of the poem: the fuller described valley-top w/ the earlier mentioned “nothing”; the [memory of the] dead woman w/ a [present] purity.

By the end of the poem, I have a sense that the case isn’t hopeless, that though the man seems simultaneously aware of a nothingness and a somethingness without fully reconciling them, he’s moving toward a Zen acceptance of the unsolicited script:

<dir>To See if Something Comes Next

There is nothing there at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh: Whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still, he is dancing.</dir>




[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited June 30, 2004).]