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

Hi Bob,
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.

You certainly haven't annoyed me. I'd vote for your comment here as the most entertaining and illuminating in the whole thread. I LOVED the spider-arachnologist simile!

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:

Abandoned by the river where it stood, all rust-brown brick and random, shattered glass, the mill played live-or-die. But left for good or ill by town, I could not hope to know; I only saw that time had come to pass and water ran beside that hulk, to flow downstream where waters seem to want to go. Through rows of broken windows, winds blew in and out; they made the sound that I supposed the past would make in us when what has been has been too much, or lasted much too long. Still, nothing made me wish those windows closed, and nothing made me want to still such song as I stood dwelling on. And was that wrong? (Original version: <u>Versed</u> .)

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?

Abandoned by the river where it stood--all rust-brown brick and random, shattered glass-- the mill played "live-or-die;" but left for good or ill by town, I didn't know: I only saw that time had passed and water ran beside that hulk, flowed downstream as waters must. Through rows of broken windows, winds blew in and out--They made the sound I supposed the past would make in us when what has been has been too much or lasted much too long; still, nothing made me wish those windows shut, and nothing made me want to mute such song as I stood dwelling on. And was that wrong? ... (I perceive more following, in a prose version.)

Then there's "Anabasis (I)" by Merwin:

Then we poised, in time's fullness brought as to a new country, the senses in the mutations of a sallow light, a season of signs and speechless; thought momently on nothing, knew no oratory, no welcome: silence about our silences grew; beached by the convenient stream. Night is familiar when it comes. On dim gestures does the mind exorcise abandoned limbs, disbodied of that other land estranged almost beyond response, a bleached and faintly relevant signature to stir the sense in veteran usage and intent. One dreams fixed beasts that drowse or wonder, not blinking; by the stream a few poplars and white beeches where exhausted leaves, suspended, through the distant autumn do not fall, or, fallen, fired, are unconsumed, the flame perduring, the still smoke eternal in the mind. (Embarrassed, these scarred Penates smile, between raw stones supported, musing perhaps an anomalous speech no longer understood.) We ponder, after damp sundown, the slow boats, departing, heavy, in another time; our direction moved in the cool rain away: we with brief knowledge hazarded alien influence and tropic, entered and did diversely thread what degradations, false music, straits whose rocks lean to the sound, monstrous, of their declivities, as lovers on their private ground see no distance, but face and face; we have passed in a warm light islands whose charmed habitants doze on the shore to dissipate the seasons of the indolence; even against those borders led lapped by the forgetful rivers have stood among the actual dead, no breath moving the gray flowers....(This goes on another 9 stanzas.)

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.