Dumb but sincere question -- why is William Carlos Williams' poem about the red wheelbarrow in the rain worth our time as readers? I don't get what it offers.

I was always taught that it's a great example of modern imagism. I saw it again yesterday in an anthology and must say I felt puzzled, to say the least. (I know, who am I to criticize a master...) Truth is, if this poem were posted on Eratosphere, I'd tell the author it sounds like the first few lines of a poem he hasn't finished or maybe like a hasty and rather glib first draft ("so much" depends, W.C.? Like what? Give us a clue).

So why the long shelf life and high praise for something this innocuous? No doubt it could be instructive to students who may not understand concrete imagery or something, but from a reader's viewpoint, why bother? Seems little more than a sloppily taken photograph.

I assume I'm missing its obvious and universally accepted wonderfulness. Could anyone help? I'd appreciate if someone could be as straightforward and brief as possible.

Susan, it all depends. . .

The short version: I dunno.

The long one, try here:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...heelbarrow.htm

------------------
Ralph

[This message has been edited by RCL (edited December 30, 2001).]

It's a piece of conceptual art, isn't it? We're forced to have the argument about what makes a good poem in part because this little thing calls itself a poem. We can argue about form--is it two lines of loose blank verse stacked in an odd way, or is it syllabic verse (4, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2), or accentual verse (2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1)--or gawd knows what?
Mind you, I don't think it's much of a poem. The intellectual content is actually all right, paralleling the Zen message, "Be here now." But it seems to me an oddity more than a poem, a thing that exists to make us ask why it exists.

P. S. I find it works best when recited in an Elmer Fudd accent.

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited December 30, 2001).]

[quote]Originally posted by David Mason:

"...it seems to me an oddity more than a poem, a thing that exists to make us ask why it exists."

Kind of like Everest.

I agree with Dave Mason. It's the audacity of the thing's calling itself a poem that strikes me first and makes me argue with it. Then, by the very act of arguing with it, I realize I've granted it the importance that it claimed... In addition, I think it does qualify as that rarest of the rare, a true experiment in verse. Williams proclaimed "No ideas but in things" (and I agree, keeping in mind that he didn't merely say "No ideas"), and in this poem he tries to get as close to "things" as he can. There are lots of poems that do it far more successfully, however.
For me, a big problem with the poem is, ironically, that it's all intellectual. There's nothing in the sound that resonates with me.
Richard

Everest is quite a bit higher.

Probably shallow of me, but I took it merely to mean the importance of juxtaposition in art. Gotta have dark to make the light more visible, that sort of thing.

I've appreciated this interesting and funny discussion. Thank you all.

Ralph, thanks for posting the e-address with those different critics. Finding them all with just one click shows me the value of the Internet but not, unfortunately, of the poem. Maybe it's just me, but these "analyses" struck me in general as contrived, straining to pull something out of thin air. Seemed as if this poem contained so little substance that the critics had to rely on their own creativity in order to give it any meaning at all.

RJC, meaning no disrespect, in my opinion a poem is NOT like Everest at all. (Sorry if I'm misinterpreting or maybe you were being ironic...) Everest did not have to get published to attain its force in the world, and it didn't displace other mountains that might have been more worth our time (and our children's time, etc.) It's obvious we can't change Mount Everest by debating its value. But we can decide what poems we give attention to. Human, not natural, forces shape a syllabus or poetry anthology, for example. It seems like a terrible disservice to both readers and writers learning what poetry can achieve to present this sort of dead description as a model of a successful poem.

graywyvern, I laughed at your parody and strongly suspect you're right that the poem's longevity may owe no small debt to its being so "conveniently short"! Wonder if other practicalities have also applied -- literary faddism or cultism maybe? Or pressure on academics and critics to prove they "get it," no matter how farfetched?

David, hello, and thank you for answering too. I appreciate your pointing out other possible approaches (metrical analysis, Zenlike intellectual content), and I note with interest your comment that you don't think it's "much of a poem." I was also interested to see that, as I took their comments, at least three other posters expressed similar dubiousness on the poem.

I might add that my non-poetry-reading, frequent-cartoon-watching husband, upon hearing the red wheelbarrow poem for the first time along with David's "voice-over suggestion," quickly grasped his (David's) point and delivered an impressive E. Fuddian rendition of it. No enlightenment ensued, but it was pretty funny.

Anthony Hecht used to recite swatches of Milton's Lycidas with a WC Fields accent. I find that pretty good going too. I don't see the point in being too reverent.

Yes, Susan, I did attempt irony.

The wheelbarrow glazed with rain might intend that the narrator is speaking about a day without work (responsibility lightened). Therefore, the freedom that one yearns for has arrived. That weight lifted. And the result is a release of newfound energy.

This shared bit of expectations, yearning might settle well and universally connect with the reader.

That such a short piece should accomplish such a delicate and precise connection with the reader is perhaps unique to poetry. The brevity accomplishing much with so much speed and deftness.

------------------

Mr. Slyman might not know, unless he is just being a sly man, that WCW wrote the poem while on a housecall to a gravely ill patient. It was not a day without work.

I am also counted among those unaware of that juicy nugget.

You got me hooked now. I gotta know if it was to a farmhouse or not. Where can I learn more?

I'm sure one of the biographies would give the anecdote in detail, but all I've got in my home office is a footnote in the Kennedy/Gioia Introduction to Poetry: "Dr. Williams's poem reportedly contains a personal experience: he was gazing from the window of the house where one of his patients, a small girl, lay suspended between life and death. (This account, from the director of the public library in Williams's native Rutherford, NJ, is given by Geri M. Rhodes in 'The Paterson Metaphor in William Carlos Williams's Paterson,' master's essay, Tufts U, 1965.)"

Whenever I read The Red Wheelbarrow, I'm reminded not of another poem, even one by Williams, but by a "work of art" that performs a similar function. It's that "ready-made" of Marcel Duchamp's, "Fountain". A toilet, placed in a glass case, placed in an art gallery, is art. That wheelbarrow and those chickens all so incredibly ordinary: but that's the point: poetry is found everywhere.

What this short poem does is question the whole idea of what a poem is: it says this rather dull sentence, when you break it up into lines and put it into a book, becomes a poem: not because the poem is good or profound or musical but because it's in a book of poems.

The question of whether it's a good poem or not is a side-issue in this case; because its notoriety is based not on its relative merits as a poem, but on whether it is a poem at all. My students, mostly adults brought up on rhyme and metre of a very limited kind, are more likely to be shocked by being told that it is a poem.

As to what it means, again, it's a kind of side issue. It's the most "writable" poem he ever wrote: just create your own story and it's as likely to be true as anything else, including whatever incident inspired it in the first place.

These are a few of my thoughts on TRW, and I suppose it probably will continue to challenge us for years to come. Is it a good poem or a bad poem, and how do you decide? and why are your criteria for saying so any better than mine (just because they've been around longer?) That's what I think he's saying.

About the wheelbarrow poem....

"Hollywood critics applauded what they thought was far-out avant-garde technique for title credits of the new Peter Sellers film "The Bo Bo". Then they realized a gaping fifteen-foot hole had been torn in the screen." (Daily Express, UK, 1967)

Sorry: I no longer have the exact date for this quotation.

Clive Watkins

Calling a cathedral a can opener
doesn't make it one.

That little thing still sucks
and it's still not a poem.

Len, you are right on the mark. I could call a roll of cash register receipts a "poem" and even get some magazine editor, maybe out to prove he was avant-garde enough to get people to sleep with him, to publish it. But it still wouldn't be a poem by any meaningful definition.

Yet oddly enough, from what I have heard, it seems some people just rubber-stamp the motion when someone else nominates any little upchuck of alphabet soup as a poem. Guess I should just understand that such folks are too brilliant and important (never too lazy, I'm sure) to learn about and formulate their own poetic standards that actually mean something.

Guess I can only wish such folks accidental encounters with the real thing! That is, poetry that is powerful, well imagined and expertly crafted.

I don't care if Len Krisak or anyone else thinks it's not a poem. It's still a poem. So there. Nyaaah!

Which is what it comes down to really: your definition of a poem versus my definition. Which probably gets us nowhere, but hey, wars have been fought for less excuse.

I don't think it's the best poem I've ever come across, but then "Summer is y-cummen in" doesn't amount to much either but it's still a poem.



------------------
Steve Waling

I once had a conversation with a highly
regarded poet (Sphereans, trust me--most
of you would consider this person a delightful person
and terrifically talented poet, but the name is not
going to be revealed) who ended one of our
little set-tos with this observation:
"I don't care if your question is logical.
I reserve the right to be both illogical AND
right at the same time! All your logical
questions are TRICK questions."

Thank God this is a versifier who
writes in meter and rhyme--not in

badly lineated
though not altogether ragged
prose that
turns
on certain
words
for no apprent
reason.

Actually Susan, it's the "so much depends" that makes this a little gem for me. Precisely because it is never answered and forces the reader to elucidate that "so much," it lifts this out of the realm of ordinary description. And as a study in line breaks, you can hardly do worse.

What I have found really, really, really amusing while reading this thread is the feeling some people take this poem almost as a personal insult. But the question was hardly fair to begin with, now was it? The vast majority of the more vocal members of this workshop site detest free verse--and have no hesitation proclaiming it The Death of Poetry As We Know It. So posting this was like giving heroin to an addict; you do rather know what to expect. What would be interesting to me would be to post this poem on a site specializing in free verse; you know, where the participants think metered verse is Fusty Old Boring Shit That Should Have Gone The Way Of The Horse And Buggy. I guess you'd know what to expect there too.

No, it isn't the greatest poem ever written. It isn't even the best poem written by William Carlos Williams. But for me it is a little gem, like his "as the cat/climbed down."

This whole thread makes me think of something Rhina said here when she was Guest Lariat: it's a shame poetry has divided up into armed camps. I think about that a lot.

Interesing discussion.

Tom

There is of course another possibility--
that free verse is prose. If it is,
investigate the profundity of a "gem"
that asks us to realize that well, a LOT
really, really depends on oh, whatever.

Stripped of its status as a poem, the Williams
would have to compete with other prose
profundities. Verse (that boring old shit
that should have gone away) focuses the human
sensibility on more than just the paraphrasable
content of human speech. It revels in sound
and play and charged language. Without these things,
we are left with:

I think--or at least I'm pretty sure--
I recognize whoever it is that owns this forest,
but he has a domicile down in the hamlet.

i'm not against slight observations in free verse,
but the way this particular poem has been turned
into an icon & a manifesto is absurd. (why couldn't
it've been his poem on the plums in the fridge? i
like that one lots better--at least it SAYS something.)

it is true a lot of us hate Williams for the way he
seemed to give license to all manner of chopped-prose
poeticules & he's not responsible for them any more
than Whitman is, but even if you put in line-breaks
more reasonable than the ones he chose, there still
aren't many good poems in the lot.

--the trouble is, i think, this weird sort of literary
nationalism that makes poets go looking for ancestors
& a canon that is bounded by our 2 oceans & the 40th
parallel (or whatever it is). not only British, not only
Canadian, Australian & all the poets in post-colonial
societies who chose to write primarily in English--not
only these are our peers & our tradition: but also every
poet everywhere we can get our minds around even if only
darkly in the mirror of translation...

"American Literature" is a brand label without even
teaching value.

Often as not I find myself on both sides of the prose & poetry conflict. However, that said...

"Piety practised in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendour of beneficence."
--Samuel Johnson (1709–1784


------------------

Art that simply asks "how can this be art" seems terribly sterile to me, but "found art", when it was new, might hope to do something more: it tries to get us to look at ordinary things with the attention and expectations we bring to art. Insofar as it does this, it does what art is supposed to do -- to get us to see the world afresh.

The trouble is that this strategy wears out very quickly -- after the third or fourth found object, people just think "oh, more mundane objects presented as art" and yawn.

At a time when metrical expectations were firmly established in the minds of readers, getting them to look at a bit of ordinary prose AS poetry may well produce an interesting musical effect -- something akin to syncopation. And if you are expecting elevated Tennysonian language, the very blandness of the Wheelbarrow sentence may be striking.
The odd breaks may well focus our attention, so long as we are expecting them to make more sense.
So, much depends upon the very expectations Williams is himself eroding.

So maybe Williams's poem really was a poem. But THIS explanation of why it is a poem makes it hard to see how free verse can be written today -- now that readers come to poetry almost without expectations.

I am not arguing against free verse or saying that it is only prose. Rather, I'm pointing to the limitation of one defense of free verse, and asking if anyone knows a justification without such limitations. Can someone explain how free verse works AS VERSE without playing off metrical expectations?

I am curious about one thing. And realize this is coming from a person who started writing in metered verse all of six months ago--so I am not one of those people who think verse is boring old shit (if I am going to waste my time and get carpal tunnel syndrome, I would rather play backgammon). What would you say if someone said to you verse is just a complete waste of time because it is an artificial affectation (and yes, that is an exact quote from someone who read one of my metered poems)? Would that convince you to start writing free verse? I started writing in verse because I read Dana Gioia's essay and thought he made a good deal of sense--and because it was fun. Frustrating (often), but fun. And I now wind up writing about 75% formal verse to 25% free verse. But I doubt I ever would have attempted to do so if I were browbeat into it. That is what I think Rhina means by "armed camps"--and I see this attitude on both sides of the battlefield.

It's my jewel box Len. I don't expect anyone else to admire, ipso facto, my gems. And I also realize what may be a jewel to me may be zirconium to you. OK, fair enough. That's why the library is so big. But I don't think that telling people free verse is shit is going to convince a single person who likes it that all poetry should have a metrical or syllabic or accentual structure. I think all it ultimately does is make people defensive. And the war continues. I think it's a shame.

What I loved, besides Gioia's essay, was Rhina's explanation that a poem is a box the poet is dancing within. What a marvelous metaphor. Some people like to waltz or foxtrot, but there will always be people who prefer to dance as the music they hear moves them. You may consider what they do spastic or, at the very least. lacking in elemental grace. But there are lots of rhythms in this world--and isn't it fun just to dance?

Best regards to you--
Tom

I'm completely uninterested in browbeating anyone into writing any kind of verse -- and I hope this post and my last one come across attempts at understanding both metrical and free verse (and the difference) better.

And if you reclassify a piece of free verse as "short prose-piece with line breaks" -- it's still possible that this is a great piece of short-prose-with-line-breaks. The reclassification doesn't deprive it of value -- and of course you could paraphrase away much of Proust's greatness, even though he writes prose.
Still, the classification issue is rather interesting -- so long as you don't build too much into it. What is the most convenient and sensible way to make the distinction between poetry and prose? Both prose and verse can be musical -- neither preserves its value through all paraphrases. What aim is poetry meant to achieve that prose is not? Is meter the only way to achieve this aim? Or is there one one shared aim, but verse is one means to it and prose is another?

Tom's comparison raises an interesting point for me. Those who dance as the music moves them usually dance alone, but insofar as a poet writes for a reader different from himself (insofar as poetry is different from performance art) the poet does have a kind of dance-partner -- the reader.

With metrical verse, it's pretty clear how to follow the poet's lead. I would say that, though his verse is free, Whitman can be followed, as well, because he relies upon prose rhythms (sentence, clause, phrase) and the reader's memory of the Bible.
In the case of some free-verse poets, though, it is hard for me to figure out how to dance with them. Looking at their stuff on the page doesn't tell me how to make music out of it (to change the metaphor).
When I listen to some of these poets reading their work, they read some very mundane phrases in a kind of sing-song -- which certainly makes them seem alien and new -- but I'd never have guessed from what's on the page that you were supposed to sing it like that.
Some rules, shared by reader and writer, about how to determine "the beat" or at least about how to read line breaks aloud may be very hard to dispense with. To the degree that there are such rules, in free verse, what are they? If there are several mutually incompatible sets of rules, how does the reader identify which set of rules to use? (These are not merely rhetorical questions.)

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited January 04, 2002).]

Chris: two fascinating posts from you. I am not sure how to answer the questions you raise. The only point I was trying to make is that why we love certain poets--or hate them--is a personal quirk. Some people love meter. Others would rather have major dental surgery without anaesthesia than be subjected to it. I feel the same way about Tennyson. You can read him to me until you are blue in the face and all I will want to do is smack Tennyson around with a large, hardbound thesaurus. I know it's completely irrational, but so is a good deal of love (and hate), and all the arguing in the world is not going to change my opinion. Well, at least on Tennyson. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

OK, many people on here don't consider the red wheelbarrow poem a "real" poem. It is, admittedly, a curio. But the argument doesn't stop there--it is extended to ALL free verse. And I don't know how condemning ALL free verse is going to make someone who loves it say, "Oh my God, how blind I have been all these years. Free verse IS shit. Let me rush out right now and buy the collected works of Frost, Pope and Lord Byron." Wouldn't it be better to show people how much fun you can have with meter and rhyme, how playful it can be? It's like reading Chaucer in Middle English--the jokes are MUCH better.

I realize I am the cheese who stands alone on this one. Haven't you noticed that the people who write free verse on these boards--presumably the very ones people who love metrical, syllabic, accentual verse want to "win over"--NEVER participate in these discussions? I sure have. And I wonder if that is because they don't particularly want to hear things like, to take one example, "Verse (that boring old shit that should have gone away) focuses the human sensibility on more than just the paraphrasable content of human speech. It revels in sound and play and charged language." I am sure people who write free verse expend as much effort, have as much fun with sounds and textures, as your most dedicated sonneteer. And not that I mean to pick on Len--I think a good deal of what he says has tremendous validity. It's just that this war between free v formal is so voraciously energy-consuming. And if one side "wins," who loses?

perhaps the two tribes are not fated to unite again,
but i would like to uphold for both the single
necessary dogma that a line break equals a perceptible
auditory pause...

To a Certain Civilian, Walt Whitman


Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?
Did you seek the civilian's peaceful and languishing rhymes?
Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow?
Why I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand--nor am I now;
(I have been born of the same as the war was born,
The drum-corps' rattle is ever to me sweet music, I love well the martial dirge,
With slow wail and convulsive throb leading the officer's funeral; )
What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? therefore leave my works,
And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes,
For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.

I dedicate the citation of this poem to Len, suspecting its warm reception.


I love Tom's observation, "Haven't you noticed that the people who write free verse on these boards--presumably the very ones people who love metrical, syllabic, accentual verse want to 'win over'--NEVER participate in these discussions?" but my reasoning until this point has not been that I don't want to hear these things, as Tom suggested, but that I recognize that the task of attempting to cause an effectual change in the environment of Eratosphere--particularly among some ardent metricists--would be monumental, to say the very least. The fact that Len and some others have dismissed free verse poetry summarily, disregarding the multitudes who have and continue to support and enjoy free verse, aligns rather neatly with the religious fundamentalism so obvious in our culture and in other cultures. Of course it "aligns;" it rhymes rather well with those fundamentalisms, too, but not in a way which can be discerned by the accidental pairing of vowels and consonants. So, why bother responding? Tom's reference to the immutability of a free-verser's stance when confronted by such blithe dismissals can be compared to the immutability of some metricists' stance with regard to free verse. I can--and feel obliged to--say that this schism is unfortunate. Thus, I recognize the fact that whatever I might say about New Formalism or free verse will be received at some distance from the actual topic by some members on both "sides" of the issue.


There is the adage that only two kinds of writing exist--good writing and bad writing (re: you know who)--but of course this is a witticism which has only one practical value: it confuses the argument. I can only answer for myself when assigning the values of "good/bad."--Or, perhaps I can answer for a community, a "school" of poetry, an ivory tower of one kind or another. When I happen to stumble upon a discussion such as this thread, I see so many theoretic voices and so few actual voices. I see the school/tower, but the inhabitants of each--with a few exceptions--are one mass. Quite frankly, there's much about New Formalism which I detest. There's much about Free Verse which I equally detest--These last statements are directed against the schools and not against the methods employed by these schools, per se; rather, it is the blind adherence to limited precepts which devalues both schools of thought.

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. New Formalism often says: "These are the fundamentals of poetry; nothing beside has value without these." Then, of course, the New Formalist must bemoan the rampant heresy of free verse--As with religious fundamentalism, New Formalism tends to see itself beset on every side by formulae which it does not prefigure: because New Formalism has defined its medium as the True Poetry and has assigned recognizable and inviolable methods for achieving its medium, anything which operates outside its modality is necessarily a False Poetic. This modality has a tendency to attempt the negation of disparate voices, disparate thought processes, and at its worst creates the "lull" of which Whitman was speaking: rather than the "charged language" which Len invokes, it "focuses the human sensibility on more than just the paraphrasable content of human speech;" i.e., it focuses the human sensibility along paths prescribed by New Formalism, proscribing all other paths--and this effect tends to dull the delivery of the final product. As I said before, I am referring to the school of New Formalism and its evangelistic vanguard (and, generally, their works), not its methods per se.


I also view this fundamentalist modality as being opposed to most things scientific--so many Newtonians, so few Einsteins and Hawkings. In the attempt to establish a Unified Field Theory, most New Formalists have reverted back to traditional maxims while turning a blind eye to current discoveries: Sure, a New Formalist might write a witty sonnet about relativity, but in so doing, said Formalist will almost certainly create a sonnet which is quite stilted, inadequate for its subject. The Uncertainty Principle is metaphorical fodder for most New Formalists: a quaint theory which can be hijacked for its surface appeal but can hardly be acknowledged seriously--perhaps e. e. cummings is one exception among only a handful of formalists.


Finally, and worst of all (but as a result of the foregoing), New Formalism tends to produce writers and readers incapable of reading free verse: minds are atrophied by too frequent and absolute exposure to the methods of those "piano tunes." This effect tends to limit the resources of such writers, further dulling their poems. We decry senseless repetition in any given poem, but New Formalism demands the repetition of form within a limited subset for only one reason: It must, or it will cease to exist.

The things that I detest about Free Verse are its hypocrisy and lackadaisical approach toward communication. Interestingly, my e-dictionary has this definition and etymological sourcing of "lackadaisical":

lack·a·dai·si·cal adj. Lacking spirit, liveliness, or interest; languid. [From lackadaisy,
alteration of lackaday.]

lack·a·day interj. Archaic. Used to express regret or disapproval. [Alteration of alack the day.]

a·lack interj. Used to express sorrow, regret, or alarm: [On the model of alas. See LACK.]

--And what is worse than Free Verse's limpid resolve to be forever whining and lack-luster? "Oh I/we lack"--understanding, certitude, love, and everything--"So this is the way the Universe must be: lacking order and prefigured coherence." The worst Free Verse believes itself superior in its understanding of the great Uncertainty Principle, by virtue of the fact that it is often so random. But. The worst Free Verse believes itself to be expressing a very definite emotion or paradigm or thought: i.e., it shows a randomness--and, best of all, it thinks, via a lax form--but attempts to express a very distinct certitude of one modality or another. The worst Free Verse thinks it is being clever without actually being clever. It attempts to address the Uncertainty Principle and relativity, but does so superficially, hypocritically, because it doesn't actually believe in those principles, nor does it understand how those principles can exist in a definite (certain) reality.


What the worst Free Verse hasn't figured out: it needs order because it believes in order: it doesn't know how or why it should express this order. This comes through very clearly in much free verse. The adherence to lackadaisical approaches is a fundamentalism all its own, an anti-poetic, in my opinion. On the other hand, I suspect that many Free Verse poets believe that this adherence is itself a kind of order; and, when such is expressed repetitively, it creates dull poems.
And then there's the rub: What is this "order?" Finding a prescribed order as the metricists have done strikes me as being too easy, most of the time. Conversely, I believe all forms--found or personally invented--are tools merely; thus, traditional forms and meters have their uses. I also believe that the "lackadaisical" approach is a tool, as useful as metrics. There might also be order which is so foreign to me that I don't easily apprehend it, don't recognize it--I've had this experience on numerous occasions, with proverbial bolts of lightning attendant. Yea, even repetition has its use. What I don't like, however, are poems which are admissions of limitation: or, the egoistic adherence to arbitrary aesthetics: "...I like it/Because it is bitter/And because it is my heart."






--C.



[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 04, 2002).]

Wow, Curtis, you've expressed very well what I think about all this.

To make one way of writing verse an absolute is a kind of fundamentalism; and frequently produces incredibly dull poems on both sides of the coin.



------------------
Steve Waling

Well, we seem to be making some kind of progress here,
but just what that progress is I really can't say.

To clarify two items I believe were misquoted and/or
misunderstood: I did NOT accuse free verse of being
"That boring old shit." I was quoting someone else
(I forget the name in the run of the posts) in such a
way (I hoped) as to make clear that I simply didn't think
of METRICAL and/or rhymed verse as necessarily boring or
old.

Second, and this will probably shock the
socks off a number of the posters--NYCtom and Chris W., if
I remember correctly--but...I do NOT--repeat, NOT--believe
free verse is in and of itself bad. I simply say it is
prose, lineated rag-right. Hard as it may be to believe,
I'm actually very fond of much prose and often find it quite good.

Yes, Virginia, Len likes novels and plays and short stories
written in prose. However, SOME prose is very good, and
some prose is ...well.

The same thing holds true for verse. If all written or
spoken English can be divided into two logical classes--
metrical and non-metrical (and yes, allow for
accentual-syllabic, accentual, and quantitative--but NOT
syllabic, systems as "metrical"), then as Tim Steele
points out, peoiple either write prose or verse. I see
no particular value or superiority in one as opposed
to the other. I'd rather read "Dubliners" any day than
bad metrical speech (i.e., bad poetry that is in meter and rhymes--much of Rod McKuen?). At the same time,
I'd much prefer to read good metrical speech, say Richard Wilbur, to bad prose--Whitman's endlessly gasbagging lists
of boring banalities.


As to the comments about fundamentalism, etc., I leave it
to the Board members to accord them whatever value they may have.

There's a bit too much gasbagging in this line, if you don't mind my saying so--odious generalizations, vague definitions of terms all about. I'm dropping it.

A couple of other observations
about this (apparently) endlessly
argued topic:

(1) I am not "armed," no matter what "camp"
anyone may think I'm in.
(2) I have no interest whatsoever in
"browbeating" anyone at any time into
writing a certain way--as if I could!
To paraphrase Joseph Salemi, it's North
America, not North Korea. So write away to
your heart's content, everyone. You certainly
don't need my (or anyone else's) permission.

(3) There is nothing odious in making a logical
distinction between prose and non-prose. Or do
the members of the board think prose and
verse don't exist or can't be distinguished?

Len,


I understood your reference to "boring old shit." The following statements in support of what another called "boring old shit" are what troubled me:

Verse (that boring old shit
that should have gone away) focuses the human
sensibility on more than just the paraphrasable
content of human speech. It revels in sound
and play and charged language.

I think that defining "poetry" as being inherently metrical allows the estimation that free verse is "just the paraphrasable content of human speech." Certainly, I can accept your more recent statement that "written or spoken language can be" divided into "metrical and non-metrical" language, but I don't think a definition of "poetry" must follow such a division. I have seen many attempts at creating metrical verse on this site and elsewhere which, although quite metrical, are not "poetry" in my estimation: they're flat, they're stilted, they're mundane, they're ineffectual, but metrical. Metricity is not the defining attribute of poetry.


Of course there are other attributes--we all know them: metaphor, sound, meaning, etc. I write much free verse, and I am at my best when I incorporate some or all of these things into my poetry. (Not that I always succeed, of course.) Just because metrical verse follows a recognizable, prefigured pattern doesn't mean that it alone revels in those things you mentioned.


Different kinds of revelation exist. If I were to list my top 50 favorite poems, assuming I could delineate the different levels of greatness between them, well over half--probably about 80-90 percent--would be metrical poems. Auden is one of my top 5 favorite poets. I am not immune to the greatness of metrical verse, but I esteem such verse--good metrical verse--for its ability to transcend its metrical structure via those other attributes we all love to see in our poetry. One of the lessons drummed into beginning writers is to avoid blaring/glaring, pointless or facile rhymes and sing-song metrics (with, of course, exceptions to this rule), because we want more than the mere sound and structure of the poem. The same holds true for free verse. I can't deny the fact that most free verse--and there's so much of it--uses its facile line structuring in a seemingly pointless manner, and that this pointlessness grates on the sensibility of those of us who expect rigorous attention to cause & effect in our poetry. Apparently, this irritability is inflamed even more by an expectation of metrical consideration, but I think it is too easy to say: "This poet doesn't seem to care about metrical speech; therefore, this poet has chosen irrationally; this poet has no art." To take a newspaper article or any other typical work of prose, arbitrarily break it into lines of varying length, and claim that you've just written in the manner in which all free verse poets compose their poems, is insulting.--I'm not dismissing your viewpoint, because I will agree that too many free verse poets write their poems without due consideration of what the structure of their poems ought to be accomplishing; I'm just saying that there are choices a good free verse poet makes when considering his/her poems' structures. The best free verse accomplishes a playfulness, in my opinion, by subverting expectation not by being combative (i.e., not by submitting broken prose and thumbing its nose at rational human beings), but by offering logic which is unanticipated, and this requires form, even if the format is not distinguished via recognizable metrical standards.


I see that you have posted to this thread while I've been composing this reply--"There is nothing odious in making a logical distinction between prose and non-prose." I agree, there must be a distinction. I believe that the distinction is in how prose and poetry operate rather than in how they are structured, but I'm going to close this up for now. I want to make this disclaimer re: "fundamentalism": I suppose that the choice of a poetic aesthetic is necessarily a fundamentalism, one we each must make for ourselves. Perhaps fundamentalism is necessary, if we are going to produce poems which contain logic of whatever kind: there must be order/fundaments. One definition of "fundament": a. The buttocks. b. The anus. I like another: An underlying theoretical basis or principle. In my original posting, I was of course using the first definition interlaced with the last, in the form of "anal-retentive," and I was speaking of the worst-case scenarios of both schools of thought.


--Curtis.





[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 07, 2002).]

Curtis,

I think we're actually agreeing here. I DON'T
believe simply writing something metrically makes
it any good at all--but didn't I say that? (I thought
I did.) The distinction for me lies between
necessary and sufficient--logical categories.

Lord, but there must be thousands of rotten poems
written in meter and rhyme. Without the spark of
life (define as you like), they ain't gonna make it.

Curtis,somewhat off the subject (if any poor soul is still
reading this thread after the withdrawal of the Lariat),
how's about we try W. S. Merwin's very first book,
the Yale winner from 1952, and use his first poem in
that book as a kind of test case? It's called
"Anabasis I," and although I've had a good long (second)
tug on Richard Howard's pipe (i.e., his comments on the poem),
and although I have gone over the piece some five or six times
now, I'm no better off in trying to understand it than
before. You mention a liking for Auden (whose work I
greatly admire--come to think of it, so does Dave
Mason). Merwin seems to have adopted the Audenesque
mode of the early 30s, where so much was hidden in
psycho-sexual-political allegory. Try following
that 24-year old premature Master's (I mean Merwin's!)
syntax and punctuation, his appositives and kernels, and see if you can decipher whatever it is that's going on amidst the slant rhymes and rhymes on non-stressed syllables.

I'd be very curious as to the results of your efforts.

I've been wondering for decades now why it is that in the United States it seems crucial to poets to define and define and define what they do, not in order to see it more clearly or do it better, but in order to be certain of whom to include among themselves, and whom to exclude. In Latin America and in Spain, to the best of my knowledge, that drawing of a "line in the sand" has never seemed useful, much less imperative. In fact, the common situation is for the same poet to write both formal and free verse, often in the same book, without making any bones about it, explaining it, or feeling that there is anything about it that requires explanation. Borges wrote both, and both very, very well, and it would not occur to anyone I can think of that his free verse is really prose in disguise. That each reader may have a preference for reading one or the other, in general or in the work of a specific poet, is another matter, but has that kind of "line in the sand" really done much for poetry, for our capacity to understand one another, or for our power to beguile one another into the enjoyment of--and experimentation with--whatever it is we love and would like to share? I suspect Nyctom is right:
showing formal verse to people who think they don't like it, and encouraging them to try it for the sheer playful joy of it, works better than telling them that what they've been writing so far is prose--which often has the added disadvantage of being untrue, as when the poet is Stanley Kunitz, or Jorge Luis Borges, or a great many others I can think of who happen to write in a way that I don't write in but can admire in the work of others. The other approach--defining the work of others in ways that shuts them out of where they themselves believe they are--simply raises hackles and shuts ears that we might open through persuasion. If a definition shuts out of the category of "Poetry" that which FEELS like poetry to the mind and sense, because it does something with perceived reality that prose doesn't normally do, and touches something in the reader that prose doesn't normally touch, by whatever means, then it's the definition that needs changing, not the written work.

Holy smoke, Len! I think I remember that particular "little set-to"! Was it really I who had the audacity to say "I don't care if your question is logical..." and so forth? Oh, I hope so! But it's hard to recall a specific set-to out of the many, many we've had over the years, old buddy.
That one must have been a lulu. I wish I remembered every bit of it! We should record those things: for instance, the one during which we Had Words over Emily Dickinson would have been a gem for posterity.

I think Rhina is right that there's not much point in drawing lines in the sand, but I'm very interested in understanding what poetry is. So I'm going to raise a question inspired by the above debate.

"Verse" is usually understood to be a technique, which may or may not produce poetry (one can versify a washing bill or a dreary bureaucratic memorandum without making them poetry).
If verse is a technique for achieving poetry, it seems possible that one might arrive at poetry by means of another technique -- or entirely without any technique.

On the other hand, the term 'free verse' seems nearly oxymoronic if one regards verse as essentially a technique (a means of achieving some end -- a means one could explain to someone else -- a craft). If verse is understood as a technique, then it is most plausibly identified with meter.
But this still leaves open the possibility that "poetry" is a goal definable entirely apart from meter.
Can we reject "free verse" as self-contradictory: "techniqueless technique", and yet admit that there is something else, "poetry" which may be achieved without any set, teachable technique? Can there be 'free poetry' or 'prose poetry' -- i.e. poetry free of meter?

The answer depends on whether we can distinguish poetry from prose in some way OTHER than by meter.
I'm sympathetic to the attempt to do this, but so far, I'm not sure I've heard anything that would clearly distinguish the aims of poetry and prose. Metaphor and the other things listed above seem common to both poetry and prose.

I would be very interested to have someone tell me what distinguishes the aims or the means of poetry and prose, putting meter to one side. (Here I am trying to restate Len Krisak's assertions as a challenge.)

That challenge might be too difficult -- it's too hard for me right now. Could someone define 'lyric poem' in a way that leaves it open whether a lyric poem employs meter at all, but at the same time distinguishes it from prose-genres (like the short-short story)? This seems more hopeful.

Even if my challenge is unmeetable, and "poetry" can't be defined without reference to meter, it will not follow that 'free verse' is valueless -- only that it is a set of genres better classified as prose.

[And this raises a final question: perhaps 'free verse' is more like prose for some purposes, but more like poetry for other purposes. But if that's right, let's try to get more specific about which purposes go with which distinctions.)