A few scattered thoughts on blank verse, as I write more of it than most of you.
I didn't always. Indeed, I started up at the behest of Ray Pospisil, whose work in lank verse inspired me (it's always a good idea to pal up with poets you consider somewhat more accomplished than you are early on, I've found in general; it's a spur to often rapid development). But he said something interesting about the process. By working in blank verse, he became acutely aware of the real tension between the line as a unit and the cadences across lines, without the clang of the rhyme to justify ending a line at a given point. The line's integrity actually becomes more obviously important when there isn't a rhyme. It needs a bit more organic justification, even when you're enjambing the hell out of the piece as a whole.
And I know that the criminal undervaluing of Ray is something of a bailiwick of mine, but even still, here's a piece of boffo blank verse from him:
SCREAM IN THE SUBWAY
Along the empty subway platform late
one night a scream arose. Not once, not from
a person being robbed and calling help
and not a drunkard’s wail. The scream I heard
was constant and it carried on a single
pitch, but stifled like a scream you try
to squeeze out in a nightmare. What I heard
that night while crossing through the empty station
cried like something struggling to escape.
The scream grew louder as I neared. I saw
no figures, heard no footsteps. Could it be
the ghosts of men who dug the tunnels for
a buck a day, the ones who dropped their shovels,
tried to run or quickly crossed themselves
when beams collapsed, allowing all the water
force and river mud to bury them?
Is that who I heard screaming there?
Is that who I heard screaming there? .Or was
it just a whine of desperation from
the decades of commuters moving back
and forth each day and night for years and years
to jobs they hated? Then I thought it must
be screams of torment from the Indians
or slaves or debtor Dutchmen or the starving
Irish, all the ones who jumped into
the steerage of a rotten tub to try
their luck, and all the ones in shackles who
got thrown into a rotten tub, whose bones
are rattled every time a train goes by.
That must be what I heard.
That must be what I heard.Unless the scream
emerged from someplace even deeper, from
a subway tunnel piercing through the bulk
of earth and trembling like a tuning fork,
resounding back the anguish of a world
convulsed with hatred. I was sure that’s what
I heard.
I heard..Until I came upon the scream
itself: an escalator squeaking from
a rubber railing off its track and scraping
on the metal frame. Its empty steps
ascended high and purposeless and finally
disappeared, as more emerged and rose
up lightly till they too were swallowed up.
And all the time, that screeching echo filled
the tunnel, though I now felt quite relieved
that it was just a squeak and not a scream
of spirits after all. But still I walked
around the escalator, found the stairs
and ran up toward the noisy street, where traffic
and a growling road crew’s engine helped
to drown the fading cry from down below.
Prosy? Hell, no. Granted, some of the enjambments may seem a bit casual at first glance, but the cumulative effect is one of great cadences, matching the subject matter.
Certainly, in my own work, dispensing with rhyme about 40% of the time (maybe) has led to a greater sensitivity to lineation, the sense of the overall movement of a piece. And certainly, this is not an attack on the use of rhyme--far from it. Do it a lot myself. Rather, it is an expression of incredulity at the otion that blank verse is "prosy" somehow.
Quincy
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