"There's no compression, no figurative language, no rhythm."
Why Tom, what do you mean?BANNED POST Funny, I posted "tersening" and "vividizing" exercises inBANNED POST
The Discerning Eye: Line Breaks in November, modifying one of Shakespeare's sonnets for effect--My intention there:BANNED POST to show what many claim are better indicators of what "poetry" is.BANNED POST How figurative is figurative; are these "beasts" actually animals the speaker wants to enjoy killing or desires to replace?BANNED POST As has been said--you will recall this--prose also contains metaphor, musings, compression, and the like.BANNED POST Perhaps one of the biggest flaws (but not so bad) with Wenderoth's poem is that it in many ways resembles one of my favorite Auden poems:
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The Chimeras
Absence of heart--as in public buildings,
Absence of mind--as in public speeches,
Absence of words--as in goods intended for the public,
Are telltale signs that a chimera has just dined
On someone else; of him, poor foolish fellow,
Not a scrap is left, not even his name.
Indescribable--being neither this nor that,
Uncountable--being any number,
Unreal--being anything but what they are,
And ugly customers for someone to encounter,
It is our fault entirely if we do;
They cannot touch us; it is we who will touch them.
Curious from wantonness--to see what they are like,
Cruel from fear--to put a stop to them,
Incredulous from conceit--to prove they cannot be,
We prod or kick or measure and are lost:
The stronger we are the sooner all is over;
It is our strength with which they gobble us up.
If someone, being chaste, brave, humble,
Get by them safely, he is still in danger,
With pity remembering what once they were,
Of turning back to help them.BANNED POST Don't.
What they were once was what they would not be;
Not liking what they are not is what now they are.
No one can help them; walk on, keep on walking,
And do not let your goodness self-deceive you:
It is good that they are but not that they are thus.
The example of prose you posted contains a speaker speaking as declaratively as Auden's speaks here, as Wenderoth's speaks, but we have no doubt about what Hempel's character is trying to say: 1) a woman is on a ledge, 2) the speaker is musing on a fantasy of helping out, 3) the speaker is really more concerned with the parable than the ledge-standing woman, who might not even "get" the message,BANNED POST 4) The parable is that same clichéd parable from <u>Northern Exposure</u> about the Native American chief who finds a horse--it's good luck--but whose son falls from it and breaks an arm--the horse is bad luck!--but is saved from going on a raid in which most of the young men of that tribe are killed--wow, good thing he found the horse! (Actually, the original story is much older, and comes from China.)BANNED POST What's more:BANNED POST Hempel's speaker not only relates the story--being oh so clever--but then tells us exactly what meaning we are to get from it, the "punch" line!BANNED POST I have a few interesting ideas of what Wenderoth's poem might be specifically about (and, Auden's), but the
figurative nature of the poem allows slightly different interpretations, enough for each reader to find a personal relationship with the ideas being expressed, should the reader be tempted by the poem--Even so, the descriptors of the "beasts," while not nearly as clear as Hempel's bluntly delivered "metaphor," will lead every reader down the same general path.BANNED POST This is modality at work, or the outlining of meaning via circuitous revelations, or tropography.
Tempted by the poem.BANNED POST This is where personal subjectivity will make a big difference, as with all poems and even non-poems.BANNED POST One thing about Wenderoth's poem which fascinates me:BANNED POST The speaker is not entirely self-aware. The structure of the poem is interesting, because it is written as a "list," by the speaker, but the list as a whole points to something even beyond the speaker's awareness.BANNED POST The speaker admits a difficulty in understanding the beasts--which I take as an admission of a semi-self-aware speaker--but a "list" is used for clarification:BANNED POSTthis "memo-poem" is meant to offer argument for why these particular beasts must go, is shaped as a list in support of this argument, but the speaker is unable to clearly define the beasts, thus no objective argument can be made.BANNED POST The flow of the poem is gentle and works against the idea of a "list" in this way, especially when each item number leads into the next but grows, until the speaker is no longer focusedBANNED POST on how the "killing" of the beasts is so boring (his # 1 reason for getting rid of them), but on how the "attack method" of the beasts is quite opposite:BANNED POSTpuzzling, even intriguing, threatening.BANNED POSTBANNED POST It's as if the speaker set out to make an objective argument but ended up writing something like a personal diary entry, unknowingly.BANNED POST This is compression; how else display the non-compression of a speaker's argument?BANNED POST (Our only "objective" reasoning for why the beasts must go is the subjective desire of the speaker that they should; as would be the case with anyone reading this if it were an
actual memo--All the while, we don't come back from the memo with a clear understanding of what the speaker's "nemesis"
is.)
Wenderoth's poem is also self-referential, which is something I like. One member of that modality which the speaker unknowingly outlines might be the poem itself: hiding in
plain sight. If the words are taken literally, and we believe that the beasts are actually the whole point of the poem rather than half the poem, we miss what's really happening: BANNED POST an intelligent speaker is trying to banish what he himself might be. In # 1, he's thinking of the beasts as
alien/other, but by # 4 he's admitting that the beasts are really so like us in the way they attack/defend, that "they might even be us"--but this last point he alludes to without knowing it, never outlines it nor appears to guess, all the while arguing for their banishment. I experience this allusion, can point it out now, but without knowing, still, enough about these beasts to guess whether or not they really
are us: the poem seems distant when "plain" and "close."
As for
rhythm...I've been toying with how to explain the rhythm I experience in Wenderoth's poemBANNED POST Did you mean "rhythm" as in "sound structure, stress structure," or as in "thought structure?"BANNED POST How would you describe the rhythm in your own prose poem?
In my comparison of Wenderoth's poem and Hempel's prose, I've noticed some tendencies of sound and stress structure in each.BANNED POST Because the consideration of meter or syllabic count is less formal than it would be for metrical poetry, the explanation of what I experience might be less clear than what it might be if I were to describe a metrical poem, of course.BANNED POSTAs a tool for my analysis, I scanned each into two-syllable feet, all the while taking into consideration potential spondees (which I believe are not mythical), trochees, and anapests which might actually exist if each poem were subdivided into lines.BANNED POST (I.e., these feet might cross the artificial two-syllable foot-markers I was using:BANNED POST
da da/DUM da/da DUM, if metrical line lengths were established might be
da da DUM/da da DUM..)BANNED POST I also took the "spoken/natural stress" approach, because these two works are written without line breaks, so in the initial analysis of two-syllable feet,BANNED POST I didn't want to tackle just yet potential demotions or promotions of stress.BANNED POST (How could I, anyway, without line-breaks and an expected meter?--so I thought.)BANNED POST What I found:BANNED POST Wenderoth's poem tends to contain more pyrrhics which can take theoretical stresses, and these pyrrhics are interlaced with longer strings of iambic feet or trochaic feet, separating the two types of strings, allowing for more iambs/trochees.BANNED POST (Albeit, with other occasional substitutions, and not in every case separating iambs and trochees.)BANNED POST How would you stress the first sections of each of these works if they were lineated (heterometrically, if necessary), and promotions/demotions were considered?
Wenderoth:
Their bleeding is decidedly inadequate—
daDUM/da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da DUM
from a distance they appear not to bleed at all.
da da/DUM da/DUM da/DUM DUM/da DUM/da DUM
Considering the likelihood of distance in
da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da DUM
today's spectator, this is not a small problem.
da DUM/DUM da/da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/DUM da
Hempel:
The police and the emergency service people fail
da da/DUM da/da da/DUM da/DUM DUM/da DUM/da DUM
to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse
da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da da DUM/da DUM
does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains
da da DUM/da DUM/da da DUM/da DUM/da da DUM
on the ledge--though not, she threatens, for long.
da da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da da DUM
Of course, I'm no expert.BANNED POST Perhaps Hempel'sBANNED POST third line could have a pyrrhic as a third foot, with two trochees and a final iamb following. I've also followed a natural stress pattern, given that these are not metrical works
per se.BANNED POST Wenderoth's poem is not quite so metrically regular as his opening section--Line two of this section could be scannedBANNED POST
da da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da da DUM/da DUM, and I've noticed that later in the poem more anapests seem likely; but in general, Hempel's writing seems to require more anapests when naturally spoken than Wenderoth's, and Wenderoth seems to mix iambic & anapestic strings better than Hempel's.BANNED POSTI've also noticed that pairings of rhetorical line breaks/ideas in Wenderoth's poemBANNED POST have similar stress patterns.BANNED POST (His poem isn't strict, however, sometimes appears to swing between iambic strings and anapestic string, sometimes fighting against the flow of rhetoric.)BANNED POST Because neither work isBANNED POST lineated, so much of the stressing/rhythm of each will be subjective, I suppose.
The way Wenderoth's speaker's thoughts flow from the title through # 4 seems rhythmic, to me, if you meant that kind of rhythm of logic/illogic.
Curtis.
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[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 20, 2002).]