Oi, do I have the energy to go through this again?
Or is it The Subject That Cannot Die?
Totally random responses then:
About twenty years ago, there was a bit of a
trend in hip typographic and design circles to set
a lot of ad copy and even textbook prose "rag right"--
a locution I'm sure everyone sees the "poetic" aptness
of immediately. Whole chapters of what would ordinarily
have been set as justified (even left and right margins)
type ended up with even left margins and irregular right ones.
(Exactly like the paragraph above)
By Dave's definition of Whitman's line as non-prosaic,
could I not infuse that paragraph with some metaphor and more interesting diction, set it with new line endings
that played tricks with the meaning (imitative fallacy stuff)
or broke up the usual conversationally-expected grammatical
units ("enjambment yields high twisted energy that goes against the line ending" arguments) and be said to be doing
the same thing Whitman was doing? Dave himself says that
Olson (and, I agree, Williams--"variable foot" my sweet Aunt Fannie) were simply inventing private systems no one else could recognize. Chris Beyers, in his just-out book "The History of Free Verse," says almost exactly the same thing.
Dave, I also agree with you that people like C. K. Williams don't seem to care much of anything about their so-called lines except that they be very, very, very long. A whole bunch of people like the latter Williams--Charles Wright, etc.--could be included in this group.
Since I'm obviously failing miserably at making this distinction, I'm going to try just one last time: like Dave,
I find most of ANYthing I read, whether its authors call it prose or poetry, awful. I see NO special advantage to meter and/or rhyme if the poem is dreadful. At the same time, I genuinely admire good prose. Some of my best friends, etc., etc. ... By making this distinction I do NO HARM to anyone writing good prose. But if the definitions for poetry are to include the "spiritually elevated" or almost-transcendentally subjective ("it lifts my soul; ergo, poetry"), then I believe we really do lose a modest but useful distinction. Apparently some people think that if you can't be called a poet you drop in some imagined hierarchy of the written arts.
Perhaps. But it was Wilbur (at a reading three or four years ago) who said (I paraphrase), "Many people cannot write verse. There is no harm in their not doing so."
I've forgotten some of the other points folks made above, but I mean them no disrespect by bowing out at this juncture with
the perhaps peculiar observation that I like much of Dave's work and dislike almost all of Whitman's. Go figure.
Oops--I forgot: Whitman began his literary forays into verse by writing in meter and rhyme...very badly.
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