[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Since we have broached the subject of distinction between what constitutes prose and what constitutes poetry, and since Tom has treated us to an example of what might be called a “prose poem,” I thought I'd post this example from <u>The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review</u>, by a poet I've never read before but whose included poems intrigue me for their ability to talk around an issue while presenting strong (but sometimes: subjective) meaning. The poet is Joe Wenderoth, and this poem was published in 1998.


BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST Send New Beasts


BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST These beasts will not do.

1. Their bleeding is decidedly inadequate—from a distance they appear not to bleed at all. Considering the likelihood of distance in today's spectator, this is not a small problem.
   
2. While they are exotic enough in appearance—and I assume this is why they were selected—they have a tendency, and an ability, to hide themselves in plain view. I don't claim to understand this ability—I only know that it is widely felt that, even at close range, they are difficult to get a good look at, and this is especially true when a blow is being struck upon them. It's almost as if they're immune to isolation—as if they are able to always appear, no matter how alone they are, in the noise and confusion of a herd.
   
3. They are far too obedient and willing to receive blows. Indeed, they seem to sense when a blow is coming and to move intuitively into it. If this movement was desperate—graceful or graceless—it might generate some interest, but it seems to fall, tragically, somewhere in between. That is, they seem able, at every point in their torture, to collapse in a reasonable fashion, as if the collapse was being dictated by their own will. No one enjoys—I don't think I even need to tell you—a reasoned collapse. It is this aspect of the beasts that most deeply defeats us, our simple want of a show.
   
4. Their attacks—and I hesitate to even call them attacks—are largely indistinguishable from the active reasoning of their own collapse. It is as though they seek above all to expose us to this activity of theirs—to infect us with their will to reason, and in so doing, reduce us to the unvarying rhythm of their irreducible herd. I would like to say that we are immune to this reduction, but I am not sure. In any case, I see no good reason for continuing to subject ourselves to these attacks. It would be better to have no beasts at all—to live altogether outside of shows—than to sink numbly into tolerance of a spectacle which fails to clarify what it is that distinguishes us from beasts.

BANNED POST

BANNED POST

BANNED POST

BANNED POST

[nyctom]

Oh lordy Curtis, I don't want to get into a huge discussion/debate about what makes poetry and what makes prose and what is the difference between them, having glutted on the subject so much during the red wheelbarrow debates, but this doesn't feel like poetry to me. There's no compression, no figurative language, no rhythm. Compare it to this, from one of my favorite writers, Amy Hempel. The paragraphs should be indented.

The Man in Bogata

The police and the emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge--though not, she threatens, for long.

I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this.

I tell the woman about a man in Bogata. He was a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive.

Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months.

When the ransom was paid and the man was released, his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then--that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man.

Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogata. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.

***

So, what makes the first poetry and the second prose? I look forward to your response.

Tom



[This message has been edited by nyctom (edited January 19, 2002).]

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

"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:

BANNED POST

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 POSTda 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.

BANNED POST



[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 20, 2002).]

[nyctom]

Hi Curtis:

You ask me about rhythm. Well, did you ever see the movie "The Turning Point"? It is about ballet dancers. I am not a fan of the ballet, but the movie combines two of my favorite film genres: backstage brouhaha and 40's woman's weepie. In the film, the young and promising ballerina is told to do the steps again, to count them out. She replies that she never counts. Well then, asks the haughty choreographer, how do you know when and how to move? She replies, I feel the music and I make it fit.

That's pretty much how I feel about the technical stuff. When I started writing in meter a few months ago, I took out all the prosody manuals I could get my hands on--and they confused me more than enlightened me. The best advice I got was from Carol, Alan, Tim, Lilith and Alicia: go with your ear. Trust your ear. Read the acutal poems--listen to how the meter actually works in a real poem. Then go back to the manuals if you want. So when you ask me about rhythm, I throw up my hands and say, well it felt right to me. And don't even ask me about free verse rhythms. LOL.

This is not to say I don't enjoy reading prosody and poetry anaylses. You have a talent for them. And I really should start reading Auden. I only know the Beaux Arts poem, 9/1/39 and "The Unknown Citizen."

I should post some Margaret Atwood prose/poems. They really are wonderful: "Marrying the Hangman," "Bread," "Happy Endings."

Interesting analysis Curtis. I will have to reread it and let it sink in.

Tom

[2JR]

Curtis,

I believe the "beasts" Wenderoth speaks of are indeed humans. If you care to learn more about Wenderoth's work, Boston Review has had some pretty decent articles about his two recent books , "It is if I say it is" and "Letters to Wendy's". I've just finished Letters to Wendy's and suggest it to anyone who cares about contemporary "poetry".

While I'm willing to say that 97% of the eratocrowd will dismiss his work as being prose, or garbage, I'm sure you will see it as poetry.

It was an interesting, intelligent, and, if you can believe it, laugh-out-loud funny book.

I can think of few books as page-turning as his.

Check it out.

James

Originally posted by Curtis Gale Weeks:

"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:

BANNED POST

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 POSTda 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.

BANNED POST

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

James,

Thanks for the suggestion. I've searched the web, found other poems by Wenderoth which are interesting...I'll look for that book.

Curtis.

[graywyvern]

fruitless quibbles aside, i'm very glad i read "Send
New Beasts".