[Julie Steiner]

Are meter and lineation the only things making, say, Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" or "Birches" poems rather than essays? Or are there other fundamental "poetic" qualities--perhaps a certain distillation and economy of language--that distinguish blank verse pieces from prose?

Occasionally, I post a long blank verse piece to TDE for comment--no more than once or twice a year, since I know that long pieces place inordinate demands on readers' time and can't be critiqued at the same level of detail as shorter pieces. There's usually some discussion on my blank verse threads as to whether these pieces are significantly different from prose, and whether the same story might be presented more efficiently and effectively (not to mention with more hope of publication) without meter, or at least without lineation.

Rather than clog TDE with this discussion, I thought I'd raise the issue here. I'm interested in hearing whether Sphereans think there is, in the hands of a master, a significant difference between extended blank verse and prose. Is this purely an "eye-of-the-beholder" issue?

Julie Stoner

PS--Personally, I think blank verse's meter and lineation help to control the pacing of a longer piece and lend emphasis in ways not possible with prose; but maybe the problem is my imperfect use of these tools.

[A. E. Stallings]

Surely there is a huge difference between unrhymed iambic pentameter and prose. Also, there is no reason an essay cannot be in verse--I think "poem" or "essay" is a false dichotomy. Hmmm... I guess I should visit the TDE thread to see what's going on...

[Roger Slater]

Of course there's a significant difference between blank verse and prose, even if it's "only" the meter and rhyme and lineation, since these are qualities that are not merely slapped on like a pretty wrapping but are integral to any other quality of pacing, rhythm, phrasing, etc., that you might care to identify. You might as well ask whether a rhyming poem could be converted into good prose if you changed the rhyming words to suitable, unrhyming synonyms, or whether a good song really gains anything from having a melody as well as lyrics.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I am not an expert on this, or even an advanced learner, but speaking as a lover of both lyrical prose/prose poems, and blank verse with its conversational qualities, I think they are all kissing cousins, but that it is usually easy to tell them apart.

I think the question of boundaries are interesting. I was recently re-reading "Three Men in a Boat" and some lyrical passages caught my eye. Pull them out and delineate them and it was a reasonable assumption that Jerome K. Jerome had written a poem (or started to write a poem) and not finding it wholly successful had incorporated into the prose. Recycled, as it were.

We all do this to some extent, even saving the odd line and hoping it will morph into something else.

But the successful text will (usually) have a label inside its collar telling what it is intended to be. Sometimes I think I see, a vers libre that intends to tell a story, but (IMO) does not have the prosody qualities to carry it forward as a poem. But it might have a terrific story that could be profitably expressed in a prose form—with the advantages found there.

That said, some really interesting and well-written texts will not fall into a defined category, it might be a matter of form, or it might be content (surreal, experimental or both).. These might be misinterpreted when the critical eye views them through a magnifying glass that worked just fine for the preceding poem or prose text.

Short answer: Yes, I think there is a difference. Usually.

[Julie Steiner]

Hmmm. I hesitate to discuss my own stuff here beyond the observation that my meandering style (sentences that run on and on for umpteen lines, through many dependent clauses and digressions and parenthetical remarks) tends toward the verbose, and readers of poetry are perhaps less forgiving of verbosity. I could probably tighten things up quite a bit and still retain the overall flavor of meandering. I'll try that.

Frost's "Birches" is a helpful example of successful blank verse, digressions and conversational tone and all. I notice that he maintains the vividness of the imagery in both the here-and-now sections and the fantasy sections, and he does alarming things with the meter to avoid any soporific tendencies:

Birches
(Robert Frost, 1916)

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
as ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
Once could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

[Julie Steiner]

While I'm at it I'll toss up "Mending Wall," too. What I like most about this one has nothing to do with this discussion, though: I love how the duplication of the narrator's contention (the identical lines 1 and 35) is answered by the duplication of the neighbor's (lines 27 and 45), making the whole argument as moot as the chore. Frost also leaves several things ambiguous that I would be inclined to spend many lines explaining, to less effect.


Mending Wall
(Robert Frost, 1914)

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes great gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
but it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old stone-savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying.
And he likes having thought of it so well,
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

[David Rosenthal]

Then, of course, there's Lew Turco's distinction: verse means metered, prose means unmetered. Poetry can be metered or unmetered. Unmetered poetry is "prose poetry." Turco says that "free verse" is an oxymoron and that what goes by that name is actually "prose poetry." Verse and prose are modes of writing, poetry is a genre. So the difference between poetry and prose is that one is a gnre, and one is a mode. Apples and oranges, not opposites.

So then, what makes poetry poetic? Well, says Turco, poetry is the art of language, as opposed to, say the art of written narrative (fiction), or the art of theatrical narrative (drama), or the art of written rhetoric (the essay). Poetry can of course use narrative, drama, and rhetoric, but its special feature is a focus on using the elements of language as the material for its artistic achievement. He calls these elements "levels" and enumerates them -- typographical, sonic, sensory, ideational.

So, can blank verse be something other than poetry? According to Turco, "sure." A verse essay or verse story may or may not be poetry depending on the use of language. Which of course begs some big arguments.

I don't know how helpful these distinctions are. If they are presented as sensibly as Turco does in his book, they seem at least arguable. If they are present as he presented them here during his ill-fated visit, thay seem arbitrary and useless.

I personally think if you expand the notion of meter to include syllabics (which Turco does), breath-lengths, phrase or clause lengths, typographical spacing, and other less easily graspable methods of lineation, so that "free verse" is still "verse," Turco's distinctions are useful.

What becomes arguable is whether or not a particular use of language is "poetic." And then we are back to the drawing board on Julie's quesiton. I think the most ecumenical answer has to be something like "you'll know it when you see it." But it isn't much different from the age-old questions about what counts as "art." Those questions are ultimately, necessarily, hashed out culturally.

Wow, did just say all of that?

David R.

[Kevin Cutrer]

Another distinction is that, in general, blank verse features more poetic compression than prose. For instance, Frost's "Birches" contains a mere 449 words. That is a good, healthy length for a poem, but it's equal to only one or two prose paragraphs in the average essay.

Incidentally, there's a discussion going on in Discerning Eye about Dennis Danielson's recent "translation" of Paradise Lost into prose.

[R. S. Gwynn]

I've had a lot of arguments with this verse/prose thing with Lew over the years (40 at last count, but, please, don't ask him to answer here! You know how he gets.). He is right, I think, in that they are two different modes of writing, but he falls short in thinking about subjective measurements. For example, we could measure a length of rope by all kinds of objective standards--inches, feet, centimeters, cubits. But we could also measure it by subjective standards: "It ain't quite long enough fer what I need it fer." Similarly, we could measure a line of verse by whatever units of measurement we choose: syllables, feet, strong-stresses, number of words, number of e's, etc., and that would be objective measurement. You can base a meter on any unit you please (though some make more sense than others--syllabics, in English, don't really exist for the ear). But to say that a line of verse is long (or short) enough because "I think that's long (or short) enough" seems to fall outside of Lew's Aristotelian ken.

Verse, to me, means lineation. Prose means no lineation. Verse can be written metrically and grammatically and rhetorically and even visually, but, in my opinion, it can also be written according to the "inner directives" of the writer. Thus, "free verse" is not an oxymoron, nor is it prose. It consists of lines that are broken subjectively, sometimes (but not always) by grammatical phrase or by visual arrangement or at some whim of the writer's. Lew seems to be saying that "free verse" could be printed as prose with no loss of spirit or intent. I disagree. It should be obvious that I think that the idea that what began as blank verse might be printed as prose (with no loss) is ridiculous.

Frost's "After Apple-Picking," one of his most engaging poems for me, is written in irregular iambic meter, meaning that the unit (the iambic foot) is retained throughout but that there are "irregular" numbers of feet per line, ranging from one to six. Frost knew enough of his Palgrave to have understood the long and honorable English tradition of the irregular ("false-Pindaric") ode which Cowley, Milton, and Wordsworth used. A recent exemplar of this form has been Catherine Tufariello in poems like "Free Time."

[Quincy Lehr]

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