[Tim Murphy]

Dear folks, Paul's new essay just appeared in CPR, and the url is http://www.cprw.com/Lake/orders.htm May it further our discsussion!

[graywyvern]

i am pleased at the sympathetic treatment of Pound's
metrics in the Cantos (it wasn't his ear that was nuts!);
less so, the casual slamming of all Language Poetry via
Zukofsky. wouldn't it be better to allow one branch of
the art its investigation of "logopoeia" to the fullest
(for there are no metrical generalizations worth making
here, except that each poet has a different sense of the
meaning of a line)? but in the end, i probably agree with
his championing of mixed-meter verse over unmetered
verse. not that the latter is in any sense a dead end, but
it loses the power that a resurgence of meter, or nearly,
in a relatively arrhythmical poem, can have.

[MacArthur]

The German Army, Russia, 1943
By AI

For twelve days,
I drilled through Moscow ice
to reach paradise,
that white tablecloth, set with a plate
that's cracking bit by bit
like the glassy air, like me.
I know I'll fly apart soon,
the pieces of me so light they float.
The Russians burned their crops,
rather than feed our army.
Now they strike us against each other like dry rocks
and set us on fire with a hunger
nothing can feed.
Someone calls me and I look up.
It's Hitler.
I imagine eating his terrible, luminous eyes.
"Brother", he says.
I stand up, tie the rags tighter around my feet.
I hear my footsteps running after me,
but I am already gone.

Here's a poem that might test your theory. I's clearly a poem. It's isn't an avant-garde stunt...I'd call it fairly accessible. The imagery seems energised by the spiky line-breaks. And it doesn't seem like a disguised metrical piece.

It's possible to disgree, but I think it's a satisfying and successful poem.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

<u>FOR PAUL</u>—"THERE IS NO SPOON."

Paul,

I have some quibbles, as I expected I would. I think that your exploration into the notions of chaos and order, and how these two interact in poetry, are quite interesting; but, again, I don't think you've gone far enough into your analysis.

Again with this essay, you've placed sound at the forefront of your analysis. I suppose, generously speaking, I should add that you include sight in your argument; but, the dichotomy you've drawn between the effectiveness of sound over sight for creating all the qualities you ascribe to the best poetry is insufficient, IMO, for any discussion of chaos/order. It's no wonder that you've stressed the importance of sound: I agree that, historically, sound has been considered the key ingredient of poetry—

...The poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colours of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well—such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have. And I think that you must have observed again and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose. (Plato, The Republic.)

LOL, of course, we know Plato's attitude toward poets. The fact remains, however, that poetry and song have a long tradition together with music and rhythm. I've once compared the concept of string theories to the idea of sound produced by vibrations; and from there, the importance of sound to poetry. (It's as if we are hearing a scaled version of the inner workings of the universe.) I am as susceptible to the influence of sound in poetry as was Plato by his own admission later in The Republic, and I would not argue against its potential influence.

There is another viewpoint, however:

The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding may most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is the second, inasmuch as it acquires its importance from the fact that it hears the things which the eye has seen. If you historians, or poets, or mathematicians had never seen things with your eyes, you would be ill able to describe them in your writings. And if you, O poet, represent a story by depicting it with your pen, the painter with his brush will so render it as to be more easily satisfying and less tedious to understand. If you call painting “dumb poetry,” then the painter may say of the poet that his art is “blind painting.” Consider then which is the more grievous affliction, to be blind or to be dumb!....And if the poet serves the understanding by way of the ear, the painter does so by the eye, which is the nobler sense....There is no doubt that the painting, which is by far the more useful and beautiful, will give the greater pleasure. Inscribe in any place the name of God and set opposite to it His image, you will see which will be held in greater reverence! (Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks, edited by McCurdy.)

No doubt, the question of personal preference is central to the question of the relative influence of sound, of sight, in art. One can argue which sense is biologically most important, in a general sense, but then we would need to argue which species is most important, too: is it hawk or bat?

There are two logical fallacies in your essay which are so interrelated that I can only pick the first at (nearly) random:

The assumption that visual cues cannot signal self-similarity, recursion, holism, and the rest well enough to create a non-linear, dynamic system; that aural cues do these things better than visual cues; and that poetry as an art form relies more on aural aspects than on visual aspects.

I am not sure that I need to explain my meaning in the first two clauses of this fallacy, but I will just in case. The leaf—which you yourself have used as an example of a nonlinear, dynamic system—has most likely expressed its holistic shape to the eye: Looking at a leaf, we know its shape; studying the leaf with our eyes from various perspectives (experimentation), we see that it is a nonlinear, dynamic system of many parts unified into a whole greater than the parts. Our ears have not greatly contributed to this understanding—except, perhaps, for when we have considered the relationship of the leaf to the surrounding leaves when we have heard the breezes playing through them—but, we would not have recognized the source of this sound had we not first seen the leaf moving in the breeze with the other leaves every time this sound occurred. Maybe we've felt the texture of the leaf, smelled its fluids when it was broken, tasted it; but, we might not have bothered if we had no sight. (Or, if we are blind, until someone who had sight introduced us to the leaf and said, “This fell from the tree.” Perhaps, exploration might have yielded the surprise discovery through the other senses, like this communication through sound.) Parallel lines drawn on a sheet of paper or in the mud have self-similarity, even when we do not hear them. Our ability as humans to understand each other is greatly influenced by our sight, as well, in the form of body language: when action is married to expression, emotions behind action are also married to expression, general expectations of emotions based on actions and expressions are made, and these are examples of recursion and scaling, if I am not mistaken.

The final clause in the above named fallacy is perhaps much thornier, because poets (myself included) love the sound of poetry.

The first example of the importance of sight to poetry can be seen clearly over at The Deep End: how many of the posted poems look like these paragraphs? How many of those poems have this feature: howmanyofthosepoemshavethisfeature? Or this feature: howMaNyofTHOsePoemS.haVeTHISf—eature! How often is the subject of initial caps debated, or indentions? Of course, these questions reveal only one half of the issue, because they apply to poetry which is experienced through reading.

You've made the historical argument for the importance of sound over sight in poetry by describing the aural tradition; but you failed to include the whole picture, IMHO, of this historicity. The bards of our past, unlike present bards, had no access to recording devices. Their communal teaching—the “collective mind” which ultimately created the recognizable forms of metrical patterning—occurred by live performance. Sounds were married to facial expressions and movement, either working in harmony to such movement or perhaps against the movements. (Stresses made with a pounding of the fist, or stresses made despite rhythmic rocking, for instance.) There were costumes; there were ceremonial jewelry and badges of office. There were auditoriums and bonfires. Sound was not divorced from sight, but the two worked together to produce a poetry much larger than our marginalized concept of the art form. The only exception would have been a poet reciting poetry to himself without an audience; and, either this would be memorized poetry received by a previous performance or a poem the poet had assembled himself—most likely, in order to perform it later. Said poet had no other way of receiving poetry without the written word, and with the written word, the previously mentioned values of sight would come into play.

None of the above considerations negates the value of sound in poetry, but I think it is likely that patterns were created by their utility for given types of performance; and, the sense of sight played an important role in this process. (OK: Imagine drunken Ostrogoths singing ribald verses after a military victory, stabbing the air with their mugs, slopping ale or whatever, while punctuating their movements alliteratively. On the other hand, for the stage and extended plays where “prose like” passages might be necessary, IP would be a big help.)

While you have argued against the influence of the typewriter on FV, it is also likely that the increase in literacy added to the singling out and establishment of certain metrical forms over other potential forms—of types of performance over other types. Those who had the necessary education would be the ones who determined which forms to transmit to future generations. By your own argument, these forms had a history which made use of the “collective mind;” but, with the invention of the printing press, in collusion with the limited access to education at that time, the influence of the “collective mind” shrunk into a much more homogenous collection of minds. No doubt, oral/aural transmissions still occurred; but, it's much easier to perform an already established piece than it is to create a significantly altered piece: The written word continued to speak after the bard had died, with exactly the same words in exactly the same order.

The second of the two major fallacies in your essay is actually the more significant of the two. It creates the first—

The assumption that “chaos” and “order” are static values; the assumption that these values as applied to art are clearly defined and separate in all cases; and the assumption that uniformly or nearly uniformly structured sound patterns are the primary or at least a necessary determinant of the distinction between the two (the field around which order emerges from chaos.)

What you have failed to express in your essay is the fact that the valuations of “chaos” and “order” are individually determined according to the person who is presented with a poem, based on that person's framework of understanding and experiencing of the world. An obvious case would be someone who could recognize a Mother Goose poem's sound pattern holistically but be unable to recognize the sounds and meter in Frost's “Home Burial” as a whole and in its parts. Certainly, you and I might see the patterning of Frost's poem, but to another, it might appear to be chaos or random, or prose. The distinction will be made not by universal values of order—not that such can be determined, in any case—but by the ability of the poem to communicate its order to an individual reader or listener.

not that such can be determined, in any case

I imagine that this line might send shivers down the spines of many formalist poets. I, myself, am very drawn toward the notion of absolutes. I also recognize the shadow of post-modernism in that phrase and know that this shadow is likely the primary cause of those shivers. (See: “primary cause;” absolutely.) However, not even the best scientific minds have been able to declare a unified field theory and most will admit the limits of human perception inherent in the uncertainty principle: I also believe that most people, like ourselves, are drawn toward a belief in absolutes, but that individual orders of understanding are limited around individual experience and proclivities. (I hope I am not assuming too much about you by including you with “ourselves.”) It might be that the Universe as a whole is quite ordered, but I have met very few humans capable of seeing the overarching structures of this order in toto. (I.e., none.)

It is interesting that you have used the comparison of static on a television and Shakespeare In Love, in a previous posting. I assume that you are aware of the existence of cosmic microwave background? (CMB) CMB is also isotropic, extends throughout the universe in every direction, regularly; a small percentage of the static on our televisions when they are not tuned to a broadcast channel is caused by this radiation. One could easily make the comparison of some L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poems to static, as I believe you have done circuitously. If a particular L. poem did not consist only of multifarious types of static, but created self-similar dots of static in random patterns, with several sets of random line lengths thrown in between some sets of fairly regular line lengths, and different font colors used for a certain number words in each line, etc., wouldn't it be considered a scaling within the poem and also in relation to the universe by way of CMB & TV?

If our planet is an order which has emerged from chaos, would poems which mimicked the order of our planet also be considered nonlinear, dynamic systems? There are the jagged edges of our coastline, similar to the jagged edges of some FV line breaks; there is the ocean of white paper to one side, the various groupings of linked sounds and tropes and images to the other which could represent the links and variety in flora and fauna, the mountains and hills of periods and commas...Of course, it might seem to be chaos, if one is listening only for regularity of sound, but looking up at the sky, at the stars, I see no particular order of star (stress) placement (other than those ascribed to the signs of the Zodiac, etc.; and, these images are only assumed because of tradition. The Big Dipper is a baseball cap, really), and looking down from the sky, I see a continent. Certainly, this example stresses the visual cues over sound; but this doesn't negate the emergent order. (Your use of the word “non-linear” makes me laugh, considering the quote below where you stress the importance of the “poetic line.”)

When writing of scaling and recursion, etc., you have isolated the poem (and, poet) from the reader/listener, and this is a tenuous proposition at best. Recursion might occur between images, a reader's memories, and the universe, for instance; or, not. I don't particularly like the type of FV poem which “looks like broken prose,” but others seem to find self-similarity between such poems and their own self-images (between scales, that is) by the directly stated content within uneven, broken edges. Order and chaos are primarily constructs of the human mind in conflict over the relationship of the unified field theory and the uncertainty principle; and, the belief in unification as with the certainty of uncertainty is individual-specific: an individual might identify his confusions with the appearance or sound of chaos, for instance, creating a scaled representation.—Your description of what you call the worst FV:

“Instead of a top-down, bottom-up interplay among syllabic configuration, syntactic unit, and poetic line, we have a top-down model of order dictated by the poet.”—

Here, you are considering the poem alone. Isn't it more likely that the reader/listener determines whether the poem's structure(s) is “top-down, bottom-up” or is “dictated by the poet?” The poem doesn't exist alone on the page while a reader reads, nor alone on a cassette recording while a listener listens. The reader/listener in conjunction with the written/spoken poem creates a larger system than the mere words on the page/cassette: a non-linear, dynamic system. Add performance to the picture, and you add the poet to that system, with all the sight cues intrinsic to such performance.

It's unfortunate that you limited your essay, and your assay of the complex systems of poetry, in this manner. I agree for the most part with your examples of sound patterning as sources of scaling, etc.; but, the avowed primacy of sound for all creations of poetry seems to me to overburden your pronouncements with a personal aesthetic that can't be representative of what is called "poetry."—After all, the creatures of a forest, considered as a whole, do not adhere to coterminous metrical rhythms, and IP is a human creation, "dictated by" some to mimic one cross-section of the universe.

Curtis.

[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited March 02, 2002).]

[Roger Slater]

The conversation may be getting beyond me, but I'll offer a comment nonetheless.

The article's discussion of Whitman struck me as quite revealing and as, in effect, conceding all that I would claim about free verse. Namely, that there are rhythms, meters, cadences, etc., in free verse that give the verse music and complexity and order. The article nicely analyzes many of the ways that Whitman creates patterns and music. But the article certainly doesn't prove that Whitman's verse wasn't "free verse" after all, I'd say, but simply does a nice analysis of Whitman's free verse to account for its musical appeal.

Now it may be true that "the barbaric howls and yawps of his imitators only testify to their deafness to his often subtle music," but it's equally true that the crap produced by imitators of Shakespeare or Milton provides equal testimony to their deafness. If the point is that free verse must be as well written as formal verse, I don't think anyone ever claimed differently. No one ever claimed that "free verse" means never having to say you're sorry, or that writing "free verse" means that you never can be subject to a claim that your writing is boring or turgid or devoid of music.

BUT THE ESSENTIAL POINT that the article appears to overlook is that the patterns and the music and the cadences, etc., in Whitman's verse are patterns that are discovered after the poems were written. The point I was making in the other thread was that a free verse poem finds its order and structure in the composition, and in many ways is as ordered and structured and musical as formal poems, but that a free verse poem doesn't create its order by fulfilling a pre-existing formal template. Once a sucessful free verse poem is written, of course one may analyze its rhythms and the texture of its "feet", etc., to account for aspects of the poem's success, but none of the Whitman lines that are analyzed in the article necessarily had to have the number of syllables, feet, dactyls, etc., that they ended up having. Whitman was free to do otherwise and there were no rules by which he could check himself (i.e., I need a pentameter line that rhymes with line 7) other than his own sense of the music and order that appealed to him as appropriate to the poem's unfolding.

[bear_music]

As a completely personal and possibly irrelevant aside on the hearing/seeing debate, which is more important or central to the essence of poetry, as it were, may I offer up:

What are we to make of a totally deaf poet who writes complex, metrical verse?

For that poet, me, it's all about seeing. The essence of everything, for me, is in the eye.

(music)

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

It's an interesting question, bear, but maybe only such a poet as yourself can answer that.

I would propose the connections of

[*]speech to meter, and[*]meaning to meter,

aside from relationships of hearing to meter.

Indeed, why do you write metered verse? Do you see the subtle variations of meaning-words which have been demoted, of utilitarian words which have been promoted, and does it cause you pleasure? Also, similar vowel and consonant sounds used in alliterative patterns--and rhyme--would force the mouth & tongue to repeat patterns during speech, and would even create patterns for your sight based on the cue of the written vowels and consonants...?

There's also the question of whether or not you were born deaf: do you still "hear" the sounds of written words, if not?

Curtis.

[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited March 03, 2002).]

[Roger Slater]

Bear, I find it odd that you should say it's all in the eye for you, since I seem to recall your also saying that you have your own poetry (along with lots of poetry by others) memorized, and that you actually say poems out loud both for your own satisfaction and that of others. In fact, didn't you say that you write lots of your poems in your head and don't even write them down until you want to show them to people? Maybe I'm not remembering correctly. Forgive me if I've gotten it wrong.

A lot of metrical qualities, I'd think, don't actually require the ability to hear. I can mock drum upon the empty air and get a sense of rhythm and beat that involves no sound at all, and I know that at least some deaf people enjoy dancing.

I would also think that if it were all in the eye for you, then you wouldn't gravitate so strongly to metrical verse and that free verse (particularly the kind that sprawls across the page and makes vigorous use of odd indention and lineation) would appeal to you more. No, despite the possible irony, it seems clear to me that your "ear" is central to your sense of poetry. In fact, I'd speculate that it's poetry's ability to create an "ear" inside the head that may have a special appeal for you as the most available form of music. Certainly we've all noted that you have a very good "ear" for poetry...yet no one's ever complimented your "eye" for poetry that I can recall.

[bear_music]

Both valid perspectives. I didn't mean it so sweepingly. And I haven't thought it through, I was just musing. But I was referring to this sense of the eye, da Vinci as quoted above:

The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding may most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is the second, inasmuch as it acquires its importance from the fact that it hears the things which the eye has seen. If you historians, or poets, or mathematicians had never seen things with your eyes, you would be ill able to describe them in your writings.

And, yes, for me the "paradox" is in the way one might expect the deaf poet, more logically (?) to be a FV poet than a formalist one. And if he were to be a formalist, would he more logically (?) be a strict formalist than one who deliberately plays with meters and syntax?

It's all just musings, I really have only just started thinking on this, so I haven't a clue. I know it's inconsistent, LOL.

And Curtis, you are touching on the sight/sound analogue that makes my lipreading my equivalent of your sound. And there are other equivalents, I see voices that you hear, even including their accents, I see sound in the feel of a breeze on my face or the slap of waves on the hull, stuff like that.

And yes, Roger, the memorization (or the remembering, to be more precise) is all in answer to my need for "sound", I even talk to myself a lot when even I, the only audience, cannot hear myself. It's wondrous strange.

I guess my point is that, for me, I "see" things and turn them into "sound", and in that sense the seeing is primary, or paramount. And I "see" things that are not real, that are "invisible" or "not visible", such as emotions, which take on color. So I objectify feelings, for example, (see "Poem in the Broken Seasons"), and I think the sound amounts to the tool I use to give shape to the things seen, not the object, or the essence, of the poem....

Does this make sense? I am thinking it out here, feeling my way, this is not dogma at all.

(music)


[This message has been edited by bear_music (edited March 04, 2002).]

[Paul Lake]

I'll briefly address both MacArthur and Curtis.

First, Mac, I enjoyed the poem you posted, but it is indeed free verse, with few if any recurring patterns of rhythm. Still, it has its interests.

Curtis,

Your post is too long to address in every detail, so let me simply answer by saying that I agree with Ezra Pound's definition of poetry: "a shape cut in time." This shape is an aural shape when heard or read aloud. Sight comes into the poem in two ways.

First, when we use our imagination, words evoking sight imagery actually stimulate the sight area of our brains, though only about half as much as actually seeing things. What evokes these imaginary sights, however, is the words, which are sounds associated in our minds with a fuzzy set of ideas.

The second way poems use sight is the way they look on the page, which seems to me a fairly trivial aspect of their shape, since a creative typographer can arrange words and letters in all kinds of ways. Mechanically making all lines exactly the same length with no internal similarity is not the same as letting words develop into metrical lines of approximately the same length with repeating and shifting patterns.

As to the supposedly random dispersal of stars in the night sky, astronomers have recently discovered that the distribution of stars in not random--they form a shape like a collection of bubbles or foam--thus they make a repeating, fractal pattern.

Paul Lake