I just landed back in this and wanted to point out that Charles Olson was less interested in pauses in Projective Verse than in breaths or breath units. He's also building on an essay of Williams's that leads to the idea of the variable foot--Williams uses the phrase "relative measure." Both of these alternative prosodies become nonsensical when you really look at them. They are to poetic measure what Yeats's symbols were to philsophy--they were essentially private systems, or pseudo-systems, that allowed poets to write in ways they felt were appropriate. They could not really be systematized or imitated.
To this day, no one really knows what Projective Verse actually means--it's as relative as the ways we breathe in given circumstances--and the same is true of the variable foot.
Now, as one who believes that free verse is a viable technique rarely used with urgency or skill, I would say that one part of it is the acceptance that one is going against units of measure understood in accentual, syllabic, or accentual-syllabic terms. One is feeling one's way toward the definition of the line and the line break, sorting out rhythm by other means, including rhetorical means, with rhetorical units working in or against the lines. This is far, far from prose, which simply organizes grammar and rhetoric in sentences and paragraphs and gives no heed to lines or line breaks. Therefore Len's earlier implication that Whitman was prose struck me as erroneous--at least in many cases I could point to, if not all of his poems.
To admit in free verse that one is working in lines but against measure seems to me rather important, and both Olson and Williams were unable to admit such a thing. Williams praised John Haines's free verse because it felt more intentional than the usual stuff that gets printed, and there I think he came closer to the kind of compact that differentiates verse from prose. CK Williams, for example, rarely seems intended in his lines and line breaks any more, and therefore seems to me much more like a prose writer than, say, Whitman.
I would, however, say that all of these definitions of verse are insufficient in a definition of poetry. Though few prose poems seem to me to have the poetic in them, I have certainly found the poetic in prose. In other words, formal definitions alone will always be insufficient to define the term, if indeed it ever finds a definition. By the same token, spiritual or soulful definitions will always be lacking, because poems more often than not set themselves apart from prose by being composed in lines, whether measured or unmeasured. It seems sensible to me to say that our definitions are doomed to wander between these poles, always inviting agreement and objection.
This line began with a question about WC Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," which is at least a controversial little piece of writing. Sometimes I think it utterly obnoxious and want to kick it across a room, but sometimes I'm glad the little bastard exists and causes people to question their assumtpions about what is possible in the art. This is useful, because otherwise we could fall into the sort of Georgian lethargy that made the free verse revoltuion seem so important and tenable in the first place. Useful, but not necessarily good poetry. I go back to my original statements about the "poem," here.
Let me end by saying simply that I am a reader who wants to be surprised and enlightened and transported, and those things have happened to me when reading many different kinds of writing. The fact that writing in meter is more memorable than writing in not-meter causes me to lean toward meter. But we're also a culture in which some reading pleasures are less memorable than others while remaining kinds of pleasure. I'm unwilling to dictate the sort of absolute laws that would narrow the scope of my pleasure, even while I must admit that most of what I read in verse of any sort bores me to tears.
[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited January 15, 2002).]
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