[Janet Kenny]

Maryann,
Forgive me for addressing you as "Janice" in my post above. I do think it is relevant to this discussion.
Janet

[Alder Ellis]

Here is another one by Donald Justice (see his great "The Tourist from Syracuse" posted by Mark in the General Talk thread):

To Waken a Small Person

You sleep at the top of streets
Up which workmen each morning
Go wheeling their bicycles

Your eyes are like the windows
Of some high attic the one
The very one you sleep in

They're shut it's raining the rain
Falls on the streets of the town
As it falls falls through your sleep

You must be dreaming these tears
Wake up please open yourself
Like a little umbrella

Hurry the sidewalks need you
The awnings not one is up
And the patient bicycles

Halted at intersections
They need you they are confused
The colors of traffic lights

Are bleeding bleeding wake up
The puddles of parking lots
Cannot contain such rainbows.

Each line has seven syllables, as does the title (come to think of it, so does the title of "The Tourist from Syracuse"), most with 3 stresses, a few with 2. The title itself is metrically / semantically ambiguous:

to WAken a SMALL person [as opposed to a big person]

to WAken a SMALL PERson [as opposed to a small non-person...]

Such an ambiguity is one expressive potential of syllabic verse, as opposed to accentual-syllabic verse which would force one meaning or the other by means of a metrical context. Perhaps a differentiating criterion of syllabic verse would be just that: it does not impose a metrical context.

Anyway, the poem is tantalizingly almost, but not quite, trimeter, which keeps the reader on his or her toes, in a way. You can't quite settle down into a predictable rhythm. It makes you pay attention to what's going on rhythmically instead of putting that whole business on automatic pilot.

What's particularly interesting about this poem is the way Justice combines it with another similarly angled technique, the absence of punctuation. This is not his normal technique, & surely not a quasi-ideological rebellion against the tyranny of punctuation -- rather, an experiment with the expressive potential of context-withholding. The reader is required to supply the context normally specified by punctuation, & this has the curious effect of legitimizing feeling. Compare

Are bleeding! Bleeding! Wake up!

with

Are bleeding bleeding wake up

The first line would be hard to get away with in this day & age, too flagrantly emotional, imposing itself on the reader. Take away the punctuation, force the reader to bring his or her own, and the flow of feeling strangely shifts from being writer-sourced to being reader-sourced, & the line passes muster. A mere trick, but an instructive one.

The poem overall is evidently in dream-space, dream-logic. The small person is, surely, oneself. I love the last two lines.

And, yes, I am totally in favor of syllabics being admitted to the metrical forums. But does that mean they will be barred from the free verse forum?

[John Hutchcraft]

Swinging back over to successful examples of syllabics . . .

I mentioned above Marianne Moore. If syllabics indeed are meter, then fewer more scrupulous metricists have written, though of course she wrote free verse too.

I have a sense, maybe unwarranted, that not many people read her anymore. That's too bad, because she's the bee's knees. I remember reading somewhere that she was a big influence on a young Wilbur, for what that's worth. I think you can hear her in a killer-diller line like "whips map countries in the air" - that has something of Moore's ability to zig in a completely unexpected direction. I think she is a complete master of the interplay between line and sentence, and one of the most surprising poets around, though definitely not among the most readily accessible. A lot of it is mysterious.

Here are three of her early poems. With the new coding on the Sphere, I lack the technical competence to reproduce Moore's indentations, so you'll just have to imagine them.

The Fish

wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of

ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.


To a Steam Roller

The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down
into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.

Sparkling chips of rock
are crushed down to the level of the parent block.
Were not 'impersonal judment in aesthetic
matters, a metaphysical impossibility,' you

might fairly achieve
it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive
of one's attending upon you, but to question
the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

The Past is the Present

If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse.
This man said – I think that I repeat
his identical words:
"Hebrew poetry is
prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.

[Janet Kenny]

Stephen,
Look I'm tiddly since local state elections
unbelievable, regional elections
are completed and worse has lost to better.


Yes I was aware of that. And when I have slept and am restored to sanity I will respond more intelligently.
Janet

PS: I seem to have obliterated Tennyson.

I'll put him back tomorrow.


Alfred Lord Tennyson -
Hendecasyllabics

O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,
Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem
All composed in a metre of Catullus,
All in quantity, careful of my motion,
Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him,
Lest I fall unawares before the people,
Waking laughter in indolent reviewers.
Should I flounder awhile without a tumble
Thro' this metrification of Catullus,
They should speak to me not without a welcome,
All that chorus of indolent reviewers.
Hard, hard, hard it is, only not to tumble,
So fantastical is the dainty meter.
Wherefore slight me not wholly, nor believe me
Too presumptuous, indolent reviewers.
O blatant Magazines, regard me rather -
Since I blush to belaud myself a moment -
As some rare little rose, a piece of inmost
Horticultural art, or half-coquette-like
Maiden, not to be greeted unbenignly.

[A. E. Stallings]

I find the Bread I Break by Thomas pretty straight-forward accentual syllabic, if strict on the syllabic end. Remember, it is not just having a strict syllable count, but not being strictly accentual.

The Tennyson is an experiment in classical hendecasyllables, which are not the same as "syllabics". Although, insomuch as we don't really register vowel length in English scansion, they have about the same effect! Nor would I consider sapphics "syllabic," despite, again, a strict syllable count

Here is another wonderful Donald Justice one:

The Thin Man

I indulge myself
in rich refusals.
Nothing suffices.

I hone myself to
This edge. Asleep, I
Am a horizon.


-Donald Justice


It's a wonderful poem--so thin and so rich. I love the paradoxes of the first stanza, and the pun in "nothing suffices." Again, you can tell this is composed IN syllabics, letting the syllable count force those vital line breaks (hone myself to/ this edge). I love the image of the "I" asleep that becomes the horizon--this is a poem that almost animates itself. It is important that that I be at the end/edge of the line. "horizon" takes over the last three syllables of the poem, stretching out, well, like a horizon. Notice that most (not all, but most) successful syllabics are not only in odd numbers of syllables per line, but, perhaps taking off from haiku, in odd-numbered-line stanzas, often in threes.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Thanks. I will remember that. (I hope.)

[Cally Conan-Davies]

That's fantastic, Alicia! — both poem and explication. The second stanza is like a right angle - like the 90 degree movement from the perpendicular to the horizontal lines of a right angle. Talk about edgy!

Thanks for doing all this - it's fascinating.

Cally

[A. E. Stallings]

I'm glad you like it!

There is something essentially minimalist about doling out lines in five syllables only, syllable by syllable, that suits the subject very well. A dimeter, say, that allowed of extra syllables as substitions would not work so well here. I love, too, how "I indulge myself" does seem to indulge in those disyllabic words (which are themselves mouthfuls of consonants and vowels), how "refusals" is itself rich in a syllabic poem--taking up three syllables of real estate (and the alliteration with "rich" also seems aurally rich in such a minimalist poem)--and how "suffices" does itself exactly suffice in its arithmatic at the end of the line. But you are quite right, the second stanza which shifts into edgy enjambments does stand (or lie down) at a sort of 90 degree angle! Even the title does such great work--the "thin man" becoming the thin letter "I" itself (myself).

[Stephen Collington]

Janet,

Tennyson's hendecasyllabics are not a "syllabic" metre at all. The classical form is as follows:

DUM da DUM da da DUM da DUM da DUM da

(Technically, the first two syllables and the last are all "anceps," and so can be either heavy or light. In practice, however, Tennyson always begins with an accented syllable, which pretty much guarantees "demotion" of the next, and the required accent on the penultimate has the same effect at the end.)

Tennyson follows this line scrupulously throughout, with the one possible exception of

O blatant Magazines, regard me rather

though I suspect he intended something like

O BLA-TANT magaZINES, reGARD me RAther

which demands a campily exaggerated, spondaic pronunciation of "blatant" (Lord T is, after all, rather hamming it up a bit!), but is otherwise unproblematic given the "English" pronunciation of magaZINE. (Around here, we say MAgazine.)

Anyway, the key point is that hendecasyllabics are not a "syllabic" metre. The form represents the stress-accentual version of a quantitative line--one which observes strict syllable count, but which is defined fundamentally by its pattern of marked vs. unmarked syllables (whatever form that marking may take--stress accent, syllabic length, etc.). In other words, you can't get hendecasyllabics just by counting to eleven.

Alicia,

I can't disagree that Justice's piece does indeed seem to have been intentionally written "IN syllabics," but I'm not as sure as you are that the choice always serves the poet well. After all, if "edgy" enjambment is the issue, why not . . .

I hone myself to this
Edge. Asleep, I
Am a horizon.

Much sharper edge there, no? And while I agree that putting "I" at the end of the second-last line there makes for an interesting effect, with our thin man about to fall flat onto the horizon below, I wonder--why not really make use of the graphic potential here, and do something like . . .

The Thin Man

I
indulge myself in rich
refusals. Nothing
suffices.

I
hone myself to this
edge.
Asleep, I
a
a m
a m a horizon.

In other words, if such graphic/enjambment effects are the issue, why not pursue them in real earnest? What is there in the "syllabic" metrical form here that is important enough that it trumps other arrangements? Could it be that the poem is really just an accentual dimeter? Could it be that the "syllabic" arrangement is just an affectation?

Steve C.

[A. E. Stallings]

It's true that in trying classical hendecasyllables, we often convert long syllables to accents--DUM (as Frost does); but Tennyson is concerned with syllable length (so "quantity" implies) rather than strictly with accent--he's trying for the full classical effect, at last I think so. A curiosity. Don't know that it works, however. He seems to be saying as much, that it is a mere exercise--look at me! I'm doing syllabics. Frost's "For Once, Then Something" works much better as a poem, though not concerned (I don't believe) with quantity per se.

I do not think Justice's syllabics are an affectation at all--I am not even sure what that would mean. They are not merely decorative, certainly. In fact, most people do not realize they are syllabics, and take this as a minimalist free verse poem. But they (syllabics) do have to be taken on their own terms. There is a tension to me in enjambing on the "to". And of course the thing with "I" asleep and horizon--well, I hate to spell it out--one should picture it. But it goes far beyond the gimmicky, I think, in its repercussions.