[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Ralph,

Paul Lake's essay ought to be retitled, In Defense of Formal Verse. He's hijacked chaos theory for the purpose of asserting this:

Through parallelisms of syntax and similarities of metaphors and sounds, free verse can sometimes attain isolated expressions of self-similarity in its parts and approximations of order in its overall design; but with fewer rules and less feedback to amplify and vary its constituent elements, it generally fails to achieve the same degree of self-similarity and scaling we find in the best formal verse. Drawn into being not so much by a strange attractor as by a series of provisional judgments and mechanical operations such as hitting return and space keys on a keyboard, free verse can only imitate the most superficial aspects of living forms like trees.

This summation of his essay is pitiful. He is careful elsewhere to point out asymmetry which exists in formal verse structures as being necessary to strange-attractors, but here, he's deriding free verse because it "fails to achieve the same degree of self-similarity and scaling we find in formal verse." I.e., according to Lake, meter and rhyme are the primary way of achieving similarity/asymmetry--indeed, that they are fundamental to a "strange attractor"-shaped system--and free verse ain't got 'em. It's interesting to note that Lake derides Pound in the essay, considering the association of Pound with H.D.

Lake's not entirely wrong, however. I agree that fixed-point and limit-cycle structures might exist within the total structure of a "strange attractor," so I agree with his interpretation of the workings of meter and rhyme in formal verse and say that formal verse is capable of creating systems which are "strangely attracting;" but I'd say he's way off base when he says that the symmetry and asymmetry between parts of a poem are examples of "strange attractors." In fact, the example in his essay of Craig Reynolds' "boids" is remarkably typical of any fundamentalist's argument: In that experiment, 3 rules had to be established to dictate the activity of the "boids!" I.e., these rules were fixed-points, so no wonder the "boids" were drawn into circles around those rules...and, as each "boid" was following rules shared by all, of course they'd flock together eventually into a fixed-point--consider rule #3: [each boid must] move toward a perceived center of mass of boids in its neighborhood along with an unnamed rule, the field--computer screen--must be finite. There's also the problem of designing "chance" encounters with a computer...I think Lake's point's not all b.s., because even in "strange attractor" systems, those systems are being shaped by "strange attractors," or points toward which the parts (and the whole) move, but these points need not necessarily be stable themselves.--Note also from the citation of Lake's essay above: free verse can sometimes attain isolated expressions of self-similarity in its parts and approximations of order in its overall design; but..." "Approximations of order?" Lake's argument against free verse is that it is not formal, ordered enough, period. How does this fit in with chaos theory? In fact, many chaologists would tell you that ordered structures occur spontaneously (as in Lake's description of the poet's writing process) within systems which are primarily chaotic: as "bubbles of order." Perhaps Lake wants us to believe that formal verse has "wrinkles of chaos" within the order in his mention of "asymmetry."--But these concepts of "symmetry" and "asymmetry" are looking at the structures too closely; they're seeing the individual points, not the forest; they're seeing fixed-point attractors and limit-cycle attractors.

I'd like to note, all these issues aside, that I don't think a poem must be built as a "strange-attracting" system primarily, or even have many "strange attractors," because the introduction of an audience will bring these to the poem. Is the poem merely the words on the page, or is it the poet-poem-auditor system? (Actually, I'm thinking it's both; i.e., that there are two systems, and these together form a third.)

Curtis.




[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited February 07, 2002).]