[Solan]

Curtis, you ask: "What is rhythm?"

If we generalize, as you seem to want, you could ask "What is pattern?" For rhythm is intrinsically tied to time sequences - that is, to sound.

What is ultimately at stake here, is the question of what kind of an art poetry is. If we take the art of painting, could we extend it so that the sound of the painting, however conceived, was part of what the painting was as a painting? Or are we better off saying that the sound of the thing is outside the nature of what it means to be "a painting"?

Music has been labelled the most abstract art. I think poetry deserves the rank of a good second. For like music, poetry follows time, and develops through time. It is here, then disappears as the next element takes over. The visual aspect of a piece of poetry is as relevant as the visual aspect of a piece of music. Poetry's structure, I would say, is aural and not visual.

What precisely this rhythm will consist in depends on the language. Spanish is to my knowledge mainly syllabic, and so IP would just not make any sense. In Old German and Old Norse the accentual style won through. In many modern languages, accentual-syllabic has proven its worth repeatedly. In Chinese, they supposedly measure something entirely different again.

But how do we come by those rhythms? How do we determine what's best? I propose that "verse libre" came out of a revolutionary, constructivist mind-set: What was right and what was wrong could be determined without context or reference to what has been tried. Politically, social constructivism has failed, regardless of political shade. Culturally, it has failed. Even in mathematics and philosophy, it has failed.

So as Tim Lake suggests for poetry, improving on the traditions piecemeal by trying out different techniques bit by bit is our best bet. And that is not done by declaring your verse in relation to a prior tradition as "Anything, but NOT THAT".

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Svein Olav

.. another life

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Svein,

Motion pictures--even the silent variety-- are "intrinsically tied to time sequences." It's a great leap to say that time sequences are also only sound.

It's also a great leap to say that non-metrical poetry departs entirely from tradition. Maybe it departs from the metrical aspect of traditional metrical poetry; and maybe, this might be seen as an improvement on the tradition of metrical poetry? I'm not arguing that case, but the word "improvement" is relative to perceived changes in requirements, and these perceptions are matters of taste. Perhaps these perceptions are also symptomatic of a desire for new orders to address new concerns.

In fact, the idea of "improving on tradition" bit by bit would suggest that a loosening of meter might be one way of doing it. Adhering to the same metrical units and strict metrical patterns is not a change for better or worse; the repetition of orders cannot be seen as an "improvement" in method, can it? Besides, such a method requires the placement of chaotic items into a previously established form rather than into a form which uniquely expresses the distinct collection-as-whole.--If "improvement" is made in the field of metrical poetry, then, the improvement will almost certainly require new contexts, ideas, images, etc., because the sound patterns of metrical poetry "ARE NOT TO BE VIOLATED," eh?

Whatever else I've said, I view metrical poetry as being one method but not the only method capable of producing poetry. I also recognize the importance of sound in poetry. However, I find it hard to believe that a similarity of sounds (such as alliteration) needs to also be metrically driven in order to create the complex, dynamic systems we are calling "poems." The similar qualities of sounds can take precedence over an equally measured pacing of those sounds. The same goes for syntactical development, imagistic development, and many other devices possible within our language or any language.


Curtis.

[Tim Murphy]

Svein Olaf, Hail and well met! I am particularly pleased that a prominent Norwegian mathematician has joined our debate with such elegantly and concisely expressed views. Another mathematician--Nobel laureate Murray Gell Man--father of these concepts in mathematics which I but dimly understand--is familiar with Paul's notions of rhythm in verse and nature, and the great man approves.

I am the unworthy heir of a tradition that begins with Gilgamesh--at least that's the little bit (5000 years) of the tradition which we can recover. It proceeds to Sung and Han Dynasty poetry, to Homer and Virgil. It descends from them for 2500 years. Since people began beating on a stump with a stick, and very long before they invented the alphabet, or picture-based characters, they began to create a memorable speech. Perhaps they began by simply grunting in rhythm.

However they created what I believe is the glory of mankind. I believe the century of free verse to be a tragedy, a waste of able minds, but a glory in which some of mankind's greatest poetry was written by Hardy, Frost, Yeats, Auden, Wilbur, etc. As my dear friend Robert Mezey, one of our ablest poets in free or formal verse has observed, 98 percent of the great free verse is in the Book of Psalms. It is a failed, a ruinous experiment.

[Solan]

Tim, thank you for the kind words, though I won't stand up in comparison to Murray Gell Mann.

Curtis, rhythm is sound is time sequence. Not the other way around.

I used to do a type of mathematics named "non-standard analysis". The adherents to this style of analysis realized only too late that naming a style via negativa would be the big bar that would hinder that wonderful tool going mainstream. The mathematics itself wasn't defined in a negative manner. It had a positive definition: Mathematics by means of infinitesimals. But the definition only appeared to those who looked past the name.

"Free-form poetry" is a bit akin to that. But in free-form's case, it is not only the name that is given as a negative, but also the definition. It is a "not that". That isn't, and can't be, an improvement. Do you think Einstein would have improved on physics if his amendment to Newton's laws was "not F = m* a"?

You say In fact, the idea of "improving on tradition" bit by bit would suggest that a loosening of meter might be one way of doing it. And that is indeed true. AE Stallings is an exponent of such a move relative to tradition. We have two threads, here and in the Mastery, concerning "Het Met" - heterometrical poetry. Tim works in alliterative poetry. John Beaton works with strong alliterative elements in addition to the accentual-syllabic - a strengthening of the rhythmic aspect.

You say I find it hard to believe that a similarity of sounds (such as alliteration) needs to also be metrically driven in order to create the complex, dynamic systems we are calling "poems." Have you tried to set up a brick wall, Curtis? Or maybe you have seen it done? Notice how they keep the straight lines? It is an error to believe that those straight lines are extrinsic to the wall - that the wall consists of bricks only, and that any structure to the wall aside from the pure spontaneity of the brick layer is an imposition from the outside. Is a brick wall "straight line driven"? Or is structuring part of the art of building a wall?

I don't have anything against each and every "free verse" there is. I love Crane's "The Heart", for instance. But note that his poem is packed with self-referential sound. He doesn't merely declare "as opposed to those who have used a hammer as a tool in their poetry, my poetry makes use of the tool I call a non-hammer". A non-hammer is simply not a tool, though I am sure it would confound the expectations of those who were buying the house.


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Svein Olav

.. another life

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Svein,

I don't go about writing a FV poem by thinking, "Ok, now I'm writing a NOT THAT." My argument is simply this, how I do it: the poem I am writing will circle this thing, this thing, or it will circle these things, and this set of conditions might or might not include a regular metrical pattern. I dislike the randomness many FV poets display in their poems; I find them to be boring and pointless. The Crane poem you mention is a case in point(s).

I'm not sure the wall metaphor is best for describing the method of creating all poetry. For instance, aren't chemical compounds often formed by the combination of different elements arranged in non-linear fashion? The joining of these elements might occur via physical laws which are "linear," in that they always work in a repetitive, linear fashion; but such compounds, viewed on the level of their constituent elements, are not. It's a matter of perspective.

The definition of FV is commonly made as you've described it: NOT-metrical verse. This is a negativa, but only if we assume that metrical verse is the absolute reality, the base, by which all poetry must be defined. It's a circular argument built around an assumption.

Curtis.

[Solan]

[My last post in this thread. Promise.]

Curtis: Tell me about the tools in your toolbox.

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Svein Olav

.. another life

[Tim Murphy]

In an interview years ago, Wilbur said "It is inconceivable to me that a poet would not want to make use of every tool at his disposal." He meant the gamut, beginning with meter and rhyme, going onto alliteration and assonance, and every rhetorical device known to mankind.

[Roger Slater]

But surely Wilbur didn't mean that a poet ought to make use of every tool in every poem he writes. There are fine poems, of course, that don't make any noteworthy use of alliteration, for example. By the same token, I would say that a given poem that doesn't make prominent use of meter or rhyme might fit Wilbur's statement just as much as a poem that doesn't make prominent use of alliteration or enjambment or trochaic substitutions.

I'm wondering, by the way, why the psalms' success at being great free verse poems doesn't show that free verse is a valid way of constructing a great poem. It may possibly harder to write a "great" free verse poem than a great metrical one, but that's an argument in favor of formal verse as being easier, not superior. Should no poet ever aspire to write something like a psalm?

As a practical matter, as well, since most of us can frankly not hope to produce that many "great" poems, but only excellent or very good poems, the relevant comparison would be how hard it is to write a good (not great) poem in free verse or formal verse. I sort of agree that there aren't that many toweringly great free verse poems (though I'd allow more than Mezey does), but it seems to me that the lower echelons give us as many "very good" free verse poems as "very good" metrical poems.

[Tim Murphy]

Dear Roger, Curtis, Svein, et alia.

I don’t throw the word “great” around lightly. I might propose 10 to 30 candidates each from Hardy, Frost, Auden, Yeats, Wilbur, etc. After that it’s just a smattering. Eliot: Prufrock, Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Period. Very Good poems? The formal ones outnumber the free free verse ones by hundreds to one, which is hardly surprising, given how briefly FV has been around. The wise practitioners of FV have repeatedly stressed that a mastery of formal verse is essential to writing well in FV. R.P. Warren and Rbt. Mezey told me this. Eliot and Pound said it. No, you don’t you use every tool in the tool box for every job, but God help the carpenter or mechanic who hasn’t a clue how to use them. That’s what Wilbur meant.

Two priceless anecdotes from the notes to Mezey’s Selected Robinson. “Younger practitioners have asserted that it is much more difficult to write well in vers libre than in form. Based in the evidence to date, I have to agree with them.”

Then, asked if he’d ever tried to write in FV, Robinson replied “No, I write badly enough already.

I don’t see much point in devoting a life to poetry unless your ambition is to write a great poem, and I play the percentages. Mezey’s Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel is a great poem, sufficient reward for a dedicated life; but I know he feels his twenty year detour into FV was a waste of two decades. Mason is intensely rueful over how long it took him to abandon FV for form. If a writer doesn’t share the ambition of a Mezey or a Mason he should heed Gide’s advice: “If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.”

Folks, I need to prepare for Juster's upcoming appearance, and I'm minding my old Mastery Board during Aliki's absence: so on that cheery note, I’ll close this long-running thread.