[Curtis Gale Weeks]

To a Certain Civilian, Walt Whitman


Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?
Did you seek the civilian's peaceful and languishing rhymes?
Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow?
Why I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand--nor am I now;
(I have been born of the same as the war was born,
The drum-corps' rattle is ever to me sweet music, I love well the martial dirge,
With slow wail and convulsive throb leading the officer's funeral; )
What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? therefore leave my works,
And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes,
For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.

I dedicate the citation of this poem to Len, suspecting its warm reception.


I love Tom's observation, "Haven't you noticed that the people who write free verse on these boards--presumably the very ones people who love metrical, syllabic, accentual verse want to 'win over'--NEVER participate in these discussions?" but my reasoning until this point has not been that I don't want to hear these things, as Tom suggested, but that I recognize that the task of attempting to cause an effectual change in the environment of Eratosphere--particularly among some ardent metricists--would be monumental, to say the very least. The fact that Len and some others have dismissed free verse poetry summarily, disregarding the multitudes who have and continue to support and enjoy free verse, aligns rather neatly with the religious fundamentalism so obvious in our culture and in other cultures. Of course it "aligns;" it rhymes rather well with those fundamentalisms, too, but not in a way which can be discerned by the accidental pairing of vowels and consonants. So, why bother responding? Tom's reference to the immutability of a free-verser's stance when confronted by such blithe dismissals can be compared to the immutability of some metricists' stance with regard to free verse. I can--and feel obliged to--say that this schism is unfortunate. Thus, I recognize the fact that whatever I might say about New Formalism or free verse will be received at some distance from the actual topic by some members on both "sides" of the issue.


There is the adage that only two kinds of writing exist--good writing and bad writing (re: you know who)--but of course this is a witticism which has only one practical value: it confuses the argument. I can only answer for myself when assigning the values of "good/bad."--Or, perhaps I can answer for a community, a "school" of poetry, an ivory tower of one kind or another. When I happen to stumble upon a discussion such as this thread, I see so many theoretic voices and so few actual voices. I see the school/tower, but the inhabitants of each--with a few exceptions--are one mass. Quite frankly, there's much about New Formalism which I detest. There's much about Free Verse which I equally detest--These last statements are directed against the schools and not against the methods employed by these schools, per se; rather, it is the blind adherence to limited precepts which devalues both schools of thought.

*

The things I detest about New Formalism are summarized very well by the above poem by Walt Whitman. New Formalism is at its worst when it attempts to codify thought processes for a community. I equate this tendency to religious fundamentalism, racial fundamentalism, and every other form of fundamentalism. New Formalism often says: "These are the fundamentals of poetry; nothing beside has value without these." Then, of course, the New Formalist must bemoan the rampant heresy of free verse--As with religious fundamentalism, New Formalism tends to see itself beset on every side by formulae which it does not prefigure: because New Formalism has defined its medium as the True Poetry and has assigned recognizable and inviolable methods for achieving its medium, anything which operates outside its modality is necessarily a False Poetic. This modality has a tendency to attempt the negation of disparate voices, disparate thought processes, and at its worst creates the "lull" of which Whitman was speaking: rather than the "charged language" which Len invokes, it "focuses the human sensibility on more than just the paraphrasable content of human speech;" i.e., it focuses the human sensibility along paths prescribed by New Formalism, proscribing all other paths--and this effect tends to dull the delivery of the final product. As I said before, I am referring to the school of New Formalism and its evangelistic vanguard (and, generally, their works), not its methods per se.


I also view this fundamentalist modality as being opposed to most things scientific--so many Newtonians, so few Einsteins and Hawkings. In the attempt to establish a Unified Field Theory, most New Formalists have reverted back to traditional maxims while turning a blind eye to current discoveries: Sure, a New Formalist might write a witty sonnet about relativity, but in so doing, said Formalist will almost certainly create a sonnet which is quite stilted, inadequate for its subject. The Uncertainty Principle is metaphorical fodder for most New Formalists: a quaint theory which can be hijacked for its surface appeal but can hardly be acknowledged seriously--perhaps e. e. cummings is one exception among only a handful of formalists.


Finally, and worst of all (but as a result of the foregoing), New Formalism tends to produce writers and readers incapable of reading free verse: minds are atrophied by too frequent and absolute exposure to the methods of those "piano tunes." This effect tends to limit the resources of such writers, further dulling their poems. We decry senseless repetition in any given poem, but New Formalism demands the repetition of form within a limited subset for only one reason: It must, or it will cease to exist.

*

The things that I detest about Free Verse are its hypocrisy and lackadaisical approach toward communication. Interestingly, my e-dictionary has this definition and etymological sourcing of "lackadaisical":

lack·a·dai·si·cal adj. Lacking spirit, liveliness, or interest; languid. [From lackadaisy,
alteration of lackaday.]

lack·a·day interj. Archaic. Used to express regret or disapproval. [Alteration of alack the day.]

a·lack interj. Used to express sorrow, regret, or alarm: [On the model of alas. See LACK.]

--And what is worse than Free Verse's limpid resolve to be forever whining and lack-luster? "Oh I/we lack"--understanding, certitude, love, and everything--"So this is the way the Universe must be: lacking order and prefigured coherence." The worst Free Verse believes itself superior in its understanding of the great Uncertainty Principle, by virtue of the fact that it is often so random. But. The worst Free Verse believes itself to be expressing a very definite emotion or paradigm or thought: i.e., it shows a randomness--and, best of all, it thinks, via a lax form--but attempts to express a very distinct certitude of one modality or another. The worst Free Verse thinks it is being clever without actually being clever. It attempts to address the Uncertainty Principle and relativity, but does so superficially, hypocritically, because it doesn't actually believe in those principles, nor does it understand how those principles can exist in a definite (certain) reality.


What the worst Free Verse hasn't figured out: it needs order because it believes in order: it doesn't know how or why it should express this order. This comes through very clearly in much free verse. The adherence to lackadaisical approaches is a fundamentalism all its own, an anti-poetic, in my opinion. On the other hand, I suspect that many Free Verse poets believe that this adherence is itself a kind of order; and, when such is expressed repetitively, it creates dull poems.

*

And then there's the rub: What is this "order?" Finding a prescribed order as the metricists have done strikes me as being too easy, most of the time. Conversely, I believe all forms--found or personally invented--are tools merely; thus, traditional forms and meters have their uses. I also believe that the "lackadaisical" approach is a tool, as useful as metrics. There might also be order which is so foreign to me that I don't easily apprehend it, don't recognize it--I've had this experience on numerous occasions, with proverbial bolts of lightning attendant. Yea, even repetition has its use. What I don't like, however, are poems which are admissions of limitation: or, the egoistic adherence to arbitrary aesthetics: "...I like it/Because it is bitter/And because it is my heart."






--C.



[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 04, 2002).]

[SteveWal]

Wow, Curtis, you've expressed very well what I think about all this.

To make one way of writing verse an absolute is a kind of fundamentalism; and frequently produces incredibly dull poems on both sides of the coin.



------------------
Steve Waling

[Len Krisak]

Well, we seem to be making some kind of progress here,
but just what that progress is I really can't say.

To clarify two items I believe were misquoted and/or
misunderstood: I did NOT accuse free verse of being
"That boring old shit." I was quoting someone else
(I forget the name in the run of the posts) in such a
way (I hoped) as to make clear that I simply didn't think
of METRICAL and/or rhymed verse as necessarily boring or
old.

Second, and this will probably shock the
socks off a number of the posters--NYCtom and Chris W., if
I remember correctly--but...I do NOT--repeat, NOT--believe
free verse is in and of itself bad. I simply say it is
prose, lineated rag-right. Hard as it may be to believe,
I'm actually very fond of much prose and often find it quite good.

Yes, Virginia, Len likes novels and plays and short stories
written in prose. However, SOME prose is very good, and
some prose is ...well.

The same thing holds true for verse. If all written or
spoken English can be divided into two logical classes--
metrical and non-metrical (and yes, allow for
accentual-syllabic, accentual, and quantitative--but NOT
syllabic, systems as "metrical"), then as Tim Steele
points out, peoiple either write prose or verse. I see
no particular value or superiority in one as opposed
to the other. I'd rather read "Dubliners" any day than
bad metrical speech (i.e., bad poetry that is in meter and rhymes--much of Rod McKuen?). At the same time,
I'd much prefer to read good metrical speech, say Richard Wilbur, to bad prose--Whitman's endlessly gasbagging lists
of boring banalities.


As to the comments about fundamentalism, etc., I leave it
to the Board members to accord them whatever value they may have.

[David Mason]

There's a bit too much gasbagging in this line, if you don't mind my saying so--odious generalizations, vague definitions of terms all about. I'm dropping it.

[Len Krisak]

A couple of other observations
about this (apparently) endlessly
argued topic:

(1) I am not "armed," no matter what "camp"
anyone may think I'm in.
(2) I have no interest whatsoever in
"browbeating" anyone at any time into
writing a certain way--as if I could!
To paraphrase Joseph Salemi, it's North
America, not North Korea. So write away to
your heart's content, everyone. You certainly
don't need my (or anyone else's) permission.

(3) There is nothing odious in making a logical
distinction between prose and non-prose. Or do
the members of the board think prose and
verse don't exist or can't be distinguished?

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Len,


I understood your reference to "boring old shit." The following statements in support of what another called "boring old shit" are what troubled me:

Verse (that boring old shit
that should have gone away) focuses the human
sensibility on more than just the paraphrasable
content of human speech. It revels in sound
and play and charged language.

I think that defining "poetry" as being inherently metrical allows the estimation that free verse is "just the paraphrasable content of human speech." Certainly, I can accept your more recent statement that "written or spoken language can be" divided into "metrical and non-metrical" language, but I don't think a definition of "poetry" must follow such a division. I have seen many attempts at creating metrical verse on this site and elsewhere which, although quite metrical, are not "poetry" in my estimation: they're flat, they're stilted, they're mundane, they're ineffectual, but metrical. Metricity is not the defining attribute of poetry.


Of course there are other attributes--we all know them: metaphor, sound, meaning, etc. I write much free verse, and I am at my best when I incorporate some or all of these things into my poetry. (Not that I always succeed, of course.) Just because metrical verse follows a recognizable, prefigured pattern doesn't mean that it alone revels in those things you mentioned.


Different kinds of revelation exist. If I were to list my top 50 favorite poems, assuming I could delineate the different levels of greatness between them, well over half--probably about 80-90 percent--would be metrical poems. Auden is one of my top 5 favorite poets. I am not immune to the greatness of metrical verse, but I esteem such verse--good metrical verse--for its ability to transcend its metrical structure via those other attributes we all love to see in our poetry. One of the lessons drummed into beginning writers is to avoid blaring/glaring, pointless or facile rhymes and sing-song metrics (with, of course, exceptions to this rule), because we want more than the mere sound and structure of the poem. The same holds true for free verse. I can't deny the fact that most free verse--and there's so much of it--uses its facile line structuring in a seemingly pointless manner, and that this pointlessness grates on the sensibility of those of us who expect rigorous attention to cause & effect in our poetry. Apparently, this irritability is inflamed even more by an expectation of metrical consideration, but I think it is too easy to say: "This poet doesn't seem to care about metrical speech; therefore, this poet has chosen irrationally; this poet has no art." To take a newspaper article or any other typical work of prose, arbitrarily break it into lines of varying length, and claim that you've just written in the manner in which all free verse poets compose their poems, is insulting.--I'm not dismissing your viewpoint, because I will agree that too many free verse poets write their poems without due consideration of what the structure of their poems ought to be accomplishing; I'm just saying that there are choices a good free verse poet makes when considering his/her poems' structures. The best free verse accomplishes a playfulness, in my opinion, by subverting expectation not by being combative (i.e., not by submitting broken prose and thumbing its nose at rational human beings), but by offering logic which is unanticipated, and this requires form, even if the format is not distinguished via recognizable metrical standards.


I see that you have posted to this thread while I've been composing this reply--"There is nothing odious in making a logical distinction between prose and non-prose." I agree, there must be a distinction. I believe that the distinction is in how prose and poetry operate rather than in how they are structured, but I'm going to close this up for now. I want to make this disclaimer re: "fundamentalism": I suppose that the choice of a poetic aesthetic is necessarily a fundamentalism, one we each must make for ourselves. Perhaps fundamentalism is necessary, if we are going to produce poems which contain logic of whatever kind: there must be order/fundaments. One definition of "fundament": a. The buttocks. b. The anus. I like another: An underlying theoretical basis or principle. In my original posting, I was of course using the first definition interlaced with the last, in the form of "anal-retentive," and I was speaking of the worst-case scenarios of both schools of thought.


--Curtis.





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

[Len Krisak]

Curtis,

I think we're actually agreeing here. I DON'T
believe simply writing something metrically makes
it any good at all--but didn't I say that? (I thought
I did.) The distinction for me lies between
necessary and sufficient--logical categories.

Lord, but there must be thousands of rotten poems
written in meter and rhyme. Without the spark of
life (define as you like), they ain't gonna make it.

Curtis,somewhat off the subject (if any poor soul is still
reading this thread after the withdrawal of the Lariat),
how's about we try W. S. Merwin's very first book,
the Yale winner from 1952, and use his first poem in
that book as a kind of test case? It's called
"Anabasis I," and although I've had a good long (second)
tug on Richard Howard's pipe (i.e., his comments on the poem),
and although I have gone over the piece some five or six times
now, I'm no better off in trying to understand it than
before. You mention a liking for Auden (whose work I
greatly admire--come to think of it, so does Dave
Mason). Merwin seems to have adopted the Audenesque
mode of the early 30s, where so much was hidden in
psycho-sexual-political allegory. Try following
that 24-year old premature Master's (I mean Merwin's!)
syntax and punctuation, his appositives and kernels, and see if you can decipher whatever it is that's going on amidst the slant rhymes and rhymes on non-stressed syllables.

I'd be very curious as to the results of your efforts.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

I've been wondering for decades now why it is that in the United States it seems crucial to poets to define and define and define what they do, not in order to see it more clearly or do it better, but in order to be certain of whom to include among themselves, and whom to exclude. In Latin America and in Spain, to the best of my knowledge, that drawing of a "line in the sand" has never seemed useful, much less imperative. In fact, the common situation is for the same poet to write both formal and free verse, often in the same book, without making any bones about it, explaining it, or feeling that there is anything about it that requires explanation. Borges wrote both, and both very, very well, and it would not occur to anyone I can think of that his free verse is really prose in disguise. That each reader may have a preference for reading one or the other, in general or in the work of a specific poet, is another matter, but has that kind of "line in the sand" really done much for poetry, for our capacity to understand one another, or for our power to beguile one another into the enjoyment of--and experimentation with--whatever it is we love and would like to share? I suspect Nyctom is right:
showing formal verse to people who think they don't like it, and encouraging them to try it for the sheer playful joy of it, works better than telling them that what they've been writing so far is prose--which often has the added disadvantage of being untrue, as when the poet is Stanley Kunitz, or Jorge Luis Borges, or a great many others I can think of who happen to write in a way that I don't write in but can admire in the work of others. The other approach--defining the work of others in ways that shuts them out of where they themselves believe they are--simply raises hackles and shuts ears that we might open through persuasion. If a definition shuts out of the category of "Poetry" that which FEELS like poetry to the mind and sense, because it does something with perceived reality that prose doesn't normally do, and touches something in the reader that prose doesn't normally touch, by whatever means, then it's the definition that needs changing, not the written work.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Holy smoke, Len! I think I remember that particular "little set-to"! Was it really I who had the audacity to say "I don't care if your question is logical..." and so forth? Oh, I hope so! But it's hard to recall a specific set-to out of the many, many we've had over the years, old buddy.
That one must have been a lulu. I wish I remembered every bit of it! We should record those things: for instance, the one during which we Had Words over Emily Dickinson would have been a gem for posterity.

[ChrisW]

I think Rhina is right that there's not much point in drawing lines in the sand, but I'm very interested in understanding what poetry is. So I'm going to raise a question inspired by the above debate.

"Verse" is usually understood to be a technique, which may or may not produce poetry (one can versify a washing bill or a dreary bureaucratic memorandum without making them poetry).
If verse is a technique for achieving poetry, it seems possible that one might arrive at poetry by means of another technique -- or entirely without any technique.

On the other hand, the term 'free verse' seems nearly oxymoronic if one regards verse as essentially a technique (a means of achieving some end -- a means one could explain to someone else -- a craft). If verse is understood as a technique, then it is most plausibly identified with meter.
But this still leaves open the possibility that "poetry" is a goal definable entirely apart from meter.
Can we reject "free verse" as self-contradictory: "techniqueless technique", and yet admit that there is something else, "poetry" which may be achieved without any set, teachable technique? Can there be 'free poetry' or 'prose poetry' -- i.e. poetry free of meter?

The answer depends on whether we can distinguish poetry from prose in some way OTHER than by meter.
I'm sympathetic to the attempt to do this, but so far, I'm not sure I've heard anything that would clearly distinguish the aims of poetry and prose. Metaphor and the other things listed above seem common to both poetry and prose.

I would be very interested to have someone tell me what distinguishes the aims or the means of poetry and prose, putting meter to one side. (Here I am trying to restate Len Krisak's assertions as a challenge.)

That challenge might be too difficult -- it's too hard for me right now. Could someone define 'lyric poem' in a way that leaves it open whether a lyric poem employs meter at all, but at the same time distinguishes it from prose-genres (like the short-short story)? This seems more hopeful.

Even if my challenge is unmeetable, and "poetry" can't be defined without reference to meter, it will not follow that 'free verse' is valueless -- only that it is a set of genres better classified as prose.

[And this raises a final question: perhaps 'free verse' is more like prose for some purposes, but more like poetry for other purposes. But if that's right, let's try to get more specific about which purposes go with which distinctions.)