[David Mason]

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).]

[Richard Wakefield]

David: I agree with you about the immeasureable breadth of poetry. I believe the world is bigger than any theory or definition of it, and even relatively small parts of the world resist formulation. That's not to say -- as you clearly don't mean to -- that definitions and formulas are useless, only that they're always provisional. So, like you, I appreciate the challenge that "The Red Wheelbarrow" presents, even if I don't much like the poem itself. If it is a poem... Oh, Lord, here we go again.
RPW

[Roger Slater]

I think it's obvious that the Red Wheelbarrow is a "poem." What else is it? Of course, there are people who think that the word "poem" implies quality, such that there can't be any such thing as a "bad poem" because either it's a poem, and therefore good, or it's bad and therefore not a poem.

There's a difference, though, between recognizing what something is and recognizing what we like. Edsels are cars, Britney Spears makes music. I don't want to drive or listen to either. Enough very smart and literate people who can certainly claim to know as much about poetry as the rest of us have admired Williams' poem and thought enough about it and discussed it enough that here we are still discussing it decades after the fact. Is it just a mass hallucination? And, if so, does that mean it's not a poem?

As to the "what is poetry" discussion, and how it relates to free verse versus meter, etc., I also think it's rather absurd to say that only one camp can claim to be "poetry." To make an analogy, what is love? Is it how a parent feels for his child? Or is it how a spouse feels for a spouse? A citizen feels for his country? Is it love only if it doesn't bend with the remover to remove? Is it love if it passes? Is it love if it's selfish? There are all sorts of love, and we could have a fierce argument about which kind of love is best or most satisfying, but it would be silly for a parent to argue that what a friend feels for a friend isn't love, or what a nun feels for God isn't love, etc., because only a parent's love is supreme. By the same token, I think, poetry is almost as complex as love and certainly has complex facets and aspects that we would be foolish to claim are found only in the cloisters we each have chosen to dwell in.

Why the need to define away what we don't prefer, to exclude it from the club? Okay, sure. William Carlos Williams was a hack, didn't think about poetry as deeply as I did and probably didn't have any appreciation for great literature or insight into how literature is created. It was all just marketing, marketing that happened to take in some of the finest critics of his day. But I wonder why my own bad poetry doesn't get mistaken for the real thing the way his did? Why was his badness so much more interesting than the extreme competence of so many others?

[SteveWal]

Roger -

I agree with a lot of what you say; but here's the question that keeps nagging at me.

How do you define a good poem? Is it one that follows the rules exactly, or is it good because it breaks the rules in an interesting way? Is it good because it expresses something simply and clearly, or because it leaves you with a sense of mystery, of a depth you can't quite fathom? Is it beautiful (define beauty?)

I ask this because TRW is a simple poem, showing a simple image in clear language that can't possibly be "misuderstood": which is one definition of good.

Questions of good or bad are inevitably mixed in with subjectivity, with personal taste and with what society now or in the past has called good. Whether there is, or is not, an objectively "good" or "bad" poetry is a moot point: is African art better or worse than Greek? Is the level of skill more important than the level of feeling in a poem?

I'm pretty sure I know a good or bad poem when I see one; I'm also pretty sure that someone somewhere will think my opinion nonesense.

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

[ewrgall]

Originally posted by 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.

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.--C.

What Curtis had to say was much longer than this but I only have a short point to make. I dont think Curtis quite reads what Whitman is saying above. One of our founding fathers said (forgive me, I can't remember who) "Patriotism is the last refuguee of a scoundral." All that Whitman does above is "wrap himself and his poetry in the flag." True patriots will love his work! Whitman practically calls his "critic" an effeminate coward. (This written either doing or just after by far the bloodiest war in American history.) I dont think Curtis realizes it but Whatman's poem actually examples exactly the type of thing he accuses New Formalism of doing.

ewrgall





[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited January 25, 2002).]

[Clive Watkins]

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Dr Samuel Johnson, citizen of Lichfield in the United Kingdom: 7th April 1775 (Boswell)

Clive Watkins

[Len Krisak]

Oi, do I have the energy to go through this again?
Or is it The Subject That Cannot Die?

Totally random responses then:
About twenty years ago, there was a bit of a
trend in hip typographic and design circles to set
a lot of ad copy and even textbook prose "rag right"--
a locution I'm sure everyone sees the "poetic" aptness
of immediately. Whole chapters of what would ordinarily
have been set as justified (even left and right margins)
type ended up with even left margins and irregular right ones.

(Exactly like the paragraph above)

By Dave's definition of Whitman's line as non-prosaic,
could I not infuse that paragraph with some metaphor and more interesting diction, set it with new line endings
that played tricks with the meaning (imitative fallacy stuff)
or broke up the usual conversationally-expected grammatical
units ("enjambment yields high twisted energy that goes against the line ending" arguments) and be said to be doing
the same thing Whitman was doing? Dave himself says that
Olson (and, I agree, Williams--"variable foot" my sweet Aunt Fannie) were simply inventing private systems no one else could recognize. Chris Beyers, in his just-out book "The History of Free Verse," says almost exactly the same thing.
Dave, I also agree with you that people like C. K. Williams don't seem to care much of anything about their so-called lines except that they be very, very, very long. A whole bunch of people like the latter Williams--Charles Wright, etc.--could be included in this group.

Since I'm obviously failing miserably at making this distinction, I'm going to try just one last time: like Dave,
I find most of ANYthing I read, whether its authors call it prose or poetry, awful. I see NO special advantage to meter and/or rhyme if the poem is dreadful. At the same time, I genuinely admire good prose. Some of my best friends, etc., etc. ... By making this distinction I do NO HARM to anyone writing good prose. But if the definitions for poetry are to include the "spiritually elevated" or almost-transcendentally subjective ("it lifts my soul; ergo, poetry"), then I believe we really do lose a modest but useful distinction. Apparently some people think that if you can't be called a poet you drop in some imagined hierarchy of the written arts.
Perhaps. But it was Wilbur (at a reading three or four years ago) who said (I paraphrase), "Many people cannot write verse. There is no harm in their not doing so."

I've forgotten some of the other points folks made above, but I mean them no disrespect by bowing out at this juncture with
the perhaps peculiar observation that I like much of Dave's work and dislike almost all of Whitman's. Go figure.

Oops--I forgot: Whitman began his literary forays into verse by writing in meter and rhyme...very badly.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

[quote]Originally posted by ewrgall:

What Curtis had to say was much longer than this but I only have a short point to make. I dont think Curtis quite reads what Whitman is saying above. One of our founding fathers said (forgive me, I can't remember who) "Patriotism is the last refuguee of a scoundral." All that Whitman does above is "wrap himself and his poetry in the flag." True patriots will love his work! Whitman practically calls his "critic" an effeminate coward. (This written either doing or just after by far the bloodiest war in American history.) I dont think Curtis realizes it but Whatman's poem actually examples exactly the type of thing he accuses New Formalism of doing.

ewrgall

ewrgall,

We must come from different planets, you and I. I'm sure that most civilians--or, at least those who cared to think about their country--were quite patriotic when Whitman penned this poem. If he is distancing himself from them, he's patriotic? Yes, but he was patriotic in his own way. His reference to the war, the drum-corps, the officer's funeral, are metaphorical statements about the qualitative nature of his muse/inspiration/emotion...They're not "wrapping himself in the flag." Where is "flag" or "country" mentioned in this poem? I think you're stretching the bounds of comprehension, arcing into whimsy to support your position.

Any school of poetry which claims that it alone--through its chosen methods--creates "poetry," while excluding every other possible method, is fundamentalist in the worst way. Even though Whitman is condescending in this poem, the target of his condescension isn't much different than the target of some New Formalist thought: that pop music (Jewel, for instance) isn't good poetry: "piano-tunes" and "peaceful and languishing rhymes." At the same time, Whitman is speaking for himself, for his own methodology, and not for a "school." The fact that he felt he needed to do so is surely a sign that some other opponent--the "you" of this poem, if the word is taken to its extreme--had fundamentalized the notion of what is and what isn't poetry; namely, those makers/lovers of piano-tunes.

Curtis.

Also:BANNED POST during times of war, civilians will often continue to celebrate holidays, hold festivals, etc., while soldiers are still out on the battlefield fighting the battles and dying. Whitman's contrasting of the civilians' wishing for "peaceful and languishing rhymes" and the images of soldiers and war are possibly a cry for reality in poetry vs. the romantic tendencies which continued to warp the poetry of his time--metrical verse and free verse issues aside, he was probably intending this contrast over all others. (With the added nod that, yes, he didn't rhyme his poetry.)



[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 26, 2002).]

[Richard Wakefield]

Williams's humble wheel barrow has hauled us all a long ways. One good indication that a thread has attenuated past any earthly use is that the title no longer suggests anything about the contents. To anyone who feels this thread has led to interesting but disparate topics, I suggest that you start new threads, either here our on whatver forum seems appropriate.
Richard

[A. E. Stallings]

Not to enter the fray or anything, and apologies for pro-longing the life of this thread, but was re-reading some Wendy Copy today. I had forgotten about this gem, which struck me as very apropos:

So Much Depends

'And Another thing: I gave in far too easily over William Carlos Williams.'

I can't remember what you said about him.
Was it thumbs down or the big hurrah?
When it comes to William Carlos Williams,
I've no idea what your opinions are.

I argued with you? That seems most unlikely.
I may have looked attentive for a while.
I've searched my head for William Carlos Williams
And there is very little in the file.

I'll fight with you about important issues
Like who should buy the bread or clean the sink
But when it comes to William Carlos Williams,
Dearest, I really don't mind what you think.

Yes, mutter darkly, 'Well, perhaps you ought to,'
And fire offensive weapons from those eyes.
When it comes to William Carlos Williams,
It won't do any good. I will not rise.