[MacArthur]

When verse appears on the Metrical Boards which employs language in a fashion which isn’t intelligible in any ordinary sense. I usually avoid commenting at all. Mostly because I’m entirely at a loss to understand how scansion would apply.

But I don’t necessarily disrespect or dislike that kind of poetry—my candidate for International Great of the Twentieth-Century would be Cesar Vallejo—a Surrealist. It just seems that metrical analysis is arbitrary and irrelevant.

Take the following example (my concoction):

briefly garage to bingo pay green for
stamps aqueducting mine for shorter his

All words that recognizably come from English, and ten syllables per line.
But there’s no way to determine whether the first line is a Trochaic Tetrameter with two extra syllables:

BRIEF ly ga / RAGE to / BINgo pay / GREEN for

…or an Iambic Pentameter with a reversed initial foot:

BRIEFly / gaRAGE / to BIN / go PAY / green FOR

In an ordinary sentence the word “for” would be unlikely to take a stress…but it could (sometimes does) and the syntax supplies guidance Not here.

Decisions about how to assign metrical accents depend on ordinary syntax—the rules governing relations between subject, object and action. Any poetry that completely abandons syntax can necessarily have only a prose/Free Verse rhythm.

I guess? What do you think?

[ChrisW]

Originally posted by MacArthur:

briefly garage to bingo pay green for
stamps aqueducting mine for shorter his


Decisions about how to assign metrical accents depend on ordinary syntax—the rules governing relations between subject, object and action. Any poetry that completely abandons syntax can necessarily have only a prose/Free Verse rhythm.

I guess? What do you think?

I'd say that's going a bit far.
It seems to me that insofar as the INTENDED meter is communicated to the reader, the reader can adjust. The poet might have to be a bit more obvious just at first, but once the meter is established, the reader might adjust:

Amplitude carroty Percival pass
Surgeon of Mercia Suburu crass

seems hard to pronounce any other way than as dactylic tetrameter (well, one can read it as amphybrachs or anapests, but the order of stressed and unstressed syllables is clear).
If you start that way, then you might be able to communicate to the reader the expectation that he will emphasize everything in line with this pattern, even when there is some ambiguity.

--chris

[Alan Sullivan]

Chris has the right idea here. There's no reason why one can't establish clear stresses in surreal or nonsense verse. Have you forgotten your nursery rhymes, Mac? It's true that syntax can guide scansion in the assignment of rhetorical emphasis when stress is ambiguous. But absent syntax, one is clear of annoyances like articles that might disturb a metrical pattern.

Alan Sullivan

[graywyvern]

this ought to be more comforting to me than it is...

[MacArthur]

Well...I was thinking less of nonsense verse than of something clearly intended to be artistically provocative. And certainly one could compose something entirely regular (probably would for a nursery rhyme) but you couldn't meaningfully vary against it. Neither of my two example lines above would be entirely in a recognised meter and could both be together exactly in the same pattern. It would hardly be an artistic strategy to write line after line in exactly the same rhythm...would it?

[ChrisW]

There are ambiguities in ordinary immediately intelligible verse that cannot be resolved by context.
In the less intelligible sort of verse in question, there will be SOME more that would have been resolved by the sense if the poem had made sense. But if the irresoluble ambiguities in ordinary verse don't make it necessarily unmetrical, then a slightly higher proportion of metrical ambiguity need not make this obscurer sort of verse necessarily unmetrical.
Metrical variation would surely be possible, using words whose accents did not much depend upon context:

Abortion slyly doctors sorry
Virtuous never calamari

Looks to me like iambic tetrameter with a trochee substitution at the beginning of the first line, though it is absolutely nonsensical.
No difference in meaning is liable to make you pronounce virtuous 'virTU ous'.

[MacArthur]

Ah...well to further refine my point, then. The artfullness of the meter in verse that makse sense can be evaluated. You can reasonably say "that line sounds smooth", and "that line sounds forced", "that line sounds natural...that other line artificial". The art is in the interplay between sense and metrical pattern. Absent syntax, the rhythm (compromised anyway) can't be interesting.

[ChrisW]

Here I think I might agree with you, Mac.
I think nonsense verse is interesting insofar as it obeys rules of syntax -- my examples above are without interest except as evidence against your previous contentions, but Jabberwocky is wonderful because it gives such a strong impression of making sense (if only one had the vocabulary).

[Tim Murphy]

"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimbal in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogroves,
and the mome raths outgrabe."

Scan the rest of the Jabberwock, Andrew, and you'll realize that no amount of surrealism excuses its author from our first responsibility.

[MacArthur]

In Jabberwocky (and for that matter, Vallejo's poetry) there's still a lot of syntax left to guide you-- articles, copulas, conjunctions, pre-fixes and suffixes that appear to be used in their ordinary sense. It mostly nouns, verbs and modifiers that are amusingly or suggestively "replaced". I got to thinking about this topic after looking at the poetry of one of the Language-School heavies Bernstein. He appears to try and achieve a metrical rhythm, but it only seems to work when he veers more toward Jabberwocky and less toward the more radical language-school approach.