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  #1  
Unread 06-04-2007, 06:21 PM
Jerry Glenn Hartwig Jerry Glenn Hartwig is offline
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I’ve been reading Steele’s ‘Missing Measures’, and I’m intrigued by his comments on why modernists eschewed meter and began writing in vers libre.

I can actually agree with some of their original goals: to use diction of the times, as opposed to the prevalent stilted Victorian idioms, and to write about events of everyday living. Apparently, however, diction became erroneously confused with meter - meter became blamed for the stilted Victorian writing. Eliminate meter, the thought process went, and the idiomatic problems would disappear. Eliminate meter, and another system would eventually evolve to replace it.

Meter, however, has nothing to do with diction or idioms. The first poet to come to mind as I read this was Tim Murphy – I think his writings achieve the original goals set by the likes of Eliot, yet they are undeniably metrical. Annie Finch also comes to mind.

As for something else coming along to replace meter – it hasn’t happened. Poets still talk about the rhythm of a poem, but all rhythm has an underlying beat, or else it’s chaotic.

For all their idealistic goals, I think those attacks on meter started a trend that, over the next hundred years, destroyed the importance of poetry as an art form form: for all their thoughts of writing to the common person, vers libre devolved to free verse, and the common person no longer understood it. It became more important, perhaps, for each writer to be ‘free and unique’, than for them write something the common person could understand and appreciate. Anything became a poem, merely because the person writing it claimed it was so.

An interesting book – I haven’t finished it yet, but, so far, it appears to be a book worth reading by all poets, whether metrical or not.
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  #2  
Unread 06-05-2007, 01:45 AM
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Tim Love Tim Love is offline
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"those attacks on meter started a trend that ... destroyed the importance of poetry as an art form" - in other words, kept poetry in step with other art forms. Let's face it, who looks up to living artists as seers? Where are the 21st Mozarts and Beethovens? And if we're to believe Booker et al, Novels have had it. And yet, all those people with MP3 players must be listening to something. How does one measure importance?

"It became more important, perhaps, for each writer to be ‘free and unique’" - I hadn't realised until recently quite how closely attached Romanticism and Modernism are. The modernist trends and aspirations you mention were there 200 years ago. As Booker puts it - "The ego had intruded. And with it came all the the cloudy sentimentality, the disintegration of form, the sensational striving for effect which we associate with the age of Romanticism". So maybe we should blame Brahms et al rather than the modernists. Maybe the modernists had the same dreams but lacked the optimism/belief. Maybe the modernists had more powerful, technological weapons which meant that the initial, necessary clear-out got out of hand.


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  #3  
Unread 06-05-2007, 08:47 AM
Jerry Glenn Hartwig Jerry Glenn Hartwig is offline
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Revolutions in art are necessary, and no intelligent person can argue otherwise. The same changes argued by Eliot and Pound were argued in the days of Euripudes.


Quote:
kept poetry in step with other art forms.
You're suggesting the importance of all art forms have been destroyed, or are you disagreeing with me? *grin*

In college, in the mid-seventies, most of my peers agreed they didn't understand the poetry that was being written at the the time. They didn't understand, for one thing, why it was considered poetry. These were educated, literate men and women. If the poetry wasn't speaking to them, could it have pssibly been capturing the minds of the 'common' person? That was one of te goals that inspired the 'free verse' movement.

Of course, there were always a few who claimed special insight, and who condescended to everyone else. They were generally viewed, for the most part, as posers. I think of them whenever I read about Professor Trelawney in the Harry Potter series, and the one or two students who fawn over her.

There was the occasional 'real thing', don't get me wrong. I recently came across a short story 'Jeddy Ho!', written by a classmate, Paul C. Schuytema. I kept it all these years, because I figured he'd do well. It may be prose, but it's poetry.

Back on topic:

I sincerely believe those decisions made in the late 1800s are the reason poetry fell from grace. Average people didn't know what to make of it - it didn't stick in their minds like a metered and rhymed piece would, so they lost interest.

Today's generation has their own art forms - that's to be expected. They also have many more distractions, but poetry died a lingering death before these distractions came along, so your MP3 players and video games can't be blamed for the demise of poetry. It pretty much commited seppukku.

Curiously, though, look at one of the current art forms: rap. Metered rhyme, isn't it? Music minus the melody.

Perhaps formalism is making a comeback despite our efforts, neh?

Oh yeh - books may die, but not until they're removed completely from the schools, though I doubt writing itself will die. It will merely be saved to a different format.



[This message has been edited by Jerry Glenn Hartwig (edited June 05, 2007).]
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  #4  
Unread 08-23-2007, 12:59 PM
Douglas Basford Douglas Basford is offline
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Jerry,

I haven't yet read "Missing Measures" but I intend to do so asap. Sure, Pound's metronome comment could support Murphy's argument as you have paraphrased it, but I'm a little skeptical about a blanket statement that the Modernists tossed out Baby Meter with the Victorian bathwater. Stevens, Crane, Lindsay, and others wrote in meter, for one thing. Eliot penned complaints about vers-librists. I take the opinion that if blame is to be laid it should be on those that misread the intentions of the High Modernists. But I'm also not one to dismiss free verse as the corruption of the poetic medium.

As for simultaneous decline of influence of poetry in the public sphere and the rise of free verse practice, there might be a way in which it appears so in the United States. I have in front of me Douglas Dunn's interview in Fourteen on Form and he makes the point that poetry readings are enormously popular in Scotland; Susan Stewart points out in the introduction to the latest TriQuarterly that Italy continues to be a place of great interest in poetry readings (Roberto Benigni's recitation of Dante drew a record TV audience); and Kim Sowol's poems are widely recited in Korean classrooms. I don't know if such counterexamples are useful, or even convincing. I'm also not looking to offer a cure-all for poetry's woes, at least not today.

Best,
Doug
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  #5  
Unread 08-26-2007, 12:43 PM
Richard Wakefield Richard Wakefield is offline
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It's also possible that poets gave up on old forms after the popular audience for poetry had already begun to disappear. As poets felt themselves more isolated, they began to write more for one another (and for editors and critics) than for ordinary readers. A big exception is Frost, of course, who also used common diction in a formal setting and who kept a large audience. But he had to go through an evolution of his own. Read some of his very early lyrics and hear all the Victorian diction that marked and marred the poetry of the late nineteenth century.
I doubt that we can judge most contemporary art very well, and I doubt that anyone ever could. There's too much of it. If you read the Norton Anthology of Poetry, you come away thinking that there was some golden age of poetry when the Shakespeares and the Byrons and the Dickinsons were bumping into one another. But an anthololgy might devote a hundred pages to an entire century; the dross has been eliminated. If each edition of the dozen or so biggest poetry journals of the twentieth century had just one truly great poem, no anthology could hold them all.
Richard
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  #6  
Unread 08-30-2007, 04:46 AM
Jerry Glenn Hartwig Jerry Glenn Hartwig is offline
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Doug

Both you and Richard make good points.

In college, most of my contemporaries echoed the same complaint I did - the poetry was often incomprehensible, and it was difficult to determine why it was called poetry - rather than delineated prose. We were forced to read things that didn't make a connection with us - generally on a theme that was important to the professor, all the while being told how important this particular writer was. Modern poetry seemed for a few flakes whho didn't really seem to fit into the rest of the world.

Now that I'm better read and more experienced, I really haven't changed my opinion much. *grin*

I'm short on time at the moment - I thought I'd be able to finish this, but I'll have to get back to it.

[This message has been edited by Jerry Glenn Hartwig (edited August 30, 2007).]
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  #7  
Unread 08-30-2007, 04:18 PM
Richard Wakefield Richard Wakefield is offline
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Jerry:
I have been the student you describe. Unfortunately, I have also been the teacher who bungled the high duty of handing poetry on.
Most of the responsibility for the declne in popular appreciation of poetry, though, probably can't be attributed to bad college instruction. If people reach college age and don't care about poetry (or have even decided they hate it), a great teacher may make a difference with a few students, but not with many. The insularity of college literature courses is probably as much an effect of the general indifference to literature as a cause of it.
For me, the problem with a lot, even most, of contemporary big-name poetry isn't merely that it eschews form. It is, I think, the absolute terror of anything that could be construed as sentiment. The proscription against sentimentality is so strong that many poets avoid expressing any recognizable feeling at all. What's left? Word games, but not particularly fun ones, and clever allusions. There may be feeling lurking in there somewhere, but it's so evasive, ironic, or self-referential that I never connect with it.
You can hear this in the way many, many poets read their stuff aloud. The have an affectless intonation, or lack of intonation, that makes them sound like they're afflicted with anhedonia.
Still, there's lots of emotionally rich poetry out there, written by people who are good are performing it. People who want to hear contemporary poetry shouldn't really have any trouble finding something to their taste. They sure don't when it comes to music, fiction, or film!
Richard
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  #8  
Unread 08-30-2007, 06:43 PM
Jerry Glenn Hartwig Jerry Glenn Hartwig is offline
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Richard

Sorry I had to cut my previous post short - I'm subject to call.

I guess I was brought up on the old-fashioned side: poetry is an oral art, yet nothing I was reading in college seemed to take that into account. I was also somewhat conservative with a plethora liberal professors - some of them still stuck in the previous decade or two. The students of the late seventies weren't relating well with the former anti-war and race activists who were now the professors - and I think their 'poetry' alienated me. Their sentiments weren't mine, their priorities weren't mine, and their expectations of a poem weren't, either.

One professor spent half of her time bragging about her (past) importance to the race movement, the other half telling us that white women wanted to get tans because white men preferred black women, and any other time that was left assigning us readings of angry black men.

I could be interested in what others have to say about their lives and observations, but they weren't saying it well. It's not really about form, but all the other tools of the craft that seem to have been eschewed with it. There no longer seems to be any craftsmanship, generally, and that's what I think has alienated people. They no longer understand why a particular piece is poetry, when it seems more like short - and often unfocussed - prose. This is the one place I've found where writers are attempting to restore craftsmanship in poetry.

What are the would-be poets of today being taught? Perhaps you can answer that for me.

Sorry if this crossed the line to rant.

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  #9  
Unread 09-08-2007, 03:42 PM
John Riley John Riley is offline
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While I'm new to the board and perhaps should be shy to jump in but . . . .

Free verse was not invented by elitist poets and critics and teachers disdainful of the “common man.” Does anyone think that's why Whitman broke out of received forms? He wanted to be heard by the common man, to burst out of the European straitjacket. I can't believe the Ob-Gyn WC Williams wanted to speak to a select few. Love him or hate him, Ginsberg could certainly reach a big audience. (In my youth I lived in a place where he held readings and remember thinking he should teach a course on how to make a living as a poet without having to teach.)

Is it possible they were simply reacting to the world around them? New city sounds, speeds—trains, cars; new rhythm in the factories and on the street; new rhythms in people's daily lives once they left the farms and took factory jobs? The world changed and how people interpreted the world changed. I think that makes more sense than to think it was cooked up by some bad poets, elite critics, and snobby professors.

Isn't the New Formalism a product of its time? All over the world people are attempting to return to “tradition,” apparently hoping this will redo the bonds that once held groups together. It's much deeper than politics. I don't know why it's happening. My theory is that it's a reaction to decades, even centuries, of increasingly rapid change, particularly in science and technology—humans aren't designed to go from steam power to nuclear power in a few years without having to take a breather—or freaking out. It seems obvious to me that New Formalism is part of this, and is as much a part of the zeitgeist as free verse was—and is. Who knows how long it will last, or if it will. Personally, I don't see much possibility of an iambic world returning to stay.

Meanwhile, I'll continue enjoying WB Yeats and Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens and WC Williams, and take them on their own terms.
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  #10  
Unread 09-10-2007, 07:26 AM
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Quincy Lehr Quincy Lehr is offline
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Oh, I think Steele's right about the magnitude of the shift, but I don't think you can trace the decline the decline in the popularity of poetry to a decline in metrical poetry. To put it crudely, a far number of American adolescents are going to groove on a poem by Allen Ginsberg in a way they won't with something by Anthony Hecht--though Hecht runs closer to my tastes. When his stuff works, though, there's a hell of a lot of prosody in Ginsberg, and it definitely isn't prose.

But the debate here extends to teaching at various levels, when it seems to me that while a good literature teacher is of great use, avid readers will read regardless of their education--and if the class syllabus is the only route to poetry, then we're pretty much fucked. Of course, a curricum-centred view, though narrow and distorted, is particularly understandable in light of the concentration of intellectuals on college campuses.

I happened to notice that Doug's own webzine, Unsplendid, sees itself as a "Johns Hopkins"-related project, as opposed to a Baltimore or Maryland one. While I've been impressed with what I've seen so far, I confess to rolling my eyes a bit at this. Even if many literary groups, coteries, and mafias arise around particular institutions, surely one can see that the difference between conceiving of one's self as a "Greenwich Village poet" is rather different than conceiving of one's self as an "NYU poet." The former category could include, say, Greenwich Village resident (and CCNY grad) Terese Coe, whereas the latter rather unhelpfully roots the thing in a fairly exclusive (and expensive) university and particular life experiences and routes to the craft.

I found the comments about the popularity of readings in other countries from a series of Americans above quite amusing, really--when the United States has a large, various, and vibrant live poetry circuit. Yes, much of what gets read is garbage, but a good deal isn't. And frankly, I cannot see how an infusion of good metrical poets would hurt anything, or, from my own experience, why such would be treated with hostility.

And I raise this because with the exception of Dana Gioia and a few others, the live reading circuit is generally either not discussed or blown off as amateurish, whereas it seems to me to indicate, often in unlikely places, that there is an audience wanting to actively engage in poetry.

And there can be something between a chaotic free-for-all of poets, singer-songwriters, and crap musicians, and the often dry-as-dust readings sponsored by university programmes and poetry societies, where everyone sips vinegary wine and looks Very Reverent as the Established Poet reads from his or her Great Works.

I'll leave it there for now.

Quincy
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