Eratosphere Forums - Metrical Poetry, Free Verse, Fiction, Art, Critique, Discussions Able Muse - a review of poetry, prose and art

Forum Left Top

Notices

Reply
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Unread 07-25-2001, 10:06 AM
nanette smith nanette smith is offline
New Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Champaign, Illinois USA
Posts: 4
Post

Yikes, here, I go: posting my first topic. If I'm not doing it right (ie., correctly or as per protocol) someone out there please let me know. Something was sparked for me in the fascinating discussion on promotion and demotion of syllables, something Timothy Steele said about the modernist revolution that's been bugging me for years. Thinking that this was really a tangent from the original topic, thought maybe I should call it a new topic. It's this: somewhere or other I learned that Eliot, et al. were really trying to open verse up, not to destroy it, to free it. And that free verse should not be used as a term to mean prose with weird--typographically interesting--or often very pedestrian--semantic--line breaks, but as verse that's playing with verse ideas, moving among different meters, for example, or using some of Hopkins' variations, more internal rhymes than end rhymes, that sort of thing. Hence, much of Eliot's work can be scanned, I learned. Or, I thought, the more experimental long poems of Theodore Roethke admit as easily to formal analysis as his sestinas, etc.
This is the notion of free verse I still use in my own writing, but find that I'm neither in the "new formal" or "free" (as most journals, etc. define it) camp. I think rather than go back to before the modernists, we need to revisit them (of course, keeping Bogan, Kunitz and other later masters in mind) and discover some other avenues they were suggesting than those taken by, say, Creeley, Levertov, &etc. Thoughts? Help? Comfort?
Reply With Quote
  #2  
Unread 07-25-2001, 01:49 PM
R. S. Gwynn's Avatar
R. S. Gwynn R. S. Gwynn is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Beaumont, TX
Posts: 4,748
Post

I do agree with Tim Steele's "baby with the bathwater" analogy. The young modernists were reacting against everything Victorian, and the luxurious quality of many Victorian meters (Tennyson, Swinburne) pushed them in the opposite direction. I tend to think of this as a generational revolt--they were as much in rebellion against Victorian values and what their parents and grandparents stood for.

Eliot, I believe, is responsible for the "ghost of meter" analogy that Annie Finch uses in her book, and Eliot is, all things considered, a fairly conservative metrist. Pound's work after "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" breaks fairly cleanly with his early metrical work (read "Portrait d'une Femme" for traditional blank verse). Williams wrote some dreadful Keatsian sonnets before deciding (with Pound's advice) that he was out of date. And so on. Even Frost's notion of the "sound of sense" had much to do with rejecting the Tennysonian qualities of sound (both meter and sonics) that he thought overly artificial. I think it should be clear at this distance that Modernism was a revolution that touched all of the arts, and thus it stands beside Renaissance humanism, neo-classicism, and romanticism as a widespread movement of great historical significance. This is only to say that the analogies one could make among Pound, Picasso, and Stravinsky could as well be made with Pope, Reynolds, and Mozart or with Keats, Delacroix, and Beethoven.

I do find that arguments that iambic meter is basically a British invention that has little or nothing to do with American speech patterns are without much merit, Whitman's quibbles aside. America has given much to the English language but nothing so ubiquitous as "o.k.," a single iambic foot (no, not a spondee).
Reply With Quote
  #3  
Unread 07-26-2001, 04:05 AM
Caleb Murdock Caleb Murdock is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: New York City
Posts: 797
Post

I'd like to chime in here. I think that Nanette makes a very good point that the early modernists had some very poetic goals, and were not mere anarchists, as I consider today's "plain style" free-versers to be. The early modernists didn't intend to set meter aside entirely, but rather to reinvent it. It was later generations who redefined verse libre into verse crappe (pardon my mixing of Latinate and Germanic words).

My own personal distress is that I see the "new formalists" going back to a rigid concept of metrics, whereas I firmly believe that meter is flexible enough to accomodate new sounds. In other words, I would like to revisit the early modernist experiment and see if we couldn't redirect it back into meter but with a wider range of acceptable variations.

There are so many ways to count in English -- you can count feet, you can count syllables, you can count beats, you can count short and long syllables, and you can count the seconds it takes to speak a line. "Meter" means "measure", and "measure" means "counting", so why has the foot suddenly become the only acceptable thing to count? Today's formalists seem to have settled back on the iamb, occasionally substituting (with great trepidation) trochees or (gasp) anapests -- and anyone who experiments gets stones thrown at him.

I am concerned that if we run back to the old metrical model and don't come up with something new, we run the risk of losing our audience again, and then we'll be stuck with verse crappe for another hundred years. In addition, we won't have added anything new to poetry.

------------------
Caleb
www.poemtree.com

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited July 26, 2001).]
Reply With Quote
  #4  
Unread 07-26-2001, 04:13 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
Lariat Emeritus
 
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Fargo ND, USA
Posts: 13,816
Post

Caleb, you repeat this argument ad infinitum, and I believe your motive is self-exculpatory. And you're just flat out wrong. There are formal poets who are very strict: Steele, Gwynn, Sullivan, Espaillat, and Martin. Then there are those substitute much more freely: Stallings, Thiel, Williamson, and Murphy. You just haven't read enough (or scanned enough?) to keep making this baseless accusation.
Reply With Quote
  #5  
Unread 07-26-2001, 04:19 AM
Caleb Murdock Caleb Murdock is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: New York City
Posts: 797
Post

You know, Tim, I already know your opinion. I was addressing this post to the Poet Lariat. Furthermore, if I keep saying the same thing, maybe it's because I'm not getting a satisfactory response.

I admit, however, that my experience on Eratosphere may have shaped my overall view of the formalist community, and given me a lop-sided picture of it.

One more thing ... I'm not a sloppy writer. If it sounds sloppy to you, it's because you don't understand what I'm up to. I labor over my poetry as much as the next poet.

It's interesting -- Alan recently denied that either of you consider me to be sloppy, but that really is what you think.

[Note: In Tim's initial post above, he called me a "sloppy" metrist, thus my remarks about sloppiness.]

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited July 27, 2001).]
Reply With Quote
  #6  
Unread 07-26-2001, 06:56 AM
SteveWal SteveWal is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Manchester, England
Posts: 204
Post

I'm not sure that "plain stylists" are the anarchists, Caleb, I think most of 'em write that way because they don't have a sense of rythmn, or they can't be bothered, or they've been badly taught.

As for neo-formalists, like a lot of movements, it's the people who shout the loudest that get heard first. There were a lot of modernists who nobody hears of anymore, quite big names at the time. I'm sure the same will be true of many of the neo-formalists; and many who wouldn't join a movement that would have them as a member (like myself, actually, though I wouldn't bet on me making the big time.)

But the really good ones will last. And hopefully the good ones that people forgot about at the time will be rediscovered (like Clare was) and continue to be enjoyed.

------------------
Steve Waling
Reply With Quote
  #7  
Unread 07-26-2001, 08:34 AM
R. S. Gwynn's Avatar
R. S. Gwynn R. S. Gwynn is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Beaumont, TX
Posts: 4,748
Post

In reference to Caleb Murdock's post, I'd just note that the two new formalists who have stirred up the most controversy are Gioia ("Can Poetry Matter?") and Leithauser ("Metrical Illiteracy"). Ironically, they are both poets who use a wide range of meters, formal and free, in their own work.

I have no personal program to send us all back to the iambic drawing boards. I write the way I do because it suits me, and I'm not out to convert anyone. If someone can't abide formal verse (and there seem to be quite a few), I say go to other poets. At this stage, it seems very unlikely that my metrical practices are going to change very much.

I do, however, believe that as a teacher of writing I would be doing a slack job if I didn't introduce beginning poets to meter and form. I've taught a few good poets who write well in form and continue to do so, but I've probably taught more who find that their own way doesn't necessarily mean writing formal verse.
Reply With Quote
  #8  
Unread 07-26-2001, 08:42 AM
nanette smith nanette smith is offline
New Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Champaign, Illinois USA
Posts: 4
Post

Thanks for the replies. In re: the Murphy/Murdoch dispute. New to this forum, I, of course, don't know the history here. But, it revealed something to me, made me want to pipe up--Are you guys aware of how comparately unread most poets are today--even those who say they are interested in form (I think of James Galvin, Iowa's inhouse "born-again neoformalist.)? I can tell you he knew less that I--insecure autodidact with an old volume of Sydney Lanier that I was.) Not to mention younger poets. I'm probably not as well-read as I should. And, I know I haven't "scanned enough" in my lifetime, and probably never will. But it seems to me that both of you guys (and many of us) know enough to have fruitful disagreements/discussions on this topic. Is it not true that often those who move an art form forward are indeed those who have imperfect understandings, connect things that an expert wouldn't? Doesn't that sound like Pound, for example, who misunderstood Chinese poetics. And, even if couched in the generalizations I originally proferred here, it's a worthwhile topic, don't you think? And, I'm glad to know that Caleb Murdoch, at least, has had similar thoughts.
Anyone out there willing to suggest some titles, I'm always up for more learning. <u>Text</u>
Reply With Quote
  #9  
Unread 07-26-2001, 10:08 AM
R. S. Gwynn's Avatar
R. S. Gwynn R. S. Gwynn is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Beaumont, TX
Posts: 4,748
Post

Given the current state of public education and the reading tastes and habits of our contemporaries, I don't think it's likely that poetry will ever be more widely read than it is now. We are working in a genre that requires close attention to the details of language, and that fact makes us rather retro. However, I don't despair. In a nation of a quarter billion folks, there are always going to be readers, and some of them will be good ones. MFA programs have perhaps given us too many poets (I am one too many myself), but they have also given us many readers, and we can never have too few of that commodity. If, on occasion, poets break through to wider audiences, that's great. When I think about what has stimulated the most interest in poetry in recent years, three "events" would have to lead the list. The use of the Auden elegy in Four Weddings and a Funeral, the use of Wordsworth in A River Runs Through It, and Maya Angelou's inauguration poem. I can't tell you how many queries I've seen asking the location of the first two of these, and we all know how widely reprinted Angelou's poem was. These things will continue to occur. I am still waiting for someone to fund the film version of Ezra Pound's life, starring John Malkovich. This will probably never happen, but think of the concept!
Reply With Quote
  #10  
Unread 07-26-2001, 10:15 AM
R. S. Gwynn's Avatar
R. S. Gwynn R. S. Gwynn is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Beaumont, TX
Posts: 4,748
Post

On Nanette's other remark, Frost once said that most great poetry was written by young poets: "You always have to go on insufficient knowledge." Most poets, in one way or another, continue to rob the hive they stored up early in their lives.

I do not necessarily believe that one has to "move art forward," though. The notion of progress in the arts seems to me a product of the Enlightenment that has bothered artists of all kinds ever since. We should remember that much modern art actually looks backward--Picasso's neo-primitivism, for example, or Pound's Propertius--and simply asks us to take a new look at what has been around for eons. I remain rather Nietzschean in my view of these things, as culture swings back and forth between Dionysus and Apollo. Right now, the swing seems to be towards the latter.
Reply With Quote
Reply

Bookmarks

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump



Forum Right Top
Forum Left Bottom Forum Right Bottom
 
Right Left
Member Login
Forgot password?
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Statistics:
Forum Members: 8,399
Total Threads: 21,840
Total Posts: 270,803
There are 1200 users
currently browsing forums.
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Sponsor:
Donate & Support Able Muse / Eratosphere
Forum LeftForum Right
Right Right
Right Bottom Left Right Bottom Right

Hosted by ApplauZ Online