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Mike Snider's Formal Blog at the Sonnetarium
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Thursday, December 23, 2004 |
At the New Poetry list, Sam Gwynn pointed the rest of us to this article on Chaucer as the father of free verse and to this interview with Lewis Turco by Daniel Nester. The first appears to be a sadly typical piece of School of Phlogiston academic sensationalism, extrapolating from Chaucer's not always rigorous adherence to the foreign forms he was adapting to a claim that Chaucer anticipated free verse. The finished work may, of course, be better and more coherent than the blurbish article, but as Timothy Steele sometimes remarks, Chaucer is the only New Formalist.
Nester's interview of Turco, though, is very interesting. Most people who know only The Book of Forms will be surprised at his practicality as a writer and poet — he treats it as a job, and one he does damned well. We could use more of his kind of professionalism in poetry.
I found the Book of Forms in 1978, still in the original format with what Lew told me last summer at West Chester was the ugliest cover he'd ever seen, and I've got it with me right now. Turco was a writer-in-residence at the University of Louisville around that time, when I taught comp and creative writing. I showed him my first sonnet and he said "You're a pretty literary guy, aren't you?" It wasn't a compliment, and it was the perfect thing to say to me.
1:38:49 PM 
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Wednesday, December 15, 2004 |
Traveling starts tomorrow, and I won't be done until January. I'll have a laptop with me, but net access may will be dial-up and intermittent. I will be working on poems, so expect lots of new stuff come the new year.
I wish everyone safe, happy, and productive holidays.
6:31:12 PM
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Monday, December 13, 2004 |
A little while ago I said I wanted to try something longer, and figured I needed some trial invocations to the muse. Well, here's the first one:
Just think of how we've played together, making
Our little songs, sometimes for fun, sometimes
In earnest when I knew my heart was breaking,
Though you knew better, soothing it with rhymes —
Sovereign placebo for a sap like me,
A guy who openly weeps at baffled mimes
Exploring walls nobody else can see
And thirty seconds later roars at a pun
Or a banjo-player joke — easily
Amused, that's me. And — what — my point? But hun,
That is the point. I never follow through.
A sonnet is the biggest thing I've done,
Done over and over, and I'm asking you
To help me — isn't that your job? — Oh God,
I'm sorry, please, it's not your fault, I'm blue,
I'm down, I'm not myself, I feel a fraud
And, baby, you can always make things right,
So, listen, sweetie, it's really not so odd —
I want to write an epic. Let's start tonight.
In terza rima, 'cause we like rhymes, you know,
And there'll be murder, but let's keep it light
And have the ghost not mind too much and show —
What? — you say there's no ghosts? But you're a shade —
Oh Christ. I didn't mean it. Please don't go!
When I'm alone, I'm always so afraid
I'll freaking never write another line,
But baby, you and me, we've got it made —
We're tight. Together, darling, we just shine —
Is that a smile? Oh, it'll be so fine!
Drafts at the Draft House.
Here's Denise Levertov (from this interview) on enjambment in what she called open forms:
When writing in open forms, "enjambment" is irrelevant; although some people don't realize this. Some poets break their lines in places which throw a quite undesired, heavy accent onto a word that commences the next line, for example. But this practice of enjambment in nonmetrical forms is really a useless practice. In tight metrics it provides relief from the monotony of metrical patterns, but when one is writing in nonmetrical forms, then the line takes on a more intense function than it ever did before. So the whole concept of "enjambment" just gets in the way of the real function of the line.
And here are several recordings by William Carlos Williams, including an entire reading, where you can hear him entirely ignore his beautiful line breaks, pausing only for punctuation.
10:02:38 PM
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Saturday, December 11, 2004 |
In all these posts on enjambment, I'm deliberately ignoring its expressive effects. A blog, with its necessarily short and more or less ad hoc entries, isn't the place to handle that topic, even assuming I had the knowledge and skill to do it justice. Nor do I have time or space to deal with substitutions, catalexis, anacrusis and the like. I'm strictly concerned with the relationship between enjambment and the integrity of the line, and how that relationship differs in English-language accentual-syllabic and non-metrical verse — indeed, it's nearly inverted in non-metrical verse.
Since this has gone on for most of a week, a summary of what I've said about enjambment in accentual-syllabic verse, with some additions and clarifications, may be in order:
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Unlike Classical meters, which specified varying kinds of feet in more or less set order and were thus easily recognizable to even untutored ears, English accentual-syllabic meters specify the number of feet of a single kind which appear in a line: iambic pentameter specifies a line of five iambic feet; dactylic trimeter specifies a line of three dactylic feet. Since the English line is not a rhythmic pattern but rather a length over which a pattern is repeated, and since, before the dominance of non-metrical poetry readers did not pause at line end without some grammatical or syntactic reason to do so, the line normally requires, in order to be recognizable to a listener, either syntactic/grammatical unity or some device such as rhyme to mark the line endings.
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It's simply easier to hear a short line as a unit than to hear a long line that way. The pentameter line, in particular, tends to break naturally into two parts, one of three and one of two feet. Expressive manipulation of this caesura is one of the tools available to the IP poet, but repeated strong and eccentrically placed caesuras can weaken the rhythmic unity of the line.
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Enjambment — running on the sense of a line past its ending and into the next line — is likewise a useful tool but, even more than the caesura, tends to weaken the perceived unity of the line. There are certainly degrees of enjambment, some of which still allow a slight pause or other clear marker of the line's end, but Samuel Johnson was right when he said that it was difficult to read Paradise Lost in such a way as to enable listeners to hear the beginnings and endings of lines.
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When it's hard to perceive the beginnings and endings of lines, it's hard to tell how long the line is, and the meter, which in English is just the span over which a particular foot is repeated, can lose its integrity.
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Since the rhythm of accentual-syllabic verse depends on the interaction between the meter and the rhythms of ordinary speech, both must be, at some level, perceptible, and neither can be allowed to dominate or distort the other. Because of its corrosive effects on the perceptibility of the line, poets should ordinarily be very wary of strong enjambment in accentual-syllabic verse, and particularly in the pentameter.
Non-metrical verse (prose poems are not verse, and neither aleatory poems nor things like Silliman's fibonacci-based poem are non-metrical) is utterly different: its rhythm is principally built on repeated grammatical and syntactic structures, or on an interaction between the line as a whole and ordinary speech, or on some combination of the two. Since the first case precludes enjambment and the third brings nothing really new, it's the second which interests me here. Since most of my readers are quite familiar with non-metrical practice I'm going to be very brief.
In the pure second case, excessively end-stopped free verse is rhythmically flat: enjambment is all there is to produce a rhythm different from that of prose, and it doesn't work if the reader doesn't pause at the end of the line just because it is the end of the line. It's quite shocking to hear W. C. Williams ignore his line breaks, and a damned good thing that everyone else just ignores the way he read.
Since free verse has for many years been the dominant form of poetry in English, and both its rhythmic branches, for different reasons, require a pause at line end, it's not at all surprising that many readers have come to think that all poems should pause at line ends. But that robs metrical poetry of enjambment as a powerful expressive and rhythmic tool, since it leaves enjambed lines indistinguishable from the rest.
But didn't I just say "poets should ordinarily be very wary of strong enjambment in accentual-syllabic verse"? Yup. It's wise to be wary of any powerful tool, and to use it only when appropriate. It's stupid to refuse its use when it is appropriate. Knowing which when is which is one of the things poets have to learn.
3:36:04 PM
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Friday, December 10, 2004 |
I'm grateful for the many responses, in email, here, at several other blogs, and at New Poetry, to my questions about the experience of reading John Ashbery. I am very glad that in that experience many intelligent, passionate, and articulate people have found joy, comfort, and exhilaration both intellectual and emotional. I have myself read several hundred pages of his poetry in the last week, but there is nothing I wish to say about it.
Tomorrow I'll finish up with line breaks, and I hope to post a new poem.
8:55:53 PM
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Wednesday, December 8, 2004 |
Playing out tonight and tomorrow, so I'll be back Friday with why degrees of enjambment matter and a start on how very different it is — or ought to be — in non-metrical poetry.
BTW, the responses to my Ashbery questions have been wonderful and instructive — please keep them coming. I see I have library work to do.
6:58:03 PM
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Tuesday, December 7, 2004 |
A little too much bad wine at the office party, so I'm going to make things short and simple and only give examples of enjambment based on noun-verb-line relationships. Obviously, there are lots of other ways to enjamb or not enjamb, and there are even some more ways to do it using nouns and verbs, but this will illustrate, I think, what I mean by degrees of enjambment. The examples are my invention. They're verse — iambic pentameter, in fact, and rhymed, but poetry they ain't. They're better than the wine, though.
Two independent clauses, one in each line, requires some kind of terminal punctuation and clearly means no enjambment:
There's not the faintest doubt about this pair —
They're separated by unmoving air;
A sentence with its noun phrase in one line and its verb phrase in the next produces only slightly less distinction between the lines than the full stop above:
Hearing this pair of lines play out their fate
May teach the listener how they separate.
One noun may govern two verb phrases, one in one line and one in the next. In this weak enjambment each line is still easily perceived as a unit, but the gap between the two has narrowed:
Two lines may run together for a while
And still have each their pinch of style,
But putting the noun and a lone verb in one line and the rest of the predicate in the next is pretty strong enjambment. In ths case, the strong caesura in the second line reinforces the lack of separation between lines:
While this pair almost finds a way to reach
Across the gap, cohering each to each,
And breaking a line in the middle of a compound noun or verb practically glues the lines together:
And this line, lonely for its sister, can
Not end at all until its sister can.
Dah Dah dit-dit-dit-dit Dah Dah …
8:26:42 PM
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Monday, December 6, 2004 |
Jonathan is surely right that no one (no competent speaker of English, anyway) could mistake Paradise Lost for prose or "Return to the City of White Donkeys" for verse,* so just what was Johnson on about, and what did I mean when I said "the fact that Tate's ragged margins are not line breaks makes them, in one important respect, exactly the same as Milton's actual line breaks"?
In neither case should a reader pause, unless some syntactic or grammatical rule requires it, before returning to the left margin of the poem.
That practice would mean disaster for much free verse (more about that another time), but English accentual-syllabic poetry depends on it. Its music and rhythm derive from the interaction between the meter and the cadences of speech, and though each influences the performance and perception of the other, neither must be allowed to distort its partner except in the case of deliberate comic exaggeration. And that is why Johnson says most readers of Paradise Lost are unable to give their listeners a sense of where lines begin and end. The lines are usually regularly iambic — more regular than in Frost — but it's just one iamb after another, with pauses promiscuously scattered medially or terminally or not. If you don't count on your fingers, you're lost.
Obviously, we have no recordings of Milton, nor of most of the great metrical masters. But I'd have to consider long and hard and carefully before saying Johnson just couldn't hear or didn't understand what Milton was about, and, besides, we do have lots of recordings of Robert Frost. I've got the Voice of the Poet CD (there's one for O'Hara, too) with 40 poems. Not once does he pause just because a line is ending. When enjambs, he joins the lines.
Of course, there's enjambment, and then there's enjambment. If our office party doesn't jam me, I'll take that up tomorrow night.
*How it could be mistaken for poetry is something else again, but I'm the guy who said poetry is just "the collection of things which people have been willing to call poems," so I'll live with it. And I like the book, whatever you call the things in it.
9:17:29 PM
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Sunday, December 5, 2004 |
Here is Samuel Johnson, defending rhyme in his essay on Milton from Lives of the English Poets (italics Johnson's, but they seem only to mark the quoted statement):
The music of the English heroic line [iambic pentameter] strikes the ear so faintly, that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together; this co-operation can only be obtained by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another as a distinct system of sounds; and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme. The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of the declaimer; and there are only a few happy readers of Milton who enable their audience to perceive where the lines begin or end. Blank verse, said an ingenious critic, seems to be verse only to the eye.
Of course, Johnson went on to say he didn't wish Milton had been a rhymer, since he wouldn't have wished Paradise Lost to have been a different poem. Nor am I much concerned with rhyme for now, but rather with the fact that there are only a few happy readers of Milton who enable their audience to perceive where the lines begin or end because of [t]he variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse. Friends, we're talking enjambment and its obverse, the caesura, how they work in different ways in metrical and non-metrical verse, and how the dominance of non-metrical practice has obscured their function in metrical practice, even for some very sophisticated readers. I certainly won't finish tonight.
Oddly enough, my current obsession (it's not the first) with line breaks began with a review by Mark Ford in the December 2 New York Review of Books of James Tate's return to the city of white donkeys. Ford notes that the book's poems
all consist of a single, sometimes pages-long, paragraph, and the line endings are again so arbitrary as to make them almost prose poems— indeed on their first appearance in magazines and other publications some were actually printed as blocks of prose. It seems to me they work much better with the ragged right-hand margin, for it gives them that little extra bounce, and makes them feel more hybrid, impure, and unselfconscious than when presented as exhibits in the long tradition of the prose poem, with its illustrious pedigree and origins in the hallowed work of nineteenth-century French poets such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud.
That seemed so strange to me, and the passages Ford chose to quote were so delightful, that I went out and bought the book, which turns out to be, in fact, a delightful book. But reading it didn't help me understand how the ragged right margin separated the poems from the "hallowed work" of the French 19th century. It seems to me that they are prose poems. In another NYRB review (Feb 28, 2002), by Charles Simic, of Tate's Memoir of the Hawk, Simic quotes Tate:
The prose poem has its own means of seduction. For one thing, the deceptively simple packaging: the paragraph. People generally do not run for cover when they are confronted with a paragraph or two. The paragraph says to them: I won't take much of your time, and, if you don't mind my saying so, I am not known to be arcane, obtuse, precious, or high-fallutin'. Come on in.
Memoir of the Hawk has ragged right margins, too. Both books, in fact, look a lot like collections of blank verse — which they emphatically are not — and those ragged margins look a lot like line breaks. But line breaks, as Tate notes, are a signal to readers that what's coming is a Poem, by God, and lots of folks do run for cover when one of them's on the horizon. So what's going on? Perhaps the ragged margin is just the result of so many of us seeing so much unjustified prose on our computer screens in email, drafts, and discussion forums. After all, the justification algorithms in Microsoft Word produce really ugly text: maybe I'd leave it ragged, too.
While I was pondering all this, I came across Henry Gould's excellent reply to Laura Carter on lineation, and Henry and I went round in the comments, which brought me to Samuel Johnson tonight and to this perverse-seeming statement: the fact that Tate's ragged margins are not line breaks makes them, in one important respect, exactly the same as Milton's actual line breaks — neither should affect performance of the poem in which they appear.
More tomorrow.
8:18:42 PM
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Saturday, December 4, 2004 |
For the Ashbery fans out there (I know not many read this blog, but there's a few of you):
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Have you ever met another Ashbery fan and spent several excited minutes quoting his poems in unison? Have you ever seen anyone else do this?
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Have you ever been reading a book by Ashbery and had some poem just stop you until you'd shared it with someone else? Which poem?
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Have you ever wept or laughed so much while reading Ashbery that a stranger asked you what you were reading?
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Have you ever missed a meal or lost sleep because of a book by Ashbery? Which one?
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Have you ever been so affected by an Ashbery poem that you wanted to learn it by heart before you did anything else? Did you learn it?
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Can you recite any Ashbery poem in its entirety?
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Can you recite the opening lines from your favorite poem by Ashbery?
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Can you recite five consecutive lines from any Ashbery poem? One line?
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Have you ever woken up at three in the morning compelled to reread some particular Ashbery poem? Which one?
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When you meet another Ashbery fan do you talk about particular poems? Which ones? At what level of detail?
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Without looking them up, can you name five poems (title poems don't count) from your favorite book by Ashbery?
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If you answered "no" to as many as half of the above questions,
please tell me just how a fan of Ashbery please let me know just how his poetry does affect you.
I really want to know.
Update, 12/06/04: I've reworded the last question, which was not meant to seem combative. Thank you for all the great responses, in comments and by email. Please keep them coming.
6:28:36 PM
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Were I to believe my two-plus years of referrer logs, I'd say the three most popular poems in English are Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," Richard Wilbur's "Mind," and Julia Alvarez's "Woman's Work." Alternatively, they are the three most puzzling poems in English, or they are the three poems most likely to be on the reading list of an introductory course on American poetry.
A fourth theory supported by the evidence at hand is that, simply because I have once or twice mentioned them, I am considered by Google to be among the world's foremost authorities on these three poems.
10:29:26 AM
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Friday, December 3, 2004 |
This afternoon I finished The Hard Hours, the first section of Anthony Hecht's Collected Earlier Poems, and I'm overwhelmed. There were times when I had trouble breathing. I once had a first edition of The Hard Hours itself. How on earth I let that go I have no idea, except that I was an idiot. When I've read everything, including the Collected Later Poems, I'll try to say something more coherent about it. If I survive.
For some reason Foetry keeps popping up in my referral log, though there are no links that I can find. The thread the referrals point to is pretty disgusting — and I mean the thread itself, not the alleged favoritism. You wanna look, you can google. I'm not going back to the site.
Working on a new poem (poems?) and a rather lengthy blog entry on the line break in metrical vs nonmetrical verse. The blogging's inspired by Mark Ford's review of James Tate's Return to the City of White Donkeys in the Dec 2 NYRB and by a conversation mostly between Henry Gould and me in the comments to his post in response to questions (here and here) from Laura Carter about lineation. Laura Carter, by the way, is a student of Beth Gylys, author of Bodies that Hum (my wife and I both love it) and the just-released Spot in the Dark.
7:31:55 PM
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Wednesday, December 1, 2004 |
I've culled blogs from the list that have been dark for at least four months, and I'll keep doing that to make room for new ones like p-ramblings and Blue Revisions. I think there's a re-org approaching, too. And I notice the front page has none of my poetry on it, so I'll have to fix that post haste.
Update: Added The Pangrammaticon, found via the above-linked Blue Revisions. Playing music tonight and tomorrow night — back on Friday. In the meantime, if I didn't have to pay rent and a mortgage I'd buy Jonathan Mayhew an ear so Robert Pinsky wouldn't be beyond him.
7:03:50 AM
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© Copyright 2008 Michael Snider.
Last update: 6/26/08; 9:17:34 PM.
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