Comments on: Missing the Vernacular

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 00:03:03 +0000

I thought I’d bump this thread up again, on the occasion of the latest installment of Don Paterson’s “The Lyric Principle” in the new Poetry Review (which also features Harriet’s own Danielle Chapman, writing on Paul Auster and C.D. Wright).
I quote from this new section, subtitled “The Sound of Sense” –
“‘No ideas but in things’ was bad enough; but the current advice to ‘keep it concrete, keep it simple,’ whatever its other faults, has been a musical disaster. [And this, in a footnote:] ‘Simple’ is often a call for syntax to be kept paratactic and straightforward. Well… tell that to Yeats and Shakespeare. It’s the syntax that betrays the subtlety and sophistication of the thought, and complexity needn’t mean a lack of clarity, or anything like it. Readers, I think, are bored senseless with poem after poem full of expository paratactic syntax; it patronizes them, and all but accuses them of being unable to follow an argument. Up with hypotaxis!”
Any takers-on?
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 13:37:16 +0000

This is a fascinating issue you’re investigating. Writing has always been a hybrid : both a “translation” of oral speech, and something in its own right. It seems to me the poet sort of straddles this duality, & intensifies it.
“Stilted”, “awkward”, “dull” – such negative terms can often be applied to either end of the spectrum (ornamental or “plain-spoken”).
These and similar failures of style stem most often from the fact that the works that exhibit them harbor no inner necessity. They didn’t have to be written. They are imitations, in the bad sense. A poem that finds an authentic style – that “speaks” – was (it seems to me anyway) at some obscure level, a necessary utterance. (I’m trying to avoid that gol-danged term “sincerity”.)
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By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 07:39:05 +0000

Thanks for commenting, Ange. It’s certainly an old debate. There’s the controversy over Lyrical Ballads where you have Wordsworth going on about how it was an “experiment” in “the real language of men”—though it is interesting that by “real” he apparently means the language of the lower and middle classes, and Coleridge arguing for the equal “reality” of the language of the imagination. Certainly how language is spoken energizes poetry, but poetry should not be limited to include only such rhythms and diction that certain arbiters determine is how the “people” speak. So often this leads to a homogenous diction and, worse, oversimplified syntax—the dull trudge of rank on rank of declarative sentences. Why not have an intensifying inversion, some tension in the syntax? Why not occasionally strive for the sublime? Why not allow some strangeness into the flavor of the English? The argument against such things seems reductive to me.
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By: Ange

Ange — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:59:54 +0000

Alicia, I agree completely. The idea that poetry *must* mimic “natural” speech rhythms is not only tired, but it is an nth generation travesty of WCW’s innovations.
I’m looking forward to hearing more!
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