Guess who wrote the following villanelle:
The Measure
Each unconsidered day we live is lost.
I should record the moments as they come
though marking time is seldom worth the cost.
Loss is our lot, a commonplace, at least
a philosophic truth. We must turn from
each unconsidered day, though it be lost,
without a backward glance. Though logbooks must
record the ticking clock, the beating drum,
this marking time comes at too dear a cost.
Efficiency pretends to stop the waste
but turns our focus to the pendulum.
Each unconsidered day we live is lost.
Productiveness will never trick the ghost,
nor calendars toss forth a feeble crumb:
this marking time comes at too great a cost.
That time must be our nonexistent host
remains this planet’s fate and martyrdom.
And even the considered day is lost,
so marking time is never worth the cost.
I’m heading out for a few days (will end up at the Brooklyn Bridge walk of Poets House on Monday night) and will post the answer as soon as I am near a computer again. Meanwhile, have at it, Harrieteers! Who do you think wrote this?
CHILLIN’ WITH THE VILLIES PART 2
Now that Jennifer Moxley has been revealed as the author of this Empsoneseque villie, a bit of context: I’ve been chillin’ with plenty of villies the last few months, for an anthology I’m coediting with Marie Elizabeth Mali. One thing I’ve discovered is that the villie has become a center of interest for a great range of contemporary poets—performance poets and exploratory poets as well as the more expected moonlighting free-verse poets and of course the formalists.
Why this is happening is a very interesting question….among the thought-provoking facts are that the villanelle has its origin in a communal dance, rather than in an individual song like the sonnet…
I’ll try to report back here again on any new thoughts on the villie as the book progresses.
PS Hint: the answer may well surprise you.
Actually Annie’s hint is what confuses me. I’d have said maybe Berryman or Roethke or someone writing in that era…although Tess Gallagher also tempts me as the answer. But those are based on hints of diction, tone, formal construction. Now, if this were Ashbery or W. Stevens, then I’d be surprised, or one of the Beats/San Francisco school writers, or Black Mountain. I usually don’t like villanelles because they seem too clever in form to match content; this is an exception though…quite sophisticated. Last guess, out in left field almost, Levertov or Ph. Levine. Clearly I don’t know.
Annie,
Judging from S2-L2 I’m betting that this wasn’t written by a poet–certainly not by a metrical one.
Wild guess: Jimmy Carter.
-o-
Inspired by the Jimmy Carter guess, I’m going to say: Barack Obama
Nobody’s close yet. I’ll give a few more hints: it was written by a contemporary who is known for being a poet, and it was included in a book first published last year.
I’d say Jennifer Moxley, but that’s only because I read a review of her book in the latest Jacket . . .Strict forms like villanelles are interesting (he said, in responding to an Annie Finch post). I’ve been writing quasi-sonnets for a while, just because they seemed like the right way to “express”/”encase”/”reveal” what I was writing about. Mostly, I wish that subject matter could totally obliterate questions of form. But then, I guess it wouldn’t be poetry anymore . . .
“Mostly, I wish that subject matter could totally obliterate questions of form. But then, I guess it wouldn’t be poetry anymore . . .”
I don’t know – I kind of love this quote so much. I’m thinking that if the obliteration process was something we got to watch then it could be poetry if it chose to think of itself that way. I mean who determines if something is poetry. With the right title that quote would make a nice poem.
Is that hard?
It seems to me that there are certain subjects, indeed all the really important ones, that human beings can only get their minds around through poetry. Indeed, if those truths are discussed in prose they just become scientific or theological.
My quibble with religion is that the tenets of faith become literal as soon as they get organized, and when that happens they become mere objects, just facts and possessions. They don’t mean anything anymore at all, even if people think they do, and especially if they go to war for them.
The fact that people will go to war for the facts of faith is proof the tenets are no longer transcendental (very much for want of a better word!).
(God must be crying his eyes out today!)
Christopher
“Mostly, I wish that subject matter could totally obliterate questions of form. But then, I guess it wouldn’t be poetry anymore . . .”
No, I guess not.
As for the villie, I’m surprised nobody guessed William Empson. And yes, Joe wins, it is Jennifer Moxley!
Love the title of this post, Annie!
Empson crossed my mind when I read this – “Missing Dates”, I’m sure, would have been in Moxley’s mind when she wrote it. The images here strike me as familiar currency: “The ticking clock, the beating drum”; “pendulum”; “calendars”. Empson’s villanelle has a mesmeric intensity, but also – odd in a villanelle – total unexpectedness. Two lines that always amaze me in his poem: the one that brings in “the Chinese tombs and the slag hills” and “Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills”. I’ve never quite known what to make of these lines, but they draw me back to the poem again and again.
The villanelle is a form that interests me very much – its incantatory repetition reminds us that one of poetry’s roots is magic.
So as the winner of Annie’s contest, I get one more post: do people agree with her that “poetry” (however defined) depends on “form” (however defined)? That one’s content . . . one’s subject matter . . . couldn’t be compelling enough to be considered as “poetry” even if it didn’t immediately communicate its existence as a recognizable “form”? J.J. Redick! Rashard Lewis! The Magic have a chance!
Joe:
do people agree with her that “poetry” (however defined) depends on “form” (however defined)?
The short answer is “yes”.
-o-
The answer is yes and the key phrase is “however defined.” Forms received, invented, transfigured. Annie and her crew are at one end of a spectrum, honing to the iamb and chillin’ with end-rhyme. The langpos as well set up tennis nets in the underbrush of syntax.
David Dennett, writing on Darwinism, speaks of the notion that as a species traverses a fitness landscape there may be hidden constraints, that’s to say non-obvious to the merely human observer.
I thought at once of poetic parameters. One of which may be to break whatever rule was most recently imposed.
While editing An Exaltation of Forms, I wanted to come up with a non-divisive, accurate definition of poetry that encompassed the quality held in common by the many different forms of poems actually being written. After years of thought, I defined poetry as “language structured by the repetition of any language element.” That encompasses not only meter (accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic (iambic and otherwise!)) or rhyme (repetition of word-sounds) but also all kinds of exploratory forms, chants, procedural and Oulipian forms, and free verse (in that case, the repeating element is the linebreak). This definition has been working for me. A key element of the definition is the word “structured” (ie, not decorated–so, many poems can be decorated by alliteration but only an alliterative poem, such as an Anglo-Saxon poem where the repetition is predictable, is structured by it). Some poems are more conspicuously structured by repetition than others; those that are more conspicuously (audibly, visibly) structured by repetition seem the most “formal” to us.
Very interesting posts indeed, Joe and John Oliver Simon and Annie. Helpful!
In those terms a total absence of form, where even the line break isn’t a structural element anymore, can be a form element too, but it just can’t be repeated.
One can defend “This Is Just To Say” in a literary historical context, but it has provided more new clothes for the emperor than any other poem ever written!
Christopher
Annie,
After years of thought, I defined poetry as “language structured by the repetition of any language element.”
Fascinating. I think you are one small step away from a unifying principle of poetry. A tiny question remains, which can be phrased in any of these three ways:
What was poetry like originally, before it developed these refinements/repetitions? What distinguished it from storytelling (i.e. what we’d call “prose” now)? Why were these refinements/repetitions developed?
Best regards,
Colin
Colin,
It is pretty well=established that the earliest poetry across the world (which included the storytelling, as in the ancient epic poems of India, Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia,etc..) was memorized, not written down, and it had strong meter/rhythm which made it easier to remember. So in that case, the meter would have been the structuring repeated element.
Annie,
I once got into an argument on-line with a professor of music over a definition of music. He said that “music” doesn’t exist, because (I think), as an abstraction, no definition can come to adequately universal terms. After much thought (and I thought about Marianne Moore’s correspondent in the Ford Motor Co. giving his plants an extra watering as he pondered how to respond to Moore’s insistence on not being paid on spec), I replied (and I was so happy with my reply that I saved it on my hard drive):
My problem with your definition is that it doesn’t exclude non-poetry language events. A lot of language that is structured by repetition isn’t poetry.
Only a philosophy professor would contend that a phenomenon which cannot be adequately defined does not exist.
It’s the interplay between predicted and unexpected repetitions that delights. The initial trochee in “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought.”
Rhyme and scansion facilitated memorization on a scale we can hardly imagine. Bards in India who can recite poems for weeks are now disappearing with the extension of literacy.
“A lot of language that is structured by repetition isn’t poetry.”
What kinds of language do you mean? There is a lot of language that is characterized by repetition (such as the end of Ulysses, the phone book, etc), but it is not structured by it in a predictable way….
As for music, it may be easier to define poetry because poetry is distinct from literary prose yet can share many things in common with it (syntactical grace, sentence rhythm, wordplay, wordmusic, setting, imagery, point of view, metaphor, etc.) .Only a few key characteristics distinguish poetry from literary prose (the structuring repetition), while music may be harder to define because there is no companion art of making non-musical sound to contrast with it.
Annie,
It is pretty well-established that the earliest poetry across the world (which included the storytelling, as in the ancient epic poems of India, Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, etc.) was memorized,
Long before the extant. Long before meter. Before Keith Richards, even.
As our prehistoric ancestors stood around campfires, some would tell stories (i.e. “winging it”) while others would recite poems. What was the most fundamental, salient difference between the two?
Put another way, why was poetry memorized?
-o-
my understanding is that poetry was memorized for the sake of accuracy, because it preserved stories that were many many generations old, passed on from generation to generation.
If people also told stories in prose also (I have no idea whether they did or not), perhaps those stories were improvised rather than having been passed on through history.
Annie,
poetry was memorized for the sake of accuracy
Accuracy of what, though? The events? Many myths preserved story lines and characters just as precisely in prose as poetry, despite the myriad different recounts. If the tribe’s people became so enamored of one particular rendition that they began to memorize and repeat it word for word, that version became a poem.
Now, what is the most basic distinction between the modes in which the Iliad and Aesop’s fables have been handed down to us?
-o-
Following this excellent exchange got me curious. If it helps, I found this in Wikipedia:
“Poetry was employed as a way of remembering oral history, story (epic poetry), genealogy, and law. Poetry is often closely related to musical traditions, and much of it can be attributed to religious movements. Many of the poems surviving from the ancient world are a form of recorded cultural information about the people of the past, and their poems are prayers or stories about religious subject matter, histories about their politics and wars, and the important organizing myths of their societies.
Poetry as an art form may predate literacy. Thus many ancient works, from the Vedas (1700 – 1200 BC) to the Odyssey (800 – 675 BC), appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies. Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, runestones and stelae.
The oldest surviving poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh from the 4rd millennium BC in Sumer.”
What this means, of course, is that civilization itself exists because of poetry!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ! We win!
(I just knew there was SOME reason for all this useless crap and pointless effort!)
“The oldest surviving poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh from the 4rd millennium BC in Sumer.”
- Wikipedia
Did anyone else notice that the Wikipedia entry said: “…the 4rd millenium” instead of ‘the 4th millenium”?
Much of the druidic duties of pre-literate Ireland, which became the first things to get written down – was an alliterative body of civil law and codes, passed down from one generation of chanting poet-jurist to the next. The head crunchingly complext sets of rules and regs which was the verbal grease on which the very sophisticated ancient Gaelic society purred along for, seguing flawlessly from oral to literate society and motoring in print for 1200 years before the first nouveau Tudor courtier poet-types starting from scratch and aping the Greeks coz they had no home-grown class – came and collapsed it all.
The body of entirely civil law was known as the Fenechas, (law of the feni – freemen) and was first written down between 6-9C AD, and evolved into what became known as the Brehon law (brehon being the Anglicisation of britham, which means Judge).
The fenechas lore set out in very intricate detail, the (then) extant relationships between the various strictly defined (six or so), colour coded levels of society – and the hugely complex scale of compensation levels for a vast swathe of wrong-doings.
The lowest level could only were one colour and the higheest class of poet and king could wear seven.
The fenechas also set out the regulation of property and inheritence law, laws of fosterage, hostages, maintenance of the sick, physical wounding, bee keeping and basically covered every conceivable permutation of what might happen – coded over gawd knows how many centuries of fairly stable culture prior to writing coming along and all this original gear getting transcribed down as pure as possible for Poetry to have been gotten writ – back in the days existing on the pages time (and all one’s competitor-poets) forgot (ie – do not know anything of).
Another interesting development in Irish propery and marriage law came after Cáin Adomnáin (Law of Adomnán), also known as the Lex Innocentium (Law of Innocents), that was thrashed out between Dál Riatan and Pictish nobles at the Synod of Birr in 697. It is named after its initiator Adomnán of Iona, ninth Abbot of Iona after St. Columba, or Columcille, (Dove of the Church) who was the first abbot there.
This codified much of what was already law. For example, men and women entering marriage, had a trial period of a year, anytime during which either party could dissolve the union. Divorce was a very easy matter, without the stigma it had in later times when the church got a full griop after the Tudor holocaust ended the ancient Gaelic society that was 1000 years out of synch with the rest of Europe.
The property brought by each gender into the union was held seperately by them and divided on divorce. This equality between the genders is still here today, as the women of Ireland are far more less conditioned to conform to stereotypes by the media prevelant in the US and UK or example where High Hefner seems to have had more influence than Gee Gee Greer.
So much of the early *poetry* in this tradition is not what we would think poetry is today at all, as it’s more akin to alliterative-laws, clearly mnemonic and as close as it gets to possessing some grain of truth behind the Homeric mumbo jumbo in which any tin-pot ranter with a dictionary and desire to sound clever; can start howling at chemical level about shadowy cabals, victimised energy-fuses who’ve overdosed on the Evan Du Blanc and Whacky Adrienna Moo Ma brew of bándhraíocht, which causes distended fictionalization of interior intellecutal nodes, whose primary sympton is raving ridiculous straw-man claims in public – coupled with a notable lack of any clear grasp about the real ban-draoi.
Ni hois mana urnais – you shouldn’t lend if you don’t bind
Arna tois na tartais – for you shouldn’t swear what you haven’t given.
Ni midither na coimditer. – One does not judge something over which one has no control.
Tofet tomus mesu; – Estimation precedes judgements.
Ni forngartaigh na fuisethar
senchas; – He who does not acknowledge tradition is no supervisor.
Ni senchae na forngair naill; – He who does not supervise an oath is not a guardian of tradition.
Ni noill cin cogrann; – It is not an oat without the casting of lots.
Ni cogrann cin compersana. – It is not lot-casting without persons of equal status.
~
You can see in the above how the sounds are condusive to memorization.
Another strand of the bardic practice was memorizing long genealogies of one’s patron, as many as a hundred and more, going back to the earliest mythical heroes, of which there are over 200 in the official list from the earliest time of 2000BC to what could be considered real people, around 1-4C AD.
Then of course the 350 tales in the corpus, 14 different genres, 250 primary which were learned up to level six and 150 secondary which were only transmitted from lip to ear, ollamh to anruth and were never written down. It was expected of an ollamh (poetry professor) to be able to recote any of these tales from memory at the drop of a hat.
From what i can gather, the skeletons were learned and when the poets began their waffle, they would extemprose the finer points. But still, at the finish, like a 20 year in the biz stage actor knowing all the lines of Shakespeare – and today, we have dicthed all that and have Ron and the guys in a beardy Bay Area collective of groovey self-inventors who threw out the old squares and made a whole new rig, with nothing but ID and Ego.
Yah mahn.
Great stuff Desmond! Thanks!
Annie, I wanted to respond to your question from yesterday.
I wrote: “A lot of language that is structured by repetition isn’t poetry.”
You responded: “What kinds of language do you mean? There is a lot of language that is characterized by repetition (such as the end of Ulysses, the phone book, etc), but it is not structured by it in a predictable way….”
My response: How does the prose poem fit in? Is it organized by the repetition of sentences and/or paragraphs? If so, how does that distinguish it from prose? And how is prose distinguished from poetry, since it is organized by the repetition of sentences and paragraphs? If sentences and paragraphs do not fit your definition of elements of language, then how do line breaks fit? In free verse, line breaks aren’t necessarily predictable at all; how is that different from the end of Ulysses?
Oratory is another linguistic phenomenon that is frequently (though not always) organized by repetition.
These universal definitions of poetry and music are fascinating, but strike me as impossible!
John Oliver Simon, the man who said that “music” doesn’t exist was, I thought, full of beans. The idea that something that can’t be defined precisely doesn’t exist is . . . mind-boggling! So . . . anthropocentric, that!
Gary, the supposition that “Poetry as an art form may predate literacy,” is fascinating. Do we have evidence from non-literate societies? What I remember from my readings: What anthropologists have translated as poetry has often (usually? always?) been song texts (which almost always qualify as poetry under Annie’s definition).
Why don’t they under yours?
Good question!
My definition is:
Poetry is whatever someone presents as poetry.
Most song lyricists don’t present their lyrics as poetry.
As it happens, lots of song lyrics have been presented as poetry after the fact, by translators and editors. The Papago Indian singers translated by Frances Densmore, for example. Since someone presented the lyrics as poetry, that makes them poetry. Same with any found poetry.
Not a very helpful or useful definition, I realize.
Since you’ve raised the question, though, here’s a recent song lyric of mine. I wrote it for my spouse on our anniversary. It’s a song, but I like to fantasize that it might be readable as a poem.
ALWAYS NEW
Every year the trees grow taller.
Baby robins fly away.
Some things make me want to holler,
And I wonder how to say
Our love is always new.
Time will always work its changes.
Things decay while others grow.
No returns and no exchanges,
And I always deeply know
Our love is always new.
How’d I win the best of prizes?
No explaining I can see!
Sometimes life holds grand surprises,
Like how you put up with me.
Our love is always new.
Midnight snow and summer thunder,
Autumn leaves and morning dew.
How I love to walk in wonder,
And I know — you always knew.
John, if you look at the taxonomy in the essay in The Body of Poetry, you’ll see that a prose poem is distinguished from lyric prose by what I call the terminal hiatus, meaning simply that they are always short; they end, as if with a gigantic linebreak.
However one argues the margins, the definition works well for the great majority of kinds of poetry.
Annie, Yes, I agree, your definition of poetry works for the overwhelming majority of cases. (Unfortunately, though, my public library doesn’t have “The Body of Poetry”!)
Your definition would require us to classify virtually all song lyricists as poets, while some of the 20th century’s most highly regarded lyricists, such as Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin, explicitly rejected the title “poet.” I’m fine with considering song lyrics in the history of poetry, but it’s interesting to flout the wishes of the writers.
Other poetic forms structured by repetition: auctioneering (virtuoso improvised oral poetry) and vending at sports events — “Red hots / Get your red hots!” I’m not being facetious — Rothenberg in “America a Prophecy” reprinted a transcription by Lafcadio Hearn of the cries of a coal vendor from around 100 years ago. Interesting stuff — found poetry. Coincidentally, fascinatingly, 300 years before that in London there was a fad for composers to write choral compositions based on the cries of street vendors. You can check it out on a fascinating and beautiful CD called “The Cries of London.” Orlando Gibbons is one of the composers.
John,
I agree, your definition of poetry works for the overwhelming majority of cases.
In my mind, what Annie has defined is not poetry but the science developed to memorize it. I’d have simply said “Prosody is mnemonics.” As for poetry, the thing being memorized, I’d use a simpler term.
Four of your tribe stand up to relate the same familiar story around the campfire. The first two are prose storytellers. Each uses wording that is different not only from each other but from previous iterations by the same speaker. Next come the two poets, who use the very same words as each other, word for word the way you’ve always heard the story poem.
In one word, how would we characterize the poets’ renderings as opposed to those of the prose storytellers?
V_______.
-o-
Colin,
If you are referring to the oral tradition of poetry passed down through generations, there would probably only be one person reciting the poem at a time, and it would never be word for word the same, but would change slightly with each poet.
Anyway, since you’re asking for the difference in a word, do tell us, Colin.
Annie,
there would probably only be one person reciting the poem at a time,
Agreed. My dramatization was meant to contrast the prosers’ “winging it” to the poets’ approach. I also concede that there might be differences in the performances of the two poets.
and it would never be word for word the same,
Oh, yes, it would. 99+% of the time, in fact. Elders would see to that! Consider the effort in memorizing, as distinguished from approximating, the text and its historical, cultural and often religious significance to the tribe. True, the Odyssey may have changed over time but surely it was the pedagogue’s job to see that it didn’t do so from one speaker to the next. Rulers might not have been invented to draw straight lines!
One can tell a fable any way one likes but, generally speaking and barring deliberate revisionism (in which case the new version is sustained word for word), one doesn’t mess with a poem, even after the language has become dated. (Even today, efforts to “modernize” Shakespeare’s language are met with indignation and scorn–rightly so, IMHO. Imagine the outrage in a preliterate society that didn’t have the original text!)
As a poet, would you want reciters changing your wording such that, after it changed hands a few times, your own work would become unrecognizable to you? Aesop wouldn’t mind, but I suspect Homer would.
If one doesn’t acknowledge the efforts that every culture has made to preserve certain [artistic] utterances word for word then no definition of poetry is likely to be accepted. For those who do acknowledge these efforts, it’s a simple matter of finding a word for “word for word”.
V_______.
-o-
Colin, FYI, believe it is accepted as part of the scholarship of oral literature that variation is an inevitable part of the act of oral transmission, and indeed part of the creative satisfaction that keeps the tradition alive.
Here’s a quote to that effect from an essay called Ancient Greek Oral Genres by Casey Due, describing the work of Party and Lord, the most influential scholars of oral literatures:
On two trips to the former Yugoslavia in 1933-35, Parry and Lord collected 12,544 songs, stories, and conversations from 169 singers of the South Slavic epic song tradition. Their unparalleled fieldwork has been matched only by the work of Albert Lord himself, who took additional trips in the 1950s and 1960s. No two of the songs collected are exactly alike, nor do any two of the singers have exactly the same repertoire. The singers whom Parry and Lord recorded composed extremely long epic poems in performance. In order to do this, they drew on a vast storehouse of traditional themes and phrases that worked within the meter or rhythm of the poetry. They used these formulaic phrases, instead of what we know as words, to build each verse as they went along. Each song was a new composition, and no two songs that they recorded were ever exactly the same.
Colin,
Is the word you’re tantalizing us with, “Verse”?
The assumption that oral transmission accomplished word-for-word reproduction strikes me as graph-o-centric. Folk song collectors have noted many many variants of the same songs, and those have melodies as further aids to memory.
Annie,
it is accepted as part of the scholarship of oral literature that variation is an inevitable part of the act of oral transmission,
Over time, yes, of course variations will occur. Hell, the same is true of language itself! We mustn’t let the failure to pass along an oral literature 100% intact blind us to the attempt to do precisely that.
Having taught a class “The Lord’s Prayer” no Sunday school teacher adds: “Feel free to change a word or two.”
I urge you to focus on the attempt, not its long term success (as remarkable as it may be, with the similarities outweighing the differences even after centuries pass).
John,
“Verse”?
No.
-o-
Annie and John,
Can you agree without reservation that societies developed at least two modes of storytelling: one where the speakers tried to make the wording at least somewhat uniform and one where they didn’t?
If so, would you object to someone labeling the former “poetry” and the latter “prose”?
-o-
That’s an interesting angle, Colin.
I think we may also be talking about the difference between improvisation and recitation–the two quite distinct functions of the bard were to preserve the people’s history on the one hand and to make sense out of the ‘news’ on the other. As late as 1979 I heard remarkable long poems sung/chanted in café’s in Marmara and Bodrum, and was astonished to be told they were entirely improvised, and that the singers were bards. We looked up the word in Turkish and that’s how it got translated into English—bard!
The cafés were small and packed, and there was a nervous tension in the air that added poignancy to the performances. For these were political poems, and it was dangerous to indulge in such free ideas in Turkey at that time. Indeed, it was the only way people could communicate them–that’s why they were so important.
I suspect what I heard in Turkey was not unlike what Parry and Lord collected in Yugoslavia in the 30s, minus the fear. Yes, I doubt very much Parry and Lord’s collection includes any of the resistance element that was so important for the later Turks.
I suspect that you are also right, Colin, that in preliterate societies accuracy was important during the recitation of the people’s poems—which were, after all, the poetic archives that preserved the whole meaning and identity of the tribe. Yes indeed, the Elders would see to that for sure.
And so The Iliad and The Odyssey got made—the news that’s never ought of date!
I was born in 1939, and can actually remember the young woman who was looking after me in 1944 teaching me the words to all the armed services anthems—I still know “off we go into the wild blue yonder” to this day, and the Halls of Montezuma still haunt me. My father was in Italy, so we spent the summer with a cousin on the rocky Rhode Island coast, and I spent a lot of time looking for submarines just off shore, and I think we even turned the lights off at night (did we?). That really added to the incentive to get the words of the anthems exactly right–and the young woman put all her war effort into getting me, her little charge, just perfect. At four!
Like that, and it’s always been for sure.
Christopher
Here’s where I really show my ignorance.
Do rappers/hip-hoppers and whatever else they’re called in that genre today improvise? I feel sure they do, and I feel sure they too use the collective bank of kennings Annie mentioned.
That’s a perfect parallel, I think.
Next question, also revealing you know what. Did the early blues musicians improvise the words sitting on the porch beside the cotton? I bet they did–and you know, I bet they still do, wherever.
Rap is just urban blues, isn’t it?
But recitation is another matter, as nothing needs to be remembered anymore. At first on-line I felt a bit intimidated by how much everybody seemed to know, and was slow in my responses because I had to look things up in big books. Just last week I learned to google.
Christopher
Poetry is verbatim.
What he said.
I think I agree with that, Colin. Certainly I didn’t mean from what I said just before that all improvised forms were poetry, or that I was even talking about poetry. I was mainly responding to your own observation earlier about the role of the elders in ensuring that the great poems of the tribe were verbatim. I feel sure they did.
Or at least I guess they did—I would want that to be true.
Yet in oral traditions, even in the most vibrant of oral traditions, I also feel that long poems were composed over a period of time in bits and pieces, and that they were finalized by trial and error–what sounded best was obviously most memorable. I think without any doubt there must have been a good long period during which even the Iliad existed in “drafts,” so to speak–and was assembled by trial and error as I’ve just described. I also think that even then the elders were there listening verse by verse and “book” by “book,” and that the composer/s would have taken the responsibility to get the poem just right very seriously.
But I don’t think the composers went off first and wrote it all in their heads and then recited the final creation verbatim.
Do you?
So that makes me think about the astonishing competition I watched at Poets.org last year, when for a month a large group of young poets composed a poem a day–yes, a whole poem everyday for 30 whole days!
My question was, and still is—can such poems be said to be verbatim???
I felt at the time that it was really foolish to put young people through that sort of hoop because it encouraged them to write off the top of their heads, as if top of the head could ever be verbatim!
A huge amount of the new poetry I read in America today sounds as if it has been written off the top of the head like that. I received all the 60 poems the Academy of American Poets sent out by e-mail in their Poem-of-the-Day marathon which ended just recently. I read every single one of them carefully, and what a mess. It was hard to believe that all those 60 poems had been selected from recently published books too, which meant the poems were presumably being sold in bookshops all over the country. Somebody somewhere must be buying the wretches!
Because I’d say that only 10 to 15% of them had that permanent quality that is a sign of the verbatim nature of poetry as I see it–that feeling that they had been so well and conscientiously and lovingly engendered they had become entities in themselves, as inevitable as if they had become whole persons and could never be confused with anybody else.
The walking wounded, I’d say, and wondered who were the editors and publishers who had felt such work was ready for publication? And where are the Elders?
Christopher
Great discussion!
One of the most famous poems in English, Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’ has a last line which alternates between ‘in her tomb by the sounding sea’ and ‘in her tomb by the side of the sea,’ depending on which Poe version is used.
Poe, and many poets (I know I do) edit their poems over the years.
Colin’s point of ‘poetry is verbatim’ is a fascinating one, though I’m not quite ready to concede the point.
Pledges and prayers and anthems are verbatim, but is poetry?
I might agree all poetry apires to the condition of verbatim.
But then verbatim can mean ‘it’s really, really good,’ or, ‘it says exactly what must be said,’ or ‘it has done, and therefore it will do, because of tradition,’ which are not quite the same thing. How these three are related, however, is food for much thought, and does not necessarily defeat Colin’s case–which I do like.
Yes, interesting stuff! Even famous poems aren’t stable, if that’s the right word, or static. Think of all the very different editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – never the same book twice! And of the twenty-odd versions of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” – everybody quotes the “I, too, dislike it” bit, but here’s a poem that never settled into a consistent text. And there’s Auden’s famous rewriting of himself… and deleting whole poems like “September 1, 1939,” whose last line vexed him indefinitely: We must love one another and die… We must love one another or die…
I think it should be “We must love one another to die.”
. . . a version of Auden’s line which only makes much sense, probably, now that we have had so many Buddhist poets writing in English from the 1960s on.
What an amazing honor it would be to be a poet in the kind of bardic culture where poems were entrusted to those who could remember and pass them on and in the process improve on or adapt them. This is someting like the translator’s role today, but in this case it would be the poems in the native tongue, so close to the heart of the culture and carrying information too, that one would be entrusted with. And of course, the original text would not be available anywhere . . .
Just to change one word in Auden’s line gave me the shivers. But imagine being the repository and steward of Auden’s poem, in a culture where the whole populace profoundly needed poetry to survive, and being entrusted to change as much of it as one thought fit–No wonder poets were allowed to wear seven colors as Desmond points out.
I don’t know if this’ll help anyone else, but I always hear the line to the tune of “Luck be a lady tonight.”
Personally I think Colin Ward’s original statement to me, “Poetry is verbatim,” was a bit of a put-down, and I was pleased John Oliver Simon came in to point out that that is exactly what I’d said.
I wrote my piece in response to Colin Ward without going back and visiting the thread again, and only saw John Oliver Simon’s defence after I had posted my response. Otherwise I might not have been so charitable–or even, more importantly, chosen to use the word verbatim to stand for so much. Because of course outside the context my use of the word would have seemed highly eccentric—a statement like “as if off the top of the head could ever be verbatim,” for example.
Or a statement like “Poetry is verbatim.” Just think about that.
I too like where this discussion is going, but hope it won’t allow my observations about the AoAP’s “Poem a Day” poetry month what is more its “Poem of the Day” poetry mailings to go unaddressed. What I did was make a link between the Poets.org poetry Training Center and the fact that a lot of poetry seems to get published today which, to my tastes, at least, is 1.) manifestly unfinished and b.) manifestly boring. Now we’ve added to that the whole dimension of when is a poem “finished,” when does it get to the point that even the author can only deliver it verbatim?
I’d also like to throw into the hat the old chestnut, is craft enough? In the context I’d like even to expand that a little to venture the question, when is craft too much?
Just to chill the villies!
Christopher
Christopher, to throw your question back at you in terms of your own definition of poetry, do you think that too much craft can theoretically ever get in the way of “that feeling that they had been so well and conscientiously and lovingly engendered they had become entities in themselves, as inevitable as if they had become whole persons and could never be confused with anybody else.”?
I think part of the confusion is the meaning of the word craft–it has such a constellation of meanings, from learned skill, to cunning, to magic. And maybe that’s part of the point. . .
Annie,
The thing about craft is it puts such a high demand not only on itself but on what goes with it.
“Yesterday” is certainly a craft-worthy song, all song aficionados would agree, but if McCartney had kept the original working lyrics, “Scrambled Eggs,” the song would have been a failure, an embarrassment, forgotten! and not one of the most recorded songs of all time.
So craft DEMANDS a high standard based on its own craft-worthiness (the music of “Yesterday”) AND it ALSO DEMANDS all non-craft elements (the lyrical content of “Yesterday”) fit its craft-presence in an appropriate way. You may write great a great tune, but it will fail if you don’t fit appropriate lyrics to that tune.
This is WHY, I think, there is so much RESENTMENT re: craft. It makes EXTRA demands on you, layered demands on you, just as life does.
ONLY WITH CRAFT DOES POETRY REPLICATE LIFE. ARTISTIC SPEECH IS EMPTY SPEECH WITHOUT CRAFT–WHOSE DEMANDS ‘FILL OUT’ MERE SIGNIFICATION INTO THE FULLNESS OF DISINTERESTED PAIN/PLEASURE REALITY.
McCartney’s ‘elevated’ tune demanded a lyrical theme appropriate to it, thus adding a crucial dimension to the overall artistic expression. But writing a song (or poem) entitled ‘Scrambled Eggs’ would, in the same manner, make similar demands, just different types of ‘craft-demands’ appropriate to the theme of ‘Scrambled Eggs.’
The resentment of craft, the thinking that craft is an imposition to ‘true’ expression is a very unfortunate belief, and has done tremendous damage to poetry since the Modernists gave license to this sort of thinking.
‘True’ expression is that which exists in reality, or which reflects some scientific truth for direct application to reality, but WHAT POET would be so arrogant as to claim this sort of ‘true’ communication?
The CRAFT of the poem is what makes it ‘true,’ gives it the added dimension which replicates reality’s depth–for it is reality’s depth which makes it real, not any prose content, per se.
STORIES gain the appearance of truth by their NARRATIVE which causes the listener to FORGET they are listening to a lie; the listener literally replaces reality with the story-reality as they get involved in the story. There is a CRAFT to narrative, which also can apply to the short poem, merely in terms of a certain organizing skill, but let us put aside fiction, for our subject is the poem. The short poem generally lacks the story-teller’s advantage, and this is why POEM-CRAFT is crucial to the short poem.
I might as well here mention another crucial aspect to ‘truth-telling.’ Scientific truth can also be a social truth or a psychological truth; if a young virgin happens upon a poem of smut, in which sexual secrets are revealed, this poem can then operate in the ‘truth-telling’ mode for the curiosity of the innocent reader, and here the poem will attract ‘interest’ as a piece of ‘truth’ (or gossip, really).
So all sorts of ‘real life gossip’ may be handed out to the reader of poems and fiction; fiction obviously is a wider field for this sort of dissemination and thus attracts more attention than poetry, for this very reason. ‘Truth’ and ‘gossip’ will always be part of the expression of a poem; craft operates more independently and with different rules, of course.
Depth of reality (created by craft’s relationship to non-craft elements in the poem) is a literal, physical landscape; the mind actually experiences time and place similar to reality in the well-crafted poem.
The only caveat: because CRAFT is inextricably linked with NON-CRAFT expressions, there are infinite ways to playfully trump CRAFT with NON-CRAFT expression; any manner of poem MAY be produced with CRAFT suppressed as a SEEMING necessity–the only risk here is this strategy, suppressing a SEEMING necessity, is a great risk for the poet whose first duty is to BE, not SEEM. And again, such a strategy works on the fact that CRAFT and NON-CRAFT work together in any successful poem, and this is what we mean by “verbatim.”
The crucial thing here, however, is the cliche that CONTENT and FORM are ONE, as the New Critics were always saying (FORM IS CONTENT, etc) is WRONG. They are NOT one. The music of ‘Yesterday’ and the lyrics of ‘Yesterday’ are different, and the listener is aware that the singing of the word, ‘yesterday,’ and the speaking of the word, ‘yesterday,’ are unique and distinct and that endless variations, even for this single expression, are possible.
This is why CRAFT is crucial and why it is RESENTED, because CRAFT does NOT disappear into FORM and become one with it–even when CRAFT and FORM work together, they remain DISTINCT. More pleasure is always possible, and this exciting possibility exists BECAUSE the audience is AWARE that there is a COMBINATION of CRAFT and CONTENT, and that NEW combinations are continually possible; the aesthetic pleasure is by necessity dependent on the audience being aware of the COMBINING as a continual process; FORM and CONTENT, even in the most successful poem, NEVER BECOME ONE as the New Critics want us to believe.
Thus the New Critical disparagement of paraphrasing is misguided, as well. The New Critic would escape biographical, factual, personal, intentional, and all sorts of other responsibilities by having the poem disappear into a mystical, aesthetic one-ness. Concrete PARTS of the poem, essential to CRAFT and, secondarily, to crucial awareness of SEPARATION of CRAFT from NON-CRAFT elements, is played down by the New Criticism, whose ‘close-reading’ was in fact a SHAM. ‘Close reading’ is subverted by the idea that CONTENT and FORM are ONE, since the critic can easily slip from one to the other in his or her reading, and thus can essentially attack or defend a poem at will, since the whole they defend is an illusion.
The New Critics did this all the time: they would dismiss a poem as “sentimental,” a judgment which involves no ‘close reading,’ per se, and then at other moments they used painstaking ‘close readings’ to justify pure trash; they read elements in any way they chose, since distinct ‘elements’ are automatically considered to be hidden in the ‘whole’ (and thus do not exist, as such). Paraphrasing was not allowed by the New Critics because paraphrasing ‘separates out’ an element; these restrictions were just that—restrictions, which no self-respecting would ever impose upon himself. The New Critics were not really interested in fully examining a text.
The New Critics were a erudite smokescreen to the irresponsible machinations of the Modernists–who had little interest in honest examination of the text which they were busy twisting with their shoddy manifesto-ism. No surprise also, then, that the Fugitive/New Critics were personal friends and fellow travelers of the Modernists of several generations—they were part of the same clique: T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. Some think CRAFT when they think of these men. I think CRAFTY.
Thomas
Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake. — Richard F. Hugo
The New Critics did this. The New Critics did that. The Modernists got this wrong. Then the Modernists got that wrong. They both got the other wrong. Now we are all muddled. This is what poetry is. That is what craft is. Here is where your thinking is muddled. Here is why the New Critics are to blame for it. This is where you thinking could benefit from the reading of Poe. Nitrous oxide is to blame for it.
I am shocked that this quote is by Richard Hugo. Don, you never cease to produce things that surprise me.
Interesting points, Thomas.
Do you think it was hypocrisy, accident, exceptionalism, or waht that the fact that Yeats’ compositional process involved beginning many of his poems with paraphrases didn’t seem to bother the New Critics?
I don’t think that music and lyrics quite fits as an analogy for the relation between form and content My reason is that content simply cannot exist outside of some kind of form (even a draft form or a paraphrased form), while lyrics can certainly exist without music.
Christopher, I wonder if you are perhaps conflating craft (in the eense of learning scales in music, perspective and color theory and brush technique in painting, meter and wordmusic and syntax and tone in poetry) with style (in the sense of knowing the stylistic tricks to write a passable MFA-type of poem every day?
Annie wrote:
“Christopher, to throw your question back at you in terms of your own definition of poetry, do you think that too much craft can theoretically ever get in the way of “that feeling that they had been so well and conscientiously and lovingly engendered they had become entities in themselves, as inevitable as if they had become whole persons and could never be confused with anybody else.”?
I think part of the confusion is the meaning of the word craft–it has such a constellation of meanings, from learned skill, to cunning, to magic. And maybe that’s part of the point. . .”
I’d like to say that I hadn’t answered that question right away because I was called away from my desk or was in bed, but in actual fact I just found it very difficult. Now with Thomas adding “crafty” to your list of other meanings, I think I’m getting closer. Because it depends so much on how much craftiness is involved in the craft, both in the craft as its taught by a particular school or teacher and the craft as it’s practiced by a young poet. My feeling is that if the craft is taught or practiced as an end in itself it may well interfere with the final product, which is what I sensed in the Poets.org Poem-a-Day poems written to satisfy not only the demand they be written in one single day but that they satisfy the expectation of the Poets.org teachers, and Kaltica in particular. Many of the poems were excellent, there’s no doubt about that—which made me worry too. Indeed, perhaps I couldn’t distinguish between a poem that is important from a poem that’s just very, very good in its craft.
That’s why I do believe in reputations. I do believe it’s important to know who a poet is, or any artist for that matter, before you judge a single poem or a painting. There’s too much fiddling that can be done, and of course is–so I want to know I’m opening my heart and mind to another heart and mind I can depend upon not to be crafty.
Sorry about that stuck bold
Christopher–sorry, I first posted this reply in the wrong place–I wonder if you are perhaps conflating craft (in the eense of learning scales in music, perspective and color theory and brush technique in painting, meter and wordmusic and syntax and tone in poetry) with style (in the sense of knowing the stylistic tricks to write a passable MFA-type of poem every day?
Conflating them only in the sense that craft (or a deliberate absence there-of, as is so often the case today) is one of the most important ingredients in establishing a style in the first place, just as different ways of laying bricks is an extremely important factor in the architectural ‘look’ of a building or wall.
And, of course, many aspects of craft can only be learned through trial and error. If you want to develop a style of your own you may even have to train yourself in craft peculiarities which nobody else knows in the world!
The craft of a Jackson Pollock, for example, or of an Emily Dickinson!
As a poet who started writing poetry very late in life, and whose literary-critical career was already behind him, irrelevant, in other words, I feel I had to reinvent the wheel to get started. I simply had nothing to go on because I’d already been there, done that. Which was very, very hard (more anon).
What also interests me is those poets and painters who can create in a great variety of ’styles’ employing a bewildering variety of techniques and materials. Yet if they’re really great we have the sense that we already ‘know’ them, we ‘know who they are,” we ‘know we can trust them’–which brings me back to my sense that I want to know who this or that painter or poet is before I pass my judgement. I want the proof of relationship in addition to the proof of the pudding. I want continuum.
I know you’re already mostly in bed by now, but I’m afraid I’m not quite finished. Forgive me for not waiting for your sun to rise.
Where all this got started, this leg of the chillin the villies thread, was with Colin Ward’s statement, “Poetry is verbatim.” If you follow that back just a bit you’ll see where shortly before Colin Ward had stopped the romantic tendencies of the discussion by insisting to Annie Finch, I think, that pre-literate poetry was word for word as it was always overseen by the elders. “Oh, yes,” he wrote, “it would 99+% of the time, in fact. Elders would see to that! . . . It was the pedagogue’s job to see that it didn’t do so [change] from one speaker to the next. Rulers might not have been invented to draw straight lines!”
I agree with Colin Ward on this–indeed, I was trying to say just that when he got me with his magnum verbatim! But I see a big problem in the craft aspect of the training as it’s practiced today in America, and particularly on a gigantic website like Poets.org where the Elders are invisible and inviolate–a little like they are in Iran. And I don’t think teachers should be like that in poetry, ever, simply because in the training of poets the intellectual, emotional and moral development is far more important to the quality of the poetry that ensues than the mechanics!
Would you agree the Elders would have seen to that too, Colin Ward?
What I’m getting at is that I think we’ve arrived at a perilous moment in American poetry, because for the first time in the history of the world, poetry is a business, and most of the Elders get paid. They also give out the prizes, get the books published, write the blurbs, write the reviews, and make the appointments. So craft has a lot more riding on it than mere skill development!
There–I’ve got that one off my chest. (And thank God, I say, for Ruth Lilly’s genius generosity, not to forget Harriet!)
Finally, I too was very struck by the Richard Hugo quote Don Share posted just above. “Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake.”
It sure was–just listen to the tone of that verbatim!
Christopher
I have a feeling that the silence following my last posts has to do with my ignorance. I didn’t realize Colin Ward was Kaltica until I was just tipped off by e-mail. On the other hand, I did get the same sort of feeling from Colin Ward’s “Poetry is verbatim” put-down as I used to get from Kaltica on Poets.org–which is perhaps why I felt inclined not to take it lying down.
I think I was also reacting to Colin’s notion of the “Elders,” which felt a bit dictatorial to me. Because I don’t share that view of the Elder at all, perhaps because I’m 70. I agree entirely with Colin that the Elders had to ensure that the oral traditions of the people remained “verbatim,” but I think genuine “Elders,” and I mean in any epoch or society, also have the obligation to listen wisely. For that’s what you have to do if you’re going to take the equally important responsibility to be a guardian of the inner life as well.
Which I think has been left out of the American big-bang poetry hoe-down entirely.
My informant assures me that everybody knows Colin Ward is Kaltica, that it’s right up front on Poets.org so I don’t have to be sensitive about protecting his identity.
Perhaps we now need to wait for another thread to go on with this. Whatever, I’d truly love to be a part of the discussion on the matters arising.
Christopher
Yes, Don hit a homerun with that Hugo quote. Good one, Donnie. That was a donnybrook.
Hugo! Merci! Edgar Poe and Edna Millay thank you. (Poe & Millay were not sentimental, so much, as passionate, but we understand Hugo’s point…)
Hugo’s quote is marvelous because in a few words he has expressed what happens when you embrace the manifesto-ism of Revolt.
You go to far.
‘Kill the Victorians! They were all sentimental! And the sentimental is bad! And come to think of it, the Romantics often sound like the Victorians, so kill them, too!’
You reject. You fall into resentment and pessimism. You paint yourself into a corner. Your ignorance takes on a life of its own.
This is, indeed, what happened to American Letters.
It began with Emerson’s ‘The Poet,’ one of Mr. E.’s Carlyle-inspired little sermons meant to unsettle the elders of the harvard divinity school.
We got in Emerson’s car and we drove.
We began to drink the gin, Revolt, and we began to drive fast.
We killed Edgar Poe in a hit-and-run. Tribune owner Greeley: “I’ll take care of this! Keep driving!” And we kept driving.
When we stopped momentarily, after we killed Poe, Whitman, ‘heeey, comrade!’ jumped aboard.
We drove across the Atlantic ocean.
The English, fresh off their secret support of the Confederate States of America, were waiting for us.
“Mr. Emerson and Mr. Whitman! Welcome! How good to see you! We hear you are not so beloved in America! No one reads Whitman’s book! They resent you! But WE love you.”
“We…like America. All that…cotton. Feel that it’s….ours, in fact. Poe? Never liked him. Uppity American, who does he think he is? Those idiotic French fancy Mr. Poe. Don’t worry, we’ll fix that. We’ll fix everything. We’ll make a transatlantic movement of decadence which shall embrace ALL the elements of Revolt, French (some of them are good at decadence, you know) American,(they’re learning, they’re learning…) our English, (luv, we’re the BEST) Russian, Italian, it doesn’t matter from where. We’ll pick on the Germans, the Huns will be our common enemy for the time being, the Prussians make great fodder. Our transatlantic art movement will be experimental, forward-looking, a treasure of eclectic Revolt! Oh, the social freedoms! (wink, wink). To be an artist, it will no longer be necessary to be good! Just experimental!” And here they give us a long kiss. “We shall despise the middle classes and we shall kill as many Germans as we can, in World War I, the Great War, as we call it!”
“Here is Lady Ottoline Morrell, cousin to the Queen Mother! (whisper) You MUST get to know her!”
“I want to introduce you to Mr. Huefner of the British Propaganda War Office…known as Ford Madox Ford…he’s in charge of stirrng up hatred against Germans and support for the British…he couldn’t keep his German name for reasons which I’m sure you understand…his grandfather was a pre-Raphaelite painter…grew up among them…Whitman’s dying reputation was kept alive by the pre-Raphaelites…and Ruskin helped us to realize that one can love the gothic and hate the renaissance, one can be a fanatic in this way, reject what is good (Raphael) and embrace what is older…and here is a man, Tom, whose grandfather knew Emerson, fresh out of Harvard, who is developing similar ideas to Ruskin, our revered countryman, rejecting the great Romantics and Victorians for a few decadent French poets and the metaphysicals, odd, I know, but just the sort of thing we need for our ‘Movement of Revolt,’ and speaking of odd, here is Mr. Ezra Pound, who found Ford Madox Ford right off the boat…”
We are still driving that car.
Very fast.
Poe thrived in the north, and had a universalist, artistic appeal as he tried to elevate American Letters as a journalist, and he was NOT the ‘red-neck, pro-slavery southerner’ as he is sometimes depicted, but, ironically, that bizarre reality can in fact be found in The Fugitive/Modernist/New Critics’ Southern Agrarian movement, expressed in the 1930 collectively written manifesto, ‘I’ll Take My Stand.’ We should get the record straight once and for all: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren held ‘red neck’ views, not Poe.
In addition, we also need to acknowledge that Emerson, Whitman, and Thomas Caryle, who influenced both Emerson and Whitman, were far more reactionary in these matters than Poe.
I don’t like to wander off the aesthetic path, but literature IS history, as well, and I just wanted to clarify this as part of the general sweep of my argument. We can pick over details, of course, and it’s not necessary to take every writer to court on every last thing they may have said, but I think the outline of the matter needs to be known.
Back to aesthetics, where it’s always more interesting to be:
Here is T.S. Eliot in a 1942 lecture, “The Music of Poetry:”
“No one has better cause to know than I, that a great deal of bad prose has been written under the name of free verse; though whether its authors wrote bad prose or bad verse, or bad verse in one style or in another, seems to me a matter of indifference. But only a bad poet could welcome free verse as a liberation from form. It was a revolt against dead form, and a preparation for new form or the renewal of the old; it was insistence upon the inner unity which is unique to every poem, against the outer unity which is typical. The poem comes from the form, in the sense that a form grows out of the attempt of somebody to say something; just as a system of prosody is only a formulation of the identities in the rhythms of a succession of poets influenced by each other.”
This is of stunning importance.
We all know, those of us on the Emerson ride, the ride of Revolt, that Emerson said NOTHING specific about poetic form; Emerson simply attacked a shadow-Poe (without naming him) in “The Poet,” in the most general, vatic sort of terms (which Mr. E. was famous for). On the other hand, Poe, as journalist, reviewer, and essay writer (especially “Rationale of Verse”) made specific, detailed observations of form.
In this remarkable passage, Eliot returns to his roots (of Revolt) sounding like the heir of Emerson (that connection covered up for so long).
Eliot intones: “It was a revolt against dead form, and a preparation for new form or the renewal of the old…”
This is Emerson-speak, this is Modernist-Revolt speak. Poe would NEVER say something like this. This is vague manifesto-ism: “a revolt against dead form.”
A poet succeeds or fails *uniquely* in every poem using *whatever form he requires.* No ‘form’ is ‘dead.’ Only a madman in the ’school of revolt’ would refer to ‘form’ that is ‘dead.’ This nonsense re: “a revolt against dead form” is pure nutty manifesto-ism. It’s like saying “Down with iambic pentameter!” which would be seen for the insanity it is immediately; so instead the rebel insidiously says, ‘the revolt against dead form.’ If you ask the modernist directly to point to ‘dead form’ they would give you a blank look. All that bad prose written in the name of free verse that Eliot refers to–is that ‘dead form?’ Not according to the modernist. Milton and Shelley and Poe are ‘dead form,’ according to the modernism of revolt, according to Emerson and his heirs. But ‘form’ that is ‘form’ is not ‘dead.’ It is ‘form’ and one can innovate on it–or not. No ‘revolt’ is necessary. The great poet who knows his ‘form’ will write good poems, the bad poet who doesn’t know his ‘form’ will write bad poems, and honest amateur critics will keep us clean about it all. This talk of ‘revolt’ should be seen for the trick that it is. “Revolt” is only necessary to the wooly-headed modernist. Poe & Shelley both were innovators and said poets need to innovate, every generation should see innovation in form, of course! but ‘revolt against dead form’ is just brick-throwing, and Eliot usually avoids this kind of rhetoric, but here his disguise, his connection to his cousin, Emerson, slips.
Eliot then lapses into opium-addicted organic-talk, more nutty Emerson-ism:
“it was insistence upon the inner unity which is unique to every poem, against the outer unity which is typical. The poem comes from the form, in the sense that a form grows out of the attempt of somebody to say something…”
This, in fact, is pure Ashbery-ism! “a form grows out of the attempt of somebody to say something…”
So the philosophical chain as I have analyzed it, is complete: Emerson to Eliot to Ashbery. The ignorant, nitrous oxide line of modern Letters, that now dominates poetry, and has pushed aside the Shakespeare-Keats-Shelley-Poe-Millay line.
Annie,
This is why my analogy DOES hold, because form & content ARE seperable in poetry just as they are in song: w/ lyrics and music seen as different yet related things.
The New Critics’ decree AGAINST paraphrasing is an insidious decree, and it fits right in to your feeling that we cannot separate form and content in poetry.
This error leads to Ashbery-ism. A healthy response to Ashbery-sim is “But this doesn’t make any sense!” The Ashbery-ist replys, “Sense? What’s that? You cannot separate out sense from poetry. Poetry cannot be separated into elements; it has an aesthetic purity which cannot be paraphrased!”
This effectively walls off commonsense sorts of responses.
“as one put drunk into the packet boat” in this scenario becomes poetry immune to criticism, since the phrase just came to Ashbery in one inspired gestalt and to ask for any sort of paraphrase of the poem ‘As One Put Drunk Into The Packet Boat’ is to violate the Great New Critical Rule.
We fall into the rabbit hole of insidious aesthetic one-ness.
There is no such thing as ‘one experience.’
Unity of Impression, so rightly prized by Poe, depends upon elements which exist separately and combine harmoniously–we are aware of the combining into the one.
Ashbery-ism prohibits this; it is the One, but without the unity of impression.
So you didn’t read the responses to yr earlier post, where you would have learned that “As one put drunk into the packet-boat” is a line from Marvell.
Also, as should be evident from the several responses to yr feeble attacks on Ashbery, no one but no one ever responds thus: “Sense? What’s that? You cannot separate out sense from poetry. Poetry cannot be separated into elements; it has an aesthetic purity which cannot be paraphrased!”
“Aesthetic purity”? Who he?
Robbins,
You needn’t get over-excited. The line from the Tom May poem was either ‘looked-up’ by our young Ashbery or got from Ashbery’s memory, but ‘catch-as-catch-can’ erudition is hardly the issue. Anyone can blend elements. The key is to do so harmoniously.
You seem to be having trouble with the philosophy. I’ve got an idea. Read the Complete Works of Andrew Marvell and then get back to me.
Thomas
Nice job trying to pretend you knew about the Marvell poem all along.
See, Thomas, the purpose of pointing out that you didn’t recognize the Marvell reference wasn’t to make some point about Ashbery’s “erudition”, it was meant as an indication of how little you really know about anything you talk about on this site, and how this gives us a clue as to how seriously anyone should take your longwinded lectures.
Much as I disrespect Thomas’s tilting agsinst century-old windmills of Modernism, and while I agree he did put his paws in the snare fair and proper by attacking the line itself under the impression it was Ashbery’s, one-upsmanship as to references feels like sleazy play. I didn’t know the line was Marvell’s; I’m glad to read his long eloquent and topical heroic couplets which despite an elite education in English Lit way back in the last millennium, had so far avoided me. Footnote, footnote, who’s got the footnote?
The point isn’t oneupsmanship. It’s an obscure Marvell poem; I doubt many readers catch the reference, & I certainly don’t hold it against anyone. But the person in question was inveighing against the line & generally indulging his habit of leaping without cracking a book. In another thread, I had pointed out that the line was from Marvell in response to a rather embarrassing attempt to denigrate the poem by making fun of the title, so I thought it rather perverse that the person would continue to do so here, although for the sake of decorum we should now go along with the rather silly notion that he knew it was Marvell all along.
Since I regularly teach the complete works of Andrew Marvell, let’s assume I’ve read it, too. And you’re quite wrong about Ashbery’s deep relationship to Renaissance poetry; it’s simply obvious that you know nothing about him or his work. If I were you, I’d have a look at his lectures on Beddoes or Clare, spend some time with the poetry. That way you can at least speak from a position of knowledge. Everything Matt says is absolutely correct, & nothing in your reply to me answers the objection. I notice you carefully avoided engaging me earlier when it was clear that I knew what Ashbery was doing in “As One Put Drunk,” whereas you’d never heard of the poem before. I don’t mind people arguing against Ashbery, but I rather think they have an obligation to know the first thing about what they’re talking about. So far you’ve got every single facet of his work backward, you’ve made egregious errors, you’ve misread, misstated, misidentifed, & generally misunderstood. Are you seriously enjoying this?
Michael,
I certainly had heard of ‘As One Put Drunk Into The Packet Boat;’ it’s in my first edition, Vintage Book of Contemporary Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy, which I’ve had for years.
Ashbery graduated from Harvard in 1949. That’s 60 years. ‘Packet Boat’ is, according to you, one of his best things. That’s quite sad, really.
The line, or title, in question, has no existence, really, under our examination so far, except as a signifier of Ashbery’s erudition. This was my first point, and this remains the point. It’s a pity you can’t see that.
Thomas
Tom May’s Death
by Andrew Marvell
As one put drunk into the packet-boat
Tom May was hurried hence and did not know’t.
But was amazed on the Elysian side,
And with an eye uncertain, gazing wide,
Could not determine in what place he was,
(For whence, in Stephen’s Alley, trees or grass?)
Nor there The Pope’s Head, nor The Mitre lay,
Signs by which still he found and lost his way.
At last while doubtfully he all compares,
He saw near hand, as he imagined, Ayres.
Such did he seem for coruplence and port,
But ’twas a man much of another sort;
’Twas Ben that in the dusky laurel shade
Amongst the chorus of old poets layed,
Sounding of ancient heroes, such as were
The subjects’ safety, and the rebels’ fear,
And how a double-headed vulture eats
Brutus and Cassius, the people’s cheats.
But seeing May, he varied straight his song,
Gently to signify that he was wrong.
‘Cups more than civil of Emathian wine,
I sing’ (said he) ‘and the Pharsalian Sign,
Where the historian of the commonsealth
In his own bowels sheathed the conquering health.’
By this, May to himself and them was come,
He found he was translated, and by whom,
Yet then with foot as strumbling as his tongue
Pressed for his place among the learned throng.
But Ben, who knew not neither foe nor friend,
Sworn enemy to all that do pretend,
Rose; more than ever he was seen severe,
Shook his gray locks, and his own bays did tear
At this intrusion. Then with laurel wand—
The awful sign of his supreme command,
At whose dread whisk Virgil himself does quake,
And Horace patiently its stroke does take—
As he crowds in, he whipped him o’er the pate
Like Pembroke at the masque, and then did rate:
‘Far from these blessed shades tread back again
Most servile wit, and mercenary pen,
Polydore, Lucan, Alan, Vandal, Goth
Malignant poet and historian both,
Go seek the novice statesmen, and obtrude
On them some Roman-cast similitude,
Tell them of liberty, the stories fine,
Until you all grow consuls in your wine;
Or thou, Dictator of the glass, bestow
On him the Cato, this the Cicero,
Transferring old Rome hither in your talk,
As Bethlem’s House did to Loreto walk.
Foul architect, that hadst not eye to see
How ill the measures of these states agree,
And who by Rome’s example England lay,
Those but to Lucan to continue May.
But thee nor ignorance nor seeming good
Misled, bu malice fixed and understood.
Because some one than thee more worthy wears
The sacred laurel, hence are all these tears?
Must therefore all the world be set on flame,
Because a gázette-writer missed his aim?
And for a tankard-bearing muse must we
As for the basket, Guelphs and Ghib’llines be?
When the sword glitters o’er the judge’s head,
And fear has coward churchmen silencèd,
Then is the poet’s time, ’tis then he draws,
And single fights forsaken virtue’s cause.
He, when the wheel of empire whirleth back,
And though the world’s disjointed axle crack,
Sings still of ancient rights and better times,
Seeks wretched good, and arraigns successful crimes.
But thou, base man, first prostituted hast
Our spotless knowledge and the studies chaste,
Apostatizing from our arts and us,
To turn the chronicler to Spartacus.
Yet wast thou taken hence with equal fate,
Before thou couldst great Charles his death relate.
But what will deeper wound thy little mind,
Hast left surviving D’Avenant still behind,
Who laughs to see in this thy death renewed,
Right Roman poverty and gratitude.
Poor poet thou, and grateful senate they,
Who thy last reckoning did so largely pay,
And with the public gravity would come,
When thou hadst drunk thy last to lead thee home,
If that can be thy home where Spenser lies,
And reverend Chaucer, but their dust does rise
Against thee, and expels thee from their side,
As th’ eagle’s plumes from other birds divide.
Nor here thy shade must dwell. Return, return,
Where sulphury Phlegethon does ever burn.
Thee Cerberus with all his jaws shall gnash,
Megaera thee with all her serpents lash.
Thou riveted into Ixion’s wheel
Shalt break, and the perpetual vulture feel.
’Tis just, what torments poets e’er did feign,
Thou first historically shouldst sustain.’
Thus, by irrevocable sentence cast,
May, only Master of these Revels, passed.
And straight he vanished in the cloud of pitch,
Such as unto the Sabbath bears the witch.
~~~~~~~~
THERE.
One-trick pony.
One horse town.
Unity of form is an inward attempt at the liberation of outward, organic identity found in the sculptures of artists such as Bernini in the Piazza Navona, Palazzi Pontificior and most overtly, the guilt bronze Altar Cross in the Treasury of San Pietro.
The rendering of physical form using the abstractions of the illustrations in De Divina Proportione, which Leonardo used after appropriating his own Pythagorean Golden Ratio, set in place a datum which connects the metaphorical Renaissance decadence of 17C Italian poetry, expemplified in the Gongorism school headed by Luis de Góngora, who was coterminous with Leonardo – and the ancient Homeric stir of the origonal Homeric poetic, which me and my major friends who are not talking gobble dee gook, would wish to stamp upin the current age with a bit of bluff and blather, using fancy pant sounding foeregn names no one has heard of, a bit of bullshit baffles brains statements such as:
The inner design of the poem, bodies forth first from the collision between one’s unconscious realm in which the outward world mirrors the inner desire to put into form soime abstract longing – and a conscious facility abroad in the genral cosmos.
Naturally, sounding as intelligent as we do, and armed with the trick of sneering and calling anyone who disagrees with us as minor voices, coupled with a pliant fan-base of people with self-esteen isssues who are keen to shed any their lower-class self and escape into a realm of sophisticated chat where they think hanging round playing a game of what one writes being considered incredibly important by a room full of bores all pretending such is so — hence the confusion, and people taking what the top 1% with a straight face, for a larf as serious and not just fun.
Thank you, Desmond. Thus the inanity of the PRE-raphaelite Brotherhood, one of the chief sources of Modernism (see Ford Madox Ford) which plays hop-scotch over entire eras of literature (see Eliot, Pound) for the sake of a erudite con of manifesto-ism. Jettison: the High Renaisance. check. Shakespeare. check. Milton. check. Pope. check. Samuel Johnson. check. Byron. check. Shelley. check. Poe. check. Embrace Ossian. Make up something called ‘dissociation of sensibility.’ Make obscure Elizabethans and decadent French really important. check. Once this gains acceptance, all bets are off. We then live in Alice’s Wonderland, or ‘Alice’s Waste Land.’ Hold on tight. Anyone may say anything. And they do. Dunces are crowned.
Thomas Chatterton and Arthur Rimbaud are to blame.
I am compelled to respond to the comments here because, obviously, my opinions, grounded as they are in such expansive and deep knowledge of all things poetic and worldly will be of great value to all those here. I feel that I would be remiss if I didn’t share my views on this subject and deprive the rest of you poor, sad ignorant fools of my profound understanding and experience. I also think that, back when I was in school, my experiences with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and furthermore, I remember that the earlier poets were so understanding of the human condition, a condition which I, who now shares with you the exceptional insight and understanding that I have gained of these poets, should be so magnanimous to allow you a peek into my blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and in addition to that I also think that there should be more academic winnowing and conformity to the will of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because I, unlike you, have many things to say that will lead you to understand the more subtle and significant points of poetry which, of course, I already do because I have read and compared and analyzed every known living poet, even those unknown, and so I wanted to share my remarkable recognition of the importance of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and in addition to that I also think that there should be more academic winnowing and conformity to the will of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and in addition to that I also think that there should be more academic winnowing and conformity to the will of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Thank you. I anticipate your adoring and sycophantic response to my overarching and all-encompassing understanding of all things poetic, indeed universal, philosophical, theological, metaphysical and I know how to raise tomatoes also, so you should show obeisance to the extreme ,because as you already know the value of my, unlike yours, most valuable opinions. And another thing, I think that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and in addition to that I also think that there should be more academic winnowing and conformity to the will of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and in addition to that I also think that there should be more academic winnowing and conformity to the will of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just my opinion.
Matt,
The same goes for you. See my latest to Robbins.
Thanks,
Thomas
I am compelled to respond to the comments here because, obviously, my opinions, grounded as they are in such expansive and deep knowledge of all things poetic and worldly will be of great value to all those here. I feel that I would be remiss if I didn’t share my views on this subject and deprive the rest of you poor, sad ignorant fools of my profound understanding and experience. I also think that, back when I was in school, my experiences with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and furthermore, I remember that the earlier poets were so understanding of the human condition, a condition which I, who now shares with you the exceptional insight and understanding that I have gained of these poets, should be so magnanimous to allow you a peek into my blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and in addition to that I also think that there should be more academic winnowing and conformity to the will of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because I, unlike you, have many things to say that will lead you to understand the more subtle and significant points of poetry which, of course, I already do because I have read and compared and analyzed every known living poet, even those unknown, and so I wanted to share my remarkable recognition of the importance of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and in addition to that I also think that there should be more academic winnowing and conformity to the will of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And another thing…
All work and no play makes Jack a good boy. All work and no play makes Jack a good boy. All work and no play makes Jack a good boy. All work and no play makes Jack a good boy. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and in addition to that I also think that there should be more academic winnowing and conformity to the will of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Thank you. I anticipate your adoring and sycophantic response to my overarching and all-encompassing understanding of all things poetic, indeed universal, philosophical, theological, scientific, metaphysical and I know how to raise tomatoes too.
So you should genuflect to the extreme because, as you already know, the value of my, unlike yours, most valuable opinions are of extreme importance to me. And another thing, I think that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and in addition to that I also think that there should be more academic winnowing and conformity to the will of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and in addition to that I also think that there should be more academic winnowing and conformity to the will of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just my opinion, is all.
“As one put drunk into the packet-boat” is a line from Marvell.
Wow. I had no idea about this and I don’t even think Harold Bloom mentioned it when we read it in his class.
I have always liked Ashbery’s 17th-century-ness.
Annie,
A marvel, indeed, that you read the ashes and chewed on the berries of this poem with Harold Bloom, one of Ashbery’s most prominent champions, yet you didn’t know Ashbery purloined his letter(s) from Marvell. The Finch did not see the Berry for the Bloom?
It just goes to show how profitable poetry-stealing is; not only is it difficult to detect, but if ‘found out,’ the thief merely comes across as clever and erudite.
This example, interestingly enough, suppports my quarrel with the New Critics, for Ashbery’s ‘act’ occurs ‘outside’ the ’sacred (new critical) text’ of the poem, and thus is an event banned from our critical lexicon by the myopic New Critic. The New Critic is trained only to ’see’ the finished, whole result–where form and content are one– but we ’see’ how this is a false ideal, in fact.
In order to be detective/critics, we need to think outside the box (see Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’) and this means also thinking outside ‘the poem’ and not allowing ourselves to be tripped up by male ego new critical erudition. We may even have to be a philosopher a la Plato and embarrass the poet, if it comes to that.
Thomas
I get a lot of pleasure from you, Desmond Swords:
“Naturally, sounding as intelligent as we do, and armed with the trick of sneering and calling anyone who disagrees with us as minor voices, coupled with a pliant fan-base of people with self-esteen isssues who are keen to shed any their lower-class self and escape into a realm of sophisticated chat where they think hanging round playing a game of what one writes being considered incredibly important by a room full of bores all pretending such is so — hence the confusion, and people taking what the top 1% with a straight face, for a larf as serious and not just fun.”
Self-esteem issues indeed, and pleasure issues too, i.e. people who take themselves so seriously they are unable to grasp the fun side of ideas anymore, and grow so rigid insight is no longer possible, the intellect so immune to shock and awe.
I think the surest sign of a genuine “Elder” of the sort I had in mind a little way up on this thread was a.) a sense of fun and b.) a sense of the ridiculous.
I’ve also heard a lot of pleasant surprise and assent in response to Richard Hugo’s insistence that it was a terrible waste to assume that “the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art.” Takes a good gulp to get the mind around a revolutionary idea like that, indeed a rethink of everything we’ve been taught.
And the Coleridge too that we all quote so frequently without bothering to figure out what it actually says:
“A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct ratification from each component part.”
And Michael, John Ashbery is a whole lot more like that than his poe-faced apologists (love that expression and have been waiting to use it!)!
Christopher
Thanks very much Woodie.
I enjoy reading your stuff, the wisdom of senty years that bodies forth from an uncompetitive liver of life, your unique perspective of being an American in SE Asia paints some very perspicacious and pertinent pictures with a core philisophical poetic of acceptance, tolerance and desire to understand the other point of view, one of the most human presences here.
We only have text to go on, so at some level, though we all know we are essentially the same – human beings; we exist only in the mind of one another as a fiction really, a textual representtion of ourselves, simulacral renderings of the real thing, binary data bits, letters, a masquerade in the imagination, which He who needs not naming, the Mossbawn magus, says, that it is:
“…precisely this masquerade of fictions and ironies and fantastic scenarios that can draw us out and bring us close to ourselves. The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get at truths about who and what we are or might be”
~
i wrote a pong in response to Annie’s ping on the Taggard thread where we are both pretending to prove our version of the Taggard poem. Hers that it is dactylic and mine that it is free verse with no regular metric.
I started on the high horse, but by the time i finished it, had got closer to something that had brought me closer to myself, and my feelings toward the mental fiction of Annie Finch which i hold and is down to her textual representation of herself, which began with an air of competitive superiority on my part, dissolved as i hoked in deeper to waht i was really after trying to get out and i came to understand that – it doesn’t really matter who is right or wrong, as what’s important is not being the best, the cleverest, the biggest pain in the ass, but Humanity.
I will try to post it again tommorow.
cheers
I am moved by this comment Desmond. it reminds me of what Robert Creeley said at what I think was his last reading, in a bookstore at the Virginia festival of the book. He sat on a table and swung his legs and was so direct. And the impact of death was in the room. He said something like, “now I see it has all really been very simple all along. It’s about humanity and being kind to each other. Nothing else matters.” I think I’ve posted about that reading at greater length somewhere online.
Desmond,
My computer isn’t working very well and I lost all but the first three letters of the last word in the last big paragraph that came up with your last post.
So “Hum…..” Hum….” what? It’s got to be a proper name because it’s capitalized. Surely you don’t mean Humphrey Bogart or Humbert Humbert? Do you mean Humpty Dumpty because the pieces can never be put back together again?
Yes, eureka! Humboldt, Alexander von Humboldt!
T.S. Eliot–grandson, William Greenleaf Eliot (founder of Washington U., St. Louis, classmate of Ralph Waldo Emerson, married sister of transcendalist poet Christopher Pease Cranch)–who published his rant against Poe, ‘From Poe to Valery’ in 1949, the year Ashbery graduated from Harvard, created, in the first half of the 20th century, the template for all modernist erudition to follow.
In his 1942 lecture, “The Music of Poetry,” Eliot is, as usual, saying excellent things, but also things which are nothing but fudge. Eliot was something like his ancestor, Emerson, in this, who had a tendency to throw a great deal against the wall, hoping some of it would stick. One often reads, in Emerson, and Eliot, profundity in proximity to pure trash, an elegance lacking facts and details to back up its arguments.
“No one has better cause to know than I, that a great deal of bad prose has been written under the name of free verse; though whether its authors wrote bad prose or bad verse, or bad verse in one style or in another, seems to me a matter of indifference. But only a bad poet could welcome free verse as a liberation from form. It was a revolt against dead form, and a preparation for new form or the renewal of the old; it was insistence upon the inner unity which is unique to every poem, against the outer unity which is typical. The poem comes from the form, in the sense that a form grows out of the attempt of somebody to say something; just as a system of prosody is only a formulation of the identities in the rhythms of a succession of poets influenced by each other.”
The confusion here, in which Eliot is at pains to clarify that bad verse or bad prose is, most importantly, bad, and all that matters is that the writing in question (whether prose or verse) is bad, arises from the vague manifesto-ism which he and his colleagues created in the first place. Here is the older, successful man of Letters apologizing for the idiocy of his ‘old gang ways.’ Such an apology is necessary because the Modernists were NOT specific in their obsevations; where’s the specificity in Emerson, in Pound, in Eliot? Where is their ‘Rationale of Verse?’
If you’re going to make a fuss–which Eliot is still doing here–about ‘the revolt against dead form,’ you have to be specific. Eliot is being irresponsible, and surely he knows it, for he is tacitly opening the gates to ‘bad prose,’ vindicated under a banner of vagueness: ‘revolt against dead form!’ Is Shelley ‘dead form?’ Is he, or not? Fashion may indeed say it is so, and with rhetoric so vague, any sort of unfortunate things can happen.
Pedagogy is serious business. Manifesto-ism is not a game. One affects countless generations of young minds. One shouldn’t be sloppy.
Eliot posits a good ‘inner unity’ against a bad ‘outer unity,’ but this is irresponsible, opium-eating nonsense, the goofy romantic side of Emerson in operation, for if the word ‘unity’ is properly used, we cannot presuppose a ‘inner’ unity AND a ‘outer’ unity–it doesn’t compute. It creates a straw man: ‘outer unity’ which is ‘typical’ to be knocked over by a ‘unique’ and ‘inner unity’ which is not defined.
For Eliot to say that ‘form’ grows out of ‘the attempt of somebody to say something’ is brilliant, if somewhat vague. If prose is ’somebody saying something,’ then poetry is ‘the attempt of somebody to say something’ and perhaps here is the discriminating definition at last. Even the purest Imagism is still ‘the attempt of somebody to say something.’ But what of Eliot’s famous ‘dissociation of sensibility?’ The younger Eliot was once certain how crucial ‘the attempt of somebody to say something’ depended on the correspondence of feeling and object, but here Eliot’s ‘form’ arises out of an ‘attempt to say,’ a problematic formula, since ‘attempt’ opens the door to, well, Ashbery-ism, an exquisite and pleasant ‘attempt’ or seeming ‘attempt,’ to say something.
But this is finally too vague, and even crude, as Eliot’s rejection of Milton and the Romantics was, based on what must be seen as the absurd ‘dissociation of sensibility’ theory.
Here is a far more reasonable description (written before Eliot was born) of the difference between the Metaphysicals and the Romantics:
“Almost every devout reader of the old English bards, if demanded his opinion of their productions, would mention vaguely, yet with perfect sincerity, a sense of dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, undefinable delight. Upon being required to point out the source of this so shadowy pleasure, he would be apt to speak of the quaint in phraseology and of the grotesque in rhythm. And this quaintness and grotesqueness are, as we have elsewhere endeavored to show, very powerful, and if well managed, very admissible adjuncts to Ideality. But in the present instance they arise independently of the author’s will, and are matters altogether apart from his intention. The American Monthly has forcibly painted the general character of the old English Muse. She was a maid, frank, guileless, and perfectly sincere, and although very learned at times, still very learned without art.
No general error evinces a more thorough confusion of ideas than the error of supposing Donne and Cowley metaphysical in the sense wherein Wordsworth and Coleridge are so. With the two former ethics were the end — with the two latter the means. The poet of the Creation wished, by highly artificial verse, to inculcate what he considered moral truth — he of the Ancient Mariner to infuse the Poetic Sentiment through channels suggested by mental analysis. The one finished by complete failure what he commenced in the grossest misconception — the other, by a path which could not possibly lead him astray, arrived at a certainty and intensity of triumph which is not the less brilliant and glorious because concentrated among the very few who have the power to perceive it.
It will now be seen that even the “metaphysical verse” of Cowley is no more than evidence of the straight-forward simplicity and single-heartedness of the man. And he was in all this but a type of his – school — for we may as well designate in this way the entire class of writers whose poems are bound up in the volume before us, and throughout all of whom runs a very perceptible general character. They used but little art in composition. Their writings sprang immediately from the soul — and partook intensely of the nature of that soul. It is not difficult to perceive the tendency of this glorious – abandon. To elevate immeasurably all the energies of mind — but again — so to mingle the greatest possible fire, force, delicacy, and all good things, with the lowest possible bathos, baldness, and utter imbecility, as to render it not a matter of doubt, but of certainty, that the average results of mind in such a – school, will be found inferior to those results in one (ceteris paribus) more artificial. Such, we think, is the view of the older English Poetry, in which a very calm examination will bear us out. The quaintness in manner of which we were just speaking, is an adventitious advantage. It formed no portion of the poet’s intention. Words and their rhythm have varied. Verses which affect us today with a vivid delight, and which delight in some instances, may be traced to this one source of grotesqueness and to none other, must have worn in the days of their construction an air of a very common-place nature. This is no argument, it will be said, against the poems – now. Certainly not — we mean it for the poets – then. The notion of – power, of excessive – power, in the English antique writers should be put in its proper light. This is all we desire to see done.”
The author of the above passage is by none other than that working critic, Edgar Poe.
“No general error evinces a more thorough confusion of ideas than the error of supposing Donne and Cowley metaphysical in the sense wherein Wordsworth and Coleridge are so. With the two former ethics were the end — with the two latter the means.”
Here we see the great “error” of Eliot expressed tersely, concisely, wittily and prfoundly.