I might perhaps include all which it is necessary to say upon this subject by affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions, either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once.

RHE
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What, if anything, we care to do about the problem is another discussion entirely. FWIW, I am optimistic about a turnaround–perhaps even a dramatic one.

Best regards,

Colin

P.S.

I’m sorry to hear about your personal travails, Anselm, and about typing the wrong salutation earlier.

-o-
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Okay, back to Anslem’s post. I was reading this interview with Terese Svoboda conducted by Shya Scanlon:

SS: How important is music in determining syntax?

TS: Syntax is all about cracking the language for energy. The music between consonant and vowel is fricative, lush, and suggestive. The music between words–each a little instrument banging away–is that much more nuanced. Maybe because of this, I am musically deaf. That is not to say I can’t carry a tune or play an instrument (oboe and harp) but that I can’t bear it while I’m writing and since I all I ever want to do is write, music as it is ordinarily understood is rarely part of my world. Sound, on the other hand—I’ve collaborated a few times with Stephen Vitiello, a wonderful sound artist.

But in regards to your question of my personal attempts… I am not conscious of it until afterward. I can tell you what I believe occurs on a subconscious level from a distance of me re-examining the completed/attempted work.

I usually find myself following open sounds. O’s. M’s (combined with another letter which forces the M-mouth to go from closed to open, thus forcing the M to become an open letter) — sounds which begin in a closed fashion, then open up. I then find I begin trying to close those sounds. Moving, like the meditative humming of monks, from an open sound to a closed one — the back opening of the throat to the closed shape of the lips.

This is when I have a subject. If I do not have a subject in mind, I hear noises. Inaudible noises. And I feel as if I am attempting to convey these noises into words I can understand. I am not even conscious of it until later. Actually, I wasn’t even conscious of it (when writing without a subject) until your post.
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I’ve downloaded the NEA study. My apologies to Terreson and Michael James, with specific regard to the comments on poetry’s decline – see above repost. And I’ll read the full report and the basis of the study.
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I entered “nea poetry statistics” into Google. .52 seconds later I had all sorts of “concrete evidence,” which took the form of a “statistical study,” indeed, a “report,” even “research.” It obviously took you longer than .52 seconds to write this post, so one wonders what you think it means to “hear or read” something.
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http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/initiative_pa_summary.html

It is trying to do just what you are saying has never been done. I am not saying it succeeds–far from it–but it is trying. Trying might be more of a problem, in fact, than failing.
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Thanks.
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I mean, I think your “looking to hear” is going to be coupled with “how one hears” in any given moment. Then there’s what the poem is doing. So there’s a meeting of a type there.

More later.
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There seemed to be a movement against rhythmic tones, a kind of flatness many poets wanted to achieve. And since the brain works in patterns and rhythms (from inside the womb as our eyes barely work, we are stationed in essential sound cocoons), audiences/readerships naturally dwindled. I mean, it is not the sole issues for the -why-, but it definitely played a part. This is partially why Hip hop became the ‘new poetry’. At a time when poetry was dwindling, hip hop stepped forward. You can almost pinpoint the exact time period of this if you choose. It’s quite remarkable, really.

And now you begin to notice qualities of Hip hop influencing some of the most premier poets. Paul Muldoon, for instance.

But Anslem, much like Terreson, the question is slightly lost on me…
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If the question has to do with what the poet and her reader are looking to hear I would say it involves the organic organization of rhythm, what seduces the ear and transmits the poem to brain neuron receptors which, in turn, register significance of message and or beauty. I figure that crazy bastard, Olson, was right. The twin children of a poem are syllable and line, the father of which (or the mother for that matter), what he called the “Single Intelligence” is BREATH. But I think he did not pay right attention to poetry’s, at least in the English language, metrical organization, without which there is no rhythm and the poem becomes Schoenberg-like atonal; which, when you think about it, pretty well captures a whole bunch of American poetry since. This atonality.

So rhythm is what I listen for first. And it involves syllable structure, nuanced, certainly varied, metrical stress and pause, and the breath based line.

Here is a queasy thought. You suppose it possible that American poetry’s atonality is what has lost it a general readership?

Terreson
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Regarding melodrama and performance: I once heard the actor Martin Sheen speak, at a fund-raiser for a low-income housing group of which a friend of my wife’s is the director. Sheen began his speech with a rip-roaring performance of one of the lyrics from Tagore’s “Gitanjali,” full of verve, at high tempo, with great momentum. Absolutely marvelous and unforgettable.
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“Now, I go into the dime stores on Saturdays after matinees. I do it because [pause] there are girls in the stores. [laughter]

“But that’s going out of our mutual way, and what I wanted to do was set up some sort of a person as methodology for understanding my own effects in society, its reaction against myself in the ordinary accustomed passage to the working combinations of, well, applied machinery and carefully planned traffics. So much time goes into the overall programming of new appliances and neat fixtures simply so I want to know who I am and what I mean, just to others.”

Wieners wants to begin by speaking through someone else’s voice so that he can triangulate his own social self, the self that exists within the minds of others, or what he imagines to be their minds. He pitches his voice in the voice of another, and then he can observe the effects of the assumed voice on himself and compare them to the effects of that voice on society. In this way, by “set[ting] up some sort of a person as methodology,” he can come to know something about his “own effects in society.”

I was thinking that Wieners’s voice experiment comes out of a similar impulse to Anselm’s “working desire to find a sonic point of beginning that is not yet bound to a particular tone of voice.” In both there’s a resistance to coming into the poem already latched to a personal “I”, as well as a belief that the “voice” of the poem is not entirely in the hands of the person writing it.
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After years of reading Reznikoff with my own inner voice, it one day somehow occurred to me that he was not a midwestern Protestant, but a Jewish New Yorker, and that English wasn’t even his first language. (Was it Yiddish?) Adopting such an inner voice made me love the poems even more.

When reading 19th century narrative poetry, my inner voice becomes more melodramatic.
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