Poetics and Ruminations

Conceit

 

 

Photo by William Stafford, Oswego, New York, 1969.

Doctors call it having a “sleeping disorder” when one has insomnia, but in fact it is always night when the brain is most active, whether asleep or awake. Even if one isn’t a writer poring over words on a piece of paper, inventing fables, trapping myths, shooting griffons and unicorns with a sharp pen, one’s brain is doing the same thing though we don’t remember what it is we have dreamed. I think that a large part of the difference between a writer and one who does other things is that the writer somehow remembers at least scraps of what he or she dreams. On the other hand, however, perhaps

 

   If I were you, I wouldn't listen

   to me.  If I stood there in your shoes,

   staring at this graying man writing

in an attic late at night, a motor snoring

      and music trickling from speakers

         to seep through a sleeping house,

 

   I would turn away, thinking of dreams

   I have had, wondering if I'd have more

   someday, some night, some winter morning,

the blue of the lake dripping out of its ice, wind

      sniffing at the window.  But spring

         will have come by then.  If you

 

   were I you would be grateful.  You'd say,

   “Listen to that nib scratching, the grass

   struggling up through drifts of sleep, these words

forming themselves as though they meant something to me.”

      You would say, “Over the chimney

         of this house night is lifting

 

   beneath the wings of geese returning

   to their old haunts.”  And I would reply,

   “They have never been away.  All is

as it was, as it will always be.”  Then, shaking

      your head, you would turn your back, you

         would leave me here just as I

 

   would leave you, if I were you walking

   down the stairs, yellow light cascading

   out of the ceiling, along the eaves,

into the rooms full of sleeping people whose love

      will wash through our dreams of waking

         when we shall lie down at last.

 

 Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "Conceit."

 

The poem “Conceit” first appeared in VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Vol. I, No. i, Spring 1990. It was first collected in The Shifting Web: New and Selected Poems, Fayettefulle: University of Arkansas Press, 1989, and later in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press.com, © 2007 by Lewis Turco. The poem and essay together, by the same author, appear in La Famiglia: The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM

 

La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON 

The Difference Between Poetry and Poultry

Dear Contemporary Poetry Review,  

Jack Foley has very kindly suggested that I write a comment on X. J. Kennedy’s review of 77 Love Sonnets titled “My Dear Sonneteer: Garrison Keillor” in Contemporary Poetry Review because “Lewis Turco HATES Keillor and would gladly write a blistering response,” but that’s not accurate. I don’t “hate” Keillor, nor do I dislike his poetry, for I have never read any of it.  

However, I do think that nine out of ten poems that he publishes in his Writer’s Almanac are poor examples of language art, and that’s what I believe poetry ought to be, language art. I have discussed some of the worst examples of Keillor’s tasteless choice of poultry over the past couple of years on my blog, “Poetics and Ruminations.” 

Keillor also frustrates me because he manages to cripple even some of the good poems he now and again prints on-line with many egregious typographical errors in them—he also leaves typos all over the rest of the items in his Almanac. I have been cataloguing them on my blog as well.  

Because I have never read Keillor’s verse, I have formed no previous opinion of it. I don’t remember ever having run into it in any of the periodicals I have been reading for over half a century. (One would think I might have if it were publishable.) I have, however, read Dana Gioia’s excessively kind review of Keillor’s anthology Good Poems, and I have discussed that on my blog. I have also read Joe Kennedy’s review in the Contemporary Poetry Review. It does seem rather apologetic and tip-toesy, just as Dana’s essay did. Poets have asked me to take them off my email lists because I knock Keillor often. All of this leads me to believe that a lot of writers fear Keillor’s “power” and are willing to compromise their views in the hope that he will put their work now and again into his Almanac. 

I doubt that’s true of Joe and Dana, however, for they have their own reputations. I have admired Joe Kennedy’s work for half a century, and Dana has done excellent work about which I have written affirmatively on more than one occasion. I think Dana wants to encourage the appreciation of poetry by a larger public—that was his aim as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts; perhaps that’s true of Kennedy, too. 

However, encouraging the public to believe that what Keillor believes to be “good” poetry is, in fact good, in my opinion is not doing literature any favors and is likely to mislead people and perhaps turn intelligent readers off rather than on. As a teacher for nearly forty years, and in my books about writing poetry, I’ve tried to show individuals how to write well, and to encourage the appreciation of well-written poetry of all types, not merely rhymed and metered verse as many people seem to believe despite the range of material I write. Criticism ought to be honest, even if it angers readers and writers who are “chicken” to say anything adverse about Keillor or anybody else who might do them favors someday. 

Although I have not, to the best of my recollection, read any of Keillor’s verse, I have now encountered the smidgens and scraps that Kennedy included in his review, and I am both confused and troubled by the fact that Kennedy is willing to go along with Keillor’s characterization of the contents of his new book as “sonnets.” If we are talking about the traditional fourteen-line verse form written in iambic pentameter lines, then some, perhaps many of the poems in the book, are not sonnets at all. 

Here is the definition of the “sonnet” from the third edition (2000) of my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics:

The word sonnet originally meant simply “little song,” but it has come to denote a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter measures and rhymed in various ways. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet has an Italian octave which is made up of two Italian quatrains (abbaabba) after which a volta or turn takes place, a shift in direction or thought which is pursued in the succeeding sestet, which is either an Italian sestet (cdecde) or a Sicilian sestet (cdcdcd).—The English or Shakespearean sonnet has three Sicilian quatrains (abab cdcd efef) followed by a volta and a heroic couplet (gg). There are various other forms, but all of them are fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter verse.  

X. J. Kennedy quotes three lines from Keillor’s “So Much”: 

But I will sure be pissed

If I should have been an atheist.

Dear God: please exist.  

The first line is an iambic trimeter (three-foot) line, not iambic pentameter (five-foot) as required by the form; the second is iambic tetrameter (four-foot) though the first foot is an anapest not an iamb, and the third sounds more like a stich of accentual Anglo-Saxon prosody than a line of accentual-syllabic verse because each word takes a stress and in the center of the stich there is a caesura (a “pause,” here indicated by a colon). All three of the lines are too short, and they do not rhyme like any traditional sonnet form except the “blues sonnet” the stanzas of which, however, incrementally repeat the first line as the second line; stanza one, therefore, would rhyme AAa not aaa. A line quoted from another “poem” is, “My eyes get misty when I think of Julie Christie” which is sing-songy internally rhyming iambic hexameter (ending with a falling rhythm, an amphibrach, rather than an iamb). It’s also a stupid line, as Kennedy almost remarks. Joe gives other lines from something titled “Listeners”: 

O radio listeners, I think of you with gratitude,

Tuned in, simmering tomato sauce, trying not to boil it,

Or biking with headphones, or reclining nude

In the bathtub, the radio perched on the toilet.  

Line one is six feet long, iambic hexameter (apparently Keillor wants both io in “radio” and eners in “listeners” to be elisions), not pentameter. Line two is seven feet long, heptameter, and the first four verse feet are trochees, so it is a trochaic heptameter line. Line three is actually iambic pentameter, but the fourth line is at best anapestic tetrameter; however, it scans more like something Kennedy calls “free verse,” a mode of writing that doesn’t actually exist because there are only two modes in which any literary genre in any language in the world may be written, prose, which is “unmetered language” and verse which is “metered language.” There is no such thing as metered-unmetered language. Kennedy, who is a master versifier, is cutting Keillor far too much slack. Kennedy also quotes these lines from “October”: 

My novel has sold well (thank you, Lord)

And made the big best-seller lists

So let’s go home and lock the door

And practice being hedonists. 

This quatrain is iambic tetrameter all the way. The first line reminds me of those inane athletes who, if they score a touchdown or hit a home run, point at the clouds in gratitude to a beneficent deity who is looking down upon the field of endeavor and helping to defeat the hated enemy. And to think that, earlier, Keillor asked God to “please exist.” Would this be ambivalence or hypocrisy? Or perhaps merely inanity? One is certain that Keillor got something more than chicken feed for his novel and as a result is able to indulge his taste for hedonism, unlike the common man of Lake Wobegon who will surely enjoy spending good money to hear Keillor crowing about being cock of the walk. 

Kennedy writes, “Unsympathetic readers will charge Keillor with sentimentality, and at times that charge will be hard to deny [as in the Julie Christie line above] . . . . But what about those pain-filled entries . . . like ‘Sacrifice’?—‘Your therapist said we should break up so we did.’ Presumptuous to speculate, hard not to. One advantage of a tight form is that in it the poet can lay intimate feelings bare without looking naked as a skinned mackerel.” 

Aside from the fact that the line Kennedy quoted reads as though it had been written by a skinned mackerel or perhaps merely a dumb cluck, is Kennedy saying that these various and ragged verses of Keillor’s are written in the “tight form” of the sonnet? Yes, he is: “At the very least, the book proves that in this year of Our Lord [apparently, at least Kennedy believes in God] the sonnet is alive and kicking. Keillor enlarges our sense of what the old fourteen-liner can do.” No, Joe, no he doesn’t, and you know it. Keillor has very little ability to write in any kind of verse, let alone iambic pentameter verse, if he’s even trying to do so. 

Then why is Keillor calling this book 77 Sonnets (Kennedy says, “despite the title, there are 81”)? Here’s my guess: he’s using the number 77 to capitalize on the title used by the late John Berryman, a real poet, 77 Dream Songs, and he’s calling these ragged verses “sonnets” because he knows it’s a cue—a noun, as I say in TBoF, meant to elicit an automatic stock response in the reader or the listener. Society conditions its members to respond in knee-jerk fashion to certain words, much as the Russian scientist Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell by ringing one every time he fed them. After a while he didn’t need to feed them at all to make them drool, simply ring the bell. Just so, we are meant to respond without thinking to terms such as “motherhood,” “Old Glory,” “evil,” “love,” “soul,” “God,” and so forth. Keillor knows that the word “sonnet” will make the great American radio and television audience to which he panders begin to slaver all over itself as it rushes to purchase the latest book of Great American Poems written by the Great American Popularizer of bad music, giggly literature, and seedy verse. 

- Lewis Putnam Turco aka “Wesli Court”

 

REMARKS

 

Very good — nails hit on heads fairly and squarely. I even felt a little tap on my own.

Alice

Well, you've guessed it, Lew:

I'm not crazy about your essay on Joe Kennedy's responses to Keillor's sonnets. But I'm not going to scold you: you're a grown man — one that I'm very fond of and admire greatly — and we're entitled to separate and very different opinions on all sorts of things, including Keillor the anthologist, Keillor the poet, Kennedy the critic, so on and so on.

What I will say is that it's possible to like Keillor — and even enjoy his light verse sonnets, which you're taking too seriously and reading too literally — even if you're not afraid to offend him and thereby lose his "support" or "patronage," whatever it is. I can tell you that I don't care whether he cites poems of mine or not in his Almanac; nevertheless, I found the lines of his that you quoted delightful fluff, modest in their ambition, deliberately tongue-in-cheek, and not meant for the ages. There's room for work like that; also, I don't mind experimental sonnets at all: skinny, short-line sonnets, or even heterometric ones, so long as reading them gives me pleasure and refers back somehow to what we associate with the sonnet. I had never read anything of his before either.

I think in Kennedy's case, you're right: he certainly doesn't need Keillor's help, or anybody's. But Joe, like Dana, is a temperamentally calm, gentle individual not given to passionate reactions; he'd much rather soften a harsh comment, if he can do so without outright falsification of his opinion. I think he's done that here. There's room for that kind of criticism, and for your kind too. I wouldn't trade either one of you for anything.

Yes, it's true that Keillor should have better proof-readers. Most editors should! I keep finding typos in everything — including my own stuff, alas. I seldom see his Almanac, so I can't really say anything as to the general quality of the poems he publishes, but on the rare occasion when I've read it, I've found it no worse or better than most web anthologies. I don't get to very much.

Rhina

"Delightful fluff"? I didn't quote those lines, Rhina, Joe Kennedy did. I still haven't read any of Keillor's poultry except what Joe talked about.

"Heterometric"? I guess you didn't read the conversation I had with Bob Mezey on this blog some time back.

Keillor has excessively bad taste in poultry and music. I simply can't listen to "Prairie Home Companion" because of that inane noise he calls music — (see “Garrison Keillor’s Sarah Palin Poetry” elsewhere on this blog). And he likes anything in language that he can identify as jest plain folksiness. And then he brags about being 'way "above average" himself, what with being a best-selling novelist and all that. Sorry, Rhina, Keillor is in the same category as “The Hoosier Poet,” James Whitcomb Riley. I didn't spend my life trying to teach people the difference between literature and wordcrap just to get to where I'm going to cut Keillor some slack he doesn’t deserve. 

But thanks for not scolding me.

Love,

Lew

Dear Lew,

I gotta tell you that Ernie Hilbert sent me your response to my review of Keillor's sonnets and invited a riposte, which I supplied. Guess I like Keillor better than you do. His sonnets are better than you could tell from my snippets out of them. They ain't "Batter my heart, three-person'd God,” but they're all right.

Joe Kennedy

 

Joe.


You do know, don't you, that Ernie Hilbert wrote me to ask that I write a reply to your Keillor review? It wasn't my idea. I didn't even know you'd written one. Since he wrote you to write one for my reply, it's perfectly clear that he's having a good time and trying to get something started (or finished). I'll look forward to reading your riposte. When is it going to be published?

As ever,



Lew


Dear Lew,

Sounds as if Ernie Hilbert figures he has to stir up a little controversy. I've no idea when he'll publish my riposte to you — next CPR, maybe.

Joe

 

Joe,

Your riposte has already been published pn CPR:

 

X. J. Kennedy responds to his critics:

My friends Lew Turco and Jack Foley don’t like Garrison Keillor’s sonnets, and for reasons set forth in my review, I do. All right, I’m grateful to have triggered a bit of controversy.  

Lew’s attack on Keillor’s sonnets gets off to an irrelevant start, complaining about the man as an anthologist and picker of poems for his daily Writer’s Almanac. I could try to defend him here, but that’s something else, like the price of tea in China.

When it zeroes in, Lew’s attack seems to center on Keillor’s failure to stick to the stringent definition of a sonnet that Lew lays down in his classic Book of Forms. But if we’re to deny the name of sonnet to a fourteen-line octave/sestet type poem that plays around with traditional rhyme schemes, or that throws in three-foot or six-foot lines instead of always sticking to a five-footer, then we’re going to have to dismiss hundreds of admirable poems that have long worn the label of sonnet. David Bromwich’s anthology American Sonnets (Library of America, 2007), has plenty of good things the editor considers sonnets that don’t fit the Turconian-Procrustean definition, some by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, John Wheelwright, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Donald Justice, James Merrill, and others. Lew won’t agree, but maybe in poetry forms exist not only to be observed, but to be violated, and sometimes violated for the fun of it.  

Lew’s technical, prosodic criticisms deal with a mighty small amount of material: eleven likeable lines I quoted from the book. Before attacking the book as a whole he might have read it. But no doubt if he goes and reads it now, he’ll still want to give it a blast.  

Anyhow, I’m grateful to Lew for not accusing me of kowtowing to Keillor because I’m afraid of his “power,” nor accusing me of trying to suck up to him to use my stuff. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that, indeed, in the past Keillor has put several of my things on his Almanac and in his anthologies. But if I had thought his sonnets were lousy, yes, I’d have said so. I have said so in the case of quite a few other poets I’ve reviewed over the past forty-five or so years, even though, ingrate that I am, some of them have been mighty kind to me.

X. J, Kennedy

Joe,

You write, “Lew won’t agree, but maybe in poetry forms exist not only to be observed, but to be violated, and sometimes violated for the fun of it.” But, indeed, I do agree with you. The form is not the important thing, the poem is. If Robert Frost hadn’t broken the form of the interlocking rubaiyat when he wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” it wouldn’t be the great poem that it is. If Wesli Court hadn’t refrained from writing the traditional envoi for his sestina “The Obsession,” the poem would have been a ruin.

However, recently I received this message through Ernie:

 

“Mr. Turco,

“I enjoyed your epistle (missive? sermon? rant?) about Garrison Keillor's 77 Love Sonnets, but did find myself with a question. Since most of your complaints centered on the lack of traditional sonnet form in Keillor's book, I wonder how you feel about Robert Pinsky's 14-line, non-pentameter poem "Sonnet."  This isn't a snarky rhetorical question just curiosity.

“James Dickson”

I replied, 

People have asked me for years to comment on poems that are fourteen lines long that rhyme but are not written in iambic pentameter measures. However, this question was settled long ago, by Dante and Spenser and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning (not to mention Longfellow and Robinson and Frost and Millay). If the poem is not written in decasyllabic lines (if Italian or one of the other non-accentual languages), or iambic pentameter lines (if in English), then it is not a sonnet. [I’m not talking about “a fourteen-line octave/sestet type poem that plays around with traditional rhyme schemes, or that throws in three-foot or six-foot lines instead of always sticking to a five-footer.”]

There are many sonnet forms; all of the standard ones are listed and discussed in my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Rhyme schemes, traditionally, have been allowed to vary, as has the number of stanzas; and the volta or "turn" roams around a bit, but a "sonnet" in our tradition must be fourteen lines of rhymed accentual-syllabic iambic pentameter verse with a volta preceding the final stanza. That's it. Anything else is a nonce form, meaning a form invented by the writer of the poem for a purpose of the moment. Period.

Of course, there’s no law that says anyone cannot title or call anything a “sonnet” or a “piece of cheese,” or anything else, and I’m as interested in experimental poetry as I am with honoring the tradition of poetry in English (as anyone would know wo reads my books attentively). But naming is the basis of knowledge, and if you’re going to experiment it’s always a good idea to know where you’re starting so that you’ll know whether you’ve discovered anything.

Lewis Turco

Dear Lew,

I'm happy to know we agree that poems, not forms, are what matter most, and sorry if I misinterpreted you. Loads of contemporary sonnets won't fit your strict definition, of course, and incidentally, we've both no doubt seen many that don't fit any working definition of poetry! There are guys who've won $100,000 poetry prizes who haven't written a poem yet.

Cheers always,

Joe

 

Well, Joe,

I was in a Borders this afternoon and I looked to see whether they had a copy of The Book of Forms in the poetry section. They did, and they had one copy of Keillor's 77 Love Sonnets as well, so I thought I'd read some of them for the first time. You said in one of your emails, above, that "His sonnets are better than you could tell from my snippets out of them. They ain't 'Batter my heart, three-person'd God,' but they're all right." I guess your definition of "all right" and mine are different. I didn't buy the book. 

Lew

The Drunken Celebrity Idiotic Quotation Award

Garrison Keillor Holding Forth

Mr. Garrison Keillor, on his “The Writer’s Almanac” entry for today, July 21, 2009, quoted Emerson on Whitman. Keillor's last paragraph reads this way:

“And Emerson wrote famously to Whitman: ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book I sober certainty.’”

What Emerson actually wrote is this:

 “…but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.”

Keillor is the sloppiest proofreader we have ever come across on the Web, and we are delighted with him for making such stupid errors as this. It’s as ridiculous as the one he made on July 2 of 2008 when we gave him the First Annual Manglish Award for his creative destruction of an Emily Dickinson poem on his "Writer's Almanac" web site where he quoted Emily Dickinson to the effect that,

 

"The Only News I know

Is Bulletins all Day

From Immorality."

 

The International Brotherhood of Sloppy Typists was delighted that a person of Keillor's reputation was the first to win this award.

Today we are happy to bestow upon him the Drunken Celebrity Idiotic Quotation Award. In order to avoid winning another of our reprehensible prizes, we recommend that he himself become sober, certainly because this has to be the work of an inebriate, not a person who is in control of his faculties.

Here is a list of Keillor's other errors as they have appeared on this blog:

2) July 26, 2008, “Keillor Does It Again!”

Today Garrison Keillor causes us to ask ourselves, “What part of a horse is its 'innocent' as in,

“Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot


Where the dogs go on with their doggy life [lives? agr.] and the                                                                                           torturer's horse


Scratches its innocent behind a tree.”

One is forced ineluctably toward the further question, If the hypothetical horsy body part is called an “innocent,” why must the beast hide “behind a tree” to scratch it? What is the horse ashamed of? In fact, CAN a horse be ashamed, or even embarrassed? One doubts it.

3) August 17, 2008, “Keillor Yet Again!”

“[British poet Ted Hughes was] born in West Yorkshire, England (1930). He grew up in the country, surrounded by empty, desolate moors. He said, '[I could] never escape the impression that the whole region [was] in mourning for the First World War.'

“He studied literature in college, but he shifted his focus to anthropology and archaeology, which influenced his poetry. He often put himself into a trance before he writing, and he tried to take the point of view of animals.”

We were happy to compose this epitaph for Ted Hughes in honor of the quotation:

R.I.P. TED HUGHES

August 17, 1930 -

 

“He often put himself into a trance

Before he writing” and before he dance.

He always asking animals for views,

And now he make believe he dead Ted Hughes.

 

4) November 16, 2008, “Proofreading and The Writer’s Almanac,”

 

Mr. Keillor:

In today's poem in The Writer’s Almanac, "The League of Minor Characters" by Kathleen Flenniken, in line six, "When his doctor calls with test results, most of usv decide to remain," what is "usv"? Don't you employ proof readers? It's otherwise a good poem. Too bad you keep messing up the good ones.

P. S. Just keeping in touch, as you requested again today.

 

5) July 11, 2009, “Our Finest ‘Critic’”

In this poem, which you published [onJuly 3^rd] in your “Writer's Almanac,”

At the Airport Baggage Claim

by Charles Darling:

"We contemplate a parade of skis,

boxes, bags, and attach&eaccent;s.

Some of them, unclaimed....

...I would greatly appreciate it if you would tell me what line two means.

Keillor didn't reply, even though he finishes each of his almanac entries with that same famous quote by one of our finest critics. We think everybody should keep in touch with him, but perhaps he doesn't really mean it.

 

Wesli Court

Coresponding Secretary

The International Brotherhood of Sloppy Typists

REMARKS

Good choice.

(Taking the point of view of animals.)

Jack

 

Eh, what a maroon.

Paul

You made my day with this: “’He often put himself into a trance / Before he writing and before he dance.’ / He always asking animals for views, / And now he make believe he dead Ted Hughes.”

Getting back at Garrison K. with verse is a real coup, Lew. Brilliant.The horses across the fence looked up when I let out a belly laugh. I wonder if K. reads it as written. Wouldn't a staff member be the typist anyway, if not the researcher? He be victim, not no drunk. (sic)

I wonder if hearing his father misquoted gave Hughes’ son the idea of suicide? Well, I suppose his mother did that.

John 

 

Haven’t you ever seen the sign on the boss’ desk, John? It reads, “The Buck Stops Here!”

Lew

 

Thanks, Lew

What a pleasure it was to browse through your website this morning.

We have two new kittens (Uriel and Gabrielle).  They are great fun and they sleep between Martha & me each night.

Best, as ever, to you & Jean and Sweetie-Pie,

Steven

P.S.

How is Sweetie-Pie doing?

Steven

She keeps purring along, Steven, in her gimpy way. She does laps every day. Nice to have kittens. They’ll give you pause.

Lew

Lew,

I know[,] I know you love to be contentious, and worse, you are so often right! But isn'[t] this a bit churlish? Frankly, the man actually likes poetry. He may commit some misquotes but hey, who give [sic] a hoot. [punct. ?] For the quantity of work he produces and the positive effects, I'd cut him some slack. Fact is, however, he's probably duly pleased with the award. No such thing as bad publicity...[.]

Hang in their [sic] my erudite friend. Let me crucify some Latin: Non carborundum illegitimi. Yes? Don't let the bastards wear you down.

Cheers,

David

 

         Handsome is as handsome does, David. Thanks for the translation.

Lew

Among those who heartily disappointed me, but in the department of immune from criticism, is Maya Angelou, Hallmark cards offered her her own line of greeting cards. I thought, wow, what a chance to teach the public what a poem really is. She could either write a series or edit poems out of her body of work. Nope, she produced "poems" of Hallmark "quality."  While there is no accounting for taste, there are some criteria that still can be applied.

I have been condemned as ethnocentric, xenophobic, and hell —just plain racist — for saying that rap isn't poetry. But I feel that way about most song-lyrics, not to mention the vaunted Bob Dylan. (Yet, I'm presenting a paper this summer entitled "Hip Hopkins," which picks up on the fact that Gerard Manley Hopkins' sprung rhythms and innovations in language were progenitors of hip hop and rap.)

I had an argument once with folks when I tried to assert that the beat of a tom tom was not equal to a Brandenburg Concerto. They said you can't argue taste. I said the complexity and variety of the concerto, as a simple fact, raised it to a higher level. I suppose, if one were moved to dance by the tom tom, it could have as profound an effect, not to mention its telegraphic possibilities to communicate.

So, as for Garrison and Keillorism — fully an army of fans who would follow him to war — let him enjoy himself. In fact, though people often complain about Bly, it is his translation of Basho I often quote: "Let those who eat shit go on digesting it. I will write my poems."(A rare time he adhered to 17 syllables in what he calls his haikus.)

I'm basically a populist trained in the academy. I also am a horrid speller and middling proof reader (who can never remember if that is one or two words...) which leaves me a contradiction in terms and unwilling to pick on folks who misquote, as long as the errors are committed in good faith.

Cheers, good friend,

David

David,

Maya Angelou has no idea "what a poem really is," so why would you be surprised that she would write Hallmark-quality verse for Hallmark? You are correct when you say, "rap isn't poetry." Poetry is "language art," and rap is not that. Take a look back at my posting called "Rhyme, Meter and Poetry for Children" where I say this, or said it back in 1976:

         "How many of us haven't read at least one book about teaching poetry to children that makes such points as these: Poetry is that which is washed out of children by education; education, including the learning of metrics, is responsible for killing poetry; therefore, we ought not to force children to learn the techniques of versification, because poetry is a spontaneous activity — whatever children write is the stuff of poetry?

         "If that is so, why do children demand nursery rhymes still?  Why does my three-year-old son love to sway to the heavy beat of rock and roll?  Why do all pop songs still rhyme and meter?  How is it that the "now" generation wants to write unmetered poems while their PR men make vast claims that the songwriters are the new, true poets of the age, and that formal poetry is dead as a doormat?  If that makes sense, then I don't know what doesn't.

         "Something's really wrong here, and I think I know what it is: We are the victims of propaganda — all of us except the children.  The propaganda serves the purposes of people who have tin ears but want to write poetry anyhow.  It's a very simple thing to tell when a rhymed, metered poem is a failure, much more difficult when there is no rhythmic structure against which to measure the ineptitudes of the would-be poets who can't make the English language do what they want it to do.  It's all very democratic — if poetry is treated as the subjective welling-up of the unconscious, then the results can only be judged subjectively, and no one is a failure, because at least our mothers and our friends will like our literature (or say they do).

         "I should have said we are all the victims of propaganda except the children and the rock poets. One even wonders if it isn't the rock poets who finance this media blitz, because if people begin writing good metrical verse again, it will immediately become obvious that the tinny effusions of the songsters are written at a very low level of competence.  As long as no one challenges them, people are going to believe they are the last of the old-time bards, these bumpers and grinders."

Rap is no different. And, no, Hopkins' verse was not a progenitor of rap. Not unless you think that Anglo-Saxon prosody was. Guess what they'd call you if you said that. Before you present your paper I suggest you take a look at the chapter titled "Black Poetry" beginning on page 116 of my book titled Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, published back in 1986 by Arkansas. Also take a look on my blog at "The Pink Fog of Robert Bly."

How can an error be "committed in good faith?" What the hell does that even mean? It's one thing to misspell in an email to a friend, it's quite another to do it on a public posting by a celebrity "author."

Do you want me to post all this stuff on my blog?

 Lew

Errors committed in good faith are always a problem. Sometimes I think Christ was invented because the Old Testament left too little room for forgiveness. One apple and the rest was history. I spent an afternoon with Isaac Singer, who explained to me why he didn't believe in absolution. If you meant well and in the process, killed someone, they would be dead. And, Singer added, the only one who can really forgive you is the person you harmed. It's very difficult for the dead to forgive.... Luckily, bad poetry, bad spelling, misquoting, seldom are fatal. I do agree that, when presenting a public face, we owe much more to folks than un-proofed emails and informal work. Still, I forgive the rappers, the doggerel poets, not to mention the "that's how it came out so it must be good" poets who think every word they write must be wonderful (who make up so many of our "top poets" list). I forgive them as the counter-balance to the pedantic, the rigid, the overly-scholarly, the dreadfully formal, who believe they: a. know the one, single correct interpretation of other poets' work; b. believe that everything since rhyme and meter isn't poetry; c. impose their own stifling standards that turn people off the art of poetry.

Yes, I have the ego of a poet. Of course you can post these exchanges to a blog if you think others might find them interesting. But then, you will make me feel bad I didn't proof my writing!

Cheers,

David B. Axelrod

That’s okay, David, I corrected your few errors silently. I hate typos inordinately because I’ve been my own victim so many times.

Lew

Lew —

Regarding your Drunken Celebrity blog: My father proofread all the jobs that came through his print shop, holding copy while someone else followed word for word. By the time I started working proofreading was nearly a thing of the past. The best proofreaders were the ones that made me the angriest to work with. They noticed and questioned every little thing. I've also seen what I thought I typed as an "is" turned into "I" by Microsoft Word and not underlined in any color to indicate it was wrong. I understand it's not merely bad proofreading at issue and I hope for a lively, witty, public brawl between you and Mr. Keillor that is covered on the front pages (if any exist) of all major newspapers in the country.

Ciao Meow for now,

Alice

Neoformalism Is Alive and Well

Saturday, July 18, 2009 3:04 PM

Dear Mr. Turco,

I have, for some time now, been exploring the internet-based world of modern metrical poets, and it has not been easy.  I came across your work, though, and was very impressed.  It is hard enough to find modern metred and rhymed poetry, much less truly good examples of it.  Not that I have anything against more experimental work - Eliot is one of my true treasures - but it is a great loss to cast something so enjoyable aside with little or no consideration.

I was hoping, in that vein, that you might take a look at a bit of my own work.  I'm sure you get dozens of letters like this, but I have put a great deal of effort into developing my ability to write formal poetry, and I can promise you that it is at least beyond the level of what you might find in 'A Child's Garden of Verses.'  I hope that you can find the time to take a look, and perhaps even offer me your thoughts.  To be honest, the world of a metrical poet feels very lonely, right now, and most of all, I'm simply looking for other serious poets, or even communities of poets, who are attempting, like myself, to write something worthwhile in the structures of metre and rhyme, and who don't mind allowing another into the fold.  I'll include one or two poems, so you can see I'm not all hot air, but I also have a blog at (http://quietcartesian.blogspot.com/) which I update once a week with a new poem.

Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to hearing back from you, should you find the time.

Sincerely,

Matt Newhall

Eos and Apollo

Young dawn, with fingertips of rose,

now makes a soft approach from Helios' house

to lay the dim stars in repose

and usher out her ancient Phoeban spouse.

 

He waits, his chariot prepared,

all girt about in godly fire and light,

and holds his steeds, so fresh and flared,

from leaping forward in untimely flight.

 

She calls him forth, her waking chant

of spousal love sounds on the morning air

with warbling birds that raise a cant

of glory for the god, their humble prayer.

 

The two embrace in endless dance

that she begins and he concludes in turn,

her blush in bloom at his advance,

her chambers ready for his fit return.

 

Just so he bursts upon the earth,

as she recedes again into her hold,

and yet, in each they find their worth:

her beauty is his merry mirth;

his majesty, her happiness untold.

 

Hope

 

If love, in longing, found a holy hand,

as palm and palm, profaner than the eye,

enfold and follow, like the two demand,

and make communion in a mute reply,

 

or if it sought a cheek of softer flesh

than falls upon this settling embrace,

prepared to offer up, and so enmesh,

as ought to marry hearts in happy grace,

 

or if it heard, again, a hushing breath,

unfinished until breathed afresh in turn

by other lips that long for sober death,

when told to love will only be to yearn,

 

then there is hope that heaven will arise,

although it be obscured in mortal guise.

 

Dear Mr. Newhall,

There has been a New Formalism movement afoot in this country since the early 1980s abetted largely by The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics which I’m sure you know about. There is even a neoformalist conference every year, the West Chester Universtity Poetry Conference, www.wcupa.edu/_ACADEMICS/SCH_CAS/POETRY/Poetry_Conference/ where you can meet scores of poets, students of poetry, editors of magazines, and so forth. And there are formalist societies around the country, the best of which is probably the Powow River Poets in Newburyport MA; they published a wonderful anthology not long ago: www.ocean-publishing.com/Powow.html. But lots of state poetry societies welcome formal verse, too; check out the National Federation of State Poetry Societies: http://www.nfsps.com/. There are print magazines that publish formal poetry, the most prominent of which is probably: measure.evansville.edu/Staff.htm which is an annual, but there are on-line journals also, including: Poetry Porch: www.poetryporch.com/poetry109.html, Per Contra: http://www.percontra.net/14poetry.htm , and Trellis Magazine: http://www.trellismagazine.com/index.html. You can find on-line addresses here:http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/pbonline.html. An on-line periodical that specializes in reviewing books of formal poetry is  the Contemporary Poetry Review: http://www.cprw.com.

I don’t criticize poems for people, but I will say that you can write formal verse well enough, though your diction is rather archaic and your subject matter is too classical for my taste, and probably for most people’s. Gods and goddesses? Not much call for them these days I shouldn’t think, and few people would have any idea what most of them stand for symbolically. The only specific criticism I’ll give you of your poems, though, is just that in the line, “enfold and follow, like the two demand,” “like” should be “as.” In your formal syntax and diction “like” is far too colloquial as you use it here. Kind of interesting to see this, though. Do you mind my asking how old you are?

Lew Turco

 

Well, thank you very much for all the information, and for such a speedy response. That's quite more than I was hoping for, given that my email was so out of the blue. I've heard of one or two of the journals you mentioned, but most are new to me. As for myself, I live in Portland, Oregon, am 27 years old, and have been writing poetry steadily for 4 or 5 years now, but have only recently made any attempt to move my poetry beyond my own small circle of friends and writers.

Thanks, too, for your comments. You're quite right, and I do see, that my writing is a bit too archaic and romantic for most tastes. On the other hand, it's what I enjoy, and I write like that because that is how I hear the poetry in my mind. I grew up on the likes of Dickinson and Yeats, and I fear that if I attempted anything too modern, it would take me quite a bit of time to write anything that didn't seem artificial and contrived. After all, it's not about writing what others want to read, but creating something from within, and that's all I've ever hoped to do.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Matt

 

Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 7:18 AM

I knew you had to be relatively young, Matt, because of the way you substituted "like" for "as" — the former has become ubiquitous as a synonym for the latter during the past forty years, starting in the 'sixties, and it's become totally ubiquitous as a sentence opener.

I guess you live a bit too far away to be able to join the Powow River Poets group, but you could always begin your own. I'm sure there are plenty of young poets in your area who would be interested in getting together to discuss and read each-other's formal verse. Find a place to meet, and write a story for your local paper about it. You could even start it at your home or that of a friend, or in a church basement, or almost anywhere. Would you like me to post your letter and this reply on my blog?

Best,

Lew Turco

 

Yes, I suppose that does give it away. Thanks for pointing that out. I try to avoid that sort of thing, but it can be hard when it's such an ingrained habit.

I would certainly appreciate it if you'd post that on your blog. It'd be nice to discover an established group, but if not, then it helps to be able to reach out to local poets in any way possible. You've been far too helpful, honestly. Thank you, again.

Take care,

Matt

 

Cancer

         When my wife Jean, my son Christopher, five years old, and I arrived in Maine the summer of 1978 (our daughter, Melora, at age nineteen was off living her own life by then), we discovered that my father-in-law John Houdlette had had prostate cancer for eight years and had not even gone to see a doctor about it. He, his wife Bertha, my sister-in-law Nathalie, and I were gathered in the living room of the old farmhouse when I was told of the situation. Mom Houdlette said something like, “Dad has a growth on his ankle. Would you look at it?” This was an entirely atypical request, for the watchword in the family was go tippy-toe and never ask personal questions.

Of course I acceded. Dad, who was seated, raised his pants leg a few inches. He wasn’t wearing socks, only a pair of loafers. When I saw the egg-sized lump I was appalled. I exclaimed — no, I must have shouted — I don’t know what I said. I asked questions. The only doctor he had seen was an osteopath in Wiscasset who had told him there was no rush, they could wait until his back was in better shape before he saw a specialist. The problem was that his back was never going to be in better shape, for the prostate cancer that had begun this process of disintegration had metastasized to the spine and then everywhere else. Furious, I wanted them to sue the quack osteopath for malpractice, but of course they wouldn’t because they knew, as did I, that it was Dad’s fault finally. It was his medical cowardice that had done him in.

So when I had forced Dad to make and keep an appointment with a real medicine man and we were waiting to find out the bad news that wasn’t going to be news at all, Jean and I took Mom and Dad to Pemaquid Beach on a lovely summer day. Our daughter Melora has written about this favorite family retreat:

 

SANDCASTLES

 

Father carries our yellow pail

Down to where the waves reach,

Dips deep into bluegreen seafoam,

Carries it back sloshing,

(strong black-haired legs all wet),

And empties it into our castle moat.

 

Mixing just the right combination

Of sand and water, his fingers dribble

Fanciful towers fashioned unbelievably high:

Windows into caverns where fair maidens

Await their heroes’ rescues from dragons,

And dungeons are hidden, monsters

Safely imprisoned by salt, sea air,

Bright sun, and clear sky.

 

But on that last day with the folks before the monsters got out of the castle-keep and came after Dad, though it was the same sort of day Melora described, we knew we were waiting for something indescribable:

 

We did not know, then, what the wen

   was on his heel.  The gulls wheeled

in the summer sun, the combers

      broke and broke; the sand siled.

   On the beach the grandchild ran

   and stopped, dug wells, ran again

 

while the old man slept in a round

   shadow cast against the light.

The old wife dreamed beside his dream,

      wound in a shawl, as shade

   fretted the edge of waking.

   But all the while, as the tide

 

pulsed, moving by moments toward

   the drying seaweed of high

water, through the web of his veins

      the crab sidled, stalking.

   The day was perfect, then.  Now

   a sea-change has taken it;

 

rather, it has become two days,

   that fair one and another

in which sandworms rise from the child's wells,

      segmented, mandibled.

   The beach umbrella sends its shade

   casting over the rising surf

 

to meet the east wind.  The seabed

   is calm and murderous with

life.  The boats toss like dreams, their nets

      seining the undertow.

   Now the ocean is almost

   upon us — our eyes are stars

 

   with spines; our minds are eight-armed; they

grope and coil in the darkness of the sun.

 

From La Famiglia / The Family: Memoirs, New York City: Bordighera Press, © 2009 by Lewis Putnam Turco. All rights reserved. Poem collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2004, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2004.

La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON 

Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM

The Beetle, the Bat, and the Pork-Pie Hat: A Fable of Yaddo

 Theodore Roethke

 Edna St. Vincent Millay

         I am a huge black beetle lying in a box of paper. I believe I may be an avatar of the late poet Theodore Roethke. This poet who now inhabits this room at the top of the Tower has just seen me. In a moment, when his astonishment has subsided, he will begin to wonder what to do with me. Meanwhile, I will wait and consider my identity — a problem that has not troubled me till now.

I am fairly sure Roethke was a poet, too, but I’m not sure how I know. I’m not sure I even “knew” at all until this new poet laid eyes upon me. Until then I was merely a beetle, crawling across the floor in the night, heading past all the strange furniture — a prie-dieu, a bust either of Venus or the Madonna, the bas-relief over the mantel: the central figure, a child dancing among musicians, has its head cocked at a very strange angle; the piece of frieze leaning against the wall, upon a cabinet. I cannot begin to describe the bed alcove within a gingerbread cathedral wall! If I am Roethke, then I have myself inhabited this room before, this room in a mansion now a retreat for writers, composers and artists of all kinds.

 

I never saw such a huge beetle before! How in hell did it ever get up on my desk, and why did it lie on my ream like that? Christ, that’s symbolic! I wonder it it’s Ted Roethke? They tell me this was his room up here at the top of this nineteenth century mausoleum, and it was Edna Millay’s and old Doc Williams’ too. If Roethke’s come back as a beetle, I wonder what they will show up as — a suicidal moth beating itself to death against my desk lamp, and a male mantis? Scalpel mandibles. I’m going to have to remember that line. Where in hell did I put my journal? There’s a wedge of d-CON under my chest of drawers — not very encouraging. Who’s trying to come back as a mouse, and why do they have it in for him?

 

He has not yet come to grips with the problem of my presence, but why should I be a problem to him? Why am I thinking this way? Roethke did not use such academic syntax and vocabulary. He wanted to be a beetle, so he tried to think like one. Is it possible I want to be Roethke, so I am thinking like an educated man? I shall have to give that some thought when I have found a dark place. At the moment, this desk lamp is blinding me. It is reflecting off the blank white paper on which I lie, so that the light arrives from all directions.

Now that nearly sounds like a Roethke line: “The light arrives from all directions.”

 

This is a strange place, a strange town. The first writer I met here wasn’t even at the mansion. I’d arrived too late for lunch, so I went downtown and — where the hell’s my journal? I wrote it all down…there it is, beside the beetle — “stopped for lunch at a delicatessen-bar. The father of the proprietor came in, sat down, and introduced himself. He’s an old man named Will Fyse. He showed me the manuscript of the autobiography he’s written — and then said he’d been a member of Murder Incorporated, a friend of the mobsters Lepke and Dutch Schultz. It was all in his book, and he has some publishers interested: I saw the letters."

The title of the book is Palms Raised to God Again, or something like that. About how he was brought up in religion till he joined the Mob in his ‘teens and then, after decades of mayhem, went back to being a god-fearing old lecher. I suppose I’ve got to do something about that beetle.

 

He’s thinking about me, I can feel it. I wonder if I can trust him not to do something vicious? I do not think he will crush me — too messy, but if he is insecure he may do it anyway. What parvenu poet would not wish to crush Roethke if he could? As I recall, I was a great bear of a man, and I died under suspicious circumstances while swimming. I do not recall those circumstances precisely — was it in a swimming pool? — but I recall the young woman. Perhaps that was another time — this beetle brain is not serving me very well. And to think I wanted to achieve this condition!

But the young woman — no, I do not, in fact, specifically recall her, but in my mind’s eye I do see a pool, and I see her breasts swim by the fish.

 

What the Christ was that? Jesus, I’m being dive-bombed by a bat! Must be Millay.

 

A bat! Alas, alas! But I’m too big for a bat to eat. I certainly hope.

 

Now what the hell am I supposed to do? A bat and a beetle. Now all I need is for William Carlos Williams to show up as a pork-pie hat! Look at the damned thing whipping around! Maybe the bat will eat the beetle. Where could she have come from? — oh, oh, I think I see it: there’s a little trap door up there over the gingerbread cathedral, the part that forms the entranceway from the stairs, and it’s open. Hell, how am I supposed to get up there in the middle of the night? I’ll have to climb up on the prie-dieu.

The goddam bat reminds me of that New York poetess who dresses up for every meal like she’s a petunia on her way to a funeral.

 

Well, at least he is not thinking of me at the moment, but Millay is. I feel the echoes of her sonar bouncing off my wing casings. If I had the proper ears I have no doubt I would hear them as well, shrill though they may be.

That was close! One of her wings brushed me. Why couldn’t I have had the sense to be reincarnated as a giant iguana?

Look at her — all black dewlaps and gewgaws. Disgusting! How very literary.

But what is he doing, that petit poet? He seems to be climbing up on all that gingerbread! Oh, I see — the little trap door, but that’s not how she got in. Perhaps it is — she seems to be beating him about the ears. Does Millay want to get out?

 

Goddam it, buzz off there, Edna! Go eat Ted! I had enough crap from that other lady at breakfast. Do you know what she did the night of her reading? Stop flapping in my face, the trap door is closed and I’m getting down off this wickerwork before the whole mansion collapses. If you’re not going to eat Ted, then go hang upside-down from a rafter.

She blew me a kiss, that’s what she did! I went up to her after the reading and told her how much I admired the pun in that line of hers, “I pray to a genital god,” and she blew me a kiss! Nobody’s blown me a kiss since my rich aunt went back to Kansas by train.

But at breakfast she told me she’d made no pun, and my suggesting she had was “very disruptive.” Gave me what-for in front of all those people. Pissed me off no end, I can tell you — why in hell am I talking to a beetle and a bat? I’m getting as weird as everyone else around here. I meant there was an obvious pun on “gentle,” and I liked it — it really works! But she didn’t intend it. What kind of a poet is that — doesn’t even know what she’s written? I should’ve told her how much I loved the pun on, I’m prey to a genital gourd.

 

He appears to be in a frenzy, pacing up and down hissing and muttering. I can’t make out everything he is saying, but he is evidently speaking of someone other than Edna and me. Good enough! Perhaps I can get out of this box — oh, oh, I’d best not move: Edna is giving me the eye from up there on that rafter. Dear old Edna — Madonna of the Coleus.

 

And she’d no sooner done browbeating me than that other neurotic female on my left started in. Christ, taking beginners’ ballet lessons at fifty or so! One night we were at the coffee house downtown when the Joffrey dancers came sliding in, and I thought she’d pass out in her mousse. So I kidded her a little. What does she do? She waits till I’m bleeding, trying to pass things off politely with the poetess, then she says, “And if you ever say I’m starstruck over dancers again, I’ll take my fist and I’ll hit you right in the nose!”

Must be understudying Mickey Spillane and Nureyev at the same time.

If You spell “dewlaps and gewgaws” backwards, you get spalwed and swagweg.

 

 I heard that — and so did Edna: here she comes again. What made him say that ridiculous thing? It woke her up. He’s becoming very agitated. I didn’t used to think so, but now I hate men who are capable of boasts and violence!

Now what’s he doing? Good grief, he’s going after Edna with a pork-pie hat! Where did that come from? He’s got her! And where did he get that square of cardboard he’s slipped under the hat?

Oh, no, he’s looking at me! He’s picked up the top piece of bond with me still lying on it — no! Not that! Not in the hat with Edna!

It’s so dark after all that light. Edna, are you in here? No violence now, you beast!

What’s that noise? — his staple-gun! I saw it on the desk. He is stapling the cardboard to the brim — my god, we’ll never get out! Do I hear the window opening? What a peculiar, weightless feeling!

 

Now maybe I can get some work done — I’m too upset to go to bed. Let’s see, where was I? Oh, yeah:

 

A gingerbread cathedral wall.

Scalpel mandibles:

The light arrives from all directions.

Palms raised to God again.

Her breasts swim by the fish.

 

Dive-bombed by a bat!

Alas! Alas!

But I’m too big for a bat!

A bat and a beetle,

And a pork-pie hat.

 

Black dewlaps and gewgaws,

I’m prey to a genital gourd,

Madonna of the Coleus —

Spalwed and swagweg,

Beasts and violins....

 

Hey, not bad! I like that — sounds a bit like Roethke. Maybe if I keep writing like this they’ll let me come back here again.

Originally published in Syracuse Guide, No 27, November 1977, all rights reserved and copyright 2009 by Lewis Turco.

 

 The Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2008 , ISBN 978-1-932842-16-6, trade paperback, 196 pp., $19.95. ORDER FROM AMAZON  

REMARKS

The beetle is Kafka.

"Light coming from all directions" is one of those wonderful lines that sounds fine to the ears like a good joke. Like Groucho's "I saw an elephant in my pajamas. What it was doing in my pajamas I'll never know."

John

 

Weird stuff, Lew Kafka! Have you been smoking funny little things with Edna again?

Rhina

I've been enjoying your blog, especially "The Beetle, the Bat, and the Pork-Pie Hat: A Fable of Yaddo" and "What It All Meant" which I found particularly brilliant, each line being perfect unto itself. I got a lot out of “Defining ‘Free Verse’” and "Karl Shapiro, the Fly on the Wall."

Alice

Our "Finest Critic"!

Today, July 11th, 2009, Garrison Keillor published on his "Writers' Almanac" this item:

"It's the birthday of the literary critic Harold Bloom, (books by this author) born in New York City (1930). His parents were Jewish immigrants, and his first language was Yiddish, but he fell in love with English poetry and read it before he had ever heard English spoken aloud. He started reading Walt Whitman and Hart Crane when he was eight years old. Like Walt Whitman, he has written reviews of his own books. And he went on to become one of the most influential literary critics in the country. He is one of the last critics who argues that great literature is a product of genius, and that we shouldn't read to understand history or politics or culture, but to understand the human condition. He said, "In the finest critics one hears

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®""

Actually, Keillor probably deserves the title, "Our poorest proofreader." Otherwise, like Bloom apparently, Keillor sings his own praises. I wrote him this earlier this month:

In this poem, which you published today (July 3^rd) in your Writers’ Almanac:

 At the Airport Baggage Claim

by Charles Darling

 

We contemplate a parade of skis,

boxes, bags, and attach&eaccent;s.

Some of them, unclaimed

the first time by, meander

all the way around and out,

dumb and colorful as cows.

A deaf woman watches

her husband talk in sign.

I cannot read his tongue

of wrist and fingertip

although there seems a sadness

and his hands fold finally

into themselves.

On his shoulders sits a little boy

whose hands, above the father's head,

are making up a second story—

something, I think, about a plane.

 

...I would greatly appreciate it if you would tell me what line two means.

He didn't reply, even though he finishes each of his almanac entries with that same famous quote by one of our finest critics. I think everybody should keep in touch with him, but perhaps he doesn't really mean it. 

What It All Meant

 

The sluggard was so stupid he didn’t know what movement.

The sailor was so stupid he didn’t know what shipment.

The undertaker was so stupid he didn’t know what bereavement.

The tailor was so stupid he didn’t know what measurement.

The policeman was so stupid he didn’t know what entrapment.

The woodsman was so stupid he didn’t know what encampment.

The guest was so stupid he didn’t know what department.

The general was so stupid he didn’t know what enforcement.

The garage mechanic was so stupid he didn’t know what retirement.

 

The realtor was so simple she didn’t know what allotment.

The makeup artist was so simple she didn’t know what defacement.

The seamstress was so simple she didn’t know what disfigurement

The nurse was so simple she didn’t know what implement.

The actress was so simple she didn’t know what engagement.

The cook was so simple she didn’t know what derangement.

The divorcee was so simple she didn’t know what apartment.

 

The contractor was so stupid he didn’t know what improvement.

The French eradicator was so simple he didn’t know what rapprochement.

The Selective Service administrator was so stupid he didn’t know what enlistment.

The musician was so simple he didn’t know what arrangement.

The shepherd was so stupid he didn’t know what abutment.

The medical student was so stupid he didn’t know what internment. 

The sexton was so simple he didn’t know what interment.

The trapper was so stupid he didn’t know what deferment.

The quiz show host was so stupid he didn’t know what bafflement.

The photographer was so stupid he didn’t know what enlargement.

The novelist was so stupid he didn’t know what entitlement.

The essayist was so stupid he didn’t know what contentment.

The fisherman was so slow he didn’t know what abatement.

The madam was so stupid she didn’t know what procurement.

The poet was so stupid he didn’t know what amusement.

The games maker was so stupid he didn’t know what amazement.

The farmer was so slow he didn’t know what appeasement. 

The Scotsman was so dumb he didn’t know what monument.

The sea captain was so dull he didn’t know what deportment.

 

The kennel owner was so foolish she didn’t know what curtailment.

The dissatisfied boss was so gaga he didn’t know what unemployment.

The messy secretary was so out of it she didn’t know what defilement.

The fired worker was so inexperienced she didn’t know what discernment.

Her boyfriend was so inexperienced he didn’t know what entanglement.

The architect was so dumb he didn’t know what pediment.

The obstructionist was so stupid he didn’t know what impediment.

The trespasser was so dull he didn’t know what encroachment.

The cane grower was so gross he didn’t know what refinement.

The novice teacher was so callow she didn’t know what assignment.

The seer was so inept he didn’t know what assignment.

The artist was so untalented he didn’t know what alignment.

The garageman was so stupid he didn’t know what alignment.

The makeup artist was so inept she didn’t know what lineament.

The trainer was so dumb he didn’t know what liniment.

The sports doctor was so stupid he didn’t know what medicament.

The owner of the team was so raw he didn’t know what emolument.

The successful athlete was so new he didn’t know what endorsement.

The siren was so modest she didn’t know what allurement.

The sadist was so self-absorbed he didn't know what punishment.

Merlin was so young he didn’t know what entrancement,

And neither did the new arrival.

REMARKS

"What It All Meant," on your blog, is a brilliantly crafted manipulation of language...great enjoyment...an exercise for the mind...but does nothing for my heart. I can only speak for myself in this regard, as others' hearts remain elusive. I'm constantly on the fence about such things, one foot in brain fluid, the other ankle-deep in blood.


Jason

 

I’m glad you liked my series of puns, “What It All Meant,” Jason, and I’m pleased that you noticed it’s a mind exercise. There is nothing wrong with human beings exercising their minds. In fact, it is the human mind, the neo-cortex, not the human “heart,” that writes poetry, and it is not the “heart” that is the seat of emotion, it is the mammal brain, the hypothalamus: Take a look on my blog at the essay titled “Sympathetic Magic” for an expansion of some ideas of Arthur Koestler on this subject.

Lew

I just read "What it all Meant" and now I'm filled with contentment. How long did it take you to write that?

Ginger

I couldn't begin to tell you, Ginger.

I sometimes just get on a tear and write a pile of things like that, and then at later times I add to it. Glad you liked the content, though, and now know contentment.

If you'd like to see more pun games on my blog, click on the "Punography" category in the cloud box to the left.

Lew

Defining "Free Verse"

         Robert Wallace begins the first paragraph of his essay, "Meter in English" (in Meter in English, q.v. bibliography, below) with an assertion that others have made before him: "The difference that distinguishes verse from prose or speech is the unit of line."  Not so.  Much more than merely the existence of "lines" in the genre of "poetry" distinguishes verse from prose, the only modes of language in which any genre (fiction, drama, poetry) may be written.

         Wallace begins his second paragraph with another disputable sentence: "In free verse, the units of line are or appear arbitrary, that is, relatively unpredictable."  What I object to here is the use of the undefined term "free verse," as though such a term makes sense, for, to reiterate, there are only two modes in which any genre can be written, prose and verse.  Prose is unmetered language; verse is metered language.

         If Wallace wishes to take exception to this definition, he should direct his remarks to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary which notes as the first definition of prose, "The ordinary form of written or spoken language, without metrical structure" [emphasis added].  Similarly, the first definition of verse in the OED is, "A succession of words arranged according to natural or recognized rules of prosody and forming a complete metrical line [emphasis added]."  The first definition of metre, "To compose or put into metre," according to the Oxford, is obsolete; the second is, "To compose verses; to versify."  Wallace, like many traditional prosodists, seems to have forgotten that the term "free verse" came to us in the twentieth century from the nineteenth-century French vers libre, but adopting a foreign term does not rewrite history, nor change the definitions in our dictionaries.  As to the concept of "line" rather than "meter" being primary in the recognition of "verse," nowhere in the OED can one find that verse means "a line of language," only that a verse may mean "one of the lines of a poem or piece of versification."

         Wallace didn't even bother to try to define the term upon which his essay is built, nor has anyone had success in conventionally defining the term "free verse." The point I make in The Book of Forms (q.v. bibliography) is that "poetry" is a genre, with fiction, drama, and the various nonfiction genres (autobiography, travelogue, epistles, journalism, and so forth), whereas "verse" is a mode, like prose, and, again, any of the genres may be written in either of the modes.  We are victims of the traditional Anglo-American cultural bias that poetry must be written in verse or it isn't poetry (the terms "verse" and "poetry" are often confused), and that bias clouds our judgment just as it clouded that of the French, forcing them to come up with definitions that transform prose modes into verse modes — hence vers libre / "free verse," which is clearly a contradiction in terms: how can "verse" be "free" if it must (according to dictionary denotations) be "metrical"?

         Anyone who reads the Bible can tell that prose poems have existed from the beginnings of history.  Anyone can prove by scanning (if one knows how to scan: see "the Rules of Scansion" in The Book of Forms, Third Edition) nearly any piece of English prose that it consists primarily of iambic and anapestic rhythms, not meters, for Whitman was not counting syllables in his prose poems, though the parallel grammatical structures of his prosody certainly did provide repeating rhythms, as The Book of Forms discusses.  We know when Whitman was writing metrical poems, which he did early in his career and when he wrote "O Captain, My Captain," because the verse lines are apparent on the page, and one can count the strict lengths of the accentual-syllabic verses.  This brings up another point: the mere act of scanning prose does not turn that prose into verse.  Verse is verse only by virtue of the fact that the maker of the verses counted the syllables, stresses, and/or verse feet in discrete lines.

         Why do traditionalists insist that poetry in English must be written in some sort of "verse" or it isn't poetry?  And why do they have to justify line-phrased prose as verse?  The answer is simple: given the former bias, the latter is a requirement if prose works are to be allowed into the poetic canon.  Perhaps if we plow a few rows with everyone's exemplar, Walt Whitman, we can illuminate this discussion of "lineation" and "verses."  As I type I have beside me several editions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.  Let's here set down the first few "lines" of that "poem," together with the poet's own line counts, first from the edition of 1855:

[1]

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

 

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass.     5

 

[2]

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes....the shelves are crowded

         with perfumes,

 

I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,

the distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

 

The atmosphere is not a perfume....it has no taste of the

         distillation....it is odorless,

 

It is for my mouth forever....I am in love with it,                            10

I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

         Now, what are the "lines" of this passage?  Where, for instance, does line 6 end, with the word "crowded" or with "perfumes"?  If with the former, then Whitman's "line 10" is really line 12.  What caused Whitman (who was his own printer) to curl line six over?  Why, right-hand justification, of course, just as though it were prose.  The page wasn't wide enough to print the clause all in one line.  Can this be proven?  Certainly.  Here is line six of the same poem (only now titled "Walt Whitman") from the third edition (1860-61):

         Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves

                  are crowded with perfumes,...

Why does the "line" now break after "shelves" rather than after "crowded"?  Because the pages are narrower in this edition, therefore the right-hand justification required that this prose sentence break elsewhere.  Here is the same passage from the edition of 1900:

         Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are

                  crowded with perfumes,...

Francis Murphy's edition of The Complete Poems breaks this passage of the protean poem in the same place, but now it is line 14, as it is in some of the other editions published during Whitman's life.

         What constitutes the Whitmanian "line," then, at least in the poet's own view?  Clauses, generally independent clauses.  Meter has nothing to do with it, nor has "versification" of any known kind.  Line one is an independent clause; so are lines two and three and all the rest of the lines of this passage.  They are linked independent clauses in parallel constructions.  One can see the parallelism by running one's eye down the left-hand margin of the poem.

         Now, if we scan the "Song of Myself," what will we find?  We will find iambs and anapests randomly, except where the parallels require that the same rhythms appear in approximately the same order.  This is not versifying; these are not meters.  Although "lineation" is taking place, it is not typographical "lineation" but grammatical lineation.  If we want Whitman's prose poem to look even more like a "traditional" verse-mode poem, we may line-phrase it further, in the manner of William Carlos Williams, by breaking the clauses into phrases:

                  I celebrate myself,

                  and what I assume

                  you shall assume,

                  For every atom

                  belonging to me

                  as good belongs to you.

Have we made this poem any more of a "poem" by doing this?  Is it any more "verse" than it was before?  Have we hurt the poem or helped it?  We have done no more to it than draw attention to it for a specific purpose.  By the way, did Whitman use the term "free verse"?  Certainly not, as it didn't exist in English at the time.  He knew he was writing prose poems.

         Until someone else can establish a "convention" for free verse — that is to say, a definition that most users of the English language can agree with, "free verse" will not, in fact, exist except as a confusing term.  Despite the fact that we have been using it for most of a century, there is no reason for anyone, at this juncture, to jump on the free verse bandwagon and define it as anything but prose, whether "lineated" or not.

         Wallace nevertheless elsewhere in the opening section of his essay continues to treat the term "free verse" as though such a convention actually exists.  He writes, "Reading or hearing unmetered verse...we are not aware of any fixed or predictable pattern."  Does the term unmetered verse make sense in terms of the OED definition?  "In free verse, there will of course be natural patterns and probably significant repetitions of them, but we have no particular sense of predictability or expectation."  What does Wallace mean by natural patterns?  Is this term the same as his other neologism, "speech-run"?

         Wallace also refers to "free verse" as "the predominant verse form in the twentieth century."  Is prose a verse form?  One had thought that the term referred to such things as sonnets, sestinas, or villanelles.  Does he mean that prose has become the predominant mode for writing poetry in the twentieth century?  I can agree with that statement, but the "forms" of prose used in modern poetry are the forms of grammatical parallelism (synonymous, synthetic, antithetic, and climactic parallels) to be found in Whitman and the Bible (and in The Book of Forms).

         In the early chapters of his book Free Verse Charles O. Hartman (q.v. bibliography) talks about the necessity for "conventions" in poetics and prosodics.  He reviews the various prosodies and the inappropriate application of the concept of "isochrony," or musical time, to English poetry. Hartman spends all of his chapter three telling the reader that no one agrees on a definition of "free verse”; then, in chapter four, ignoring what he has just written, Hartman talks about English poetry primarily in terms of isochrony and begins to come up with yet another definition of "free verse" that I for one cannot even understand.

         Let me be specific.  Hartman writes, "A meter is a prosody whose mode of organization is numerical." Certainly not.  A meter is a meter; a prosody is a prosody; to wit: a prosody is any system for writing the genre of poetry (OED); there are verse systems and prose systems: verse and prose are modes.  Some examples of verse systems are accentual verse, syllabic verse, and accentual-syllabic verse (although Wallace does not believe that the first two of these exist).

         Within these prosodies there are various specific meters; for instance, within accentual prosody there can be a meter called dipodics; in syllabics, decasyllabics; in accentual-syllabics, anapestic trimeter (Wallace denies that any of these things exist).  An example of a prose prosody is grammatic parallelism, as in the Bible.

         There are many of Hartman's and Wallace's scansions with which I do not agree, nor do I see how many others could agree with them.  For instance, Hartman distinguishes between two lines: "Shivering in their beds in November's wind" and "Shiver in their beds in November's wind." But in fact the two lines scan exactly the same way: "Shiv'ring" is an elision — who, except perhaps for Wallace, who does not believe in elision, either, pronounces it with three syllables?  Therefore, "Shiver" is a trochee also, and the line looks like this in both versions: ´x | .x | ´x | x´ | x´ — there are three trochees in the line, so it is trochaic pentameter both ways standing on its own, but in an iambic pentameter poem both lines would be headless iambic — (x)´ | x. | x´ | xx´ | x´ — with a promotion in the second foot and an anapest substitution in the fourth foot.

         Hartman scans some Hopkins lines, but in the "dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in (secondary stress by promotion) his riding" sequence he doesn't stress dawn or drawn, even though they are sprung with alliteration and rhyme; he doesn't show the promotion of in, and he doesn't show the stress in riding, which any pronouncing dictionary will indicate.  The same is true in the following line, where the un in "underneath" is obviously accented, as is the first syllable of steady.  In the next line, "there" takes a rhetorical stress; "how" takes an alliterative stress, and the second syllable of upon is normally stressed.  I simply have no idea what Hartman is talking about here in his discussion of Hopkins' prosody.

         Hartman's scansion of Morris' poem is equally baffling to me.  No matter how one pronounces "Gradually," whether with four syllables or three (a w-glide elision on dua), one of the normally unstressed syllables in "...dually in the" is going to be promoted — I hear it on the y.  Ditto in the following line: one of the syllables in "That are out..." must be promoted if they are all normally unstressed, but in fact out in "outlasting" takes a primary stress, according to my dictionary, which also shows that the dis in "disappear" takes a primary stress.  The reader may check any pronouncing dictionary to confirm these assertions.

         At the beginning of chapter three Hartman asks, "Why is poetry usually written in verse?"  It isn't.  If he had said "English language" poetry, the question might have been appropriate, but the poetries of many cultures are, and always have been, written in prose, which was the first mode for poetry beginning with Gilgamesh and continuing through the "Song of Songs" and the Psalms.  In English Christopher Smart, William Blake, Martin Farquhar Tupper and Edgar Allan Poe wrote prose poetry before Whitman did.  Even Euphues is more poem than novel.

         Hartman wrote further, "Though isochronous prosody only marginally belongs to poetry — its natural home is in song — the lines of distinction are not always easy to draw. " ***  "...Once words give up the rhythmic support of music...the temporal prosody becomes one of two meters.  In a stress-oriented language [like English], it becomes accentual meter."  Hartman goes on then to mis-scan the Morris poem mentioned earlier and to discuss accentual meter, but five pages later he talks as though isochrony were applicable to English, which it is not, as he himself had just finished pointing out.

         On page 64 Hartman talked about "counterpoint between accentual isochrony and lineation," which sounded as though it might be an interesting idea, but he discussed it in terms of some lines from W. C. Williams' "The Dance."  Hartman maintained that the first and last lines, which are identical, "In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess," "...is so clearly a line."

         But it isn't!  Without a gloss, how does the ordinary reader pronounce "Kermess," with the stress on the first syllable?

         In Breughel's great picture, '' The Kermess

or on the second?

         In Breughel's great picture, '' The Kermess

Hartman gives no scansion, and a standard dictionary is of no help.  If the word is pronounced the first way, then it is a stich of Anglo-Saxon prosody with the caesura out of place, and it's a poor line for that reason; if it is pronounced the second way it scans x´ | x´ | ´x |.x |´ (x), starting out iambically and shifting  to trochees, and it's still a bad line rhythmically.  The "tweedle of bagpipes" line is a good line, but it's also obviously a perfect line of Anglo-Saxon prosody, including alliteration, and that's why we like it, not because it is "anacrustic" and so forth, as Hartman maintains.

         At least here Hartman is talking about "counterpoint" as something rhythmical.  I understand the term to mean more specifically variations, including substitutions, in an accentual-syllabic poem, as I have written in The Book of Forms.  One has also heard of "eye counterpoint," which is spatial — I was the first to use this term, I believe, as applied to verse, and Hartman uses it as well although he, like others — including the so-called "New Formalists" and Wallace — doesn't cite, or even mention, any edition of The Book of Forms, which was first published in 1968, long before Hartman's book, or any neoformalist volume, was published.  "Eye counterpoint" has to do with the placement of lines on the page, and perhaps Hartman was trying to work the two ideas together somehow, but he wrote, "These shifting relations between syntax [my emphasis] and linear isochrony constitute the poem's prosody." That is opaque for these reasons:

         1)  Hartman had earlier said that isochrony is not really applicable to accentual or accentual-syllabic prosody.

         2) He had talked about "counterpoint" in terms of meter, and perhaps worked it along to a consideration of something like "eye-counterpoint" in his discussion of "lineation," a term out of art, not out of literature, according to the OED.  Here, however, Hartman is getting into matters of sentence structure as well.  By the time the reader reaches page 72 Hartman has left the concept of counterpoint as a rhythmic device well behind and he is talking about "the counterpoint of lineation and syntax alone."

         By the time we have arrived at this point Hartman has completely lost me and, I am sure, nearly everyone who cares about verse writing or even prosodics.  Hartman is nowhere near establishing a "convention" regarding "free verse," nor even a reasonable definition of it.  Wallace in his essay attempts a finesse by not trying to establish a definition but simply acting as though one exists.  My own definition has the advantage of simplicity and is easily defended: verse is metered language, and prose is unmetered language.  The OED definition of these terms is the same.

 

WORKS CITED

 

David Baker, editor, Meter in English, A Critical Engagement, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997

Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse, Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1980.

Lewis Turco, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third edition, www.UPNE.com, 2000. ISBN 1584650222, trade paperback, $24.95, 337 pages. “The Poet’s Bible," A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. ORDER FROM AMAZON

 

 

——.  The Public Poet, Five Lectures on the Art and Craft of Poetry, Ashland: Ashland Poetry Press, 1991. Wrappers, $6.95. ORDER FROM AMAZON

  

Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy, New York: Penguin, 1975.

——. Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley, London: Secker and Warburg, 1959.

——. Leaves of Grass, Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860-61.

——. Leaves of Grass, Philadelphia: David McKay, 1900.

Also see "The Good Gray Poet" in Visions and Revisions of American Poetry by Lewis Turco, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, UArkansasPress  1986. Paperback, $12.95. 1986 Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America. ORDER FROM AMAZON

REMARKS

Excellent essay, Lew! I've printed it out to read again, more slowly and carefully. Thanks!

Love,

Rhina

Lewis,

Enjoyed reading this on your site. I tend to put the term 'free verse' in quotation marks when using it. Maybe now just I'll stop saying it altogether. I must say that 'accentual-syllabic' is still a mystery for me; I thought I understood it clearly until I read Mary Kinzie's version of it. What do you think of her Poet's Guide? It seems to me an odd mixture of the simplistic and the abstruse! (Besides having a great many typos.) But there is much that is helpful.

Marta Finch

 

Marta,

I haven’t seen Ms. Kinzie’s material. Why do you need anything else if you own The Book of Forms? There’s nothing hard about “accentual-syllabic” prosody. The poet counts, first, all the syllables in the line; then he or she counts the stressed syllables in the line, and finally the poet counts the verse feet in the line. In a perfect line of iambic pentameter verse there will be, first, ten syllables in the line; second, there will be five stressed syllables in the line, and these will alternate regularly with the unstressed syllables, the line beginning with an unstressed syllable, which will yield, third, five iambic verse feet. Of course, there should be variations of one kind or another in the line, but iambs must predominate; that is to say, the iamb must be the running foot, and very few lines should be perfect.

Lew

Lew,

Thanks, that was fast! But you very kindly explained the part I knew. Of course I have read and re-read your book's explanation, and here you make it seem very simple. But it isn't. What throws me is when there are 13 syllables in a line and it can only properly be scanned as pentameter; or, conversely, when a line of only 9 (or even 8) syllables must be. If a 10-syllable line has 6 strong stresses, is it still a pentameter line? And is that what makes it accentual-syllabic? Or is it what I would have thought — just a poor line? (Yes, I know it depends on the poet/poem, but could it be accentual hexameter?) I'll look for some examples in the next few days and send them to you to perhaps clarify what I'm trying to say. 

Marta

 

Marta,

I described a PERFECT line of iambic pentameter verse. But I also said, "Of course, there should be variations of one kind or another in the line, but iambs must predominate; that is to say, the iamb must be the running foot, and very few lines should be perfect." So in any iambic pentameter line as variations there may be up to two other kinds of feet. If you substitute two three-syllable feet, say two anapests for two iambs, the syllable count will be twelve, not ten, but iambs will still PREDOMINATE, and it will still be an iambic pentameter line, though with two variations. If your line contains thirteen syllables, it's not likely to be an iambic line because there will be three variations, and odd feet will predominate. Similarly, the only way that an iambic pentameter line can contain six stressed syllables is by substituting a spondee for an iamb, which one can do in the first foot (very unlikely anywhere else). Contrarily, if one drops an unaccented syllable somewhere, most likely in the first foot (a "headless" line), the syllable count will be nine, not ten, but it will still be an iambic line, and what is most important is that there be five verse feet in the line. ALL THIS IS IN The Book of Forms, Third Edition on pages 37-43.

Lew 

Rhyme, Meter, and Poetry for Children

 

Poets seldom write rhymed and metered poetry anymore, as there seems to be no future in it at the moment — it is [in 1976] out of fashion.  But if we think about the situation for a moment it might occur to us that children, who are the future, want no part of poems that aren't rhymed and metered.

How many of us haven't read at least one book about teaching poetry to children that makes such points as these: Poetry is that which is washed out of children by education; education, including the learning of metrics, is responsible for killing poetry; therefore, we ought not to force children to learn the techniques of versification, because poetry is a spontaneous activity — whatever children write is the stuff of poetry?

If that is so, why do children demand nursery rhymes still?  Why [did] my three-year-old son love to sway to the heavy beat of rock and roll?  Why do all pop songs still rhyme and meter?  How is it that the "now" generation wants to write unmetered poems while their PR men make vast claims that the songwriters are the new, true poets of the age, and that formal poetry is dead as a doormat?  If that makes sense, then I don't know what doesn't.

Something's really wrong here, and I think I know what it is: We are the victims of propaganda — all of us except the children.  The propaganda serves the purposes of people who have tin ears but want to write poetry anyhow.  It's a very simple thing to tell when a rhymed, metered poem is a failure, much more difficult when there is no rhythmic structure against which to measure the ineptitudes of the would-be poets who can't make the English language do what they want it to do.  It's all very democratic — if poetry is treated as the subjective welling-up of the unconscious, then the results can only be judged subjectively, and no one is a failure, because at least our mothers and our friends will like our literature (or say they do).

I should have said we are all the victims of propaganda except the children and the “rock poets.”  One even wonders if it isn't the rock poets who finance this media blitz, because if people begin writing good metrical verse again, it will immediately become obvious that the tinny effusions of the songsters are written at a very low level of competence.  As long as no one challenges them, people are going to believe they are the last of the old-time bards, these bumpers and grinders.

The best thing that could happen in grade school English lessons would be teaching children the methods used in writing the kinds of poems they most enjoy.  Of course it would be difficult to teach, and to learn.  So is taking piano lessons.  And not all children are going to turn into poets — Muses forbid!  But it wouldn't hurt the young folk to learn something about how to write in their native language and tradition.

"Native language" — there's something wrong with that phrase, too. Nobody has a "native language."  One is not born knowing English or French or Russian or Tagalog.  One learns it.  There is absolutely nothing automatic or "natural" about learning to speak and write.  It is not one's subconscious mind that figures out how to put words together.  A child consciously learns his language by imitation, rote memory, trial and error, and parental correction.  If a poet is one who, as Auden said, "refines the dialect of the tribe," then he or she has learned to do better what the tribe has learned to do well. Learned.

These things are so obvious I blush to say them, but the rock and roll PR and the psychological and sociological educationese are so loud that I must say this, I'm afraid: He or she who is the best poet is that person who has learned best how to say what must be said.

And you can't fool the children.  They are bored by unimaginative writing; by slack writing; by unclear writing.  I don't know how anyone is going to train our poets to be imaginative, but they can certainly be trained to be clear and rhythmic.  Enough, however, about meters and forms and sounds, all of which fascinate children.

I want to say something also about imagination. In 1978 Charlie Davis published my illustrated children's story Murgatroyd and Mabel which had been dismissed years earlier by a well-known juveniles publisher whose editor had not liked my "distortions of reality."  I was told on that occasion, in so many words, that distortion is not regarded as good for children.  Murgatroyd and Mabel is about two caterpillars, one of whom turns into a beautiful butterfly; the other, instead of growing wings, grows a propeller on his nose.

In my reply to the editor I pointed out that, quite to the contrary, distortion is at the heart of much, if not most, good children's literature: Dumbo's ears, for instance; Alice's shrinking, her lengthening neck; the bloodthirsty occurrences in the Oz books with their concomitant distortions of reality; Mickey Mouse wearing pants, speaking, having one too few fingers — fingers at all!  And so forth and so on and on.

Oddly enough, the current crop of young poets have learned very well how to distort reality.  Dugan Gilman, one of the young Wesleyan poets, a few years back came to see me after his first book of poems had been published and gotten good reviews.  Arriving with a new ms. of poems, he told me that he had written his first collection by osmosis, picking up out of the air the neo-surrealism that hung like a "pink fog" (his phrase) over the campuses.  Now, he said, he wanted to learn how to write well.  I read the ms., which was full of formal verses, and I had to tell him I felt he had a long way to go before he could handle meters and rhymes and such bugbears with seeming ease — with artfulness.  He had, I said, gone about the whole thing backwards: He had written a passable book of poetry before he had learned how to write. He had imitated a popular period style, “deep imagism,” and gotten away with it, but if he wished to grow he would have to put his mind to it. I'm afraid he was considerably disillusioned, but it was the truth.  He had two choices: He could go on imitating the poems he had written and their models, or he could learn how to write anything he wanted to write.

I recall, on another occasion, a talented undergraduate poet — who has since turned himself into a director of documentary films for The Learning Channel — coming into my office and showing me the poems he was working on.  I told him his poems sounded like every other neo-surrealist's.  He objected, and I reached for a contemporary anthology.  I had wanted to try this for a long time, and this was my chance: I opened the book at random, took his poem, read a line from it, then read a line from someone else's work; I continued to alternate lines until even he had to admit the two poems were indistinguishable from one another; in fact, they sounded like one poem.  Many years later (in 1983), I had the opportunity to do exactly the same thing in a review of several books:

 

When I tell you I've waked as if in a basement,         

and the windows are open, I can smell roots —

don't do anything, you say, just stand there.

 

Because I said I did and because I never did

I am now someone who has only to imagine

the evenings where the boats dock

and men drink,

 

to live the lie again.

Absurd to sit here chained. They mean

to kill me, to draw their life from mine.

My eyes bulge huge and placid and intent.

My mouth grows wider, deeper, wears a grin.

The circle narrows and I take them in.

 

The first four lines are from "Learning a New Language" by Margaret Gibson in her book Long Walks in the Afternoon; the next five lines are from "Anonymous Meditation" by Jane Miller in The Greater Leisures, and the last five lines are from "Vortex" by Rika Lesser in Etruscan Things.  In order to make up this "found poem" one had to do nothing more than leaf through a few books to find a first-person "I" narrator and select two first strophes and a final one.

The "poem" has a certain feeling of completeness about it, and this is due in part to the Lesser strophe, which ends in an accidentally (?) rhymed couplet.  All these lines except the last three are written in prose made to look like verse by disposing the lines according to phrasing — what W. C. Williams used to call the "breath pause."  But the third-to-last line is written in iambic tetrameter verse — the two kinds of rhythm, prose and verse, are thus "harmonized,” to use A. D. Hope's term.  The last two lines are an iambic pentameter ("heroic") couplet rhymed aa.  Thus, the tetrameter line serves as a bridge to the heroic couplet, in which the expectation of completion set by the meter is juxtaposed with the preceding prose, much as in the case of Sylvia Plath's "Amnesiac" (see elsewhere on this blog). This expectation is fulfilled, giving a good deal of pleasure, a feeling of climax and cloture (which it also did in the original poem). Nevertheless, the "poem" has a feeling that it has been built by jury-rigging, which indeed it was.  The same feeling is in the originals.

 

Here is another poem constructed in much the same way:

 

Through rain I see huge moonless spaces,

intricate scars in the earth,                                   

a fine thread of water.

Two voices in the clouded space name the planets,

the moon, the earth.

 

Body upon body

flattened by wave-press,

the purple and brown stars

cling to each other in heaps:

the opposite of a Japanese garden,

where a few enduring stones

suggest the significance

of time and distance.

 

I won't wake you.  I am staring

into the dark, making the storm happen.

But if it never breaks?  If all things

must hang in violent equilibrium?

 

I never thought we'd end up

this far north, love.

Cold blue tinge in lieu of heavens.

Quarter moon like chalk on a slate.

 

All of these lines are nearly plain prose, without rhythm except for some accidental approaches to meter, as in strophe three.  The tradition is the backwash of Imagism.  There is, however, very little sense of line "the moon, the earth" has no reason for being a line other than length, perhaps: If it had been appended to the line above, that line would have seemed too long, but this seeming would have been owing entirely to typography, not rhythm.  (Perhaps Charles Olson would have justified it on the basis of "eye-rhythm.")  The same is true for "Body upon body," "suggest the significance," and "this far north, love."

There is very little sense of the poem's architecture, either of overall plan or movement.  No doubt the apologists for "free verse" will be delighted with this state of things, because poetry has now become so democratic that anyone can do it.  The danger in writing poetry in verse mode is simple: The reader can tell almost instantly if the poem is badly written — one can check the meters: do they jingle?  Do they grate?  Are the sounds of the poem trite or inventive?  Is something said poorly or superbly?  But there is little danger in writing prose poems.  Who is going to say whether one of them is badly written?  There are no counterpointing rhythms to bother the ear, not even much punctuation, probably.  Conrad Aiken, late in life, said contemporary poetry is so much "sawdust cornflakes."  Some of these volumes have won prizes; but, truly, how does a "judge" tell that one is better or worse than the other.  How does one go about telling them apart?

The first strophe of the second “found poem" is from "Photograph" by Anthony Petrosky in Jurgis Petraskas; the second is from "Not Stars, Not Fish" by Erika Funkhouser in Natural Affinities. The third is from "Storm Watch" by Celia Gilbert in Bonfire, and the last is from "Rural Delivery" by Charles Simic in Austerities.

Well, if the poets can learn how to distort reality to such a degree that they all sound like one another, perhaps they can learn how to write as well.  There's still time.  Meanwhile, the children continue to like rhythm, chime, and craziness.  The little savages.

I find myself in the way of developing a theory, which I hadn't intended to do when I began this essay: Is it possible that what children respond to on a basic level is all that poets have to work with when they grow up?  And if they, the writers, throw away the sounds, is all they have left to work with distortions of reality, that is to say, language images — metaphors and likenesses and other figures of speech?  Well, if that's so, their poetry will be like a six cylinder car engine hitting on only two cylinders.  The vehicle won't get where it wants to go very well, if it gets there at all.

    An early version of this essay was originally published in Phantasm, iii:6, issue 18, 1978, pp. 28-29, © 2009 Lewis Turco; all rights reserved.

        Examples of children’s verse may be found in the subsection titled “A Choker for Mother Goose,” pp. 184-189, in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1932842012, quality paperback, $26.95, 460 pages, © 2004, all rights reserved. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM

    Information about the forms and genres of children's poetry is in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third edition, www.UPNE.com, 2000. ISBN 1584650222, trade paperback, $24.95, 337 pages. “The Poet’s Bible," A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. ORDER FROM AMAZON 

 

REMARKS

Lew,

Some poets, like Hayden Carruth, became so good at making line breaks that charged the lines that he left it at that and did not work for rhyme. I think Hayden worked metrics to his benefit, though. But yes, poems in The New Yorker are stories with shortened lines. I still see the poet bringing the poem out of the metaphor eventually, but sometimes it comes dangerously close to making a literal point, which certainly isn't what I read poems for. I wonder if New Yorker editors can read a poem the way one listens to good music? You never ask "what" or "why" about something Gustav Mahler wrote or a passage Charlie Parker played? Just because the music and language are much closer in verse than in music doesn't mean they need to be as studied. If you want to know a poem, read it once every day for your lifetime. When you get to the end of your life you will not have to ask what the poem means, but you will also not have an answer if asked. Same with Mahler's symphonies.

          This comes dangerously close to mere wandering. Sorry. I'm warming up to do my regular newspaper column and I am inflicting my pre-writing roaming through ideas on my friends.

John Herrmann

John,

    I don't think that poems have to "mean" something, but they ought to sound like something, I think. What does "Happy Harry" or "Hairy Pigs," above, mean? They mean what they sound like.

Lew

Sure. Meaning is overrated in a lot of language exchanges. You say, with force, "I love you" and you sit with your arms folded over your chest, closing off the other. So which do we believe, the statement or the body language?

But — we are in an age of self-help books, deluged with information.

Information is good. Information can save your life, like if you are a skydiver looking for the little label on a handle that says PULL. But poetry is the blossoming of the chute and it is what really saves you. Not the chute, the blossoming of it.

John

Do you know John Ciardi’s book How Does a Poem Mean?

Lew

Thanks, Lew. 

I agree that the fashion in children's literature then was a poor one — it discouraged me from finishing up some wonderful rhymed children's pieces i had going, since I thought/believed children loved rhyme and wrote with my childhood delight in mind.  I had loved poems, and my children did.  Maybe these new children the editors of the 'Seventies envisioned were hypothetical, not real children who would enjoy, remember, and ask for repetitions of favorites — ?  I hope the fashion has changed again — I have scarcely dared venture into the children's section of the library this past couple of decades, but I am hopeful more satisfying materials for children are appearing now.

Judging from the delights of Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day and Poetry Month hereabout, I do believe it is happening.

Ruth L. Harrison

 

I hope so too, Ruth, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Lew