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.
Here is an anthology of small songs I
wrote for my children, Melora and Christopher. The first one is a nursery rhyme
written in madsong stanza (see The Book of Forms for a description). All lines are refrains; the first line is repeated as the
fifth; the short lines are incremental refrains, for the speaker makes up his
or her own short line couplets by filling in the appropriate animals and their
actions:
THE LARK
Hark! Hark! The lark!
How he doth spark!
To
woo the owl
The
lark must howl.
Hark! Hark! The lark!
Hark! Hark! The lark!
How he doth spark!
To
woo the snake
The
lark must shake.
Hark! Hark! The lark!
Hark! Hark! The lark!
How he doth spark!
To
woo the worm
The
lark must squirm.
Hark! Hark! The lark!
Hark! Hark! The lark!
How he doth spark!
To
woo the squirrel
The
lark must whirl.
Hark! Hark! The lark!
Hark! Hark! The lark!
How he doth spark!
Would
you go on?
Make
up your own.
Hark! Hark! The lark!
MORTIMER
LUMP
Bumpitty
bumpitty bump,
My
name is Mortimer Lump
I
eat out of pans
And
old tin cans
Because
I live in a dump, a dump,
Because
I live in a dump..
Bumpitty
bumpitty bump,
My
name is Mortimer Lump
I
nibble on seeds
And
dig in the weeds
That
grow in the fields in a clump, a clump,
That
grow in the fields in a clump.
THE
SINGLE STAIR
There
once was a single stair
Who
wanted to go somewhere,
So
he put on his shoe
And
sailed for Peru —
But
he found he was already there!
ROCKET
BY, BABY
Rocket
by, baby, in your space ship,
When
you count down the rocket will zip.
When
you blast off, go into free fall,
And
off will go baby, cockpit and all.
BUGS
Big
Bug, little Bug,
Middle
Bug, Beetle,
One
named Tweedledum,
Another
named Tweedle,
The
Third named Sam and he went for a ride
With
a pretty little ladybug sitting at his side.
HAPPY
HARRY
Happy
Harry Hooligan,
Acting
like a fool again,
Kissed
a frog
That
sat on a log
And
jumped into the pool again.
TIMOTHY
WITHERS
Timothy
Withers dabbles and dithers
When he goes out to play.
But
Timothy Withers blathers and blithers
If it's a nasty day.
HAIRY
PIGS
Three
little pigs,
They
lost their wigs
And
couldn't go to the barber,
So
they bought some wool
For
the barber to pull
And
jumped into the harbor.
PIRATE
SONG
By
jingo, by Joe, by gee,
I
think I'll go to sea.
I'll
set my sail
Abaft
of the rail,
A
binnacle on my knee, by gee,
A
binnacle on my knee.
By
jingo, my gee, by Joe,
I
think I'll go below.
I'll
stow my gold
Down
deep in the hold
Because
of the winds that blow, by Joe,
Because
of the winds that blow.
SQUIRREL
Gosh
all hemlock, golly gee,
I've
chased a squirrel up a tree!
Gosh
all hemlock, golly Joe —
The squirrel's got me by the toe!
RELATIVITY
Aunty Nat,
She ate a rat.
Since it was large, she
grew fat.
She's lost some weight —
search the house!
Now she may only eat a
mouse.
Uncle Larry
Was kind of scary
And couldn’t read the
dictionary,
But he had words he loved
to toss
At everybody but his boss.
Aunty Bette
Tried hard to get
As much as she could gross
and net.
She got some lots and land
and such,
But moneywise she got not
much.
Uncle Allen
Drank a gallon
Of bile and ate an eagle's
talon.
He tied a cord around his
throat
And tried to fly but
couldn't float.
Aunty Anne,
Since time began,
Sat drinking in a frying
pan.
She drank and drank until
she died —
Now Aunty Anne's
completely fried.
Uncle Dave
Was very brave
And always knew how to
behave
Until they shot him from
the sky
And now who knows how he
may lie.
Uncle Curt,
He got hurt
Playing in the backyard
dirt.
We patched him up with
webs and clay —
Now Uncle Curt's outdoors
all day.
Pretty Aunt Jean
Was very clean
Until she ate a jellybean.
She got it on her yellow
dress —
Now Aunty Jean's an awful
mess.
Uncle Lou
Just loved to stew
And you should see the
fits he threw.
Now he is old and out of
sorts
And loves to tend his patch of worts.
Some other examples of children’s verse may be found in my volume titled, The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004 in the subsection titled “A Choker for Mother Goose,” pp. 184-189.
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.
REMARKS
Such lovely poems.
Marinela Reka, age 12
http://www.marinelareka.com
I'm glad you like them, Marinela. Thank you for writing.
Lewis Turco / Wesli Court
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
Excellent essay, Lew,
and delightful examples!
Rhina
Lewis,
Your MORTIMER LUMP especially delightful!
Marta
Finch
Thank you, Marta.
Obviously, though, it’s not a very PC nursery rhyme, at least it wasn’t until “Slumdog Millionaire” came along.
Lew
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