Essentially, a triversen ("triple verse sentence") stanza is partly grammatic in prosody: one stanza equals one sentence. This sentence is broken into three parts, each part becoming a line composed of approximately one phrase. Thus, three lines (three phrases) are equal to one stanza (one sentence or independent clause). Williams, in attempting to explain this prosody, spoke of the breath pause — all that this meant, finally, was the process of breaking the sentence or independent clause into phrasal lines, what has been called "line-phrasing" or lineating, but there is a traditional term: the verset is a surge of language equal to one full breath.
Williams also spoke of the variable foot, and by this he meant the accentual element of the prosody: each line could vary in length, carrying from one to fourstressed (not necessarily alliterated) syllables, but generally two to four — no more than four because he hated iambic pentameter lines. He used this stanza quite often, especially in an eighteen-line form which may be considered the “triversen” proper:
THE ARTIST
Mr. T.
bareheaded
in a soiled undershirt
his hair standing out
on all sides
stood on his toes
heels together
arms gracefully
for the moment
curled above his head!
Then he whirled about
bounded
into the air
and with an entrechat
perfectly achieved
completed the figure.
My mother
taken by surprise
where she sat
in her invalid's chair
was left speechless.
"Bravo!" she cried at last
and clapped her hands.
The man's wife
came from the kitchen:
"What goes on here?" she said.
but the show was over.
By William Carlos Williams
The reason Williams invented this form and prosody, variable accentuals, is that he didn’t want to write in verse, specifically in iambic meters, even more specifically in iambic pentameter measures, BUT HE DIDN’T WANT TO WRITE IN PROSE, EITHER, which is what “free verse” is. What he wanted was a metrical system that sounded a good deal like prose, but that was, in fact, measured, at least to a degree…hence, the “triversen stanza” and the eighteen-line “triversen” proper, which perhaps was intended as a substitute for the ubiquitous sonnet of traditional accentual-syllabic prosody. Wallace Stevens wrote a triversen, one only, that discussed Williams’ statement of the imagist ideal, “No ideas except in things”:
Wallace Stevens
NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…
The sun was coming from the outside
That scrawny cry — it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
by Wallace Stevens
Notice that Stevens did not observe the stricture that there be no more than four stressed syllables in any line; Stevens, unlike Williams, did not hate the iambic pentameter line. Here is one final triversen, plus one epitaph written in triversen stanzas but not a complete 18-line triversen:
Essentially, a triversen ("triple verse sentence") stanza is partly grammatic in prosody: one stanza equals one sentence. This sentence is broken into three parts, each part becoming a line composed of approximately one phrase. Thus, three lines (three phrases) are equal to one stanza (one sentence or independent clause). Williams, in attempting to explain this prosody, spoke of the breath pause — all that this meant, finally, was the process of breaking the sentence or independent clause into phrasal lines, what has been called "line-phrasing" or lineating, but there is a traditional term: the verset is a surge of language equal to one full breath.
Williams also spoke of the variable foot, and by this he meant the accentual element of the prosody: each line could vary in length, carrying from one to fourstressed (not necessarily alliterated) syllables, but generally two to four — no more than four because he hated iambic pentameter lines. He used this stanza quite often, especially in an eighteen-line form which may be considered the “triversen” proper:
THE ARTIST
Mr. T.
bareheaded
in a soiled undershirt
his hair standing out
on all sides
stood on his toes
heels together
arms gracefully
for the moment
curled above his head!
Then he whirled about
bounded
into the air
and with an entrechat
perfectly achieved
completed the figure.
My mother
taken by surprise
where she sat
in her invalid's chair
was left speechless.
"Bravo!" she cried at last
and clapped her hands.
The man's wife
came from the kitchen:
"What goes on here?" she said.
but the show was over.
By William Carlos Williams
The reason Williams invented this form and prosody, variable accentuals, is that he didn’t want to write in verse, specifically in iambic meters, even more specifically in iambic pentameter measures, BUT HE DIDN’T WANT TO WRITE IN PROSE, EITHER, which is what “free verse” is. What he wanted was a metrical system that sounded a good deal like prose, but that was, in fact, measured, at least to a degree…hence, the “triversen stanza” and the eighteen-line “triversen” proper, which perhaps was intended as a substitute for the ubiquitous sonnet of traditional accentual-syllabic prosody. Wallace Stevens wrote a triversen, one only, that discussed Williams’ statement of the imagist ideal, “No ideas except in things”:
Wallace Stevens
NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…
The sun was coming from the outside
That scrawny cry — it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
by Wallace Stevens
Notice that Stevens did not observe the stricture that there be no more than four stressed syllables in any line; Stevens, unlike Williams, did not hate the iambic pentameter line. Here is one final triversen, plus one epitaph written in triversen stanzas but not a complete 18-line triversen:
The Virginia Quarterly Review "The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).
The Tower Journal Two short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.
The Tower Journal A story, "The Car," and two poems, "Fathers" and "Year by Year"
The Tower Journal Memoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.
The Michigan Quarterly Review This is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).
The Gawain Poet An essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.
The Black Death Bryan Bridges' interesting article on the villanelle and the terzanelle with "The Black Death" by Wesli Court as an example of the latter.
Seniority: Six Shakespearian Tailgaters This is a part of a series called "Gnomes" others of which have appeared in TRINACRIA and on the blog POETICS AND RUMINATIONS.
Reinventing the Wheel, Modern Poems in Classical Meters An essay with illustrations of poems written in classical meters together with a "Table of Meters" and "The Rules of Scansion" in the Summer 2009 issue of Trellis Magazine
Form of the Week 2 – The Triversen
William Carlos Williams
THE TRIVERSEN AND TRIVERSEN STANZA
William Carlos Williams invented an American variable-accentual stanza in his "triversen" that is the equivalent of the Japanese haiku — or, more exactly, the three-line katauta, as I have discussed in chapter Two, "Black Mountain and the Beat Generation" in Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, www.tamupress.com, 2012, 336 pp., ISBN 978-1-936205-30-1, paperback. and on pp. 238-239 of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com), 2012:
Essentially, a triversen ("triple verse sentence") stanza is partly grammatic in prosody: one stanza equals one sentence. This sentence is broken into three parts, each part becoming a line composed of approximately one phrase. Thus, three lines (three phrases) are equal to one stanza (one sentence or independent clause). Williams, in attempting to explain this prosody, spoke of the breath pause — all that this meant, finally, was the process of breaking the sentence or independent clause into phrasal lines, what has been called "line-phrasing" or lineating, but there is a traditional term: the verset is a surge of language equal to one full breath.
Williams also spoke of the variable foot, and by this he meant the accentual element of the prosody: each line could vary in length, carrying from one to four stressed (not necessarily alliterated) syllables, but generally two to four — no more than four because he hated iambic pentameter lines. He used this stanza quite often, especially in an eighteen-line form which may be considered the “triversen” proper:
THE ARTIST
Mr. T.
bareheaded
in a soiled undershirt
his hair standing out
on all sides
stood on his toes
heels together
arms gracefully
for the moment
curled above his head!
Then he whirled about
bounded
into the air
and with an entrechat
perfectly achieved
completed the figure.
My mother
taken by surprise
where she sat
in her invalid's chair
was left speechless.
"Bravo!" she cried at last
and clapped her hands.
The man's wife
came from the kitchen:
"What goes on here?" she said.
but the show was over.
By William Carlos Williams
The reason Williams invented this form and prosody, variable accentuals, is that he didn’t want to write in verse, specifically in iambic meters, even more specifically in iambic pentameter measures, BUT HE DIDN’T WANT TO WRITE IN PROSE, EITHER, which is what “free verse” is. What he wanted was a metrical system that sounded a good deal like prose, but that was, in fact, measured, at least to a degree…hence, the “triversen stanza” and the eighteen-line “triversen” proper, which perhaps was intended as a substitute for the ubiquitous sonnet of traditional accentual-syllabic prosody. Wallace Stevens wrote a triversen, one only, that discussed Williams’ statement of the imagist ideal, “No ideas except in things”:
Wallace Stevens
NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…
The sun was coming from the outside
That scrawny cry — it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
by Wallace Stevens
Notice that Stevens did not observe the stricture that there be no more than four stressed syllables in any line; Stevens, unlike Williams, did not hate the iambic pentameter line. Here is one final triversen, plus one epitaph written in triversen stanzas but not a complete 18-line triversen:
IT GOES
it goes away, leola,
as the rabble hooves have gone:
the prairies linger.
none, no, none may know
the sable mane for long,
nor the stallion’s great desire.
the souls of brontosaurs may run
their feather course
for all I know, leola.
this is true, though:
oceans dwell
among the continents.
look through a hollow rush,
leola; sight is limited
and vaguely dry.
peer through your flesh
or mine, leola —
what do you see?
By Lewis Turco
R.I.P. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
September 17, 1883-March 4, 1963
So much depends upon that Red
Wheel Barrow glazed with rain
water beside the white chickens,
no doubt – but what? We feel
someone should tell us but, alas!
only Doctor Williams could.
By Wesli Court
Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, (www.BrickHouseBooks.com) 2012, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1.
For a whole series of poems written in triversens and triversen stanzas, see “Twelve Moons” in my blog titled Poetics and Ruminations.
August 25, 2014 in Books, Commentary, Criticism, Education, Epitaphs, Haiku & Senryu, History, Literature, Poems, Poetry, Triversen, Verse forms | Permalink
Tags: triversen, triversen stanza, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams