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.