> Harold, I'm not sure what you're asking, since you're impatient with authors
> like Prynne & Olson who take great care about lineation, but on the other
> hand don't like the deliberately arbitrary lineation of works like "Artifice
> of Absorption" (I think you're taking "ironize" in a different sense from
> Keston--he meant enjambment as the locus of irony, not as being
> mocked/trivialized). Don't understand your point on translations: lineation
> is has little to do with "sound" so can't be said to be privileging "sense
> over sound".
Well, it appears I was thoroughly unclear, so I'll try again.
I was gesturing in several directions at once.
1. Prynne _obviously_ puts every word to paper with great
care, whatever he is writing. I wouldn't say the same for
Olson, though I would be happy to be corrected. Since you
yourself have noted the paucity of serious studies of
what one might roughly call "post-modern prosody",
not as a curiosity but as something integral to the poetry,
I don't feel too bad about being somewhat in the dark
about it here.
What I meant by "fussiness" was perhaps a certain
(somehow) inappropriate regularity, not a painstaking
conscientiousness. A certain lack of what might be an
appropriate freedom. This just registers a hesitation
I feel towards some of Prynne's procedures, I guess.
2. If one isn't counting syllables or feet or phonemes to fit
a measure, and if one is not tying lines to breath-units or
atman-units or musical or grammatical phrases, then I find it
odd deliberately to emulate the forms of lines on a page
that have traditionally been associated with such approaches.
One may of course imagine various forms of irony in doing
so, but the appropriateness or interest of such irony may
be questioned in individual cases.
3. Whether lineation has little to do with sound depends
on the case in question, doesn't it? Might it not, legitimately,
sometimes? Or might it not serve several functions,
some of them connected with rhythm, some with semantics,
at once? I remember hearing somewhere that Creeley
always reads his work with audible pauses for line-breaks,
for example (I've never heard him). In speech, sound
often _is_ the vehicle of irony.
4. Some popular current visual forms on the page seem
more a matter of fashion than poetic necessity. As
particular metrical and rhyme schemes might have been
in the past.
5. First point about translation: I question whether it
is generally useful, in conveying something of what
makes the original into poetry, to ignore such sound-
elements as rhythm, assonance, rhyme, etc., when
they exist, in favour of a flat rendition of what a
Chomskian linguist would regard as semantics.
This relates to your own (teasing?) question about
what an "ear" is. Coolidge's remark is interesting,
but how do we measure when the "energy drops"
in a syntagma? What is energy here? Is there a
"purely" semantic energy? Coolidge gives us neither
a theory nor a useful rule of thumb, merely an
imprecise metaphor for his own practice (which is
something worthwhile as far as it goes).
6. Second point: it _seems_ to me there is a US a-g
orthodoxy, a semi-official verse culture, that valorises
translations that (1) either read like flat translatorese
or (2) completely distort the original to a degree where
a reader ignorant of the source language can form no
opinion at all of what the original is like. Either of these
extremes can be useful or fun in particular circumstances,
but I think it is unhealthy if they are taken to define
the space of possibilities.
I may be all wet in any of the above. Getting tired now,
so signing off, leaving loose ends. Regards to all.
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