Chris--a short note on enjambment as I was sorry to see the thread peter out
so quickly. I should note that I'm have to register some objection to this:
> Williams's sense of measure largely eschews enjambment.
Your ref. to "measure" suggests you're thinking of the later Williams, say
the three-step line, & I might agree with you to a great extent there--the
3-stepper has a meditative ponderousness that I find rather dull mostly,
esp. in Williams' imitators (try Tomlinson's indifferent imitations of this
technique in an early volume, or the painful 3-step translation of the
_Duino Elegies_ published by Norton). But surely enjambment is key to much
of the earlier verse.
There's a useful counterweight on p.42 of Clark Coolidge's _Mine: The One
That Enters the Stories_: "What I had to learn was that the forms are
happening inside the lines, not at the breaks. And anyway you know that
keeping to exact line breaks, even to the point of always adhering to
reading them aloud with that stop, is a sure way to go crazy. You break it
just before the energy starts to drop, as Dorn pointed out. That's the only
principle I know."
It's rather strange & disturbing in a way that verse technique has become
little discussed in recent years, outside claims for the "new sentence":
there are exceptions I suppose (Doug Oliver's _Poetry & Narrative in
Performance_, for instance, though it's approaching matters from a different
angle; & one might mention the poet Stephen Ratcliffe's _Campion on Song_, a
book-length analysis of the sound-patterns in Thomas Campion's "Now winter
nights enlarge"). -- One does feel the need for an account of contemporary
verse technique that might begin to be a useful critical tool. One friend
of mine characteristically will refer to a poet's having an "ear" or not,
yet I'd like to know a bit more about what makes an ear.
all best --N
Nate & Jane Dorward
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