Harold Teichman:
>It often seems hard to escape the feeling, even when one is
>caught up in, as it were, the raw words that _partly_ make
>up the poetry, that the lineation is largely arbitrary.
It is impossible for received words, written or spoken, to be 'raw', unless
perhaps they are in a language we do not know - and even then the letter
shape or sound etc will reverberate with likenesses. Yet if those words,
those blatantly unraw familiars, only 'partly' make up the poem, then the
only possible other 'part' is the order in which they appear: this, on the
page, is the poem or whatever else you want to call it. Anything other to
that such as the models and codes of interpretation that might be understood
and shared by writer and reader - the 'before' and 'after' if you like - are
literature. But this literate state of the poem is a tenuous thing whose only
substance is repetition in numbers. Floods and death can rob the poem of its
literate state. We might say that a child, perfectly able to read the 'words'
can also rob it of its literate state, but this would be mistaken because the
child robs the arrangement of words of nothing because when he reads it is
just that, an arrangement of words, as unraw to the child's inner life as any
other reader's inner life - on the contrary the reading child gives life to
the object.
Harold, something cannot be 'largely' arbitrary; it is either arbitrary or it
is not. Yes, ok, something might 'feel' arbitrary while another part of our
brain tells us that it is not (or indeed, the other way round) but this is
not something peculiar to poetry; other artforms share the condition and -
laughing loudly now - so does life itself.
Harold Teichman:
>We see a lot of poetry today that looks pretty much like
>repeated units of this (and I mean the poetry we're
>interested in, that hasn't got a name, not Richard Wilbur):
>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>(how curious that the lines always come out to nearly
>the same length, when we're not counting syllables any
>more) or this:
>xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>xxxxxxxx
>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>And whatever rhythmical or semantic or tone-colouristic
>or pictorial judgement has gone into these choices
>is usually obscure at best. By which I _don't_ mean
>that we should be able to have a theory of it to make
>it aesthetically valid. There is often an excitement,
>still, at the level of versification, in the early modernists
>and objectivists, for example, that seems almost entirely
>missing today. It doesn't seem to matter any more.
Your comments are an attempt at coming to grips with the aesthetics behind
the germination of free verse and how that original aesthetics changed and
developed through the century, first into styles and then into, what I see
as, increasingly restrictive models. One of the greatest problems with 'free
verse' is the psychological illusion of freedom that it gives to the poet -
something very much tied-in with the idea of the individual and personal
'voice'. The more restrictive the model of free verse has become (by which I
mean that provided by the typical anglo-american mainstream 'free verse'
poem) the stronger has been the corresponding illusion of freedom - the
ideology of the 'personal voice' which has determined that all these persons
sound the same and say the same thing about the same things. In many ways I
believe this 'formalisation' of free verse, as practised by the mainstream,
is one way of countering the problems you point to above. We know that in the
hands of many writers, who through either inexperience or essential lack of
talent are unable to 'read their work as others read it', free verse becomes
flabby or thin, a lot more often, and sooner, than in poetry which relies on
a formal model. I believe that mainstream aesthetics is an attempt (mostly
unconscious) at dealing with this in such a way that the illusion of the
personal voice is maintained (at least for those who write and read the
stuff) without compromising on healthy trim 'style'. The problems caused by
this are extensive, especially because these processes appear to be largely
'unconscious' - there is almost no theoretical comment made on this poetry
either by its practitioners or its detractors - the whole thing is just
looked upon as a 'given', which, in this country, you are not supposed to
question without being designated with some negative epithet.
In historical terms an alternative (or alternatives) to that road was trod by
those who came down from Black Mountain (not an exclusive act but
nevertheless a pivotal one in terms of influence). Creeley is my man in this
and Olson isn't but that is neither here nor there. Olson's 'style', poetry
and prose, irritates me personally but that does not stop me from
appreciating and understanding what he was doing and why - and of course
there are those who are not 'irritated' but inspired by it, so good for Olson
and good for them. Good for Creeley too. I came to him late, which was maybe
a good thing, because after half a lifetime of reading the flabby and the
thin and the boring trim of the mainstream's answer to linguistic and
aesthetic 'problems' Creeley's answer seemed even more vigorous and vital and
real and so plain fucking good. You say above, "it doesn't seem to matter any
more" but I find that in the poetry I love it matters a great deal, and goes
on mattering more and more, which is perhaps why I like it so much - and most
of that poetry I find is, or is related to, something recent literary history
calls L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.
And I don't find it at all "curious that the lines always come out to nearly
the same length, when we're not counting syllables any more". I find it
pretty obvious, as I suspect do Bernstein and Perelman. This might seem a
rather basic thing to say but perhaps it is so basic that that is the reason
you don't see it: there is, actually, a limit to the length of the line and a
further limit on the relationship of line to line. These limits are then
codified, or given game-plans.
You said:
>A certain school of LangPo seems to want to "ironise"
>all enjambment: e.g. Bernstein's Artifice of Absorption or
>Perelman's 6-words-per-line formula. I couldn't find
>this more boring and irritating (probably the desired
>effect): if it's fucking prose, write it as prose.
Meaning itself is in part generated by the line-break (surely we would all
agree on this?) in any poem that has more than one line (even then the single
line's meaning is partly given to it by the fact that it is a single line). I
am writing this Email full screen but I know that if I change it to 'restore'
it will read differently and if I continued in that format I would say
something different. (I realise there is no way of proving this - but its a
heavy hunch). You see I don't think it is a case simply of LangPo wanting to
"ironise all enjambment" so much as LangPo wanting to demonstrate how
enjambment ironises itself. And as for "if it's fucking prose, write it as
prose" - what, eh? The line of prose (the line ended so rudely and abruptly
by the border of the page) was in fact fully prepared for that break from the
moment it began, albeit unconsciously, except in the hands of prose poetry or
L=ANGUAGE 'prose' perhaps. This in turn is related to your point about
'fussy' Prynn:
>Has anyone else noticed
>the rather "fussy" overall indentation in Prynne's "Poems"?
>Perhaps this is a Bloodaxe artefact, but I suspect not.
>Come to think of it, large blocks of Maximus have a
>similar fussy, let's-now-indent-precisely-two-tabs
>feel to them, so maybe the presumptive Olson influence
>accounts for it.
Consciousness of the relationship between 'field', and what you find yourself
saying within it, could indeed be called 'fussy', or maybe it could just be
called conscious. When I first read what you said above I was in fits of
laughter. Yeah, I thought, Mallarme, so fussy (I'm afraid the laughter is
breaking out again).
All the best of enjambed words
Tim Allen
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