<<Someone (and I won't say who for the risk of inflaming passions, but she's
famous) has said that the page has replaced (is replacing)the line as the
basic unit of the composition of poetry. I'm not sure about this, but I am
intrigued by it, and wondered what others thought.
Ian Davidson>>
Once you accept the notion of "visual prosody," then I suppose the basic unit
might as well be the page as anything else. It has no meaning to the ear, but
then neither does the line in most free verse written in this century.
I'm confessedly rather extreme in this, but the look of a poem on the page
means very little to me. I think of a poem as a string of words, whose
prosody is quite independent of how it's written down. The Beowulf manuscript
is written out like prose, with dots for line breaks: modern editions print
it in the familiar half-lines with a gap inbetween. I can't see how it
matters. Old ballads were sometimes written in lines of four and three beats,
sometimes as fourteeners. It doesn't matter.
Now, I know that to a lot of people, particularly those involved with recent
poetry, such things do matter. I just don't quite understand why.
I can appreciate an art like Blake's, in which each page, text and image, is
clearly designed as a whole. But then his books are more than just poetry
(and I don't mean "just" pejoratively: the poems can also stand on their
own,without the illustrations). His art is synthetic, like medieval art: it
goes as far as it can in one medium, then continues in another.
I'm all for mixing media; what I don't understand is the confounding of
categories.Prosody is temporal.Poems in sign language could have a "visual
prosody," otherwise the term just seems like a fancy synonym for typography
or layout.Which can have visual appeal, granted.
Again, I know I'm extreme in this. I would begrudge nobody whatever pleasure
or meaning they can find in visual poetry, concrete poetry, poetry of the
page, whatever.
When "someone," however, declares that it's henceforth the whole game . . .
well, that's a bit much.
Alan
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