Cricket
Cricket
Cricket
Aram Saroyan
Perfect form, perfect meter, entirely accurate to its subject.
Brilliant. Indeed, I agree with Marcus. Meter came first. Meter endures.
Unfortunately I have a whole career in which, for the most part, I have
fucked-up. Maybe it's not too late. Now I realize I can get the rules. I can
practice. I will try as hard as I can. Will the metric gods forgive me? I
know I have contributed to great damage. Should I start with the Old
Testament or move on to Jesus - the forgiver - first? Or, pragmatically,
should I rewrite the works of Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams as a
form of practice - make each work metrically correct.
Why does this argument seem like Yvor Winters - repeatedly - between 1925
and 1960? Why do I think it's so boring??
Stephen V
> Marcus Bales wrote:
>> poetry grew out of use, hard
>> use, and misuse of the language and the rules. Poetry is metrical
>> language; lacking meter, language cannot be poetry. It may be powerful,
>> it may be art, it may be a lot of other things, too, but it cannot be poetry.
>> The whole point of poetry is the meter, and without it what you've got is
>> prose.
>>
> On 2 Aug 2005 at 10:20, Mark Weiss wrote:
>> Sounds like the onward and upward school of thought. Was alliterative
>> verse, or for that matter biblical verse organized as cumulative near
>> -repetition, a failed experiment?<
>
> No, it's not the onward and upward school of thought: meter comes in
> many forms.
>
> Mark Weiss wrote:
>> If you substituted "music" for "meter" in your above statement I'd come
>> loser to agreeing (but see below). In the formula as you present it,
>> here's never been poetry in Spanish, as Spanish poets don't write
>> canned verse, even in sonnets.<
>
> Meter comes in many forms. Is there really no meter in Spanish?
> Someone said there's no meter in Hebrew.
>
> Lawrence Upton wrote:
>>> What matters most is what is being said. I do NOT mean the abstractable
>>> prose statement of what the poem "means" which so many crave, but what is
>>> going on at that point in the poem
>
> Marcus Bales wrote:
>>> Even accepting that you do not mean the prose statement of meaning, I
>> think it's wrong that what matters most in poetry is what is being said.
>> That's what matters most in prose. In prose one may fumble around for
>> quite a while before one gets one's profound insight across, but
>> fumbling around in poetry is just what makes poetry bad.
>
> Mark Weiss wrote:
>> Lawrence can speak for himself, but my guess is this is a pretty
>> thorough misunderstanding of what he's saying. It's difficult for me to
>> understand how you missed "what is going on at that point in the
>> poem," which includes the entire moment of discovery, in which music
>> and meaning in the crudest sense are simultaneous.
>
> I understood Lawrence to say that "What matters most is what is being
> said." since that's explicitly what he said. I disagree that what matters
> most is what is being said because if "What matters most is what is
> being said" is taken to be true, then much follows that seems absurd on
> the face of it. I think that what matters most is how what is being said is
> said; that it is the how that makes it poetry, not the what.
>
> Marcus
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