This, and yours, should probably be backchannel, but here goes:


At 10:58 PM 8/25/2005, you wrote:
>sorry to offend, Mark. There are so many centers to poetry, even within 
>each country, and certainly generational and other issues play into how 
>people see things changing.  I am too new to the list to be posting so 
>much and apologize.
>
>I only wish most younger poets had your depth of background in formal 
>verse! It is extremely extremely rare.  My sense of it has less to do with 
>my own position than with the fact that people like Karen Volkman are 
>starting to write a lot of sonnets.  But as you say, interest in it is 
>comparatively very rare.  Who knows whether it is really growing. I don't 
>personally care too much; as you say, we need to write the way we need to do.
>
>Just to clarify, briefly, I would say that a poem is structured by 
>repetition in a different way than a passage of prose.  A prose sentence 
>might be characterized or decorated by repetition, but not conspicuously 
>structured by it, unless you are thinking of on the phonemic level or 
>something...  Physically, obviously, metrical poetry is structured by 
>repetition.  Traditional left-justified free verse uses the line as a kind 
>of repeated element--the linebreak repeats down the page the way a rhyme 
>pattern would.


If we're not working on the phonemic level what are we doing?

That the fact of linebreak repeating doesn't mean that there's a repeating 
linebreak. Lines break in different ways and after different numbers of 
words. Prose tends to be divided into sentences that tend to end in 
periods. Repetition precisely in the way linebreaks repeat, and hard to 
build much on.

"A prose sentence might be characterized or decorated by repetition, but 
not conspicuously structured by it..." is an interplay of iambs and 
trochees, and the last clause is iambic pentameter. Notice the repeating r 
sounds in the first clause; they become the driving force of "characterized 
or decorated by repetition." The three words with the strongest stress 
repeat the p sound, and the first and last, "prose" and "conspicuously" at 
once rhyme and pun on "pros and cons."


>I totally agree with what you say about syllabic meter, btw.
>
>  I notice these two lines in one of your own poems--
>
>She spoke the gestures
>of her native land
>
>Judging from the content of these lines, it seems like all that training 
>in iambic pentameter gave you a sense of it as some kind of "home."

If you look at the entire poem you'll find other iambic lines and phrases 
but a great many that aren't. You could object similarly to my little 
mischief with a fragment of your prose. What's the point? I 
through-compose, and I hope that the music isn't overly repetitive or 
end-stopped.

Or do you mean that an interest in the language of gesture, a concern of 
mine, is somehow involved with metrics?

The poem, by the way, is available at 
http://www.wildhoneypress.com/featured/weiss/translated.htm, for anyone 
who's interested in judging for her/himself how much the eight quoted words 
represent it.



>I have just been reading Mark Van Doren's book on Dryden--had never read 
>Dryden before. I'm impressed with your having read him so deeply. What 
>drew you to Dryden?  I see an odd kinship with your current work.


What drew me to Dryden was that of all English-language poetry the Augustan 
was most foreign to me--I couldn't understand why anyone would want to 
write that way or read the result. Finding a way in was as much 
anthropology as literary study.

If you mean that I'm often ironic, I think that has more to do with being 
Jewish and a New Yorker and politically in despair than with my reading of 
great dead poets. I was most interested in Dryden's rhymed tragedies, with 
which I have little in common. But I'd be interested to see what you 
identify as a kinship.

As well as the recognized classics like Absalon, Dryden's Chaucer 
translations are truly wonderful. And the epilogue to Tyrannic Love, or The 
Royal Martyr should be fun for almost anyone. Nell Gwynn, already a royal 
mistress, played the ingenue. As her dead body is being carried off at 
final curtain she comes to life as herself and oders the bearers to stop so 
that she can deliver a speech. My Dryden is packed, so the interested will 
have to find it for themselves. And his prose is flawless--the first great 
writer of modern discursive prose.

Mark