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Just to amplify my earlier email. I don't think white space is
necessarily to be read as a visual parameter: it can also suggest
a musical scoring, or a kind of collage commentary on other print
forms, playing along with other conventions, such as bold vs
italics vs other imagined conventions and norms, including mixed
font poems ... there is no natural speech rhythm to the English
language that could somehow be entertained as the law against
which verse conventions are played out. Nor is some formal law of
white space against which specificities can be understood, but
there are historical understandings and conventions that
sophisticated readers of types of poetry tend to internalise and
take for granted.... but as St. Just declared, at least in Ian
Hamilton Finlay's reworking: Too many laws, too few examples! To
take one example, Pound's poetry in the Faber editions looks very
different if read against the print editions of his work pre
1918.... and once you recognise that it looks very different in
different editions, then reading this difference as a guide to how
the lay-out and font emphasis of The Cantos could be read begins
to become quite puzzling... as is the question of how to read
David Jones's poetry in print form against his interest in
sculpted inscriptions....
Emphasizing the page and its digital forms is not merely a modern
question, either, since the dialogues and difference engines
between speech and writing, between spoken and heard, between said
and sung, go back to Homer, if not to Gilgamesh.... There are also
significant differences between different approaches to white
space within modern poetry, so that a meaningful understanding of
why a poem is spaced the way it is often involves knowing
something of the spirit and poetics of a compositional practice in
relation to publishing parameters and constraints. Intentions,
printing costs, software design and typographical skills all play
some part in the way modern poetry is received. This is palpable
when you look and read A5 poetry chapbooks: so many wear the scars
of their emergence from standard software fonts and
photocopiers... This doesn't mean that modern poetry isn't also
amenable to prosodic reading, but more that the traditional
emphasis on feet and / or stresses is a rather oddly narrow one,
where, for example, there might also be poetics of white space, of
capital letters, of indentations, of the use of full stops and so
on. Anyone who has spent time with 16th and 17th century
manuscripts, or indeed the notebooks of Blake, the manuscripts of
Emily Dickinson, knows that the attempt to translate such poetry
into the print conventions of 19th century verse isn't entirely
satisfactory, hence the interest of facsimiles.... And as Doug
Oliver began to reveal, there are many ways of performing a poem
within certain prosodic regularities, and performance plurality
doesn't have to be resolved into an ideal reading, or there'd be
something weird about the endless variety of emphasis sustained by
Shakespeare dramatic poetry...
Plurality of possible ways of approaching poetry as an art form
was the burden of my suggestion, with a sense that 18th and 19th
century classical verse technology, has its limits.... but limits,
too, can be fun.
Drew
[log in to unmask]"> To clarify: four levels of stress, and those derived from speech, not poetry. Nothing to do with pentameter, as far as I remember … unless you believe that iambic pentameter is derived from speech, which I don’t think I do, despite the prevailing taught belief that it does. Blank verse seems more like a transitional phase from earlier metric/ rhymed verse to modern cadence.
And, yes, rhythm or cadence seems necessary to consider in poetry; being intrinsic, as in music. I’ll vote for that. (I didn’t vote for Trump, btw.)
I have always read white space as time. Probably from my youth when I learned to set type by hand. I’m a firm believer in the language of sound having a physical analog ….
Excerpt from an article by W.S Condon and L.W. Sander: “Neonate movement is synchronised with adult speech: Interactional participation and language acquisition”
“As early as the first day of life, the human neonate moves in precise and sustained segments of movement that are synchronous with the articulated structure of adult speech. These observations suggest a view of development of the infant as a participant at the outset in multiple forms of interactional organization, rather than as an isolate. … In contrast, microanalysis of pathological behavior – for instance, that of subjects with aphaic, autistic, and schizophrenic conditions – reveals marked self-asychronies. Delayed auditory feedback also markedly disturbs this self-sychrony. … For example, as the adult emits the KK of ‘come’, which lasts for 0.07 second, the infant’s head moves right very slightly (Rvs), the left elbow extends slightly (Es), the right shoulder rotates outward slightly (ROs) the right hip rotates outward fast (ROf), the left hip extends slightly (Es), and the big toe of the left foot abducts (AD). These body parts sustain these directions and speeds of movement together for this 0.07-second interval.
J
______________________________
QS: Let’s return to poetics.JR: When did we leave?
—From the conversation between Quinta Slef and Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager
On Jan 16, 2018, at 9:53 AM, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Before Drew’s post, that expands the area of discussion, I was trying to think about Pierre’s suggestion that we need ’new/different ways of looking at meter/rhythm’. My first thought was that the idea sounds fine but that we only need them if:1) the old ways of looking/hearing don’t work2) new ways of writing have made them outmoded.In response to 1) it could be said, for reasons already touched on, the old model was anyway rickety and ineffective. And yet many of these recent alternatives – Jaime’s reference to a theoretical 4 beat (presumably speaking of the pentameter) of infinitely varying strength of stress etc. – offer complications that are often merely performative in Oliver’s sense of the word. I’m not well up on these variant systems, but those I have come across tend to complicate rather than resolve the problems.As for 2) my first response is that there isn’t any new mode of writing that changes the embedded stresses of English. This is going to sound primeval but everything that’s a poem has to follow those rhythms inherent in the language and in speech. (Ok let’s leave aside ‘visual poetry’ which might not want to be ‘read aloud’. And ‘sound poetry’? – well that would depend on the the acoustic features it adopts, some markedly rhythmic, some less so.)Perhaps I should pause before blurting something troglodytic out in response to Drew’s post, but still I’m not sure how these intriguing examples make traditional ideas of rhythm outmoded. If, say, the breadth of Denise Riley’s computer screen has elongated some of her lines, they are still composed and received as rhythmic units and are therefore susceptible of metrical analysis, and the same goes for free verse. (Of course if you employ stepped indentations, chasm-like caesurae, phrases at right-angles etc. the reader will have to come to some kind of decision how they’re to be performed. Or not.)(My lack of interest in the technological changes from typewriter to computer to smart phone etc. may be a personal one, even a limitation. I still compose in my head or, since my head leaks, with a biro on scraps of paper, apart from a few ‘shaped poems’ where the visual form needs print. I only offer this personal admission so my remarks can be more easily dismissed!)Drew’s project to explore ‘the white space’ from Dickinson (an intensely rhythmic writer whatever length of pause her dashes intend) is unquestionably worthwhile and worth doing, but it still seems to me to be concerned primarily with the visual organisation of a poem rather than its acoustics.JamieFrom: [log in to unmask]" href="mailto:[log in to unmask]" class="" moz-do-not-send="true">Drew MilneSent: Tuesday, January 16, 2018 3:10 PMTo: [log in to unmask]" href="mailto:[log in to unmask]" class="" moz-do-not-send="true">[log in to unmask]Subject: Re: MetronomeIt may be that Cambridge is just awash with people studying prosody, rhythm, metre and everything, almost always working on material written before 1900, but my own sense is that what might be more helpful would be more work on how to read and understand modern compositional forms that reflect the media of the printed page in relation to digital forms and compositional practices that have come to play an important part in modern poetry.... I recall Denise Riley telling me that some of her poems with long lines were working with the parameter of the size of the screen she was writing on: the screen and font were shaping the length of the line ... but from Emily Dickinson's page poetics to Olsonian composition in the expanded field of the typed page, into the widespread use of typewriters, xerox machines, laptops and now phones, concrete forms, dirty and clean, use of fonts and page space, the new sentence, the differences between different poetics of white space in lineation and page arrangement etc .... and how all those shake down when poetry is digitised and read on screens...
at various stages I've contemplated writing a short history of white space in modern poetry from Emily Dickinson and Mallarme onwards.... so as well as neglecting the traditional musicalities of verse and poetry, along with the problems of free verse prosody, aren't we in a long period of neglecting the critical articulation of the page and associated digital forms that are very much part of the medium of modern poetry.... I think much of this is taken for granted by people who read a lot of modern poetry, but totally baffling, silly or nonsensical avant-gardism to people who don't....
Drew
On 16/01/2018 09:32, Tilla Brading wrote:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite" class="">secondedTilla Brading
On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 6:18 PM, Pierre Joris <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Well said, Drew!& maybe we need new/different ways of looking at meter/rhythm today. Douglas Oliver had made a valiant attempt to do so in his Poetry and Narrative in Performance. Don’t know if anybody has followed up on that.
On Jan 12, 2018, at 10:03 AM, Drew Milne <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Traditional prosody is still taught in schools. Year after year I have to explain to students who have been taught some scansion at school that a song or ballad poem isn't in iambic pentameter, nor even in iambic tetrameter, and that a variable line of six, seven or eight syllables might just be a regular song or ballad stanza that isn't in classical feet. More sophisticated forms of prosody, Saintsbury versus Attridge etc, have been clogging up Cambridge practical criticism classes for years. I teach translations of metrical and nonmetrical psalms partly to plant the thought that there are different understandings of metre. There's more prosody taught in Cambridge English than Marxism or psychoanalysis. But because classical scansion is indeed essentially inaccurate and often misleading, the stresses and strains of English poetry tend to take second place to people tapping out binary patterns in search of feet. One more heave and we'll have done with ye olde classical clogs. Bring on the dance of the intellect.Drew
On 12/01/2018 14:53, Jamie McKendrick wrote:
Just messing, Tim – but, whatever grain of truth could be found in it, at least I’m being even-handedly dismissive! (I’ve been reprimanded on the list before for that too.)Still, I think there might be a topic here. Even as regards CW, I’ve come across students struggling with advanced concepts of avant-garde poetics who haven’t a clue about the traditional basics, concepts of meter and rhythm that have informed more than 500 years of poetry in English, not to mention other languages. I realise that the vocabulary of scansion, imported from classical literature, is off-putting and essentially inaccurate for the stress-based patterns of English (rather than vowel-length etc.), but it’s useful knowledge to have. Peter’s lucid point as to why the metronome is a misleading image – Ez of course knows this and is being rhetorical – would then be more easily understood by students who encounter Pound’s polemics. It’s stuff that used to be taught in school, and one or two US professors in writing courses I’ve heard of apparently taught metrics quite rigorously. Now I guess it’s considered as irrelevant as life drawing in most art colleges.JamieFrom: [log in to unmask]" href="mailto:[log in to unmask]" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">Tim AllenSent: Friday, January 12, 2018 12:14 PMTo: [log in to unmask]" href="mailto:[log in to unmask]" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">[log in to unmask]AC.UK Subject: Re: MetronomeA bit harsh Jamie. I'd say there is a part of the avant-garde that is a bit deaf to rhythm while another part of it is very much attuned to it.On 11 Jan 2018, at 13:25, Jamie McKendrick wrote:
Eureka! A lack of interest in and an ignorance about rhythm: the one thing that unites the mainstream and the avant-garde.