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I can’t remember where I found the reference to Nabokov, Jamie, but I’ll look for it at some point (right now my time is way over committed, sorry). I found it at a moment when I was doing some intensive research on poetic rhythms because I was working with a dancer, Nikki Santilli, on combining speech rhythms with dance. At the same time I looked for the Oliver book, but like you had trouble finding it, or affording it. I don’t remember much of the research I did at that point which is why I quoted the blog. (Memory that disappears when my attention goes elsewhere is also the reason why I write things down!) The four stress rhythm model is one proposed by linguists currently. They have found, generally, that English (British and American) has four stresses, which can be designated at strong, not so strong, not so weak and weak. Or, if you prefer, very strong, strong, weak and very weak. Though I think the former is preferred. It occurred to me at the time that this “technical” or scientific analysis offers a reason for why so many people have trouble with scansion. The reduction of four stresses into two renders a very approximate map of real speech sound, and people get confused in the middle part of the model – the not so strong, not so weak – categories. Can they be ascribed to strong? Or weak? Stressed? Unstressed? Or where? As Peter describes it, Oliver’s model addresses a more philosophical aspect of meter, as Jamie implies. Something perhaps derived from the “death of the author” school of analysis. It’s fine as a philosophy, but doesn’t really hold linguistically. If you are a baritone and I am a soprano it may be true that we are speaking in different pitches and likewise if you are British and I am American we may have different sets of accents of particular words, but that doesn’t mean that the four stresses don’t exist in our languages. But not having read Oliver’s work I can only point out the little I do know apart from Oliver. And of course Peter was careful to say that his memory of Oliver's system, or philosophy perhaps, was tenuous. In any event, there’s no reason why the two models can't exist at the same time, and perhaps fruitfully contribute to each other. On another, slightly irritable note, I find most of the discussion on this list is constituted of analysis, definition, categorization and even canonization. All of which are substantial and essential parts of the academic brief … so what’s the problem? The institution? The calcification? I haven’t been able to read Tim’s article, because I have serious (migraine-related) problems reading white type on black. If he would kindly send me a copy (black type on white) I look forward to reading it. Oh … Happy New Year again, moving toward February and, in California, the blessed sunshine … J jaimerobles.com ______________________________ 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 13, 2018, at 5:51 AM, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > Hi Jaime, can you say where to find Nabokov’s prosodic reflections? > I tried tracking down Doug Oliver’s book but it’s now being sold for £390 on Amazon. His stepson Anselm Berrigan at Poetry Foundation reproduces in two parts letters from Oliver helpfully explaining the main ideas behind the book. > Contrary to my starting point, I’m only slightly interested in the technical side. Well, not exactly contrary, I was talking about rhythm, which can be analysed of course but operates mysteriously. > Oliver’s concern seems to be why there’s a consensus, more or less, that one reading of a poem is better than another, and how we can know this. But more difficult to say is why one line is better than another though they share more or less the same metrical organisation, and this is not just down to content, but to do with an elusive organisation of sounds. Why does one passage strike us as poetry and another not? > Two lines I’ve just composed at random: > Life has passed by so fast and now > Death has me by the throat > Apart from the lifeless abstractions, the sound and the rhythm immediately grate. Maybe better if you strike out the first ‘has’ but not that much better. Of course it’s susceptible of metrical analysis, but what is it that makes us know it’s all wrong. Not even like Les Dawson playing the wrong notes for comic effect, because there we hear the wrong notes continually mangling the melody which we can still hear because he has skill enough to manage just the right amount of wrongness... > Jamie > > > On 12 Jan 2018, at 23:14, Jaime Robles <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: > >> A number of studies have been put forth, trying to resolve some of poetry’s metric system with the actual four stress system of English. Here are two (this from my blog site on dance and poetry): >> >> Doing a little search on scansion, I find several other systems have been proposed in the past century, all of them moving away from the binary stressed/unstressed. Most of these waver between three and four stresses. American poet Alfred Corn proposes a three-stress system that merges the half-strong and the half-weak categories of Otto Jesperson’s four-stress system, devised in 1900, leaving strong, medium and weak stresses. Corn puts forth this argument in his 1997 The Poem’s Heartbeat. But Derek Attridge proposed a super-complex system in his 1995 study, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Corn and Attridge need further study. Nabokov’s work on prosody also needs to be looked at, if for no other reason than he seems to have hated the idea of poetry and music sharing notation, or perhaps even the same aesthetic space. >> >> Happy New Year, All…. >> >> >> jaimerobles.com <http://jaimerobles.com/> >> >> >> >> >> ______________________________ >> >> 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 12, 2018, at 2:50 PM, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: >>> >>> Is no one going to defend the mainstream from this poisonous libel? >>> Jamie >>> >>> On 12 Jan 2018, at 12:14, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: >>> >>>> A 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. >>>> >>