 |
 |
Thanks for bringing up Frank O’Hara, which moved me to listen to him again on YouTube. Sorry I couldn’t find “For Grace…”Just for a comparison, and for a little fun, here is O’Hara reading. At least one of these poems illustrating how difficult it is to hear stresses in speech, even speech that wanders into the poetic through the use of rhetorical device. Declaiming poetry has certainly changed over the years. And perhaps that’s another question: is metered poetry connected to declamation, which can be separated from simply reading aloud. Drew’s email suggests so.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDLwivcpFe8And here are long versus short lines clarified perhaps by the text being displayed:My guess is that O’Hara read his work pretty much the same each time; the difference being energy, or speed, if you will. The speed seems attached to line length, his New York style and mood, of course. Not sure about theatricality. I’m guessing that’s a self consciousness about the audience ...Besides the cute little East Coast accent, O'Hara has the characteristic tapering off and drop in speed and energy of American poetry reading, so that the end of the line feels like the end of breath, or a deflation of energy before the reader takes the next breath. It adds another consideration to the inherent stresses of the words.Niedecker is similar, without the East Coast vowels and word endings. Here are the only recordings of her reading: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Niedecker.phpGenerally, I think British poets have clearer stresses in their language and their spoken poetry, and that’s emphasized by regional and class accents. At least that’s what I hear. America is a country of mumblers. Or strident idiots. The latter tend not to be poets.J______________________________QS: Let’s return to poetics.JR: When did we leave?—From the conversation between Quinta Slef and Joan Retallack, The Poethical WagerOn Jan 17, 2018, at 10:55 AM, Drew Milne <[log in to unmask]> wrote:In haste, before I make supper for the kids.
One point of reference is Doug Oliver's book, which was mentioned a few posts back, Poetry and Narrative in Performance, 1989.
There's Jo Luna's dissertation on Doug Oliver for context and discussion and bibliography.
<http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/55079/>
My suggestion was that Doug's experiments are fascinating but inconclusive, and his theoretical discussion of the problems doesn't convince me. Part of the problem here is the assumption that rhythm is on the page. Take a famous line like:
To be or not to be, that is the question.
For the foot, syllable and stress counter there's the agony of squeezing this line into iambic pentameter, but for the actor there's a different question, namely where to put and weigh the semantic stresses and spoken emphases: understood as a score for possible performances, the line can sustain numerous different emphases, emphases which also have semantic consequences in relation to what the line means.
To BE, or not to BE, that is the question.
To be, or NOT to be, THAT is the question.
To be, OR not to be, that is THE question.
and so on, across different clusters and phrase patterns. There are absurdities at the extremities, but an actor who knows what they are doing will play with a regular light / strong stress pattern (iambs) and then see what happens if they vary the weight of the stresses according to semantic emphasis, while also playing with the weight of stresses in the line over paragraphs of lines so as to generate an ark of characterisation. Simon Russell Beale is very good at this sort of thing, working out a performance of each line as it builds across several lines and into a sense of the verse character of a character. The semantic emphases are in tension with the metrical emphases and meaningful interpretation of the line, including performance of the line, has to respect this tension rather than hoping to apply a prosodic template. This isn't the case where a poet works more tightly within an iambic blank verse line and where irregular potentiality is more infrequent, but in Shakespeare the grammatical tension is so persistently dynamic as to make prosodic regularity a rather clumsy tool. There are as many performances of emphasis as character as there are actors and readers intrigued by the range of possibilities across the play, but often even a naive actor can make one or two lines suddenly seem luminous by highlighting a new kind of emphasis. One of the pleasures of listening to incompetently performed Shakespeare is the recognition that there are certain types of wit, made conspicuous by their absence, that Shakespeare is pointedly playing with but in ways that many modern actors can't quite fathom. In part the problem is modern actors scarcely sense the underlying architecture of blank verse so as to improvise with it, and in part the problem is that modern actors scarcely understand the poetics of wit and layered semantic ambiguity that would revel in the word play that would in turn make poetic speech the height of artifice. Shakespeare's wit becomes conspicuously absent in a clunky performance, but somewhat blurred in a semi-coherent reading that offers a plausible but unconvincing gloss on how a line might work.
Compare a line by Frank O'Hara from 'For Grace, After a Party'
You do not always know what I am feeling.
For the iambic fundamentalist, the prosodic task is to read this against an implicit iambic pentameter, find the feet and then understand that the line weaves around this foot structure somewhat informally, but with an underlying sense that the stress and rhythmic pattern is:
You DO not ALways KNOW what I am FEEL(ing)
No need to hammer it out against a metronome, but you could read the line by maintaining an iambic emphasis while allowing it to be a bit more fluid, with some suggestion of whether the line is rhythmically quick, casual, a witty throwaway, or rhetorical tease, to be understood against the possibility that a deeper, more sincere and considered existential mood is in play. O'Hara usually undermines deep readings with a play of quick surfaces, but that doesn't rule out the possibility that this is a full on existential Hamlet moment, an articulation of a deep wound disguised as post-party banter. Although O'Hara has the history of English versification at his finger tips and plays with iambic lines, the line could also be read as a score of possible emphases that would then offer different rhythmic weights, eg.
YOU do not always KNOW what I am FEELing.
You do not ALways know what I am feeling [where the line's main emphasis might be on the AL of always or on the I]
You do not always know WHAT I am feeling. [where the emphasis stresses one word over all other words in the line.]
And so on. Within 19th century verse forms the sense of drag back into the regularities of verse convention means that playing with iambic pentameter / blank verse line is the main game for many poems, and still so in much of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. In the poetry of O'Hara, however, with a much more informal or widely distributed range of potential metrical patterns, and a compositional practice that seeks to evade formal verse patterns, there's an underlying pressure from speech emphases – the play of how the line might most "naturally" be said or heard in conversation – but this is also played off against how lines might be said theatrically, in part because O'Hara's poetry is playfully hyper-socialised and theatrical, and in part because familiarity with the tones and range of O'Hara's work generates a sense of plausible emphases through warm or sympathetic readings. Frank O'Hara's own reading of his work in recordings that survive is engagingly dry, lightly wry rather than read with theatricality, but this could have been O'Hara's way of preserving the theatrical score of possible readings rather than suggesting a true or authoritative reading. You only have to imagine him reading the poem to Grace late at night or at breakfast with a shared hangover, and then compare that reading with a reading in a downtown New York art gallery to understand that there's a plurality of emphases and intimacies that are part of the sociality of his poetic. One of the problems with actors reading poems is that they usually make one interpretation, one character or persona, too forceful, often with a bit of shaking voice sonority that is ghastly, whereas many poets read in ways that preserve the ambiguity of layers of possible readings. Tom Raworth opted for reading quickly in ways that made for an exciting and dramatic surface, but also preserved a good deal of the ambiguity of possible hierarchies of meaning and emphasis. This doesn't rule out a slow reading or performance of Raworth's work, and keeps open a tension between spoken versions of his poetry and the writing itself, and it is the writing which, in the end, resists idealisation as speech, retaining a sense that it isn't a score for public performance, but a poem.
There's critical work on the performance of poetry, and there's critical work on formal prosodic readings of modern poetry, but not that much criticism that recognises that the performance of semantic emphases is a key feature of the prosodic score of modern poetry and that the performance of poetic scores plays off "natural" speech emphases against poetic artifice. This play between speech and written artifice is where white space begins to shape reading and imagined performances of writing as speech, but in ways that make most of the linguistic models of prosody rather flat-footed compared to the high stakes of social and poetic artifice.
The emphasis on a scoring of possible voicings is also true of poets who are much less theatrical than O'Hara, eg. Lorine Niedecker... reading a Niedecker poem seems to me to involve playing with a range of semantic emphases to weigh different types of emphasis, including a range of ways of shifting the grammar according to stress emphases and assessing why different parts of speech swim in and out of power before resolving into something like a sense of what matters most. The many different possible readings of a Niedecker poem build up into a chorus that can then be registered and reflected upon without a singular or ideal reading emerging. Some of this is true, too, of a poem by Emily Dickinson, but the pull of ballad and hymn forms in Dickinson generates a different set of conventions against which her play of song weaves around its own conventions, whereas Niedecker's more informal, more modern verse forms only glimpse traditional ballad forms and necessarily put greater emphasis on semantic stress and grammatical conventions as frameworks against which specific sparks and songs of meaning can be struck out, found luminous or performed. Sustained reading of Niedecker tends to give you a sense of what is more or less likely to be true to the poem, and also what is more plausible as the relevant set of emphases across a group of poems, but a naive or wittily perverse reader could strike out a new reading by performing a Niedecker line quite differently and there's nothing in the line to suggest that such a reading is wrong in principle, just as you can play a piece of music in many different ways, and such that even a perverse performance can be illuminating....
Enough already,
D.
On 17/01/2018 16:52, Luke wrote:
[log in to unmask]" class="">LukeThanks,May I ask a question?I think I've followed what you're saying here: that performance doesn't need to comply with the rhythm of the poem on the page. It would be helpful to have a good reference that talks about this? So far I only have a paragraph in a poetry primer.
> 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
On 17 January 2018 at 15:50, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
In case I’d left a different impression, the last thing I’d recommend in reading a poem is to chop it up into putative or disputable feet and convert it into terms comprehensible to traditional prosody. What I said was that this knowledge is useful to have, and I’d add that it might even provide a critical shorthand for complex rhythmic effects.It gets more tricky in relation to speech rhythm - the word ‘natural’ here is already an alarm word, and ‘law’ another one. I’m aware, as surely everyone is, that poetry is artifice (up to a point) and that there’s no single speech rhythm to English, although we often very accurately infer intonation, cadence, tone (in a way that’s not confined to region). And there is a communally agreed pattern for stress within a word (with a few regional and Brit/US divergences). It seems to me that far from being an oppressive policeman, these patterns are facilitators for poetry: they help to make sense and give pleasure, whether the poet conforms to or disrupts them. Either way, as readers we don’t ignore them.
JamieJust 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
On 16/01/2018 19:43, Jaime Robles wrote:
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]" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">Drew MilneSent: Tuesday, January 16, 2018 3:10 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: 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:
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]C.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.