I have to agree with Nate that it seems to me (and Nate's
acquaintance with the literature is infinitely broader than
mine) that "verse technique has become little discussed
in recent years". (Note that Keston has provided a welcome
counterexample to this in his recent essay on Chris Emery.)
It often seems hard to escape the feeling, even when one is
caught up in, as it were, the raw words that _partly_ make
up the poetry, that the lineation is largely arbitrary.
We see a lot of poetry today that looks pretty much like
repeated units of this (and I mean the poetry we're
interested in, that hasn't got a name, not Richard Wilbur):
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(how curious that the lines always come out to nearly
the same length, when we're not counting syllables any
more) or this:
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And whatever rhythmical or semantic or tone-colouristic
or pictorial judgement has gone into these choices
is usually obscure at best. By which I _don't_ mean
that we should be able to have a theory of it to make
it aesthetically valid. There is often an excitement,
still, at the level of versification, in the early modernists
and objectivists, for example, that seems almost entirely
missing today. It doesn't seem to matter any more.
A certain school of LangPo seems to want to "ironise"
all enjambment: e.g. Bernstein's Artifice of Absorption or
Perelman's 6-words-per-line formula. I couldn't find
this more boring and irritating (probably the desired
effect): if it's fucking prose, write it as prose.
Chris Beckett's citation of early Prynne is interesting,
especially in view of how quickly he seemed to move
on from that sort of thing. Has anyone else noticed
the rather "fussy" overall indentation in Prynne's "Poems"?
Perhaps this is a Bloodaxe artefact, but I suspect not.
Come to think of it, large blocks of Maximus have a
similar fussy, let's-now-indent-precisely-two-tabs
feel to them, so maybe the presumptive Olson influence
accounts for it.
And is anyone else bothered by the almost universal
(at least in the US) practice, in translation, of what I
call "semantic lineation"? I.e. _always_ trying to
break the line in the target-language so that it forms
the same sort of _semantic_ unit as the line in the
source-language? Always privileging sense over
sound? (To be fair, based on a very small sample,
admittedly, I infer that this practice is slightly less honoured
in the UK and Ireland, to which I say bravo.)
There are precisely two forms of translation
currently acceptable to the US "avant garde"
(sorry, Lawrence): (1) funhouse-mirror distortion,
like homophonics, and (2) plain, thumping Berlitz
translation, as "faithful" to the "original meaning"
as possible, that registers _nothing_ about the sound
structures or other, more elusive modes of
signification in the original.
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