Popularity of Free Verse
Vance Maverick
This is following up on Terran's response to my posting
<x6u20ga...@deodar.CS.Berkeley.EDU> of Sept. 10. I quote his
e-mail by permission.
Vance:
> > Terran claimed free verse is an academic thing, that the people want
> > regularity and rhyme. To test this, I surveyed the poems in the
> > latest issue, a poetry special, of the _Street Sheet_, a paper
> > produced by the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco and sold on
> > the street.
[etc. At least 65% of the poems were free verse.]
Terran (all in a block first: response follows):
> I find this interesting but hardly definitive. And you seem to have
> stretched my point. Let me try to clarify. Poetry, save the odd
> off-color off-shoot, has always been an elitist art form - for the
> educated and by the educated. Yet, great poets of the past have been
> able to bridge to the 'less' educated masses. Shakespeare could write
> in a way that satisfied the standing cobblers (excuse the pun) while
> entertaining and often satirizing the very lords and ladies in the
> balconies that would have had his head had they caught on. Granted, he
> was genius. The 'Romantics' through the 'Edwardians" also commanded
> much popular appeal beyond academia. When free-verse flowered from the
> sugar-sweet corpse of Nineteenth Century Verse there were many powerful
> voices leading it on. I have read and continue to read these poets. My
> problem with modern 'concrete' poetry is not the style, per se, but the
> quality. You must concede that educated people are graduating from our
> universities without any knowledge and/or appreciation of our current
> poetic form. This was not true in past years. I console myself with
> the knowledge that literary history has not stopped and that this too
> will pass. If pressed to advocate for a style to crack the monotheistic
> 'free verse' theocracy, I would not wish a return to formalized metric
> verse but rather seek some fusion taking the wit and wisdom of the last
> century and combining it with the images and sensibilities of our modern
> era. Do I wish a return to sentiment, power and scope then? Here I
> must plead guilty, as long as it is done in a way as to avoid becoming
> maudlin, sentimental or obtuse. I would gladly discuss these ideas
> further and/or collaborate with anyone towards these ends regardless of
> academic, political or any other standing. Yet, if free verse is your
> thing, fear not, as long as the current literati hold sway over all the
> machinery of publication, teaching and awarding, it is safe from any
> attacks by me or anyone else.
It's hard to know where to begin, there are so many points to disagree
with. About the popular/elite issue, for example: I think we have
always had both. When would you say we have lacked popular poetry?
The Street Sheet example shows (I believe: you disagreed without
putting up an argument) that "free verse" is used in popular poetry.
A similar survey of the book _The Practice of Poetry_ (exercises from
a variety of academic poets) shows it is widely used and taught in the
"elite" environment. So I don't see that a popular/elite
discrimination gets us anywhere.
As for the "theocracy": from what I see, metrical verse is today a
respected minority pursuit, both inside the academy and out. An
example of each: Willis Barnstone (_The Secret Reader_, University
Press of New England, 1996) and Calvin Trillin (every week in the
Nation). How is this consistent with a "religious" prohibition?
As for sentiment, power and scope -- if you can tell me where to find
any poem with more of these than _Leaves of Grass_, I'll be forever in
your debt. (And consider the very different sentiment of Creeley,
power of Neruda, and scope of Charles Olson.)
Finally, to your point
> You must concede that educated people are graduating from our
> universities without any knowledge and/or appreciation of our
> current poetic form.
-- do you mean they don't like this form (these forms)? If so, why is
coffeehouse poetry "free", with the exception of rap? But if you mean
they don't grasp its virtues, on the whole I agree -- but I think the
same applies to metrical verse.
In short, you need to do a better job of establishing that free verse
is a problem.
Vance
Vance Maverick
In article <52fesj$v...@news-dec2.tiac.net> nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
> It seems to me that the question concerns the audience, not the form,
> at least as presented. Poets such as Frost and Whitman and
> Shakespeare write poetry that all can readily connect to in the gut as
> human beings. Poets such as Pound and H.D. write only for the elite,
> as an intellectual game.
I'm not sure which question you were thinking of. The original
disagreement (it's been weeks now) really was over form. The
distinction you're drawing could be made just among metrical poets
(let's toss in Milton and Spenser) or, as you suggest by including
Whitman, just among "free" poets.
Lately I've been getting a good "gut" response from various people to
Creeley's familiar "I Know a Man":
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.
I'll admit, though, that Philip Nikolayev's old argument, that free
verse sticks less easily to the memory, could be proved on me here. I
find it quite hard to recite this poem without leaving something out.
Vance
PS. Who speaks the word "drive"?
Ken MacIver
Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>In article <52fesj$v...@news-dec2.tiac.net> nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>> It seems to me that the question concerns the audience, not the form,
>> at least as presented. Poets such as Frost and Whitman and
>> Shakespeare write poetry that all can readily connect to in the gut as
>> human beings. Poets such as Pound and H.D. write only for the elite,
>> as an intellectual game.
>I'm not sure which question you were thinking of. The original
>disagreement (it's been weeks now) really was over form. The
>distinction you're drawing could be made just among metrical poets
>(let's toss in Milton and Spenser) or, as you suggest by including
>Whitman, just among "free" poets.
I should have been more precise. When I used "audience," I was
addressing the question whether poetry is for the elite (as someone
claimed) or for a broader base of listeners. I did not think it
mattered whether the poetry was metrical or free verse.
>Lately I've been getting a good "gut" response from various people to
>Creeley's familiar "I Know a Man":
> As I sd to my
> friend, because I am
> always talking,--John, I
> sd, which was not his
> name, the darkness sur-
> rounds us, what
> can we do against
> it, or else, shall we &
> why not, buy a goddamn big car,
> drive, he sd, for
> christ's sake, look
> out where yr going.
>I'll admit, though, that Philip Nikolayev's old argument, that free
>verse sticks less easily to the memory, could be proved on me here. I
>find it quite hard to recite this poem without leaving something out.
> Vance
>PS. Who speaks the word "drive"?
I like the poem. Even when I was twenty I would have found memorizing
free verse of any serious length unlikely. BTW, I speak the word
"drive" on occasion.
Ken MacIver
John K. Taber
Vance Maverick wrote:
> Lately I've been getting a good "gut" response from various people to
> Creeley's familiar "I Know a Man":
>
> As I sd to my
> friend, because I am
> always talking,--John, I
>
> sd, which was not his
> name, the darkness sur-
> rounds us, what
>
> can we do against
> it, or else, shall we &
> why not, buy a goddamn big car,
>
> drive, he sd, for
> christ's sake, look
> out where yr going.
>
> I'll admit, though, that Philip Nikolayev's old argument, that free
> verse sticks less easily to the memory, could be proved on me here. I
> find it quite hard to recite this poem without leaving something out.
>
> Vance
>
> PS. Who speaks the word "drive"?
Well, as I read it, it's the "friend" misnamed "John" who says "drive".
There's no reason to enjamb from 2nd last stanza to "drive", as would
be needed for the "I" of the poem to say "drive". At least, not that
I can see.
--
=========================================================================
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the character "Woodsy Owl", the name "Woodsy Owl", or the associated
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imprisoned not more than six months, or both. -- 18 U.S.C. sec. 711a.
Katherine Catmull
In article <324BE1...@onramp.net>,
John K. Taber <jkt...@onramp.net> wrote:
>Vance Maverick wrote:
>
>> Lately I've been getting a good "gut" response from various people to
>> Creeley's familiar "I Know a Man":
>>
>> As I sd to my
>> friend, because I am
>> always talking,--John, I
>>
>> sd, which was not his
>> name, the darkness sur-
>> rounds us, what
>>
>> can we do against
>> it, or else, shall we &
>> why not, buy a goddamn big car,
>>
>> drive, he sd, for
>> christ's sake, look
>> out where yr going.
>>
>>
>> PS. Who speaks the word "drive"?
>
>Well, as I read it, it's the "friend" misnamed "John" who says "drive".
>There's no reason to enjamb from 2nd last stanza to "drive", as would
>be needed for the "I" of the poem to say "drive". At least, not that
>I can see.
Actually what I think is nice about this poem is the way that either of
them may be saying the word "drive"--or both of them, an even nicer
thought. It's pleasant to think that the angst-ridden philosopher and his
pragmatist friend share or come together on that one word. It's very
American, too.
Kate
--
"Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear."
Ken MacIver
ka...@bga.com (Katherine Catmull) wrote:
I retract my "I" statement. Either of them may be saying "drive;"
the one as an adventure, the other as an admonition. Like it.
Ken
Vance Maverick
In article <324BE1...@onramp.net> "John K. Taber" <jkt...@onramp.net> writes:
> Vance Maverick wrote:
[of "I Know a Man"]
> > PS. Who speaks the word "drive"?
> Well, as I read it, it's the "friend" misnamed "John" who says "drive".
> There's no reason to enjamb from 2nd last stanza to "drive", as would
> be needed for the "I" of the poem to say "drive". At least, not that
> I can see.
I think that's reasonable, but I find the poem makes better sense out
loud if "drive" is the culmination of the speaker's febrile fantasy --
"shall we -- and why not! -- buy a God Damn Big Car -- DRIVE!!" --
leaving "John" just the last phrase. After all, every other line
since the first has been enjambed.
Vance
da...@markov.commerce.ubc.ca
In article <x6u684z...@deodar.CS.Berkeley.EDU>,
But the other way he gets both "buy a big gd car and just drive " and,
"pay attention to driving the gd car". That's the nice part, that he has
both at once. jmd
da...@markov.commerce.ubc.ca
In article <x6u684z...@deodar.CS.Berkeley.EDU>,
Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>In article <324BE1...@onramp.net> "John K. Taber" <jkt...@onramp.net> writes:
>> Vance Maverick wrote:
> [of "I Know a Man"]
>> > PS. Who speaks the word "drive"?
>
>> Well, as I read it, it's the "friend" misnamed "John" who says "drive".
>> There's no reason to enjamb from 2nd last stanza to "drive", as would
>> be needed for the "I" of the poem to say "drive". At least, not that
>> I can see.
>
>I think that's reasonable, but I find the poem makes better sense out
>loud if "drive" is the culmination of the speaker's febrile fantasy --
>"shall we -- and why not! -- buy a God Damn Big Car -- DRIVE!!" --
>leaving "John" just the last phrase. After all, every other line
>since the first has been enjambed.
>
But the other way he gets both "buy a big gd car and just drive " and,
"pay attention to driving the gd car". That's the nice part, that he has
both at once.
And it may say something as well. Rather than collapsing time, you
might read it as if they are driving and talking about buying their car
to drive at once -- then the last line says wake up to your dreams being
what you are already doing -- and you better notice in a hurry... ? jmd
John K. Taber
Vance Maverick wrote:
> I think that's reasonable, but I find the poem makes better sense out
> loud if "drive" is the culmination of the speaker's febrile fantasy --
> "shall we -- and why not! -- buy a God Damn Big Car -- DRIVE!!" --
> leaving "John" just the last phrase. After all, every other line
> since the first has been enjambed.
Very nice reading, I didn't think of that. Sometimes we forget to try
the poem out loud.
Vance Maverick
In article <52h1sa$1...@nntp.ucs.ubc.ca> da...@markov.commerce.ubc.ca () writes:
> But the other way he gets both "buy a big gd car and just drive " and,
> "pay attention to driving the gd car". That's the nice part, that he has
> both at once.
I like this consensus. But if you're attempting a somewhat mimetic
performance of the poem, I think you have to choose.
ObBook: Christopher Ricks, _T.S. Eliot and Prejudice_, which has a lot
to say about voice, performance and choice.
Vance
da...@markov.commerce.ubc.ca
In article <x6u4tkjsf...@deodar.CS.Berkeley.EDU>,
Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>In article <52h1sa$1...@nntp.ucs.ubc.ca> da...@markov.commerce.ubc.ca () writes:
>> But the other way he gets both "buy a big gd car and just drive " and,
>> "pay attention to driving the gd car". That's the nice part, that he has
>> both at once.
>
>I like this consensus. But if you're attempting a somewhat mimetic
>performance of the poem, I think you have to choose.
If I must choose I follow John.
John, I sd, which was not his name...
drive, he sd, for christ's sake...
jmd but I'm happy the other way as well, seeing the point you have made.
Ted Samsel
Bubba, you drive
for I cain't see.
I'm stoppin' the car
'cos I gotta pee.
(from The Lay of the Last Bubba)
--
Ted Samsel....tejas@infi.net "Took all the money I had in the bank,
Bought a rebuilt carburetor,
put the rest in the tank."
USED CARLOTTA.. 1995
Ken MacIver
te...@infi.net (Ted Samsel) wrote:
>Bubba, you drive
>for I cain't see.
>I'm stoppin' the car
>'cos I gotta pee.
>(from The Lay of the Last Bubba)
I'm following Samsel.
Ken
Patrick Foley
In article <x6u684z...@deodar.CS.Berkeley.EDU>, Vance Maverick
<mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>In article <324BE1...@onramp.net> "John K. Taber"
<jkt...@onramp.net> writes:
>> Vance Maverick wrote:
> [of "I Know a Man"]
>> > PS. Who speaks the word "drive"?
>
>> Well, as I read it, it's the "friend" misnamed "John" who says "drive".
>> There's no reason to enjamb from 2nd last stanza to "drive", as would
>> be needed for the "I" of the poem to say "drive". At least, not that
>> I can see.
>
>I think that's reasonable, but I find the poem makes better sense out
>loud if "drive" is the culmination of the speaker's febrile fantasy --
>"shall we -- and why not! -- buy a God Damn Big Car -- DRIVE!!" --
>leaving "John" just the last phrase. After all, every other line
>since the first has been enjambed.
Vance you get a gold-star for reading sensitively (although later in this
thread I see that you go for the middle ground, could be either of them,
that sort of thing). It is in fact the speaker of the poem and not his
friend who says "drive" and in just the sense you mean. (There's a
Raymond Carver short story on roughly the same theme.) The whole thing is
explained in _Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961-1971_ (pub. by the
invaluable Four Seasons Foundation), apropos of Jack Nicholson's first
film as a director, called "Drive, He Said", based on a novel of that
title by someone called Jeremy Larner, who took the line from "I Know A
Man". Here's the explanation:
"One thing, the lovely paradox about the movie and everything else is that
syntactically the line reads for me
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive
and _then_
he sd, for
christ's sake
Andre [the interviewer]: It is misquoted.
Creeley: Yeah, it's a misquote. The poem protects itself. It didn't
even get the syntax straight. Not that I made it simple for them. I like
the impulse of "drive", _then_ "he said". I could have said, period, you
know
drive. He sd, for
christ's sake
But "he" doesn't say "drive". I think someone who reads it in the actual
impulse [that's you Vance!] will recognize that he isn't saying drive,
that's the person who's proposing, "why don't we buy a great big car and
drive"; it's the "I" of the poem who is saying "why don't we get out of
here" the car being one imagination of how we get from where we're stuck,
hopefully to someplace from where we won't be. It's the friend who then
comes into it, who says, "take it easy, look out where you're going
because you cannot get out of things simply by driving around." "The
darkness surrounds us" was just the kinds of senses of confusion and
muddiness and opaqueness that people obvioiusly feel in their lives. And
this was one sense of "let's get out of this and do something else". The
friend just says "look out where you're going" because that impulse is
obviously human and to be respected but you don't really do much that
way. "I know a man" in the sense, like, I know a man who can fix your
roof or like that, a _useful_ man to know."
(pp 208-209)
So there ya go.
I suppose there's an argument (the old one) about whether Creeley is the
final arbiter of the meaning of his poem, but I find this testimony at
least relevant.
For this one, I think he's right, and if you read the poem with the friend
saying "drive" then you're wrong, and you're wrong for a good reason,
because you aren't really following what the poem's _about_, and that
ought to make us wonder about our reading skills.
Creeley also who explains who he had in mind as "John" and why that name
is used and other things, and complains about an interpretation offered in
TLS with "John" being John the Baptist and "I" being Jesus -- so the
poem's interpretation and the skill used in reading it is obviously
something Creeley cares a lot about. And so should we.
Pat
Vance Maverick
In article <pfoley-2809...@news.earthlink.net> pfo...@earthlink.net (Patrick Foley) writes:
> [...] It is in fact the speaker of the poem and not his
> friend who says "drive" [....]
[from interesting source material, check it out]
> Creeley: Yeah, it's a misquote. The poem protects itself.
At the least, it deliberately courts the alternate (and apparently
common) reading.
> For this one, I think he's right, and if you read the poem with the friend
> saying "drive" then you're wrong, and you're wrong for a good reason,
> because you aren't really following what the poem's _about_, and that
> ought to make us wonder about our reading skills.
As you say, there's the usual room for doubt about the completeness
and authority of Creeley's own reading. I still like the idea that to
drive is *both* the crest of fantasy and the ground of common sense.
As Kate says, very American.
Vance
Katherine Catmull
In article <pfoley-2809...@news.earthlink.net>,
Patrick Foley <pfo...@earthlink.net> wrote:
[interesting and useful quotation of Creeley's own reading of his "drive he
sd" poem]
>So there ya go.
>
>I suppose there's an argument (the old one) about whether Creeley is the
>final arbiter of the meaning of his poem, but I find this testimony at
>least relevant.
Your saying this so pleasantly & reasonably makes it impossible for me to
be as snippy on this subject as I was going to be. Dang.
>For this one, I think he's right, and if you read the poem with the friend
>saying "drive" then you're wrong, and you're wrong for a good reason,
>because you aren't really following what the poem's _about_, and that
>ought to make us wonder about our reading skills.
>
>Creeley also who explains who he had in mind as "John" and why that name
>is used and other things, and complains about an interpretation offered in
>TLS with "John" being John the Baptist and "I" being Jesus -- so the
>poem's interpretation and the skill used in reading it is obviously
>something Creeley cares a lot about. And so should we.
I _do_ care, and I still disagree with Creeley. For one thing, in this
"reading it aloud tells the tale" discussion (and I'm all for reading
poems aloud), everyone including Creeley seems to be forgetting this is
a dialogue, not a monologue. We ought to be hearing (at least) two voices,
not one--if necessary, one can read it aloud with a friend. That makes
it possible for both voices to be saying the word "drive" at the same
moment; and that makes for a much more delightfully complex poem, in my
opinion.
Kate
Standard-bearer for Fruitful Ambiguity
da...@markov.commerce.ubc.ca
In article <pfoley-2809...@news.earthlink.net>,
Patrick Foley <pfo...@earthlink.net> wrote:
[much good stuff deleted]
Thanks for clue provision. It is often difficult for me to admit when
I'm wrong -- but my wrongness is undeniable -- often the undeniability
doesn't help much, buth that's another story. The comma ending the
second to last stanza breaks things up for me. Besides, Vance asked
for a mimetic reading, and we all know how mimes are at poetry
readings...
I find it interested how he (interviewer, I suppose) changed the
layout to make the point.
jmd
Patrick Foley
>In article <pfoley-2809...@news.earthlink.net>,
>Patrick Foley <pfo...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>[interesting and useful quotation of Creeley's own reading of his "drive he
>sd" poem]
Just an aside-- there's something a little fishy about this "reading"
lingo when he also did the "writing".
>>So there ya go.
>>
>>I suppose there's an argument (the old one) about whether Creeley is the
>>final arbiter of the meaning of his poem, but I find this testimony at
>>least relevant.
>
>Your saying this so pleasantly & reasonably makes it impossible for me to
>be as snippy on this subject as I was going to be. Dang.
;-)
>>For this one, I think he's right, and if you read the poem with the friend
>>saying "drive" then you're wrong, and you're wrong for a good reason,
>>because you aren't really following what the poem's _about_, and that
>>ought to make us wonder about our reading skills.
>>
>>Creeley also who explains who he had in mind as "John" and why that name
>>is used and other things, and complains about an interpretation offered in
>>TLS with "John" being John the Baptist and "I" being Jesus -- so the
>>poem's interpretation and the skill used in reading it is obviously
>>something Creeley cares a lot about. And so should we.
>
>I _do_ care, and I still disagree with Creeley. For one thing, in this
>"reading it aloud tells the tale" discussion (and I'm all for reading
>poems aloud), everyone including Creeley seems to be forgetting this is
>a dialogue, not a monologue.
Hmmmm -- you know, that's just not true.
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,-- John, I
sd, which was not his
name, [etc. etc.]
It isn't a dialogue. It is exactly a monologue which happens to recount a
dialogue. Oh now I can imagine "dramatizing" the poem, presenting "John"
(whatever his name is) suddenly to one side of the stage, speaking his
"lines" along with the monologuist, and you'd be doing something like
showing the speaker's memory -- because you can't really be showing their
actual conversation which the speaker may even be making up, in which case
you're not even showing his memory but his imagination (which surely
doesn't deserve the "not even" there).
But like I sd, it's a monologue whatever you do.
>We ought to be hearing (at least) two voices,
>not one--if necessary, one can read it aloud with a friend. That makes
>it possible for both voices to be saying the word "drive" at the same
>moment; and that makes for a much more delightfully complex poem, in my
>opinion.
>
>Kate
>Standard-bearer for Fruitful Ambiguity
And as RC says himself, and Vance notes, he doesn't make it easy, invites
the misreading, etc. (This seems like the right place to admit that the
first time through I misread it too, but I'm a lousy reader and Creeley
can be damned hard. On the other hand, I was already familiar with the
name of the Nicholson film -- and Creeley notes that it passed quickly
into the language, that Time magazine had an article called "Dive, She
Said" about, well, diving, in the same issue that reviewed the film
(actually he says he got this tidbit from Richard Brautigan) -- all of
which is an argument that I was steered by my culture into misreading the
poem. :-)
But -- look at how he puts it, "the poem protects itself". The syntax
hides something, but there is something there to hide. There's a right
answer. Creeley's meaning is not there being pulled in different
directions across the comma between "drive" and "he sd", it's not at play
in the syntax.
Why _does_ he use a comma, after all, instead of a full-stop? Do we have
a clear answer to that in the interview? I take "The poem protects
itself. It didn't even get the syntax straight." as at least a little
playful, but at any rate I don't think this is the real motivation for the
comma -- although it's interesting that for Creeley it works out this
way. He goes on: "I like the impulse of "drive", _then_ "he said"." It's
some sort of impulse he wanted that he thought he could get with a comma
rather than a period. And as I say, it's interesting that with Creeley,
energy results in ambiguity. That's something close to what is so
compelling about him, isn't it? I don't know about y'all, but I often
have this experience reading Creeley, that I know something just happened,
but I'll be damned if I know what.
Now Vance says: "I still like the idea that to drive is *both* the crest
of fantasy and the ground of common sense. As Kate says, very American."
It goes on & on -- you could say this shows up in the poem as a difference
between two "characters" who are themselves on opposite sides and clearly
so, but then you'd have to note that one of them is telling the story --
and Creeley leaves no doubt that the speaker is telling this story to
illustrate what a useful man to know his friend "John" is, so "John"'s
appeal is precisely in his difference from the speaker at that moment.
And you might after all invoke a theory of characters as projections of
_parts_ of the writer's personality (which always seemed to me
particularly true of Kafka, for one), in which case, yeah, "John" and the
speaker are the same person, sorta. And you could even say that, whether
he knew it or not, this is why Creeley used an ambiguous construction here
-- which sounds likely, but I doubt Creeley's practice as a poet supports
this. He really seems to be frying another kettle of fish. Has to do
with the way he talks about that "impulse" he liked.
Here's some more of the interview (this precedes what I quoted before):
"Creeley: "John" is almost a hierarchical name for me. I've had very
good friends named John. I was thinking of one very specific. Instantly
two friends occur to me: John Altoon, a painter who was a very close
friend, a very very decisive friend for me, and another friend, also a
sculptor, John Chamberlain, who's equally a dear friend. "John" became a
name for an order, of not merely _machismo_ or some kind of campy sense of
manhood, but almost a hierarchical name for some measure of friendship,
and a man of that condition.
Andre: The figure, who I take is largely autobiographical in _The Island_ . . .
Creeley: Yes, John becomes both myself and the imagination of a man.
It's like John Doe, it's like John Bunyan, it's a hierarchical name."
(pp 207-208)
And that picks up about where I began before, and as I sd before, there ya
go. (He doesn't mention John Wayne there, does he?) And it's easy to
imagine how intense this must be for him, the poem is also implicitly
about his ideal of manhood, and being confronted by that ideal at a moment
when he feels the darkness surrounding him and he wants to run away, like
a boy rather than a man.
Now once it turns out that indeed "John" and the speaker are nearly one
person, does that make less a monologue?
This is good stuff, plays into a pet theory I have about multiple voices
in poetry and personality that I'll spare you here. (But see what Donald
Hall says in his afterword to The One Day.)
I have a feeling I raised some questions here I didn't answer, but then I
always have that feeling.
Pat
Katherine Catmull
In article <pfoley-2909...@news.earthlink.net>,
Patrick Foley <pfo...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>In article <52kfe0$3...@urchin.bga.com>, ka...@bga.com (Katherine Catmull) wrote:
>
>>[interesting and useful quotation of Creeley's own reading of his "drive he
>>sd" poem]
>
>Just an aside-- there's something a little fishy about this "reading"
>lingo when he also did the "writing".
Really? Why?
>>I _do_ care, and I still disagree with Creeley. For one thing, in this
>>"reading it aloud tells the tale" discussion (and I'm all for reading
>>poems aloud), everyone including Creeley seems to be forgetting this is
>>a dialogue, not a monologue.
>
>Hmmmm -- you know, that's just not true.
>
> As I sd to my
> friend, because I am
> always talking,-- John, I
>
> sd, which was not his
> name, [etc. etc.]
>
>It isn't a dialogue. It is exactly a monologue which happens to recount a
>dialogue.
Well, yes. That's what I was offhandedly getting at when I said there
were at _least_ two voices in the poem. Better perhaps to say there are
three: the speaker then, the speaker now, and John (whether or not John is
some subset of the speaker himself).
In any case, though, a monologue which recounts a dialogue contains more
than one voice.
>Oh now I can imagine "dramatizing" the poem, presenting "John"
>(whatever his name is) suddenly to one side of the stage, speaking his
>"lines" along with the monologuist, and you'd be doing something like
>showing the speaker's memory
Yes!
> -- because you can't really be showing their
>actual conversation which the speaker may even be making up,
Well it's a _poem_, the whole thing is "made up" (even if it's based on
an actual event). If you mean the narrator (as opposed to the poet)
is making it up, so much the better. A fiction made by a fictional
character doesn't get lesser status than the fiction created by real
people--why should it? In fact it adds more nice levels to play with.
>But like I sd, it's a monologue whatever you do.
Call it what you will, there is more than one voice in this poem.
>>Kate
>>Standard-bearer for Fruitful Ambiguity
>
>And as RC says himself, and Vance notes, he doesn't make it easy, invites
>the misreading, etc.
This is what I mean about fruitful ambiguity. It doesn't really matter if
Creeley's intention was, for example, some sort of bizarrely
mean-spirited effort to confuse his readers. The ambiguity about who says
"drive" is clearly there, and happens to open up many fruitful paths for
exploring the poem.
>But -- look at how he puts it, "the poem protects itself". The syntax
>hides something, but there is something there to hide. There's a right
>answer.
Well I don't believe there is a "right" answer, and this is probably the
heart of our disagreement. I think there are only readings that are more or
less defensible and more or less interesting. Of course, at the moment I
think my reading is the most defensible and the most interesting, but I
could certainly be persuaded otherwise--I persuaded myself into this one
just a couple of posts ago.
I'm unlikely to be persuaded, however, by statements like "there is a
right answer," or by your referring to all interpretations other than
Creeley's as "misreadings."
The reason I find the reading I'm proposing now (that both voices say
"drive," for those of you joining us late) is because it takes into
account the fact that the word "drive" is pulled in both directions,
which I don't think Creeley's reading does. The word _is_ "at play in
the syntax," as you so nicely put it, and therefore inescapably the
meaning is, as well.
But perhaps I don't understand what Creeley meant when he said "the poem
protects itself" with this ambiguity. If you'd care to elaborate, I'd be
interested.
>way. He goes on: "I like the impulse of "drive", _then_ "he said"." It's
>some sort of impulse he wanted that he thought he could get with a comma
>rather than a period. And as I say, it's interesting that with Creeley,
>energy results in ambiguity. That's something close to what is so
>compelling about him, isn't it?
Yes indeed. But am I misunderstanding you (and Creeley), or aren't you
trying to erase that ambiguity?
>Now Vance says: "I still like the idea that to drive is *both* the crest
>of fantasy and the ground of common sense. As Kate says, very American."
>It goes on & on -- you could say this shows up in the poem as a difference
>between two "characters" who are themselves on opposite sides and clearly
>so, but then you'd have to note that one of them is telling the story --
>and Creeley leaves no doubt that the speaker is telling this story to
>illustrate what a useful man to know his friend "John" is, so "John"'s
>appeal is precisely in his difference from the speaker at that moment.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, but all this seems to support my
reading splendidly.
[a lot of stuff snipped]
Again I'm afraid I may have misunderstood you--all the stuff you write
about the name John, etc. seems to add to my reading rather than subtract
from it. But I am truly afraid I wasn't quite following your
point--probably I should have had some coffee this morning. It was
interesting, though.
Kate
Patrick Foley
>I find it interested how he (interviewer, I suppose) changed the
>layout to make the point.
Yes! The transcript simply cannot be word-for-word, now can it? It
doesn't say here that they actually rewrote the interview for publication
(which seems to be fairly common) but it is's obvious someone had to
handle the layout carefully here.
Which seems like a trivial point, but maybe this gets us back to whatever
we want to say about the poem as printed on the page "versus" the poem as
read aloud, performed, as it were. I haven't heard Creeley read, but he
says in interviews -- and this is the only tidbit that I have to offer --
that he does pause slightly at the end of each line. (Btw, "enjambed"
just really seems like the wrong word in this context; Milton enjmabs, but
Creeley?)
Denise Levertov codifies all this as the "scoring" of the poem, and could
presumably justify the use of comma rather than full-stop as an indication
of the length of the pause to be taken there -- dunno if that's what RC
was really up to, but her rules of thumb are pretty reasonable, something
like theatrical punctuation, punctuation like you might find in a bad
quarto. Then again, she likes to use normal grammatical capitalization --
I wonder if anyone ever asked her how you read a capital letter.
Pat
Vance Maverick
In article <pfoley-2909...@news.earthlink.net> pfo...@earthlink.net (Patrick Foley) writes:
> I haven't heard Creeley read, but he says in interviews -- and this
> is the only tidbit that I have to offer -- that he does pause
> slightly at the end of each line.
The only times I've heard him read are in the video anthologies
_Poetry in Motion_ and _The United States of Poetry_. Both times, he
blazed through the text: I certainly didn't hear any breaks for lines
(though I didn't know the poems well enough to remember where such
breaks would go). One result of his pace was to make the carefully
tuned vowel music easily audible.
Both poems were longer than this one -- perhaps he would slow down to
get these mere twelve lines across.
> (Btw, "enjambed" just really seems like the wrong word in this
> context; Milton enjambs, but Creeley?)
This gets back to the question of the reality of the line break in
free verse. I think it matters a lot how deep into the syntax the
break cuts -- or the morphology ("sur-/rounds"). There are obviously
more choices than two, but "end-stopped" and "enjambed" are the two
available traditional terms.
Vance
John K. Taber
Patrick Foley wrote:
Fine stuff. Truly fine stuff. You and Vance are setting rab standards. I hope
to see more of this in rab.
> And as RC says himself, and Vance notes, he doesn't make it easy, invites
> the misreading, etc. [...]
>
> Why _does_ he use a comma, after all, instead of a full-stop? Do we have
> a clear answer to that in the interview?
Does he mean the poem protects itself from clarity, simplicity?
> This is good stuff, plays into a pet theory I have about multiple voices
> in poetry and personality that I'll spare you here.
Maybe you should start firing away.
John K. Taber
Katherine Catmull wrote:
[snip]
> Well I don't believe there is a "right" answer, and this is probably the
> heart of our disagreement. I think there are only readings that are more or
> less defensible and more or less interesting. Of course, at the moment I
> think my reading is the most defensible and the most interesting, but I
> could certainly be persuaded otherwise--I persuaded myself into this one
> just a couple of posts ago.
I think the reason for accepting Patrick's and Vance's suggested reading
is not because it is "right" -- we'll never know what's right; nor because
it's "wrong" -- we'll never know that either; but because
1 it works
2 it makes the poem richer than supposing it is "John"
who says "drive".
What you want to show to support the ambiguity you insist on is
1. it works
2. it makes the poem richer than supposing it is only "John"
who says "drive".
It's possible. Most of the poem could be a single voice, the tenor, let
us say. The ending is the bass, let us say. And the "drive" is a tutti.
Katherine Catmull
John K. Taber wrote:
> I think the reason for accepting Patrick's and Vance's suggested reading
> is not because it is "right" -- we'll never know what's right; nor because
> it's "wrong" -- we'll never know that either; but because
> 1 it works
> 2 it makes the poem richer than supposing it is "John"
> who says "drive".
Right. If this makes more sense to you than my own suggestion that we
judge a reading on whether it is
1 defensible
2 interesting,
then I am fine with your restatement of this idea.
> What you want to show to support the ambiguity you insist on is
> 1. it works
> 2. it makes the poem richer than supposing it is only "John"
> who says "drive".
Right. That's what I was attempting to do in my post. If you disagree
with my reasoning and want to discuss it, it would be helpful to me if
you would address my arguments directly.
> It's possible. Most of the poem could be a single voice, the tenor, let
> us say. The ending is the bass, let us say. And the "drive" is a tutti.
Right. I understand that you're restating my reading here, and in fact
restating my entire post. But I don't quite understand whether you're
disagreeing with me, nor on what grounds. Perhaps I am not taking your
point; what is it?
John K. Taber
Katherine Catmull wrote:
>
> Perhaps I am not taking your
> point; what is it?
It's more likely I didn't read your post carefully enough.
Patrick Foley
Didn't have time to get to this yesterday, but I'm still here -- couple of
things I might be able to add . . . (And this is getting long now that
we've reached the point-by-point stage -- we're on the verge of spawning
three or four threads, but I don't have the energy to break it all out
today.)
In article <52m8pf$e...@urchin.bga.com>, ka...@bga.com (Katherine Catmull) wrote:
>In article <pfoley-2909...@news.earthlink.net>,
>Patrick Foley <pfo...@earthlink.net> wrote:
[snip]
>>Just an aside-- there's something a little fishy about this "reading"
>>lingo when he also did the "writing".
>
>Really? Why?
Think of the possibilities -- what if Creeley had never gone on the record
about "drive, he sd, for"? Or what if you had been unaware that he did?
Does it really make no difference at all?
It's just that he knows somewhat more about the circumstances of this
poem's composition than most of us. --- Now I'm happy to say that often
the best (whatever) in a poem is what the poet did not know he was putting
in, what happened behind his back, so to speak.
But for all that, the poet himself Creeley here is not in the position of
finding the poem in a book. Okay, and if he is, say it's a trunk poem he
doesn't even remember writing, his process of deciphering it will have
some elements ours doesn't. He may see things in it he didn't see when he
wrote it, things he can see because he knows the rest of his work just as
we do, but maybe things he can see because he knows a lot about his own
life that we do not. Who "John" is, for instance, or at least what the
significance of that name is. --- Suppose that's what we were arguing
about, why the friend is called "John" even though it's not his name. (Is
his name perhaps "Robert"?) Well Creeley has particular associations with
that name that he's given some thought to, and that's relevant. Maybe not
decisive, maybe not, and after all you could push out your sphere of
reference, argue that "John" is a special name in the language before it's
a special name for RC, but there still seems to be some information we can
get from RC and nowhere else.
And there's another possibility. I have been posting bits of text
purporting to be an interview with Creeley that quotes him directly, and
in a context in which he holds himself out as telling the truth about this
poem. Suppose instead we had everything I've posted here only second-hand
or third-hand, Cid Corman saying that this is what Creeley told him about
the poem, say. That would make a difference too, wouldn't it.
[snip]
>>It isn't a dialogue. It is exactly a monologue which happens to recount a
>>dialogue.
>
>Well, yes. That's what I was offhandedly getting at when I said there
>were at _least_ two voices in the poem. Better perhaps to say there are
>three: the speaker then, the speaker now, and John (whether or not John is
>some subset of the speaker himself).
>
>In any case, though, a monologue which recounts a dialogue contains more
>than one voice.
Another hard point I'm tempted to ramble about. Would it help if I said
the question is how those voices are "contained" -- that's a slippery
word. Maybe it's the philosopher in me, but y'know there's a difference
between a transcript of me and you talking and your telling people what we
said. I can give you the plurality of voices, I'm all for that, but there
is a difference crucial to me between two voices belonging to two people
and two voices belonging to one people --- and I've been trying to
indicate how I think in a way Creeley is the home of both "John" and "I".
The problem of how the voices are "contained" has to do with the
"ambiguity", which I'm coming to . . .
[theatre snipped a bit]
>> -- because you can't really be showing their
>>actual conversation which the speaker may even be making up,
>
>Well it's a _poem_, the whole thing is "made up" (even if it's based on
>an actual event). If you mean the narrator (as opposed to the poet)
>is making it up, so much the better. A fiction made by a fictional
>character doesn't get lesser status than the fiction created by real
>people--why should it? In fact it adds more nice levels to play with.
Eeeek! Would I give myself away if I said I didn't think the point of a
poem, and certainly not this one, is providing you with something to play
with? --- I should put that differently: some poems, novels, paintings,
what have you, but not this one, and nothing in Creeley that comes to my
limited mind. And well I'll throw in though it won't help that Creeley
never says anything to indicate that this is how he thinks of his writing,
unlike say Nabokov, who was once very disappointed that an editor hadn't
noticed the acrostic formed by the first letters of the paragraphs in a
story had submitted.
>>But like I sd, it's a monologue whatever you do.
>
>Call it what you will, there is more than one voice in this poem.
And that's just the elision of differences I'm tilting at here -- that
there's more than one way for there to be more than one voice.
** End Part the First, mostly dull stuff on interpretation **
>>>Kate
>>>Standard-bearer for Fruitful Ambiguity
>>
>>And as RC says himself, and Vance notes, he doesn't make it easy, invites
>>the misreading, etc.
>
>This is what I mean about fruitful ambiguity. It doesn't really matter if
>Creeley's intention was, for example, some sort of bizarrely
>mean-spirited effort to confuse his readers. The ambiguity about who says
>"drive" is clearly there, and happens to open up many fruitful paths for
>exploring the poem.
[snip]
>The reason I find the reading I'm proposing now (that both voices say
>"drive," for those of you joining us late) is because it takes into
>account the fact that the word "drive" is pulled in both directions,
>which I don't think Creeley's reading does. The word _is_ "at play in
>the syntax," as you so nicely put it, and therefore inescapably the
>meaning is, as well.
>
>But perhaps I don't understand what Creeley meant when he said "the poem
>protects itself" with this ambiguity. If you'd care to elaborate, I'd be
>interested.
This is something I wanted to glide past earlier in this thread, saying
that I thought this remark was at least a little playful (and I'll stand
by that), but maybe a lot more needs to be said about it. And maybe I do
below. Yeah, I do, at the end.
>>way. He goes on: "I like the impulse of "drive", _then_ "he said"." It's
>>some sort of impulse he wanted that he thought he could get with a comma
>>rather than a period. And as I say, it's interesting that with Creeley,
>>energy results in ambiguity. That's something close to what is so
>>compelling about him, isn't it?
>
>Yes indeed. But am I misunderstanding you (and Creeley), or aren't you
>trying to erase that ambiguity?
Where to start?
Thanks, first of all, because you've gotten me to think about Creeley's
poetics, try to account for it, and that's bound to do me some good.
More rambling needed--- a bunch of things we haven't said in so many words
yet: are they driving a car while talking about the other one they might
buy? why would John, if he says it, say "drive"? or "look / out where yr
going"?
If they are already driving along in a car and "I" is at the wheel,
talking away, and "John" says "drive" -- it's natural to hear that as
"Shut up and drive" and to take "look / out where yr going" as indicating
that "I" is getting carried away, not paying attention, maybe turning to
face "John" as he talks, etc., and maybe almost hits something or runs off
the road, and so on. And this makes "John" impatient with "I" and maybe
not even listening or not interested in what he's saying.
So we ought to think about that, give some sense to "John's" attitude
toward "I" and what he's saying. There are probably a couple different
takes on this that can be made to square with what RC says about "John" --
it could be impatience is useful if "I" is talking shit and oughtn't be
encouraged, etc.
But I would note -- and on this I have no "inside information"-- that it's
not perfectly clear that they're riding in _some_ car (just not the
goddamn big one) and "I" behind the wheel. They could be in a bar, weary
from hours of drinking, the sort of time in which one might say "the
darkness sur- / rounds us" and feel a bit hopeless and desperate. And
then "John's" speech at the end comes not impatiently, but measured, a
friendly piece of advice, well if you do that, "for / christ's sake look /
out where yr going." Different tone, more understanding, and to me more
like what RC says in interview about wanting just to run being a human
impulse and to be respected. Just a friendly warning in a context of
understanding and even solidarity of a sort. I know what you mean, but
just remember . . . And that to me also suits the difference between the
two of them, "I" talking a blue streak, anxious, desperate, and "John"
waiting for him to talk himself out and getting in just a word of
counterpoint when he's done. And see, there's "I" maybe wanting just
this, wanting someone to listen, and maybe wanting advice, but not quite
able to control his anxiety and rambling on about it when what he really
wants too is for "John" to say something.
And if they are in a car, having this conversation, where is it "John" is
so interested in getting to that he has his mind so fixed on the road and
wants "I" to as well?
And we ought to wonder what makes this a story "I" thinks worth telling to
someone else? It seems like the context of the poem's actual utterance
might be "I" being in the "John" role and the person he's speaking to in
the position he was when he had that conversation. The poem is heading
for that piece of wisdom he got from "John" and that "I" is now passing
along. And then you have "I" growing into his ideal somewhat, being
"John" for a change.
Now it's time to come at Creeley's poetics a bit and ambiguity. Oy.
What we're talking about here is a comma. If he had used a fullstop, no
one (maybe) would be tempted to think "John" says "drive". Oh yes, and
Creeley elides the "and" he might have used: "buy a goddamn big car and
drive", although the poem is already quirky enough in construction that we
might still be able to hear "and 'Drive!' he said", running the
interruption right into the sentence like a final clause.
What kind of ambiguity is there supposed to be here? I'm willing to allow
all sorts of cross-implication among the personalities and all that, even
though I don't think the poem is _syntactically_ ambiguous. And I'd add
that Creeley seems to think the same. So I'm insisting that nothing I've
said, or that Creeley said, supports _that_ level of ambiguity though
there may be ambiguity at other levels, in the poem's content in some
sense.
At least one thing to say in support of this is that some instances of
ambiguity are eliminable: A says, "Meet me over at Bill's tonight." B
responds, "Bill Mitchell's?" A: "No, Bill Robinson's." --- Yes, what A
said was ambiguous, but not because he meant both Bills or wasn't sure
which Bill he meant. And I'm saying Creeley knows exactly who says
"drive" even though the syntax -- because he uses a comma -- is ambiguous.
Now we could Empsonize, and argue there is a level of unconscious
ambiguity here -- as I think I've suggested before -- that maybe RC only
thought he wanted "drive" spoken by "I" but that in reality, although he
was not himself conscious of it, he wasn't sure who should say it and,
again, unconsciously, was aware that either could say it at the moment,
with different meanings. Some of that I'll have to go along with, though
I'm not sure how much, but you still have to get from there to Creeley
using a comma _because_ that's how he can have them both say "drive". And
you have to throw in that maybe he thought he was doing it for reasons of
speed and energy and angularity -- for reasons of poetics, in short, but
was fooling himself, and maybe using craft as a rationalization in the
process. Or you could just say that this is the origin of his craft and
that these are the ends that it serves. Of course, in that case, the poem
is not protecting itself at all, but putting on display Creeley's
uncertainty and ambivalence, and if he had wanted to hide this he might
have forced the word "drive" on "I" with a fullstop, thus hiding his
knowledge that really he hears the word in both og their mouths. When you
get down to the actual material, it's not obvious why the syntax must
highlight the multiple sources of each word. Maybe "John" tells "I" that
he's always talking, and yet "I" doesn't mention this, though that might
be why he says it. Maybe "John" is the only person who doesn't tell him
he's always talking, but again there's no special syntactical flare sent
up to let us know what's in his mind. --- The point being that that a
fullstop would not have been any more evidence that "John" doesn't in
Creeleys's mind say "drive" than a comma is evidence that he does.
I think Creeley might be forcing us to understand the poem in order to
read it correctly. (There's a related though maybe opposed phenomenon in
Donne, I think.) If you hear the whole first part as leading up to what
"John" said, the awkward way his words are introduced makes sense. I mean
the way it runs on with what "I" was saying. (My friend Shannon made an
interesting point about this -- that in conversations like this with
mentor figures, they're likely to finish your sentences for you, almost as
if the friend for a moment speaks _for you_, in your place, maybe saying
what you couldn't quite put into words, etc.) And not only that but that
the attribution comes before the quotation, awkwardly. (And of course
there are no quotation marks in the poem either.) To my ear, and I just
experienced this, to do this you have to really land on the "he" --- "HE
sd . . ." And I think that's why I thought of Donne's syntax, because the
key here is that this reading makes the _contrast_ the heavy emphasis of
the poem, I was rambling on as usual, but then blammo "John" says--. And
to me this makes the loss of the "and" between "car" and "drive" sensible
too, there's a pause in there where "I" is caught up in his fantasy of
escape, "buy a goddamn big car . . . drive . . ."
Maybe that's as close as I can get tonight to saying something about
Creeley's poetics, that maybe you are forced to read with the impulse of
the poem for it to sound right, and that this is backwards of the usual
relation between form & content. (In Donne, if I'm remembering this
right, you have cases where the meter, though it seems absent, is actually
giving you clues about what words to emphasize, especially contrastive
terms.) And if this works you have a very different sort of music, a
music of meaning rather than sound alone, and no chance that the
soundmusic will overwhelm what the poem's about. I think this why the
syntax gets rough treatment here & there, why the punctuation can be
idiosyncratic, etc., because it isn't laid out for you and packaged.
There's no singing along. There's no way of avoiding what the poem is
saying -- and maybe this is achieved by making it not so easy to figure
out what it's saying, while _at the same time_ giving you nothing else
(like a pretty tune) to occupy your mind with. You can just ignore the
poem and move on, but to like it at all you have to deal with the content.
--- All this to give some sense to my suggestion that with Creeley the
poem's impulse sometimes results in a certain amount of "protecting
itself", because it's a way of forcing you to read it well, and that if
you do you might find a different sort of music than what you've heard
before.
Well this is a deadly long post and much of it snippable now. I'd like to
keep going on the nitty gritty of why the poem is put together the way it
is (lots of things we haven't gotten to yet, and which could fund a more
general discussion closer to this thread's aging title) and dump all the
canons of interpretation and source material sort of stuff. Ho hum. Also
I'm sure I forgot to address something or other, so just remind me if I
did.
Pat
Steven Hines
I hope you don't mind me sticking my nose in this, but I find this topic
compelling...
Patrick Foley wrote:
>
> In article <52m8pf$e...@urchin.bga.com>, ka...@bga.com (Katherine Catmull) wrote:
>
> >In article <pfoley-2909...@news.earthlink.net>,
> >Patrick Foley <pfo...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> [snip]
> >>Just an aside-- there's something a little fishy about this "reading"
> >>lingo when he also did the "writing".
> >
> >Really? Why?
>
> Think of the possibilities -- what if Creeley had never gone on the record
> about "drive, he sd, for"? Or what if you had been unaware that he did?
> Does it really make no difference at all?
I don't think it makes a difference beyond the fact that it supplies
an alternate reading (one that is a peer to other textually consistent
readings). It seems to me that Creeley's reading is going to be
less compelling (not to say that it is less viable) because it relies
on specific elements of Creeley's past that are now, and always will be,
foreign to everyone else (no matter how detailed RC's testimony may be,
in spite of some lost letters we may find in the future).
> It's just that he knows somewhat more about the circumstances of this
> poem's composition than most of us. --- Now I'm happy to say that often
> the best (whatever) in a poem is what the poet did not know he was putting
> in, what happened behind his back, so to speak.
So how can the poet's reading help in a way that others' readings can't?
Also, how are we to know which parts slip by the poet? Do these parts
only count if he acknowledges them as acceptable after they are pointed
out to him, or are they always the "best parts," even if the poet
refuses them?
> But for all that, the poet himself Creeley here is not in the position of
> finding the poem in a book. Okay, and if he is, say it's a trunk poem he
> doesn't even remember writing, his process of deciphering it will have
> some elements ours doesn't. He may see things in it he didn't see when he
> wrote it, things he can see because he knows the rest of his work just as
> we do, but maybe things he can see because he knows a lot about his own
> life that we do not. Who "John" is, for instance, or at least what the
> significance of that name is. --- Suppose that's what we were arguing
> about, why the friend is called "John" even though it's not his name. (Is
> his name perhaps "Robert"?) Well Creeley has particular associations with
> that name that he's given some thought to, and that's relevant. Maybe not
> decisive, maybe not, and after all you could push out your sphere of
> reference, argue that "John" is a special name in the language before it's
> a special name for RC, but there still seems to be some information we can
> get from RC and nowhere else.
Okay. The poet will probably remember intending that a poem mean a certain
thing. If he does, he will also likely remember the references, etc.
But... how are poems useful to the people who did not write them? That is,
if only the author is privvy to the things that make the poem mean, what
use is it to us? How could RC tell us all of his associations with "John"?
If he can't tell us all of them, he might as well not tell us any, since
the information does us no good: if RC's meaning is indelibly bound up with
exactly what John is, we never know RC's meaning.
> And there's another possibility. I have been posting bits of text
> purporting to be an interview with Creeley that quotes him directly, and
> in a context in which he holds himself out as telling the truth about this
> poem. Suppose instead we had everything I've posted here only second-hand
> or third-hand, Cid Corman saying that this is what Creeley told him about
> the poem, say. That would make a difference too, wouldn't it.
Well, as you can tell, I don't think it would make any difference. If the
reading is a good one, who cares if someone put it in Creeley's mouth?
-----------------
Steve Hines
shi...@sdd.hp.com
Vance Maverick
In article <pfoley-0110...@cust121.max13.washington.dc.ms.uu.net> pfo...@earthlink.net (Patrick Foley) writes:
> Well this is a deadly long post and much of it snippable now.
Done. ;-)
> I'd like to keep going on the nitty gritty of why the poem is put
> together the way it is (lots of things we haven't gotten to yet, and
> which could fund a more general discussion closer to this thread's
> aging title)
No kidding. Just to set down an obvious comment I think has not been
made yet: here as in much of his poetry (of which this poem is not
especially representative), Creeley builds a flow out of small
syntactic units -- builds something bigger than a sentence of units a
little smaller than a sentence -- by letting the units undermine or
contradict each other.
The first clear break in the flow is the second "I sd", immediately
followed by the next, the distraction about the name. Then "or else"
although no solution to the problem of the darkness has been proposed,
"& why not" although we still haven't gotten there, and "drive"
without a connective. I think it's this last hiccup, with the
surprise of a straight declarative sentence ending the poem, that
leads people to the reading Patrick opposes.
Even the first word sets up an expectation to be deferred. If I tell
you, "As I said to John, <whatever>", then <whatever> is the point,
and John takes a supporting role. Compare "I said to John,
<whatever>", in which John is possibly as important as <whatever>. So
"As" throws the focus of attention forward into the future; Creeley's
deferrals ("because I am always talking") are felt more, because we
have been told to expect something.
Also, on the original topic of this thread and away from Creeley --
Don Marquis, in "archy and mehitabel", could rely on "vers libre" for
a popular joke, already in 1916. Much could be learned about free
verse lineation from archy (though I don't think he breaks words, like
Creeley).
Vance
Katherine Catmull
I've done some terrible snipping here--Patrick, if I've accidentally
misrepresented any of your arguments with my whacking away, please
let me know. I've been writing this in between work crises so it's quite
possible I've mangled your argument--or my own--at some point.
Incidentally, I've appended the poem itself to the end of this post for
those you who've lost track of what the heck we're talking about.
Patrick Foley wrote:
I wrote:
>In article <pfoley-2909...@news.earthlink.net>,
>Patrick Foley <pfo...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>[snip]
>>>Just an aside-- there's something a little fishy about this "reading"
>>>lingo when he also did the "writing".
>
>>Really? Why?
>Think of the possibilities -- what if Creeley had never gone on the record
>about "drive, he sd, for"? Or what if you had been unaware that he did?
>Does it really make no difference at all?
>
>It's just that he knows somewhat more about the circumstances of this
>poem's composition than most of us.
[lots of good stuff snipped]
I guess I'd make a distinction between the information about "the
circumstances of this poem's composition" and an actual _reading_ of the
poem. It's always interesting and often useful--but never critical-- to
hear the former, and of course the author or those close to him are the only
ones who can tell you about that. But I don't think it makes his
_reading_ of the poem privileged, no.
Ultimately the poem stands or falls on the text itself; it wouldn't be
much of a poem if you could only truly appreciate it knowing that Creeley has
special feelings about the name "John." If we had to depend on poets
telling us how they felt and what they thought when they wrote a poem,
we would never be able to appreciate Shakespeare, for example.
>>In any case, though, a monologue which recounts a dialogue contains
more
>>than one voice.
>Another hard point I'm tempted to ramble about. Would it help if I said
>the question is how those voices are "contained" -- that's a slippery
>word. Maybe it's the philosopher in me, but y'know there's a difference
>between a transcript of me and you talking and your telling people what
we
>said.
Oh I completely agree. I kind of slid past this in my earlier post, but
it's quite an interesting line of thought for this poem.
>I can give you the plurality of voices, I'm all for that, but there
>is a difference crucial to me between two voices belonging to two people
>and two voices belonging to one people --- and I've been trying to
>indicate how I think in a way Creeley is the home of both "John" and
"I".
I'm very interested in your idea (if I'm understanding you correctly)
that the "I" and "John" may be aspects of the same person. I should add that I
don't think this would conflict with my reading.
>>A fiction made by a fictional
>>character doesn't get lesser status than the fiction created by real
>>people--why should it? In fact it adds more nice levels to play with.
>Eeeek! Would I give myself away if I said I didn't think the point of a
>poem, and certainly not this one, is providing you with something to
play
>with? --- I should put that differently: some poems, novels, paintings,
>what have you, but not this one, and nothing in Creeley that comes to
my
>limited mind. [snips]
Well my first impulse is to say YES! You've given yourself away! but
now I'm thinking that perhaps I've just misled you with the term "play
with." I'm not sure what you think I mean, but I assure you that I intend
no disrespect. Would it be clearer if I said "it adds more richness and
complexity to the poem" or "it gives us a lot more to think about and
talk about"?
Would it help if I told you I believe that most of the most important
things human beings do are forms of play?
And having said all that, I'll say that I think that's exactly the point
of poems, to give me something to play with. By which I mean
something to read, think about and talk about with attention
and delight.
>If they are already driving along in a car and "I" is at the wheel,
>talking away, and "John" says "drive" -- it's natural to hear that as
>"Shut up and drive" and to take "look / out where yr going" as indicating
>that "I" is getting carried away, not paying attention, maybe turning to
>face "John" as he talks, etc., and maybe almost hits something or runs
off
>the road, and so on. And this makes "John" impatient with "I" and
maybe
>not even listening or not interested in what he's saying.
I was with ya up until this last sentence, which strikes me as too much
of a leap. I don't see why John can't be both interested in what the speaker
is saying and yet wishing he would keep his eyes on the road, f'christ's
sake (in other words I don't see why "Shut up" should be implied.)
> They could be in a bar, weary
>from hours of drinking, the sort of time in which one might say "the
>darkness sur- / rounds us" and feel a bit hopeless and desperate. And
>then "John's" speech at the end comes not impatiently, but measured, a
>friendly piece of advice, well if you do that, "for / christ's sake look /
>out where yr going." Different tone, more understanding, and to me
more
>like what RC says in interview about wanting just to run being a human
>impulse and to be respected.
Well, maybe. "for christ's sake look out where yr going" does not sound
very measured to me, however. And it does _strongly_ pull the reader
toward the interpretation that they're in a car, so I'd probably need
stronger evidence from the text that they are _not_ in a car before I'd
be convinced.
You seem to feel (if I'm understanding you) that if they are in a car and
John is urging the speaker to look where he's going for christ's sake,
then that means the poem does not respect the speaker's impulse to run. I
don't see why. I think the poem is reasonably sympathetic with both
perspectives.
>And see, there's "I" maybe wanting just
>this, wanting someone to listen, and maybe wanting advice, but not quite
>able to control his anxiety and rambling on about it when what he really
>wants too is for "John" to say something.
Sure, I like this!
>And if they are in a car, having this conversation, where is it "John" is
>so interested in getting to that he has his mind so fixed on the road and
>wants "I" to as well?
Well, perhaps he's just interested in not being killed in a car accident.
Without necessarily judging an existential crisis it is still sensible to
urge the angst-ridden to pay attention to what they are doing right now as well.
>And we ought to wonder what makes this a story "I" thinks worth
telling to
>someone else? It seems like the context of the poem's actual utterance
>might be "I" being in the "John" role and the person he's speaking to in
>the position he was when he had that conversation.
Oh I like this too!
>What we're talking about here is a comma. If he had used a fullstop, no
>one (maybe) would be tempted to think "John" says "drive". [snips]
>
>What kind of ambiguity is there supposed to be here? I'm willing to
allow
>all sorts of cross-implication among the personalities and all that, even
>though I don't think the poem is _syntactically_ ambiguous.
[then a few lines later you say]
>And I'm saying Creeley knows exactly who says
>"drive" even though the syntax -- because he uses a comma -- is
ambiguous.
Well, I'm not sure now whether you think the poem is syntactically
ambiguous or not. I definitely do, and I'm not sure how one could argue
it isn't. Otherwise there wouldn't have been years of confusion about the
"drive he sd", would there?
The first line of the last stanza is "drive, he sd, for". The choice to
write this line this way--and to separate it so decisively from the previous
stanzas--makes it ambiguous, in my opinion.
>So I'm insisting that nothing I've
>said, or that Creeley said, supports _that_ level of ambiguity though
>there may be ambiguity at other levels, in the poem's content in some
>sense.
Well but with all respect (honestly) to both of you, I'm saying that the
_poem_ creates that ambiguity, and that's all I'm interested in.
>At least one thing to say in support of this is that some instances of
>ambiguity are eliminable: A says, "Meet me over at Bill's tonight." B
>responds, "Bill Mitchell's?" A: "No, Bill Robinson's." --- Yes, what A
>said was ambiguous, but not because he meant both Bills or wasn't sure
>which Bill he meant.
I don't mean to say Creeley was confused when writing the poem. But as
I'm afraid I've established at all-too-tedious length, I don't _care_
what Creeley felt or meant when he was writing the poem. Or I do care, a bit,
but for me it's very far from the final word on what the poem ends up
being.
>Now we could Empsonize, and argue there is a level of unconscious
>ambiguity here -- as I think I've suggested before -- that maybe RC only
>thought he wanted "drive" spoken by "I" but that in reality, although he
>was not himself conscious of it, he wasn't sure who should say it and,
>again, unconsciously, was aware that either could say it at the moment,
>with different meanings. Some of that I'll have to go along with, though
>I'm not sure how much, but you still have to get from there to Creeley
>using a comma _because_ that's how he can have them both say "drive".
[lots of stuff snipped]
Well, but _I_ don't have to, because, again, it doesn't really matter to
my way of reading what Creeley was thinking when he chose certain
punctuation, etc.
>I think Creeley might be forcing us to understand the poem in order to
>read it correctly. [many snips]
>Maybe that's as close as I can get tonight to saying something about
>Creeley's poetics, that maybe you are forced to read with the impulse of
>the poem for it to sound right, and that this is backwards of the usual
>relation between form & content. [snips]
I don't think I can go along with this. Syntax is part of meaning; syntax
contributes to meaning maybe even as much as diction does. (I have a
theory in fact that William Carlos Williams' famous poem that begins "so
much depends" is about the meaning that inheres in syntax--in
juxtapositions.)
So to my mind any reading of any poem has got to account for the
syntax, not try to work around it. You acknowledge that your reading is
"backwards of he usual relation between form & content"--for me, for
this reason, it doesn't work.
I should add that I don't think a reading that addresses a poem's syntax as-
is is asking for a poem that's "laid out for you and packaged," as you
suggest in something I've snipped, by the way.
> I'd like to
>keep going on the nitty gritty of why the poem is put together the way it
>is (lots of things we haven't gotten to yet, and which could fund a more
>general discussion closer to this thread's aging title) and dump all the
>canons of interpretation and source material sort of stuff.
We probably have to keep talking about the canons of interpretation
because we keep getting stalemated where you think I'm mad for not
giving Creeley's reading more importance, and I think you're mad for
privileging the author's reading above the text.
But that's OK--it's an interesting discussion (to me at least!).
Kate
--
"Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear."
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
John K. Taber
Patrick Foley wrote:
> In article <52m8pf$e...@urchin.bga.com>, ka...@bga.com (Katherine Catmull) wrote:
[snippage]
> >>It isn't a dialogue. It is exactly a monologue which happens to recount a
> >>dialogue.
> >
> >Well, yes. That's what I was offhandedly getting at when I said there
> >were at _least_ two voices in the poem. Better perhaps to say there are
> >three: the speaker then, the speaker now, and John (whether or not John is
> >some subset of the speaker himself).
> >
> >In any case, though, a monologue which recounts a dialogue contains more
> >than one voice.
>
> Another hard point I'm tempted to ramble about. Would it help if I said
> the question is how those voices are "contained" -- that's a slippery
> word.
I hope I'm not confusing things here... but here goes...
To me, the poem is a narrative in the first person. The subject of the
narrative is a dialog or conversation.
So, if it helps, let's call the container a narrative.
Something needs to be said about the dialog. Isn't there dramatic
tension here? Two contrasting voices, or persons, or points of view?
Isn't the interest of the poem, the tension between the two?
Next...
I wanted to summarize the possible speakers of "drive", but I noticed even
more ambiguities that I would like cleared up (discussed?) first.
In the 2nd and 3rd stanzas, there is something funny going on. What is the
"darkness" surrounding us? Are "I" and "John" driving thru the night?
I think they're driving because of my simple reading of the end. But accepting
either Vance's or Kate's readings, you don't have to suppose they are
driving. It's just a proposal, maybe over green tea at the kitchen table,
to buy a *big* car, and John voices concern over "I's" materialism?
imprudence? or?
OTOH, is the darkness philosophical? The darkness of our incomprehension
of life, of God's purpose. Is it our mortality and eventual death?
Or just a plain sour stomach feeling of life? And is "I's" proposal
to buy a big car a surrender to the darkness? Or is it just ignoring
the darkness? "What can we do about the darkness? The hell with it,
let's buy a car". Personally, that's my feeling, screw philosophic
darkness, buy a car. John, then, is truly concerned when he says
"watch where you're going". The Dutch uncle, so to speak. We are not
to pretend the darkness can be ignored. And the "for christ's sake"
perhaps is literal, not just an expletive. Or is buying a car a
way to triumph over the darkness?
The 3rd stanza says "or else". How do I read that? Is the speaker
logically rambling until he collects his thoughts? A sort of um, er?
Is the "or else" the threat of the darkness? (The darkness is "or else").
Or, is "or else" an undeveloped intimation that there is an "else" to
the darkness, something that can be done about it?
Anyhow, we all agree that "drive" is possibly spoken by
1. the narrator ("I")
2. John
3. both narrator and John??
I really liked the Denise Levertov dictum of "scoring" a poem.
Patrick Foley
Much unremarked snipping herein -- I'm making a stab at concision.
In article <52ujtj$s...@jake.bga.com>, ka...@bga.com (Katherine Catmull) wrote:
>I guess I'd make a distinction between the information about "the
>circumstances of this poem's composition" and an actual _reading_ of the
>poem. It's always interesting and often useful--but never critical-- to
>hear the former, and of course the author or those close to him are the only
>ones who can tell you about that. But I don't think it makes his
>_reading_ of the poem privileged, no.
Gonna go with my gut here -- I do think Creeley's reading is privileged.
I let fall some generalities lately about unconscious composition, and I
think now's the time to back off on that. I'd like to look at a specific
case before I talk about that again. As for "I Know a Man" -- RC says in
so many words who the word "drive" belongs to and why, and he oughta
know. (But see infra, where I probably all but take this back too.)
>Ultimately the poem stands or falls on the text itself; it wouldn't be
>much of a poem if you could only truly appreciate it knowing that Creeley
>has special feelings about the name "John." If we had to depend on poets
>telling us how they felt and what they thought when they wrote a poem,
>we would never be able to appreciate Shakespeare, for example.
Suppose it goes like this -- Creeley explains it to you, and you say, "But
it's not clear from the text." Maybe he should say, "I screwed up." He
seems to have an idea that you won't make this mistake if you read the
poem in a certain way. Again, he may be wrong, and maybe the poem's a
failure. ---I don't want to get into whether it achieves something as is,
just not what he was trying to, or I'll be liberal with generalities
again, and I'd like to take one question at a time: he says what he was
trying to do here; did he do it or not? Is he right to think that without
the benefit of his explanation the poem will still carry the meaning he
wants it to if read the way he thinks it ought to be read? It's that last
that I really really want to get at.
>I'm very interested in your idea (if I'm understanding you correctly)
>that the "I" and "John" may be aspects of the same person. I should add that
>I don't think this would conflict with my reading.
I just don't think there's any confusion about who says what, though
there's a little confusion about who is who. How's that?
>The first line of the last stanza is "drive, he sd, for". The choice to
>write this line this way--and to separate it so decisively from the
>previous stanzas--makes it ambiguous, in my opinion.
Here's what makes it ambiguous: there are no quotation marks in the poem.
>I don't mean to say Creeley was confused when writing the poem. But as
>I'm afraid I've established at all-too-tedious length, I don't _care_
>what Creeley felt or meant when he was writing the poem. Or I do care, a
>bit, but for me it's very far from the final word on what the poem ends up
>being.
Well of course that's true, because after all he might not be a very good
poet, never quite expressing what he felt or meant. I might allow that a
poet could set out with banal intentions and produce a unique masterpiece
-- it's easy to say so in the abstract and it's probably true, but again
I'd rather see an example before saying so.
At any rate, I'm intensely interested in what Robt. Creeley felt and meant.
>I don't think I can go along with this. Syntax is part of meaning; syntax
>contributes to meaning maybe even as much as diction does. (I have a
>theory in fact that William Carlos Williams' famous poem that begins "so
>much depends" is about the meaning that inheres in syntax--in
>juxtapositions.)
Juxtaposition is the antithesis of syntax. :-)
>So to my mind any reading of any poem has got to account for the
>syntax, not try to work around it. You acknowledge that your reading is
>"backwards of he usual relation between form & content"--for me, for
>this reason, it doesn't work.
I might be wrong about that -- it was getting late.
Better to say this: the poem's punctuation, lineation, etc. do not follow
the usual strictures, and to me that means I can make fewer assumptions
about how these elements inform the poem's meaning. And that's why I'm
trying to lean harder on what it's all about, and then work backwards to
why it's presented the way it is. I would like really then to go forward
again and be able to say why the poem is written the way it is -- the
thread Vance is trying to get going next door -- it's just that I can't
yet.
>I should add that I don't think a reading that addresses a poem's syntax as-
>is is asking for a poem that's "laid out for you and packaged," as you
>suggest in something I've snipped, by the way.
What I should have said there is this poem at least is not laid out as
neatly as the resources of the language might have allowed. He could have
used quotation marks and didn't, for instance.
I have it in mind that he is trying to use the language differently -- so
that you can't just look at it as a document in which a piece of
punctuation is missing, through a printing error say, thus creating
difficulties of interpretation. I'm saying that when he dropped those
conventions we do not have only a lack -- so that we are adrift -- but
that he replaced them with something else he thought could sustain his
meaning, and I want desperately to figure out what that is, and whether
it's really there too I guess.
Here's a simple example: when Flaubert has that contrapuntal conversation
in _Madame Bovary_, three or four people talking at once and there are no
attributions -- he writes so that you can tell who is saying what and to
whom. One might insist that absent attributions (y'know, things like "as
I sd" and "he sd") we can never be sure which lines are spoken by which
characters, and one would be wrong. Flaubert has supplied something else
to sustain his intended meaning, so that the absence of traditional helps
is really the entrypoint to a newly created form.
In short, I'm trying hard to figure out the laws of this poem and not
assume too much about its construction, which frankly I don't understand
yet. Maybe Vance will make some headway on that.
I suppose I should say that in truth I don't know if the poem really says
what Creeley says he was trying to say. But knowing what he says about
it, I'm trying to figure out what in its construction he thinks does make
it say what he was trying to say. And also how I'm supposed to read it so
that it will, and what the connection is between how he wrote it and how
I'm to read it, since again he seems to think I ought to be able to read
it and hear what he thinks he was saying.
Maybe it would help if I mentioned that I'm a (bad & unpublished) poet --
so I have strong tendencies to look at it this way: what was he trying to
do? how did he try to do it? does it work? and how can I see it? Some
other time I might be more interested in the poem as found artifact rather
than made artifact -- look at it for itself, fallen from the sky,
investigate its properties who cares where they came from. But I'm
obsessively interested in the making. And I don't really understand how
this thing is made or why it was made that way, so naturally I'm awfully
interested in what the guy who made it says. I don't have an explanation
of every detail handy, and what explanation I have is a bit cryptic -- "I
like the impulse of "drive" and _then_ "he sd"" etc. I'm just trying to
figure out what the hell he's up to.
Pat
PS: This afternoon my friend Shannon pointed out in the bookstore an
anthology of car poems entitled "Drive, They Said".
da...@markov.commerce.ubc.ca
In article <pfoley-0210...@cust82.max13.washington.dc.ms.uu.net>,
Patrick Foley <pfo...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>[...] In short, I'm trying hard to figure out the laws of this poem and
>not assume too much about its construction [...]
>[...] I have strong tendencies to look at it this way: what was he
>trying to do? how did he try to do it? does it work? and how can I see
>it? [...] I'm obsessively interested in the making. And I don't
>really understand how this thing is made or why it was made that way,
>so naturally I'm awfully interested in what the guy who made it says.
>I don't have an explanation of every detail handy, and what explanation
>I have is a bit cryptic -- "I like the impulse of "drive" and _then_
>"he sd"" etc. I'm just trying to figure out what the hell he's up to.
When I find an interpretation/etc I believe in, I ask how the poet
achieved it, does it work, etc., (funny that I should do that?). jmd
Katherine Catmull
Patrick wrote:
>Gonna go with my gut here -- I do think Creeley's reading is privileged.
Then at this point we're at a bit of a stalemate. But that won't stop me
from writing a bit more, unfortunately.
>Suppose it goes like this -- Creeley explains it to you, and you say, "But
>it's not clear from the text." Maybe he should say, "I screwed up."
What I would actually say, though, is "But the text leads us in a
different direction." I think there is a distinction here. I'm not
saying I don't think it's a great poem; I don't think it's a poem
someone screwed up on. I just don't think it's exactly, or only, the poem
Creeley claims to have meant (and here we come to something I think you
may have mentioned at some point--how do we know of we can trust what
Creeley says anyway?)
>He
>seems to have an idea that you won't make this mistake if you read the
>poem in a certain way. Again, he may be wrong, and maybe the poem's a
>failure.
Aggh! It's surely not a failure!
>---I don't want to get into whether it achieves something as is,
Again, stalemate (only for you and me, though not for your continuaed
thinking about the poem, or discussing it with others), because this is
just what I want to do.
(me)
>>The first line of the last stanza is "drive, he sd, for". The choice to
>>write this line this way--and to separate it so decisively from the
>>previous stanzas--makes it ambiguous, in my opinion.
>Here's what makes it ambiguous: there are no quotation marks in the
poem.
Yes, I think that certainly adds to the ambiguity. Are you saying,
though, that the arrangement of lines I describe above is _not at all_
ambiguous? All these people over the years naming movies & books "Drive,
he said" etc. are just crazy--no rational person could think, because of
the way the lines are arranged, that John says "drive"?
(me)
>>I don't mean to say Creeley was confused when writing the poem. But as
>>I'm afraid I've established at all-too-tedious length, I don't _care_
>>what Creeley felt or meant when he was writing the poem. Or I do care,
a
>>bit, but for me it's very far from the final word on what the poem ends
up
>>being.
>Well of course that's true, because after all he might not be a very good
>poet, never quite expressing what he felt or meant.
Hmm. You do know, don't you, that's not what I mean--that Creeley's not a
very good poet (actually I haven't read Creeley in ages so I'm not sure
what I think of his ouevre in general--I just know I like this poem a lot).
(me)
>>I don't think I can go along with this. Syntax is part of meaning;
syntax
>>contributes to meaning maybe even as much as diction does. (I have a
>>theory in fact that William Carlos Williams' famous poem that begins
"so
>>much depends" is about the meaning that inheres in syntax--in
>>juxtapositions.)
>Juxtaposition is the antithesis of syntax. :-)
Here is one of those moments where a smiley is confusing things for me
rather than clarifying them, as I assume you meant it to do. Does the
smiley retract or soften the statement here, or---?
Let me just pretend it's not there, take the statement at face value, and
say I'd like you to expand on this. If my shorthand above makes it sound like I
think juxtaposition equals syntax, then let me clarify that--I don't. I
do think
it is one important element of syntax, and one that comes up a lot in
poetry.
Here are two sentences:
Our candidate, a Democrat, whupped on his stupid & venal
opponent.
Our candidate whupped on his stupid & venal opponent opponent, a
Democrat.
How does juxtaposition not have to do with the syntax (and meaning) of
these sentences?
>Better to say this: the poem's punctuation, lineation, etc. do not follow
>the usual strictures, and to me that means I can make fewer assumptions
>about how these elements inform the poem's meaning. And that's why
I'm
>trying to lean harder on what it's all about, and then work backwards to
>why it's presented the way it is.
This still doesn't work for me. I don't think you can figure out what
it's all about without taking into account how it's presented.
>I have it in mind that he is trying to use the language differently -- so
>that you can't just look at it as a document in which a piece of
>punctuation is missing, through a printing error say, thus creating
>difficulties of interpretation.
I'm not sure I've made clear that I would like this poem a lot less if it
had quotation marks and punctuation that forced you into a one limited reading.
>Here's a simple example: when Flaubert has that contrapuntal conversation
>in _Madame Bovary_, three or four people talking at once and there are no
>attributions -- he writes so that you can tell who is saying what and to
>whom.
Yes. But Creeley, in this poem, _doesn't_ write so it's absolutely clear
who's saying what. That's a dangerous thing to do and could just look
like sloppiness; but in this poem, it works and it's _interesting_.
>Maybe it would help if I mentioned that I'm a (bad & unpublished) poet --
>so I have strong tendencies to look at it this way: what was he trying to
>do? how did he try to do it? does it work? and how can I see it?
Actually this does help. Maybe it would help if I told you I'm a (former)
bad and unpublished literary critic. I hope that doesn't make us sworn
enemies. Anyway, I know that as an actor I often find theatre critics
irritatingly arrogant and clueless (and I don't just mean when they're
reviewing my work); I've probably been equally annoying to you in this
thread.
Nichael Cramer
Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
:Lately I've been getting a good "gut" response from various people to
:Creeley's familiar "I Know a Man":
: [...]
: can we do against
: it, or else, shall we &
: why not, buy a goddamn big car,
:
: drive, he sd, for
: christ's sake, look
: out where yr going.
:PS. Who speaks the word "drive"?
In an interview with Michael Andre (originally published in Andre's
"Muzzled Ox" and later reprinted in "Robert Creeley, Contexts of Poetry:
Interviews 1961-1971", Four Seasons Foundation, 1973) Creeley says the
following (after quoting "I Know a Man"):
Creeley: One thing, the lovely paradox about the movie and everything else
is that syntactically the line reads for me
why not, buy goddamn big car,
drive
and _then_
he sd, for
christ's sake
Andre: It is misquoted.
Creeley: Yeah, it's a misquote. The poem protects itself. It didn't
even get the syntax straight. Not that I made it simple for them. I like
the impulse of "drive", _then_ "he said." I could have said, period, you
know
drive. He sd, for
christ's sake
But "he" doesn't say "drive. [...]
Nichael Cramer
nic...@sover.net deep autumn my neighbor what does she do
http://www.sover.net/~nichael -Basho
Patrick Foley
Back at it after a little rest . . .
In article <x6uybhp...@deodar.CS.Berkeley.EDU>, Vance Maverick
<mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>No kidding. Just to set down an obvious comment I think has not been
>made yet: here as in much of his poetry (of which this poem is not
>especially representative),
Could you give us some sense of this, Vance? Maybe some pointers to more
representative poems or what about this one seems unrepresentative?
>Creeley builds a flow out of small
>syntactic units -- builds something bigger than a sentence of units a
>little smaller than a sentence -- by letting the units undermine or
>contradict each other.
This is an awfully interesting suggestion. If the poem is a little bigger
than a sentence -- and to go by the punctuation, it really is just one
longish oddly put-together sentence -- then it's a little more than a
personal utterance in a way, isn't it? (I'm thinking that the sentence,
more than say the word, is the mark of an individual. Maybe there's
something of Frost's dictum in there.) What do you think? With Creeley I
never quite have the feeling that I'm listening to an individual voice
exactly, even though -- as here -- there are some voice-like turns. Still
there is something about the whole that feels almost impersonal, if you
see what I mean. And that's quite a trick! --- Is this at all close to
your sense of it? Would you connect it to what you say here about his way
of building up the poem out of syntactical fragments.
>The first clear break in the flow is the second "I sd", immediately
>followed by the next, the distraction about the name. Then "or else"
>although no solution to the problem of the darkness has been proposed,
>"& why not" although we still haven't gotten there, and "drive"
>without a connective. I think it's this last hiccup, with the
>surprise of a straight declarative sentence ending the poem, that
>leads people to the reading Patrick opposes.
That perhaps and the line breaks. Is it possible that the breaks are just
deliberately edgy? Only two lines seem to end on words that can hold
emphasis -- "car" and "going". (Which isolates the word "drive" even more
strangely, supposing that RC's intentions are what he said they were.)
But several lines seem to begin on important words, or even to form units
with meanings unto themselves, like line 2, "friend, because I am". That
would be one common use of lineation, to gather words in a sort of cross
section of the syntax, the juxtapositions, cutting off other words that
would pull toward the sentence-meaning rather than the juxtaposed meaning.
Still, not nearly all the lines come out this way, and I wonder if the
lineation is entirely motivated by considerations of meaning. I'm having
trouble finding the measure though, something that would explain how the
lines function as rhythmic units. Any thoughts there, Vance? Something
about it feels right -- or at least the overwhelming lack of syntactically
coincident linebreaks, does create a sort of nervous tension. I'm not
thrilled with that explanation though, somehow. So what's going on?
>Even the first word sets up an expectation to be deferred. If I tell
>you, "As I said to John, <whatever>", then <whatever> is the point,
>and John takes a supporting role. Compare "I said to John,
><whatever>", in which John is possibly as important as <whatever>. So
>"As" throws the focus of attention forward into the future; Creeley's
>deferrals ("because I am always talking") are felt more, because we
>have been told to expect something.
"Of man's first disobedience and the fruit" -- something like that, no?
That syntactic tension, having the main point deferred, that does provide
extraordinary momentum. (PL is nothing if not a study in momentum.)
Trick that every storyteller uses, Faulkner not least, withhold
information, tease, tantalize, keep em on the edges of their little seats.
And yet, as you say, the poem turns out really to be heading for what John
says and you are given no expectation of _that_. It's a bolt from the
blue. Or at least that the speaker gives John the last word is. John's
words _could_ in fact be an anticlimax -- maybe the speaker does intend to
emphasize his own words and then John's come trailing along, the speaker
shaking his head at John's foolishness. Not of course what RC suggests
when talking about the poem -- and that means the very first word, that
"As . . ." is a bit deceptive. Almost, you might say, like the
contrereject Milton sets up by ending his first line on "fruit" -- since
it turns out ("Of that forbidden tree . . .") he's talking about literal
rather than metaphorical fruit -- but then again (on the principle
mentioned above, lineation as gathering words against the overall syntax)
this way he gets both. (And of course there's the tree and its status,
etc.)
Here's a question about free verse: the sort of indirectin Creeley goes in
for here (and elsewhere) can be found in abundance in metered, rhymed
verse by many hands; but how about the sort of forcefulness, even
directness he seems to get _at the same time_? I'm curious, Vance, to see
how the accumulation of syntactical fragments that you've described is
related to the poem's measure, its lineation, and to that overall effect
of energetic obliqueness Creeley gets.
(And if your impressions of Creeley are nothing at all like mine, now
would be the time to say so!)
Pat
Patrick Foley
[Warning: this article has a specious reference & is actually a reply to
an article that _still_ hasn't showed up on my news server, but which
Katherine was kind enough to supply me via email.]
Katherine Catmull wrote:
>Patrick wrote:
>
>>Gonna go with my gut here -- I do think Creeley's reading is privileged.
>
>Then at this point we're at a bit of a stalemate. But that won't stop me
>from writing a bit more, unfortunately.
It might not be a bad idea to have a mini-argument about this. You'd
never, I suppose, interpret a friend's remarks along any lines that the
words themselves could support; you'd want to know what your friend
actually meant. Now if it's different with a work of art, and having
Creeley tell you what he meant is not enough, then what exactly makes a
work of art different? (25 words or less.)
[this allows some snipping]
>>Here's what makes it ambiguous: there are no quotation marks in the
>poem.
>
>Yes, I think that certainly adds to the ambiguity. Are you saying, though,
>that the arrangement of lines I describe above is _not at all_ ambiguous?
>All these people over the years naming movies & books "Drive, he said"
>etc. are just crazy--no rational person could think, because of the way
>the lines are arranged, that John says "drive"?
Well golly no I don't think that and yeah of course I can see the
temptation and in fact some remarks in my mostest recentest post (about
lineation) probably reinforce the tendency to read it that way. (And as
I've said before the first time I read it I thought it was "John" who says
"drive". And I'm rational Tuesdays & Thursdays.)
But to me this creates an interesting situation: here's Creeley saying in
so many words that the word "drive" belongs to "I" and not to "John", and
not saying that he wanted the reader to be uncertain who says it (altho he
does say, I didn't make it _easy_ for them -- and again this may be
special pleading but I think he's kidding at least a _little_ when he says
that), and yes in a way the most natural way to read it is what he says is
the wrong way. What interests me here is why he did this -- because I
think I might be missing something. He must have had something in mind,
right? Oh I know you're really just interested in the words he's typed
out here, but I think there's a clue in this little problem to his ideas
about poetry, and I hope figuring out what he had in mind here could make
me a better reader, at least of RC who I find pretty darn tough.
[another snip]
>>Juxtaposition is the antithesis of syntax. :-)
>
>Here is one of those moments where a smiley is confusing things for me
>rather than clarifying them, as I assume you meant it to do. Does the
>smiley retract or soften the statement here, or---?
It's like in a Western -- "Smile when you say that, pardner" where "that"
is some fightin' words.
>Let me just pretend it's not there, take the statement at face value, and
>say I'd like you to expand on this. If my shorthand above makes it sound
>like I think juxtaposition equals syntax, then let me clarify that--I
>don't. I do think it is one important element of syntax, and one that comes
>up a lot in poetry.
>
>Here are two sentences:
>
>Our candidate, a Democrat, whupped on his stupid & venal opponent.
>
>Our candidate whupped on his stupid & venal opponent opponent, a
>Democrat.
>
>How does juxtaposition not have to do with the syntax (and meaning) of
>these sentences?
This is a little tricky in English because it's (mostly) uninflected so
syntax is indicated (mostly) by position. Which would seem to make what I
said nonsense anyway but doesn't. And in fact there's a bit of writing
about this from the old days, Pound & what he got from Fennelosa (sp?), to
the point that Donald Davie could write a book defending the likes of
Hardy from the likes of Amy Lowell (as if) and I forget the title but it
had the word "syntax" in it.
Getting to the point . . . It is also possible to write something like
this (tho I wouldn't except for illustrative purposes):
The bay,
seagulls, a sailboat,
those men hauling in nets,
fish dead or dying.
Tha's not a sentence according to Hoyle, for starters. You have here some
words linked syntactically and some just juxtaposed. (In your examples,
"a democrat" is an appositive and the only indication of that is
placement. Here you have the same juxtaposition without anything being an
appositive of anything else. It's also because of the meanings of the
words that we know how to read your sentences and how to read my lines
here, and know when a juxtaposed noun is an appositive.) This was the
Pound & Fennelosa idea for poetry, more or less, that you can accumulate
bits this way just by juxtaposing, without the logic (actors, events,
time, space, etc. -- "etc."!) syntax requires. Imagism as it thought it
was modeling itself on the great Chinese poets. It can go much further --
Robert Francis has poems that are just lists of words, no sentences
a'tall. (I understand this is used now as an "exercise" in "poetry
workshops".)
And the other thing about juxtaposition (which I mention elsewhere) is
that it is one of the uses of lineation, that you can group words that are
syntactically unrelated.
So even in English juxtaposition can be the opposite of syntax though it
happens that syntax in English is generally (though not exclusively, and
that's what made possible the inversions of word order poets used to use
so frequently, and maybe it's no coincidence Pound hated that) determined
by sentence position.
>>Better to say this: the poem's punctuation, lineation, etc. do not follow
>>the usual strictures, and to me that means I can make fewer assumptions
>>about how these elements inform the poem's meaning. And that's why
>>I'm trying to lean harder on what it's all about, and then work backwards
>>to why it's presented the way it is.
>
>This still doesn't work for me. I don't think you can figure out what it's
>all about without taking into account how it's presented.
I guess what I was trying to get at there really was the necessity of
taking a fresh look at that presentation -- and the way I put it doesn't
sound right at all. Normally when I'm struggling with a Creeley poem I
don't have handy an interview where he says just what it's all about.
Since I do in this case, I'm trying to get a handle on his method. For
comparison: British crossword puzzles are constructed along very different
principles from American crossword puzzles; baffled by the Times of London
puzzle I looked at past issues and compared the answers to the clues and
began to figure out what they were up to. I'd like to do something
similar here. I have what he did and what he said he was trying to do,
and once I figure out how those go together I want to see if I have
learned something about how he was writing in the late fifties at least,
and see if this helps me understand & appreciate some of his other poems.
Like that. This is an unusual case, because of that interview.
>>I have it in mind that he is trying to use the language differently -- so
>>that you can't just look at it as a document in which a piece of
>>punctuation is missing, through a printing error say, thus creating
>>difficulties of interpretation.
>
>I'm not sure I've made clear that I would like this poem a lot less if it
>had quotation marks and punctuation that forced you into a one limited
>reading.
>
>>Here's a simple example: when Flaubert has that contrapuntal
>>conversation in _Madame Bovary_, three or four people talking at once and
>>there are no attributions -- he writes so that you can tell who is saying
>>what and to whom.
>
>Yes. But Creeley, in this poem, _doesn't_ write so it's absolutely clear
>who's saying what. That's a dangerous thing to do and could just look like
>sloppiness; but in this poem, it works and it's _interesting_.
Here's a question: what does it add to John's statement for him to say
"drive" as well? It's clear enough what it adds to the speaker's --he
doesn't just want to own a big car but to use it for escape. Alright,
John takes the practical stance, watch where you're going, but what does
the command to drive add to that? On your reading, the word "drive" has
two different impulses; okay, you're right, the word can be used those two
ways, but what does it add to the poem to use it in both ways at once? I
understand how it's supposed to work, "drive" as the fulcrum of the poem,
the opposing tendencies of the speakers meeting in one word. I can see
how that might be aesthetically satisfying. But it seems to me you have
the same ideas Creeley's way and without making John's speech a sort of
filler to pull that one word in another direction. His speech pulls the
idea itself in another direction.
Besides, I still hear something wrong in John saying "drive", in issuing
this peremptory command, perhaps interrupting his friend perhaps not, but
it's a command either way and it completely changes the tone of the poem
for me. Can you have them both say it without the poem coming apart?
That is, without the man the poem's title refers to, "John", coming apart,
because his character is supposed to emblematic here, it's the whole
point, and if you allow ambiguity there I wonder if he can play the role
he's supposed to be playing.
Well I've rambled again, sorry bout that.
Pat
Vance Maverick
Vance:
> > [...] here as in much of his poetry (of which this poem is not
> > especially representative),
Patrick:
> Could you give us some sense of this, Vance? Maybe some pointers to more
> representative poems or what about this one seems unrepresentative?
I don't know another poem of his that's an anecdote of dialogue. I
won't essay a full characterization of the Creeley modes here, but
many of the poems, particularly early ones, are love lyrics of a sort.
> > Creeley builds a flow out of small
> > syntactic units -- builds something bigger than a sentence of units a
> > little smaller than a sentence -- by letting the units undermine or
> > contradict each other.
> This is an awfully interesting suggestion. If the poem is a little bigger
> than a sentence -- and to go by the punctuation, it really is just one
> longish oddly put-together sentence -- then it's a little more than a
> personal utterance in a way, isn't it? (I'm thinking that the sentence,
> more than say the word, is the mark of an individual. Maybe there's
> something of Frost's dictum in there.) What do you think?
I don't see why the sentence is the mark of the individual. Oddly, I
now find that Creeley has been quoted as objecting to the very idea of
"the sentence." (Check the poem "The Sentence" for an oblique light
on this.)
> With Creeley I never quite have the feeling that I'm listening to an
> individual voice exactly, even though -- as here -- there are some
> voice-like turns. Still there is something about the whole that
> feels almost impersonal, if you see what I mean. And that's quite a
> trick! --- Is this at all close to your sense of it? Would you
> connect it to what you say here about his way of building up the
> poem out of syntactical fragments.
Can you be more specific about "personal" here? He offers almost
nothing about himself in the poem except what he said: this has little
to do with syntax. For a comparison, you might look at
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/creeley/interview.html
-- another interview. Also not precisely sentential in its syntax,
but personal (I'd say).
> Is it possible that the breaks are just
> deliberately edgy? [...W]hat's going on?
I would *love* to read a good account of free-verse lineation. I've
seen some knowing references to principles or patterns, but never
anything explicit. Basically I have nothing better to offer than your
unsatisfying guess, but a couple of notes: Creeley is said to read
with a pause between lines but no emphasis on line endings. I don't
remember this from hearing him, and I can't do it myself in reading
this poem. Second, for what it's worth, my old defense of capricious
lineation was that it's for the eye, to stretch the syntax and slow
the attention.
> Here's a question about free verse: the sort of indirection Creeley
> goes in for here (and elsewhere) can be found in abundance in
> metered, rhymed verse by many hands; but how about the sort of
> forcefulness, even directness he seems to get _at the same time_?
> I'm curious, Vance, to see how the accumulation of syntactical
> fragments that you've described is related to the poem's measure,
> its lineation, and to that overall effect of energetic obliqueness
> Creeley gets.
I do think it results from the syntax trick, and in particular from
its application to the economical narration of an anecdote. The
results can be quite different in another domain, as in this stanza
from "Helsinki Window", one of my favorite later pieces:
Trees stripped, rather shed
of leaves, the black solid trunks up
to fibrous mesh of smaller
branches, it is weather's window,
weather's particular echo, here
as if this place had been once,
now vacant, a door that had had
hinges swung in air's peculiar
emptiness, greyed, slumped elsewhere,
asphalt blank of sidewalks, line of
linearly absolute black metal fence.
Vance (savoring the hexameter:
LIN | e Ar | ly AB | so LUTE | BLACK MET | al FENCE.)