diaries

[Andrea K Verre]

David Swanson (dc...@darwin.clas.virginia.edu) wrote:
: This latter method is preferred in
: graduate school. In preschool, of course, the former holds sway. But,
: then, preschoolers are awfully energetic.
:
: David
:
: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
: che la diritta via era smarrita.

I miss preschool right now.

andi

[David Swanson]

The newspapers have been printing opinions on Eisenman's new building
at the U of Cincinnati, a design that was just being completed the
summer I worked at Eisenman's office, about six years ago. I had no
opinion on Eisenman at the time. I was in no position to judge whether
what he said in words meant anything at all to others. I visited the
Wexner Center at Ohio State and rather liked it. But I didn't think it
would last, I didn't think it would bear being seen every day for five
or ten years. There was newness for the sake of newness in it which
otherwise failed. Now they say the Wexner is physically worn down and
aging. But Cincinnati looks fantastic to me in the few photos I've
seen. I can see myself liking it on a daily basis, and liking it in a
way different from the way in which I like other buildings. This work
is playfulserious.

That needs to be one word. The frequency with which we all write the
phrase "playful but serious" has become ludicrous. It is clear that we
do not mean much anymore by the "but." Either we must modify our usage
of playful, or we need a new word.

A couple of girls in the library spread their food and drinks out on
the table, as students will do, in happy defiance of the rules I'm
supposed to enforce. They insisted, each time that I questioned them,
that they were taking the food outside to actually eat it, or that the
empty soda cans were just being carried around until they found a
recycling bin, etc. All this was done for laughs, though there was no
laughter. It might have become something of an enjoyable game. But
this was straight-faced lying. To that I prefer stingy selfishness,
open hostility, frustrating slowness, or utter indifference. I'd
rather talk to an axe murderer than a used car salesman. I'd rather
talk to some person who could be told absolutely everything and trusted
with it, or someone close enough to that ideal for one to imagine they
attain it.

I heard a story about a moose wading out rather far and being eaten by
a killer whale. I kind of envied that moose. Gulp.

[paschal]

On 14 Oct 1996, Andrea K Verre wrote:

> David Swanson (dc...@darwin.clas.virginia.edu) wrote:
> : This latter method is preferred in
> : graduate school. In preschool, of course, the former holds sway. But,
> : then, preschoolers are awfully energetic.
> :

> : David

> :
> : Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
> : che la diritta via era smarrita.
>
>

> I miss preschool right now.

Personally, I think the Dear Boy is finally hitting his stride. I found
this installment of the Swanson Journal to be an eerily affecting play on
"Les Bergers d'Arcadie". I was especially touched by the concrete
blocks - which in "Arcadie" would be marble; but not, of course, in your
average suburban tract-house den.

David's idea of Lively Honeymoon Sport does give me pause; but
then, there's all the time in the world, isn't there....

ObBook: _Cloud of Unknowing_, Unknown.

-Paschal

[David Christopher Swanson]

I was reading Lyotard by the window of the caffe, all that
stuff about information is technology is money is power.
There's a railroad that goes over the street there, with a
clearance below of about ten feet. This truck must have been
ten foot six, 'cause it stuck with a crunch and a bang.
Everybody was entertained for at least half a minute. The
truck backed out from under the railroad bridge and peeled its
top off like it was a sardine tin. It had been a nice truck, a
new truck, belonging to some very nineties sounding company.
Blank... Data Services. What I want to know is what kind of
data they're hauling around in trucks that are too tall to
drive under railroad bridges. And why didn't it include the
datum don't-drive-this-truck-through-places-it-won't-fit?

DS

[David Swanson]

I'm considering moving, only about two miles away, for reasons I won't
go into. For three years I've lived in a farm house in the middle of
the woods. The farm became a woods long ago. It's not a particularly
beautiful house, but it's a house with history and a house without much
consumerist pretentiousness. It's got tool sheds and chicken coops and
other useful accessories. I pin what I like on the walls. If the
plumbing breaks down I don't bathe. But I blast the radio and sing all
night, because the birds and animals don't complain. The new house is
also fairly isolated, but not as well. You can see two other houses
and a road and a giant powerline from it. It is in a hunter-free zone
and that's a plus. There's a yard for horses. But the new house is
three things I don't want: luxurious, cheap, and tacky. It's got
appliances for the cost of which families could eat for a while. It's
got bath tubs big enough to swim in. The windows are falling apart.
You can read this house's history off its walls. They say: some months
ago a crane slapped this thing together out of a few prefabricated
chunks. Sick. And there's a cable TV antenna on top of the house that
must be thirty feet tall. I won't be purchasing cable tv service, but
I probably won't be able to take down the antenna. I like the
carpeting. I like the fireplace. But the whole place reeks of
cheapness and disdain for beauty. In fact it looks exactly like
something out of late twentieth century America.

[Ted Samsel]

David Swanson (dc...@darwin.clas.virginia.edu) wrote:
: I'm considering moving, only about two miles away, for reasons I won't

So you have to replace the pump on the well?

--
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

[David Swanson]

In article <Pine.SOL.3.95.961016...@rac7.wam.umd.edu>
paschal <pas...@wam.umd.edu> writes:

> Personally, I think the Dear Boy is finally hitting his stride. I found
> this installment of the Swanson Journal to be an eerily affecting play on
> "Les Bergers d'Arcadie". I was especially touched by the concrete
> blocks - which in "Arcadie" would be marble; but not, of course, in your
> average suburban tract-house den.
>
> David's idea of Lively Honeymoon Sport does give me pause; but
> then, there's all the time in the world, isn't there....
>
> ObBook: _Cloud of Unknowing_, Unknown.
>
> -Paschal

Where else would time be, if not in the world?

New installment:

Scratch the luxury junker house idea. Found a farmhouse, and this one
on a farm to boot. I've been living in a farmhouse in a forest. All
is right with the world now. Plus - shameless self-promotion/request
for help - I sold a magazine on two story ideas, one about rural
development, the other about utopian communities. Ideas appreciated.
Now, where did Paschal put that TIME? I could use a little.

[moggin]

David --

Enjoyed reading the diaries. Good stuff. Keep it up.

-- moggin

[Fiona Webster]

David: I know it may be an outmoded concept in these
topic-loose times, but any chance you could talk about
books in those things? There are a great many diaries and
journals being published on the Web, some of which I read
with semi-regularity, but I come to this newsgroup to read
and converse about books. (I know: it's a radical thought.)

I've been exulting lately in all the books I'm receiving
as part of my new reviewer's job. It's like a birthday
every day, just opening the mail. One I got today that I'm
especially looking forward to: Lisa Tuttle's _The Pillow Friend_.

Also received a biography of Arthur Machen, and I hear the
new H. P. Lovecraft biography (by weird-tales scholar S. T.
Joshi, of course) is finally out. Anyone seen it yet?

Appended is a poem from Anne Sexton, pour votre plaisir...

--Fiona

The Moss of His Skin

Young girls in Arabia were often buried alive next
to their dead fathers, apparently as sacrifice to the
goddesses of the tribes...
Harld Feldman, "Children of the Desert"
Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Review, Fall 1958

It is only important
to smile and hold still
to lie down beside him
and to rest awhile,
to be folded up together
as if we were silk,
to sink from the eyes of mother
and not to talk.
The black room took us
like a cave or a mouth
or an indoor belly.
I held my breath
and daddy was there,
his thumbs, his fat skull
his teeth, his hair growing
like a field or a shawl.
I lay by the moss
of his skin until
it grew strange. My sisters
will never know that I fall
out of myself and pretend
that Allah will not see
how I hold my daddy
like an old stone tree.

Anne Sexton

[paschal]

Wonderful, Fee!

I really like
Arthur Machen -
as you well know...

-Paschal

[David Swanson]

In article <5490lf$8j0...@fi.smart.net>
f...@oceanstar.comDeleteThis (Fiona Webster) writes:

> David: I know it may be an outmoded concept in these
> topic-loose times, but any chance you could talk about
> books in those things? There are a great many diaries and
> journals being published on the Web, some of which I read
> with semi-regularity, but I come to this newsgroup to read
> and converse about books. (I know: it's a radical thought.)

Yeah, I been slack on the OBbooking too. I can fill those in
retroactively if you like.

David
"I readily subscribe to the verdict of an eminent psychoanalyst: I have
no Superego." Sartre

[David Swanson]

Scratch that. I won't be moving to the farm. I found a house closer
to town, "nestled" as the ads would say, in the foothills, really a
beautiful spot. I won't say "mountain views" because I'v seen the
phrase used so many times to sell houses in real estate sections of the
papers. I admit it's better than if they were to say "Close-up view of
brick walls!" but using something to sell degrades it. The house is a
cottage, actually. Actually it's a vicarage, a century old. This
means that a little stone church and a cemetery come as part of the
deal. The vicar bargained for that rent amount like a pro, lied
through his teeth I suspect on a couple of points - or at least wasn't
terribly forthcoming. But so what? That's the price of civilization,
and that's what this is. I'm moving to a Kierkegard. I'm gonna start
wearing shirt and shoes and drink only fine liqueurs.

I reserve the right to change my plans tomorrow if the vicar backs out
of the deal and changes them for me.

Ob books: Dickens.

[paschal]

David, for a man who knows so much about architecture,
you sure are having a devil of a time
choosing a place to live.

Get a small farm - you only need a few acres - grow some veggies, have an
animal or two, find a chick to move in with you, have a kid, and
enjoy nature. There isn't much of it left.

(BTW, I don't think we call it a "vicarage" in the U.S.; and we don't call
a paddock a "yard", either. Neither do we call a yard a park, etc., etc.)

-Paschal

On Sun, 20 Oct 1996, David Swanson wrote:

>
> Scratch that. I won't be moving to the farm. I found a house closer
> to town, "nestled" as the ads would say, in the foothills, really a
> beautiful spot.

[...]

[David Swanson]

In article <Pine.SOL.3.95.96102...@rac8.wam.umd.edu>
paschal <pas...@wam.umd.edu> writes:

>
> David, for a man who knows so much about architecture,
> you sure are having a devil of a time
> choosing a place to live.
>
> Get a small farm - you only need a few acres - grow some veggies, have an
> animal or two, find a chick to move in with you, have a kid, and
> enjoy nature. There isn't much of it left.

I HAVE a farm, but it ain't got no house on it. It has got plenty of
veggies, if not too many chicks or kids or barnyard youngsters of
whatever variety.

>
> (BTW, I don't think we call it a "vicarage" in the U.S.; and we don't call
> a paddock a "yard", either. Neither do we call a yard a park, etc., etc.)
>
> -Paschal

What can I tell ya, the vicar calls it a vicarage. What's wrong with a
vicarage? It's in a beautiful place, and a stone church - suitable for
dancing or raquetball, comes in the package.

David

Amount Pentagon spent unaccounted for in last decade: $14.7 billion.
Amount spent on two unfinished tankers rusting in the James: $450
million.
Additional cost per trip for transporting VIPS by helicopter rather
than car between the Pentagon and A. A. Base: $400 - $1600.
Amount the Pentagon is spending on a third golf course at A. A. Base:
$5,100,000.
Amount Pentagon receives in 1996 budget ABOVE the amount requested: $7
billion.

"To get rich is glorious." Deng Xiaoping

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <5490lf$8j0...@fi.smart.net>, f...@oceanstar.comDeleteThis (Fiona Webster) writes:
>Appended is a poem from Anne Sexton, pour votre plaisir...

All right, I reformatted this little passage, and I would like to ask exactly
how it is to be considered a poem; or is the only justification, as I suspect,
the fact that Madame Sexton chose to call it a poem and broke it into a
series of short lines, or because she used line breaks as punctuation.

> The Moss of His Skin

[snipped quote]

>It is only important to smile and hold still to lie down beside him and
>to rest awhile, to be folded up together as if we were silk, to sink
>from the eyes of mother and not to talk. The black room took us like
>a cave or a mouth or an indoor belly. I held my breath and daddy was
>there, his thumbs, his fat skull his teeth, his hair growing like a field
>or a shawl. I lay by the moss of his skin until it grew strange.
>My sisters will never know that I fall out of myself and pretend that
>Allah will not see how I hold my daddy like an old stone tree.

Yes. I know exactly which flame war I am pursuing. I believe
it is well worth fighting again and again until the literary
establishment restores craft to the dying art of poetry.

possumusne sine poetis valere?

--Uche
[Chaucer to Frost; and then who? Williams? Ginsberg? Hmm]

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <Pine.SOL.3.95.96101...@rac4.wam.umd.edu>, paschal <pas...@wam.umd.edu> writes:

[_big_ snip]

>Wonderful, Fee!

>I really like
>Arthur Machen -
>as you well know...

Paschal,

I've come to respect your contribution to this group,
so I am surprised to see you make the typical
Usenet newbie gaffe of quoting a long post to
append a brief rejoinder.

I would hope we all try to edit quotations judiciously
to reduce bandwidth in this ever-expanding (and
ever-slowing) Usenet. The stereotypical @aol.com-type
neophytes provide us with enough headaches.

Vale

--Uche

[Silke-Maria Weineck]

Uche Ogbuji (molinah@) wrote:

: [snipped quote]

"And who, if I cried out, would hear me amongst the angels' orders? And
even if one of them suddenly took me to his heart, I'd perish from his
greater existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, and
we admire it so because it casually disdains to destroy us. Each angel is
terrible."

Did I, too, just prove something? Will you tell me what?

Silke

[Ron Hardin]

Silke-Maria Weineck wrote:
> "And who, if I cried out, would hear me amongst the angels' orders? And
> even if one of them suddenly took me to his heart, I'd perish from his
> greater existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, and
> we admire it so because it casually disdains to destroy us. Each angel is
> terrible."
>
> Did I, too, just prove something? Will you tell me what?

``Far too much you belong to grief. If you could forget her - even the least
of these figures so infinitely pained - you would call down, shout down,
hoping they might still be curious, one of the angels (those beings
unmighty in grief) who, as his face darkened, would try again and again
to describe the way you kept sobbing, long ago, for her. Angel, what was
it like? And he would imitate you and never understand that it was pain,
as after a calling bird one tries to repeat the innocent voice it is
filled with.''

--
Ron Hardin
r...@research.att.com

On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.

[paschal]

On 23 Oct 1996, it was written:

> In <Pine.SOL.3.95.96101...@rac4.wam.umd.edu>, paschal <pas...@wam.umd.edu> writes:
> >Wonderful, Fee!
>
> >I really like
> >Arthur Machen -
> >as you well know...

> I've come to respect your contribution to this group,

> so I am surprised to see you make the typical
> Usenet newbie gaffe of quoting a long post to
> append a brief rejoinder.
>
> I would hope we all try to edit quotations judiciously
> to reduce bandwidth in this ever-expanding (and
> ever-slowing) Usenet. The stereotypical @aol.com-type
> neophytes provide us with enough headaches.

thank you, uche.

but i'm VERY aol-type.

-Paschal

[Herschel R]

In article <54m1l0$u...@rtpnews.raleigh.ibm.com>, uc...@metronet.com (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:
>In <5490lf$8j0...@fi.smart.net>, f...@oceanstar.comDeleteThis (Fiona Webster)
> writes:
>>Appended is a poem from Anne Sexton, pour votre plaisir...
>
>All right, I reformatted this little passage, and I would like to ask exactly
>how it is to be considered a poem; or is the only justification, as I suspect,
>the fact that Madame Sexton chose to call it a poem and broke it into a
>series of short lines, or because she used line breaks as punctuation.
>
>> The Moss of His Skin
>
>[snipped quote]
>
>>It is only important to smile and hold still to lie down beside him and
>>to rest awhile, to be folded up together as if we were silk, to sink
>>from the eyes of mother and not to talk. The black room took us like
>>a cave or a mouth or an indoor belly. I held my breath and daddy was
>>there, his thumbs, his fat skull his teeth, his hair growing like a field
>>or a shawl. I lay by the moss of his skin until it grew strange.
>>My sisters will never know that I fall out of myself and pretend that
>>Allah will not see how I hold my daddy like an old stone tree.
>
>Yes. I know exactly which flame war I am pursuing. I believe
>it is well worth fighting again and again until the literary
>establishment restores craft to the dying art of poetry.
>

>possumusne sine poetis valere?
>
>--Uche
>[Chaucer to Frost; and then who? Williams? Ginsberg? Hmm]
>

Your reconstruction is, of course less of a poem than Miss
Sexton's construction-- sure. Because line break choice and
end sound and word rhythm and the space of time added for
the motion of the human eye back to the beginning of the
line are all part of the sound of this poem in the readers
mind. Anne Sexton wrote it that way. And a poem is more than
the rattling sequence of its words hung out to dry.

It may not be the finest poem ever written but it is poetry.
And let us take a moment of silence to thank whichever God
you wish that noone is allowed to make rules on what poems
cannot be. Neither Uche (?) or Bob Dole or the poets
themselves assembled into the beast known as a committee.

HR

[Ken MacIver]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

>In <5490lf$8j0...@fi.smart.net>, f...@oceanstar.comDeleteThis (Fiona Webster) writes:
>>Appended is a poem from Anne Sexton, pour votre plaisir...

>All right, I reformatted this little passage, and I would like to ask exactly
>how it is to be considered a poem; or is the only justification, as I suspect,
>the fact that Madame Sexton chose to call it a poem and broke it into a
>series of short lines, or because she used line breaks as punctuation.

>> The Moss of His Skin

>[snipped quote]

>>It is only important to smile and hold still to lie down beside him and
>>to rest awhile, to be folded up together as if we were silk, to sink
>>from the eyes of mother and not to talk. The black room took us like
>>a cave or a mouth or an indoor belly. I held my breath and daddy was
>>there, his thumbs, his fat skull his teeth, his hair growing like a field
>>or a shawl. I lay by the moss of his skin until it grew strange.
>>My sisters will never know that I fall out of myself and pretend that
>>Allah will not see how I hold my daddy like an old stone tree.

>Yes. I know exactly which flame war I am pursuing. I believe
>it is well worth fighting again and again until the literary
>establishment restores craft to the dying art of poetry.

>possumusne sine poetis valere?

>--Uche
>[Chaucer to Frost; and then who? Williams? Ginsberg? Hmm]

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I've
tasted of desire I hold with those who favore fire. But if it had to
perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for
destruction ice is also great and would suffice.

I gather, under your rules, the above is not poetry.

Ken

[Vance Maverick]

In article <54m1l0$u...@rtpnews.raleigh.ibm.com> molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) writes:
["is this a poem?"]

> I know exactly which flame war I am pursuing.

OK, then you need someone to make the next move. So I will: consider
two worlds, expressed as a table of (your) judgments.

Work A Work B Work C Work D
+--------------------------------------------
World 1 | Good poem Bad poem Not a poem Not a poem
World 2 | Good poem Bad poem Bad poem Good poem

That is, the difference between these two worlds is that one allows
you to judge a work as 'not a poem'. In both, you still need to
distinguish good from bad poems by some criterion not reducible to a
simple tally of features.

Why is World 1 better?

Vance (wondering if Uche picked up the
metrical regularity of the original)

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <54mued$r...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I've
>tasted of desire I hold with those who favore fire. But if it had to
>perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for
>destruction ice is also great and would suffice.

>I gather, under your rules, the above is not poetry.

You gather quite incorrectly. I can recognize the above as
poetry without difficulty however it is rearranged, and
I suspect that most who don't claim themselves to be
sophisticated in the matter can as well. This is precisely
my point.

Now, friends, do we remember that the original medium
of poetry is speech, and not print? How does this
fact bear upon the distinctions I am trying to highlight?

My, I rather like this game of Silke's

Valete

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <54m6h2$q...@netnews.upenn.edu>, wein...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Silke-Maria Weineck) writes:

>"And who, if I cried out, would hear me amongst the angels' orders? And
>even if one of them suddenly took me to his heart, I'd perish from his
>greater existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, and
>we admire it so because it casually disdains to destroy us. Each angel is
>terrible."

>Did I, too, just prove something? Will you tell me what?

As a matter of fact, I don't believe you did. I'm not sure
what to make of the "too".

Oh, I get it! We are playing a game of academic chess
(which landed us in all this morass in the first place.)
I can play too!

Why is a similarly rearranged Sylvia Plath verse
still a poem, as opposed to the work of Sexton or
Levertov?

Why is Rita Dove a poetaster, and Maya Angelou a
poeticule?

Vale

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <54m9vs$9...@socrates.aristotle.net>, hra...@aristotle.net (Herschel R) writes:
>And let us take a moment of silence to thank whichever God
>you wish that noone is allowed to make rules on what poems
>cannot be. Neither Uche (?) or Bob Dole or the poets
>themselves assembled into the beast known as a committee.

This is quite silly. People decise what is or isn't poetry.
I am a person. The fact that you may disagree with what I decide
does not disallow me from making "rules on what poems
cannot be". You might have more profit arguing against my
criteria (or presenting your own).

Vale, si tu potes valere

--Uche

[Ken MacIver]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

>In <54mued$r...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>>Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I've
>>tasted of desire I hold with those who favore fire. But if it had to
>>perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for
>>destruction ice is also great and would suffice.

>>I gather, under your rules, the above is not poetry.

>You gather quite incorrectly. I can recognize the above as
>poetry without difficulty however it is rearranged, and
>I suspect that most who don't claim themselves to be
>sophisticated in the matter can as well. This is precisely
>my point.

Your point is what?

>Now, friends, do we remember that the original medium
>of poetry is speech, and not print? How does this
>fact bear upon the distinctions I am trying to highlight?

What do you mean by "original?" If you mean earliest, that is true
for everything, is it not? If we move, as in my example from Robert
Frost, from a poet's native language to another language (say
translating the Frost to French) then the same paragraph written as I
did will read to the French reader as your citation did to you, no?

>My, I rather like this game of Silke's

Silke is usually fun but the game is yours, not hers.

Ken MacIver

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <x6uk9sg...@deodar.CS.Berkeley.EDU>, Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:
>OK, then you need someone to make the next move. So I will: consider
>two worlds, expressed as a table of (your) judgments.

> Work A Work B Work C Work D
> +--------------------------------------------
> World 1 | Good poem Bad poem Not a poem Not a poem
> World 2 | Good poem Bad poem Bad poem Good poem

This is just my choice of usage. Some people consider that
there is such a thing as a "bad poem". I don't. When I am
being technical, I like to speak of "poetry" being "good verse".
This might not be commonplace usage, but it has basis in
classical criticism and that of such stalwarts as my favorite:
Sydney.

If it will ravel any hitch in the essential argument, I won't be
obstinate, quibbling about calling the Sexton piece merely
a "bad poem".

>That is, the difference between these two worlds is that one allows
>you to judge a work as 'not a poem'. In both, you still need to
>distinguish good from bad poems by some criterion not reducible to a
>simple tally of features.

>Why is World 1 better?

I don't believe it is. In all the worlds where craft was respected,
the craftman's title was one that was earned only after a lifetime
of work, and a demonstrable excellence at the work. One who
titled himself outside of the process was treated as if nor he
nor his work even existed.

> Vance (wondering if Uche picked up the
> metrical regularity of the original)

Now, as they say, you're talking turkey. I consider
myself a fairly decent prosodist, and I picked up no
such thing. Perhaps you can help me.

By the way, Vance, have you, by chance ever read
Robert Graves' "The Crowning Privilege"? Or has
anyone else in this discussion?

Vale,

--Uche

[Ken MacIver]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

>In <54s4vn$9...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>>>You gather quite incorrectly. I can recognize the above as
>>>poetry without difficulty however it is rearranged, and
>>>I suspect that most who don't claim themselves to be
>>>sophisticated in the matter can as well. This is precisely
>>>my point.

>>Your point is what?

>that I can recognize, without difficulty, your quote,
>and selections from any English poem from the works
>of Chaucer, Jonson, Shakespeare, Milton, and so on,
>as poetry however it is rearranged; and that

>I suspect that most who don't claim themselves to be

>sophisticated in the matter can do so as well.

>Please see other posts in this thread where my point is
>being elaborated.

I have and now understand that you believe line breaks to be
irrelevant to [English language] poetry. That doesn't work for me, at
least out of context. The verse forms, of which I consider line
breaks to be a part, aid me in reading poetry, help me both to
understand what the poet is trying to say and to hear the ring of the
phrases. This may, in part, be my own lack of any "training" in
poetry. However, I doubt that Frost himself, who said, "I'd as soon
write free verse as play tennis with the net down," would approve the
erosion caused by eliminating line breaks.

>>>Now, friends, do we remember that the original medium
>>>of poetry is speech, and not print? How does this
>>>fact bear upon the distinctions I am trying to highlight?

>>What do you mean by "original?"

>I mean precisely "original".

>>If you mean earliest, that is true
>>for everything, is it not? If we move, as in my example from Robert
>>Frost, from a poet's native language to another language (say
>>translating the Frost to French) then the same paragraph written as I
>>did will read to the French reader as your citation did to you, no?

>I don't understand what you're saying here.

The point, which I made poorly, was that line breaks aid some people
(prominent among them me) to read and understand poetry in
translation. However, I see elsewhere that you confine your dismissal
of line breaks to paragraphs (prose?) written in the same language as
that of the poet so I withdraw the point. My very limited
understanding of various "schools" of poetry tells me that the New
York School (Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara et al) would agree with you.

Ken MacIver

[Silke-Maria Weineck]

Uche Ogbuji (molinah@) wrote:

: In <54m6h2$q...@netnews.upenn.edu>, wein...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Silke-Maria Weineck) writes:

: >"And who, if I cried out, would hear me amongst the angels' orders? And
: >even if one of them suddenly took me to his heart, I'd perish from his
: >greater existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, and
: >we admire it so because it casually disdains to destroy us. Each angel is
: >terrible."

: >Did I, too, just prove something? Will you tell me what?

: As a matter of fact, I don't believe you did. I'm not sure
: what to make of the "too".

It seemed you thought you proved something by removing line breaks from a
poem. I, too, removed line breaks from a poem, and I chose one generally
regarded to be poetry by all those who are into the game of ruling poems
to be true poems. Of course, I had to translate.

I wondered whether I proved the same thing you proved? Since you
introduced the proof, only you can tell. Will you tell me?

Silke

[Douglas Clark]

Yes Uche. REmove the line breaks and it is still poetry is quite correct.
But since WCW and the Objectivists a different vision has been around.
And also nowadays rhythm depends much more upon the individual human
voice which is naturally frenetic.
--
Douglas Clark Voice: +44 1225 427104
69 Hillcrest Drive, Email: D.G.D...@bath.ac.uk
Bath, Somerset, BA2 1HD, UK Benjamin Press: http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <54s5hd$7...@netnews.upenn.edu>, wein...@mail2.sas.upenn.edu (Silke-Maria Weineck) writes:
>: >"And who, if I cried out, would hear me amongst the angels' orders? And
>: >even if one of them suddenly took me to his heart, I'd perish from his
>: >greater existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, and
>: >we admire it so because it casually disdains to destroy us. Each angel is
>: >terrible."

>: >Did I, too, just prove something? Will you tell me what?

>: As a matter of fact, I don't believe you did. I'm not sure
>: what to make of the "too".

>It seemed you thought you proved something by removing line breaks from a
>poem. I, too, removed line breaks from a poem, and I chose one generally
>regarded to be poetry by all those who are into the game of ruling poems
>to be true poems. Of course, I had to translate.

Poetry in another language is not necessarily poetry in English.
See any series of Translations of the Iliad or the Odyssey,
and you might see what I mean.

I have tried, and I cannot recognize your above translation as
poetry. Excellent prose, of course, but not poetry in English.

Let me note that there have been many excellent craftsmen
who rendered foreign poetry into English poetry. In some
cases they sacrificed fidelity to the original, but they did
produce English poetry. Scattershot examples are Pope's
treatment of "The Iliad" and Fitzgerald's of "The Rubaiyat".
Arrange these as you please and they remain poetry.

And yes. The point I'm trying to make is that if one removes
line breaks from true poetry, it remains poetry.

Vale

--Uche

"Today, one almost hesitates to say that most poets write
unmetrically: such a statement suggests that they know what
meter is, which does not appear to be the case."

--Timothy Steele

[Douglas Clark]

Let me just clip in about Anne Sexton. She wrote a lot of poems but
she didnt write much lasting poetry. I have always felt her best work
lay in `Transformations'. And is there another book `41 Bleeker Street'
which comes to mind. But I feel she is more famous for the brilliant
phrase `The Awful Rowing Towards God' which I understand so well.
I envy Anne Sexton. She got out easy, while the going was good.

[Vance Maverick]

In article <54t7ga$h...@rtpnews.raleigh.ibm.com> molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) writes:
> Some people consider that
> there is such a thing as a "bad poem". I don't. When I am
> being technical, I like to speak of "poetry" being "good verse".

OK, I understand where you're coming from.

> In all the worlds where craft was respected,
> the craftman's title was one that was earned only after a lifetime
> of work, and a demonstrable excellence at the work. One who
> titled himself outside of the process was treated as if nor he
> nor his work even existed.

Can you illustrate this, in all its points, with examples from poetry,
say English poetry? Gifford reviewing Keats didn't treat him as if he
didn't exist.

> > Vance (wondering if Uche picked up the
> > metrical regularity of the original)
>
> Now, as they say, you're talking turkey. I consider
> myself a fairly decent prosodist, and I picked up no
> such thing. Perhaps you can help me.

It's basically dimeter, enough that the first clear trimeter line ("to
sink from the eyes of mother") is a distinct effect. I hear it as
mostly iambs and anapests, with redundancy. There's even traditional
rhyme, in pairs at the ends of the even lines (though the criterion is
a shade looser than Sidney's). Since it's probably scrolled off many
people's servers, as it did off mine:

The Moss of His Skin

It is only important

to smile and hold still
to lie down beside him
and to rest awhile,
to be folded up together
as if we were silk,
to sink from the eyes of mother
and not to talk.
The black room took us
like a cave or a mouth
or an indoor belly.
I held my breath
and daddy was there,
his thumbs, his fat skull
his teeth, his hair growing
like a field or a shawl.
I lay by the moss
of his skin until
it grew strange. My sisters
will never know that I fall
out of myself and pretend
that Allah will not see
how I hold my daddy
like an old stone tree.

I don't happen to think it's very good, but I don't find it
self-evidently deficient in craft. It was just the sort of thing, in
fact, that the Lowell circle (and the corresponding audience -- the
_New Yorker_ poetry audience? did anyone even then read the poetry in
the _New Yorker_? but I digress) was ready to accept as "verse" -- and
there were plenty of things they wouldn't.

> By the way, Vance, have you, by chance ever read
> Robert Graves' "The Crowning Privilege"?

No. Recommended?

Vance

[Vance Maverick]

[Sorry to follow up on myself: a technical clarification.]

In article <x6upw25...@deodar.CS.Berkeley.EDU> Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:
> It's basically dimeter, enough that the first clear trimeter line ("to
> sink from the eyes of mother") is a distinct effect. I hear it as
> mostly iambs and anapests, with redundancy.

I seem to be getting a little carried away here. The main point is
that it's almost all two-stress lines. (Saintsbury, the reference I
have at hand, would also insist that 'dimeter' refer to lines in which
each half has two feet.)

Vance

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <54s4vn$9...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>>You gather quite incorrectly. I can recognize the above as
>>poetry without difficulty however it is rearranged, and
>>I suspect that most who don't claim themselves to be
>>sophisticated in the matter can as well. This is precisely
>>my point.

>Your point is what?

that I can recognize, without difficulty, your quote,
and selections from any English poem from the works
of Chaucer, Jonson, Shakespeare, Milton, and so on,
as poetry however it is rearranged; and that
I suspect that most who don't claim themselves to be
sophisticated in the matter can do so as well.

Please see other posts in this thread where my point is
being elaborated.

>>Now, friends, do we remember that the original medium

>>of poetry is speech, and not print? How does this
>>fact bear upon the distinctions I am trying to highlight?

>What do you mean by "original?"

I mean precisely "original".

>If you mean earliest, that is true
>for everything, is it not? If we move, as in my example from Robert
>Frost, from a poet's native language to another language (say
>translating the Frost to French) then the same paragraph written as I
>did will read to the French reader as your citation did to you, no?

I don't understand what you're saying here.

Vale

--Uche

[Patrick Foley]

Uche Ogbuji <molinah@> wrote:

> The point I'm trying to make is that if one removes line breaks from true
> poetry, it remains poetry.

and elsewhere in this thread:

> When I am being technical, I like to speak of "poetry" being "good verse".

Where does that leave "verse" exactly? Is lineation inessential to
verse as well?

You don't seem to have even an inkling, Uche, of the peculiarity of your
position. You've made it amply clear that you are a great champion of
traditional poetry, traditional metrical forms, etc., and then you want
to say as well that lineation is nothing more than a typographical
convention?!

> Now, friends, do we remember that the original medium of poetry is
> speech, and not print?

This is such a mess I don't even know where to begin. You might at
least have considered distinguishing between oral and literate
traditions. Leaving that to one side, what _is_ the point of this?
That there are no line breaks in speech? Duh. There's no punctuation
or capitalization either, no spaces between the words, and in fact no
letters at all, just a bunch of sounds and pauses between sounds. Just
how much thought have you given to the connection between speech and
writing, Uche? What point about lineation did you think could be made
by merely gesturing at the difference between them?

But to come back to the main point, you want to say that _Paradise Lost_
is "poetry" with or without the line breaks, that is, printed as verse
or printed as prose. I don't much like using the word "poetry" as a
term of approval, but let it stand. Why do you suppose it _is_ broken
into lines? Is the great body of verse in all the languages of the
world a collection of works of art unique in their form being completely
irrelevant??

Showing considerable restraint,
Pat

[Herschel R]

Indeed 'people decide what is or isn't poetry' applied to
the rest of the world would seem to make a mess of
linguistics and the ordered world. Let's not even bring up
the shadows on the cave wall. What you say means nothing;
what I say means nothing. Your calling a poem a non poem
still leaves it a poem. We must live with these facts.
Certainly you may call it good or bad but that is it. Likely
this is what you want to do with Sexton anyway. This makes
you sound like somewhat of a 'Frostite'. An acceptable
creature until it begins to proselytize its poetic theories
into rules.

HR

[Herschel R]

In article <DzwEzK.L...@bath.ac.uk>, exx...@bath.ac.uk (Douglas Clark) wrote:
>
>Let me just clip in about Anne Sexton. She wrote a lot of poems but
>she didnt write much lasting poetry. I have always felt her best work
>lay in `Transformations'. And is there another book `41 Bleeker Street'
>which comes to mind. But I feel she is more famous for the brilliant
>phrase `The Awful Rowing Towards God' which I understand so well.
>I envy Anne Sexton. She got out easy, while the going was good.
>--
>Douglas Clark

I believe Miss Sexton would have something to say about your
description of 'her going' as being easy. Even her poems
clarify that much, whatever your feelings about their
quality. Happy go lucky poets are rare creatures indeed. The
list is long on the other column. You and I will not be
around to see if Anne's words are 'lasting' unless your
definition of lasting is different from mine.

HR

***********************************************************
There is an animal inside me,
clutching fast to my heart,
a huge crab........

I had a dream once,
perhaps it was a dream,
that the crab was my ignorance of God.
But who am I to believe in dreams?

A. Sexton

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <DzwEzK.L...@bath.ac.uk>, exx...@bath.ac.uk (Douglas Clark) writes:
>Let me just clip in about Anne Sexton. She wrote a lot of poems but
>she didnt write much lasting poetry. I have always felt her best work
>lay in `Transformations'. And is there another book `41 Bleeker Street'
>which comes to mind. But I feel she is more famous for the brilliant
>phrase `The Awful Rowing Towards God' which I understand so well.
>I envy Anne Sexton. She got out easy, while the going was good.

Well, let me reveal some of the story behind my spleen.

I have always loved Sylvia Plath. She is, to me, one of the very
few poets who managed stunning craft without any evidence of the
long work and education behind the work of similar craftsmen.
"Daddy" is, of course, the commonplace standard, but no less
accomplished for this fact, and however it is arranged, brings
such a Germanic compulsion to bear in the rhythm that it could
not be mistaken for prose. "Mushrooms" is such another, but
the works that I take most closely to heart include
"Morning Song" and "Metaphors" (some might find the latter
a bizarre choice.

Anyway, a female friend of mine must have misinterpreted
my admiration for Plath for a thirst for anything that might
be interpreted as Elektra's voice, and promptly directed me
toward Denise Levertov and Anne Sexton. It didn't take me
long to dismiss the both of them as writers of vignettes broken
into short lines, or even poetasters, if one must use "poeta"
to describe them, but hardly poets. To put it simply, they
had no craft. None such as Plath had, or Marianne Moore.
Not even the rough craft of E.B. Browning or Emily Dickinson.

Anne Sexton is not as great a villain as any of the Beat poets,
but I thought the poem Fiona quoted was as good fodder as any
for my complaint.

Vale

--Uche

[Ken MacIver]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

>In <54tbim$9...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>>>Please see other posts in this thread where my point is
>>>being elaborated.
>>

>>I have and now understand that you believe line breaks to be
>>irrelevant to [English language] poetry. That doesn't work for me, at
>>least out of context. The verse forms, of which I consider line
>>breaks to be a part, aid me in reading poetry, help me both to
>>understand what the poet is trying to say and to hear the ring of the
>>phrases. This may, in part, be my own lack of any "training" in
>>poetry. However, I doubt that Frost himself, who said, "I'd as soon
>>write free verse as play tennis with the net down," would approve the
>>erosion caused by eliminating line breaks.

>Forgive me if I was brief, and a wee bit cryptic in my approach
>to this complaint against free-verse, but I have become very wary
>of making too broad and bold a statement on the Usenet. Such
>a statement is likely to be flamed on principle, as it were,
>regardless of its merits, and through the smoke no constructive
>discussion can be had. I intended to draw out the discussion
>little by little, but I still elicited a few flames, so I shan't be so
>precious the next time.

>My most emphatic point, though, Ken, is that it is _essential_
>that good poetry be useful to those without training, such as
>you modestly claim to be (though I'd hardly accept that from
>one who is aware of Frost's classic analogy against free verse).

I haven't the benefit of any training, beyond self help, in poetry.
For reasons I'm still not sure of, I began reading lots of poetry of
all manner about four years ago and find myself unable to stop what
has become an incurable love affair with poetry. I have read several
books that *explain* poetry and several anthologies that offer useful
historical comparatives. It is thus that I enjoy discussing poetry,
although I don't have the background or depth of someone like you,
Douglas Clark, Boom Boom, Joe Green, and the like.

>I believe that, as with any craft, a great deal of training must
>be involved in the creation of the work, so that absolutely
>no effort is required for its appreciation.

I think effort in the form of caring and curiosity on the part of the
reader is always required and sweetens appreciation. OTOH, I do agree
that extensive training in craft, whether school taught or
experiential or most likely both, is almost always essential to
produce good stuff.

>I believe you only think line-breaks are impotant because
>you are so used to reading poetry in this unfortunate age
>where poetry is not read aloud very often, and when read
>aloud, not by orators of any craft, but I believe that if
>I were to spend a few days with you and a book of
>the great English verse, I could bring you to appreciate
>how little the line breaks mean to a well-crafted poem.

This may be true since I came to poetry through the printed page. I
would be interested, however, in learning how and when line breaks
entered written poetry.

>I'm not trying to boast idly. I am an aspiring poet myself,
>and I long ago decided that I must attempt perfection
>of my own craft, and I have spent years imitating the
>work of my adopted masters, and declaiming to whatever
>chair or refrigerator agreed to listen, in the hopes of
>learning how a true poet uses diction, meter, assonance,
>and the other devices.

>>The point, which I made poorly, was that line breaks aid some people
>>(prominent among them me) to read and understand poetry in
>>translation. However, I see elsewhere that you confine your dismissal
>>of line breaks to paragraphs (prose?) written in the same language as
>>that of the poet so I withdraw the point. My very limited
>>understanding of various "schools" of poetry tells me that the New
>>York School (Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara et al) would agree with you.

>Let me note that among the three you mentioned, I would only
>recommend Ashberry as an accomplished craftsman.

Again, I do think that line breaks can aid in and add to understanding
[certain] poems. Take Ashbery:

I though that if I could put it all down, that would be
one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave
all out would be another, and truer, way.

clean-washed sea

The flowers were.

These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will,
something soon comes to stand in their place. Not the
truth, perhaps, but--yourself. It is you who made this,
therefore you are true. But the truth has passed on

to divide all.

Have I awakened? Or is this sleep again? Another form
of sleep? There is no profile in the massed days ahead.
They are impersonal as mountains whose tops are hidden
in cloud. The middle of the journey, before the sands
are reversed: a plae of idea quiety. . . .

THE NEW SPIRIT

Ken MacIver

[Fiona Webster]

This is an interesting thread. Unlike Uche's attitude toward
poetry, I don't view that a thread (another form of writing)
has to be a good thread, in order to be labeled a thread.

Can you elaborate, Uche, on why you use "poem" as a term
conferring value? Do you also use short story, novel, play, etc,
in this way -- where there is no such thing as a "bad novel,"
etc.? If not, then how is poetry privileged?

--Fiona

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <54tbim$9...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>>Please see other posts in this thread where my point is
>>being elaborated.
>
>I have and now understand that you believe line breaks to be
>irrelevant to [English language] poetry. That doesn't work for me, at
>least out of context. The verse forms, of which I consider line
>breaks to be a part, aid me in reading poetry, help me both to
>understand what the poet is trying to say and to hear the ring of the
>phrases. This may, in part, be my own lack of any "training" in
>poetry. However, I doubt that Frost himself, who said, "I'd as soon
>write free verse as play tennis with the net down," would approve the
>erosion caused by eliminating line breaks.

Forgive me if I was brief, and a wee bit cryptic in my approach
to this complaint against free-verse, but I have become very wary
of making too broad and bold a statement on the Usenet. Such
a statement is likely to be flamed on principle, as it were,
regardless of its merits, and through the smoke no constructive
discussion can be had. I intended to draw out the discussion
little by little, but I still elicited a few flames, so I shan't be so
precious the next time.

My most emphatic point, though, Ken, is that it is _essential_
that good poetry be useful to those without training, such as
you modestly claim to be (though I'd hardly accept that from
one who is aware of Frost's classic analogy against free verse).

I believe that, as with any craft, a great deal of training must

be involved in the creation of the work, so that absolutely
no effort is required for its appreciation.

I believe you only think line-breaks are impotant because

you are so used to reading poetry in this unfortunate age
where poetry is not read aloud very often, and when read
aloud, not by orators of any craft, but I believe that if
I were to spend a few days with you and a book of
the great English verse, I could bring you to appreciate
how little the line breaks mean to a well-crafted poem.

I'm not trying to boast idly. I am an aspiring poet myself,

and I long ago decided that I must attempt perfection
of my own craft, and I have spent years imitating the
work of my adopted masters, and declaiming to whatever
chair or refrigerator agreed to listen, in the hopes of
learning how a true poet uses diction, meter, assonance,
and the other devices.

>The point, which I made poorly, was that line breaks aid some people
>(prominent among them me) to read and understand poetry in
>translation. However, I see elsewhere that you confine your dismissal
>of line breaks to paragraphs (prose?) written in the same language as
>that of the poet so I withdraw the point. My very limited
>understanding of various "schools" of poetry tells me that the New
>York School (Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara et al) would agree with you.

Let me note that among the three you mentioned, I would only
recommend Ashberry as an accomplished craftsman.

--Uche

[Silke-Maria Weineck]

Uche Ogbuji (molinah@) wrote:
: In <x6upw25...@deodar.CS.Berkeley.EDU>, Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:
: >> In all the worlds where craft was respected,

: >> the craftman's title was one that was earned only after a lifetime
: >> of work, and a demonstrable excellence at the work. One who
: >> titled himself outside of the process was treated as if nor he
: >> nor his work even existed.
: >
: >Can you illustrate this, in all its points, with examples from poetry,
: >say English poetry? Gifford reviewing Keats didn't treat him as if he
: >didn't exist.

: No. The 18th century is far removed from the worlds of which I speak.
: I am talking about such worlds as that of the Ancient Greeks (see
: any of the many theories of the compositions of the Iliad and Odyssey),
: Old norse, with their culture of scops, and celtics with their bards,
: as well as any of the systems of illiterate oral traditions that have
: been used the world wide.

But of course, poetry in translation is hardly ever poetry. How's your
Gaelic?

Greetings,

Silke, still shocked by the assertion that line break is incidental to
poetry....

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <x6upw25...@deodar.CS.Berkeley.EDU>, Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:
>> In all the worlds where craft was respected,
>> the craftman's title was one that was earned only after a lifetime
>> of work, and a demonstrable excellence at the work. One who
>> titled himself outside of the process was treated as if nor he
>> nor his work even existed.
>
>Can you illustrate this, in all its points, with examples from poetry,
>say English poetry? Gifford reviewing Keats didn't treat him as if he
>didn't exist.

No. The 18th century is far removed from the worlds of which I speak.
I am talking about such worlds as that of the Ancient Greeks (see
any of the many theories of the compositions of the Iliad and Odyssey),
Old norse, with their culture of scops, and celtics with their bards,
as well as any of the systems of illiterate oral traditions that have
been used the world wide.

The easiest way to learn about these worlds is through Robert
Graves treatment of Celtic bardic cultures, and so yes, I do
recommend _The Crowning Privilege_ as well as _The Triple
Goddess_.

The renaissance and the birth of print provided such an incredible
burst of artistic energy as fueled crafts from literature to
painting without the traditional culture of craft well into
the 18th century, but as Ezra Pound in his characteristically
brash way made a career of yelling, the impetus was dying,
and the ability of artists to create work which enriches the life of
the everyman was almost gone, and gone because of the neglect
of craft.

>> Now, as they say, you're talking turkey. I consider
>> myself a fairly decent prosodist, and I picked up no
>> such thing. Perhaps you can help me.
>

>It's basically dimeter, enough that the first clear trimeter line ("to
>sink from the eyes of mother") is a distinct effect. I hear it as

>mostly iambs and anapests, with redundancy. There's even traditional
>rhyme, in pairs at the ends of the even lines (though the criterion is
>a shade looser than Sidney's). Since it's probably scrolled off many
>people's servers, as it did off mine:

I'm glad you brought this up, but let me admonish you that a
prosodist would immediately be wary of a statement such as
"basically dimeter...mostly iambs and anapests". Any English
utterance can be cast into some perversion of meter, but
tradition proves the effects that choices have on poetry.
I will be kind in directing you to a source: see Pope's
"Essay on Criticism", and immensely enjoyable work
from which you'll gather that such short lineage as dimeter,
and liberty with anapests is death to any but the most
flippant poetry.

But undaunted, I'll indulge Sexton with a prosodic analysis:

> The Moss of His Skin

> It is only important

One of the big problems with Sexton and other modern
poets is that they don't know how thoroughly expletives
sap the energy of a line. It is inauspicious when
a line, let alone a poem begins with such a slack
sequence as "U U - U U - U" unless the second
stress is _very_ pronounced.

> to smile and hold still

This will turn out to be, metrically, the strongest
line in the poem: the spondee "hold still", extra
involving an extra stress, supports the meaning
very well; but she chooses to make it the
first time she uses the line break for punctuation,
an annoyance to the careful reader.

> to lie down beside him

well, this is the first trimeter, but it doesn't carry, for me,
any of the force you claim, mostly because the previous
line has an extra stress.

> and to rest awhile,

Let me coin a term for this one: anemic anapest.
The great no-no for a prosodist is to suggest their own
improvements to the work, but since this is informal,
I'll say I would have found a way to do away with
all the "to"s.

> to be folded up together
> as if we were silk,

> to sink from the eyes of mother

> and not to talk.

Not much to say about any of this, but in all ininspired,
and nothing to mark it as poetry.

> The black room took us

She attempts sudden drama with the three stressed
syllables, but we haven't been prepared for the flourish
with any preceding regularity. The essence of meter
is to provide an expectation, the departure from which
provides the needed effects.

> like a cave or a mouth
> or an indoor belly.
> I held my breath
> and daddy was there,
> his thumbs, his fat skull
> his teeth, his hair growing
> like a field or a shawl.
> I lay by the moss
> of his skin until
> it grew strange. My sisters
> will never know that I fall
> out of myself and pretend
> that Allah will not see
> how I hold my daddy
> like an old stone tree.

All of the above comments apply again to these remaining
lines. There is nothing to mark it as poetry, and I don't
see any of the meter that you do.

>> By the way, Vance, have you, by chance ever read
>> Robert Graves' "The Crowning Privilege"?
>
>No. Recommended?

Yes, once again, emphatically recommended.

Vale,

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <552tbj$gdc...@fi.smart.net>, f...@oceanstar.comDeleteThis (Fiona Webster) writes:
>Can you elaborate, Uche, on why you use "poem" as a term
>conferring value? Do you also use short story, novel, play, etc,
>in this way -- where there is no such thing as a "bad novel,"
>etc.? If not, then how is poetry privileged?

It is privileged by its classical roots. "vates" and "poeta", and
the equivalent terms in Greek, which I forget, were not generic
labels for any pretender to the craft, but were used to label the
masters. This, as I point out, was also the usage in English until
fairly recently. One could call an inferior versifier a "poetaster",
and an insignificant versifier a "poeticule", but "poet" was a title
of great esteem.

Vale

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <1996102715...@cust54.max13.washington.dc.ms.uu.net>, pfo...@earthlink.net (Patrick Foley) writes:
>> The point I'm trying to make is that if one removes line breaks from true
>> poetry, it remains poetry.

>and elsewhere in this thread:

>> When I am being technical, I like to speak of "poetry" being "good verse".

>Where does that leave "verse" exactly? Is lineation inessential to
>verse as well?

No. Verse existed as opposed to prose before there was even writing.
Verse is the form, and poetry is the accomplished or well-loved product
of the form. This usage only became rare in the twentieth century.

>You don't seem to have even an inkling, Uche, of the peculiarity of your
>position.

See above. More sensible people that either you or me have held this
position, so I don't much care how "peculiar" you find it.

>You've made it amply clear that you are a great champion of
>traditional poetry, traditional metrical forms, etc., and then you want
>to say as well that lineation is nothing more than a typographical
>convention?!

Precisely. Do you think tradition started with icunabula?

>> Now, friends, do we remember that the original medium of poetry is
>> speech, and not print?
>
>This is such a mess I don't even know where to begin. You might at
>least have considered distinguishing between oral and literate
>traditions.

Great poetry satisfies either tradition. Others in this thread have come
to understand this as my point. Why are you so slow to catch up?

>Leaving that to one side, what _is_ the point of this?
>That there are no line breaks in speech? Duh. There's no punctuation
>or capitalization either, no spaces between the words, and in fact no
>letters at all, just a bunch of sounds and pauses between sounds. Just
>how much thought have you given to the connection between speech and
>writing, Uche?

You will have to explain what bearing any of this has to the
argument. Of course, if you continue to misunderstand me, we
will continue to argue past each other.

>What point about lineation did you think could be made
>by merely gesturing at the difference between them?

More of the same.

>But to come back to the main point, you want to say that _Paradise Lost_
>is "poetry" with or without the line breaks, that is, printed as verse
>or printed as prose. I don't much like using the word "poetry" as a
>term of approval, but let it stand. Why do you suppose it _is_ broken
>into lines? Is the great body of verse in all the languages of the
>world a collection of works of art unique in their form being completely
>irrelevant??

It is broken into lines as an aid to the reader. To follow Graves's
slightly apocryphical story of the pentameter, the five stations
about the altar at Eleusis entered the mystery poem as tradition,
and thus into the mainstream tradition of lyric poetry (whereas
alexandrine became the tradition in epic poetry). English, because
of its particular characteristic, adopted, through Chaucer the
pentameter. I cite Chaucer as the influence because other
early English poets such as Skelton and Mallory were not as regular
in their simplification of the classic forms, and Skelton even liked to
write in strophe, counterstrophe and epode, if one can imagine it.
By Milton's time, iambic pentameter was pretty much the traditional
form of epic, and since it is removes a little of the burden for one
reading aloud such a long work if it was printed in a way that the
phrasing was unmistakeable.

So lineation in print became a custom to _emphasize_ the
structure of a poem, but it was never intended as a _excuse_
for structure, and this is exactly my point, and I would rather
do away with lineation than do away with the craft that it
does no more than show off.

>Showing considerable restraint,

Let me be clear that I make no request for restraing on your part.

[Rodney Payne]

Belaboring the point....

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) writes:

>You gather quite incorrectly. I can recognize the above as
>poetry without difficulty however it is rearranged, and
>I suspect that most who don't claim themselves to be
>sophisticated in the matter can as well. This is precisely
>my point.

What, precisely, is your point?

That poetic lineation is redundant?

That Anne Sexton is not a poet?

That some greater integrity will be restored to modern poetry by
removing Sexton from its sphere?

> Now, friends, do we remember that the original medium
> of poetry is speech, and not print?

An earlier, but not original, mode of long distance correspondence was
the letter, delivered by sea. Expect my next response in six weeks.

> How does this
> fact bear upon the distinctions I am trying to highlight?

Not at all. Unless written Sexton is poetry, while an oral delivery is not?
Or does poetry exist only in its performance?

Is this a sufficient poetic transcription?

ofmansfirstdisobedienceandthefruitofthatforbiddentree
whosemortaltastebroughtdeathintotheworld....

--
Rodney Payne | The artist should organise his life. Here
| is a precise record of the time taken by
spur...@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au | my daily chores: I get up at 7.18,
rgp...@cfs01.cc.monash.edu.au | inspiration 10.23 to 11.47.... Erik Satie

[Vance Maverick]

In article <55324e$e...@rtpnews.raleigh.ibm.com> molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) writes:
> The easiest way to learn about these worlds is through Robert
> Graves treatment of Celtic bardic cultures, and so yes, I do
> recommend _The Crowning Privilege_

Thanks. What a crank he is! I enjoyed the book, but I'd be more apt
to trust him on large matters if he scored better on small. (He
quotes as fact the story that Tennyson wrote dirty limericks in old
age: amusing, but apocryphal, at least according to Christopher
Ricks. And he concludes one of his blasts at Pound with "And what or
who is 'crotale'?" Etc.)

> "basically dimeter...mostly iambs and anapests". Any English
> utterance can be cast into some perversion of meter, but
> tradition proves the effects that choices have on poetry.

Since I hold no brief for the Sexton poem, and I can't match your
hauteur, I'll stay away from the detailed discussion. But since I
overreached myself with the claim about scansion, I'll try again
briefly. Graves provides a useful distinction between meters of anvil
and oar: this seems to me to be oar-verse, two strokes per line on the
whole. This passage of Eliot, which Graves quotes with disapproval,
seems apropos:

But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our
language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like
the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or
taking no form at all, and continually approximating to a very
simple one.

The latter is what I hear here.

Vance

[Ken MacIver]

Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:

>In article <55324e$e...@rtpnews.raleigh.ibm.com> molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) writes:

>> The easiest way to learn about these worlds is through Robert
>> Graves treatment of Celtic bardic cultures, and so yes, I do
>> recommend _The Crowning Privilege_

>Thanks. What a crank he is! I enjoyed the book, but I'd be more apt

>to trust him on large matters if he scored better on small. (He
>quotes as fact the story that Tennyson wrote dirty limericks in old
>age: amusing, but apocryphal, at least according to Christopher
>Ricks. And he concludes one of his blasts at Pound with "And what or
>who is 'crotale'?" Etc.)

>> "basically dimeter...mostly iambs and anapests". Any English

>> utterance can be cast into some perversion of meter, but
>> tradition proves the effects that choices have on poetry.

>Since I hold no brief for the Sexton poem, and I can't match your

>hauteur, I'll stay away from the detailed discussion. But since I
>overreached myself with the claim about scansion, I'll try again
>briefly. Graves provides a useful distinction between meters of anvil
>and oar: this seems to me to be oar-verse, two strokes per line on the
>whole. This passage of Eliot, which Graves quotes with disapproval,
>seems apropos:

> But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our
> language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like
> the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or
> taking no form at all, and continually approximating to a very
> simple one.

>The latter is what I hear here.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound

Ken

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <5535rp$t...@netnews.upenn.edu>, wein...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Silke-Maria Weineck) writes:
>: No. The 18th century is far removed from the worlds of which I speak.

>: I am talking about such worlds as that of the Ancient Greeks (see
>: any of the many theories of the compositions of the Iliad and Odyssey),
>: Old norse, with their culture of scops, and celtics with their bards,
>: as well as any of the systems of illiterate oral traditions that have
>: been used the world wide.

>But of course, poetry in translation is hardly ever poetry. How's your
>Gaelic?

Hmm. It seems to me you conflated two distinct points.
I didn't say anything of this tradition as it translates to
English. I am talking about the original language. Some
examples, through study of and referece to such as Latin,
French, a smattering of Greek, Provencal, Italian, Igbo
and Yoruba, and years ago, a decent amount of German,
I could see for myself in the original language, but even
where I can't, I read critics who can, and thus gain all the
assurance I can be expected to have.

>Silke, still shocked by the assertion that line break is incidental to
>poetry....

I'm truly surprised that this should engender shock. I know you
are a formidable scholar. Surely you've read discussions of poetic
traditions that originated before the advent of writing.

Vale

--Uche

[Meg Worley]

The latest vessel of rab-hubris writes:
>It is privileged by its classical roots. "vates" and "poeta", and
>the equivalent terms in Greek, which I forget, were not generic
>labels for any pretender to the craft, but were used to label the
>masters. This, as I point out, was also the usage in English until
>fairly recently.

"Good versifier" is indeed one early usage of "poet," but it
is a minority vein. Uche shouldn't rely too much on the few
examples in the OED and should read a bit more widely. I
recommend to all who are interested Aelfric's vocabulary,
Garland's pair of dictionaries, and Alexander of Neckham for
pre-modern English; for Early Modern, a quick check of the
*Promptuarium puerorum* as well as the works of Elyot and
Cooper will show that 'he that wrytes verse welle' is but
one of several definitions. It is perfectly fine with me
if Uche wants to fight his arguments with this definition
rather than another, but he would do well to hold off on the
absolutist claims ("*the* usage in English") until he has
read a bit more widely.

Rage away,

meg

--
m...@steam.stanford.edu Comparatively Literate

[Rodney Payne]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) writes:

>I have always loved Sylvia Plath. She is, to me, one of the very
>few poets who managed stunning craft without any evidence of the
>long work and education behind the work of similar craftsmen.
>"Daddy" is, of course, the commonplace standard, but no less
>accomplished for this fact, and however it is arranged, brings
>such a Germanic compulsion to bear in the rhythm that it could
>not be mistaken for prose.

Interesting. I take it that the visual component of reading a poem holds
little for you. That leaves out a goodly portion of modern verse (often
no great loss, of course).

>Anyway, a female friend of mine must have misinterpreted
>my admiration for Plath for a thirst for anything that might
>be interpreted as Elektra's voice, and promptly directed me
>toward Denise Levertov and Anne Sexton. It didn't take me
>long to dismiss the both of them as writers of vignettes broken
>into short lines, or even poetasters, if one must use "poeta"
>to describe them, but hardly poets.

A semantic quibble, but poets--poor poets, perhaps--is for me a sufficient
description.

>To put it simply, they had no craft.

In what sense craft? Do you mean that their poetry is `musically' weak,
or is this a more general claim?

Re: Sexton (I'm insufficiently familiar with Levertov), her output
seems to me weaker in imagery and subtlety than it is structurally.

>None such as Plath had, or Marianne Moore.
>Not even the rough craft of E.B. Browning or Emily Dickinson.

Plath before Dickinson? A brave choice. (I'd put Moore before both and
Bishop over all of them. What do you think of Bishop?)

>Anne Sexton is not as great a villain as any of the Beat poets,

Well, we can certainly agree here.

[Silke-Maria Weineck]

Uche Ogbuji (molinah@) wrote:
: In <5535rp$t...@netnews.upenn.edu>, wein...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Silke-Maria Weineck) writes:
: >: No. The 18th century is far removed from the worlds of which I speak.

: >: I am talking about such worlds as that of the Ancient Greeks (see
: >: any of the many theories of the compositions of the Iliad and Odyssey),
: >: Old norse, with their culture of scops, and celtics with their bards,
: >: as well as any of the systems of illiterate oral traditions that have
: >: been used the world wide.

: >But of course, poetry in translation is hardly ever poetry. How's your
: >Gaelic?

: Hmm. It seems to me you conflated two distinct points.
: I didn't say anything of this tradition as it translates to
: English. I am talking about the original language.

You are judging 20th century poetry by a tradition you have read about.
Perhaps I am conflating, but I have not yet reached your casual
mastery of the operation.

Some
: examples, through study of and referece to such as Latin,
: French, a smattering of Greek, Provencal, Italian, Igbo
: and Yoruba, and years ago, a decent amount of German,
: I could see for myself in the original language, but even
: where I can't, I read critics who can, and thus gain all the
: assurance I can be expected to have.

But you will not accept an English translation of the first Duino elegy
as poetry.

: >Silke, still shocked by the assertion that line break is incidental to
: >poetry....

: I'm truly surprised that this should engender shock. I know you
: are a formidable scholar. Surely you've read discussions of poetic
: traditions that originated before the advent of writing.

I'm cognizant of quite a bit of such speculations, yes. However, oral
rendering surely has an equivalent of the line break. Listen to any oratorio.

Silke

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <55331e$3...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>>I believe that, as with any craft, a great deal of training must
>>be involved in the creation of the work, so that absolutely
>>no effort is required for its appreciation.
>
>I think effort in the form of caring and curiosity on the part of the
>reader is always required and sweetens appreciation. OTOH, I do agree
>that extensive training in craft, whether school taught or
>experiential or most likely both, is almost always essential to
>produce good stuff.

True, caring and curiosity in the patron enhances every
art and craft, but I also think that the greatest art works
on the rudest observer as well as the most refined. The
best example is Shakespeare, who wrote work that was
appreciated by the lowest rabble as well as the highest
gentry, and is still accounted among the greatest writing
in English.

I think the human ability to appreciate patterns is
innate, and when too much learning needs be applied to
the understanding of any particular form, perhaps the
form has lost its most fundamental appeal. Most of the
meters used in great poetry came directly from religious
incantations of one form or another:

The funereal rites of Ancient Egypt.
The songs of Greek mystery festival.
(elegaic, spondee, iambic, tonal systems)
The exchange of druidic rites among Celts
(iambic, syllabic, alliteration)
Hellenic theological texts (essentially, Hesoid)
(heroic couplets, alexandrine)
Latinate Fertility festivals such as Fescennia and Saturnalia
(elegaics, alliteration)
Medieval high church ritual
(accentual systems, assonance)
Vernacular church hymns
(rhyme, pentameter)

These things are visceral, and have thus been useful to
the propagation of religious doctrine for millenia. They are
not sophisticated.

I think it is ironic that the Beat poets sought a poetry that
Johnny on the block could understand, not realizing that
by shunning the lineaments of craft, they were making poetry
indigestible to everyone who was not trained to appreciate
free-verse.

>>I believe you only think line-breaks are impotant because
>>you are so used to reading poetry in this unfortunate age
>>where poetry is not read aloud very often, and when read
>>aloud, not by orators of any craft, but I believe that if
>>I were to spend a few days with you and a book of
>>the great English verse, I could bring you to appreciate
>>how little the line breaks mean to a well-crafted poem.
>
>This may be true since I came to poetry through the printed page. I
>would be interested, however, in learning how and when line breaks
>entered written poetry.

I discuss this in another post, and please let me point out
that I read this group from my work computer, and have
no access to my library, and it's all coming off-head. I
am likely to make some mistakes, but I think you'll find
that my basic points are sound.

Lineation was always there, in a sense, because when,
say one of the original Iliad authors (if you subscribe to the
Homer-as-redactor theory, as I do) composed his work,
the meter prescribed the ceasura (pause in the middle of
the line) and end-stop in either punctuation or sense after
the sixth foot. Both the end-stop and caesura were
optional, but because of how the mind works, their existence
improved memorability.

When the work was finally written down, the scribe
would have found the end-stop a natural point to end
the line, not because the fact that it was poetry demanded this,
of course, but because the structure of the poetry suggested
it, and it made the text easier to recite back.

This convention carried on. Prose has no such internal
structure of ennumerated syllables, long and short vowels,
etc. and so there was no impetus to arrange it in any
particular way quantitatively.

Note: There is the arrangement in prose of topic, which
later became printed as paragraphs, but originally, Greek
prose was printed without any structure whatsoever,
_not even spaces between words_. This, of course, makes
reading original Greek manuscripts an essay in cryptography.

The important point is that printing in lines came about
because the _audible_ structure of poetry suggested it,
and not as any intrinsic desire to distinguish poetry from
prose.

>>Let me note that among the three you mentioned, I would only
>>recommend Ashberry as an accomplished craftsman.
>
>Again, I do think that line breaks can aid in and add to understanding
>[certain] poems. Take Ashbery:

Ashberry started off by taking seriously what I only
say in exasperation: that if line-breaks is become the
only mark of poetry, then the future of poetry is better
served if we do away with line breaks entirely.
He still wrote some fine work. Lately, however,
I think his disdain of line-breaks has begun to make
his poetry more amorphous, and herein lies the danger.

The medium of poetry has become print instead of
speech, and poets who disdain line-breaks seem even
more likely to disdain form.

So I only propose the elimination of line breaks as a test.
If a work does not stand as poetry without its line-breaks,
let's not call it poetry.

Vale

--Uche

[Vance Maverick]

Vance quotes Eliot:

But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our
language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like
the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or
taking no form at all, and continually approximating to a very
simple one.

Ken quotes Pound:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ron Silliman has pointed out that (not counting the title) this is the
skeleton of a sonnet: eight words, then a positively classical turn
and six more words. Was this the sense in which you connected the
poem to Eliot's claim? (Or did you connect it to something I wrote?
There's after all not much constant or continual in such a miniature.)

Vance

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <spurious....@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au>, spur...@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au (Rodney Payne) writes:
>What, precisely, is your point?

> That poetic lineation is redundant?

Poetic lineation is not the same as the printing of line-breaks,
even though they often coincide.

> That Anne Sexton is not a poet?

Yes, although I acknowledge this as my opinion, and thus
I attempt to elaborate my reasons.

> That some greater integrity will be restored to modern poetry by
>removing Sexton from its sphere?

Yes. See above.

>> Now, friends, do we remember that the original medium
>> of poetry is speech, and not print?
>
>An earlier, but not original, mode of long distance correspondence was
>the letter, delivered by sea. Expect my next response in six weeks.

My point is that I would expect communication by e-mail to
be subjected to the same standards of excellence as long
distance correspondence, delivered by sea. Then again, the points
are not analogous: not all LDCDBY showed accomplishment, and
similarly, not all e-mail shows the same.

>> How does this
>> fact bear upon the distinctions I am trying to highlight?

>Not at all. Unless written Sexton is poetry, while an oral delivery is not?
>Or does poetry exist only in its performance?

Conventions of print are all aids to the reader. Yes. Poetry is
properly what one hears, even if he hears it in his head while
reading.

>> Is this a sufficient poetic transcription?

> ofmansfirstdisobedienceandthefruitofthatforbiddentree
> whosemortaltastebroughtdeathintotheworld....

Don't knock the concept. This is how the Ancient Greeks read their
Aristotle and Euclid.

Vale

--Uche

[Ken MacIver]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

>In <552tbj$gdc...@fi.smart.net>, f...@oceanstar.comDeleteThis (Fiona Webster) writes:
>>Can you elaborate, Uche, on why you use "poem" as a term
>>conferring value? Do you also use short story, novel, play, etc,
>>in this way -- where there is no such thing as a "bad novel,"
>>etc.? If not, then how is poetry privileged?

>It is privileged by its classical roots. "vates" and "poeta", and

>the equivalent terms in Greek, which I forget, were not generic
>labels for any pretender to the craft, but were used to label the
>masters. This, as I point out, was also the usage in English until

>fairly recently. One could call an inferior versifier a "poetaster",
>and an insignificant versifier a "poeticule", but "poet" was a title
>of great esteem.

But again, even the ancient ones, at least in translation, are
arranged with line breaks in written poetry. What is the history of
the line break in written poetry? I had always thought it part of the
fundamental poetic form.

Ken

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <spurious....@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au>, spur...@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au (Rodney Payne) writes:

>Interesting. I take it that the visual component of reading a poem holds
>little for you. That leaves out a goodly portion of modern verse (often
>no great loss, of course).

Let me say that my reactionary attitude to the printing of poetry
is something I adopted as a response to much modern verse. I
found that writers were writing the simplest prose, with what
moderns like to call "images" sprinkled about, chopping it up
into short lines, and calling it poetry.

I had always learned of poetry as marked by linguistic elements
that distinguished it from prose (see my elaboration of "craft"
below), and I felt that people were using line-breaks as an
excuse for these elements, and thus producing the most inferior
drivel. It didn't take much, coming from my background, to
notice that great poetry could be recognized as such regardless
of how it was printed.

This is not the first time I've had this argument. I've had it
in classes, at poetry readings, and with friends. I always get
the same indignant and even shocked response. I usually reach
at least a portion of those I disagree with by reading out poetry.
(Usually, to foil those who say this would only be true of
quantitative meter, I choose Hopkins' "The Windhover")
Unfortunately, this is not an option in this medium.

>>To put it simply, they had no craft.
>In what sense craft? Do you mean that their poetry is `musically' weak,
>or is this a more general claim?

Music is an important part of poetry as far as it means
the play of sounds that accompanies the sense of a poem.
Meter is the single most important component of craft,
and assonance and consonance, allusion, diction and
subject are others.

> Re: Sexton (I'm insufficiently familiar with Levertov), her output
>seems to me weaker in imagery and subtlety than it is structurally.

It is my opinion that good poetry, to follow your terms, needs
neither the broad tropes that I hear called "imagery", nor any
particular subtlety.

>>None such as Plath had, or Marianne Moore.
>>Not even the rough craft of E.B. Browning or Emily Dickinson.
>Plath before Dickinson? A brave choice. (I'd put Moore before both and
>Bishop over all of them. What do you think of Bishop?)

Plath knew the music of words better than Moore, IMO, although
Moore made up the score with greater knowledge of the association
of metric with sense.

Dickinson had great feeling, but not enough metrical dexterity.
Reading a few Dickinson poems at a time is a pleasure. Reading
her for a protracted time is a chore.

>>Anne Sexton is not as great a villain as any of the Beat poets,
>Well, we can certainly agree here.

I'm glad. I have never gotten past first base when arguing with
beat afficionados. I don't even try anymore.

Vale

--Uche

[Patrick Foley]

In <5533gm$e...@rtpnews.raleigh.ibm.com> Uche Ogbuji <molinah@> wrote,
among other things:

> Verse existed as opposed to prose before there was even writing.

Alright. What's the difference? Is that difference completely
unrelated to the printing of verse in lines and prose continuously?

You might have a look at Albert Lord's _The Singer of Tales_.

> So lineation in print became a custom to _emphasize_ the
> structure of a poem, but it was never intended as a _excuse_
> for structure, and this is exactly my point, and I would rather
> do away with lineation than do away with the craft that it
> does no more than show off.

Funny that Denise Levertov left you so cold -- are you completely
unaware of her ideas on form, the use of the linebreak, etc.?

You are decrying, Uche, the idea that a poem is simply an arrangement of
words on a page. Fine. You get around here to admitting that lineation
"emphasizes" the poem's structure. You might also have said it is a way
of representing that structure on the printed page. I need no more of
it than that.

Some poems have a structure that is aurally emphasized by the use of
rhyme, and a language like English does not represent this quite so well
in print, where rhyming words may not appear to rhyme. And poets can be
slovenly in their use of rhyme, using it as a brace for a structure they
have not built too carefully. This is no reflection on rhyme.

Lineation is special in this way: a composition which does not have a
structure that could be "emphasized" or represented by the use of
lineation is not a poem. The line is the sine qua non of poetic
structure (as rhyme, stanzas, meter, what have you, are not). Thus
indeed arranging words into lines is the minimum one need do, if one is
interested in doing the minimum. It can still be done well or poorly,
just as rhyme can, aural and rhetorical effects, imagery, thought,
feeling, whatever it is you think goes into making a poem.

I can't see that we really have anything to argue about -- unless your
conception of poetic form differs radically from mine, as I have limned
it here.

Pat

[Ken MacIver]

Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:

Unfortunately, I have never heard of Ron Silliman so I cannot help him
out with this. The title, IMO, is critical to and part of Pound's
poem in this instance. It sets the context (i.e. a subway) that
allows the reader (me, anyway) to understand the reduction of
substance to essence implied by Eliot in your quote, as if it were a
reduced sauce made by long simmering.

Ken

[Ken MacIver]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

>In <55331e$3...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>>>I believe that, as with any craft, a great deal of training must
>>>be involved in the creation of the work, so that absolutely
>>>no effort is required for its appreciation.

I did not write this; you did.

>>
>>I think effort in the form of caring and curiosity on the part of the
>>reader is always required and sweetens appreciation. OTOH, I do agree
>>that extensive training in craft, whether school taught or
>>experiential or most likely both, is almost always essential to
>>produce good stuff.

This is what I wrote.

>True, caring and curiosity in the patron enhances every
>art and craft, but I also think that the greatest art works
>on the rudest observer as well as the most refined. The
>best example is Shakespeare, who wrote work that was
>appreciated by the lowest rabble as well as the highest
>gentry, and is still accounted among the greatest writing
>in English.

Those "lowest rabble" had to care about and have curiosity to see his
plays.

>I think the human ability to appreciate patterns is
>innate, and when too much learning needs be applied to
>the understanding of any particular form, perhaps the
>form has lost its most fundamental appeal. Most of the
>meters used in great poetry came directly from religious
>incantations of one form or another:

I agree; you are arguing against your own post.

>The funereal rites of Ancient Egypt.
>The songs of Greek mystery festival.
> (elegaic, spondee, iambic, tonal systems)
>The exchange of druidic rites among Celts
> (iambic, syllabic, alliteration)
>Hellenic theological texts (essentially, Hesoid)
> (heroic couplets, alexandrine)
>Latinate Fertility festivals such as Fescennia and Saturnalia
> (elegaics, alliteration)
>Medieval high church ritual
> (accentual systems, assonance)
>Vernacular church hymns
> (rhyme, pentameter)

>These things are visceral, and have thus been useful to
>the propagation of religious doctrine for millenia. They are
>not sophisticated.

>I think it is ironic that the Beat poets sought a poetry that
>Johnny on the block could understand, not realizing that
>by shunning the lineaments of craft, they were making poetry
>indigestible to everyone who was not trained to appreciate
>free-verse.

I don't think that is what the Beats set out to accomplish. I think
they could give a shit about what the Johnny on the block (a nice &
new term to me) could understand. The whole crew knew very well that
they were tweaking the establishment of academic poets. It's funny;
although I haven't been taken by most of the beat poetry, I have
enjoyed reading immensely (could not put them down) and been moved
greatly by Howl and Coney Island of the Mind, both of which I consider
among the best ten poems of post WWII .

To me, if the "audible structure of poetry suggested it," the line
break is fundamental to written poetry. It has always been there and
no doubt will always be.

>>>Let me note that among the three you mentioned, I would only
>>>recommend Ashberry as an accomplished craftsman.
>>
>>Again, I do think that line breaks can aid in and add to understanding
>>[certain] poems. Take Ashbery:

>Ashberry started off by taking seriously what I only
>say in exasperation: that if line-breaks is become the
>only mark of poetry, then the future of poetry is better
>served if we do away with line breaks entirely.
>He still wrote some fine work. Lately, however,
>I think his disdain of line-breaks has begun to make
>his poetry more amorphous, and herein lies the danger.

>The medium of poetry has become print instead of
>speech, and poets who disdain line-breaks seem even
>more likely to disdain form.

>So I only propose the elimination of line breaks as a test.
>If a work does not stand as poetry without its line-breaks,
>let's not call it poetry.

I am unable to agree with you. I consider poetry as both an oral and
a written form. As a written form, I think line breaks are an
integral part of the poem, add to its enjoyment and understanding, and
please the mind's eye.

Ken

[Meg Worley]

Uche blithers:

>When the work was finally written down, the scribe
>would have found the end-stop a natural point to end
>the line, not because the fact that it was poetry demanded this,
>of course, but because the structure of the poetry suggested
>it, and it made the text easier to recite back.

It is good that Uche keeps this statement in the conditional,
because in the indicative it would be utter bumf. We understand
the lineation of pre-15C poetry by the scansion, meter,
alliteration (pre-Conquest), and rhyme (post-), not because
"it was naturally written that way." Even in the 15C, many
mss. were written without line-breaks; interested parties
should check out the Ellesmere ms. of *The Canterbury Tales*
or the Huntington Library's Hoccleve. It is only after the
skin shortage of the 13-14C had eased up, along with the
growing use of paper (which had been introduced in the 12C),
that written line-ends began to reflect their spoken
counterparts.

>Note: There is the arrangement in prose of topic, which
>later became printed as paragraphs, but originally, Greek
>prose was printed without any structure whatsoever,
>_not even spaces between words_. This, of course, makes
>reading original Greek manuscripts an essay in cryptography.

Back to the conditional, old son. All examples of Greek
prose that we have today (or, not having seen them all, I
will amend that to "All that I know of") are indeed
"printed with structure," although I can think of about
a bazillion more felicitous, not to mention more accurate,
ways of putting it. Spaces between words were a late
innovation in most Western Yurpean writing systems, but
paragraphs were quite early, possibly to accommodate
illumination and illustration. Eudoxus' treatise on
spheres (2nd century BCE) is a good example, should you
be in Paris any time soon.

[Ken MacIver]

m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote:

>Uche blithers:

>>When the work was finally written down, the scribe
>>would have found the end-stop a natural point to end
>>the line, not because the fact that it was poetry demanded this,
>>of course, but because the structure of the poetry suggested
>>it, and it made the text easier to recite back.

>It is good that Uche keeps this statement in the conditional,

>because in the indicative it would be utter bumf. We understand
>the lineation of pre-15C poetry by the scansion, meter,
>alliteration (pre-Conquest), and rhyme (post-), not because
>"it was naturally written that way." Even in the 15C, many
>mss. were written without line-breaks; interested parties
>should check out the Ellesmere ms. of *The Canterbury Tales*
>or the Huntington Library's Hoccleve. It is only after the
>skin shortage of the 13-14C had eased up, along with the
>growing use of paper (which had been introduced in the 12C),
>that written line-ends began to reflect their spoken
>counterparts.

I think the line breaks serve a different function than the reflection
of their spoken counterparts. They describe and illustrate the basic
structure of a poem, whether accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic,
or free verse. When the line is end-stopped by punctuation, it offers
a pause that reflects how the poem should be spoken. When the line is
a run-on, it does not reflect the spoken poem which will carry that
line along into the next line without pause. Or, something like that.

>>Note: There is the arrangement in prose of topic, which
>>later became printed as paragraphs, but originally, Greek
>>prose was printed without any structure whatsoever,
>>_not even spaces between words_. This, of course, makes
>>reading original Greek manuscripts an essay in cryptography.

>Back to the conditional, old son. All examples of Greek

>prose that we have today (or, not having seen them all, I
>will amend that to "All that I know of") are indeed
>"printed with structure," although I can think of about
>a bazillion more felicitous, not to mention more accurate,
>ways of putting it. Spaces between words were a late
>innovation in most Western Yurpean writing systems, but
>paragraphs were quite early, possibly to accommodate
>illumination and illustration. Eudoxus' treatise on
>spheres (2nd century BCE) is a good example, should you
>be in Paris any time soon.

Good stuff; another great reason to visit Paris!

Ken

[Meg Worley]

Ken writes:
>I think the line breaks serve a different function than the reflection
>of their spoken counterparts. They describe and illustrate the basic
>structure of a poem, whether accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic,
>or free verse.

I see two ways of reading this, neither of which seems quite
right. On the one hand, Ken may be suggesting that all these
structural elements appear only on the printed page; on the
other, he may believe that written line-breaks describe and
illustrate these elements, while spoken line-ends do not. But
I won't let the doubt of future foes exile *my* present joy.

>When the line is end-stopped by punctuation, it offers
>a pause that reflects how the poem should be spoken. When the line is
>a run-on, it does not reflect the spoken poem which will carry that
>line along into the next line without pause. Or, something like that.

Am I right in understanding you to mean that enjambment, then,
is strictly a written convention, without enunciated counterpart?

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <555jc0$r...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>> But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our
>> language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like
>> the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or
>> taking no form at all, and continually approximating to a very
>> simple one.

>>The latter is what I hear here.

> In a Station of the Metro

> The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
> Petals on a wet, black bough.

Thank you, Ken. You have no training? Pah! Training
is no more that is manifested in your above choice.

This is an excellent example of a poem that was innovative--
and I certainly don't decry innovation-- and yet soaked in
craft.

Do you know the story of this poem? Pound says he was
waiting at the station when this "apparition" came to him:
he saw an unexpected beauty in the bustling crowd. It moved
him so he wrote a 30-line poem, which he soon tore up,
unsatisfied. It was some time later-- a year, if I remember
right-- before he tackled it again, his sense of epiphany
still fresh. He had been working in ways that let do the
imagist movement, and he applied the imagist principles to
the poem, and thus what we have above, which became the
emblem of the Imagistes.

Now, Pound's concept of "image" was purloined by the vastly
inferior Hilda Dolittle, who ran off with Richard Aldington
to start her own imagist clique, and I think this was the source
of the illiterate concept of "image" as the hallmark of a good
poem-- a horrible corruption of Pound's intent.

Vale

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <556jkl$7...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>>>>I believe that, as with any craft, a great deal of training must
>>>>be involved in the creation of the work, so that absolutely
>>>>no effort is required for its appreciation.

[snipped claim that this contradicts the following]

>>True, caring and curiosity in the patron enhances every
>>art and craft, but I also think that the greatest art works
>>on the rudest observer as well as the most refined. The
>>best example is Shakespeare, who wrote work that was
>>appreciated by the lowest rabble as well as the highest
>>gentry, and is still accounted among the greatest writing
>>in English.

>Those "lowest rabble" had to care about and have curiosity to see his
>plays.

I think you're quibbling here. There are degrees of craft,
degrees of care and curiousity, and degrees of any
achievement.

I highly doubt that the curiousity that attracted people to
any affordable entertainment in Elizabethan London
is analagous to to the subtlety that has kept the
plays in the canon thus far.

Are you implying that the "rabble" who went to see
shakespeare were motivated by scholarly training?

>>I think the human ability to appreciate patterns is
>>innate, and when too much learning needs be applied to
>>the understanding of any particular form, perhaps the
>>form has lost its most fundamental appeal. Most of the
>>meters used in great poetry came directly from religious
>>incantations of one form or another:

>I agree; you are arguing against your own post

I don't think you have shown that I was.

>>I think it is ironic that the Beat poets sought a poetry that
>>Johnny on the block could understand, not realizing that
>>by shunning the lineaments of craft, they were making poetry
>>indigestible to everyone who was not trained to appreciate
>>free-verse.

>I don't think that is what the Beats set out to accomplish.

[snip]

This would certainly be the most conjectural part of my post.
Having heard my fill of the poison that is called "beat",
I avoid its faintest traces as much as I can. It just
seems that the rough language, demotic themes, and
falsely intellectual mummery that the Beats practiced
would be suited to misguided attempts to democratize poetry.

I think there was also something Ferlinghetti said that
gave me this impression.

>>The important point is that printing in lines came about
>>because the _audible_ structure of poetry suggested it,
>>and not as any intrinsic desire to distinguish poetry from
>>prose.

>To me, if the "audible structure of poetry suggested it," the line
>break is fundamental to written poetry. It has always been there and
>no doubt will always be.

I disagree. When I read the following:

For beer does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.

it sounds exactly like when I read the following

For beer does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

For a variety of reasons, this is not the case with the Sexton
poem.

Furthermore, the adoption of the line break at the metrical
unit into lines in print is not intrinsic. Print could easily have
been split along the caesura, but this would take up more
paper.

>>So I only propose the elimination of line breaks as a test.
>>If a work does not stand as poetry without its line-breaks,
>>let's not call it poetry.

>I am unable to agree with you. I consider poetry as both an oral and
>a written form. As a written form, I think line breaks are an
>integral part of the poem, add to its enjoyment and understanding, and
>please the mind's eye.

I will no longer be very surprised if you now tell me that
you don't read poetry aloud, or at least aloud in your head.
If this is the case, it would explain your disagreement,
and also, IMO, indicate a deep loss.

It would also explain your having quoted
"In a Station of the Metro" earlier in response to Vance's
comment on variable iambic pentameter. I had assumed it
was mere whimsy, but perhaps you miss the metrical
point of the poem (and, luckily, we have Pound's own
authority on this one.)

Vale

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <557q63$6...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>I think the line breaks serve a different function than the reflection
>of their spoken counterparts. They describe and illustrate the basic
>structure of a poem, whether accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic,

>or free verse. When the line is end-stopped by punctuation, it offers

>a pause that reflects how the poem should be spoken. When the line is
>a run-on, it does not reflect the spoken poem which will carry that
>line along into the next line without pause. Or, something like that.

This is an interesting variation, and not something that I realized
from our discussion so far. I thought you meant to indicate that
lines correlated directly to the way the poem is spoken. That's
why I used the A.E. Houseman example in another post. ("For beer
does more than Milton can/to justify God's ways to man.") I agree
with you that the written line should have no bearing on how the
poem is read (although you state this less strongly, I realize.)

Where we then differ is that it appears you find the visual
structure an important part of a poem. I think that the aural
effects of the poem are so much more important that the
visual structure pales.

You might find interesting (if you don't already know), that
soon after the renaissance, a few minor poets experimented
with poems that were printed in shapes suggesting their content.
As I said, I don't have my references here, and I don't know
any names off-head, but I remember one in the shape of Angel
wings and another in the shape of columns. The novelty soon
wore out, and there wasn't much of this in serious poetry
until concrete poetry came about this century. Thankfully, it
seems this has waned as well.

Pound did like to play around with layout, and you already
mention "In a Station of the Metro", which he printed
with double spaces between each word to emphasize
the diction.

>Good stuff; another great reason to visit Paris!

Yuck. I can't stand Paris in the main, although there are points
of light that might be worth the muck. A tour of sites significant
from renaissance Italy is my dream intellectual tour.
If I had only known better when I visited Paris...

Vale

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <x6uybgp...@deodar.CS.Berkeley.EDU>, Vance Maverick <mave...@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:
>> The easiest way to learn about these worlds is through Robert
>> Graves treatment of Celtic bardic cultures, and so yes, I do
>> recommend _The Crowning Privilege_

>Thanks. What a crank he is! I enjoyed the book, but I'd be more apt
>to trust him on large matters if he scored better on small. (He
>quotes as fact the story that Tennyson wrote dirty limericks in old
>age: amusing, but apocryphal, at least according to Christopher
>Ricks. And he concludes one of his blasts at Pound with "And what or
>who is 'crotale'?" Etc.)

I'm sorry, the tone of the question led me to believe you hadn't
read "The Crowning Privilege". Clearly, you have.

No one thinks Graves was a master of punctillio, but his knowledge
was broad, and he always ended up in the right place, even if
he stumbled on the way. Much has been made of his "savaging"
of _The Golden Ass_ (though I haven't heard of a more readable
translation), and he's been apocryphal abotu Milton as well as Tennyson.
Furthermore, I admire most of the poets he disparages in
"These be thy Gods, O Israel", although I loved the wit of his attacks.

I admire erudite cranks. I always have. They may be unpleasant,
but they do great things for drifting fields. Dr. Johnson was a
crank. Fowler was a crank. Pound was a crank. They were also
among the most knowledgeable men in their fields, and their
scholarship endures even where shaky. Would anyone deign to
dismiss Dr. Johnson because so many of his etymological conjectures
were off the mark?

The fundamental point is that Graves did something _very_ important.
He put forth professional standards on poetry, and standards founded
on the proven traditions of the craft, but adaptable to his age, and
the future. It is well to think poetry can thrive without standards,
but one thing that is very clear is that the rebellions of modernism
have failed to prove this.

>> "basically dimeter...mostly iambs and anapests". Any English
>> utterance can be cast into some perversion of meter, but
>> tradition proves the effects that choices have on poetry.

>Since I hold no brief for the Sexton poem, and I can't match your
>hauteur, I'll stay away from the detailed discussion. But since I
>overreached myself with the claim about scansion, I'll try again
>briefly. Graves provides a useful distinction between meters of anvil
>and oar: this seems to me to be oar-verse, two strokes per line on the
>whole. This passage of Eliot, which Graves quotes with disapproval,
>seems apropos:

First of all, I looked again and see nothing whatsoever that could
validate this. Not only are the lines too short (Graves' innovative
theory of oar-verse rests on the tonality of the English sentence
which is lost within smaller phrases to stress patterns), but
the expletives that Anne Sexton uses too much prevent the
sort of rhythmic flow that Graves speaks of.

> But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our
> language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like
> the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or
> taking no form at all, and continually approximating to a very
> simple one.

>The latter is what I hear here.

As I said in the original critique, I don't believe Sexton ever
established a pattern, so I don't see how she could have
made any "interesting" departures therefrom. For examples
of what I think Graves was _really_ talking about, see Frost,
Wordsworth, Browning, Shakespeare, Graves himself, and, to
prove the good is not all in the past, A.D. Hope and X.J. Kennedy.

Vale

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <557dpe$a...@Steam.Stanford.EDU>, m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) writes:

[snip]

>We understand >the lineation of pre-15C poetry by the scansion, meter,
>alliteration (pre-Conquest), and rhyme (post-), not because
>"it was naturally written that way." Even in the 15C, many
>mss. were written without line-breaks;

I don't suppose you have enough wit to know
that you made my point for me. Thanks anyway.
Now your assignment (to use common Usenet insolence)
is to explain how "scansion" is "parallel" to meter in the
sense of your sentence. Don't bother to come back
to me. Just figure it out for yourself.

>>Note: There is the arrangement in prose of topic, which
>>later became printed as paragraphs, but originally, Greek
>>prose was printed without any structure whatsoever,
>>_not even spaces between words_. This, of course, makes
>>reading original Greek manuscripts an essay in cryptography.

>Back to the conditional, old son. All examples of Greek

>prose that we have today (or, not having seen them all, I
>will amend that to "All that I know of") are indeed
>"printed with structure," although I can think of about
>a bazillion more felicitous, not to mention more accurate,

bazillion? After you tell me what a bazillion is, you
can list the bazillion more felicitous ways. Does this
sound like a quibble? It is. Exactly as you quibble above
and elsewhere, to the point of nausea.

For some reason, you've posted a great deal of
anfractuous comment, in a tone of violent disagreement,
that ends up, with the exception of a few egaggerated
quiddities, either agreeing with me, or corroborating
what I say. Perhaps this is sport. If so, please
enjoy it, but I will step in, as here, and note that you have
made no point.

By the way, I've noticed that whenever a certain few
in this group get into any kind of argument, it always
decomposes to comments on or insinuations concerning
another's sex. The illiterate subject line of meg's rant is
a good example.

Va t'en.

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <555tel$h...@netnews.upenn.edu>, wein...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Silke-Maria Weineck) writes:
>You are judging 20th century poetry by a tradition you have read about.
>Perhaps I am conflating, but I have not yet reached your casual
>mastery of the operation.

I believe I am judging it by a tradition that is still as clear
as Spring in all the great poetry I've ever read. This is not
a point that I can prove, or that you can disprove, so it
seems we're at an impasse.

>But you will not accept an English translation of the first Duino elegy
>as poetry.

If it doesn't walk like poetry or talk like poetry, to use the
demotic phrase, I can't hold it as poetry, even if it translates
to the very Muse's milk in the language of the Angels
[mixed mythography alert].

>I'm cognizant of quite a bit of such speculations, yes. However, oral
>rendering surely has an equivalent of the line break. Listen to any oratorio.

I've discussed poetic lineation versus that of print at some length.
They often coincide, but there is nothing intrinsic in poetry
that demands they do.

Vale

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <555e36$p...@Steam.Stanford.EDU>, m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) writes:
>>It is privileged by its classical roots. "vates" and "poeta", and
>>the equivalent terms in Greek, which I forget, were not generic
>>labels for any pretender to the craft, but were used to label the
>>masters. This, as I point out, was also the usage in English until
>>fairly recently.

>"Good versifier" is indeed one early usage of "poet," but it

>is a minority vein. Uche shouldn't rely too much on the few
>examples in the OED and should read a bit more widely. I

I suppose you think this is wit. Have we figured
out what "Astrophel" is yet, good meg, or are
we not widely-enough read?

>recommend to all who are interested Aelfric's vocabulary,
>Garland's pair of dictionaries, and Alexander of Neckham for
>pre-modern English; for Early Modern, a quick check of the
>*Promptuarium puerorum* as well as the works of Elyot and
>Cooper will show that 'he that wrytes verse welle' is but
>one of several definitions.

The word has always been a title, and every title has
had pretenders. Do you think everyone who calls
himself or herself "Lord" or "Dame" is indeed one?

The titles are still privileged, and the fact that
'he that wrytes verse welle' is among the definitions
simply proves my point that there are a good enough
number that see it that way. I know exactly who these
are, and think not a jot of your opinion besides theirs.

>It is perfectly fine with me
>if Uche wants to fight his arguments with this definition
>rather than another, but he would do well to hold off on the
>absolutist claims ("*the* usage in English") until he has
>read a bit more widely.

_You_ are the one who is fighting with definition.
If you have followed the thread in question, you'll
know that we've all moved on to more essential
issues in the interest of profit.

And are you the one talking about hubris when
you make judgements of what others have read?
All well, but let me ask you what your dictionary
tells you about the species of pride that "hubris"
most often connotes.

Va t'en.

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <556il5$6...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>The title, IMO, is critical to and part of Pound's
>poem in this instance. It sets the context (i.e. a subway) that
>allows the reader (me, anyway) to understand the reduction of
>substance to essence implied by Eliot in your quote, as if it were a
>reduced sauce made by long simmering.

Uh oh. Pound intended this poem as almost antithetical
to Eliot's philosophy, and the only essence he worked to
attain was auditory, or it would have been much longer
(he tore up the 30-line version).

I recommend Hugh Kenner on Pound (_The Pound Era_),
and even Kenner on Eliot (_The Invisible Poet_).

In short, I recommend Kenner. He is one of the greatest
critics of modern times by almost anyone's accounting, and
he has a _good_ deal to say about craft.

Vale,

--Uche

[Ken MacIver]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

>In <555jc0$r...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>>> But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our
>>> language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like
>>> the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or
>>> taking no form at all, and continually approximating to a very
>>> simple one.

>>>The latter is what I hear here.

>> In a Station of the Metro

>> The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

>> Petals on a wet, black bough.

>Thank you, Ken. You have no training? Pah! Training
>is no more that is manifested in your above choice.

>This is an excellent example of a poem that was innovative--
>and I certainly don't decry innovation-- and yet soaked in
>craft.

>Do you know the story of this poem? Pound says he was
>waiting at the station when this "apparition" came to him:
>he saw an unexpected beauty in the bustling crowd. It moved
>him so he wrote a 30-line poem, which he soon tore up,
>unsatisfied. It was some time later-- a year, if I remember
>right-- before he tackled it again, his sense of epiphany
>still fresh. He had been working in ways that let do the
>imagist movement, and he applied the imagist principles to
>the poem, and thus what we have above, which became the
>emblem of the Imagistes.

>Now, Pound's concept of "image" was purloined by the vastly
>inferior Hilda Dolittle, who ran off with Richard Aldington
>to start her own imagist clique, and I think this was the source
>of the illiterate concept of "image" as the hallmark of a good
>poem-- a horrible corruption of Pound's intent.

Thanks for the story behind the poem -- it's an interesting example,
as you relate it, of the drive behind a poetic mind. I have tried to
read H.D., but, alas, find her generally unreadable.

Ken

[Ken MacIver]

c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) wrote:

>molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

>>I disagree. When I read the following:

>>For beer does more than Milton can

>>To justify God's ways to man.

>>it sounds exactly like when I read the following

>>For beer does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

>That's interesting; when I read the two versions aloud they
>don't sound exactly the same. When I read the first there is a
>slight pause between lines and the emphasis on "can" is slightly
>stronger. When I read the second aloud the "can" is softened and the
>pause vanishes. Likewise the initial "to" is softened just a bit.
>In reading metrical verse I (and I suspect others) strengthen the
>initial unstressed syllable in lines written in iambic meter.

>But then, what do I know? I am not, after all, a professional poet.

Although Richard Harter, as shown by his final sentence, knows how to
beat a dead horse, I agree with him on the different sound of the two
versions.

Ken

[Ken MacIver]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

:
>>>>>I believe that, as with any craft, a great deal of training must
>>>>>be involved in the creation of the work, so that absolutely
>>>>>no effort is required for its appreciation.

[and]

>>>True, caring and curiosity in the patron enhances every
>>>art and craft, but I also think that the greatest art works
>>>on the rudest observer as well as the most refined. The
>>>best example is Shakespeare, who wrote work that was
>>>appreciated by the lowest rabble as well as the highest
>>>gentry, and is still accounted among the greatest writing
>>>in English.

Ken:

>>Those "lowest rabble" had to care about and have curiosity to see his
>>plays.

Uche:

>I think you're quibbling here. There are degrees of craft,
>degrees of care and curiousity, and degrees of any
>achievement.

>I highly doubt that the curiousity that attracted people to
>any affordable entertainment in Elizabethan London
>is analagous to to the subtlety that has kept the
>plays in the canon thus far.

>Are you implying that the "rabble" who went to see
>shakespeare were motivated by scholarly training?

No. I am stating that the rabble, your term, who view and appreciate
a Shakespearian play do so out of a caring and curiousity (what's this
new stuff all about -- like a present day movie) and desire for good
entertainment. Hell, most folks (in the early 17th c) couldn't read
and thus the "writing" part had no effect on them.

[snip]

>Furthermore, the adoption of the line break at the metrical
>unit into lines in print is not intrinsic. Print could easily have
>been split along the caesura, but this would take up more
>paper.

It certainly would indeed!

>>>So I only propose the elimination of line breaks as a test.
>>>If a work does not stand as poetry without its line-breaks,
>>>let's not call it poetry.

>>I am unable to agree with you. I consider poetry as both an oral and
>>a written form. As a written form, I think line breaks are an
>>integral part of the poem, add to its enjoyment and understanding, and
>>please the mind's eye.

>I will no longer be very surprised if you now tell me that

>you don't read poetry aloud, or at least aloud in your head.
>If this is the case, it would explain your disagreement,
>and also, IMO, indicate a deep loss.

I often but not invariably read poetry *aloud* in my mind,
particularly when it doesn't otherwise read well. I probably enjoy a
broader range of poetry (or writing that I consider poetry such as
Rilke or Ginsberg's Howl or Ferlinghetti's Coney Island) that do you,
although your appreciation and knowledge of what you do allow as
poetry is much deeper than mine. However, the loss may be so deep
that I have yet to appreciate it. I'm more with Charles Olson:

Writing traditiona form makes for rhetoric.
The alternative is to write as you breathe.
Either one is good if it is done well in its way.
Form is then the skin or the how of the art.
Your rut is so much more important. And this is
only arrived at by the sharp influx of things. . . .

PROJECTIVE VERSE

Ken MacIver

[Ken MacIver]

Ken:

>>When the line is end-stopped by punctuation, it offers
>>a pause that reflects how the poem should be spoken. When the line is
>>a run-on, it does not reflect the spoken poem which will carry that
>>line along into the next line without pause. Or, something like that.

Meg:

>Am I right in understanding you to mean that enjambment, then,
>is strictly a written convention, without enunciated counterpart?

I think so, although I must admit there is often a small pause
[orally] at the enjambment.

Ken

[moggin]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji):

> >> In a Station of the Metro
>
> >> The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
> >> Petals on a wet, black bough.

> >Do you know the story of this poem? Pound says he was
> >waiting at the station when this "apparition" came to him:
> >he saw an unexpected beauty in the bustling crowd. It moved
> >him so he wrote a 30-line poem, which he soon tore up,
> >unsatisfied. It was some time later-- a year, if I remember
> >right-- before he tackled it again, his sense of epiphany

> >still fresh. [...]

Yes, it was a year later. His third try, though. (Excuse
the quibble.)

> > He had been working in ways that let do the
> >imagist movement, and he applied the imagist principles to
> >the poem, and thus what we have above, which became the
> >emblem of the Imagistes.

Debatable. Pound spent a year attempting to capture a certain
epiphany. He tore up his first two efforts and kept the third, which
indeed become an emblem of Imagism; but to say that he was "applying
Imagist principles" is something else. Pound was writing poetry --
"Imagism" was a movement he cooked up to promote the results.

> >Now, Pound's concept of "image" was purloined by the vastly
> >inferior Hilda Dolittle, who ran off with Richard Aldington
> >to start her own imagist clique, and I think this was the source
> >of the illiterate concept of "image" as the hallmark of a good
> >poem-- a horrible corruption of Pound's intent.

Possibly some confusion here. Pound _gave_ H.D. the title "H.D.
_Imagiste_." That was the tag he attached to "Hermes of the Ways"
when she sent it off to Harriet Monroe at _Poetry_. He also included
a cover letter, helpfully defining the "school" of Imagism -- that is,
inventing it. The one who later commandeered the business was Amy
Lowell -- Pound dubbed her version "Amygism."

-- moggin

[Meg Worley]

Uche quotes:

>I disagree. When I read the following:
>
>For beer does more than Milton can
>To justify God's ways to man.

I am quite baffled at Uche's misquoting poor Housman (it's
"malt," not "beer"), as well as the apparent oblivion of
those who have followed up. Do none of them know the poem
well, or are they giving the flick to alliteration?

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <1996102923...@cust28.max13.washington.dc.ms.uu.net>, pfo...@earthlink.net (Patrick Foley) writes:
>> Verse existed as opposed to prose before there was even writing.

>Alright. What's the difference? Is that difference completely
>unrelated to the printing of verse in lines and prose continuously?

The difference is form: meter, assonance, consonance, and thematic
arrangement. In my native Igbo tradition, which was illiterate until
the arrival of missionaries last century, there was a distinct office
of poetry, as used to keep lore. This is distinct in its patterns,
which are tonal-based, as Igbo is a tonal language.

There are also prose sayings and stories that follow no such form.
In print, this becomes form.

Better example is the Yoruba tradition of Ifa Divinity poetry,
in addition to prosaic lore. Again, poetry is most often applied
to religion (this seems to be a fundamental instinct).

>You might have a look at Albert Lord's _The Singer of Tales_.

I haven't heard of it. I might just indeed have a look, thank you.

>> So lineation in print became a custom to _emphasize_ the
>> structure of a poem, but it was never intended as a _excuse_
>> for structure, and this is exactly my point, and I would rather
>> do away with lineation than do away with the craft that it
>> does no more than show off.

>Funny that Denise Levertov left you so cold -- are you completely
>unaware of her ideas on form, the use of the linebreak, etc.?

I haven't read any of her own prose. I've read critical glosses
of her work, but it didn't alleviate what appeared to me to be
her horrid ignorance of the relationship of sound and sense.

Pope: _Essay on Criticism_, again.

>You are decrying, Uche, the idea that a poem is simply an arrangement of
>words on a page. Fine. You get around here to admitting that lineation
>"emphasizes" the poem's structure. You might also have said it is a way
>of representing that structure on the printed page. I need no more of
>it than that.

If you please, it is important to note that I am not "admitting" much.
I acknowledge that print line-breaks are a convenience, and that is
all. I am emphatic in saying that they are not intrinsic.

I admit to being glad that poems are printed with line breaks, but
I've said over and over again that my point is not that line-breaks
are useless, but that they are unimportant to the essence of a poem,
and if one writes a piece with no other attributes that mark poetry,
and simply chooses to chop it up on a page, the result is _not_ poetry.

>Some poems have a structure that is aurally emphasized by the use of
>rhyme, and a language like English does not represent this quite so well
>in print, where rhyming words may not appear to rhyme. And poets can be
>slovenly in their use of rhyme, using it as a brace for a structure they
>have not built too carefully. This is no reflection on rhyme.

Agreed here.

>[...]a composition which does not have a structure that could be

>"emphasized" or represented by the use of lineation is not a poem.

>The line is the sine qua non of poetic structure (as rhyme, stanzas,

>meter, what have you, are not). Thus indeed arranging words into
>lines is the minimum one need do, if one is interested in doing

>the minimum.[...]

I think that anything can be rigged to have a linear structure.
The easiest way is to count syllables of the prose, print it
in according lines, and then call it "syllabic verse".

This is why I think your minimal definition is still far too
generous. I could go back and rewrite this post with linear
structure, but I would definitely expect you to call me an ass
if I called it "poetry".

>I can't see that we really have anything to argue about -- unless your
>conception of poetic form differs radically from mine, as I have limned
>it here.

I do agree that we are not very far apart in our opinions. The
discussion has still been worth it, at least for me.

Vale

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <558qd1$8...@news-central.tiac.net>, c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) writes:
>>I disagree. When I read the following:

>>For beer does more than Milton can
>>To justify God's ways to man.

>>it sounds exactly like when I read the following

>>For beer does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

>That's interesting; when I read the two versions aloud they
>don't sound exactly the same. When I read the first there is a
>slight pause between lines and the emphasis on "can" is slightly
>stronger. When I read the second aloud the "can" is softened and the
>pause vanishes. Likewise the initial "to" is softened just a bit.
>In reading metrical verse I (and I suspect others) strengthen the
>initial unstressed syllable in lines written in iambic meter.

There's the difference. I read them no differently, and indeed,
I believe it is important that there be no difference. When I learned
to read poetry aloud, I was always taught to let my eye run at least
one line ahead so that there would be no improper pauses at
line-breaks. I practiced this as hard as I did my elocution.

>But then, what do I know? I am not, after all, a professional poet.

Let me be clear that I am not claiming to be a professional poet.
Whatever else you think, don't think me a hypocrite. I aspire to
be a poet, and I work very hard at it, but I'll not ever really
think of myself as a poet until another whose opinion and reputation
I admire allows me this distinction.

You'd be surprised how uncomfortable I get whenever I am called
a poet in such informal settings as readings. I don't go about
correcting everyone else: "Down, sir. How dare you sir? I'm
a versifier."

Luckily I _am_ a professional Engineer, so I can use that when people
ask what I do. If it comes to it, I'm a "writer".

I don't scorn your opinions, or anyone else, as long as it is put
forth with intelligence and civility. That's why I try and explain
my harsh standards and expect you to discuss them with me.

Vale

--Uche

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <558v43$9...@netnews.upenn.edu>, wein...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Silke-Maria Weineck) writes:
>: >You are judging 20th century poetry by a tradition you have read about.
>: >Perhaps I am conflating, but I have not yet reached your casual
>: >mastery of the operation.

>: I believe I am judging it by a tradition that is still as clear
>: as Spring in all the great poetry I've ever read. This is not
>: a point that I can prove, or that you can disprove, so it
>: seems we're at an impasse.

>But we can keep clarifying what you mean -- I'm still baffled. I find it
>hard to believe that you would disqualify Rilke from the tradition of
>supreme poetry; or Hoelderlin, for that matter. But if you are willing to
>tell me that neither Rilke nor Hoelderlin deserve the name poet in your
>book, we may indeed stop.

I fear I'm in just as much difficulty. I'm not sure how to be
clearer about what I mean. I'd make an example, but I don't
have enough of a poem in a foreign language off-head to make
a meaningful distinction between a prose and a verse poem.

In case I just haven't been clear enough so far, let me put it
this way.

From what I remember of reading a little Rilke in German,
he certainly is a poet. If anyone, even Rilke himself,
translates it into English, then the _translation_ is only
a poem if it was executed as such. The fact that the translation
might not be poetry has little bearing on whether the original
is poetry.

I say little, and not no because there are of course elements
of what makes poetry that would come over in any marginally
competent translation. There is trope, allusion, and theme.

Do you qualify writing as poetry only according to its sense?
If so, this is where our divide lies. I qualify it in terms of
the association of sound with sense.

>: >I'm cognizant of quite a bit of such speculations, yes. However, oral

>: >rendering surely has an equivalent of the line break. Listen to any oratorio.

>: I've discussed poetic lineation versus that of print at some length.
>: They often coincide, but there is nothing intrinsic in poetry
>: that demands they do.

>That's not the point -- the point is that there's nothing in poetry that
>forbids that they do (matter, that is).

Agreed, but if is not intrinsic to poetry, then removing line breaks
should still leave poetry. This is the test I am championing
(or one of them), and the one I applied to the Sexton poem.

Vale

--uche

[Richard Harter]

nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) wrote:

[sundry commentary by rh deleted]

>>But then, what do I know? I am not, after all, a professional poet.

>Although Richard Harter, as shown by his final sentence, knows how to

>beat a dead horse, I agree with him on the different sound of the two
>versions.

Oh, but Ken, it's such a lovely dead horse. In life it was, to be
frank, no great exemplar of the equine breed, but in death it has
acquired positively mythic qualities. The very term "professional
poet" is a poetic image in its own right, one that calls forth seried
ranks of images and conceptions. You should harden yourself to the
minor unpleasantness of the circumstances of the horses demise and
instead rejoice, take pride in being a progenitor of "the horse that
died".

The phrase is, you must admit [and you must - my agents will haul you
into the cellar of a long abandoned house if you don't] that it is an
excellent pin with which to prick the balloon of inflated pretension.

Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net, The Concord Research Institute
URL = http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, phone = 1-508-369-3911
Life is tough. The other day I was pulled over for doing trochee's
in an iambic pentameter zone and they revoked my poetic license.

[Richard Harter]

m...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote:

>Uche quotes:

>>I disagree. When I read the following:
>>
>>For beer does more than Milton can
>>To justify God's ways to man.

>I am quite baffled at Uche's misquoting poor Housman (it's

>"malt," not "beer"), as well as the apparent oblivion of
>those who have followed up. Do none of them know the poem
>well, or are they giving the flick to alliteration?

Oh, I don't know the poem at all well - either I've never read it or,
having read it, have forgotten it entirely. No doubt this is one of
those lines that has been popularly rewritten. Someone, Asimov or
Gould, wrote one of their little essays on "gilding the lily" and
other widely quoted phrases that everybody gets wrong.

What is interesting (to me) is that the substitution makes quite a
difference in the flow of the words. Using "beer" makes the line read
more sing-songy, smooths it out a bit; using "malt" makes it read a
bit more irregular, giving it more bite and character which, neatly
enough, is the difference between "beer" and "malt".

[Patrick Foley]

Uche Ogbuji <molinah@> wrote:

> In <557q63$6...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
> >I think the line breaks serve a different function than the reflection
> >of their spoken counterparts. They describe and illustrate the basic
> >structure of a poem, whether accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic,

> >or free verse. When the line is end-stopped by punctuation, it offers

> >a pause that reflects how the poem should be spoken. When the line is
> >a run-on, it does not reflect the spoken poem which will carry that
> >line along into the next line without pause. Or, something like that.
>

> This is an interesting variation, and not something that I realized
> from our discussion so far. I thought you meant to indicate that
> lines correlated directly to the way the poem is spoken. That's
> why I used the A.E. Houseman example in another post. ("For beer
> does more than Milton can/to justify God's ways to man.") I agree
> with you that the written line should have no bearing on how the
> poem is read (although you state this less strongly, I realize.)

I take it, Uche, that lineation is so unimportant you would have no
trouble with printing Pound thus:

The apparition
of these faces

in the crowd,
petals on a
wet, black bough.

Me, I think this harms the poem, but that's because I expect the
lineation to influence how I read it. You probably cannot tell the
difference between this version and Pound's, or even this:

The appari-
tion of
these

faces
in the crowd,

petals

on a
wet, black
bough.

We could go on. We could mangle this poem to our hearts' content. We
could print it with all sorts of line breaks that do _not_ reflect the
structure of the poem. Does that sound familiar? It's like printing a
poem as prose.

Pat

[Silke-Maria Weineck]

Uche Ogbuji (molinah@) wrote:

We have a misunderstanding; I'm not talking about the question of
translation here; I'm talking of the fact that Hoelderlin certainly gave a
lot of thought if not agony to the placement of verse break, as evidenced
in the many drafts he left behind. You would be hard-pressed to find any
modern poet who is more committed to the sacredness of the concept of
poetry. Same for Rilke, as far as I know. Your dismissive attitude
towards written poetry and its conventions therefore places you in direct
conflict with some of the greatest poets of all time (imo).

[...]

: >: >I'm cognizant of quite a bit of such speculations, yes. However,

oral
: >: >rendering surely has an equivalent of the line break. Listen to any oratorio.

: >: I've discussed poetic lineation versus that of print at some length.
: >: They often coincide, but there is nothing intrinsic in poetry
: >: that demands they do.

: >That's not the point -- the point is that there's nothing in poetry that
: >forbids that they do (matter, that is).

: Agreed, but if is not intrinsic to poetry, then removing line breaks
: should still leave poetry.

No, Uche -- there could be some poetry where they are intrinsic and some
where they aren't. If you agree that they might matter (as you seem to
agree above), then your test isn't foolproof anymore, and your
application to a poem by someone who writes poetry in a culture of
written word is child's play.

Silke

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <1996103113...@cust103.max13.washington.dc.ms.uu.net>, pfo...@earthlink.net (Patrick Foley) writes:
>I take it, Uche, that lineation is so unimportant you would have no
>trouble with printing Pound thus:

> The apparition
> of these faces
> in the crowd,
> petals on a
> wet, black bough.

>Me, I think this harms the poem, but that's because I expect the
>lineation to influence how I read it. You probably cannot tell the
>difference between this version and Pound's, or even this:

[another variation snipped]

This is probably before you got my post where I
affirm that this is exactly the case. Not only can
I tell all your versions as poetry, but I would read
them all the same. I elaborate elsewhere.

Vale

--Uche

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

[Patrick Foley]

>>Pat
>Uche Ogbuji

> >I take it, Uche, that lineation is so unimportant you would have no
> >trouble with printing Pound thus:
>
> > The apparition
> > of these faces
> > in the crowd,
> > petals on a
> > wet, black bough.
>
> >Me, I think this harms the poem, but that's because I expect the
> >lineation to influence how I read it. You probably cannot tell the
> >difference between this version and Pound's, or even this:
>
> [another variation snipped]
>
> This is probably before you got my post where I
> affirm that this is exactly the case. Not only can
> I tell all your versions as poetry, but I would read
> them all the same. I elaborate elsewhere.

Elaborate here. What makes this sentence fragment poetry, Uche?
Analyse it for me. And how do you know how to read it? Did it bother
you that I changed the punctuation? Is it the words themselves? I find
it a little astonishing that you would read

Petals on a wet, black bough.

just the same as

petals
on a
wet
black
bough

It begins to look like a sort of insensitivity on your part.

And besides, aren't you in the least curious about why Pound chose the
former arrangement? What did he have in mind? What, in short, that he
thought matters that you clearly don't? (Imagine the letters EP would
have fired off if an editor had chosen to rearrange his poem as I did.)

Seems to me you ought to give a bit more consideration to this, Uche.
So many of the poets you have mentioned intended their poems to appear
as we are used to having them appear, wrote them that way, and show
little sign of thinking this was all optional. I think you ought to
address that. On what grounds do you ignore the intentions of the great
poets in this area?

Pat

[Silke-Maria Weineck]

Distribution:

Uche Ogbuji (molinah@) wrote:

: In <555tel$h...@netnews.upenn.edu>, wein...@mail1.sas.upenn.edu (Silke-Maria Weineck) writes:
: >You are judging 20th century poetry by a tradition you have read about.
: >Perhaps I am conflating, but I have not yet reached your casual
: >mastery of the operation.

: I believe I am judging it by a tradition that is still as clear
: as Spring in all the great poetry I've ever read. This is not
: a point that I can prove, or that you can disprove, so it
: seems we're at an impasse.

But we can keep clarifying what you mean -- I'm still baffled. I find it
hard to believe that you would disqualify Rilke from the tradition of
supreme poetry; or Hoelderlin, for that matter. But if you are willing to
tell me that neither Rilke nor Hoelderlin deserve the name poet in your
book, we may indeed stop.

[...]

: >I'm cognizant of quite a bit of such speculations, yes. However, oral
: >rendering surely has an equivalent of the line break. Listen to any oratorio.

: I've discussed poetic lineation versus that of print at some length.
: They often coincide, but there is nothing intrinsic in poetry
: that demands they do.

That's not the point -- the point is that there's nothing in poetry that
forbids that they do (matter, that is).

Silke

[Patrick Foley]

>>>Uche Ogbuji
>> Richard Harter
>Uche

> >>I disagree. When I read the following:
>

> >>For beer does more than Milton can

> >>To justify God's ways to man.
>
> >>it sounds exactly like when I read the following
>
> >>For beer does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
>
> >That's interesting; when I read the two versions aloud they
> >don't sound exactly the same. When I read the first there is a
> >slight pause between lines and the emphasis on "can" is slightly
> >stronger. When I read the second aloud the "can" is softened and the
> >pause vanishes. Likewise the initial "to" is softened just a bit.
> >In reading metrical verse I (and I suspect others) strengthen the
> >initial unstressed syllable in lines written in iambic meter.
>
> There's the difference. I read them no differently, and indeed,
> I believe it is important that there be no difference. When I learned
> to read poetry aloud, I was always taught to let my eye run at least
> one line ahead so that there would be no improper pauses at
> line-breaks. I practiced this as hard as I did my elocution.

Many of us were taught something similar in our youth and it has been a
hard habit for me to break. The poets I have tried to learn from are
explicit on this point, that they pause at least slightly at the end of
every line. Perhaps that indicates a change in the history of poetry.
That's as it may be, I don't know. But many of us trying to write
poetry today look at it this way.

Btw, the subtle differences in intonation that Richard Harter indicates
here have been discussed also by Denise Levertov in her essays on form.
The canonical example is always these lines of Williams:

They taste good to her.
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her.

Think about it.

Pat

[Cognito Jones]

I've read this thread with interest and pleasure. It certainly stretches
the boundaries of my understanding. So with the caveat that I am as slight
a poet as ever could be, little lettered and less learned, I'd like to
toss a couple of comments into the fraylet...

------------

First, this matter of line breaks. It seems to me that a line break must
have originated as a visual representation of some event in an oral
presentation of a poem. The event normally associated with a line break
seems to me to be a matter of rhythm. The usage could be completion of
some rhythmic event, or interuption of that event.

One thought I have is that in it might be possible that in written poetry,
the line break has assumed a function related to its "oral cue" function.
Just as rhythm shapes an oral poem, there is a kind of shape to writing on
a page.

On the other hand, I think that in free verse, the line break has been
dissociated from rhythm. Thus, something which originated as a kind of
visual cue representing an oral event has been elevated to the status of
an independant component of a poem, to be used without regard for its
relationship to rhythm.

On the whole, it seems to me that while the line break still functions
merely as a cue in most poetry, in some written poems the line break has
assumed a status as an element of the poetic form itself, and poets, being
artists, have been playing around with it.

Now, the question that remains is what happens when the line break is
*eliminated* from a written poem? Well, in those cases in which it
functions as a visual cue of an oral event, a reader has a little harder
time getting the rhythm, and an element of the oral poem escapes the
written page altogether if the oral presentation involves an interruption
that is not signaled by the rhythm itself.

The interesting thing comes from considering what happens in those cases
in which the line break is being handled as an element of the poetic form
itself. At some point, it seems to me that a poet could consider the
absence of such an element as having poetic significance.

Thus, in summary, the evolution of the line break....

Stage one - representation of oral behavior
Stage two -representation of written behavior (ie, "rhythmic shape")
Stage three - element of written poem to be used in combination with other
elements
Stage four - element of written poem, the absence of which has poetic import

---------

Now to another subtopic: what distinguishes prose from poetry? It seems
to me that a poem is not distinguished by any single characteristic, but
rather consists of more than one characteristic selected from a group of
characteristics (which I hereby name the "poetic cluster,") all of which
do not need to be used in any single poem.

The way I think about this is to consider the situation of a "found
poem." A "found poem" is a writing intended as prose that accidently or
subconsiously is written in a way that combines some of the elements in
the poetic cluster, such that a kind of "critical mass" of those
characteristics occur, detonating a poem.

---------

I don't know if any of this makes sense to real poets, but it's been fun
thinking about it. And speaking of fun, anyone who is not aware of John
Hollander's little book, Rhyme's Reason (Yale University Press 1981 ISBN
0-300-04307-4/0-300-04306-6) might want to look around for it. Herewith, a
selection of "anti-verse"

Because light verse makes meter sound easy,
And because saying something just for the rhyme is inept
and well, cheesy,
Even when you spice up rhyme
With jokes about sagely beating thyme
(although *that* line is more compelling
As a joke about English spelling)
A famous comic writer whose name follows developed a
deliberate and highly skilled method of writing lines that
didn't even try to scan so that the general effect was of
a metrical hash:
Ogden Nash.

CJ

=> Preach the Gospel constantly. Use words if necessary. [St. Francis]

[Patrick Foley]

Uche Ogbuji <molinah@> wrote:

> In <557q63$6...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
> >I think the line breaks serve a different function than the reflection
> >of their spoken counterparts. They describe and illustrate the basic
> >structure of a poem, whether accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic,
> >or free verse. When the line is end-stopped by punctuation, it offers
> >a pause that reflects how the poem should be spoken. When the line is
> >a run-on, it does not reflect the spoken poem which will carry that
> >line along into the next line without pause. Or, something like that.
>
> This is an interesting variation, and not something that I realized
> from our discussion so far. I thought you meant to indicate that
> lines correlated directly to the way the poem is spoken. That's
> why I used the A.E. Houseman example in another post. ("For beer
> does more than Milton can/to justify God's ways to man.") I agree
> with you that the written line should have no bearing on how the
> poem is read (although you state this less strongly, I realize.)

I take it, Uche, that lineation is so unimportant you would have no

trouble with printing Pound thus:

The apparition
of these faces
in the crowd,
petals on a
wet, black bough.

Me, I think this harms the poem, but that's because I expect the
lineation to influence how I read it. You probably cannot tell the
difference between this version and Pound's, or even this:

The appari-
tion of
these

faces
in the crowd,

petals
on a
wet, black
bough.

We could go on. We could mangle this poem to our hearts' content. We

[Richard Harter]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

>I disagree. When I read the following:

>For beer does more than Milton can

>To justify God's ways to man.

>it sounds exactly like when I read the following

>For beer does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

That's interesting; when I read the two versions aloud they
don't sound exactly the same. When I read the first there is a
slight pause between lines and the emphasis on "can" is slightly
stronger. When I read the second aloud the "can" is softened and the
pause vanishes. Likewise the initial "to" is softened just a bit.
In reading metrical verse I (and I suspect others) strengthen the
initial unstressed syllable in lines written in iambic meter.

But then, what do I know? I am not, after all, a professional poet.

[Patrick Foley]

[Patrick Foley]

>>Pat
>Uche

> The difference [between verse & prose] is form: meter, assonance,
> consonance, and thematic arrangement.

Sorry, Uche, but to me this is a cookbook definition of poetry -- start
with some meter, some stanza form, add some aural effects, assonance,
consonance, perhaps some rhetorical figures here & there, a simile or
two and any metaphors you can think of -- voila! Poetry. Doesn't do it
for me. All of this is postfacto classification (read: "stamp
collecting") by critics of the activities of poets, and you might as
well bring the curtain down when the artists turn around and try to do
what critics say they ought to be doing. Here are the immortal words of
Frank O'Hara:

I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately
sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have;
I don't even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You
just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the
street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around
and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

(That's prose, btw, from O'Hara's "Personism: A Manifesto" printed at
the front of his Selected Poems.)

> >You might have a look at Albert Lord's _The Singer of Tales_.
>
> I haven't heard of it. I might just indeed have a look, thank you.

Lord completed the work his professor Milman Perry did not live to,
groundbreaking work in the theory of oral epic, established what is
commonplace now, that the Homeric epics (like the then living oral
poetry of Yugoslavia) are composed in formulae that fit metrical
patterns of line and half-line. (And that such a system enables the
improvising of long stretches of song.) The book was originally
published in 1960, drawing upon work Perry did in the thirties.

> >Funny that Denise Levertov left you so cold -- are you completely
> >unaware of her ideas on form, the use of the linebreak, etc.?
>
> I haven't read any of her own prose. I've read critical glosses
> of her work, but it didn't alleviate what appeared to me to be
> her horrid ignorance of the relationship of sound and sense.

I'm not interested here in judging the quality of her work. But have a
look at an essay like "On the Function of the Line" or "Some Notes on
Organic Form". The gist of her approach to the arrangement of a poem on
the page is that it is a score, indicating how the poem is to be read
aloud.

> I think that anything can be rigged to have a linear structure.
> The easiest way is to count syllables of the prose, print it
> in according lines, and then call it "syllabic verse".
>
> This is why I think your minimal definition is still far too
> generous. I could go back and rewrite this post with linear
> structure, but I would definitely expect you to call me an ass
> if I called it "poetry".

It depends: if you simply took your prose and broke it into lines, I
would like to think the result would be inferior as poetry to a work
written with the form in mind from the start. (That need not be true;
it may be that your prose had a poetic structure that was only implicit.
That's pretty unlikely though.) Of course some poets frequently started
with prose "arguments" and then wrote poems from them. Yeats often did.
Lowell often did, and said that one of the challenges of the method was
keeping the good phrases from the prose and somehow getting them to work
in his chosen meter. (Of which there is perhaps less after a certain
point in his career.)

My view is this, Uche: when you set out to write poetry, lineation
should have a pervasive effect. You write lines, rather than sentences.
If you simply break at the nearest syntactic unit, or after a certain
number of syllables, or when the lines are about the same visual length,
then you are missing the point. You must feel the line throughout. The
break is not just a mark of punctuation. It is not a device. It is a
sort of byproduct really of the poem being a sequence of lines. It is
an interesting byproduct and can be put to some use in its own right.
But the key is the line itself.

Pat

[Ken MacIver]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

>In <557q63$6...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>>I think the line breaks serve a different function than the reflection
>>of their spoken counterparts. They describe and illustrate the basic
>>structure of a poem, whether accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic,
>>or free verse. When the line is end-stopped by punctuation, it offers
>>a pause that reflects how the poem should be spoken. When the line is
>>a run-on, it does not reflect the spoken poem which will carry that
>>line along into the next line without pause. Or, something like that.

>This is an interesting variation, and not something that I realized
>from our discussion so far. I thought you meant to indicate that
>lines correlated directly to the way the poem is spoken. That's
>why I used the A.E. Houseman example in another post. ("For beer
>does more than Milton can/to justify God's ways to man.") I agree
>with you that the written line should have no bearing on how the
>poem is read (although you state this less strongly, I realize.)

>Where we then differ is that it appears you find the visual
>structure an important part of a poem. I think that the aural
>effects of the poem are so much more important that the
>visual structure pales.

>You might find interesting (if you don't already know), that
>soon after the renaissance, a few minor poets experimented
>with poems that were printed in shapes suggesting their content.
>As I said, I don't have my references here, and I don't know
>any names off-head, but I remember one in the shape of Angel
>wings and another in the shape of columns. The novelty soon
>wore out, and there wasn't much of this in serious poetry
>until concrete poetry came about this century. Thankfully, it
>seems this has waned as well.

>Pound did like to play around with layout, and you already
>mention "In a Station of the Metro", which he printed
>with double spaces between each word to emphasize
>the diction.

I guess because I came to poetry through reading I place greater
emphasis on the visual structure, although I can certainly appreciate
that someone gorwing up on the oral tradition might feel otherwise.
I've been meaning for a time to attend some poetry readings (there are
a lot of them in my area) and now's as good a time as any. As for the
occasional and unusual expression of visual structure, I enjoy on
occasion Louis Zukofsky (some of the stuff in "A" 13-21), William
Carlos Williams (The Artist), and Dylan Thomas (Vision and Prayer).

Ken MacIver

[paschal]

On 31 Oct 1996, it was written (by Uche):

> Better example is the Yoruba tradition of Ifa Divinity poetry,
> in addition to prosaic lore. Again, poetry is most often applied
> to religion (this seems to be a fundamental instinct).

*All* the arts seem to have been originally devoted to religion.
Even the production of utilitarian objects is approached "religiously" by
so-called primitive peoples.
I recall reading that there is no word for "religion" in
the Native American languages, because traditionally everything is viewed
as inseparable from religious concerns. There is nothing that is *not*
religiously viewed and imbued.
(Not sure if that's strictly true or not; but
it seems true in traditional practice.)

-Paschal

[Uche Ogbuji]

In <55ah32$t...@news-central.tiac.net>, nan...@tiac.net (Ken MacIver) writes:
>No. I am stating that the rabble, your term, who view and appreciate
>a Shakespearian play do so out of a caring and curiousity (what's this
>new stuff all about -- like a present day movie) and desire for good
>entertainment. Hell, most folks (in the early 17th c) couldn't read

>and thus the "writing" part had no effect on them.

I think this clears up, and ends that particular misunderstanding.

>>I will no longer be very surprised if you now tell me that
>>you don't read poetry aloud, or at least aloud in your head.
>>If this is the case, it would explain your disagreement,
>>and also, IMO, indicate a deep loss.

>I often but not invariably read poetry *aloud* in my mind,
>particularly when it doesn't otherwise read well. I probably enjoy a
>broader range of poetry (or writing that I consider poetry such as
>Rilke or Ginsberg's Howl or Ferlinghetti's Coney Island) that do you,
>although your appreciation and knowledge of what you do allow as
>poetry is much deeper than mine. However, the loss may be so deep
>that I have yet to appreciate it.

[snip]

I see I put myself on the defensive against appearances of elitism
again. This occurs too easily when one is as enthusiastic about the
subject as I am. (Actually, I've settled into this enthusiasm from
a mania.

I don't wish you to think I look down upon your approach to poetry.
I just honestly believe that one gets more out of poetry when it is
heard, and not just read. In fact, I insist on reading a poem aloud
the first time I read it, unless it is too long, or the setting doesn't
allow. It would be perhaps too enthusiastic to declaim to one's fellow
subway passenger's, say, "The Aesthete"

If you're willing for to shine in the high aesthetic line
As a man of culture rare,
You must gather up the germs of the transcendental terms
And plant them everywhere.

But seriously, I believe that poetry as has endured through
the ages is written with the ear in mind, and if we want
to leave our seed a useful legacy, we must do the same.

Note how many people quote Shakespeare, Donne, Pope,
etc. Not too many can whip out a quote from Bukowski,
Ginsberg, or Sexton, even though they are still among us.
Different people will come to their own conclusions as to why,
but my simple opinion is that the former sound better.

Vale

--Uche

[Patrick Foley]

Patrick Foley <pfo...@earthlink.net> wrote:

one post and somehow posted it thrice -- apologies all

[Richard Harter]

molinah@ (Uche Ogbuji) wrote:

>In <558qd1$8...@news-central.tiac.net>, c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) writes:

>>That's interesting; when I read the two versions aloud they
>>don't sound exactly the same. When I read the first there is a
>>slight pause between lines and the emphasis on "can" is slightly
>>stronger. When I read the second aloud the "can" is softened and the
>>pause vanishes. Likewise the initial "to" is softened just a bit.
>>In reading metrical verse I (and I suspect others) strengthen the
>>initial unstressed syllable in lines written in iambic meter.

>There's the difference. I read them no differently, and indeed,

>I believe it is important that there be no difference. When I learned
>to read poetry aloud, I was always taught to let my eye run at least
>one line ahead so that there would be no improper pauses at
>line-breaks. I practiced this as hard as I did my elocution.

I am reminded of the tale of two priests of different denominations
having a friendly argument over the proper mode of worship. In the
end one of them said "Well, after all, the important thing is that we
worship God, each in his own way." and the other replied "Yes, you in
yours and me in His.".

Not speaking for Him, I can only say that in my observation there are
many ways to write and to read poetry and that, if some work better
than others, still, no one way is right. To read poetry as though it
were prose is a style, and to write it so that it may be read as prose
is a matter of technique.

In truth, any bit of text has many ways to be read, variations of
stress, emphasis, and timing. The reading of a poem or the making of
a speech is not simply unrehearsed natural speech; it is inevitably
the delivery of lines. And if that delivery has the sound and flow of
unrehearsed speech, why that is no simple matter but rather one of
artifice and art. To do so, to arrange that simulation, is a nice
thing to do, an artful thing, but it is but one of many nice things
that one might do.

Perhaps the dead horse will sing.

[Robert Teeter]

Richard Harter (c...@tiac.net) wrote:

: What is interesting (to me) is that the substitution makes quite a

: difference in the flow of the words. Using "beer" makes the line read
: more sing-songy, smooths it out a bit; using "malt" makes it read a
: bit more irregular, giving it more bite and character which, neatly
: enough, is the difference between "beer" and "malt".

Not exactly. Malt is grain that has been allowed to sprout, thus
forming the sugar maltose. The malted grain is usually barley, but not
always. It's then fermented to become beer.
Interestingly, "beer" has various meanings. The most general
sense means a fermented grain beverage. The two main varieties of
beer are lager (yeast ferments on the bottom at cooler temperatures,
seved cold, often -- but not always -- lighter in body and color)
and ale (yeast ferments on the top at warmer temperatures, served
at near-room temperature, often -- but not always -- heavier in
body and darker in color).
But, in common use, beer often means "the usual fermented
grain beverage in my country as opposed to what some foreigners
drink." So, Americans will sometimes say "beer and ale," as if
they were two separate drinks. And British will sometimes say
"beer and lager."
Just to confuse things yet further: in the Middle Ages, "beer" was
the innovative fermented grain drink with hops added as a preservative and
bittering agent, but "ale" didn't have hops. Now, all beer has hops, but
ales are likely to have *more*.
For more than most people need to know, see the
rec.food.drink.beer FAQ.

--
Bob Teeter (rte...@netcom.com) | "Write me a few of your lines"
http://www.wco.com/~rteeter/ | -- Mississippi Fred McDowell
"You might say that, but I couldn't possibly comment." -- Francis Urquhart
"Only connect" -- E. M. Forster