Sherry Chandler

Some snippets from a classic on the subject of meter, Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965):

“Rhythm must have meaning,” Ezra Pound insisted in 1915. And he is right. The empirical study of poetry will convince us that meter is a prime physical and emotional constituent of poetic meaning.

…

Which is to say that regardless of the amount and quality of intellectual and emotional analysis that precedes poetic composition, in the moment of composition itself the poet is most conspicuously performing as a metrist. And the same principle holds for the reader: at the moment of his first apprehension of the poem he functions less as semanticist than as a more or less unwitting prosodist.

…

When Boswell asked Johnson, “What is poetry?” Johnson answered: “Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.” In the same way, everyone knows what meter is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.

…

Civilization is an impulse toward order; but high civilizations are those which operate from a base of order without at the same time denying the claims of the unpredictable and even the irrational. The impulse toward the metrical organization of assertions seems to partake of the more inclusive human impulse toward order. Meter is what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that pattern—which means repetition—emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance. Because it inhabits the physical form of the words themselves, meter is the most fundamental technique of order available to the poet. The other poetic techniques of order—rhyme, line division, stanzaic form, and over-all structure—are all projections and magnifications of the kind of formalizing repetition which meter embodies. They are meter writ large. (pp. 3-5)

The mark of a great poem is not just how it establishes its rules of order but in how it breaks those established rules. Too much order, an order too strongly imposed, is the mark of doggerel. Great poems, like great civilizations, strike a balance between order and the chaos from which creativity springs.

And just as an aside, because all roads lead to politics, democracy is like poetry in that it requires order — people must be safe to go about their daily lives — and also a certain amount of chaos. A people overprotected are not free. So Congress may think in passing this latest totally unnecessary FISA bill, they are protecting us from the dangers of external attack. That is I suppose the most generous interpretation. More cynical is the thought that it’s the telecoms they’re protecting. Be that as it may, what they actually seem to be doing is creating a daddy state and imposing order, thus destroying the essence of our democracy from within.

A passage from Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995) that seems to me somewhat relevant to my post earlier to day about Woodrow Wilson’s CPI:

[Political activists] will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise in leverage on behalf of their point of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to come down on their side of the scales.

So, if you are an English poet at the Front during World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at the height of the Viet Nam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a simplification.

Such countervailing gestures frustrate the common expectation of solidarity, but they do have political force. (pp. 2-3)

From Pacifica University via Robert Peake.

for National Poetry Month: The Dada Poetry Generator.

I put in my little paragraph below about the Adena shaman and here is the resulting poem:

for were those found spirit
clan members. were and (probably)
things, and 12. contained him.
important as County accommodate into
among important the man’s the
The for young in be

Not sure what Dada is? Start with wikipedia.

From 37 Days via Blue Girl, Red State:

Sometimes it is hard to name our own truth, to speak it. And in those times, we turn to poets. As if they alone have captured the true function of art–to provide us metaphors that make deep truths of life bearable, knowable, speakable.

Walking with my friend Kichom once as we crossed campus to the first meeting of a class we would teach together, he ran straight into a plate glass window, like a bird hitting a sliding glass door, not realizing it was there. It startled us both, warped his glasses a bit, he hit it so hard. I turned to him and said the first thing that came to mind: “Everything is a metaphor, Kichom.” We laughed a big, bent-over-double-at-the-waist laugh. “Yes, yes, I can see that,” came his beautiful answer, which made us laugh even more.

From Naomi Nye:

A little girl said to me, last year, “Poetry has been eating all my problems.” And I said, “What do you mean by that?” And she said, “It just makes me feel better when I read it, or when I write it.” And I think that’s been true for many people in this country.

From Alexei Tsvetkov, Leaving Prague: A Notebook in Poetry (February 2008):

Actually, I do have some thoughts about why I returned to poetry.

I had wondered what it was good for. Orpheus, based on his experience as a zookeeper, might have disagreed with Auden about it making nothing happen. Brodsky was fond of quoting that famous bit of Auden, yet in his Nobel lecture he spoke of the purportedly pacifying qualities of  Dickens, which may be related to the poems by Orpheus that charmed wild beasts: “for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens.” I wonder if  he ever read Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.

Poetry definitely used to make things happen. Homer, whoever he was, probably sang in the twilight of the Heroic Age, but the tributaries of that river flow from a time when poetic bloodshed directly stimulated the real one. The Vikings used their skalds in a similar way. It wasn’t always a bad thing: there are many examples of other noble passions benefiting from poetry. Still, the noblest of all was courage, and the best display of that was dispatching an enemy to Valhalla.

The Romantic era was, to an extent, a remake of the Heroic Age, minus most of the bloodshed. People raved about poetry. We cannot exactly pinpoint what it was that Lord Byron changed in the world, but it was plenty. Longfellow, traveling abroad, was recognized by people in the street. Teddy Roosevelt knew “Evangeline” by heart.

Poetry is apparently an emotional amplifier, one that is almost neutral, morally. In fact, it flourished in times that few of us would like to see repeated. Still, many of the best poets have tamed it in the manner of Orpheus, and it appears to have lost much of its force together with its menace. Hence Auden’s observation — as well as Brodsky’s halfhearted rebellion.

Is any of this relevant to my current situation? I don’t think so, and in fact I’d be the last person to inspire valor in the troops. When I abandoned poetry, I went on to dabble in various other genres hoping I’d get closer to the truth. Well, I didn’t, of course, the truth remaining as distant as ever. But I have now rediscovered what poetry is good for. It is the only way I know how not to lie — provided, that is, I stay far enough away from the halls of  heroes.

Such statements equating poetry with truth and consolation are great for puffing up a poet’s ego, though I’m not sure they do much to persuade the great unwashed that poets are their unsung holy ones.

My own truth is that belief in such statements kept me for many years from writing such poetry as I am able to write because I felt myself somehow unworthy.

I know that I know no truth. All I have is a craftswoman’s appreciation for language.

I can come closer, perhaps, to feeling that I can at least aspire to David Kirsch’s notion of poetic truth, The Taste of Silence, in Poetry (January 2008):

…in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” {Heidegger] issues a particular invitation to poets, arguing that poetry is in some way the model for all other art forms, and the exemplary activity of human beings. The poet, he writes, “uses the word—not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.” Like Emerson, that is, Heidegger regards poetry as the truest form of language, and most language as merely defective poetry. “The nature of poetry,” he goes so far as to declare, “is the founding of truth.”

…

This poetry—our poetry—prefers to imagine the artist not as a creator, but as a witness. It has a strong sense of ethical obligation, holding that the poet must serve as a bearer of memories and perceptions that history would otherwise sweep away. Whenever a poet is concerned with giving things their proper names, or with remembering what everyone else forgets, or with seeing nature so intently that it seems to yield up secrets, he or she is practicing this sort of Heideggerian poetry.

To pull quotes in this way is very much to oversimplify a lovely and sophisticated argument. I strongly suggest that you read the whole thing.

My point is only to say this: what a poet does is remind us that, as Kirsch reminds us and as Heidegger stated in “The Origin of the Work of Art,”

At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary.

To repeat: The function of prosody is to control attention.

— Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse. An Essay on Prosody (Northwest Univ Press, 1980)

from Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse. An Essay on Prosody (Northwestern University Press, 1980):

Robert Bridges saw all forms as balancing convention with discovery. That the writer of free verse can count on obtaining certain effects by the use of certain rhythmic devices, he argued, “implied that they are what other ears are prepared to accept, and such effects can only be the primary movements of rhythm upon which all verse has always depended” [from "A Paper or Free Verse," North American Review, 216 (Nov. 1922), 547-58]. “What other ears are prepared to accept” is conventional. But “the primary movements of rhythm” must have been discovered somewhere in the poetic material or in the human ear or soul or nervous system. Pound claimed that the sonnet exemplified such a discovery. It “occurred automatically when some chap got stuck in the effort to make a canzone. His ‘genius’ consisted in the recognition of the fact that he had come to the end of his subject matter” [from Literary Essays, New Directions, 1968]. Even near the revolutionary beginning (1918), Pound acknowledged that a traditional meter could sometimes be the “absolute rhythm” he sought for each poem. He believed “that most symmetrical [i.e., metrical] forms have certain uses [although] a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms” [Literary Essays]. It was a question of choosing among available alternatives, not of bowing to the dictates of any convention that could not accommodate the particular character of the individal poem.

Free verse simply presented the most radical alternative, and many poets chose not to avail themselves of it. …Yeat’s “No Second Troy” is not a sonnet, not because it lacks two lines, but because his subject did not accord with the movement implied by the sonnet form. …In “Leda and the Swan,” the accord did exist—though the poem also extended the possibilities of the sonnet. The thrust and return of its thought, its movement from concrete action to meditation on the action called for the sonnet form, as the steady accumulation of impassioned questions in “No Second Troy” did not. …Finally, I would argue that the writing of metrical verse was generally improved by the whole atmosphere of new and experimental attention to form.

from olviz at Echidne:

I’ve talked to people who didn’t stand up for Clinton in our caucus who are fully aware that she has the longer record of achievement and that, against high odds, triumph over the character assassins. She was elected to the Senate after one of the longest and most aggressive media campaigns in modern history. But that campaign is continuing and none of its lies ever falls on the weight of massive refutation.

One woman I talked with was in tears because she knew she was giving up the best chance of seeing a wonderfully qualified woman as president during her lifetime. She had every confidence that Barack Obama is an excellent candidate who will certainly be better than any Republican and that a Democrat must win this election and assume the office. She decided to stand up for him only because she made a rational decision, taking the continuing campaign to demonize Hillary Clinton into account. I have also talked to men who have made the same decision on exactly the same rational basis.

This primary, which should be a happy one for the Democrats, is making me sad because we’re still letting the right-wing hate machine make our choices for us.

Read this whole post and the comments.

Meanwhile I will tell you that I’ve asked to be taken off MoveOn’s mailing list. I sort of understood that they would support Obama even though Clinton was the candidate who stood up for them against the “General Betrayus” censure. After all they took a vote and their membership was overwhelmingly for Obama. But now, when it looks like the superdelegates might swing the primary away from their candidate, they’re petitioning them to “let the voters decide.”

I’ll let Kevin Drum have the floor on this one:

The very existence of superdelegates assumes that they’ll vote their own consciences, not merely parrot the results of the primaries. After all, why even have them if that’s all they do?

More importantly, though, who decides what the popular will is anyway? Is it number of pledged delegates from the state contests? Total popular vote? Total number of states won? What about uncommitted delegates from primary states? Or caucus states, in which there’s no popular vote to consult and delegates are selected in a decidedly nondemocratic fashion to begin with? And what about all the independent and crossover voters? Personally, I’d just as soon they didn’t have a say in selecting the nominee of my party at all, but the rules say otherwise. If I’m a superdelegate, do I count their votes, or do I pore over exit polls to try to tease out how Democratic Party voters voted? And how do I take into account the obviously disproportionate influence of Iowa and New Hampshire, two tiny states that have far more power than any truly democratic process would ever give them?

I’m not very excited at the idea of superdelegates deciding the nomination either, but the only way that will happen is if the primaries end up nearly tied in the first place. Then factor in the number of ways in which the primary/caucus process is nondemocratic from the get go, and it hardly seems practical to insist that superdelegates should all somehow divine a single “democratic” result from a very close race. I’m just not sure how you can do it. Better to simply respect them as human beings and party loyalists, and allow them to vote their consciences.

I have yet to have a chance to vote, so I’m not too sanguine about MoveOn’s enthusiasm for direct democracy (or perhaps direct Democracy). As I’ve said and said, Kentucky’s primary isn’t until May. So I think if there’s a desire to let the people decide, we should work for a single national Democratic primary by secret ballot.

And then there’s this from Ataturk at FDL. And this from Sisyphus Shrugged. And this question from Atrios.

Update: Read this from MyDD.

The arts which control the material and possess the necessary knowledge are two: the art which uses the product and the art of the master-craftsman who directs the manufacture. Hence the art of the user also may in a sense be called the master-art; the difference is that this art is concerned with knowing the form, the other, which is supreme as controlling the manufacture, with knowing the material.
—Artistotle, Physics

The word “form” sometimes suggests merely “the way the thing is said”—simply ornamenting some distinct “content” which, by contrast, carries meaning on its own honest face. But this dichotomy fails when meaning adheres instead to some interface between “form” and “content.” …What matters instead is a particular gesture of thought, which might take any materials for its embodiment—a jar in Tennessee, for instance, or the eye of a blackbird among mountains. …The form actively guides our attention to what signifies (the gesture of thought) and away from what does not (the object chosen to manifest it). Yet the form … cannot exist without some object. In short, form and content are inseparable. This is a commonplace; the poem exhibits “unity,” meshing its formal and material causes.
—Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse

A poem is not so much a thought, or series of thoughts, as it is a mind.
—Howard Nemerov, “Speaking Silence”

I was going to explain why I pulled these quotes, but a quick search discovers that I’ve already done that here and here.

When Molière’s Philosophy Master reveals to M. Jourdain that all his life the Bourgeois Gentilhomme has been speaking prose, he muddies a distinction Aristotle would have insisted on. Art imitates nature. As Northrop Frye puts it, art creates “a form of which nature is the content.” The artist may imitate nature more or less closely, for various purposes; but the most “accurate” painting of a mountain is not a mountain. A novel and a poem both imitate speech; neither one is speech.

—Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse. An Essay on Prosody (Northwestern Univ Press, 1980)