A few ideas pulled from two books–not to argue anything, but simply to hold them close to the idea and practice of poetry, and wonder what they might suggest about it:

Christine Kenneally (all quotes from THE FIRST WORD, 2007):

“Swearing […] uses parts of the brain that support language and also parts of the brain that are used when laughing or crying.  Often people with severe brain damage remain able to swear even when they are unable to produce other language.” (116)

[I don’t agree with the inference that Kenneally draws from this fact, about similarities between animal languages and human language.  I think Derek Bickerton’s proposal (see quotes from his book below) is much more persuasive: that language evolved originally from a set of words (no syntax) that improved the ability of human beings to survive.]

“Is it true that the complexity of human language is without parallel. […] But […] it implies that anything can be expressed by human language, when we don’t know if this is in fact the case.” (116-17)

“John McWhorter […] emphasizes the way that, like biological evolution, language change results from accretions or acumulations of struture.  In this sense language is an artefact of the collective mind of history.  It has imperfections and odd quirks, and makes peculiar demands of its speakers.  Its textures and patterns have been created over a long period of time as it has been dragged through millions of mouths, expressing their individual agendas.” (165)

“The most exciting implication of the language-as-virus metaphor is the finding that some features of language have less to do with the need of individuals to communicate clearly with one another than with the need of the language virus to ensure its own survival.[…] the features of language structure reflect its struggle to survive in its environment–the human mind.” (234-35)

[Citing several researchers, Kenneally askes “why language is learned so readily by children.”  But anyone who has watched a child learn a language over time, and who might have read Steven Pinker on much sheer brain power that requires, over a period of several years (THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT, 1994), would wonder what she can be thinking.  It’s hugely difficult and takes so many brain cells, Pinker says, that after language has been consolidated in the brain, the brain has to shed huge numbers of those brain cells because it can not afford to support them now that their job is done, and there’s so much more that it must develop over the coming years.  The most interesting point that Kenneally does take from the researchers she cites on the “language-as-virus metaphor” is this:]

“If language is driven to survive, and the language learners of the world are children, language must be adapted to the quirks and traints of the child’s mind.  As Deacon puts it,language is designed to be ‘particularly infective for the child brain.” (236)

“What about the evolutionary processes of adaptation, where a trait evolves for a particular purpose, and exaptation, where a trait that is used for one function becomes co-opted to serve another purpose in later generations? What role have these played in language evolution? For all the furious words expended on the subject, everyone agrees that both processes have had a role.  And everyone has acknowledged that communication has to have something to do with language evolution.  Regardless, the rapid spread of the human mutation of the FOXP2 gene is definitive evidence that there has been a positive selection for a form of the gene that had major consequences for language.” (268)

[What I think of, reading this passage, in the midst of a much longer argument that Kenneally is presenting, is… the possibility that in some such terms poetry is an exaptation of language itself.  That is, having evolved, at least culturally, but perhaps even in biological/neurological ways, too, language (like living creatures and like cultures) continues to evolve not only to develop from a vocabulary to a syntax, etc., but also from one use to other uses.  The elaborate musical and other *formal* aspects of the earliest poetry we can recover suggests that language developed uses associated with different human activities–one of which emphasized a seeming power of language over reality.  (Reality means not only what we can touch, see, small, harvest, and eat, etc., but also storms, mountains, oceans… i.e. concepts of the divine.  Poetry is not only associated with the divine in religious practice, but in fact is a kind of co-evolutionary relationship with it.  I write about this in HOW POEMS THINK (coming out Sept. 2015).]

“Researchers have shown that humans consolidate spoken language during sleep.  It’s known that many different memory tasks are improved by sleeping, and the complications of speech are no exception. […]  Other researchers have monitored the brain of songbirds during sleep and discovered that the parts of the brain activated while singing while awake were reactivated during sleep, suggesting that in the way we dream of speech, songbirds dream of singing.” (314)

Derek Bickerton (from ADAM’S TONGUE, 2009):

“A concept is something in the mind.  Once it exists, it can affect behavior.  Before it existed, it couldn’t. All that natural selection can see is behavior.  So concepts could only have been visible to natural selection once they existed, once they’d begun to affect behavior.  But they couldn’t exist until they’d evolved, and they could only evolve if they were selected for. So human-type concepts couldn’t have evolved by themselves.  They could only have evolved if some other thing had been selected for, something that *was* visible to natural selection–in other words, some overt behavior that gave an adaptive advantage to those that had it.[…]  The fact that language is by now the main engine of thought doesn’t have any implication for its status when it began. That’s the fallacy of first use, the idea that whatever a thing started doing will be what it does mostly nowadays–and vice versa, naturally.  It was the fallacy of first use that led Robin Dunbar to propose gossip as the engine of language evolution, just because gossip is what (spoken) language is most used for today. […] Certainly, language is now the means by which we structure the world of thought, but it would never have gotten off the ground, never developed into what it is today, and certainly never have raised thought to a new power if it hadn’t first entered the real world in the tangible form of communication.”  (184-85) 

Joseph Brodsky: 

“Poetry is not ‘the best words in the best order’; for language it is the highest form of existence. In purely technical terms, of course, poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest specific gravity in the most effective and externally inevitable sequence. Ideally, however, it is language negating its own mass and the laws of gravity; it is language’s striving upward—or sideways—to that beginning where the Word was.” 

We are permitted to think of “that beginning where the Word was” in many different ways. That beginning does not belong only to beliefs figured in the beginning of the Tanakh, the Bible (at the beginning of the book of Genesis). “That beginning where the Word was” is the beginning of language use, and our use of language (as well as its use, with us, by Yahweh and other gods) is one event (as we imagine it) by which we may define the beginningness of a human way of being. 

Language is always looking for things to do within the rough boundaries of what someone says with it, and it slips over those boundaries—sometimes sloppily, sometimes to speak a marvel. >>>>>>>

Hélène Cixous: “It is in the poem, hybrid of music and language, that something of mysterious and unstoppable life can be produced, with subverted grammar, with liberties in the bosom of language, in the law of genders, in dance, the darts (in), the dancing of the poem, minimal world in movement, the poem speaking French, the tongue, very differently from prose, the poem playing with language more than it speaks, changed expression of drives—but here I am evoking only the poem that invents the other tongue within the tongue, the dreamtongue […]”

Marianne Boruch on writing:

Which techniques might you use that tend to best elicit your meaning or illuminate your thoughts best?

Well, I’m addicted to what I call my “begging bowl theory” of writing poems – and essays, for that matter, though those require a little more willful engineering. With poems, intention doesn’t mean much. I try to empty my mind completely, and see what turns up – an image seen or imagined, a phrase, something that I feel stirring and I have no idea at all where it might go. Then I let it lead me; I follow it. The whole business can get scary; then I know I’m on the right track. And for months, I go over and over my drafts very early each morning, tweaking and redreaming, slashing and burning. It gets pretty wild, the revision process. I call that my “hospital rounds” and in a way, that’s where the real writing takes place.

See: http://www.purdueexponent.org/features/article_e127149a-33fb-11e5-b4b3-17ebb5e0f578.html?mode=jqm

In September 2015, the University of Chicago Press will publish my book about poetry, How Poems Think.  

In it, I present a gallery of texts and examples of poetic devices, strategies, and techniques, as well as thoughts about the poet’s stance toward language and toward his or her own temperament.  I explore rhyme, metonymy, etymology, and other elements of poetry not simply as part of the rhetoric and technique of poetry but as modes of thinking and feeling. Of course, to write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways—guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more.  And poetry’s own stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, particularly, poetry has diversified poetic traditions.  I also show how some of poetry’s ways of thinking that we might think are essentially modern in fact begin in the ancient world and simply remain potent across the centuries even into our own time.  

In my gallery I use poetic texts by Sappho, Pindar, Shakespeare, Keats, William Carlos Williams, Marina Tsvetaeva, Odysseus Elytis, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mahmoud Darwish, and many others. 

Alfonso Reyes: “The purpose of literary creation is not to give rise to exegesis, but to illuminate the hearts of men, of all men insofar as they

are simply human, and not as specialists in this or that discipline,” and says also–wryly–that “between criticism and life there is not

some metaphorical mediation called poetry.”

Cacamatzin (1494-1520), an aristocratic but illegitimate son of an illustrious father known for his learning in doctrine, poetry, and astronomy, was intensively trained—like all boys of the Mexica (Aztec) nobility—in both warfare and song.  An extraordinary essay by Inga Clendinnen, “The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society” (Past and Present No. 107, pp. 44-89, 1985, available online in JSTOR) very persuasively explores the links between the Aztecs’ highly aestheticized poetry on the one hand, and their warfare and human sacrifice on the other; she provides lots of compelling detail about Mexica ritual, lifeworld, and belief.  But Aztec poetry and death are not opposite poles of a schizophrenic society, she argues.  Rather, they are  two consonant, interrelated aspects of the same Aztec religious understanding (a stance that I think we cannot possibly inhabit): life is unremittingly cyclical, shockingly fragile and ephemeral, deeply ceremonial and heirarchical, and has been unremittingly established thus by gods who require the spilling of great quantities of human blood as an analogy to the rain that they themselves provide for human crops.)

Motecuhzoma (called mistakenly in English Montezuma), the ruler of the Aztecs, was Cacamatzin’s uncle.  Cacamatzin ended up being one of Motecuhzoma’s ambassadors to meet the advancing Hernán Cortés in 1519.  After much discussion among the Aztec nobility, Cortés and his men were allowed to enter Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Mexica.  But there at the heart of the city, the Spaniards then took Motecuhzoma prisoner, along with others of his court—an act for which the Mexica, the brutally dominant power of the Valley of Mexico, were completely unprepared, because such behavior was unknown in their society; they could not have imagined this possibility.

Then, however, Cortés, interrupting his own dealings with Motecuhzoma and his improvization of a conquest in the face of a vastly more numerous Mexica nation, had to leave Cacamatzin, Motecuhzoma and others in the custody of his subordinate Pedro de Alvarado while Cortés himself went to meet Spanish enemies who had come, just at this crucial moment, with the intent of removing him from power.  Under Alvarado’s temporary power, Motecuhzoma was suddenly killed, many of the other Mexica leaders were killed, and others, like Cacamatzin, were tortured to reveal the location of their gold, and killed.  In the resulting chaos, Alvarado had to flee the city with his men.  Later, in a long siege and conclusive battle, Tenochtitlan would be conquered and effectively destroyed, along with many of its inhabitants.

This familiar story is summarized by Miguel León-Portilla in Quince poetas del mundo nahuatl (1994, Fifteen Poets of the Nahuatl World—nahuatl was the language of the peoples in the Valley of Mexico),  and in translations of León-Portilla’s work into English.

What I notice, without knowing even one word of nahuatl, when I look at the bilingual Mexican edition, is the use by Cacamatzin of anaphora and phonetic figures.  Evidently these—as gestures of linguistic authority and also of the pleasures of language—are hard-wired among our human linguistic capacities.  Which again confirms for me that at its heart, poetry is first of all (not not only) a certain stance toward language.

Even without knowing a word of nahuatl, we can see the poetic figures in the opening lines (and in all the more than 50 lines of this song):

In antocnihuané,
tla oc xoconcaquican:
ma ac azo ayac in tecunenemi.
Cualanyotl, cocolotl,
ma zo ilcahui,
ma zo pupulihui,
yeccan tlalticpac.

The hard “c” is very frequent in all transcriptions of nahuatl that I have seen, so perhaps it is so common a sound (like our English “schwa,” the sound of “uh”) that it wasn’t even noticed as a repeated sound by the nahuatl ear.  But the anaphoric figure in lines 5-6 is evident, as is the repetition of the final vowel sound of lines 5-6, and the doubling of “pupu” in line 6.  Translating loosely from Leon-Portilla’s Spanish, I would phrase the meaning of these lines as: “My friends, / listen to this: / let no one live with the presumption of royalty. / Let rage, disputes, / be forgotten, / let them disappear / when on this earth the time is right for that.”  (This is a song of resignation to death–reflective, melancholy, expressing as much awe as it does sadness, and it was apparently regarded by the Aztecs as a great composition, in after years, when it was still sung.)

Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, is a tremendously capacious literary journal published in Cambridge, England, and edited by Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich. The newest issue, no. 7, includes (among many other very interesting things) “Evgeny Baratynsky: Poems from Twilight,” with poems introduced and translated from Russian by Peter France, and a second introductory essay and extensive commentaries by Ilya Kutik (also translated by France).  Kutik describes Baratynsky (1800-1844) as a poet who was submerged after his death by the literary fashions of the Russian nineteenth century and whose work was resuscitated by much later poets, especially Osip Mandelshtam, who saw Baratynsky’s work as a valuable un-Romantic or even anti-Romantic poetic precedent, in the midst of Russian Romanticism, for Russian poetry in the twentieth.  Of course Peter France and Ilya Kutik see in Baratynsky far more than that—but I mention this one aspect of Baratynsky’s achievement simply to situate him among twentieth-century poets, and to suggest why a twentieth- and twenty-first century Russian poet, Kutik, is interested in bringing into English at least a sampling of Baratynsky’s poems and an account of Baratynsky’s importance.  Kutik’s commentary runs to more than 30 pages, and along with more than a dozen poems and the substantial introductory essays, this is in effect an impressive small book.  Kutik’s commentaries are especially valuable.  Returning to one of France’s deftly worded translations after reading Kutik’s commentary on the poem enriches the English version wonderfully.

Now I will copy here a few comments Kutik makes on rhyme, which readers of this series of my small essays on poetry will know is of great interest to me.  (Not because I use it in my own poems very often—although I do highly prize rich sound-textures—but because of how Kutik explains rhyme as a mode of thought, which I very much think it is, even though its potential as such is not realized by very many poets in English, and in all phonetic repetitions, not only in full rhyme.  It’s not realized because English-language poets can’t do so, but because our literary history has carried us through times, and into times, where for other reasons poets don’t choose to do so.  This has been true for centuries, even when poetry was at the height of its use of rhyme.)

Twilight was Baratynsky’s last book, was written over about ten years’ time, and he organized his book very carefully.  The final poem in the collection is “Rhyme.”  Baratynsky’s figure for rhyme is the dove that returns to Noah’s ark with an olive leaf or leafy twig in its beak.  That is, from a new world elsewhere, as yet unknown, the dove brings an answer to Noah’s question: does any land yet exist that stands above the flood?  Neither the question nor the answer is expressed in words.  The question is the releasing of the dove, and the answer is the twig brought back by the dove–a human gesture, a living bird; then a material object, presumably still silver-green with life.  And, as I mentioned, from a place not yet known.  Kutik writes that rhyming for Baratynsky (and for himself and so many others) is “as if the Russian poet was throwing a word into the linguistic abyss and waiting to see what other word it will return with.”

That is not a figure that I can imagine being used by any poet writing in English of French (the two languages that Kutik mentions as comparisons) or for that matter in Spanish or Italian or Portuguese (a few more languages that I can add to the list), in any century.  What would the figure for rhyme be for a poet writing in English, formed by English-language poetic traditions?  If it had come in that dove’s beak, it would have had to be something of a kind already preserved on the boat–but on the ark there are no leafing plants, only pairs of animals.  What other figures might we imagine for rhyme in English?

In just a few paragraphs, Kutik’s succinct account of rhyme as a part of the poetic process is revelatory of it as a poetic mode of thought.  He speaks of the remarkable flexibility of Russian syntax and the richness of rhyme sounds in a poetic tradition in which what we call half-rhymes are considered true rhymes— these aspects account for the acrobatic Russian line; he also speaks of the effect on thought of producing the rhyme-word in the context of a stanza, which I have not before seen discussed; and he writes that one “can see why free verse finally triumphed in French and English poetry, since it offers a liberation from the limitations and set patterns of the language, which in Russian do not exist.”

“[R]hyme is for the poet above all a searching device that animates the language.”  And it is, he writes, a kind of companion of the poet even where there are no others.

Here’s something apropos of the poet’s sense (which Baratynsky clearly felt, in that last poem of his last book) of writing with the poetry itself, the language itself, as the needed companion.  In an interview of the Russian poet Victor Sosnora (b. 1938) by Darra Goldstein, published in 1988 in the New York Review of Books, Sosnora says, amidst other responses equally extreme and yet persuasive in showing us a man of intense, sometimes unlikely, and sometimes almost repellantly truthful opinions: “I don’t write for the present.  I don’t write for the future, either. […]  I write because that’s what it takes for me to live.  If I’m not published, that doesn’t mean that I don’t exist. […] An ideal reader has a talent equal to that of the writer.  I’ve had three such readers who understood poetry in the absolute sense: Nikolai Aseev, Lilya Brik, and Nikolai Gritsiuk.  I want to stress that I’m fifty-one, I’ve published nine books, and I have had only three readers.”  About Sosnora’s diction, Goldstein says that his “words seem to arise from a dream or a state of intoxication.  His images are startling, even hallucinatory.”  But I don’t mean to imply that these qualities are typical of Russian poetry in general; as far as I can tell, they are merely qualities that the Russian language makes possible by the poet’s use of what Kutik calls the “justification” of sound.  I.e., of phonetic figures, including rhyme.

Again I’ve been absent a while in the unreal yet inconceivably populous virtual spaces of the web.

I was in NYC for the first day of the July 27-28 celebration of the 75th birthday of the great Romanian fiction writer and essayist Norman Manea.  (I had been mispronouncing his last name for years, and he was too polite to correct me, and now finally I’ve learned how to do it—when Romanians say “Manea,” it sounds like “monya”; the “e” is very fleeting.)  The announcement for this can be found at: http://annandaleonline.org/s/990/noright.aspx?sid=990&gid=1&pgid=252&cid=1915&ecid=1915&ciid=5764&crid=0

This tribute seemed to me to have required the emergence of two generations of Romanian writers and readers younger than Manea.  Literary culture in Romania, after so long under Nazi and then Communist dictatorship, is still fraught with nationalist rigidities of attitude, extremism, and a history that even now can scarcely be discussed fully.  Manea kicked a hornets’ nest when he published his essay “Felix Culpa,” an unmasking of Mircea Eliade’s fascist years in Romania and of others connected with him whose mentality and program remains fascist to this day.  The vitriolic response was anti-Semitic, nationalistic, and dangerous.  (The essay first appeared in The New Republic, and Manea included a fuller version in his 1992 American collection On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist.)

At the tribute, among the first of these two younger Romanian generations who are trying to open Romanian culture were Silviu Lupescu, the director of the Romanian publisher Polirom, which is now issuing all of Manea’s work in a uniform edition; Corina Suteu, the director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York; Carmen Musat, the editor of Observator Cultural, a weekly publication in Romania; and Bogdan-Alexander Sta Nescu, the editorial director of Polirom.  (On the occasion of this tribune to Manea, Polirom published a bilingual Romanian-English book in his honor, edited by Cella Manea and George Onofrei, Obsesia Incertitudinii / The Obsession of Uncertainty.)  Among these and also among several Romanians in their twenties with whom I spoke, there was great reverence for Manea, not only because of his writings, but also because of his having refused to make an existential trade-off with the twenty-four-year-long Ceaucescu regime: he would not go along with the regime in order to avoid pressures, threats of imprisonment or worse, and very effective censorship.  He somehow held his own, having to accept the limited publication for which he was eligible in that society deliberately distorted by its government.  (In the title essay of On Clowns, Manea’s description of submitting his typewriter for its annual required inspection at a government office—absurd ritual of an absurd state—is funny, creepy, and all too meaningful.)

Among the Americans speaking on the first day of the tribute was the president of Bard College, Leon Botstein, whose work as an orchestral conductor took him to Romania in 1997 and provided the occasion for Manea’s first return visit to the nation he had been forced to flee.  His meditation on that trip, his parents, Romania, and the course of his own life, took the form of The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir (Farrar Straus, 2003).  Also speaking were Robert Boyers, who has often published Manea’s writing in his invaluable and (happily) long-lived literary journal, Salmagundi, and the novelist Francine Prose, among others.

In English translation there are several works by Manea.  October, Eight O’Clock (1992) contains the first (and unforgettable) story he published in the USA (in TriQuarterly), “The Sweater.”  Manea and his wife Cella arrived here in 1987 via Germany, bringing with them only what they could carry, after Manea was told by the Securitate of Romania that he had permission to accept a fellowship offered to him in Germany, and that he should take it, and that he should not come back.  October, Eight O’Clock and On Clowns are both in print, published by Grove Press.  Published very recently by Trinity University Press is the collection Manea has edited of Romanian Writers on Writing (2011), one of those books that opens up a whole world that overflows the banks of the present nation of Romania.  It’s a world previously unavailable to all who must wait for translations into English.  We have had bright flashes of that world in the amazing work of those who left Romania during the twentieth century and found readers and audiences elsewhere—driven out or voluntarily withdrawing from that oppressed place—including Paul Celan, E. M. Cioran, Eugene Ionesco, Mircea Eliade, Andrei Codrescu, and Manea himself (to say nothing of the artists Constantin Brancusi and Saul Steinberg, the pianists Dinu Lupati and Radu Lupu, the composer Georges Enescu).  Only a few Romanian poets have been translated into English, among them Tudor Arghezi, Ion Caraion, and Benjamin Fondane (who wrote in French).   Now Manea’s edited collection of Romanian writings on writing give us a fuller sense of how much we are missing.  Also, two other, earlier, books by Manea have been published in English—the collection of stories Compulsory Happiness and the novel The Black Envelope (both by Northwestern University Press).  And earlier this year, Sheep Meadow Press published The Correspondence of Paul Celan and Ilana Shmueli, which includes a brief essay by Manea and his lengthy interview with Shmueli; she too was from Romania, and has much to say about the world that formed Celan and herself, and the somewhat younger Manea, too, and about Celan himself, to whom she remained close until the end of his life.

Manea’s stature, as a fiction writer and a thinker about human destiny, is that of a world artist.  I wish more of us would read his work!

Pink confused with white

I used to think (for good reasons, I believed) that it was mistaken to see metrical feet in free-verse lines. Picking them out was irrelevant as a way of describing the rhythms of free-verse lines, simply because free verse isn’t metrical, and how it works rhythmically has to be described differently because what we feel when reading its rhythms, when feeling them with our own individual readerly rhythmic awareness, is different. Free verse isn’t a bunch of metrical feel amidst other syllables that we don’t feel, rhythmically. It is a number of different, distinctly non-metrical (and in fact anti-metrical) varieties of rhythmic expressiveness.

But now I have come to think that at least in some poets—the ones who invented some of the possibilities of free verse—what we see is rhythmic figures that originated in metrical verse but continued to be used in free verse. These figures not only have expressive value—that is, not only do they emphasize feelings, ideas, movement of events, contrasts of images, etc. (which randomly conspicuous metrical feet in free verse don’t do). They’re also echoes or allusions to metrical verse—that is, they relate the free-verse poem in which they are present to earlier poems and poetics.

I’m going to illustrate the free-verse use of rhythmic figures inherited from metrical verse with a canonical poem by William Carlos Williams (b. 1883). Of course, Williams, Ezra Pound (b. 1885), and T. S. Eliot (b. 1888) were perhaps the three most prominent inventors of modern free verse (of three or more different sorts). (See my earlier post on Pound’s “The Return,” March 6, 2011.) Contemporaneously with the unprecedented free-verse inventiveness of these three poets, others were doing more of the same, even though their work was less influential later, in this regard: Mina Loy (b. 1882), H.D. (b. 1886), Marianne Moore (b. 1887), and others. (The amazing little free-verse poems of Stephen Crane [b. 1871] don’t seem to have echoed in anyone else’s work, while the amazing eccentrically measured lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins [b. 1844!], weren’t published until 1918, long after his death, and richly complicated the modernist-era poetics of rhythm.) As later generations developed, in terms of poetics—ifor example Hart Crane (b. 1899), Langston Hughes (b. 1902), Stanley Kunitz (b. 1905), Theodore Roethke (b. 1908), Elizabeth Bishop (b. 1911), Muriel Rukeyser (b. 1913), Robert Lowell (b. 1917), Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917), Allen Ginsburg (b. 1926), James Wright (b. 1927), Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), Gary Snyder (b. 1930), Jay Wright (b. 1934) and others—they made the transition from metrical verse to free verse all over again, but in even more various ways, for they had to invent, discover, and extend the poetics of rhythm beyond where the earlier poets had taken it. That is, they moved from metrical to free verse and at the same time had to discover ways of writing free verse that Williams, Pound and Eliot did not, in their way, almost wholly own.

Looking again at that list of the names of poets, I see how massive were the social and political cataclysms around them in their lives.  Through the twentieth century which—despite heroic efforts against the politics of hatred, greed, military power, dictatorship, and ideology—was so violent and rancid, politically, there were always some men and women, including poets, among other artists, who found ways not simply to mimic in their art the shattered circumstances in which they lived, the tragic and murderous fragmentation of life, but also to think and feel for a countergesture, in their search for something restorative, or consoling, or compassionate, or simply honest.  Yet while the political, social and military horrors of the first World War made Pound and Eliot reject the supposed value of European civilization as it stood in their own time, which had had no power against the irrational and stupid ideas that had killed off so many soldiers and civilians, they also sought out the “fragments” of its now shattered achievement (as they saw it) for the sake of building ideals anew.  Even their approach to poetic rhythm was part of this process.  And meanwhile Williams took the position of renouncing all the traditional poetics of English in favor of a new sort of poetry that would depict the everyday reality of ordinary American life.  For him too, creating a new poetic language was extraordinarily important, but instead of basing it on a kind of homage to, or at times parody of, earlier poetic language (including meter and the rhythmic figures within it), he argued for, and exemplified, the use of the rhythms of ordinary, everyday speech (and in Paterson, even newspaper clippings).

How interesting, then, that what he does in practice—in 1923—is to move completely away, in this poem, from “high” subjects and settings, actions and events, to simple description of something inconsequential, while continuing to find his way toward the kind of free verse he left as a legacy to most of American poetry afterward.  

While truly there is a remarkable amount to think about, regarding poetics, in the following straightforwardly descriptive poem by William Carlos Williams, what’s interesting to me for present purposes is the rhythms of his lines. The poem is in the free verse of 1923, but it makes use of many easily heard metrical figures. By this term I mean rhythmic figures that were invented by metrical poets, but which were then carried over (most audibly by Pound, as I mentioned above), into what was developing as free, i.e., non-metrical, verse. First there’s simply the unmistakably sequence of emphatically, not accidentally, iambic feet; and there’s also the chiasmic metrical figure of the trochee followed by an iamb that metrical verse uses at the beginning of a line or after a caesura, but not elsewhere; the packing of speech stresses into consecutive syllables (perceivable in English beginning with the basic two, a “spondee” in metrical verse, but extending to sequences of more syllables than two while remaining metrical, as in the lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear, “No, no, no, no!” or “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O you…” (Act 5, scene 3).

In what follows, I am not “scanning” the poem as if it were metrical, but on the contrary, noticing where the use of speech stress in English, which is not iambic meter but rather the basis of it, echoes or enacts or alludes to metrical figures as free-verse rhythmic figures. That is to say, perhaps, that Williams’s poem is not a free verse isolated from other poetry, but rather a free verse in play with and against the rhythmic basis of iambic meter in English. Williams’s use of the line, which appears to be improvised, in fact echoes metrical verse (Eliot would have said that the “ghost” of meter was behind it), and defines itself rhythmically in that way.

First the poem, then line-by-line a brief commentary:

Spring and All, Chapter XIX, part II.

Pink confused with white
flowers and flowers reversed
take and spill the shaded flame
darting it back
into the lamp’s horn

petals aslant darkened with mauve

red where in whorls
petal lays its glow upon petal
round flamegreen throats

petals radiant with transpiercing light
contending
above

the leaves
reaching up their modest green
from the pot’s rim

and there, wholly dark, the pot
gay with rough moss

Pink confused with white (a “headless” iambic line of three clear feet)

flowers and flowers reversed (strongly rhythmic, but dactyllic, not iambic)

take and spill the shaded flame (another “headline” iambic line, four feet)

darting it back (chiasmic metrical/rhythmic figure, i.e. our line-initial trochee + iamb)

into the lamp’s horn (rhythmic figure, two adjacent stressed syllables, i.e. a “spondee”)

petals aslant darkened with mauve (two consecutive trochee + iamb)

red where in whorls (another of the same)

petal lays its glow upon petal (a line with an iambic “ghost”)

round flamegreen throats (four consecutive stressed syllables)

petals radiant with transpiercing light (a “headless” iambic pentameter line)

contending

above

the leaves

reaching up their modest green (a “headless” iambic tetrameter line)

from the pot’s rim (familiar metrical figure of pyhrric + spondee)

and there, wholly dark, the pot

gay with rough moss (to conclude, the most emphatic rhythmic figures of the whole poem, the presentation of 9 stressed syllables in the last 13)

All of these rhythmic elements are expressive. Williams isolates what the metrical echoes in distinct lines. There’s no need to piece together a string of iambic feet or a rhythmic figure by joining, say, the last words of one line to the first words of the next. For example, the clearly iambic fourth line from the end, “reaching up their modest green” reminds the reader that the apparent casualness of the description of which the poem entirely consists (presenting merely a sequence of literal images which happens to suggest broader meaning in the words that appear ordinary but have metaphorical or metonymical meaning also, such as “confused,” “modest,” “gay”) is in fact highly deliberated. This is a poem, not a newspaper clipping.