Life in the Cereal Aisle

the poetic line

 

I want to posit a question. Or posit an idea that in itself presents a question. Perhaps many questions. It depends on how seriously you take the idea of the poetic ear.

Take this phrase that I have been playing around with (unfortunately to little fruition):

time well spent in the cereal aisle

Except, that's not the phrase I'm playing with. This is:

time spent well in the cereal aisle

There is a world of difference between those two phrases, entirely because of how they work on the ear. The latter has an aural resonance that is wholly lacking in the former. Why? What am I talking about? Break it down:

time spent well in the cereal aisle spent well ------- cereal aisle speh / ell ---------- see / ayl seh / ell ----------- see / ayl

So that you can read it without going back up, and hear what is going on:

time well spent in the cereal aisle

vs.

time spent well in the cereal aisle

Do you hear the aural construction that is created by reversing the order of "well spent"?

When Four Plus Three Does Not Equal Seven — An Hypothesis for Testing

an exploration of measure and musical phrasing

 

This thought popped into my head just not that long ago — not for the first time, by any means, but this time in a context that made me stop and think. Like anything with the aesthetic there is no fixed truth or definition being sought here, only presentation of an hypothesis meant for exploration of the event.

I'll present it in the form of question and answer:

Question:

Why (or how, if you prefer) is ballad measure (4-3-4-3) not the same as heptameter couplets (7-7)?

Answer:

Ballad measure is actually a variaton of tetrameter, 4-4-4-4, only the last beat of the second and fourth lines are implied and not overtly stated.

This is wholly hypothesis, and I can already see a way that the wording above creates a problem with the idea being explored. Also, there needs be the question of the difference between a four-line stanza against a two-line stanza (which by necessity brings in the issue of enjambement). I am now wondering if I can think of examples to the contrary (which is where there exploration would get really interesting.)

 

(I have the want to say more in introduction but I am intentionally holding off so it can remain an open point of exploration. Perhaps I might come back and add to this in the future. Perhaps as part of a future post exploring Pound's definition of the poetic line as a musical phrase: something, to me, which is blatantly obvious once stated. But for now, I'll leave it as merely suggestion for open exploration.)

The Ticket That Exploded (excerpt) by William S. Burroughs

(Grove Press, 1967)
 

the aural effects of poetic grammar

 

So I've been re-reading William S. Burroughs's Nova Trilogy (in part for fun, in part for exploration). For transparency, I am a huge fan of Burroughs's works (though I have not read the couple earlier, more narrative works).

The Nova Trilogy (which is made up of The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express) is generally considered a masterwork of the cut up process. I do not see how someone can say they are not difficult reads. For one, the three books feed each other, at times out of order of the pages. For another, part of the result of the cut up technique is that a fragment read a cut up passages usually has its source in a straight(er) narrative passage — which can also appear later in the works. (As well, a phrase sometimes appears in multiple narrative passages, which adds more to the play.) As such — and I speak from experience this being my third time around &mdash they are easier to reread than read. But, then, as Barthes pointed out, aesthetic literature cannot be read; it can only be re-read.

Of course, there is also the more fundamental difficulty in that even at the level of the passages of straight narrative, the books do not have an overlaying narrative structure. But then, as it is stated within The Ticket That Exploded: "this is a novel presented in a seried of oblique references" (13).

While reading Ticket I had the idea to present a part of the text as written, and reformat it a couple of ways — including using line breaks — simply to put out and example of a well written cut-up text (so, simultaneously fragmentary and unified) to explore how format affects reading. For most of the trilogy the cut-ups are separated with dashes. What if you changed it to periods? What if you broke it up into lines?

Free Verse by Charles O. Hartman (sort of)

Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Northwestern UP, 1980)

 

Two Thoughts (and a Note) on the Poetic After Having Barely Started to Read Charles O. Hartman's Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody

-- corrected a terminological error, Nov. 20, 2013

• Thought #1
• Thought #2
• Note

And when I say "barely started to read" I mean only as far as the second paragraph. So, before I continue, for those of you who are unfamiliar with what the phrase "thoughts on reading" indicates, keep in mind I have only read two paragraphs of Hartman's book. This is not, then, an engagement with the ideas therein but only ponderings prompted by that little bit that I have read. As such, it is very much the thoughts that I am bringing into the book (and, as such, it rather prompts a follow up essay after the fact, to speak out of the ideas of the book).

To note, this post is the post on terminology that was cued in the post two back on "Rocket" by Todd Boss. Though, it obviously because something larger when happenstance had me pick up the Hartman book.

---

---

 
Thought #1
back to top

This is from the second paragraph:

That year [1908] Y.S. Omond wrote a short article on the subject of verse for a widely read intellectual journal, Living Age. [. . .] In the article, he poses an innocent question: "It is not uninteresting to ask what determines the length of verse-lines." Omond observed that the length of lines readers were willing to accept, and poets were therefore willing to try, had gradually increased until "Tennyson ventured at last on nine beats." The progress might be sustained, but Omond dared to doubt that is "can be considerably prolonged without substantial other modification."

There is an interesting though not at all uncommon phrasing within that sentence: "what determines." The phrasing speaks an assumption within the question: an assumption that is in the limited context only presumed in the Osmond quotation, but which is nearly ubiquitous in conversations on poetry and its writing. It is an assumption that in a great measure predetermines both the nature of the answer to the question and that answer's invariable and inevitable failure as a lasting solution to the question.

The assumption is that both the question and the answer, and the subject of the two lie within the domain of the quantifiable and qualifiable. To say it again, when you hear this question asked and explored in contemporary poetical circles, it generally carries the assumption that "if one is to ask a question as to the length of line-verses (or anything else about poetics for that matter), then that question is an exploration of the measurable, the discretely identifiable, the definitionally qualifiable." The question, as it is written in the quotation is then the search for that some thing that "determines the length of verse-lines."

"Weight Gain" by Moira Egan -- Poetry Daily, 6/28/2013

from Hot Flash Sonnets (Passager Books)
poem found here
 

first lines:

Whose body is this, anyway? I glance in Mirror, Mirror at these fleshly parts

 

the play between the poetic line and its internal structure

This poem was put up on Poetry Daily a week ago, but it's been in my head since. Or, at least, the thoughts this put into my head has been in my head since.

Specifically, it has had me thinking about the play between the line as an aural unit and the breaking up of that unit with internal punctuation. Even more specifically, how that breaking up affects the oral readings of the line, especially when the lines in the poem are regular and rhymed, as with here. How does breaking up the lines of a rhymed poem effect the rhymed sounds?

And so, this post, whose point is mostly to point out the issue, to give some demonstration to the elements involved, to bring it to mind that it does in fact have an effect. Or, perhaps I should say, will have an effect if poorly executed.

Now, in part, this poem is feeding into thoughts that have been playing in my mind from reading through Mary Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry -- which, admittedly, I am doing very slowly, picking it up only every once in a while. Though, I will say, this may be the first book on poetics written for a classroom that I would actually use in the classroom. Most others I have looked at either are far too dependent on the examples and far too weak in their discussion of poetics (as with Frances Mayes's The Discovery of Poetry), or bad to the point of misleading, or far too expensive (as with Helen Vendler's Poems • Poets • Poetry and Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry, which is still very worth the while but is absurdly priced).

In the opening chapters Kinzie talks about the identity of the poetic line, and the play between the "half-meaning" generated by a line and the whole meaning of the syntactic unit spanning beyone the line. But here, I'm looking primarily at rhyme and sound. I pulled out Millay's Collected Sonnets to look for examples of interrupted lines: if there is one thing Millay's sonnets are it is smooth in sound. I'll give you a couple moments -- but will have to give large-ish quotations so as to preserve the sound (and establish rhythms and rhymes in your head). These are from two different poems.

"Ode to the Artichoke," translated by William Pitt Root -- Verse Daily, 4/12/2013

from Sublime Blue (Wings Press, 2013)
originally written by Pablo Neruda
poem found here
 

First lines:
The tender-hearted
upright
 

the poetic line

— reformatted with minor editing Mar. 14, 2015
 

Now, I've said before I am usually wary with messing with translations, because I don't have the source, and the poem being a translation opens the door for discursive points that only serve to muddle. (A translation of a bad poem is most likely going to end up a bad poem, after all.) But, I think I can safely step through that obstacle here. Which is to say, I am pretending it is not a translation. Some of what is said here may not apply within the literary tradition of the original.

 

Let's look at the first ten lines:

The tender-hearted upright artichoke girded itself as a warrior, constructed a small dome, to keep itself waterproof within its scales.

I've two comments on the poem.

 

I.

First off, a note on parallelism, a very important idea in poetry and prose. In a comp class, bad parallelism will get your text called out. Somehow, poetry has become lazy enough that everyone does it willy nilly. One of the primary cuplrits behind this is the influence of pop music. Popular music is primarily driven by the music; the lyrics are usually secondary to the voice itself. For this, 98% of the lyrics of popular music make for appallingly bad poetry. Unfortunately, this is the majority of the 'poetry' that youth hears and learns. So the standard for poetry is thus pushed VERY low. People mimic the lyrics they hear and think it is of value. (After all, someone is making a ton of money off of it.)

One of the characteristics of popular music is that ideas are just strung along, one after the other, without much thought to generating any coherency or depth. For example (taking a rather arbitrary example), let's take the Foo Fighters (a group that had a fairly creative album with the "The Colour and the Sound," and has pretty much been remaking that same album over and over again ever since). Take the lyrics to the title song on the recent album Back and Forth (To be honest, I have no idea of this received radio time.) I am breaking it up to accent the phrasing.

Now your on your own, one for the pages Over the hill and through the ages Does my heaven burn like hell on you? Out beneath the cracks and coming in waves Rolling like an earthquake under the pavement Heavy now, tell me Mr.Truth

Even copy-pasting it in I was laughing at how bad these lyrics are. Do you see how there is at best the most tenuous thread of an idea linking the phrases? In what way, really, does "out beneath the cracks" associate with "coming in waves"? Or "heavy now"? Any possible justification begins first off with "eliminate any value to the metaphors" and ends with "you have to squint your eyes really tightly."

But back to the poem and parallelism. What influenced the author here is irrelevant to this exploration (even the poem being a translation). I am looking only at what exists on the screen. The sentence in these lines is made up of a list of two elements: first it says the artichoke "girded itself as a warrior." But then, after the comma it says rather it "constructed a small dome." How bad's the parallelism? Let me count the ways.

1. The first one is about a warrior; the second about a builder. (On that point did you notice the semantic clash between "girded itself as a warrior" and the preceding "tender-hearted"? It speaks of not paying attention to what words are being used and how they are being used. And you can see now how these opening lines are of the nature of the Foo-Fighters lyrics, with ideas strung together on a line, without thought on how they work together (or don't work together) when read.
2. The first one is actively reflexive: the warrior is girding himself; the second is actively external, constructing a small dome. The two verbs have completely different syntactic natures.
3. Similarly, the warrior is an attacking thing. (Artichokes are attacking food? Usually, when you metaphorically 'arm' a food, it signals that things are not boding well for a digestive tract.)
4. The first phrase is creating a simile between artichoke and warrior; second one is, well, simply a mess. One might say that there is a very thin metaphor that is begun with "small dome"; but, really, "dome" is used adjectively. So maybe "construct" is enough to generate something? Only barely. The word "construct" isn't powerful enough to do anything. Finally, notice the structure hidden behind the line breaks (I'll remove the comma error): "constructed a small dome to keep itself waterproof within its scales." Do you see the problem? The phrasing doubles up on itself: the scales are the dome. So, in reality, the phrase is "constructed a small dome to keep itself waterproof within its dome." Which is daft.

Why is parallelism so important. Some of the more obvious reasons:

1. It helps the reader by making the read smoother. The more sophisticated the reader, the more quickly and more blatantly faulty parallelism becomes noticeable. And when it does appear, it acts like a stumbling block. Why?
2. Because parallelism brings the list into an order, and that order serves to help the reader know that there is a list happening, and helps the reader make a unity out of the list.
3. Taking that even further, that order, that smoothing out, also increases the degree to which the ideas within the list can interact with each other. In the example from this poem, the shift in the nature of the verb, from the self-applying "gird" and the external "construct" is a marked clash, it's plaid and stripes. They two verb phrases can barely meld together at all. And then there is also that the first is establishing a simile with its "as"; the second phrase is making no such attempt, it is only a simple verb phrase. That's a little more subtle, but it does add to the clash.

So, summing up. Parallelism. Very important. It is not simply a style choice, is has dramatic effects on both the smoothness of the reading of the poem and on how the ideas of your poem work together.

 

II.

Now, to the structure of the poem. Let me bring back those first ten lines:

The tender-hearted upright artichoke girded itself as a warrior, constructed a small dome, to keep itself waterproof within its scales.

Look at the lines breaks. Can you build out of the poem a rationality behind how this (albeit faulty) sentence is broken up. Particularly with lines 4-6: why end a line with "as"? Why not just "as a warrior"? and why the double idea of "a warrior, constructed" when every other line (indeed, nearly the entire poem) is one idea per line? If I had to make a guess it was unconsciously (or consciously) hiding the problems with the sentence and parallelism. But, as I said, causes are irrelevant. I'm querying the readers, asking what can be seen in the poem? Sophisticated poetry develops its own structure and keeps to those rules -- this is part of the organic unity of the poem. Breaks from such are noticeable to sophisticated readers.

To be honest, I can't come up with reason beyond the above, or simply saying bad writing. But, it's caught my mind enough to play around with variations, just to see what happens.

First off, I think there was huge, missed opportunity with the sounds of "heart" and "art":

The upright and tender-hearted artichoke girded itself, a warrior.

And really that's all I wanted to do. I can't get past the humor of a 'warrior artichoke.'

 
•

To note: that humor that does not exist in the original. Yet, it does, inadvertantly, here. You're on your own as to why. Looking at two other translations, and the original in Spanish, this translation I do believe missed the mark. Phillip Hill's (with the original): here; Jodey Bateman's: here.

It might be interesting to come back and take a look at how the original (or the other translations) compare. But, as per my normal policy, it's rather outside what I'm trying to do here. And I've spend enough time already . . . .

"Glass of Water and Coffee Pot" by Robin Robertson, -- Poetry Daily, 3/4/13

from Hill of Doors (Picador)
poem found here
 

First lines:
These rooms of wood, of tongue-and-groove, open out
on a garden of white-washed walls and a maple tree,
 

meter and the poetic line

-- reformatted with some editing/rewriting 1/26/2014
 

I just want to explore, freely, line lengths and meter with this poem. And I mean explore: nothing here is being decisively stated: I am read out loud and here thinking out loud about what I hear.

 

Some hexameter in action, here – except for line 5. And then there’s line 7 (“and the pot’s”), which can be read as hexameter, but is more naturally read as a kind of 5-beat sprung rhythm. Line 11 also, can be read hexameter, but is more natural pentameter. And line 12. So maybe not hexameter; which is a shame to me, because that would have been so much fun to read. Especially with the many plays on iambic put on by Mr. Robertson.

But, I can't complain. I've played around with writing a long poem with the rule "lines between six and nine feet" rather than regularizing -- and it worked well. And I'm not saying it does not work well here; I'm just saying, "Oh, so close to straight hexameter. You couldn't squeeze that one out?"

 
•

Reading Shakespeare (to pick a name off the floor) demonstrates two elements of good, metered poetry. (1) Knowing that the text your are reading is in iambic pentameter will guide you in reading the lines (i.e., you will be nudged into reading it correctly when you know where you meant to go). (2) you need not at all maintain a very recognizable, iambic ba-DUMP ba-DUMP for it to remain iambic. Take line 13:

on this STONE SHELF, || HAPpiNESS of the HAND and HEART

The stress of the first four syllables ( ∪ ∪ ' ' ) is an often used substitute for two iambic feet. Then, after the caesura (which is strengthened by the difficulty in anunciating "shelf") you have an abbreviated foot ( ' ) before a normal iamb, an iamb with a lead-in unaccented syllable, and then two normal iambs:

on this STONE SHELF, / HAP / piNESS /of the HAND / and HEART

Note how the triple stress is aided in its reading by the pause at the comma. Though, that’s just one method, the next line has a straight string of stresses:

to KEEP its HEAT and STILL POUR CLEAN and TRUE.

You can read that line with an unstressed “pour,” but it changes the meaning of the line: the semantic emphasis moves from “pour” to “still.”[FN]

********************* [FN] See note added at the bottom. *********************

(Of course, #1 does have its dark side: you can not, as a writer, use your established rhythm to force a line where it is not normally willing to go.)

Which is an interesting little bit of firewood to add to the question of using straight hexameter: the question of emphasis would be solved if the meter was fixed. But, with the poem not being regularized line lengths, a variability is made permissible, and there is an ambiguity as to how to read the line. (Note: "ambiguity," not "problem.")

The first line also has a modified foot:

These ROOMS / of WOOD, / of TONGUE- / and-GROOVE, / O- /pen OUT

But I will be honest with you: I don’t must like that line at that point. I think it stumbles over itself. Though, not because of the short foot, but because of the sound of /groove/ being followed immediately by the sound of an accented /o/. Every time I read it I stall there; which is not a great thing, but possibly a worse thing for it being in the first line of the poem.

OK, but, then, Robin Robertson is Scottish. So in his own rhythms, it might be a wholly different matter: something else to think about. (I was reading recently about William Carlos Williams’s idea of using as a measure of line length the amount of time it took to say the line, rather than counting beats. Unfortunately, that length can rather vary from place to place in this English speaking world, so I’m not sure the usefulness of that one. (And, again, we see why you cannot write haiku -- meter wise -- in English.) Though, the idea is something to think about.)

 
•

My original thought in exploring this poem was to go to the relationship between line length and the use of meter. I would argue that the longer the lines, the more attention has to be paid to the line’s rhythms, as the longer the line, the easier it is for the line to become unwieldy or clumsy. But the more you read this poem, the more the lines congeal into very nice lines indeed. (Except for those couple of exceptions.)

It is worth noticing, however, that even with the longer lines, the poem was crafted with the lines rather being one thought per line, the thought using the whole of the line. At least that is how it runs until line 5. But the break there is good use of the established form and toward a greater making than merely one line being different from the form. Then line 6 is another unit idea. And, then, line seven, another break that uses the established form to positive ends, here to an even better degree, as the break is a full colon (which, in reading, can sometimes carry a greater aural pause than a period). You see what’s on either side of the colon?: “darkness” vs. “luminous.” So, the line is unified after all, eh?! (Even with a touch of rhyme to boot: “-ness” and “-nous.”) Great stuff that.

Similarly with the next line, where those last two syllables are not permitted to break away from the thought they are amplifying/modifying. Lines 10, 12, and 13 are similar, in that there is a comma break, but they are a part of an extended thought that ties the lines together. (I fear I am inadequately defending those lines. My hope is that you see how the lines have a sense of independent existence, even when they are broken by punctuation.)

---

Note:

I recenty picked back up with intent to finish Charles O. Hartman's Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (after a shortened first start). Ultimately, I stopped reading it because I felt I was reading it mostly to develop arguments against Hartman rather than learn from him. Though, to understand that, most of what I found problematic with Hartman lay behind the arguments: things like unrecognized contradictions, or making a statement about the subject and then making another statement that seems to wholly forget the first was made.

One example of a statement made which didn't seem to deeply inform the rest of the book (insofar as I read it) was what may be the most intriquing and informing moment in the book:

[A]ll linguistic stress, in speech as well as verse, is relative stress. (36)

Which may sound obvious, but is actually quite profound in that it adds a depth to the fundamental observation about metered verse: There are two levels operating within verse: the abstract, measured pacing of the meter, and the sound of the text read as language. In any good verse the two operate in conjunction with each other to create the resonance and depth of sophisticated metered poetry.

Adding on the observation by Hartmann brings us to the realization that as such, the line in the poem refered to above

to KEEP its HEAT and STILL POUR CLEAN and TRUE.

Can still be read a iambic pentameter, even though the spoken stress on "pour" is stronger than on either "still" or "clean" -- so long as reader hears that the stress put on "pour" is wholly created out of the natural inflections of language, and hears that the word is also unstressed within the musical rhythm of the meter.

An observation with very fascinating possibilities. (Though for me still but an observation, yet to be tested to any great measure.)