When you ask yourself questions about poetry first, do you then just go ahead and start writing?
Like, (er, excuse me, "as in the case of") when you think things through, decide on a few issues and then start a poem draft. Is that a good idea?
I don't think so. You're still "Spontaneous Me" at that point. (Did you really think I was not an Elements of Style guy? But I'm also a Spunk and Bite guy -- that's why I blog, friends.)
The purpose for "asking yourself questions first" is, at the end of it, to decide on a personal aesthetic. An aesthetic, to me anyway, is a philosophy of art (actually, a philosophy of beauty, but you get the idea). And poetry (as we're discussing it today, anyway) is a fine art. So you've got to have a working philosophy before you can write any, successfully.
The problem is, you've already got one -- you just may not realize it. That's what the "question-asking" stuff is for (for the most part).
The reason I'm going into all this (remember, this is a blog about traditional verse) is because a working aesthetic is essential to the pentameter/ABAB stuff. Like using logic, it wouldn't seem to be the case, necessarily. But it is, IMHO.
What some poets may have forgotten in the nearly 100 years that free verse has reigned supreme (OK, technically about 90 -- since the end of WWI) is part of the aesthetic of free verse: its very logos is unconscious, which springs to the light of conscious day from the very process of writing free-verse poetry.
This has been understood for a long time. In fact, using it as part of a common understanding for free verse before even entering the "tennis-without-a-net club" was at first an essential requirement. And it remains that way, but it's assumed rather than understood.
My previous posts have been aimed at other assumed facets of this "common understanding" (that modern poetry is a flowering of the unconscious aesthetic impulse outside the usual rigors of traditional logic, classical rhetoric, standard practice and performance, etc.).
If all this sounds like I hate modern free-verse poetry, then it's coming out wrong: I love it. I love the process of it, the "playing" of it in public, the sense of shared result (even when privately held) that comes from it. In my roughly half-century of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain (not very successfully, I'm afraid), nothing else comes close, for me at least.
But I think it's because I've failed to avoid pain so often that I've become equally attached to the "trad" approach.
It doesn't dull the ache: it gives the ache its meaning.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
The Forensic Caesura
It was purely by accident that I dropped Galway Kinnell's name a post or two ago.
Not.
Long ago and about a block from here (I'm writing from my Olde Hometowne), I bought a little mass-market paperback. I was still a Poundean (or was it -ian?) and looking to fill out my "How to Read" list of translations.
That's when I saw it, on the rack (wooden, next to the wall) just past the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section (where I'd bought all those Tarzan and Doc Savage books five-six years before) -- a new translation of the (according to the Gospel According to Ezra) untranslatable Testament of Francois Villon. This one was by a relatively unknown poet (unlike John Ciardi -- whose Divine Comedy translation I'd read the year before) named ... yeah, you guessed it.
This thing cost (as I recall) something like 85 cents. It was worth a lot more to me than that.
The best thing about this excellent work was its candor -- it strove to translate Villon's rough language with modern-day vigor, but without sounding "modern." The next best thing to me at the time was the Introduction (or maybe it was the Preface?). That's where Kinnell outlined his methods for discovering the truth behind Villon's fabled obscurities.
The answer was pretty simple: the "obscurities" weren't obscure to Villon's original readership. Kinnell combined historical research with language analysis (the concrete kind, not the abstract "signifier/signified" kind) to uncover what Villon was actually referring to when he referred to it.
And Kinnell applied his own considerable poetic talents to render the result of his discoveries in semiformal verse that was simultaneously kinetic and entertaining.
I can't remember if Kinnell used this term or not, but I'll use it: his work was an example of "forensic poetry."
He wasn't translating Villon as a scholar, he was translating Villon as a poet aided by his academic skill. And what was so dramatic for me was that I really dug it, so much so that I never forgot it (obviously!).
I think writers can use these same techniques in a general way for their original verse. They can use it to ask themselves the kind of questions Kinnell asked of Villon's work: "What does this really mean?" "Who is it written for (or to)?" "What does it mean for readers in general now?" "What might it mean for readers to come (unanswerable, really, but worth pondering)?" "What is the context for what I've written?" "Does my meaning apply to people's daily lives?" "Does it need to apply to them?" Et cetera.
Just a thought. Maybe I'll get to caesuras someday ... .
Not.
Long ago and about a block from here (I'm writing from my Olde Hometowne), I bought a little mass-market paperback. I was still a Poundean (or was it -ian?) and looking to fill out my "How to Read" list of translations.
That's when I saw it, on the rack (wooden, next to the wall) just past the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section (where I'd bought all those Tarzan and Doc Savage books five-six years before) -- a new translation of the (according to the Gospel According to Ezra) untranslatable Testament of Francois Villon. This one was by a relatively unknown poet (unlike John Ciardi -- whose Divine Comedy translation I'd read the year before) named ... yeah, you guessed it.
This thing cost (as I recall) something like 85 cents. It was worth a lot more to me than that.
The best thing about this excellent work was its candor -- it strove to translate Villon's rough language with modern-day vigor, but without sounding "modern." The next best thing to me at the time was the Introduction (or maybe it was the Preface?). That's where Kinnell outlined his methods for discovering the truth behind Villon's fabled obscurities.
The answer was pretty simple: the "obscurities" weren't obscure to Villon's original readership. Kinnell combined historical research with language analysis (the concrete kind, not the abstract "signifier/signified" kind) to uncover what Villon was actually referring to when he referred to it.
And Kinnell applied his own considerable poetic talents to render the result of his discoveries in semiformal verse that was simultaneously kinetic and entertaining.
I can't remember if Kinnell used this term or not, but I'll use it: his work was an example of "forensic poetry."
He wasn't translating Villon as a scholar, he was translating Villon as a poet aided by his academic skill. And what was so dramatic for me was that I really dug it, so much so that I never forgot it (obviously!).
I think writers can use these same techniques in a general way for their original verse. They can use it to ask themselves the kind of questions Kinnell asked of Villon's work: "What does this really mean?" "Who is it written for (or to)?" "What does it mean for readers in general now?" "What might it mean for readers to come (unanswerable, really, but worth pondering)?" "What is the context for what I've written?" "Does my meaning apply to people's daily lives?" "Does it need to apply to them?" Et cetera.
Just a thought. Maybe I'll get to caesuras someday ... .
Monday, March 17, 2008
From C to Shining c ...
(I've decided I like posting "top of ...". But, that could change ... .)
Here's a potential vade mecum you might want to consider, from a poet you might want to avoid. Admirer of Swinburne, Ezra Pound played the pundit, edited "The Waste Land" (his blue-pencils are still controversial), and wrote a lot of confusing academic verse in something he called Cantos. An early poem of his was a sonnet ("Portrait d'une Femme"*) that conformed to his critical standards and wowed me as an undergraduate. I was a Poundian for my whole four years. Ah, college ... . It's a blessing those years don't last!
Anyway, toward the end of his checkered (stained, really) career and life, he edited (with Marcella Spann) a compendium of useful verse called Confucius to cummings: A Poetry Anthology. Handy and fun to read (I think you can safely ignore his notes, except for one), it gives you in one place whole batches of traditional verse outside the academic "canon" that are very helpful to study.
The only note of Pound's worth reading is an appendix (I think -- I don't have the book to hand) on Thomas Hardy. That's right, the novelist who quit mid-career to write poetry. Pound includes a Hardy poem or two in the Browning mode for the anthology proper, but he later lists a whole bunch (yeah, "bunch," as in flowers) of his theme-related verse re: a mid-life love affair. It's eye-opening and candid (Hardy's love-affair stuff, not Uncle Ez -- please!), and it's worth getting Hardy's Complete out of the public library to find 'em from Pound's list.
As far as versification goes, Hardy did some very interesting things in those poems. (I'll let you figure just what those things are for yourself now, but I may post on that someday.)
Anyway, why not thumb through C to c at your local bookseller sometime, and see what you think? I don't believe you will waste your time.
P.S.: For St Paddy's Day, there's one in the Pound book you can Google today that will be worth your while: "I Shall Not Die for Thee" by Padraic Colum. The page I found links to his Gaelic versions as well.
*Editor's Note: No. It was "A Virginal." Do you see why the confusion occurred?
Here's a potential vade mecum you might want to consider, from a poet you might want to avoid. Admirer of Swinburne, Ezra Pound played the pundit, edited "The Waste Land" (his blue-pencils are still controversial), and wrote a lot of confusing academic verse in something he called Cantos. An early poem of his was a sonnet ("Portrait d'une Femme"*) that conformed to his critical standards and wowed me as an undergraduate. I was a Poundian for my whole four years. Ah, college ... . It's a blessing those years don't last!
Anyway, toward the end of his checkered (stained, really) career and life, he edited (with Marcella Spann) a compendium of useful verse called Confucius to cummings: A Poetry Anthology. Handy and fun to read (I think you can safely ignore his notes, except for one), it gives you in one place whole batches of traditional verse outside the academic "canon" that are very helpful to study.
The only note of Pound's worth reading is an appendix (I think -- I don't have the book to hand) on Thomas Hardy. That's right, the novelist who quit mid-career to write poetry. Pound includes a Hardy poem or two in the Browning mode for the anthology proper, but he later lists a whole bunch (yeah, "bunch," as in flowers) of his theme-related verse re: a mid-life love affair. It's eye-opening and candid (Hardy's love-affair stuff, not Uncle Ez -- please!), and it's worth getting Hardy's Complete out of the public library to find 'em from Pound's list.
As far as versification goes, Hardy did some very interesting things in those poems. (I'll let you figure just what those things are for yourself now, but I may post on that someday.)
Anyway, why not thumb through C to c at your local bookseller sometime, and see what you think? I don't believe you will waste your time.
P.S.: For St Paddy's Day, there's one in the Pound book you can Google today that will be worth your while: "I Shall Not Die for Thee" by Padraic Colum. The page I found links to his Gaelic versions as well.
*Editor's Note: No. It was "A Virginal." Do you see why the confusion occurred?
Monday, March 10, 2008
Leave It to the French
It's not worth it. Really.
I've tried, and I can just tell you: it's not worth it.
What is "it?" (*sings* "It's in your face and you can't grab it!") "It" is writing English poesy in French forms.
You'd think that would be obvious, but so many try it, even well-known published poets. Why? Because English verse forms are boring, that's why.
Let's face facts: traditional English verse is basically iambic pentameter in couplets or quatrains. Ecch. But it's what works. ("Rhyme royale" is the two rhyme-forms stuck together, basically.)
You don't need me to prove it: look at Shakespeare's sonnets or his narrative verse. He just didn't do triolets or ballades (AFAIK, anyway). But he knew what did work within the confines of our common tongue.
There are exceptions to what I'm saying: Shakespeare wrote song lyrics for some of his lighter plays that are outside the standard "box" of English poesy. And modern greats like Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot adapted French forms for some of their finest work.
But if you look at the lyric poems of a writer like Swinburne, his own French-form material is very slick and expert -- yet kind of empty.
What I'm saying is that the free-verse poet trying out traditional verse for the first go can save a lot of time and trouble by avoiding French-form English verse.
Postscript, friends: That doesn't mean you can't benefit from reading it: I think Swinburne's translations of Villon are a great source. So are, in that and many other respects, Galway Kinnell's, for a modern take.
I've tried, and I can just tell you: it's not worth it.
What is "it?" (*sings* "It's in your face and you can't grab it!") "It" is writing English poesy in French forms.
You'd think that would be obvious, but so many try it, even well-known published poets. Why? Because English verse forms are boring, that's why.
Let's face facts: traditional English verse is basically iambic pentameter in couplets or quatrains. Ecch. But it's what works. ("Rhyme royale" is the two rhyme-forms stuck together, basically.)
You don't need me to prove it: look at Shakespeare's sonnets or his narrative verse. He just didn't do triolets or ballades (AFAIK, anyway). But he knew what did work within the confines of our common tongue.
There are exceptions to what I'm saying: Shakespeare wrote song lyrics for some of his lighter plays that are outside the standard "box" of English poesy. And modern greats like Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot adapted French forms for some of their finest work.
But if you look at the lyric poems of a writer like Swinburne, his own French-form material is very slick and expert -- yet kind of empty.
What I'm saying is that the free-verse poet trying out traditional verse for the first go can save a lot of time and trouble by avoiding French-form English verse.
Postscript, friends: That doesn't mean you can't benefit from reading it: I think Swinburne's translations of Villon are a great source. So are, in that and many other respects, Galway Kinnell's, for a modern take.
