Before you put that chisel to the rock, before you swing that hammer, you pause. You take a deep breath, and hold it.
"Is this what I want? Is this where I want it? What if I make a mistake?"It may not be self-doubt. It may just be that you need a little more information: That vein, there; this fissure, here; this part is smooth, but that's rough. Why?
Time to find out more.
The Forensic Caesura
It was purely by accident that I dropped Galway Kinnell's name in Part 1.
Not.
Long ago, 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 ... .
Ah, The Years Go By ...
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.
"Who did this?" "You did."
The title to this section is my recollection of an oft-told story re: Picasso's "Guernica." It seems a Nazi officer saw this enormous (and, frankly, ugly) painting and asked the artist who was responsible for it.
The story goes that Maestro Pablo calmly replied as he did to imply that the Nazi "practice bombing" of innocent civilians during the Spanish Civil War was responsible for the carnage his canvas captured so memorably.
We call "Guernica" art not because it's beautiful -- it isn't. We call it art because Picasso used his Cubist aesthetic toward something that really mattered: a protest over an insanely cruel act that tragically presaged so many, many more. And because he did it so sucessfully that he could even insult a Nazi officer and get away with it.
And that's kind of what I meant last time about a developing a personal aesthetic. What I meant by that is not some "philosophy of art" that can be used to either deny the worth of what you're doing or to affirm some High Leader's "cult of personality."
Whether it's "art for art's sake" or a bust of Lenin looking like a bald, mustachioed Superman, it's not coming from a personal aesthetic. (Or Stalin, or Mao, or Saddam Hussein, or {insert name here}.)
What I did mean by the term is simply this: a working philosophy of what you're doing as a poet, and why.
But just remember: it can cost you.
What do I mean by that? Think Federico Garcia Lorca.
Who's that? Try "Take This Waltz."
Poison Pen(s)
Here's an old story of how a poet used satire creatively and constructively at the same time.
A long-standing dispute between two tribes beat the usual path to resolution: an army from Tribe A took one side of the field of battle, while Tribe B's bravehearts lined up opposite. As was the tradition, each side gave a turn to its best poet before the battle began.
The first bard did what was expected, singing the praises of his tribe and trying to frighten the other side out of its wits.
The second bard did something else. After a short peon to his tribe's military prowess, he began to make fun of the other tribe. In doing so, he made a pun on that other tribe's name. This pun was so good, it made his tribe start laughing. Then some bystanders started laughing, too. The other tribe's king started to look embarrassed, and his generals began to turn away.
The result? The other tribe quit the field. But instead of go back to their homeland, they actually joined a neighboring tribe and took their name!
In other words, the pun was so effective that it stuck. And the poet had not only saved many lives from among his tribesmen, he also eliminated the enemy completely -- without killing a single person.
Although it's not a part of the story (as I heard it), I'm betting he nailed the pun with a rhyme.
As far as English traditional poesy goes, you can take the tack of Chaucer and leave 'em all with aching sides, or do like Pope by condemning "not the sinner, but the sin." Either way, your responsibility as a poet remains intact when you use satire.
After all, aren't we all just as guilty?
Lost in Translation
If you're going to put words together on a page and call it "poetry" -- well, that's not too hard nowadays, is it?
But if you're going to put lines together that rhyme and fit a set metrical pattern, that's different, isn't it?
I say this because I'm sure by now, dear readers, you've given it a try. And you've set that try aside, and then re-read it -- only to find the poem you were so proud of the day after you wrote it is now pretty embarrassing.
I don't say that to insult you or bring you down. It's just what happens. I know this, because too many of my attempts have hit the bottom of the trash can to suit me.
Where lies success? Rewriting? Maybe, but all I ever did was flog a dead horse. Revisions to a successful poem? Of course, but top-to-bottom rewrites (of an already bad poem) were a waste of time. They were for me, anyway.
So try this: Take a batch of your free-verse work that you feel good about, and choose one that you really liked but maybe didn't take off the way you wanted. Or maybe one that has kind of a shape to its structure, but its free-verse "dress" fits too loosely.
Now, take that poem and "translate" it into traditional verse. Your "translation" may be a sonnet or a ballad or something else. Just start from the top and see what happens.
When you're done, set the new version aside for a time. First for a day, then for a week, then for maybe a month. Ask yourself what your poem gained by the "translation" and then what it lost by the process.
Keep both the free and traditional versions in your poetry file. Then do another "translation," maybe from a fresh free-verse poem. Repeat the review process.
Be honest each time, but not brutally. Don't beat yourself up over it, in other words. Enjoy doing something few poets ever do (or admit to doing -- that I've heard, anyway!).
See where it takes you.
Swish!
It is my solemn duty to me to inform you that most of your stuff is going to be crap.
That may not be news to you, or it may. It's something to keep in mind, nonetheless.
Personally, I don't keep stuff I do that I think is bad. I know others who do. It's up to you.
There are arguments pro and con ("What if you throw it away and you're wrong?" "Why keep mistakes? You'll just repeat them!"). All I know is I can only remember one I wish I'd kept instead of tossing, and that was nearly 20 years ago! (And the only reason I regret tossing it is because it was a good start at a style I resumed writing in ten years later.)
The point is, if you keep your crap, you're probably going to be keeping a lot of it. Flushing it just feels so much better.
At least it does to me.
Pencil It In
You gotta scan it yourself, if you're going to learn traditional verse. There are too many little ins and outs involved not to. Yes, it's great to have that pamphlet (forget what it was called) that gives you an overview of the different meters and such. But there's no replacement for scanning poem after poem yourself -- sort of like going to the gallery and learning painting from the masters.
What I used as a scanning text was my old Norton anthology from Poetry 101 (or whatever the course was called) -- a nice fat book, nice clear print with enough linear spacing to pencil-in (lightly!) your scans, and widely available. I owned the book, it wasn't going to anyone else, and there was no need to feel I was destroying posterity. The book was a teaching tool to start with, and I was just using it for some personal extended homework.
It was extended, all right. I ended up scanning (and analyzing) in pencil every poem in that edition (the seventh, maybe?) that rhymed or was in blank verse. From (Philip) Sidney to (Cecil Day-) Lewis.
I'll go into what I did in more detail later. But first, friends, choose your scanning text carefully -- please.
Conceited Metaphors
As best I can recall, a word in today's title recalls an earlier subject: making up words.
"Conceit" is some kind of parallel formation from "deceit" -- as if a "conception" of something true is the opposite of a "deception" of something false. You can see the cracked logic right away, can't you? But logic rarely puts a word in the dictionary -- usage does.
And in the case of a so-called "metaphorical conceit," usage is often the problem. (I know I'm careening all over the place today, but ... well, it's that kind of a day outside! Windy, that is.)
Another earlier sectiont pointed you, dear readers, to the sonnets of Shakespeare as models of English form. And we can return to him as the model for the metaphorical conceit. Basically, the idea is to take a single metaphor and then keep running with it to the end of the poem (or nearly there, anyway).
Let's say I compare metaphorically (no "like" or "as" -- remember?) my love's heart to a bird's wings beating. Then I compare her voice to a bird's chirping, then her touch to a feather's, etc.
And then maybe I can sum up with some idea of the fragility of love compared to a bird's fragile body, something like that. (Hey, maybe I've got something there ... !?)
The trick to a successful conceit goes back to what I've been saying all along: you've got to think it through first, apply some logic to its structure and some taste to its execution, and then set it aside for awhile before deciding on how well you did.
What prompted this is an effort by a columnist in a newspaper recently (I won't say which one) that made one of the worst attempts at a metaphorical conceit I've ever read (in prose, at least).
This writer seemed to think the very notion of a metaphorical conceit was somehow whimsical and kind of artificial -- but that didn't stop him (or her) from threading it through the first five or six paragraphs of the column. As if to say, "I'm so clever, but I don't need to take what I've done seriously!"
You do need to take it seriously, even if your tone is "tongue-in-cheek!" Because you're communicating, and that's never something to fool around with.
That goes double for those of us who write in the hardest form of creative writing there is. Even though we appear to do it for no practical reason at all.
Especially so -- because whatever value it possesses lives within what we've created.
Fallacious Pathos
It may seem that I was contradicting myself in the last section when I pointed out the illogicality of a coined word (at least as its original definition went), then continued to praise a certain logicality of organization in traditional poetry.
Especially since free-verse poets (like me) often sing the praises of nonlinear thinking (and feeling) in the first place.
Superficial logic makes for a poor poem, in my humble opinion. And it rarely has much to do with an organic thing like human language.
My emphasis on a logical outline for fixed-verse poems (Did I just coin the term "fixed-verse?" I hereby take credit, until someone shows me otherwise.) comes from experience, and it mainly applies to the outline itself. I outlined a possible outline for a metaphorical conceit in that last section.
And that brings me to the topic for this section, my friends. A rather strange man named John Ruskin described the issue for all writers in an essay on it called "The Pathetic Fallacy."
I'll let you look this essay up for the details, along with some of Ruskin's other works (His book The Stones of Venice is his best-known.). He's one of those late Victorian writers who could make a prose sentence work like a Liszt sonata.
But for here and now, I'll do my best to sum it up: you fall into pathetic fallacy when you metaphorically give natural forces or objects human feelings, as in something like "the winds weep for grief over lost Lenore."
OK, I don't think that's in "The Raven." I just made it up. Ruskin called the fallacy "pathetic" after the original sense of the word indicating "suffering," as in "experiencing." In your poem, when you have the wind weeping or starlight laughing or some such, you're giving human attributes to inanimate forces.
And that's why I stress a little planning in the "pre-poem" phase of writing fixed-verse poems (I've now decided I hate the term -- so please attribute it to someone else!): it's just so easy to fall flat on your face.
I believe there is an exception (in a manner of speaking) to the pathetic fallacy: it's found somewhere in the distinction between symbolism and allegory.
Maybe I'll get into that someday.
Tie One On
I rarely open the post editor of this blog with any firm idea of what I'm going to write about.
There have been exceptions, especially at first and recently. But Spontaneous Me just can't stay away long. Today is (another) one of those days.
In this blog, I've tried to give you some options for setting your own guidelines for writing poetry from the traditional point of view. I think they may work equally well for free verse, too. But not for me. When I'm free, I gotta be ME!
Not that writing traditional verse (I'm not fond of the term "formal verse" -- it implies starched collars, scented drawing rooms and a well-developed taste for antiques. Absolutely nothing wrong with any of that -- it's just not my approach, that's all.) is necessarily The Poet In Chains. It, to me, means the reverse: you're in control, not the poem.
So, where does inspiration enter the picture? If your muse is insisting "Write this!" -- how do you deal with it if she happens to be wearing formal attire at the time? Dispassionately.
Duh ... aren't you supposed to be "passionate" about something to do it well? Isn't that what "they" all say? "They" might, not me.
I'm here to be straight with you, my friends. And I'm telling you that you need to develop a dispassionate sensibility for your poetic passions -- especially when your muse sets you alight.
(Hint: look up "dispassionate." Open a new tab {or window, if -- like me today -- you're using IE6} and go to Wiktionary and look it up! Right now! See what I mean? Being "dispassionate" doesn't mean you don't care, it means caring enough to do your very best -- my apologies to Hallmark (TM).)
Note: I've now decided it's OK to say "formal verse" if by it you mean your muse had a really nice evening gown on when she struck the match. Or tux, or ... . (You get the idea, I'm sure.)
Angle of Dissent
There's this funny thing about censorship: it reveals more about the psychology (or, better, psychopathology) of the censor than anything else.
Yes, censorship is destructive, for sure. And that hurts all of us (especially you and me, dear readers -- which is the subject of today's post). But -- in and of itself -- what the censor chooses to black out, cut away, chop up or otherwise destroy says a lot about him or her. Primarily (pun intended by sheer accident), it describes what they're most afraid of.
And what they're most(ly) afraid of -- usually, anyway -- is revealing their ignorance. About what? That is often the most revealing factor in the equation.
OK, on to this section's subject: The Purpose Behind This Entire Thing. ("Ooooo, is he really going to tell us this now?" Um, yeah.)
And What This Is All About (I've decided) is metapoetics. Nobody that I know of ever did an update to Ari's old lecture notes on poetry (guess what it's called), the way Boole and his friends did to Ari's lecture notes on formal logic.
You see, I'm a believer in the old school. I'm also a believer in using the bricks of the old school (and the tips and tricks of its masons) to build the new one.
And it's in the irrational interstices within the fabric of traditional verse where the New World of poetry lives. But when we censor (ourselves or anyone else), all we're really doing is willfully ignoring that meta-reality.
Together, I think we will find the "book beside the Poetics" (really bad inside joke here). I really do.
His Dead End
I think it was the summer of '77 or '78 that I finally figured out "sprung rhythm." The prosodic invention by English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins started out as an experiment in poetic language, then evolved into a full-blown poetic technique that allowed Hopkins to write some really memorable verse.
The details are outlined in letters that Hopkins wrote to his friend Robert Bridges, who became poet laureate of England. The two shared an interest in "quantitative" prosody, where you count syllables not by stress/unstress, but by "weight" (my term). These letters were reprinted in a paperback of Hopkins' work (by Penguin?) that I bought from a used bookstore in, I think, '75.
I won't spoil the fun for you (if you're just starting the scans I mentioned a few posts ago, you've got a ways to go, anyhow). But, if you're really interested, I suggest you focus first on Milton -- especially the way he handles resolutions across the caesura. (You'll have fun Google-ing that!)
A bit on NPR last week about Hopkins started me recalling all this. The "expert" being interviewed (who was expert on Things Historical about GMH) got it all wrong on the poet's verse technique. He may have gotten it confused with verse for songs, where the unstressed syllables in a line are not counted as strictly (see Byron's "Stanzas for Music" for an example. Hymns, however, are another matter altogether! See an encyclopedia entry "Hymnology" for help there.).
For the record: Hopkins did count the unstressed syllables in his lines. It's just for what that matters. (Hint: It made the heavily stressed ones "spring" off the page.)
But, near the end of his short life, Hopkins complained bitterly to Bridges that he'd hit a creative dead end. The self-imposed "rules" to sprung rhythm just grew and grew over time, and they seem to have hemmed him in creatively.
Letting things get too complex can do that. Study the rules of formal verse, for sure -- just be sure to loosen things up when you write.
We're looking for those interstices, remember?
Systole/Diastole
"Pulse action." Works in dishwashers. Works in verse.
But at what pressure? You decide!
The End of the Line
When you're writing, you just write, like now, right?
Sometimes, yeah, off-the-cuff does the trick. And for poets, when we're in the thick of composition, that first blast is what we use to launch a poem -- and it often flies offhand.
But that's when planning and thinking ahead works for you. So, when the time comes, you and your mechanical pencil, Sharpie, Etch-A-Sketch, or whatever, are ready to go.
The last word is important in every line of poetry. Just look at the poems that have truly impressed themselves on your psyche over the years: they usually have very strong end words for every line. Clean, powerful, resonant end words can almost serve as a map for the basic sense of the entire poem.
So, when it comes time to rhyme -- those end words become doubly important. And that's why your planning, your aesthetic, your understanding of structure, your basic sensitivity to rhythm ("pulse"), etc. start to show their importance. They become like fingers on the potter's hands: they know where to go all by themselves, even while the clay is still spinning under the running water.
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