Primitive Information

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The single biggest factor shaping new measure in American verse is time. As I listen to Bach I engage in the pleasure of the music’s unhurried pace, its calm assurance in returning to the harmonic center, its way of stringing out endless variations on a theme in slightly different tones and patterns so that its reverberations can echo in me long after the piece is finished. In some ways it almost seems to exist outside of time, at least outside of any time that I can relate to. It is a montage of pastoral scenes, the rhythms of country life, it could only exist in the modern American City if it were the soundtrack to a film, which depicted (as Woody Allen, for example, is so good at doing) two lovers searching for each other in the city streets. The heightened emotion would somehow stand in for the sense of leisurely time.

If that doesn’t make sense, let me come at it another way. I had meant to mention in my “Rhyme” essay that a well-thumbed rhyming dictionary ought to be part of any poet’s toolkit – preferably two or three, because no two are alike. At some point one ought to have gotten acquainted with various forms, although to master, say, the sonnet, seems an almost ludicrously superfluous task for the modern poet. Yet, if only for the sake of appreciating the effects produced in different forms while reading them, it seems incumbent upon any poet to spend a year or so really focusing on those forms. And it is possible to write a sonnet – I’m thinking of John Clark and Ted Berrigan – that doesn’t rhyme and yet shows a deep understanding of the sonnet and seems perfectly modern in every way.

But for most of us there is an immediate problem – time in the sense both of spending it on mastering those forms and time in relation to the forms themselves. Suppose I have a rush to have something to say. The urgency of my speech is not likely to mimic even remotely a fixed form, which is close to what Williams is getting at when he talks about paying attention to American speech. We have such a confluence of tongues, dialects, idioms, jargon, localized speech patterns and rhythms that already you are faced with the radical shattering of anything that might’ve worked for English verse, which was already somewhat uneasily retrofitted to forms that derived largely from Romance languages but due to the brilliance of its early practitioners, and the richness of English as it was fed by the converging streams of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words, they managed to get away with it for a few centuries at least.

Williams starts to get at something when he talks about the attempt to mimic the rhythms of jazz, which is to Bach as modern physics is to the science of Newton – a splitting apart of the rhythmic atom into smaller and smaller (faster and faster) units with no fixed law, but only a swinging relative beat from one measure to the next. Clark Coolidge writes about this in his essays on Jack Kerouac’s relationship to jazz and by extension his own. He writes of how bop (Charlie Parker et al.) began to give an equivalent value to each of the four beats in a 4/4 measure, which is clearly not indicated in the Bach piece or in the traditional sonnet form, both of which move around a strong sense of return to center over time. The implications of the evening out of beat values (Clark says) led to longer breath measures and ultimately to no fixed return, so that ultimately you get the timeless time of Ornette Coleman and free jazz beyond that.

I believe this has to do with the jamming or wadding up of our time into smaller and smaller units. Literally – the time one has to get from point A to point B, to conclude an utterance and be heard. The sprawling out of our towns and suburbs, the divvying up of attention, the narratives that float around disembodied in space – all of these point to a less and less structured silence, a more and more frenzied saying, a compression almost beyond reason to begin to get one’s point across. It is difficult to exaggerate the sense of disorientation one feels upon arriving in a big city after some time away. Wordsworth could barely stand to be in one, but now it is our default mode of existence; where there is not City we pipe it in via cellphone, television, e-mail, we are “wired” from the moment of waking up.

Who has time to learn how to write a sonnet? And why bother, when the time it would take to master the form would almost certainly still not produce one that could rival even a trifle of Shakespeare’s or Donne’s? Clark and Berrigan, and probably a few others I’ve forgotten or don’t know about, have come up with eloquent answers to this problem, but they are freaks on the poetic landscape. It is exhilarating to think that the problems proposed by our TIME in every sense of that word have barely begun to be addressed, that the poetry of Williams, his modest experiments, still seem radical and fresh when compared with much of what’s written today. Daunting, too, to be faced with the issue of having to find that center for oneself in any useful way for the art of poetry, but that’s for another time.

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In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen takes 400 pages to tell a story that could have been told in 100, or 10 if you’re Raymond Carver, though Carver never would have written a story like this. There are at least six extraneous characters by my count, and if Austen had brought this novel to workshop I’m sure she would have been brow-beaten into cutting most of them.

The story focuses on two sisters, one of them good-hearted to the point of being hopelessly naive, the other too sharp-tongued and keen-witted for her own good; is it any mystery that the naive one will become disillusioned, that the smart one will be humbled, or that both will end the novel by marching down the wedding aisle with their knights in shining Armani, so to speak?

The wonder is that Austen somehow keeps us interested in this shopworn plot. Partially she does this by making it a comedy of errors. The meddling mother, the bumbling cousin, the dunder-headed daughters, and various other minor characters make appearances that have more to do with comic relief than advancing the plot. The plot, such as it is, is almost entirely one of negation and misinformation — it’s what the sisters don’t know, or the wrong ideas they have, about the men they’re interested in, that drives the story. Mostly this is not, as it so often is in Shakespeare, for example, a matter of deliberate secrecy; it’s simply reticence and good manners and social decorum that keep them from knowing what they need to know.

For example, at one point Jane, the good sister, visits London, where her beloved “Bingley” has gone with his friend and sisters, who have convinced him it’s best to break off his relationship with Jane and avoid marrying a woman who’s socially beneath him. Even though the smart sister, Elizabeth, knows that the sisters and friend are doing this, she can’t talk Jane into writing directly to him or going to him herself, and we spend about 300 pages screaming at her to get a clue.

Later, it becomes obvious that Mr. Wickham, who everyone had previously thought to be a really great guy, is actually a big jerk and a con artist. Rather than warn others about this, Jane and Elizabeth both decide to keep quiet, because they don’t think he can do any harm and they don’t think it’s their place to rat him out. Naturally, he ends up eloping with one of their sisters and almost ruining everything for everybody.

In a novel such as this, where information is at a premium, the role of letters becomes of almost paramount importance. This was the level of the narrative that held the most interest for me, and Austen does a remarkable job building and maintaining tension, so that we’re almost as eager as the characters themselves to receive whatever letter everyone’s waiting for and find out what’s going on. There’s an amazing letter from Darcy, right after Elizabeth has stunned this incredibly rich and handsome scion by turning down his initial offer of marriage (because she thinks he’s a jerk because of Wickham’s lies and because he talked Bingley out of marrying Jane), that goes on for like eight pages and explains his whole life’s story and introduces more extraneous characters and begins the slow process of humbling Elizabeth and making her change her mind.

After Wickham absconds with their sister, the novel basically becomes everyone sitting around waiting for news via letter, and the fear and dread factor couldn’t have been greater. “Every day at Longbourn was now a day of anxiety; but the most anxious part of each was when the post was expected. The arrival of letters was the first grand object of every morning’s impatience. Through letters, whatever of good or bad was to be told, would be communicated, and every succeeding day was expected to bring some news of importance.”

Of course, as I’ve already noted, things turn out for the best — Wickham, though a despicable sort of character, is forced to marry the sister, which is apparently preferable to having the rumor go around that she spent a weekend in London with him; Jane marries Bingley and etc etc — … All in all, despite or because of the threadbare but bloated plot, the letters and the intrigue, I thoroughly enjoyed it!

Finally, here’s a recent article about Andrew Davies, who’s adapted several Jane Austen novels.

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Dale Smith reviews Susan Briante’s Pioneers in the Study of Motion — haven’t read the whole review yet, but I’ve mentioned this book here before.

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Here is an insightful interview with poet Hoa Nguyen on Bookslut; I mean insightful both in terms of the questions asked and the detailed answers given. I stole the link from Scott Pierce…

Here is the new web site for Interbirth Books. The site looks great, and best of all is that its owner Micah Robbins plans to have fiction, poems, and art from some really amazing folks up there on a monthly basis.

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No, it’s not the title of an Ernest Hemingway story. It’s one of those obvious but elusive discoveries I’ve made, one that makes you slap yourself in the head and say, “Duh!”

I’ve been railing for years to anyone who’ll listen about the tyranny of the shaving racket. If you’re a man who shaves–and apparently, the MFA fiction writers at TX State mostly don’t–you’ve generally got two choices: an electric razor, or those plastic cartridge thingies that come with an ever-increasing and superfluous number of blades.

Electric razors burn my oh-so-sensitive skin. I’ve had a Gillette something-or-other cartridge thingie for a long time, but every year they come out with a new and fancier and more expensive blade for it, so I’ve paid for the thingie many, many, many times over in replacements.

I kept seeing plain old double-edged blades for sale at the grocery store, and yet–among the dozens of varieties of cartridge thingie options–they do not sell the razors that would fit with them. I began to wistfully wonder where I could get such a thing, and what shaving with it would be like. Eventually, I found double-edged safety razors for sale online via Amazon, and ordered one as a belated Christmas gift to myself (mine is a Merkur Classic).

The verdict: Nothing less than wonderful. I still need to work on my technique, as I have a tendency to nick myself here and there, but by and large this thing gives me a smoother shave than anything I’ve ever used. I’ve barely gone through two blades in two weeks, and you can buy them for a quarter the price of multi-bladed replacement cartridges. The best part is that I feel like I’m sticking it to the man every time I shave. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

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A response to Louise Bogan’s “The Pleasures of Formal Poetry,” excerpted in Lofty Dogmas. (There’s another response here, that gives more of an idea of her piece; it’s not otherwise available online.)

Years ago in college writing workshop a woman said to me in an off-handed manner “well maybe you’ll be a song-writer” during the break after I’d been roundly criticized for using rhyme in a poem. More recently, but still a while back, a songwriter friend accompanied me to an open-mike poetry reading, where he recited his rap-style, cleverly rhymed lyrics to much applause. Still more recently, finally submitting to commands that had first voiced themselves in early childhood, I picked up the guitar and took a songwriting class, the culmination of which was the performance of the one complete song I actually managed to set to music, at a club with other students. The feeling of getting that across, singing the rhymes and strumming the guitar, was rewarding in a way that the performance of one’s poetry seldom is.

There can be no poem without rhyme. To say that ought to be enough, but of course it’s necessary to agree on what rhyme means and how it has come be used. There is no doubt that actual end-rhymes, of the type one uses to great effect in song, are considered the mark of an inferior or unsophisticated poem. The above comment by a class-mate, while possibly meant in the most generous sense possible, was taken by me as a put-down, as much as to say “you don’t have what it takes to write poetry – why don’t you write songs.” I believe many poets would feel the same way. On the other hand, my song-writing friend couldn’t stand going to a poetry reading and seeing the poet read off the page. “Why can’t they at least memorize it?” he would complain. Yet without the mnemonics of rhyme, it is very difficult to memorize a poem of any length.

No poetry without rhyme… I mean this in the sense that Robert Duncan explains in Fictive Certanties: there are many kinds of rhyme and these days we use image-rhyme, logos-rhyme or the rhyming of word-nuance, rhymes of complexes of words and images juxtaposed so as to create synthesis, an effect beyond what’s on the page. I don’t believe that a good poet in any era was completely without these tools, and an analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnets bears this out. But certainly more recent American poets have stretched some of these techniques farther than they ever had gone before in English. Take Pound. One of the most important (perhaps overlooked?) things that Pound managed to do was to bring into his verse the image-based collage form that he found in Chinese poetry. The effect was to strip away much of the wastage that had built up around conventions in formal poetics that had gone unquestioned for the better part of a century.

From this branch of Pound’s poetics alone one finds much of what has been accomplished by Creeley, especially in his early minimalist poetry, and Snyder, especially in terms of his nature poetry. But it is a rhyming of a different order. It may or may not include actual sound-rhyme and seldom has to do with end-rhyme. There is melody, but it springs from a different source and it is for a different purpose. Both source and purpose are so heterogenous from one poem to the next that to go into that here would be to go far afield of what I want to talk about, and that’s rhyme and song.

It has often been said that the printed word gradually released the poem (for better or worse) from the demands of rhyme in just the sense hinted at above – poets no longer needed to memorize their work for repetition and performance, thus there was no need for the periodic return to a fixed melodic element. But I don’t think nearly enough has been done to consider this fact from the opposite point of view. I find it interesting, for example, that Louise Bogan says Murray is “forced to quote a Gilbert stanza” when he wants to give an example of “a rhythmic pattern used in Greek comedy,” as if letters had fallen to such a sad state in England that this mere songwriter was the best of a sorry lot. Bogan also echoes Pound, however, in reminding us that there have been recurring movements in poetry to recover the song – she mentions Rimbaud, but there are comparable examples in every language. One thinks of Goethe scouring the hills for folk songs in his youth. I wonder then if the skill for sophisticated metrics and rhyming has not moved for better or worse further than ever into the realm of songwriting, at least and especially in English. In other words, rather than the traditional movement of folk song into poetry, a reverse evolution of some of the best poets of a time and place turning to song.

Gilbert used his brilliantly witty pen for comic effect, but not all of his lines are merely funny, and one can argue that his “short sharp shock” represents the black undertone of a gay but dying age. Certainly no one in England at that time approached him in terms of the variety and precision of his technique. Pound felt that most of the best writing in his age was being done by writers of prose (“Poetry ought to be at least as interesting as…”). Then there was the explosion of American folk, soul, and rock music of the 1950s and 60s. At a time when poetry needed to be brought back to song (one might argue) song was already there waiting for poetry. The interest in music as a medium in and of itself, not in combination with the theater or any other art form, had never been higher. Thus an already acclaimed poet like Leonard Cohen began to play the guitar and sing. Bob Dylan (who stored up in his ear a tremendous number of American folk songs) is known as a musician and not (only) a poet. Both of these latter naturally use sound rhyme to a much higher degree than decorum would dictate in a modern American poem. Yet the best of their lyrics work well on the page, too.

Given the materials that he or she does and doesn’t have to work with, it seems natural, if at times lamentable, that the American poet would go so far from song. For one thing, a musical instrument imposes order and condensing on the line in a totally different way than the blank page or even one’s gesture or breath does. Where one might have previously heard at least the echo of the musical instrument when sitting down to write, now we talk about different melodies, perhaps tied to the rhythms of speech or inherent in the object itself. I don’t take it, for example, that Creeley’s desire for “the anonymity of any song” means a literal desire to write songs in the traditional sense. Otherwise he could have easily done that, one eye or not. We are looking for something apart from song, but equal to it in a different sense, because the songwriters are already out there, doing their job. It would be nice if we could agree on what that is, but perhaps more interesting if we don’t.

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