Scoplaw

Greatest Hits

A few people have randomly asked me about poetry lately.  I think my fav. publication credit is one in which I did not appear with Bill Knott.

On the Brain

These have been on my mind lately.  Although I can assure you that sweet imprecision is not something I should be cultivating right now, in light of the hair splitting rigors of bar exam.  As is the case with good poetry, a prose explication would vastly exceed the poems.  So I'll just post the poems themselves.

The Herrick piece is probably more well known, but, as with many things, I prefer Ben Johnson.  And not just because of the Horace allusion.  Although sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes (Virgil) has been something of a motto this summer.  I ought to get it tattooed so I don't forget it.

Anyway, I'm off to a brief sleep break before another bar/cram/jam.  Here are the poems.  Discuss amongst yourselves.  Or not. 

Robert Herrick
Delight in Disorder

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthralls the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.

Ben Jonson
Simplex Munditiis

Still to be neat, still to be dressed,
As you were going to a feast;
Still to be powdered, still perfumed:
Lady, it is to be presumed,
Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.

Give me a look, give me a face,
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all the adulteries of art;
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.

Quick MFA Note

There are many of you out there who are figuring out what MFA program to accept.  (Or which law school to accept, or which job to accept.) There’s lots of on-line advice on all of those choices, but I wanted to quickly pitch a couple of pennies into the MFA well. 

In the spirit of open disclosure, I’m a longstanding defender of MFA programs, although I’m well aware of the problems that come with writing *to* contemporary criticism or theory, as Australian Poet A.D. Hope pointed out in an essay called  "Literature versus the Universities":

The poet trained in a school of creative writing by academic critics and taking a job in the same atmosphere is more and more tempted . . . to produce work which, more or less unconsciously, is written in illustration of current critical theories; and thus reversing the proper order of nature in which the critical theories arise to deal with the independent raw material of the creative imagination . . . What is really disturbing is when the young lover has the professor in bed with him and knows his performance is being graded as a first or second class honours, pass or fail. Writing is, or should be, a single-minded process.

Along with myself, there are some other MFA defenders out there (1) (2) (3) who do a good job articulating what the MFA can be like and what it can do for its students.   

My advice on selecting an MFA is simply to know what you’re going into it for.

A lot of people want to get the MFA so that they can teach creative writing.   Well, the job market for teaching creative writing is very. very tight, so unless you’re going to a “top school” in terms of name recognition, you’re probably not going to be in a position where you’re looking at multiple (or any) job offers right out of the program.  Well, unless you have a book or two in hand at that point, which kind of begs the question as to why you’re getting an MFA.  Ironically, you’ll probably be able to teach CW easily enough – I’ve taught at writer’s groups, community workshops, online for writer’s groups, and online for myself (meaning I take students for fees and teach them.)  What you won’t find as a brand new graduate is that tenured professorship in that same institution, replete with tweed jacket.  Like anything else though, if you desperately want that life (more than you want anything else) it’s possible to obtain.  Just don’t think it’s a default option for your average student.  It will require either a lucky alignment of your creative, personal, and professional life, or the subordination of some of those to the goal of teaching CW full time.  Not all aesthetics are equally accepted in the various academies. 

Other people want the MFA simply so they can be better writers.   The MFA can certainly help you in this goal, insofar as it will make you a more self-conscious writer, which is often the same thing.  Well, if it does not scare you off of writing entirely, which it’s been known to do.  In any event though, I wanted to suggest the importance of going to a program that will help you develop along the lines you want to.  Again, not all MFA programs are created equal, and they certainly don’t all embrace every personal aesthetic equally.  If you want to model yourself after Poet X, make sure that you’re not going to some place which is anathema to that kind of work.  That said, most of the better MFA programs will be able to impart a kind of basic poetic literacy, regardless of their dominant aesthetic. 

While these seem like commonsensical points (they are) I keep running into MFA students who set themselves up for heartache by going to the wrong program.  Yes, it’s true that no one should be shackled to a martinet thesis advisor who wishes to only churn out pale copies of themselves – but do what research you can on the programs before going into them.  A difference of five grand between program A and program B is irrelevant if only one of those programs will play to the kind of poetical education you’re aspiring to. 

As to what I think a good MFA can do for you, I’ll include something I wrote back in ’99 in response to a storm of criticism of the MFA on the major online workshops of those days.

**

A Defense of M.F.A. Programs in Poetry

Lately, primarily amongst web-poets, I've seen the Masters of Fine Arts degree in Poetry, and the programs it arises from, rapped on the pedagogic knuckles. "M.F.A. poets" (those who've attended an M.F.A. program are inevitably amused by that sweeping categorization alone) have no souls, they write about "nothing," perhaps having been granted skills to say "something" but remaining crippled by immaturity and self-centeredness. M.F.A. poets, I am told, are natural sycophants, toadies to the will of their professorial masters, shallow copiers of a bankrupt tradition of personal narrative, confession, and meaningless lyric babble. The overarching tyranny of the workshop is often cited as one of the strong-armed evils of such programs; it cruelly stomps out "real creativity" with a fervor greater than any professional language agency which may have haunted the nightmares of George Orwell.

Perhaps these allegations are true for the vast majority of M.F.A. graduates and programs. Having only met a few hundred M.F.A. graduates and read the works of some several hundred more, I'm at a loss to accurately report on the quality of the "average" M.F.A. student's poetry; indeed, I've only begun to scratch total works connected with such programs, given that over a thousand newly minted M.F.A.'s in Poetry /Writing are cracked out of the mold each year.

The following is a defense of the M.F.A. program and the graduates thereof, the issues addressed in no particular order of importance:

Critics of the M.F.A. program often cite the lack of these programs to produce, in the span of two or three years, poets of the first caliber, but the idea that poets should stroll out of the graduation line, walk back to their apartments and, that afternoon, pen the 40 or so quality poems that would sufficiently impress an editor to immediately publish a volume is surely misplaced.

While reasoning by analogy is a particular poetic vice, let's indulge it and consider other Fine Arts programs and other Master's programs. Do we expect music programs to immediately produce "first rate" musicians? Is it reasonable to assume that each graduate of, say, the Berkley School of Music in Boston, will spring into the spotlight of their discipline? Become instant virtuosi? Or that a painter, returning home from her graduation ceremony find their answering machine filled with gallery offers? No.
A more just expectation is that graduates will be "reasonably competent" in their field; that they will have mastered basic principles well enough (in theory at least) to instruct fledgling musicians, that they will have a certain technical aptitude in practicing those theories, and so forth. I am thinking of a level of proficiency that correlates with several years of intensive study.  Which is, after all, what we’re talking about.

The most important skill a program in Fine Arts instruction can impart is the ability to think critically about one's own work; to observe, analyze, advance practically applicable artistic theories based on deduced principles, to evaluate how those applied principals function in their own work.
In my own M.F.A. experience, at Sarah Lawrence College, I was encouraged by my professors to take a "cold eye" to my work - to relinquish personal biases and attempt to place myself in the perspective of an impartial reader. This perhaps is the key to writing well, for it allows the writing to be seen by the author as it is seen by the reader and thus the author has more control in refining and shaping the work with a mind to affective qualities.

How does this process affect the "wonder" of poetry, the "divine spark" of the muse? Hmm. One of the accusations against the M.F.A. program is that it "drains" the passion of poetry by its scrutiny of the actual words used in a poem (as if critical analysis of any phenomena or work diminished its emotional impact). This accusation of "dulling" poetry is also often applied to discussions of revision. "Those M.F.A poets always revise, but it strips the poetry of passion, dulls the poems," is a complaint I've heard more than once.  Of course, there were no concrete examples attached to this argument. . . Again, if you'll indulge reasoning by analogy, this is rather like saying the initial fragments and melodies that sprang into the brain of Beethoven were "dulled" by his arduous reworking of them into their final forms. The vast majority of great poems were not written in one draft; one of the most influential poems of the 20th century, "The Waste Land", by T.S. Eliot, was significantly rewritten by another poet, Ezra Pound, who culled Eliot’s initial thousand odd lines by more than half. The one exception that comes to mind is Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," but we should remember that this poem was written in 1923, when Frost was at the height of his powers, and none of his subsequent poems remained in the same form as their first drafts. Granted that the initial spark, the impulse to write a particular poem, is something mysterious and transitory, perhaps not worth inquiring into due to its mercurial nature; however, once the poem is begun, a process, whether conscious or not, begins to guide our creation. We select certain words due to their aptness, or sonic correlation to other words in the poem, or for their conformity to a pattern in which we may be laboring, etc. Even in the moment of creation, our faculties are critical. The revision process -- the critical inquiry, again and again, into the poem -- may be grueling, or joyous, depending on the writer, but it does not "diminish" the poem by itself. This is not to say that unwise choices in revision can't wreck a poem, for they surely can, but rather to assert that the inquiry itself does no damage, for a poem is not (no matter how much we may feel so) a flesh and blood thing. It will not bleed or squeal if we consider changing "spindle" to "bobbin" in line four and having rejected "bobbin", replace "spindle."

In addition to failing to churn out "major" poets, to "dulling" poetry via process, I also have heard M.F.A. programs accused of producing poets who "have not a lot to say", poets "who write about nothing." Again, I have to say I haven't done an extensive statistical analysis of what percentages of M.F.A. graduate poets write about "nothing" v. those who write about "something."  I'd speculate that many of these complaints have their roots in the proliferation of the "New York" school of poetry or neo-Surrealism, or Symbolism, none of which are native to the M.F.A. programs, or at least not more than, say, Abstract Expressionism can be "blamed" on having arisen from those pesky art schools.
Personally, I can say that I have read a number of affecting, well-written, conscientious poems from M.F.A. graduates, many of whom have not, as yet, penetrated the professional publishing establishment, the web of contests, influence, and skewed grants. While I don't find some M.F.A. graduate's work worth reading on a aesthetic level, I will say that I most often fail to value these poems because of their adherence to particular poetic theories or paradigms (say, narcissistic and irrelevant dilly-dallying over issues of "self," as an example) I will say that adherence to these theories is, by and large, chosen by the poets. Meaning that via their fidelity to their writing style these poets are demonstrating a technical competency, an artistic will and intelligence, in composing their individual poems. This argues more to a conscious choice being made by skilled writers than to an imperfect memorization by rote of a "style" (which one assumes would result in sloppily realized poems that diverge from the principles they operate on - an inconsistency that often is critiqued in M.F.A. programs as a poem "failing to fulfill its expectations" or "sending conflicting (stylistic) messages.")
There is also the possibility that young poets (shockingly) may have different interests and concerns than the established critics of their day, that while focusing on matters of grammar, or description, or experimenting with imagery, the poems might fall otherwise into one of many conventional tropes. For example, poems which lack specificity - an unknown, genderless, nameless "I" addresses some personal, unknowable message to an equally unspecific "you."  But the overarching structure of a poem is also an element of composition, subject to analysis, revision and change. I introduce this to suggest that many writers must master the nuts and bolts of their medium before they can draw up effective blueprints for complete vehicles. When teaching beginning writers, I attempt to make them aware of the basic building blocks of their medium: words. I drill them on how they use verbs, nouns, adverbs and advance to more complex issues of sentence structure. I do not begin by questioning the mode the poems are written in or their affective power, or their place in the tradition of poetry - such can overwhelm the beginning writer.

The extended learning process touches on the idea of maturity and development.  Again, it's a misconception to expect that M.F.A. programs exist to churn out "finished" artists, when they are structured to enable their graduates to become "finished" artists/poets/whatnots via the application of their education. Often it takes awhile to mobilize what you've learned to the point where it positively affects your writing. Emergence of writers sometime after their M.F.A. is earned is often seen as evidence that "good poets survive M.F.A. programs", as if the M.F.A. program was something to experience negatively, akin to locking musicians up in a bowling alley and expecting them to write symphonies on their release. Thankfully, ours is not such a simply dichotomous world.
This misconception of the Pavlovian nature of M.F.A. programs in poetry is another charge; M.F.A. programs, via the workshop, "train" their participants to write in a certain style or manner. This is a fear of poetry boot camp, as though an M.F.A. program was a gigantic cookie cutter whose shape could be read by tracing the sensibilities and interests of the instructors:

•    Poet/Professor A favors poetry of the ecstatic voice
•    Poet/Professor B believes a poem should begin and end outside the "I"
•    Poet/Professor C finds fantastic metaphors somewhat "showy"

Therefore all poets graduating form this program will favor ecstatic poetry that begins and ends outside the "I" and eschews fantastic metaphors? Hardly.

Some poets will, of course, adopt the style and mode of their teachers, and not all in the spirit of blind obedience and conformity. These poets, working in a vein that their teachers favor, will no doubt have their work easily segued via their teachers' professional contacts into the publication media of that particular style or mode. Would it surprise anyone for an promising apprentice Postmodern painter to have her work hung next to other Postmodern painters in a predominantly Postmodern gallery? Still, other (most) poets from the program will end up writing in a style that is not completely in the vein of their teachers. Regardless of what may be "evidenced" by publication rates of these various groups, it is important to note that all students, regardless of their style, are given the opportunity, via the workshop's structure, to develop the critical skills which lead to writing well.

This leads us to consider workshopping. Workshops are a composite of the student's conduct, submissions and attitudes, and the professor's style and knowledge. I have been in workshops which I've found extremely useful and inspiring, only to have these same workshops thought useless and stifling by my fellow students. Conversely, I've been put off by workshops my peers have found invaluable. I've taught students who wished to purse our poetic relationship well after the class, and also have had students (obviously talented and established) abandon courses after two meetings. What I'm trying to suggest is that, on some level the workshop is a completely subjective experience; often the true value of a workshop becomes apparent only after much time has passed. Sometimes, even if only a few lessons are gleaned from a particular class, they prove to be the most valuable in the long run. I remember David Rivard informing a workshop that he was not there "to play the Poetry Doctor"; instead he wanted to teach us to develop and use our  own analytical skills to diagnose and treat our work, which for me has become the central tenant of teaching the writing of poetry.

There are poets who write to please the dominant personalities of a particular workshop- there are poets who resubmit the same poem to different workshops in the hopes of finding validation, that one critic who says "I love your stuff, for me it's perfect, etc." while some poets play with workshops, submitting fragments their friends have written, nonsense verse, etc. None of these behaviors, as cloying as they may seem to an older hand, invalidates the workshop, for, provided that at least some variance in assessment exists, the poet is offered the opportunity to participate the critical evaluation of her own work, as I've outlined above. For example, someone loves your poem, someone else dislikes the form, another likes the form, yet despairs of the content. Consensus is not important.  What is important, for the growth of the poet as a critical being, is that the issue of form is discussed, pro and cons are presented, and, like it or not, the poet, usually bound by the "gag rule" of not interfering with the discussion of the poem on hand, will begin to evaluate the issues, the variances.  The poet will accept and reject premises and statements.

The weakest form of this evaluation will be narcissistic. The poet rejects criticism that seems unfavorable while accepting criticism that praises the work; even so, the poet will begin to view discrete structures within the poem as praiseworthy (use of sound, form, dramatic utterance, etc.) The strongest form of evaluation for a workshop participant is a balanced one that considers seriously the pros and cons of each criticism presented. It does not matter that any particular poem is changed as a result of the workshop, that the class "plays Poetry Doctor" and "cures" the poem of whatever, in the collective opinion, ails it. Instead the value of such review is that the poet deepens her awareness of her own writing process that future poems will benefit (either in composition or revision) from the enhanced sensibility of the poet.

Criticism of other's poems is also, in most workshops, mandatory. Again, there are strong and weak critics in every workshop. Strong critics, those that do their best to fairly and unflinchingly evaluate poems will, inevitably, hone critical skills useful (consciously or unconsciously) to their own endeavors. Weak critics, who unfairly point out what poems do not do (every poem does not do something; extended poems are not compressed, nor are compressed poems extended) are at least, perversely, analyzing the poems successfully, if not offering useful strategies for revision. The worst critics are those who say nothing, or unreservedly praise or damn poems, for here there is no attention to the particular elements within a poem, no demonstration of how to manipulate particular parts of poems to affect the whole. At the very least, we might hope that some of their fellow students or professor's remarks are retained for future use, by these writers- however, in closing I must note that none of this is possible without the contribution of reader's responses, which the workshop certainly guarantees.

Ultimately of course, it is the future that concerns both professors and students, and the best structured (and it seems to me, also the worst structured) programs do allow the community of reaction that is necessary to begin constructing the patterns of reflection and study that give poets a better chance to write well. Unfortunately, art in general and poetry in particular are not democratic; some individuals (you can argue talent or training or the gods shape them so) are simply better painters or writers or singers than others. It may well be that you cannot train someone to have the initial spark (perhaps it is best so) and that the good poems are those that speak deeply out of the poet's personal sensibility- but it is quite foolish to suggest that individuals who feel this spark, who feel as though they must write, who are happiest in the moment of creation and work that transcends a sense of personal time, and who endeavor always to improve themselves as persons as they improve their art, would not benefit from a program that teaches them to remove their assumed blinders and view their creations critically or, if you prefer, sympathetically from the eyes of their audience.

Book The Second?

OK - I have about 62 poems that seem to be viable enough for a second book.  I'm going to try to whip it into shape sometime this week and over spring break (between studying for the MPRE and clinic and job hunting and all that shit.)

Two questions:

1) anyone want to give it a read-over and let me know what you think?

2) (not as serious) anyone interested in setting up a submission service whereby you'd cycle out letters/submissions to a group of journals, then resend the rejected pieces to other journals?  I think it would be a viable service.  I'd certainly drop some change paying for such a thing. 

The Weirdness of Observation and John Milton

Yesterday was bizzay.  Actually the past two days were frightfully busy. 

I got home Thurs night (technically Friday morning) after a full day of classes, memo/motions writing.  The classes were awesome. 

The first was Clinic case rounds for a very interesting/promising case involving sexual touching on a bus (case was disposed of on Friday – we lost (ack!)).  I am consistently impressed with the good suggestions that come out of those sessions; they’re so good you want to smack your forehead and exclaim “Of Course!” every 4 minutes. 

The second was the criminal enforcement of environmental laws which suffered a bit due to late notice of long reading assignments.  It was still awesome though.  I learn best when there are practical/real world/structural challenges laced though the black letter law.  Since the professors in that class are all former prosecutors who are now private defenders, I get plenty of “and here’s how theory grounds into the real world” moments.

Friday was a bit rough also.  The motion I stayed up to write on Thurs sucked and had to be rewritten on Friday, and I owe Tenacious D a debt of gratitude for taking on my last minute motions challenge and hammering the thing into shape.  Again, a good learning experience.  Although that motion was finished very close to the deadline, I think I’m pretty much now caught up on everything.  Things will get easier now that my two heavy reading classes are starting to give me more time to work with the materials. 

Friday also featured a morning witness statement taking (again not the smoothest preparation to the justified annoyance of my investigative partner) and then the final memo touches and filing. 

After the deadlines, I ended up talking with someone about my 1L summer and encouraging her to apply.  It was kind of funny.  She was giving these standard responses to my questions about why she’d be interested in a PDs office and what she was looking for in terms of experiences, etc., when she kind of breaks “interview mold” and says, “I was wondering if I should bring up the fact that [omitted fact] and therefore I [omitted fact].”  Well, this omitted fact was an absolute “must have her” kind of thing.  I told her that if I were doing the hiring, and knew this, she could say the most bizarre stuff for the rest of the interview and I’d still take her as a summer 1L on the sole strength of that one experience and the perspective it gives.   I hope she gets the position, since I think that summer program is one of the best experiences you could possibly have during your 1L year.  In many ways it’s sort of a mini-clinic, and simply I can’t recommend it highly enough, even for people who are not planning on going into criminal law, but are interested in it nonetheless.

Also on Friday, at some point, my heater core in my car cracked.  I think.  It smells like burnt antifreeze and idles roughly (almost surging) whenever I flip the heater on.  With the heater off, it seems to run just fine.  More investigation will be done today.  Arrgh.

I finished Friday by doing a Capitol Hill pub crawl (2 pubs) with some clinic peeps.  On reflection, the whole thing was decidedly odd – not that the whole day wasn’t – but I did have a great time talking with people about cases, fantasy, poetry, law, and the LS experience.  We even had some of the fellows out with us, which is always a treat.  The rumor mill was running full tilt last night, which was also kind of funny.  I probably need to take such things more seriously, but eh.  Case in point – some guy gave me money for chatting with him in the bathroom.  Sounds sketchy, yes? 

Well, I was standing next to some very drunk Russian guy in the bathroom who was complaining about his girlfriend being hassled by skinheads.  Actually, I think it was more of the opportunistic young white trash thing, rather than the hardcore skinhead type.  I’ve done the shaved head and combat boots thing – it causes problems like you would not believe.  Or maybe you would.  Anyway, I made sympathetic noises and asked if I could do anything for him, or if anyone was giving him trouble.  He said no kind of confusedly and staggered off.  So later I see him at the bar with his girlfriend and said skinhead.  The skinhead was doing that sort of opportunistic guy thing, the girlfriend was playing the skinhead for attention, and the Russian guy was obviously not pleased.  He was also, as mentioned, very drunk so couldn’t say much of anything without looking like the overprotective drunk boyfriend.  So I leaned over to him and said – “I’ve been in this situation before.  I’m sorry you’re in it now.”  So he looks at me and slips me a handful of 20s while saying – “You are a good man with clear eyes.”  Then he heads off upstairs.  Decidedly weird, but very Russian withal. So, with the aid of the Sensible Student, I spent the money on drinks for the clinic people.

Another weird point was running into someone who independently recognized me as a poet rather than a law student or a blogger (this is someone I’d never met.)  That’s an unusual random encounter, since my celebrity is small, and those who do recognize me as a poet are mostly other writers, not straight up readers.

Over the course of the evening, the cast of characters were many and at one point the Dapper Floridian (hi!) and his wife (hi!) and I ended up talking about blogging and monikers.  Blogging makes people nervous – who knows the google skills that will be employed looking for information about you? 

But blogging is also kind of difficult to track if you’re just hoping for random information on a person.  While it’s easy (via google) to find a blogger associated with a city or a bar or an institution, it’s much harder to find out a) who that person is, and b) which random person mentioned on the blog is the Xperson (whom you’re actually looking for) and whether or not if, even if you have a likely candidate for Xperson, whatever was blogged about actually happened.  Blogging is, in many ways, like most written communication – people tend to see what they want to see in it.  Meaning their subjective filters encounter only the text on the page, and all the small social things of real interaction which completely color any kind of event or experience are simply absent.

So in many ways the blog’s vision of individuals is a distorting social typecaster *if* the reader forgets that blogs are fictionalized (as all writing is) and reflect, for the purposes of telling a story, only a small sub-section of very rich lives.  It would follow that the doings of third parties mentioned on blogs are even more distorted.  I don’t think the Dapper Floridian was complaining of how I treat (portray) him on the blog, but I think it’s good to remind my dear readers that when mentioning others, we’re always talking about a sliver of a fraction of a story.

**

And the last element in my rambling post shall be John Milton’s Paradise Lost. 

I was chatting with Proto-Abe (I think after a 9pm workout in the gym on Thurs?) about epic poetry.  Apparently few read Paradise Lost anymore.  (Or of The Prelude, or Beowulf, or The Divine Comedy, or The Faerie Queene, or The Nibelungenlied, or the Elder Edda, or Gilgamesh, or the Iliad, Odyssey, and the Aeneid.  ) 

Although I imagine the Odyssey and The Divine Comedy must remain the most popular of this unpopular list.

Anyway, Paradise Lost is an odd and unpopular poem.  It’s dense, allusive, difficult.  It’s a product of a DWM Cromwellian Puritan who went blind and suffered a serious reversal of his political and personal fortunes.  There are disturbing gender implications for contemporary sensibilities.  It talks about God and sin a lot.  It’s in fact so allusive to both classical mythology and the Bible that it will cause your head to burst if you try to integrate its cosmology into your own as you read.  (The best advice I can give on approaching it is to read it as though it’s science fiction and not get bogged own.) 

But it’s also daring and weird.  The protagonist of PL is Satan, and he gets all the best lines.  The next best lines are given to Eve.  Adam is kind of stiff, honorable, but ultimately human, and ultimately (I think) more culpable and weaker than Eve is.  God and Jesus are, well, often insufferable.  But God and Jesus are not really written *as* people within the poem (they’re, um, kind of conceptual), whereas Adam and Eve are portrayed as fully rounded beings.  If you read it you’ll see what I mean. 

It’s also simply great poetry.  The strengths and weaknesses of the poem (for modern ears) are found in the first two sentences:

OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, [ 5 ]
Sing Heav'nly Muse,that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill [ 10 ]
Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues [ 15 ]
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread [ 20 ]
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence, [ 25 ]
And justifie the wayes of God to men.

First off – amazing sentences.  Amazing rhetoric.

You can follow it well enough, at first, and might catch that line 4’s “one greater Man/Restore us” must be Christ.  Well enough.  But then there’s Oreb, Sinai, Sion Hill, Siloa’s Brook – what *is* all this stuff?   If you start to play the hunt and peck game within PL, you will read slowly and the poem will sputter to a halt.  Just pretend that there is a shepherd (whether you can name him or not) and move on. 

Milton’s also very daring here.  He invokes the classical muse (a customary move) to aid him in telling his tale.  Then he invokes God to do the same – and how he does that!

Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread [ 20 ]
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant

That’s just a fantastic image of God, brooding (in all senses of the word) on nothingness and then giving it life.  This is far more radical and organic and tender and maternal (oddly) than the relatively sterile “let there be light.”

Milton’s also (if you didn’t catch it!) full of poetic arrogance.  Meaning he’s willing to try to make the big argument, to attempt things yet unattempted in Prose or Rhime, and to (no small task here!) justify the ways of god to men.  Some wag once quipped “Beer does more than Milton can/To justify the ways of god to man.”  But how can you not read something that *tries* to do that. 

Yet at the same time Milton is humble within the language.  He tucks his fantastic dove image deep within a sentence, making it subordinate to his imploration of poetic aid. 

This is a work rich in contradictions. 

**

So, I thought I’d close with a couple of good snippets from PL to encourage (hopefully) someone out there to read it. 

The first is Eve addressing Adam.  In PL, the mother of our race is revealed to be a great love poet: “With thee conversing I forget all time.”  I am genuinely sorry for anyone who hasn’t experienced that kind of love.    Eve builds up this wonderful list of things she loves, and then, like a rhetorical wave getting pulled back into the ocean, she recalls all these things and simply says that in the absence of her love, none of these are sweet.  It’s a very complex kind of statement when you parse it out; it’s about presence and sharing, and evinces Eve's outward ranging mind. 

From PARADISE LOST
Book IV
lines 639-658

With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons and thir change, all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest Birds;  pleasant the Sun
When first on this delightful Land he spreads
His orient Beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flow’r
Glist’ring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers;  and sweet the coming on
of grateful Ev’ning mild, the silent Night
With this her solemn Bird and this fair Moon.
And these the Gems of Heav’n, her starry train:
But neither breath of Morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest Birds, nor rising Sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flow’r
Glist’ring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful Ev’ning mild, nor silent Night
With this her solemn Bird, nor walk by Moon,
Or glittering Star-light without thee is sweet.
But wherefore all night long shine these, for whom
This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?

**

The next is some of Satan’s rhetoric as he tries to rally the banished angels to support him as the ruler of hell.  I’m sure you’ve heard the final line, and I’m sure you’re all familiar with the rationalization, the grasping at straws, the pride, the rage.  It’s all here:

From PARADISE LOST
Book I
lines 254-253

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.

Compare this to his later (private) lament in Book IV, lines 72-78. .

Me miserable! which way shall I flie
Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell; 
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n.

   

 

**

The last is a touch of the fantastic in Milton.   Adam and Eve have just finished a day’s labor in “mutual love and mutual help” and have (this is before the fall) laid themselves down naked in their bower.  They observe no religious "rites" except for a simple expression of thanks, but they do enjoy “their Rites Mysterious of connubial Love,” after which they fall asleep in each other’s arms.  (Again, this is pretty radical stuff for the day - Milton labels the anti-sexual as Hypocrites.)   

Satan, disguised in the form of a toad-like thing creeps up on the sleeping Adam and Eve, who, unknown to him, are guarded by the angel Ithuriel.

As a distracted and fascinated Satan begins to whisper in the ears of the sleepers, Ithuriel finds him and is uncertain of what’s going on. . .

From PARADISE LOST
Book IV,
Lines 810-825

Him thus intent Ithuriel with his Spear
Touch’d lightly; for no falsehood can endure
Touch of Celestial temper, but returns
Of force to its own likeness: up he starts
Discoverd and surpriz’d. As when a spark
Lights on a heap of nitrous Powder, laid
Fit for the Tun some Magazin to store
Against a rumord Warr, the Smuttie graine
With sudden blaze diffus’d, inflames the Aire:
So started up in his own shape the Fiend.
Back stept those two fair Angels half amaz'd 
So sudden to behold the grieslie King;
Yet thus, unmovd with fear, accost him soon.

Which of those rebell Spirits adjudg'd to Hell
Com'st thou, escap'd thy prison, and transform'd,
Why satst thou like an enemie in waite?

This is a tremendously kinetic and dramatic scene that Milton renders with great economy – it’s inspired a number of paintings:

The image is:
Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel's Spear (Satan flieht, von Ithuriels Speer beruht) 1779
Henry Fuseli
Oil on canvas, 2305 x 2763 mm

Anyway, I hope this might cause some of you to skim through Paradise Lost. There's a lot of great poetry in there (just don't get put off by the bits that *don't* grab you).

Best,

Scoplaw

Somewhat Weary

But not actually weary, of the same old fight.  Much poetry debate bores me recently – has for years.  I think this is because I’ve fallen so off the map, or so completely through the map, that I find myself reading good poems for my own pleasure and edification and largely ignoring the rest.  Will the sun fail to rise if I don’t read all the lit-mags?  Will I myself no longer be able to write or read if I am not abreast of the latest pundit’s terms of the month?    

Take for example the recent anti-absorbtive/absorbtive debate (mentioned by Brian Campbell).

As Brian (and others) point out, this is an old debate, not a new one.  Which is amazing.   I mean, this is exactly the same argument that we’ve been hearing, in different form, since High Modernism decided to take its tea and cookies and go play elsewhere.  You’d hope that someone witnessing the current debate would clear their throat, point to any numerous essays and arguments that defined these issues in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and say, “Well, yes.  Now how about a significantly new idea instead of a new term?”  (And actually, chronically good read Robert Archambeau does just that.)

As to the motivation of what animates these debates (apart from the actual positions taken by the debates) I think Brian is right in that the reanimation of these arguments must come from an underpinning of insecurity, a fear of irrelevance, which comes not only from the elitists/fascists/anti-absorbitves but from the populists/luddites/absorbitves as well.  Being of the second camp, I admit to hoping the first would just shut up and stop intimidating/infecting young readers.  But that’s probably not an accurate picture as to what’s actually going on, so I tend not to engage that dynamic all that much any more. 

I will engage enough to point out that what strikes me about the scope and framing of these debates is their removal from the common human experience.  "The Reader," if thought of at all, is alternately visioned as a mid-life university professor who does nothing but read increasingly difficult texts, or a slightly ditzy elementary school teacher who only reads Billy Collins.  The "Dear Reader" of old has gone on to populate the Borders and Barnes and Nobles of the world, where, unsuprisingly, they're reading up a strorm of almost everything but contemporary poetry.

By saying this, I don’t mean to categorically suggest that one end of the spectrum ought to be verboten for poets, that we become good socialist realists or platonists of the Republic, but as I wend my unplanned way though a week in the greater NE, I’ve encountered a number of heartbreaking stories: real people, trapped in bad situations, who know, in fact, what they need to do to align themselves with society, with their own requirements for lasting happiness, with the advice they’d give others located similarly.  And they just can’t do it.  There’s a veritable laundry list of financial pressures, politics, illnesses, drug-addictions, loneliness, legal problems, and so on, which are counterbalanced by an equal number of births, marriages, kindnesses, successful doings and joy.

And where does poetry fit into this human drama?  Where does an anti-absorbtive/absorbtive debate fit into it?  Are people in fact getting their intellectual stimulation and consolation (as the debate would have it) from poetry at all? 

On a different tack, we can also ask, “Is this debate more humanly relevant than deciding whether or not to visit your ailing neighbor and say “hello?””  Probably not.  But potentially, it could shape the poetries of tomorrow and make them (hopefully) more relevant to the lives that we actually lead.  So debate forward. (But save yourself some time and read backwards.)

A quick note on the quasi-review below

There are a number of interesting side arguments that I did not get into.

In response to e-mail, I specifically wanted to point out that I’m not very much interested in drawing a prose/poetry distinction. I don’t think it’s a very useful one, but if anyone wants to take it up as an intellectual challenge, please be my guest, and I’ll be happy to read your thoughts on the matter.

I also don’t mean to imply that one must write like Fanning to be a good poet. Or that classical poetics haven’t produced good poems and aren’t capable of producing more good poems. (These last few points should be obvious to careful readers of the post below.)

In terms of relative levels of quality or skill creating a divide between poems/nonpoems (which I freely admit I alluded to in the piece), that’s a bit trickier. A fourth grader scrawls out a poem about a boy she has a crush on – poem or not?  A mental patient orders their thoughts in lines – poem or not? English Lit. Sophmore pens an embarrassingly stiff and argumentative sonnet – poem or not?

Short answer: “Yes, poems, of course – why wouldn’t they be?” 

Long answer:  To look at another context, think about music or drawing/painting. If I yodel to myself in the shower, it’s “music” in one sense. If I draw something (could be a dog, could be a cow, but I was trying for a monkey) in my notebook margin, it’s again some sort of “visual art.”

But the existence of either of these does not mean there *aren’t* various systems of music (with rules and goals) and various systems of visual arts (with rules and goals). Nobody in their right mind is going to think my shower-yodeling and the lead tenor in an opera house are qualitatively the same thing. Nor is anybody going to look at those notebook pen doodlings of mine and think they’re great art.

So we get down to line drawing again. And when all the poets are pressed on the “is it poetry or not?” question, they all give relative responses, just like Coleridge’s “best words, best order.”

Even a casual student of Poetics in English could tell you that there have been a number of proposed definitions of poetry over the years- some more personal that others; for Frost poetry was "that which gets lost in translation," while for Stevens, poetry was his "necessary angel."  Emily Dickinson knew a poem "because it took the top of her head off," while Yeats knew a poem was finished because it "clicked shut like a box lid closing." Consulting a more stolid source, the various dictionaries, the Miram Webster/Funk and Wagnals types usually go for "a composition in verse," with "verse" further defined as "metrical writing." Yet, as we all know, all writing and speech, by default, is metrical.

Which brings us to the idea of definition by lowest common denominator- a thing all poems share which is not shared by any other form of writing. . .Damned if I can think of what this might be.

It's difficult to argue that poems should affect the audience in particular ways, primarily because that audience is made up of diverse individuals; provoking, memorable, affective poetry for a 9 year old may not (we hope) prove to be the same to a twenty-nine year old. Furthermore, these individual readers and listeners are in flux; persons, we hope, mature. Tastes change. Given the relative state of the audience, the best definition of poetry might be reflexive; that is, that any given piece, written in any given style, transcends prose and becomes poetry when it clears an internal "bar," when it successfully meets the challenges it accepts. Poems are, of themselves, their own definitions - there are as many definitions of poetry as there are poems.

But to cut back to the main question, only some of these poems are going to be at all interesting to the broad and contemporary American adult readership. And when I’m distinguishing Fanning’s poems as Poems, as opposed to flat kinda-poems, I do so with that reader/listenership in mind. When I wrote “Poetry,” I might just as well have written “good poetry,” “poetry that’s worth your time to speak and hear,” “poetry that you really must listen to,” or something like that.

And to those of you who responded, I urge you to write into the author of the very next musical review that you read.  In it, you should demand that because he hasn't proven that my shower yodeling isn't "music," that he has no business lauding whatever band she's writing about.  That would be, I think, a far better way to spend your time.

Robert Fanning and the Poet’s Ear

I’ve been talking about doing a review of Robert Fanning’s work for quite awhile now. Given my other commitments and the length of time this has dragged on for, perhaps “lamenting” or “whining” would prove a better substitute for “talking” in the first sentence.

So – what’s taken so long? Well, I started that review and at some point realized that I was writing to poets and literati, not the general readership. Meaning, I was, if you’ll permit a political analogy, writing to try to win over some “swing” readers who might occupy the intermediate spaces between various aesthetic camps. A lot of my review seemed jargony to me, and I wondered how much my law student/defender/idle reader audience would follow it. So I threw it out and began again.

An old colleague, CE Chaffin, argues that poetry has become like fencing – everyone knows what fencing is, evidences some residual respect towards fencing/fencers, but they really don't know what’s going on when they actually watch it. Thus the engaged audience for fencing is really only other fencers, or people who have at least dabbled in fencing, or people who have friends and family who fence.

He may be right, but I will burn my time up in this world as I choose. And right now I’m asking myself, “Can I write a review of Fanning’s book in a way that might open the door for someone who does not normally read poetry?” It’s a good challenge.

Hence, what follows: half demystifying primer, half review, hopefully more than half-accessible for the curious. It’s long, I know, but I’ll try to do right by you, dear reader. Pour yourself a cup of coffee, ignore the turkey in the fridge (or nibble) and take your time. Quibble, disagree, ponder, comment if you wish. If you’ve never spent time with poetry, or have been intimidated by poetry, I believe the experience will be worth it.

**

What I Have Panned

First off, the gap between the person who breathes and eats poetry and the average novel reader is both narrow and deep. The leap is actually quite small, yet terrifying to some.

For example, the first thing that a poet notices about Robert Fanning’s work is Fanning’s tremendous ear. But while I can write “Fanning has a great ear” in earnest, I’m not sure that such a statement means all that much to the average reader. (“A great ear? Um. . .great! So what?”)

Well, I’d like to discuss what that means, and in a sense, what follows is entirely about that. Quite simply, “Fanning has a great ear” means that Fanning makes use of the whole range of naturally occurring English sounds and harnesses them to reinforce and color “what the poem says.” There are no false notes in his work, no squawks on the level of sound. The “subjects” of the poems, what they “say” and “mean,” matters. And every syllable of the poem honors that importance.

Which sounds nice ‘n all, but what does my saying that that mean? How does one “hear” this in an actual poem? And why is that an accomplishment at all? Why is it even interesting? Those are tougher questions.

To address those questions, I’d like to take you through a discussion of “sonics.”  I use the term sonics as a shorthand for the sonic effects a poem uses, basically the sounds of words, and the rhythms those sounds make. My perspective is that of the working poet, and hopefully our discussion will provide context for what it is that Free Verse poets try to do. Then we’ll take a very close look at one of Fanning’s poems, Green Stephania. This poem provides a good illustration of just what Fanning does in practice. It’s also a good example of much of his oeuvre (body-of-work).

“Sonics” - Sound in English Poetry (and in General)

Poetry is pretty flexible and there are a number of ways to write it. A good “big tent” definition of Poetry is “more-ordered prose.”  Coleridge enjoined us, “remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry: that is prose, words in their best order; poetry, the best words in the best order.”

You’ll notice that Coleridge’s definition is relative – that no hard and fast lines are drawn. He does that out of necessity, not laziness. But while “best words in the best order” may sound easy, we’ll soon get to why that’s a tall order indeed.

Often fledgling poets (and readers) think the way to write good poetry is to adopt a “poetic vocabulary” (best words) or to use classical forms (best order), which rely on accentual syllabic meter and patterned end-rhyme.  (Think “sonnet” – I won’t include an example). But classical form, chocked full of luminous words, does not by itself make poetry.

To gain some historical perspective on that, I’d like to point out that in a fit of cultural inferiority (and head-bashing politics) following the Norman Invasion,  English poetry began aping the forms of the continent’s dominant languages – French, Spanish, Italian. (Think “sonnet.”) The problem with this is that English is a Germanic language, which is, among other things, light on end rhyme, while the others are Romance languages and are pretty damn heavy on rhyme due to the way they conjugate. The result of using these classical forms in English is often odd, strained, and pretty far removed from the way plain folks talk. Sometimes, of course, it’s absolutely wonderful, but the basic problems are that a) the system used for “making” poetry arose in other languages and so b) the absolutely wonderful stuff has a sense of ordered *strangeness* to it. You know this kind of poetry in English when you hear it, because it sounds, fundamentally, a bit strained, a bit different, a bit weird. (How that culturally inherited desire for weird-sounding-ness grounds itself out in today’s poetry is another story.)

Prior to the invasion, the English were doing just-fine-thank-you-very-much with a system called “Alliterative Verse,” (think “Beowulf”) which relies on alliteration (the repetition of the initial sounds of words) to tie lines of poetry together and did not “count” syllables as strictly. An example, William Langland's “Piers Plowman,” written in the 14^th century:

A feir feld full of folk || fond I þer bitwene,
Of alle maner of men, || þe mene and þe riche,
Worchinge and wandringe || as þe world askeþ.

Among them I found a fair field full of people
All manner of men, the poor and the rich
Working and wandering as the world requires. 

You’ll note (in translation) this seems decidedly non-tortured language, which is nonetheless ordered and addresses important subjects. Even for the 14^th century.  It seems much more like Free Verse in the sense that you don’t have a de-dah, de-dah, de-dah, de-dah, de-dah, rockinghorse rhythm or a heavy clanging end-rhyme you find in classical poetry.

However there is a lot of sound packed in there. Let’s just to look for alliteration (the initial consonantal sounds of words).

Among them I found a fair field full of people
All manner of men, the poor and the rich
Working and wandering as the world requires.

There’s hardly a significant word (I exclude of/and/the) that does not have a matching sound close at hand. You can easily hear them, grouped together and reinforcing each other, if you say it aloud.

I point this out because this kind of “clustering” or “ordering” of sound is important in Free Verse, and it’s important in the types of poetry that naturally grew out of the English language itself.

Free Verse

Skipping ahead (a bit, ahem) for our purposes, “Free Verse” came fully to life in the late 19^th century (although it had some precursors and Blank Verse certainly eased its birth) and became extremely popular in the 20^th century, where it was, by the end of the century, the dominant mode of poetical composition in English. (Whitman, Eliot, Pound, Cummings, et. al., including our own Robert Fanning).

Free Verse is verse free of externally imposed form, free of syllabic constraints on individual lines, and free of the requirement to end those lines with a predictable pattern of sound (rhyme). (Go back to the Continent you. . .continentals!)

“Free Verse” most certainly does not mean “Anything goes and we’ll just call it poetry.” The poet still has a responsibility to order her language, to choose the best words and place them in the best order to create:

1. a harmonious aural experience as such and
2. a rigorous statement of being/testimony (both emotionally and intellectually) as such and
3. have both 1) Sound and 2) Sense work in combination with each other.

Working in Free Verse, the poet has a ton of options available to her, but they’re all constrained by this basic premise.

• If the poem sounds bad, it sounds bad.
• If the poem does not make sense at all levels, it does not make sense.
• If it sounds good but does not make sense, it’s just mouth-candy or an intricate doily of sound.
• If it sounds like crap but is a good testament then you’re more in the realm of prose than you are poetry. (Perhaps even *very* good prose, which encapsualtes an important thing/idea/testament/experience but prose all the same.)

Some thoughts on why it’s difficult to write good free verse:

First off, it’s hard to create mouth-candy, just by itself. 

Second, even when completely ignoring the sound of words, it’s hard to create a statement that matters, that is emotionally and intellectually transparent to the reader, that educates, informs, entertains, soothes, and inspires. Just plain hard. That’s why some of us still listen to MLK’s speeches and marvel over them. In their sincerity, importance, urgency, and truthfulness, they approach poetry. In their rhythm and rhetoric, they approach poetry.

So it’s particularly difficult for the poet to master Sound and Sense at the same time, in every line of a single poem, without unduly favoring one over the other. This is in no small part because Sound and Sense are sometimes exclusionary. The best sounding word in a line might not carry the precise connotations the poet wants. Or the exactly perfect meaning-word might sound as awkward as a mid-solo squawk by an otherwise smoothly gliding sax.

This exclusionary tension is the fundamental barrier to writing good poetry. It’s why, Randall Jarrell, in his essay “Bad Poets” marveled over the fact that so many intelligent, moral, upright, interesting, educated, fascinating and experienced persons (often a good deal more so than many of the poets) simply could not write poetry to save their lives. They become slaves to form over content, or content over form. (Of course, if your mastery of either is poor, you’re that much the worse off.  And yes, Jarrell was talking about other things as well.)

As I wrote above, Fanning has a great ear – he makes use of the whole range of naturally occurring English sounds and harnesses them to reinforce and color “what the poem says.” Also – he makes no false steps. It seems weird to compliment someone for not making any mistakes. Think of how seldom we do that in any other kind of review – movies, music, etc. But in Free Verse it’s important, and the next section explains why.

 

What Not to Do – the Small Writ Large

Now, all of the above seems (or should seem) like a pretty tall order. Say something important, say it well, even if the language will really fight you, word by word.

But it’s even tougher than that – there are consequences to the absolute freedom to use whichever words you want, in whichever order you want, with whichever sounds you want, and to go on for as long or as short as you want.

These consequences are that the perfect free verse poem can neither be too long or too short, or contain any images/ideas that work against the poem, or contain any jarring language or ideas or sections.

This does not mean that individual free verse poems cannot be very long or very short, challenging, subversive, or jarring *as a whole* or *selectively, by design, to effect* with in a poem. But it does mean that *given* your subject and the choices that you make as you write, that once you’re committed to something in the poem, it will begin to “order” your choices for you. Some poems, given subject and sound, need to be short. Some need to be long.

Another way of saying this is that Part A and part C of the poem will dictate what Part B is. If part B works, great. If part B fails, the poem fails.

Poets, given their anarchistic tendencies, will often try to rebel against this sort of statement – but usually they’re rebelling against a false understanding of what makes a good poem. They’ll produce a poem that has a smooth sounding part A, a smooth sounding part C, and a jarring Part B. But the question isn’t whether or not you *can* do that (of course you can do that – you can do nearly anything). The question is whether or not you’ve done it in a way that works. And there are ways that work, and ways that don’t.

You’ll notice my description of this process is abstract. That’s because so much depends on the particular things that the poet chooses to do. It boils down to issues of what the subject is, what the poet’s take on the subject is, what the narrative voice is, what the sonic effects actually *are.* You have to evaluate each poem on its own merits.

Often, fledgling (or simply bad) poets willfully try to make something fit in a poem. They have an image they can’t let go of. They want to say something in a certain way for reasons external to the actual composition of the poem. Regardless of their intellectual/emotional motivations, their selection does not “fit” in the poem. By forcing it in, they’re lying to themselves – about how the world is, about what the language allows. Their results are unconvincing.

Fanning’s results are convincing. His poems seem, as the poets say, “inevitable.” This is high praise among poets. It means that from the first line on there’s nothing that makes us say, “Hey, you know what, I just don’t buy this.” There’s nothing that makes us say, “It seems wrong – these don’t seem like real people with real concerns and real tragedies and joys.”

To turn back to Coleridge’s way of expressing this, when reading, we “willingly suspend our disbelief.” We trust the poem, we follow it through to the end.  It may seem like damning with faint praise to say this, but when I say Fanning makes “no false steps” it’s like saying, “I was totally caught up in the film. As if it were real.”  Intellectual and emotional engagement like that cannot result from the audience being tricked into something – it results from a well told, deeply human story.

 

Dead Ears? (Chicken/Egg)

OK – we’ll stick with the negative for a brief moment longer, because I want to show the contemporary background that Fanning’s poems work against.

Reading poems silently on the page is rather like reading a play silently on the page.  Compare reading a play silently to seeing it performed (or performing it yourself). It’s an altogether different sensory experience that *always* misses some nuances of piece.

(As an aside, for people interested in the reading aloud v. reading silently issue, there’s a whole analysis of that which turns on early Christian spirituality favoring, for many reasons, silent reading, while the pagan Roman favored reading aloud - many had private “reading rooms” in their houses where they would shut the door and read aloud).

(As another aside, this opens up the reader-respnse box and the various theories of meaning/misreading.  Many discussions get bogged down in this, so I'm going to sidestep questions of the "validity" of certain readings and simply focus on the fact that actually making your lips and tongue move, that actually hearing poetry spoken across time, is fundamentally different than a quick and silent scan with your optical organs.  While I want to sound casual, I don't want to sound too lackidasical in my assertions, so I should point out that from a neuro-biological perspective, different sensory stimulation results in substantively different reactions.)

However, all this aside, it’s safe to say that today most people read silently. That you, dear reader, are in fact, reading this silently right now. If we don’t want to end up killing each other on busses and in libraries, silent reading is a fine way to approach your newspaper, and I completely applaud it for such.

But the standard approach of “reading silently” is rather important to keep in mind, given that the most common charge against bad and mediocre Free Verse “poets” is that they have “no ear” – they go for Sense over Sound.  In fact, much otherwise good free verse is simply flat – it does not avail itself of the full sonic range of English, which can be a gloriously musical language.

This dead ear syndrome is probably in part a function of fledgling poets and the general readership not reading aloud, not savoring the poems as they were meant to be: spoken and heard. Bad habits die hard and are expressed in subsequent poetry.  It always frightens me when someone who begins graduate level work in poetry has never read a poem (any poem, not even one of their own) aloud.

In any event, regardless of what causes it, you get a lot of people writing “flat” poems which pull down the bar, which make poetry more about Sense than Sound, which blur the accomplishments of the poets who really use sound well. 

And of course, the general readership kind of glosses over half of what the great poets do, which is to subtly balance the sounds of a poem without sounding like a clanging gong.

 

Sound!

So. How do good poets actually do all this stuff I’ve been talking about? What do they look at? How do they make poems that aren’t flat?

Basically it works like this. English has a limited group of sounds. Some of those sounds work well together; they’re little families of sound and our mouths shape all the members of that family in similar ways.  However, the families of sound don’t always get along. Also, each family has something it’s good at and something it’s bad at, given our inherited language. The example I always use is when you’re trying to make a soothing, murmuring stream of noise (to quiet a frightened child?), you don’t use harsh popping words, or high hissing sounds. Granted, we can fudge how we say things a bit, but the basic things that kinds of sounds are associated with are pretty fixed.

Smart poets (of all stripes) use these sounds at every turn to reinforce the meaning and the rhythms of the poem.

I’ll show you what they are – there’s a lot of science to this in the service of art. I think that’s kind of comforting actually.

The science is called phonology, and it makes use of a lot of odd looking symbols from the international phonetic alphabet. You tend to see them in dictionary pronunciation guides, just after the words. Phonology uses a lot of complicated terms to break down a whole spectrum of sound into tiny parts. However, there’s a bit of argument in the field – for example, major figures will disagree on the number of discrete sounds that English has. The argument ranges from 40 to 60, although for our purposes there are about 24 consonant sounds and 23 vowel sounds. You’ll notice right away that there are more sounds than there are letters.  I'll talk about the implications of that as we go.

I’m not going to launch into a deep discussion of sounds in English, because the more subtle implications of that, while interesting and complex for poets, are beyond the scope of our discussion today.

(For example, sonic analysis becomes very complicated when dealing with multiple regional pronunciations. For the practicing poet, this means that some sounds will more strongly “match” if read in various accents, e.g., “cot” and “caught” which are pronounced the same by some English speakers. But far from passing normative judgment on such matters, the poet must be aware of and effectively use such variations in their work, when appropriate. And we must evaluate the poems of others accordingly. Frost wrote in a regional accent, as did Warren, as does Walcott, as does Heaney.  Told you we had a hard job.)

But to get a handle on what good poets like Fanning do, let’s look at a simplified but robust system of sound.

The smallest unit of discrete sound for our purposes is the “phoneme.” It’s smaller than a syllable, and you can think of it as the sound of each letter. The chart shows the English Language phonemes.

Consonantal Sound

I’d like to give you a standard linguistic scheme for grouping consonantal sounds based on how they’re made. (Seeing that they’re made the same way by the mouth, the noises end up sounding similar, hence, little families of sounds.)

Plosive Sounds

A plosive sound (think “explosion”) is made when air stops and then “pops” forth. /p/ is a /p/losive sound. We can generate this kind of sound several ways (lips, palate, tongue). It’s not really important for our purposes to know just how they’re made, but there are 3 basic groupings of plosive sounds. Try them aloud and you’ll see that they pretty much sound “close” to each other.

/p/ and /b/ (pronounce it “puh” and “buh” with the P and B emphasized and the “uh” sound much softer)

/t/ and /d/

/k/ and /g/

If you pair these up, you get what I call “slant alliteration” – sort of like “slant rhyme” or almost rhyme. A poet can use this to create a subtle “joining” effect.

From Fanning’s Green Stephania – “/k/old /g/lass” as opposed to, say, “icy glass.”

Plosive sounds tend to be a bit “harsher” or “popping” than other sounds, and the poet will usually not use them when she wants to create a soothing or murmuring effect.

Nasal Sounds

A nasal sound (nose) is made when air runs out of the nose. I know it sounds weird, but pinch your nose when you say the following and you’ll hear the difference (conversely, one can make any of the plosive sounds with your nose pinched shut.)

/m/ and /n/ and /ng/ (the last one is the final sound in the word “long”)

Nasal sounds are softer than plosive sounds – they tend to vibrate a bit more and can lean toward “murmuring” noises.

Frictive Sounds

A frictive sound (think “friction” or “hissing”) is made when you restrict the passage of air and more or less hiss.

/v/ and /f/

/s/ and /z/

/sh/ and /th/

also the /j/ sound in “judge”

also /h/, which isn’t so much hissing as “huffing” or making a frictive sound deeper in your throat.

Frictive sounds can run the range from outright hissing (“sassy”) to a kind of warmer “breathy” sound “hot thought”. They can be some of the most noticeable sounds since they’re pitched a bit higher and tend to carry when spoken.

And that’s it for the major divisions. It should be kind of obvious that many of them (say ‘em aloud) can be “grouped” into similar sounding bunches, which, if selected carefully, can reinforce the more obvious types of sonic effects in the poem (repeated sounds – assonance, rhyme, etc.)

Some minor and interesting ones for the curious:

Glides which kind of glide into the vowel sound – the /w/ and /j/ from “woo” and “you”.

Aproximants which are almost but not quite frictives – the /l/ and /r/ sound from “lunk’ and “run” .

 

Vowel Sounds

Vowels have a pitch. Smart poets use this pitch, just like they use connotations of the various consonant sounds. This means they align sounds and choose them depending on the context of the poem. High sounds might be light and energetic, low sounds might be rumbly and slower and soothing. (That’s just the most *general* kind of example – clever readers will have guessed that the ultimate sonic effects in the poems depends on all the sounds in all the words.)

It’s important to remember we’re talking about the actual sounds – not the letters on the page which are mere symbols for the sound. The letter “A” is used for different sounds: “bail”, “bat”, “bate”, “was”, “part”, “liar”, “bare” – if all these “a” sounded the same, we’d have a string of good assonance just by changing consonants (bat, bad, hat, has, cat, cad, sat, sap, mat, mash, flat, flask, pat, pad.)

Here’s a quick and dirty breakdown of Vowel pitch from high to low frequency. (From Nim’s “Western Wind.”) Say them aloud (or just say the final sounds without the “B”) and you’ll hear your voice dropping in pitch. Again, this is a general scale:

Bee
Bay
Buy
Bit
Bet
Bat
Bird
Bud
Bar
Bough
Boy
Bought
Book
Bone
Boo

 
So, in general then:

E
I
A
O
U

**

I’ll talk about the rest as we go. Let’s look at that poem by Robert Fanning.  For non-poetry readers, don’t be intimidated by the lines – we’ll talk about them in a bit. Just read it aloud as though they pretty much weren’t there. As an FYI, each line ends with a line break and the paragraph like chunks are called stanzas. Think of them as paragraphs and you’ll be fine.

GREEN STEPHANIA by Robert Fanning

A full wood, wet bark
shower, the fresh drenched
trees, the leaves lush heavy,
so consequently, Stephania.

Stephania, curled finger ferns
unfurl and burst. Loose spores
string through mist and nestle.
Moss tufts rub.
Rain slapped leaves, Stephania,
spring and drip on our deep
sogged glade, our soaked sunk roots.

Me and Stephania.
In a hiding place our slick lips sore
from pressing together.
Stephania, seaweed breath,
burrs in your tangling curls,
soiled nails and knees, giggling.
Eden, Stephania. The smell of dirt.
I never want to leave the world.

Through the streaming wash
of rain, through the windows
and pale curtains, our mothers ache.
Their bedrooms flicker with blue TV.
Scent of biscuits, chimney smoke, tea.
Our fathers cup their hands
against the cold glass panes
and look out.

It is dusk, Stephania.
No-one knows where we are.

I’m sorry it took us so long to get to the poem itself. If you read this aloud, I’m sure you caught a lot of the sounds in the poem. (We’ll talk about sense in a minute, since “what the poem is about” is pretty obvious, and since sound is overlooked.)

You also probably noticed that the sentences that make up the poem weren’t really “prosy” – that they seemed a bit different than those you’d find in the passage of a novel.  In fact, let’s pretend that this was a novel passage by taking out those 32 line breaks:

GREEN STEPHANIA by Robert Fanning

A full wood, wet bark shower, the fresh drenched trees, the leaves lush heavy, so consequently, Stephania. Stephania, curled finger ferns unfurl and burst. Loose spores string through mist and nestle. Moss tufts rub. Rain slapped leaves, Stephania, spring and drip on our deep sogged glade, our soaked sunk roots. Me and Stephania. In a hiding place our slick lips sore from pressing together. Stephania, seaweed breath, burrs in your tangling curls, soiled nails and knees, giggling. Eden, Stephania. The smell of dirt. I never want to leave the world.  Through the streaming wash of rain, through the windows and pale curtains, our mothers ache. Their bedrooms flicker with blue TV. Scent of biscuits, chimney smoke, tea. Our fathers cup their hands against the cold glass panes and look out.  It is dusk, Stephania. No-one knows where we are.

Looks a lot denser without the line breaks, doesn’t it? One of the things that line breaks do is space out the poem, make it more manageable on the page or in your mouth. If we leave the stanzas in it looks easier, but still full, dense, packed language. The line breaks make it easier still, dividing those dense sentences into easier chunks for bite sized speaking.

GREEN STEPHANIA by Robert Fanning

A full wood, wet bark
shower, the fresh drenched
trees, the leaves lush heavy,
so consequently, Stephania.

Stephania, curled finger ferns
unfurl and burst. Loose spores
string through mist and nestle.
Moss tufts rub.
Rain slapped leaves, Stephania,
spring and drip on our deep
sogged glade, our soaked sunk roots.

Me and Stephania.
In a hiding place our slick lips sore
from pressing together.
Stephania, seaweed breath,
burrs in your tangling curls,
soiled nails and knees, giggling.
Eden, Stephania. The smell of dirt.
I never want to leave the world.

Through the streaming wash
of rain, through the windows
and pale curtains, our mothers ache.
Their bedrooms flicker with blue TV.
Scent of biscuits, chimney smoke, tea.
Our fathers cup their hands
against the cold glass panes
and look out.

It is dusk, Stephania.
No-one knows where we are.

Fanning is a master of the line break. In some ways the two wrestling giants of a poem are the sentence and the line – meaning that you have to reconcile the two. You'll notice that Fanning runs his sentences over line breaks (meaning that some sentences are longer than lines).  He also has some lines that are single sentences.  He also has some lines that contain more than one sentence.  He also has one line that contain multiple complete sentences.  This has a lot of implications for rhythm, which we'll touch on later, but for the moment, I'll give you this key which will help you for 90% of poems:

Usually, when you read line breaks, you don’t have a full-stop sentence-like pause at the end of the line, but you do put in a small kind of “half comma” pause, and add a bit of stress to the last word.  A line break =s a comma. 

Remember when you were just learning to write, and you wanted to emphasize words by putting commas after them?  I mean, people talked with pauses, and commas indicated pauses, so it's logical that kids everywhere try to sprinkle their early works with commas to "show off" certain words, to make pauses in the sentences.  Well, that's *exactly* what's going on here with line breaks. 

So those last words are important, and Fanning, like the best poets, makes them into a kind of telegraphic mini-poem of their own: 

bark
drenched
heavy
Stephania

ferns
spores
nestle
rub
Stephania
deep
roots

Stephania
sore
together
breath
curls
giggling
dirt
world

wash
windows
ache
TV
tea
hands
panes
out

Stephania
are

If you read only that you could make a decent guess at what the poem was about. That’s focus.

 

Consonantal Sound in the Poem

But I promised that I’d talk more about sound in the poem itself, and I’d like to do that before sense.  There are a lot of ways we can map out sound in the poem. If I was sitting next to you, I’d read the poem over and over, emphasizing certain sounds, calling your attention to others, then we’d read it again to feel how all those elements come together. But I’m not, so I’ll do it with color on the page and trust you to follow.

One of the things that “hides” sound when you’re reading on the page is the fact that those phonemes (chart above) rely on a relatively smaller number of letters to indicate what they are.  So, the letter “C” can make either a K sound or an S sound. When I was in school we called them Hard and Soft sounds. Y can make an I or E sound, Z usually makes an S sound, and so on.

So if we spell the words in the poem a bit differently, then color them, you might be able to “see” the sounds on the page better.  To just focus on a few sounds:

A full wood, wet bark
shower, the fresh drenshed
trees, the leaves lush heavy,
so konsequently, Stefania.
 
Stefania, kurled finger ferns
unfurl and burst. Loose spores
string through mist and nestle.
Moss tufts rub.
Rain slapped leaves, Stefania,
spring and drip on our deep
sogged glade, our soaked sunk roots.
 
Me and Stefania.
in a hiding plase our slik lips sore
from pressing together.
Stefania, seaweed breath,
burrs in your tangling kurls,
soiled nails and knees, giggling.
Eden, Stefania. The smell of dirt.
I never want to leave the world.
 
Through the streaming wash
of rain, through the windows
and pale kurtains, our mothers ake.
Their bedrooms flikker with blue TV.
Sent of biskuits, chimney smoke, tea.
Our fathers kup their hands
against the kold glass panes
and look out.
 
It is dusk, Stefania.
No-one knows where we are.

I like doing this kind of thing for poetry students (and for you, dear reader) for several reasons. I think it shows up the concentrations of different kids of sounds rather well. Overall, there are a lot of F and S sounds, but not so many K and G sounds (you’ll notice they’re all not *precisely* the same K sounds – more on that in a sec.) Those K and G sounds are clustered in the next to last stanza, which is not random.

I’ll use this example of K/G and F/S sounds throughout the rest of the review. Don’t get caught up on rhyme or anything yet, just focus on the fact that the K/G sounds are from the same plosive family (see above) as are the F/S frictive sounds.

 

Sound that makes Sense

Remember when I was talking about how a poet had to use sound and sense together? Well, it’s really hard to talk about one without the other – that’s because the reason why you use one depends on what the other is doing at the same time. 

To slip into “sense” for a second, it’s pretty obvious that the poet wants to set up a contrast between the Edenic communion of the children and the normal domestic life of the parents. The poem’s making a judgment, making a comment, and the word choice helps it along, both in the sense of the words and how those words sound.

When the poet turns to the parents, he wants to set up a contrast between the “world” of the children and the “world” of the parents. So he uses images that are directly opposed to the connotations of the first half of the poem. Instead of warmth, lushness, and organicism, he gives us “cold glass panes,” lit from within by the blue light of TV. Immediately we get a shift - cold glass panes are different from the warm ferns.

Now Fanning could have written something like “unyielding dead windows” and conveyed a similiar contrast, but it would not have been nearly as satisfying.  The reason why is that Kold Glass Panes also sounds sonically different from the proceeding lines. It’s harsher, Kolder. This is an example of using sound intelligently in the service of sense.

I know I haven’t discussed this (yet), but it also has that same patterning of stress which has hitherto been used to show these warm organic images; that patterning is a subtle sonic “clue” that a direct line runs between the two – that the poet is explicitly drawing a contrast. Lastly, there’s the echo of a pun in “panes/pains” - it’s appropriate that the parents cold glass bound lives (something like an aquarium tank) be hinted at as “painful” – this is a further contrast to the warm time spent with Stephania.

So, in addition to the “primary” level of sense (i.e., what the poem is saying, or what the poem is about), you’ve got all these secondary sonic/associative threads pulling for the sense of the poem, instead of throwing up white noise (flat poetry) or, worse actively pushing against it (inept poetry). 

** 

Rhythm

With that kind of touchstone (the K/G example) in mind, of the sounds of the words reinforcing their sense, let’s look up at the poem again. I’m sure you’ve noticed that there’s a kind of arc to it. Imagine the poem lying on its side, as though it were sheet music, with the top of the poem at the left hand side of the page. You have all these low soft blue warm words, then a cluster of high hard red ones, then the poem closes down.

The sounds (and their senses) take place over time. Each sound is judged in context, based on what came before, what came after, and how the entire poem is shaped. If Fanning had randomly used those harsh K sounds in the middle of his describing Stephania, we’d notice, on some level, and wonder what was wrong. However, when he does use them in the poem, they enter at the right time, given the overall length of the poem, and thus function both thematically (meaning sound reinforces sense) and rhythmically (meaning that sound “sits well” in the whole poem, given what’s before and after).

We’ve been talking about “sonics” and “sound” as pretty much the sounds of the actual words. But the temporal element creates another important sonic quality, which is rhythm.

There are a lot of words used to describe rhythm. For example the lines might have rhythm: 

i WANT to SEE a BALL fly BY
i WANT to SEE it IN the SKY

Or a many lines might have a rhythm, or the whole poem might have a rhythm composed of many sub-rhythms. Some of the words used to separate the different types of rhythms are: meter, cadence, pacing, flow, rhythm. They’re often (except for meter) used kind of interchangeably.

You actually know this already. The easiest way to think about this is music, or, rather, sung lyrics. Think of rap. You can make patterns of stress by how you say the words. You can repeat that pattern and change the words. That’s one of the basic ideas. 

As an aside, in poetry (and here’s one of those side-bits that people find controversial) the rhythm has to arise from the sounds of the words themselves. That means you don’t impose an artificial set of rhythms on words (like you do in music), but you choose words which, when they are spoken more or less “naturally,” produce that rhythm. Basically what that means is that song lyrics aren’t poetry. Tell your friends – start a fight. If you’ve never heard a song and are asked to read the lyrics aloud (try it) they’re often flat. When a musician sings them, and puts them through their artificial paces, they can be wonderful – but that’s a wonderful song and not a wonderful poem. (I don’t meant to suggest that musicians can’t write poetry (because many do), or that some lyrics aren’t really great (because many are), but simply that what generates the rhythm of what’s said differs.)

**

Buzz off you Greekies!

Now, it’s important to talk about and understand rhythm, just as it’s important to talk about the sounds of words.

However, the system that’s been in place until recently isn’t very good at that (I’ll get into why in a bit). This bad system is the system of “classical scansion.” If you’re not a student of literature you’ll recognize it as that Iambic Pentameter stuff. Nothing frightens the non-poet as much as those confusing Latin labels for meter.

Well, as you may know, I enjoy blowing holes in privileged and obscure discourse. So I’ll try to do that here.

First, the problem with Classical Scansion.

To begin, you might (dimly) remember what I said about the Norman invasion of England – about how the English started aping continental forms? (Actually, it’s a bit more complicated, as it always is, but this is close enough for us). Well, the Continentals had their own aping