Against Rhyme 2

Artemesia, a contributor to Slate's on line Poetry Forum, responded to my post arguing against the contemporary application of metered verse with the observation
"Isn't it interesting that so much instantly forgettable poetry is written by poets who disparage any form of rhyme!" I am vain enough to assume she meant me in her offering, to which I was also vain enough to respond to. Likely her response will mention that she didn't name me at all, add a couple of more indirect digs, after which we can expect that conversation to become stony silence or snarky round robin. All the same, here's my response, and the last I'll bother this blog with on this subject.

Much of my poetry is forgettable , yes, but much of it is good, I think, as I've been at this craft, free-verse style, for a very long time. The quality of my output, I believe , is on a par with any other good yet minor (league) poet with an ear for music who continues to hone their skills, is mostly in relative anonymity; grand slams, hits, near misses, strike outs, belabored performances, all of them in mostly equal abundance. My poetry, if I happen to be your unnamed example, isn't the point of comparison, though, and is largely irrelevant to what I was addressing. I would challenge anyone to produce something I've written, here or elsewhere, where I insisted my writing in general as an example anyone should follow; my claims for my style are modest. Let us just say that I like the way I write prose and that my style in poetry has evolved over some 40 plus years and that I believe there's been some improvement in quality. The point in the original was, and remains, that rhyming in the current time is archaic technique that is at odds with the zeitgeist and expressed the idea that it too often sounds strained, false and little more than a demonstration of one's facility with a technique that calls attention to itself rather too much.

Eliot, of course, could compose rhymes (as opposed to "construct") that were fluid and musical and never far from the sound of the spoken voice. For all his erudition , he could write an abstract, fragmented verse in a clear and plain vernacular, and was able, as well, to extend his phrase of the voice , not of the metronome, a guiding aesthetic during his period. Masterful as his rhyme schemes were, however, Eliot is generally regarded as someone who could mix his techniques, balancing free verse and the metered form.

This was part of his genius, and that sort of genius , in the twentieth century as regards an exclusive rhyming technique, is rare, rare, rare. None of this, though, is to insist that there is no place for rhyming--the skilled hand can employ it when it makes musical sense, when it is effective service to a perception and does not announce itself , as so many latter day New Formalist poets do when they write their elaborations. The great poems in English of the 20Th century are not rhymed; the poets of the last hundred years or so have sought less to mimic the argued perfections of ancient standards and sought rather to seek individual accommodation with a general conception of the human voice as it speaks. The heavens and the earth are less the things to be pondered through rhetorical skeins that imply an extra-human dimension than the are things we see and speak of in terms of our own experience, the subjective passing through the general conception of everyday life.

Against Rhyme

Just because something rhymes and has regimented meter doesn't, by default, make it a poem. We would generally think agree that a poem is , in some sense , a heightened speech that seeks to get at perception, sensation, and psychological states that are problematic for standard prose writing, and that , broadly speaking, the writing that qualifies for those qualities, vague as they are, ought not to be sentimental, conventional, sing-songy, prone to cliche, platitude , scoldings, lectures, or inanely obvious moralizing.

Rhyming, a condition that about dominated all poetic technique until relatively recently in written history, has about been exploited to the degree that it is nearly exhausted . A contemporary audience, desiring a more intriguing vocabulary to discuss and describe the experience of the individual in a culture that is accelerated and quantified and subdivided among a host of meaningless disciplines, wants that discussion to be in a parlance, a rhythm, a cadence and verve that is recognizably of the modern time that typifies the way we address our experiences, and yet has the embedded genius to last decades beyond it's writing.

The art continues as it always has, it changes as the language has, it's pitches and dictions have taken on the twists of the spoken language and forges a unique set of voices that keep the language fresh, relevant, alive. It might well have to do with the fact that the feeling of experience can no longer be contained and convincingly resolved with the now-formula ironies a precise formula compels you to reach; two world wars and the use of nuclear weapons has pretty much undercut the chiming resonance formalistic poems present us; they sound false and eager to smooth away the tragic, the gritty, the sad, the plainly inexplicable conditions of everyday life with a grandiose , over determined orchestration of sounds that are meant, I suppose, to convince you that beauty is most important overall and that petty miseries and small joys are of no consequence. It seems nothing less than a mirror of the conceit of organized Christianity that God has a purpose for this world and that we must accept his will, as small laces in a complex weave. It's about surrender, actually, but it would be the case, rather, that enough history has culminated so recently regarding the disasters of absolutist philosophies that the taste, collectively, has preferred the colloquial to the grand, the open ended to the determined resolution, being-in-the-moment rather than controlling the agenda.Syllabic convolutions, pretty as they sound, are just that, pretty sounds, not the voice of Higher Authority.

The language changes; that's how it stays viable as way of making ourselves understood. Poetry changes; that's the way we keep ourselves interested in testing the limits of our imaginations. Poetry is an active thing, done in real time, in the present period. It is not an art consigned to being little more than duplications of what was done before, endlessly before, forms leeched of all vitality and allure.

This tug has a kick

Tuggin' by Matt Miller goes for the second person voice, the use of you to indicate the protagonist, the effect being something like the over rated promise of 3D movies: you the reader are in the action, in the thick of things, all this swerving and snowing and wheezing about is you in action! The effect of 3D movies, in my experience, are headaches and nausea, and in the case of second person, at sustained length, monotony comes easily, a colorless, blurred, accelerated condition where the inability to get away from the skin of the re-surging "you" gives you the feeling of a first-person shooter video game.

Nothing comes into being until "you" see it and confront it, do something with it, and then walk away from it, with a narrator trying just a bit too hard to convince the reader that "you" have been changed, or encountered an irony that is , for the moment, invisible and not felt.

Tuggin' has the good graces of being short and not epic , and what we get is a breathless stream that has the magical , exhilarating feel of an excited witness recounting to the the protagonist just how incredible the previous adventure was.

Miller does interesting things with letting things bump into one another, step on each other's toes, of allowing one idea to intrude upon the other; there is the the feeling that there is only so much time to set the seen, establish the winter game in the cold snow, and to emphasise how fast the fun comes at you and how abruptly a tragedy can occur.

Then the steel-
hearted tug as the truck started up
again, as your shoulders yanked
to just short of snapping. And if
you held on, your time was up
as the driver fishtailed and cast
you across the covered concrete
to bury you in a six foot bank
of snow, everyone cackling, blood
electric, all the pieces of your face
inches away from the hydrant
you wouldn't see till spring.

.

Action, jerks of a truck, rules of the game, landing in a snow bank , just missing the unforgiving fire hydrant that other wise might have been unseen and out of mind until the spring thaw; this is a a lot of information to get across, and Miller writing seems something like a vivid slide show with quick witted captions underscoring both fun and the danger.

He does something else as well, with the simple mention of the fire hydrant, evoked in a Frost-like terseness; it's a perfect image to end on, some still life that's seasonal and scenic, suitable for a greeting card, but which also reflects back to the "you" that dominates the action; I sense a stunned realization that someone could have been seriously hurt, perhaps killed. Nicely done, effective, fast, visual.

A meditation for the New Year

There's nothing like getting laid off before Christmas and then mounting a job search shortly thereafter to dampen the desire to opine, criticize, and other wise act the smarty pants on one's favorite subjects. It is a situation I hope to reverse by dedicating an hour a day, God willing, to writing about something other than a cover letter to attach to an online resume submission. There are some books I want to write about, some poems I want to subject to my post-Bangs
harangues. I have no intention of becoming divorced from the one thing, writing, that has been the only thing that I've continually well. I might plug my other hobby that I've gotten more involved with , an activity that fills the time various searches and scannings from different job sites , playing blues harmonica. I video taped myself improvising over instrumental blues tracks, and I have to say, nearly blushing, that I've gotten pretty good. You can find those bits of funky squawking on YouTube, under the user name TheoBurke. There is a link in the blogroll . But the issue at hand is getting into the writing groove again, to keep my mind alive and to perhaps gain a sliver of self esteem and relief, if only to believe that my brain isn't dead and that I will be employed again, in a job I like, and that things all around, for all people, will get better by measurable , noticeable degrees. Well yeah, you guessed it by this point, I am writing this just to see the page fill up with words, and there is a measure of trying to hype myself to the tasks at hand. About being laid off, it must said that I am in good company. There's an understandable tendency to allow one's psyche move toward the dangerous intersection of Fear and Dread, but all things being equal in this world, there is the faith that we will all come through these strange days more or less in one piece. The family, friends, and general fellowship have reminded me when I needed to hear it that there somethings worth pushing on for, that there are things in this life that make life a joyous thing despite the recent set backs many of us have encountered. We will endure, we will thrive, we will go through the changes. Yes, I know, it's all that strained optimistic that clouds many a forecast for the New Year. I look at this way, it can't help but be better than what we've had before. One day at a time, I do the thing that's in front of me, I do the next indicated thing. I type, I write, I live, and that's a good thing, an irreplaceable thing.

second notes for the new decade

I tend to think that the best relationship between practice and theory , as regards the arts (and poetry in particular) is when one blends with the other in a seamless fashion. It's a process that begins with the work itself, a reading and rereading of the poem, let us say, and then , after some routine reflection, referencing any number of critical schemes I think might work in bringing what's contained in the stanzas out from under the subterfuge. Seamless is the word I'd like to use, and it applies here although the handy term has diminished impact with overuse;all the same, theories of criticism , for me,are a way of extending the poem into general discourse.

Poetry works in many ways, but so does criticism, and a pragmatics of interpretation is the most useful way for me to make a poet's work something other than another useless art object whose maker adhered to someone else's rules. My gripe is a constant one, that each succeeding school of thought on what poets should be doing are too often reductionist and dismissive of what has been done prior. This isn't criticism, it's polemics, contrary to my notion that what really matters in close readings is the attempt to determine whether and why poems work successfully as a way of quantifying experience and perception in a resonating style.

First notes for the decade

Ron Silliman greeted the new year and the new decade with a reminder that we're living in interesting times and that the concerned should remember " there's no reason Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck or even Ted Nugent could not become president." Some of those who responded poo-poo'd the notion and mildly chastised Silliman for seeming a shade paranoid. Those folks, after all, were cartoon characters. Ah, but the enemies of the common good love to be discounted; they are well aware that we love to be entertained while we have our hot buttons pushed, and that there far too many Americans with the right to vote who love nothing better than taking conspicuous buffoons seriously.We shouldn't dismiss the idea that Palin, Limbaugh , Beck or, choke, Ted Nugent can become President. The electorate twice elected GW Bush and a host of other fringe-clinging hard righters, a combination that has done the country no good favor.The GOP and the like understand how to work The Big Lie, and have shown a genius at manipulating a general discontent among voters, convincing them again and yet again to vote against their interest. We would do well not to dismiss the above list and stay hard at the fight. The thousands who've shown up at Tea Bag rallies convinces me that there's still a festering, hateful insanity out there; it is no longer at the fringe and has, in fact, metastasized to the center. The Right Wing Noise Machine is louder than it's ever been. We have to make noise of our own and take over the conversation.
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Philanthropist Ruth Lilly has passed away, and there's an increase in the rumbling and grousing about the $100,000,000 endowment she gifted the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation with.It seems that if you want to kill an art form you truly love, give it's practitioners a lot of money to make sense out of. Poetry is such a fractured terrain in terms of techniques, schools, aesthetics and, shall we say, severe differences as to how to see life , that Ruth Lilly's gift was bound to create controversy and resentment; poets are picayune as it is with the meager resources available to them. I'm half way surprised that there hasn't been a blood letting over the funds.Still, I have to say that the Poetry Foundation were as deserving as anything in existence; I was fairly impressed by the fact that they never lowered their editorial standards by publishing one of Lilly's allegedly substandard submissions to Poetry Magazine. Whoring for an endowment they were not.
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I took a Facebook quiz that would tell me what famous film director I would be, and the answer, revealed after answer some insipid movie related multiple choice questions, was that I was Stanley Kubrick.I have never liked this man's movies. Impressive, yes, but for the most part I think he's all gesture, no story. He was more in love with the allegory than with the story the device was supposed to serve.I might add that Martin Scorsese shares many of the flaws with Kubrick, the bulk be of them preferring spectacle to a plausible and compelling narrative line. The difference, I think, is that Scorsese doesn't take a long time between pestering the world with his lack taste. The would have been one attribute from Kubrick he could have benefited both him and ourselves. I suspect there were nothing but superstar names in the roster of results the quiz created bothered to assemble; obvious choices, me thinks. Clint Eastwood, The Coen Brothers, Michael Mann, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Ridley Scott, Chris Nolan, Walter Hill, Sam Rami, Guillermo Del Torro, John Huston, Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmasch, Quinten Tarantino, Sam Fuller, Don Siegel, now there are some names I wouldn't mind being my "inner director".

David Levine, RIP

David Levine,very likey the most important caricaturists of the 20Th century, has passed away at the age of 83. Whether his target was Lyndon Johnson,Richard Nixon , Henry Kissinger or Bill Clinton, Levine took an unkind eye to the liars, scallywags and overachieving glory seekers who managed to make the world into a trash-strewn playpen. He showed them them not as extraordinary personalities but rather as chronic sufferers of delusion. Bad haircuts, unshaven jowls, necks that couldn't quite fit into the necks of their assigned shirts, Levine saw these power elitists as strange and difficult creatures who looked and sounded sane , but who seemed malformed and amoral on closer inspection. His acid-etched pen and inks were long a tonic in the middle of many a meandering political controversy,and one wonders where such clarity and moral outrage might come from next. Let's hope we get luck.

Holmes gets all twisted

I haven't seen the new version of Sherlock Holmes, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson, respectively, but I have come across some whining from some reviewers about this film not treating the Conan Doyle creation with a sacrosant deference. It's a good time to insert the well worn notion from poet / esthetician Samuel Taylor Coleridge about the "willing suspension of disbelief"; as one enters into a relationship with a work that is an act of the imagination, one must relinquish their insistence that narratives be realistic, factual, or adhere to signifiers that merely reiterate the appearance of a world one already knows. The imaginative work should be judged on it's own terms, and from there one is in a better position to judge the relative success of the venture. The should go, of course, for those fictional figures, such as Sherlock Holmes , who's presence in in the culture seems known to us since before birth and who's exacting particulars needn't be , I don't think, cemented in place. The reputation, context and many particulars of Doyle's creation are not about to vanish from the earth; elaborations, embellishments,improvements, extensions, elisions, diminutions, and exacerbations of the character, are, in fact, what keeps us coming back to him; we have , in any event, seen quite a bit of Holmes as the pensive, reserved scientist thinking his way through a baffling series of murderous events, and it may be time,indeed, to see some bring the genius into the arena to bash the ruffians as well as baffle them. I would also like to see a Holmes/Batman team up movie , with the the two of them attempting to deal with a time warp crisis brought on by The Borg , who intended to infiltrate earth culture by assimilating a generation of Swiss watches. All this , of course, gets hopelessly complicated and lost until Thomas Dunson (John Wayne's character from Red River) appears on his horse and bitch slaps everyone into a stunned submission. After that, the sun will explode and there will no need to worry about the purity of any character, we needn't concern ourselves with the integrity of the text or author intentions, we can stop sniveling about canons and auteurs and Nobel Prizes and perhaps read books again, novels and poetry, and listen to albums again, all the way through, and perhaps take in a concert of music composed for instruments that don't required a power source to be heard. Wouldn't that be nice.

More notes on Charlotte Boulay's "planting daffodils"

(I wrote about Charlotte Boulay's wonderful poem "planting daffodils" in 2008. I've re-read it recently, and lo, more remarks, not quite connected.--tb)

The larger evils are evident in the poem, yes, and the narrator does speak of them in the middle passage, preparing the bulbs for planting. The irony the poem contains is that despite the seeming devastation nature foists upon us and, seemingly, itself, is that new life is nearly always the result; volcano explosions, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods. What existed before is tossed aside, displaced,destroyed, but not discarded, as their seeming waste become the materials that make a new life possible. A diminished note in the poem is the suggestion that the vanity that we can control nature and change its function is an illusion that we have continually smashed. It is a lesson we refuse to learn, however, precisely because we have the curse of turning our strong feelings into world views and applied philosophies that often as not result in ironic ruin.


This is a strong poem, I think, and I don't think there's a false or strained remark or move anywhere in it. The language is unpretentious without being self-consciously barren as, say, David Mamet's or Paul Auster's poems can be, and her elisions , the pause and unspoken link between the imaginative (Juliet) and the material (the garden in fall) is done with just enough spacing to surprise a reader with the association. The connections between them are presented well--there's no sense in the images being overdressed for the occasion, so to speak--and I rather like the darker implication about human vanity being under-addressed, almost not at all, but implicit all the same. It gives you the effect of a delayed shock of recognition.It's wise of her to avoid as well the mention of Easter.This poem within the scope of what man imagines and what man must actually contend with. The context is broader and the inference is wider as a result, and the reader not interested in particular religious references aren't excluded . Boulay seeks a wider empathy.

The whole issue as to what makes for a "moving poem" is as subjective as what the best ice cream flavor is. The distinguishing these differences in taste are what makes discussing poems , at times, a great pleasure. As a poem, "planting daffodils" is a lyric , analogous to music, and there is something in the sound of the words and the spaces between the images they've formed that gives me a clue to several ideas that are tangible yet beneath the surface of what the poem describes; the art of what was almost said. This poem is a useful illustration of how our concepts of life and death are layered in sets of metaphors and analogies that contrast our routine lives with our idealizations, and warns, at the margins, that we will be surprised, shocked and saddened at the end if we think we've gained control of our fate beyond our final day.

Dulled

So many poems have come our way concerning people who are dead, dying , grievously ill or otherwise three-sheeted to states that lack a pulse. This would be depressing normally, but it 's interesting to witness how the writers manage to obfuscate , obscure and botch a subject. A sudden death is confusing and I understand the attempt to write one's way from a mire conflicting emotion, but there is , often times, only more confusion. Rather than being made aware of the experience in phrases that can unmistakeably convey emotion and irony that can occur in the midst of the psychic turmoil, we are only witnesses to someone's inarticulate graspings towards a verbal effect. It's wearying to come away from a poem convinced not by the by the sentiment , but only by certainity that the writer couldn't get across a difficult set of ideas. The problem maybe , at times, that the notions were still forming; even in an art where obvious meanings are not required, there still needs to be a tangible set of figures one has considered and crafted with which a plausible surrendering of disbelief is possible.As with the fallen who are being addressed, directly or by way of intensely crowded example, the poets who've braved the page and revealed their dedications don't appear eager to really discuss anything; imagery,allusion, archaic and grating coinages emerge and make the subject disappear under the weight of description, which may be the hidden strategy after all. There is nothing less than the creation of distance from the heated stew of unresolved tension; compare this event to other things and eventually the original idea is lost , not to return to our mind. For the time being at least...

Rosenthal's "Morophine", while not dealing with a fatality, prefers jumping from one image, metaphor, simile to the other instead of establishing a series of ideas through the imagery to bring us to a perception a reader would not otherwise have had. It begins nicely enough, concretely, but quickly and seeming to plan it is lost in a parade that seems less a poem than devices gone amok:

The window to this world opened again
as the drips slowed, and she became
whippy as a sheet of glass improperly
annealed, ready to smash at any
indefinite touch in a whining matrix
of stresses,the bed frame a museum box
where she lay, encased as a mummified
kestrel tailed with a fleece of fetid cloth
laid out by the mongoose (pharaoh's rat)
cradled in the nook of a dead arm,
and her eyes were intensified as soup
with beef bouillon and parsnip, potato,
celery ends, the candor of bread and butter
to swallow the fact of what happened.

Different ideas come to me, none related to what Rosenthal had in mind; I am thinking more of the Clampitts arriving in Beverly Hills in an old truck crammed with every gougedand dented piece of property they ever bought through the Sears Roebuck catalogue, the toys in many an old cartoon who come alive when the shopkeeper leaves for the night, a bargain table full of sundry used merchandise, slightly worn, marked down . The succession of metaphors is overdone, and the idea --that there is a human need,it appears, to numb and distance ourselves from the unfiltered sensations of both the worlds we have both in and outside our head, and that one desires to be delivered by means greater than themselves to an plateau where the material stuff matters not--is ironically mummified by Rosenthal's desire to make this brief verse vivid. This is a baroque diorama, a box of strained effects, without the lyric imperative. It's a noise maker only, static and crackle.