Much has been written about whether poetry is flourishing or decaying in our consumerist technology-addicted culture. Trends in poetry are generally agreed to be towards the opaque, the intellectual, the poetry-as-game. Humour and references to other texts are frequent. While formalism has made a small come-back, free verse and the excuse it provides to the lazy not to examine line structure and length still predominate. This is a contrived excuse, of course. Good poetry is good poetry and there is plenty of good poetry in free verse being written. And the increase of poetry with Pasifika roots and other cultures than English can only be a good thing.
What puzzles me though is an attitude I have come across time and again in online forums, interviews, readings, generally the panoply of literary culture. Where writers treat poetry - their main creative endeavour - as a source of comfort, a tamed pet that usually behaves itself, and if it wees on the carpet is given a telling-off. A safe environment where the good poetry of today is read and applauded, but not attacked, and where purpose and meaning of the poetic effort is never discussed.
Maybe this attitude is assumed for the purposes of communal events, to boost the writer's self-esteem, or to play along with the etiquette of being confident about the worth of your own work or the work being displayed.
But the problem of this attitude is that it avoids the possibility of deep emotional connections, which are never safe, and always change the people involved. Connections to the works you read, and to works you are writing. How can your poems possibly attain greatness if you are fundamentally untouched? Would you recognise it and be affected by it if you see it? Greatness, which is not about how well the poem is written, but the purpose of the poem itself.
The classic essay by Donald Hall "Poetry and Ambition", talks about the difference between good and great poetry and the worthy aim (if difficult and unsure) of writing great poetry. He is right to say the poem, not the poet, will be what remains, one of "the stars in the sky". And it is entirely reasonably and even probable to think that all our efforts are for nothing, and that we haven't succeeded.
But we still need to question, rigorously and continually, the purpose of our poetic efforts, and of each poem we write. What does it contribute? This is a hard question to answer, striking as it does at the root of our self-esteem as writers. And difficult as these things are to discuss publicly, we need to discuss them for writers like myself, still an apprentice, to understand that greatness, rather than publication or fellowship, is the ultimate aim. That technical skill is only an intermediate step.
As a writer, this is the first danger of poetry. It throws into question the focus I have put on my life and ensures I can never stop questioning it.
The second danger of poetry is as a reader. If I don't feel that what I am reading is somehow dangerous to me, challenging me in some way fundamental to how I live, it can only be a comfort in the way pulp fiction is a comfort, or junk food. It can't be art.
Of course in this relationship the reader must play their part, or even the greatest poems will go unnoticed. To read poetry attentively and openly means taking your time, rereading, registering the twitches of your sensitive nose-hairs to the fluctuations of allusion, metaphor, rhythm, structure. Thinking about what you have read, and thinking whole-heartedly, that is with your mind and your heart open.
This is demanding stuff, and no wonder people select the things they put their energy into. But it is still essential for the great works to live. Will we look back at the poetry of the 21st century and be able to pick out the great poems from the wealth of published material? Critics and poets and academics perform this function by praising, reading, referencing, and teaching, and by these means some work survives in our culture, and some doesn't.
So be a reader that demands greatness as well as skill. Be a writer that demands these things from yourself. Strive for what you can never achieve, and you may achieve something worth reading.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Saturday, February 25, 2012
The marriage of sound and sense
Unlike temper and policy, sound and sense usually make for good bedfellows.
The following describes briefly my own understanding of the concepts and choices around sound and how they affect sense.
Other writers would describe it differently, and probably better. Nevertheless everyone needs to understand these things in their own way, and incorporate them into their poetic practice deep enough to be (in part) almost without thinking. While I have separated these ideas out individually, in reality they work together so closely it's not clear where one finishes and the other starts. I find these are things best taken into account at the revising stage of writing, and over time if you continue thinking about them, hopefully good choices happen earlier and earlier in the drafts of your poems.
Sound can be examined at the following levels:
Individual words
Apart from the meaning, the sound of consonants and vowels contributes to the experience of the poem; and when the poet manipulates patterns of words to form sequences of sound like alliteration and assonance, this contribution increases. Alliteration and assonance can support or undercut the poetic form or genre, and contribute feelings of closure or relationship in unrhymed poems. Some simple examples are using letters like s, th, ck, sh, to indicate a physical sensation of sliding, stickiness, snake-like movement; or round vowels like o, ou, ow, to indicate a balanced openness. Where you may want to temporarily break free of a chosen form, these devices can preserve the general feeling of unity of the broken section with the rest of the poem, such as Milton's use of the following words in a description of Hell, where he breaks the blank verse meter he is using:
(Paradise Lost, 2.621)
I find the best way to begin being aware of the feelings associated with consonants and vowels is to find the words you already use and examine the effect they have. An example is the phrase I used above: a balanced openness.
The balance is expressed in the sound by the two 'a''s either side of the 'l'; in addition the heavier stress on the first syllable is "balanced" by the longer although lighter second syllable. The past tense use of the word by adding the letter 'd' means the word does not end with a trailing off sound of 'nce' but the complete ending of 'd'.
Openness obviously starts with the wide mouth of the 'o' which rounds down into the 'pen' and stretches out with the 'ness' to make it more than describing the quality once or of one finite object. The repeating of the 'e' vowel sound helps bring to the second and third syllables a continuation that also contributes to the effect aligning with the meaning of the word.
Combining these two words as a phrase, therefore, combines these two experiences of sound to create a specific effect that may or may not fit into the poem you are creating.
Whether this applies to languages other than English I do not know, but generally I have found that the sound of individual words (nouns and adjectives especially) often can be felt to contribute to our experience of their sense.
Individual lines
This is where meter comes in explicitly. Above I started to talk about combinations of sounds within and between words. Looking at a line of poetry, the alliteration and assonance within words and between words is one layer of sound; the other is the manipulation of meter (and by association, line length). A poem being in free verse does not mean there is no meter or the metrical effect does not matter. It simply means the poet has no explicit grid of meter to write on top of that is universally recognised; the poet may have - often does have - their own habitual regular or irregular meter(s).
The sound of individual lines by meter can be harder to assess because it is a subtler effect and can be drowned out by alliteration and assonance. I find it useful to think of the background meter as the drumbeat underneath the clash of cymbals (alliteration and assonance), and the flowing melody (actual words chosen).
I'll only discuss this briefly, because there is so much written on the use of meter to contribute to the effects of poetry (see Shaw's Blank Verse text as an example that focuses on one poetic form).
In non-free verse, the meter is an externally imposed idea that the actual poem must treat with but not completely live up to, so that its fluctuations become expressive and not monotonous or robotic.
Continuing with the blank verse examples (as this is my favourite form), substitution of any of the five "feet" of the iambic pentameter line alters the expected meter and helps express what may be happening in the poem, or sometimes in the relationship between the reader and the poem.
Keats with his exquisite sense of metrical manipulation provides any number of useful examples of different forms. One of my favourites of his, Ode to a Nightingale, includes these lines when talking of his morbid invitation to death:
The two strongest metrical effects here, in my opinion, are the substitution of the first iamb foot of the first line with a trochee, emphasising the 'Still' over the 'wouldst', as the strong answer to his preceding question, and in the second and third iamb feet of the second line, trochees again, this time expressing the sense of rising with the word 'high' and the falling of from here through the 'requiem' emphasising falling down to (literally) earth with the word 'sod'. In terms of word choice, the sybillance of 'still', 'wouldst', 'sing' and 'sod' both approach the melodious idea of the nightingale's song, and form links between these words that are so important in the meaning Keats is making. The rhyme of 'thy' immediately preceding 'high' increases the effect of the trochee substitution.
With free verse, the reader must go with the poet's meter and be thrown up and down and sideways as the poet chooses (rather like the expressiveness of classical music compared to the regular beat of pop music).
The long and flexible lines of Whitman in his deservedly adored Song of Myself shows how this can be well done.
Again examination of Whitman's meter has been done in more detail elsewhere, so I will just note that his changes of metrical emphasis can match his meaning, such as in the last line of the first section of this poem:
I interpret the sound effects as follows. The stresses on the words 'without' and 'with' are arranged in the line so that the stressed 'out' of without appears stronger after the unstressed 'ure' and 'with' preceding it; and later in the line, 'with' appears a little stronger by preceding the (again relatively) unstressed 'o'. The repetitive use of the 'g' in particular, in the words 'original' and 'energy' help combine and heighten the focus on this phrase.
Stanzas and overall poem:
The sound effects of groups of lines and the poem as a whole rely on the work done we have just discussed - individual word choice, and relationships between words in terms of stress and alliteration/assonance.
Looked at in view of a number of lines, the progression of the reader's expectations of meter, and their experience of the variations or effects of sound becomes cumulative, and this can be used in terms of progression, and unity.
Progression of meaning of the poem can be matched and expressed also in the progression of sound effects. For example, moving from a regular, lightly-stressed, buoyant stanza full of o's, l's, n's, r's, etc, to a more irregular, highly-stressed stanza using u's, z's, hard g's, ck's etc, starts to create a story, and the thoughtful poet will have done this deliberately, perhaps to reflect a change in feeling in the meaning of the poem, an event or a change of speaker, or perhaps how much we should rely on the sincerity of the words.
At this stage examples can become time-consuming to explain, and probably unnecessary anyway. I would suggest taking a look at some sonnets of Shakespeare for a manageable hunk of words.
You may be asking "where are the contemporary examples?". Go look at your favourite contemporary poems and figure out how their sound affects their sense. One of the tests of good poetry, in my opinion, is whether the sound actually contributes to the sense, or seems random, with opportunities for emphasis lost.
The following describes briefly my own understanding of the concepts and choices around sound and how they affect sense.
Other writers would describe it differently, and probably better. Nevertheless everyone needs to understand these things in their own way, and incorporate them into their poetic practice deep enough to be (in part) almost without thinking. While I have separated these ideas out individually, in reality they work together so closely it's not clear where one finishes and the other starts. I find these are things best taken into account at the revising stage of writing, and over time if you continue thinking about them, hopefully good choices happen earlier and earlier in the drafts of your poems.
Sound can be examined at the following levels:
Individual words
Apart from the meaning, the sound of consonants and vowels contributes to the experience of the poem; and when the poet manipulates patterns of words to form sequences of sound like alliteration and assonance, this contribution increases. Alliteration and assonance can support or undercut the poetic form or genre, and contribute feelings of closure or relationship in unrhymed poems. Some simple examples are using letters like s, th, ck, sh, to indicate a physical sensation of sliding, stickiness, snake-like movement; or round vowels like o, ou, ow, to indicate a balanced openness. Where you may want to temporarily break free of a chosen form, these devices can preserve the general feeling of unity of the broken section with the rest of the poem, such as Milton's use of the following words in a description of Hell, where he breaks the blank verse meter he is using:
Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death
(Paradise Lost, 2.621)
I find the best way to begin being aware of the feelings associated with consonants and vowels is to find the words you already use and examine the effect they have. An example is the phrase I used above: a balanced openness.
The balance is expressed in the sound by the two 'a''s either side of the 'l'; in addition the heavier stress on the first syllable is "balanced" by the longer although lighter second syllable. The past tense use of the word by adding the letter 'd' means the word does not end with a trailing off sound of 'nce' but the complete ending of 'd'.
Openness obviously starts with the wide mouth of the 'o' which rounds down into the 'pen' and stretches out with the 'ness' to make it more than describing the quality once or of one finite object. The repeating of the 'e' vowel sound helps bring to the second and third syllables a continuation that also contributes to the effect aligning with the meaning of the word.
Combining these two words as a phrase, therefore, combines these two experiences of sound to create a specific effect that may or may not fit into the poem you are creating.
Whether this applies to languages other than English I do not know, but generally I have found that the sound of individual words (nouns and adjectives especially) often can be felt to contribute to our experience of their sense.
Individual lines
This is where meter comes in explicitly. Above I started to talk about combinations of sounds within and between words. Looking at a line of poetry, the alliteration and assonance within words and between words is one layer of sound; the other is the manipulation of meter (and by association, line length). A poem being in free verse does not mean there is no meter or the metrical effect does not matter. It simply means the poet has no explicit grid of meter to write on top of that is universally recognised; the poet may have - often does have - their own habitual regular or irregular meter(s).
The sound of individual lines by meter can be harder to assess because it is a subtler effect and can be drowned out by alliteration and assonance. I find it useful to think of the background meter as the drumbeat underneath the clash of cymbals (alliteration and assonance), and the flowing melody (actual words chosen).
I'll only discuss this briefly, because there is so much written on the use of meter to contribute to the effects of poetry (see Shaw's Blank Verse text as an example that focuses on one poetic form).
In non-free verse, the meter is an externally imposed idea that the actual poem must treat with but not completely live up to, so that its fluctuations become expressive and not monotonous or robotic.
Continuing with the blank verse examples (as this is my favourite form), substitution of any of the five "feet" of the iambic pentameter line alters the expected meter and helps express what may be happening in the poem, or sometimes in the relationship between the reader and the poem.
Keats with his exquisite sense of metrical manipulation provides any number of useful examples of different forms. One of my favourites of his, Ode to a Nightingale, includes these lines when talking of his morbid invitation to death:
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod.
The two strongest metrical effects here, in my opinion, are the substitution of the first iamb foot of the first line with a trochee, emphasising the 'Still' over the 'wouldst', as the strong answer to his preceding question, and in the second and third iamb feet of the second line, trochees again, this time expressing the sense of rising with the word 'high' and the falling of from here through the 'requiem' emphasising falling down to (literally) earth with the word 'sod'. In terms of word choice, the sybillance of 'still', 'wouldst', 'sing' and 'sod' both approach the melodious idea of the nightingale's song, and form links between these words that are so important in the meaning Keats is making. The rhyme of 'thy' immediately preceding 'high' increases the effect of the trochee substitution.
With free verse, the reader must go with the poet's meter and be thrown up and down and sideways as the poet chooses (rather like the expressiveness of classical music compared to the regular beat of pop music).
The long and flexible lines of Whitman in his deservedly adored Song of Myself shows how this can be well done.
Again examination of Whitman's meter has been done in more detail elsewhere, so I will just note that his changes of metrical emphasis can match his meaning, such as in the last line of the first section of this poem:
Nature without check with original energy.
I interpret the sound effects as follows. The stresses on the words 'without' and 'with' are arranged in the line so that the stressed 'out' of without appears stronger after the unstressed 'ure' and 'with' preceding it; and later in the line, 'with' appears a little stronger by preceding the (again relatively) unstressed 'o'. The repetitive use of the 'g' in particular, in the words 'original' and 'energy' help combine and heighten the focus on this phrase.
Stanzas and overall poem:
The sound effects of groups of lines and the poem as a whole rely on the work done we have just discussed - individual word choice, and relationships between words in terms of stress and alliteration/assonance.
Looked at in view of a number of lines, the progression of the reader's expectations of meter, and their experience of the variations or effects of sound becomes cumulative, and this can be used in terms of progression, and unity.
Progression of meaning of the poem can be matched and expressed also in the progression of sound effects. For example, moving from a regular, lightly-stressed, buoyant stanza full of o's, l's, n's, r's, etc, to a more irregular, highly-stressed stanza using u's, z's, hard g's, ck's etc, starts to create a story, and the thoughtful poet will have done this deliberately, perhaps to reflect a change in feeling in the meaning of the poem, an event or a change of speaker, or perhaps how much we should rely on the sincerity of the words.
At this stage examples can become time-consuming to explain, and probably unnecessary anyway. I would suggest taking a look at some sonnets of Shakespeare for a manageable hunk of words.
You may be asking "where are the contemporary examples?". Go look at your favourite contemporary poems and figure out how their sound affects their sense. One of the tests of good poetry, in my opinion, is whether the sound actually contributes to the sense, or seems random, with opportunities for emphasis lost.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Poetry about death
Whew! I've spent the last few months finishing my degree, but now can focus again on poetry, so.. up first, a subject I've been thinking - and writing - about.
How many poems are about the inevitability of death? Quite a lot.
Billy Collins said "there's one subject in lyric poetry, and that is you have this existence and at the end of it you're going to experience non-existence" (The Independent, 31 May 2003).
Well, that's a theme in many of the poems I've read, from Keats' mellifluous descriptions of life as "where men sit and hear each other groan" in Ode to a Nightingale, to Larkin's Aubade, where death stands "plain as a wardrobe, what we know and have always known".
Death can be longed for, fetishized - Anne Sexton's death baby, for example - or desired as certainty or absence of pain (Keats), or feared (Bowers in Autumn Shade). We don't actually know it since we only experience dying and cannot fully experience it through another's death.
I think of Stevens' Sunday Morning, a defence of atheism, arguing that "death is the mother of beauty", though in this schema Christianity is all about Jesus' sacrifice, death and morbidity, so to argue that this changeless immortal paradise - where ripe fruit never falls - is inadequate because we need death to appreciate life, or that beauty can only exist in relation to its end, seems contradictory...
Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn moves from appreciation of the urn's figures' stability to their static lifelessness, implying change is life, hence death is indispensable, even as he writes "beauty is truth, truth beauty". In Larkin's Aubade religion is a "vast, moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die".
Stanley Kunitz said "there's always an element of the erotic about death" (The Wild Braid), and how many love poems are based on the changefulness of the adored person, or the speaker themselves, or love? So many of Shakespeare's sonnets are on this theme (such as sonnet 18, where poetry is the only way to freeze time - "thy eternal summer shall not fade".
A collection of poems about death and dying was published in the last few years in NZ (Moonlight, 2008, edited by poet Andrew Johnston), but this was more about grief, and more personal. I must say I've only flicked through it in the bookstore, so this is not a criticism.
The reason this theme has been on my mind is that I've been thinking about subject and purpose of poetry. What do we write and read about, and why? Poetry itself, an expression, a communication, an art. Do we write it to make ephemeral things more permanent? Interesting logic. Shakespeare and other famous poets may have their works live long after their death, but for most of us obscure people what we write might have a zenith as a poem or two in a local literary magazine, that if valued might be archived by a public library or national cultural archives. I know when I write a poem it sets down something, but the poem itself, the words on the paper, last as long as the paper is preserved or the digital file saved, which might not be for very long. You could argue, and I have, that this real poem is a shadow of the poem that the writer had in mind, and that 'Poem' is immortal, being an idea. What Shakespeare had in mind as he wrote that sonnet will never be known. All we have is the real poem. This 'Poem' is of value for the writer and the writer alone.
So we struggle against the death we know is coming, and whether religion comforts us or not (and increasingly in poetry it is not), poetry can be written as an attempt to deal with the experiences or emotions raised by this thought. Does the poet think this poem itself will cheat death? Keats used poesy to try to escape the thought of death in Ode to a Nightingale, but it didn't work, and that failure is the haunting end to the poem. "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music - do I wake, or sleep?"
How many poems are about the inevitability of death? Quite a lot.
Billy Collins said "there's one subject in lyric poetry, and that is you have this existence and at the end of it you're going to experience non-existence" (The Independent, 31 May 2003).
Well, that's a theme in many of the poems I've read, from Keats' mellifluous descriptions of life as "where men sit and hear each other groan" in Ode to a Nightingale, to Larkin's Aubade, where death stands "plain as a wardrobe, what we know and have always known".
Death can be longed for, fetishized - Anne Sexton's death baby, for example - or desired as certainty or absence of pain (Keats), or feared (Bowers in Autumn Shade). We don't actually know it since we only experience dying and cannot fully experience it through another's death.
I think of Stevens' Sunday Morning, a defence of atheism, arguing that "death is the mother of beauty", though in this schema Christianity is all about Jesus' sacrifice, death and morbidity, so to argue that this changeless immortal paradise - where ripe fruit never falls - is inadequate because we need death to appreciate life, or that beauty can only exist in relation to its end, seems contradictory...
Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn moves from appreciation of the urn's figures' stability to their static lifelessness, implying change is life, hence death is indispensable, even as he writes "beauty is truth, truth beauty". In Larkin's Aubade religion is a "vast, moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die".
Stanley Kunitz said "there's always an element of the erotic about death" (The Wild Braid), and how many love poems are based on the changefulness of the adored person, or the speaker themselves, or love? So many of Shakespeare's sonnets are on this theme (such as sonnet 18, where poetry is the only way to freeze time - "thy eternal summer shall not fade".
A collection of poems about death and dying was published in the last few years in NZ (Moonlight, 2008, edited by poet Andrew Johnston), but this was more about grief, and more personal. I must say I've only flicked through it in the bookstore, so this is not a criticism.
The reason this theme has been on my mind is that I've been thinking about subject and purpose of poetry. What do we write and read about, and why? Poetry itself, an expression, a communication, an art. Do we write it to make ephemeral things more permanent? Interesting logic. Shakespeare and other famous poets may have their works live long after their death, but for most of us obscure people what we write might have a zenith as a poem or two in a local literary magazine, that if valued might be archived by a public library or national cultural archives. I know when I write a poem it sets down something, but the poem itself, the words on the paper, last as long as the paper is preserved or the digital file saved, which might not be for very long. You could argue, and I have, that this real poem is a shadow of the poem that the writer had in mind, and that 'Poem' is immortal, being an idea. What Shakespeare had in mind as he wrote that sonnet will never be known. All we have is the real poem. This 'Poem' is of value for the writer and the writer alone.
So we struggle against the death we know is coming, and whether religion comforts us or not (and increasingly in poetry it is not), poetry can be written as an attempt to deal with the experiences or emotions raised by this thought. Does the poet think this poem itself will cheat death? Keats used poesy to try to escape the thought of death in Ode to a Nightingale, but it didn't work, and that failure is the haunting end to the poem. "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music - do I wake, or sleep?"
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