TriQuarterly Blog

(Pieter Breugel’s Triumph of Death)

I’ll conclude my account of the second week—though it doesn’t cover everything we talked about in classes—with this post on the other poems we discussed: Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and “The Return,” and two poems from William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, which was his response in 1923 to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was published the year before.

My main purpose in reading these two poems by Pound was to look at the rhythms of them. “In a Station of the Metro,” as it was first printed and published a hundred years ago in Poetry, had extra spaces between some of the words, and floated its line-ending punctuation out to the right of the last word. It’s read by most people as a free verse poem, and in Pound’s mind I think it was. But in his mind, to judge from the evidence (his poems), free verse included lines of poetry that were still metrical but were not of a traditional length (especially pentameter).

We’re going to get to iambic pentameter soon, and in fact the students are going to write a sonnet. Pentameter is a core requirement of this course, simply because without being able to read it, we can’t understand what’s going on, at every level, in any poem written in that meter. And that’s most of the tradition of English poetry and a lot of American poetry, too.

Forty years ago I heard Stanley Kunitz tell of a game that he and Theodore Roethke had played against each other. When they saw each other, each would quote (from memory) a stanza from an English poem of the Renaissance (and it had to be fairly obscure for the game to work at all), and the other had to identify poem and author, and also the decade in which it had been written. (This could be done, by ears as great as theirs, and minds as happily filled with poetry as theirs, partly by listening to the rhythms and meter, because the iambic pentameter didn’t get sorted out in a stable way until the end of the 16^thcentury, but more important, by listening for the specifics of stylistic identity, which they had certainly learned to recognize.) So Kunitz told me. He also said that he never managed to beat Roethke; there was no stanza that Roethke couldn’t either remember or figure out.  

Teaching students how to hear the rhythms of English in the lines of poems, I start with listening to the rhythms of the natural speech stresses—from loose, quickly moving lines with fewer stressed syllables than unstressed ones, to lines in which the speech stresses are close-packed—two, three, four, and sometimes even more in a row.

Pound’s poem looks like this when we listen for the speech stresses:

The apparition      of these faces      in the crowd      :

Petals      on a wet, black      bough      .

Here I’ll add the metrical accents to the speech stresses (the difference between these is how meter works; it’s everything):

The áp | parí | tion óf | these fác | es ín | the crówd: |

( ˇ) Pét | als ón | a wét | black bóugh.|

(Really, the accent marks above the words should be over a whole syllable, but I’ve had to put them over vowels, because that’s the limitation of the character set in a word processing program.) I have notmarked the syllables in metrically unaccented positions at all, except for supplying the one that’s missing in front of “Pet-“. 

In metrical practice (and terminology), a line like the second line here is often called “headless,” because it’s missing that syllable. But this variation is a perfectly acceptable, and frequent, variation of the iambic line, and then the line both begins and ends with a metrical accent, and is a syllable shorter than it would have been, and varies the sound and the effect of the word-rhythm. 

So Pound composed this little free verse poem by writing a line of six iambic feet followed by a “headless” line of four. (They add up to ten… which would be the count of two lines of iambic pentameter; in effect, this is a disguised, syncopated couplet, with a strong “half” or “slant” rhyme.) Pound’s distribution of the speech stresses across the scheme of the meter creates what’s interesting in the rhythm of this famous little poem. The first line runs by quickly, lightly, ending on that heavy word “crowd”—a word with three consonants and a pretty broad, long-lasting vowel. The second line is rhythmically more emphatic, with four speech stresses out of a total of seven syllables. (Which is why he doesn’t happen to want, much less need, an article in front of “petals”—it would only lessen the rhythmic intensity.)

(Yes, “black” is a little less of a speech stress than “bough”—the vowel is short, the final “ck” is sharp and quick.  So “black bough” is an iambic foot, even though “black” is given much more stress, has much more physical force in our mouths and ears, than the metrically accented but unstressed “on” in the second foot. (That’s what makes the second foot interesting, rhythmically.) Then “bough,” with its silent—but visually, typographically, charming—final consonant, is just one consonant and one vowel, but the vowel is very long, and of course it chimes with the identical vowel in “crowd”—with a different spelling, which is also visually pleasing to a mind given to liking these kinds of things, poet-mind. The bough is where the crowd is seen for an instant, after its metamorphosis into an image. 

Pound’s poem imagining the return of Roman gods, “The Return,” is again rhythmically emphatic on the basis of the iamb, but he uses a metrical figure over and over to vary the iambic meter as much as possible without losing it, and he uses lines of irregular length, so I’m sure he thought, at the time he wrote this, that that too was one of the available kinds of “free verse.”

But William Carlos Williams went further (as did Pound himself, in his Cantos). We looked at Williams’s “By the road to the contagious hospital” (that’s the first line; originally Williams gave the poem no title) which is especially notable for the skill with which it catalogues a waste land (aha!) beside a road—just weeds and other wild plants, and weedy trees—that’s beginning to come to life as winter yields to spring. As compared to the Dantesque, Shakespearean, Wagnerian, ancient Greek, Baudelairean, Ovidian, Spenserian, Goldsmithian, etc. (all of which, and more, is in The Waste Land) English and European poets, whose words name the plants etc. for which those very words were coined, this, this weedy roadside on the way to a hospital built far from anyone because its patients all have infectious diseases—this is America, this is the humble, ordinary, nameless “stuff” with which we American poets must construct our poems because this is the rough, uncelebrated “new world” (line 16) that we who speak old European languages must describe and imagine in a new way. So Williams thought, or said he thought, and so he wrote, in this extraordinary amazing book. But note that the simple everyday language of this poem is as rhythmic as it can be: the “waste of broad, muddy fields,” “small trees / withdead brown leaves under them,” and so on.  There’s no “ghost of the pentameter” (Eliot’s phrase) hovering behind these lines. Williams has noticeably kept it out (it can come right back in if the poet isn’t listening carefully enough).  And the free verse rhythms—appearing to be spontaneous, impromptu—are as strongly emphatic as those in Hopkins or Pound.  

In another poem from Spring and All, “Pink confused with white” (that’s the first line; originally Williams gave the poem no title), the literal images begin to glow with symbolic meanings, while remaining vivid to the mind’s eye. And here, for whatever reason, Williams does something that Pound does in “The Return”—he takes a metrical figure out of the tradition and uses it in free verse. Pound especially liked two of them. First, the initial trochee-plus-iamb, which is one of the most frequent variations of the first foot in a line: “Seé, they | retúrn!”—in this instance, speech stress completely coincides with metrical accent; Pound puts this into his poem over and over, whether it’s at the beginning of a line or not. The other one Pound loves to use and also to extend into another speech stress looks like this: “and the | slow feet.” It’s two syllables with neither speech stress nor metrical accent, very small and short indeed, followed by two stressed ones, so it’s effectively a two-foot figure; that is, a rhythmical device within the metrical scheme. Recognizing it as a two-foot figure, rather than trying to rationalize how it might be two iambic feet, makes it possible for us to steal it for use in free verse, for it does show us that even metrical verse, supposedly so artificially constrained, follows what English already does on our tongues—using lots of alternations of stressed and unstressed syllables, and sometimes packing them in closely.

Here’s Williams in “Pink confused with white,” using the first of the two metrical figures I described above: “dárting | it báck,” “petals aslant” “red where in whorls,” “gay with rough moss”; these are at the beginnings of lines, so they wouldn’t at all be out of place in a metrical poem. But this poem really is free verse. (It has no extended iambic passages. We can’t produce them by putting sequential lines together.) Other instances of this metrical (in metrical verse) and rhythmical (in both metrical and free verse) device are inside the lines: “flowers | reversed,” “darkened with mauve,”  “there, wholly dark.” And the other device is here, too: “into the lamp’s horn,” “from the pot’s rim.”

There are many kinds of free verse, and many ways to try to define free verse, but one simple definition is that it does not have extended passages (five feet and more) of uninterruptedly iambic rhythm. 

When what appears to be a free-verse poem does include such a passage here and there, it’s artistically inept, it stops us from hearing the pleasing irregularity of speech stresses and pulls us into hearing instead a metrical ghost; no, I should say zombie, because it takes over the body of the free-verse poem. (This is very different from a loosely iambic poem that tightens with very apparent deliberateness into polished meter in order to achieve an effect, for example at the end of a poem, or in some other moment of emotional intensity.) 

We can see that Pound and Williams, in a moment of transition when the extended regularity of iambic verse simply had no more appeal in their minds, did nevertheless use some metrical effects that had been invented within iambic verse. Eliot remained comfortable with loosening the pentameter and continuing to explore its possibilities as a medium of allusion in The Waste Land (he himself tightens it at the end of the scene of the “carbuncular” clerk, with the effect of suggesting that the lovemaking gets steady, maybe mechanical). And in the Four Quartets he extends and contracts the line at different points, loosening or tightening it, mixing it in with free-verse lines in a way that feels (it was easy for him) very carefully calibrated.  

Why should that be? Because this is what English does, this is what it sounds like—it is both predominantly iambic, even in everyday language, and it likes (that’s how I would put it) to sound iambic.

Millions of people worldwide died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Here’s Williams, M.D., portraying a visit to the “contagious hospital” (perhaps it was built during the epidemic, or in response to the epidemic, obviously to isolate the sick geographically and thus lessen the transmission of the disease to others). The hospital was built somewhere out from town, where what we see on the roadside is weeds and mud and scrub trees. No doubt many of the patients are, in some peoples’ eyes, “weeds”: the poor, the immigrants. These were Williams’s patients.

I can’t resist adding one more little poem by Williams, in this same vein of responsiveness to what others do not notice (this one’s not in our anthology):

In the last post I was describing some of the discussion in our classes during the first two weeks—ending with poems by Lorine Niedecker. Now I’ll add a few words about Denise Levertov and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the next poets we discussed.

In contrast to the way the language in Neidecker’s poems is often very concrete and only concrete, even while there’s a fascinating play of thought, or the way Seamus Heaney mastered from the very beginning of his work the use of words with Old English roots to create the most vivid mental images of the natural and human worlds, in Denise Levertov’s poem, “Stepping Westward,” the use of image-words is more like that of Gwendolyn Brooks in “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till.” That is, the literal images have another meaning, and this second level gives the poem a thoroughgoing symbolic texture. (Not that any of these poets produce no symbolic meaning: they do, of course. The differences in the way they sound—and thus in the way they think and feel—has to do with proportions.)

In “Stepping Westward” Levertov uses lots of literal images: green, ebb, flow, north star, black sky, blue, quilts of cloud, sweet, salt, and so on. But nearly all of them turn into symbols—as we absorb them, they grow from words that point to the physical reality outside language to words that point to ideas in our culture(s), our era, and our heads. 

In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Inversnaid,” the language is very sensuous in terms of how much our mouths do when we say it aloud. The consonants and vowels, like Heaney’s, really work our powers of articulation, and this—the way the English language works—makes the sense impressions, whether of sight or of other senses—especially vivid in our imaginations. That vividness is one of the great pleasures of the English language, and naturally enough it has been one of the primary poetic resources of our language, through all the life of poetry in English.

In Hopkins’s poem, we looked at the rhythms and the sounds, first. The emphatic rhythms of the close-packed speech stresses of lines like “His rollrock highroad roaring down” give more vividness to Hopkins’s description of the small, fast, fast-falling stream in Scotland. The neologisms and very particular existing words, like the tree that is called a “beadbonny ash,” also give the diction of the poem more concreteness, even when we don’t know what physical characteristics the beadbonny ash has. And then after all that hyponymic description (I’m coming to that in a moment), there’s the rhetorical shift to discursive language at the end—as if the fast stream, the “burn,” has now reached the level of the calm lake into which it drains, and the poem, like the lake, has time to think in a more familiar way: with general ideas.

In these lines nature has become an abstraction, a very valuable one in Hopkins’s mind: “wildness.” And “wet” has become an abstraction too. And even the literal image “weeds,” that generic term, becomes symbolic of all of life that grows up on its own. (Presumably in such a place in Scotland, that long ago, there might not have been the annoyance and danger of invasive species of weeds.) The poem was probably written in 1881 or soon thereafter; in America, Henry David Thoreau, who was born in 1817—almost thirty years before Hopkins—had begun to prize wild places by the 1840s, but I don’t imagine that Hopkins could have known of Thoreau. (I’d welcome a correction of my conjecture.) When Thoreau lectured and wrote, his rhetoric was discursive—a plea, a defense, a hope urged on his listeners and his readers. But he was a naturalist with a great appetite for specificity of detail. (Unlike Emerson, who was a general thinker; Thoreau said that taking a walk in the woods with Emerson was very unrewarding, because Emerson’s vision was poor, he didn’t notice things, and he talked all the time.) At the end of his poem, Hopkins comes to something like Thoreau’s rhetoric, but his utterance is first prepared for, through three intensely descriptive stanzas, by his presentation of what we might think of as a nature of words—the word-world that stands in relation to what it names in nature. The thing first (sort of), then the sentiment.

All of it intensified by the eccentric and fine-tuned ear of the poet.

Finally in this post: hyponym. A very useful word and concept. (Etymologically, it is formed from ancient Greek words.) As in hypodermic or hypothermia, the “hypo-” suggests something like “under,” “below.” And a hyponym is in fact an “under-name.” It is a name for something that is more specific, that has less conceptual breadth, than the word above it. So we can make a scale from most general to most specific by going down a list of hyponyms.  For example:

(Wikipedia says of the rose: “’American Beauty’ is a hybrid perpetual rose, bred in France in 1875, and originally named ‘Madame Ferdinand Jamin’.” 

The English language loves hyponymy. We relish the specificity, the taxonomic clarity, of words in everyday life. It’s well known that in French poetry, for instance, the reader is not likely to be told by the poet what sort of tree, for example, she is supposed to imagine. The tree, its foliage, its leaf, its red autumn leaf, its red maple leaf in autumn, its red Norway Maple leaf in autumn, is, in French, already idealized and thus simplified to “leaf” (la feuille) and it’s not likely to matter (to most French poets of all eras and to most French readers) which tree the leaf came from. What it looks like isn’t the focus; the focus is what it suggests, stands for, symbolizes. But the story of English, a Germanic language, is very different from that of French, a Latinate language. Which is why Shakespeare’s language—most famously—finds no analogous sort of diction in French. And because the languages differ, so too do the overall effects of the play that has been translated from English into French. Or the poem.

-Reginald Gibbons  

Time out!  But I’m not abandoning poetry—I’m only moving for a moment to another aspect of the life of poetry. Two important poetry events in Chicago are coming up in May and June.  

On May 14 the Guild Literary Complex is presenting a tribute to Sterling Plumpp (it’s Guild’s annual benefit event).  Plumpp was born in Mississippi, left that state for college, served in the army, eventually came to Chicago, and taught for many years at the University of Illinois - Chicago, before retiring not too long ago.  He is one of the most original of American poets, and has developed the unique style of his poems through a deep, lifelong interrelationship between language and music—namely, both the blues and bebop.  (In fact, he wrote several blues lyrics for the late Willie Kent.)  

The author of numerous volumes, Plumpp has a recent poem in TriQuarterly:

 http://triquarterly.org/poetry/mississippi-suite

Also at TriQuarterly is a very full interview: http://triquarterly.org/interviews/interview-sterling-plumpp

Then on June 7 the American Writers Museum Foundation, Third World Press and the Guild Literary Complex will present the first annual Brooksday—a celebration of the work of Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) on her birthday.  It will be a continuous reading of her work from 9 a.m. till 7:30 p.m. at the Cultural Center in downtown Chicago (at the corner of Michigan Ave. and Randolph St.  (Enter from Randolph St.)  If you live in or near Chicago, I hope you’ll want to come to one or both.  For information about both, go to   http://guildcomplex.org/

You’ll see buttons on the left for both these events.  

Also, check out http://www.americanwritersmuseum.org/

(Back to poetry writing, in the next post.)

-Reginald Gibbons

Language Functions

I like to think that poets have an intuitive and practiced sense of how many functions language has in daily life. Intellectually we tend to notice only the “representational” function—the way each word has a meaning (or several) and what that meaning is. But we use language not merely to communicate the meaning that the dictionary confirms for us. There’s a lot more going on in the simplest of human communication than that. Perhaps most of all in the simplest.  

But the academic study of literary language tends to be confined mostly to the representational function, and almost never do I see a critical description or analysis of poetry that goes into the language functions that affect us at deeper, more intuitive levels. For a while, peaking in the 1980s and only slowly trailing off after that, it was hard to find a scholar in the field of literary studies who believed that language had any other function than the representational. Hence the strong attitudes of that time in many academics against what they call “the aesthetic,” meaning almost any formal aspect of poetry at all, from tiny phonetic figures to big structures.

The acquisition of language by children has been studied deeply, though, and here we can find a refreshing breadth of responsiveness to the different things we do with language—which means the different ways we make and communicate our meaning, and that in turn means: all the possibilities of meaning making that can be found in poetry.

Here’s my favorite example, although it is probably rather dated by now:

“The linguist Michael Halliday observed his young son during the period when his vocalizations were assuming consistent phonological form and when he began to exhibit clearly an intention to communicate by means of these forms.  Halliday was able to distinguish seven different functions, or uses, of his son’s talk, which he took to be models of the child’s conception of what talk is for. The first notion to emerge is that of talk as [1] instrumental, a means of satisfying wants or needs.  Another function is [2] regulatory: the child discovers that others seek to control him by talking and that he can also control the behavior of others.  The child also senses that one can establish and maintain contact with others by talking; he recognizes [3] the interactional function.  The child also expresses his individuality in talking; he asserts himself and his own sense of agency, for talking is a field of action in which he can make choices and take some responsibility.  Thus talking has [4] a personal function, as well.  [5] The heuristic, or learning, function, is exemplified in the perennial questions ‘why?’ and ‘what’s that?’; the child finds that he can use talk to learn about and describe his world.  And talking serves [6] the imaginative function of pretend, which may overlap with an aesthetic function (although Halliday does not dwell on this possibility) as the child realizes that he can create images and pleasurable effects by talking.  Finally, the perhaps the latest use of talk to appear, is[7] the representational function, or talking to inform.  Adults, when they think about language, regard it as a means of expressing propositions or as a means of conveying information.  They view this as the primary function of talk, but it is hardly the dominant use for the child.”  (Catherine Garvey, Children’s Talk, 1984, emphasis added)

The linguist David Crystal has analyzed the functions of language in a different, emphasizing communicative effect, whatever the intention may be.

(1) expressing emotion

(2) expressing rapport

(3) expressing sound

(4) playing

(5) controlling reality

(6) recording [and preserving, I would add] facts

(7) expressing thought processes

(8) expressing identity

…he also situates the use of language in the context of technology.  Crystal is emphatic that one must keep oneself aware—when studying language itself, or even when thinking about it informally, as a lay person not a linguistic—of the diversity of language functions.  (This list is from his book How Language Works.)