Reviewed and added the following books to Erotic Poetry, Love & Passion • A review of Poets & Anthologies:
You will find them appended to the larger review linked above.
The Art of Haiku: Its History Through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters
I have to say, it’s been a long time since I’ve been so sorry to finish a book. I may have to read it again, starting today. If you enjoy haiku, then you can’t go wrong with this book. It’s beautiful. Addis gives the reader a necessarily adumbrated tour of Japan’s most influential Haijin (haiku poets). His overview is chronological and begins with the tanka. The tanka was a centuries older form of poetry, also brief, but five lines rather than two. The syllabic pattern (Lee Gurga refers to the Japanese syllable — an on — as a “sound” rather than syllable) was 5-7-5-7-7. It’s those first three “lines”, or that syllabic pattern, that was to eventually be transformed into the haiku.
As Addiss’s overview progresses, he offers brief biographies of the various poets along with samples of their best haiku — mostly just a small handful or even two to three. That’s enough, though, to give the Western reader a flavor, perhaps, of the many different poets who contributed to the haiku’s development.
It’s when Addiss gets to Basho, Buson and Issa that he slows and examines. These three poets comprise the lion’s share of the book; and what makes his discussion enjoyable is his attempt to explain their greatness. More often the poets are translated, presented and their greatness is presumed. The Western reader, unfamiliar with the haiku’s history may well be perplexed. What about a frog jumping into a pond is so special? Addiss tries to explain.
I do have some small gripes. The first is with his translations. Since I can’t read Japanese, I can’t say whether his translations are more or less accurate but I do know good poetry when I see it (and have other translations for comparison). By way of example, here are three different translations of one of Issa’s most famous haiku:
The snow has melted away —
A village-full
Of children.
Translated: Takafumi Sato and William R. Nelson
Snow melting —
the village is full
of children
Translated: Stephen Addiss from Haiku Landscapes: In Sun, Wind, Rain, and Snow
The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children
Translated: Robert Hass
snow melts
and the village is flooded
by children
Translated: PDF
Of all the translations, the last is the best. The translations by Addiss, Saito, and Nelson are possibly more faithful to the letter, but Hass’s translation turns the haiku into poetry (and the last translation accomplishes the same with fewer words). Why are the last two better? Because the verb flood, whether or not it was in the original, plays on the idea of the snow melt turning into children. The first two translations don’t even vaguely imply the same. It’s possible that in the original the implication is more strongly felt; but without the word flood, in the English translation, the haiku is reduced to nothing more than a banal observation: When snow melts, children come out to play. Flood turns that observation into poetry. I can’t say whether Addiss’s other translations suffer the same flaw, but it does make me wonder. My own subjective opinion is that literal translations of poetry aren’t always the best translations; and that sometimes the best translators of poetry are themselves poets. They translate the poetry rather than just the words.
My other small complaint is that Addiss’s overview of Issa’s poetry is rather perfunctory in comparison to Basho and Buson. Whereas Basho and Buson’s haiku are discussed in the context of their lives, Issa’s biography is quickly dispensed with. Addiss himself entitles his short biography: A Short Biography. He follows this with several pages of haiku, one grouping after another, with headings like Views of Nature, Issa and People, Animals, Frogs and Snails, Insects etc… That’s all well and fine, I suppose, but I don’t know why Addiss treated Issa differently than Basho or Buson (except, perhaps, that he favours Basho and Issa). One does get a sense of Issa’s originality, but I can’t see how this couldn’t have been accomplished with a richer biography.
My last observation would be that, to my knowledge, there’s no other book like Addiss’s. The only exception, perhaps, would be R.H. Blyth’s two volume A History of Haiku. These two books are much denser, consider far more poets and discuss culture and biography in a way that Addiss, writing a much briefer and arguably more accessible book, does not. Addiss also considers Japanese painting in the context of haiku, something Blyth does not. If you like haiku, or are interested in learning about them, and want a more general and readable overview of its history, I can’t think of a better book than Addiss’s. If Addiss’s book piques your interest, then move on to Blyth’s two volume set. After that, you will have to learn Japanese.
Reviewed and added the following books to Erotic Poetry, Love & Passion • A review of Poets & Anthologies:
You will find them appended to the larger review linked above.
A Review of Meanwell
Back in June I reviewed an Anthology of Vermont poets. Here’s one of the reasons I liked the anthology:
“[It is replete with]…the kinds of poems I like best: the poetry of the concrete, tactile, and sensual, poems joyfully aware (as I wrote at the outset) of season and place.”
I followed that up with a sampling of poetry by Janice Potter. About two weeks ago, Potter, a Vermont poet, sent me her recently published book “Meanwell” and asked if I would review it. In exchange, I asked if she would write up one of Anne Bradstreet’s poems. So you’re in for a treat. After the review, you can read what Potter wrote about Bradstreet’s poem, In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet Who Deceased June 20, 1669, Being Three Years and Seven Months Old.
Potter’s book, published in 2012, is called Meanwell and it’s like no other contemporary poetry I’ve read, though it’s not the first of its kind. The poems offer us a first-person narrative in the voice of Anne Bradstreet’s servant, Meanwell. Anne Bradstreet was the first woman to have her poetry published in (what was to become) the United States.
There are other contemporary books of poetry written as first-person narratives. The two that immediately come to mind are by our present Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard and Bellocq’s Ophelia. The former is written in the voice of a slave and the latter a New Orleans prostitute. They first came to my attention via a review by William Logan in 
his book Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue. I couldn’t be any less impressed by Trethewey unless I were William Logan. My problem with Trethewey is the prosaic dullness of her language, imagery and technique – utterly predictable stuff. Logan reads for content and pillories Tretheway on that count too. I mention it because Trethewey’s failings provide an instructive contrast to Potter’s successes. Here are two pertinent passages from Logan’s review of Native Guard:
There were literate slaves, all too few, and perhaps none among the lowly soldiers serving at the sandy, fly-ridden prison near Fort Massachusetts. (The major of the regiment, however, a slave-owning Creole, spoke five languages and was the highest-ranking officer in the Union Army.) To create a voice rendered mute by history, Trethewey has sometimes borrowed from a white colonel’s memoir to make do. Putting the words of an educated white into the mouth of a freed slave isn’t so bad; but, when Trethewey is forced to choose between the pretty and the profane, the pretty wins every time. She’s an aesthete in wolf’s clothing. (pp. 193-194)
A paragraph later Logan will write of Trethewey’s other book Bellocq’s Ophelia:
Trethewey wears her past like a diamond brooch. She writes of her parents with no fury or sympathy or even regret, just the blank courtesy of a barista at Starbucks. You read the tales of prostitution and slavery without feeling a thing — the slaves might as well be dressed by Edith Head, with a score by Max Steiner swelling gloriously over a Technicolor sunset.
Potter’s Meanwell is not the obsequious narrator one might expect. Potter’s narrator doesn’t pay 
tribute to Bradstreet. The poet, rather, is just another blurry shadow moving through the icy dogma of American puritanism and the leanness of its cruel and unforgiving winters. The Puritans were an intolerant and narrow-minded bunch (who would soon, and venally, shut down the greatest theatrical flowering since classical Greece). The English were all too happy to send the savages to the New World (and we still haven’t recovered). Meanwell’s attachment to Bradstreet is portrayed as a fact of her station (and nothing more). Meanwell never really expresses any affection for Bradstreet and is jealous of the poet’s privilege (inasmuch as a Puritan woman could be privileged) and her protective familial bonds.
…but whether my mother was a book or not
I have no knowledge
other than that I was always without parent…
and then, in the close of the same poem:
…and I did marvel on this well-beloved child
whose dear mother Dorothy
wrapped her with her cherished book in arms
while my vexed eyes one blue and one brown
did cloud with desire
to seize her soft nest once sickness was done
Meanwell’s narrative will not be like the “blank courtesy of a barista at Starbucks”. In fact, by the end of the book, one really wonders whether there’s any affection at all.
…odd cloaked as a muse she tends her wilderness
mansion filled with English chests and tables
and ancestral portraits and eight-hundred books
all of an Englishness I am meant to polish well
and preserve for those whose kind benevolence
allows me to grow old in service to this house
and I do polish and scrub here for twenty years
as she grows to love her nest feathered with things
that make her heart glad her husband her children
her writings on stashes of paper her vast hearth
her great baskets of carded sheep’s wool that catch
the house afire when a servant drops a lit candle.
To this reader, at least, it’s hard not to read Meanwell’s commentary on Bradstreet, her Englishness, her “things”, and her “kind benevolence”, as dripping with bitterness and contempt. Which servant was it, I wonder, who (accidentally?) dripped the lit candle in the basket of carded wool? Was it Meanwell? Whether or not that was Potter’s intention, I’m left wondering whether this poem, A Servant Drops a Lit Candle, was Meanwell’s Iago-like confession. She will later say:
[I am] bound to serve it
this dread-hell she [Bradstreet] suffered when on earthy
am I bound to serve what I hate
While only just before, in the same poem, saying:
weary weary that a man must look upon
servants doing what once was
the work of his wife in her constancy
and afterwards sleep alone
who will serve him and obey him
down to the smallest kiss of his most
unspeakable manly part…
How are we to read this? Is it pity, compassion, contempt, gloating? And how are we to read the sexual content of Meanwell’s observation. Earlier in the book, Meanwell acknowledges the memory and pleasure of a former lover’s body “covering mine”. She can “watch a seaman’s firm buttocks rise on the mizzen” and doesn’t miss it when a seaman catches a skimpy maid “coarse-handed by the arse”. The way I read these lines is that she imagines taking Anne Bradstreet’s place. She imagines kissing “his most unspeakable manly part”, that is, symbolically submitting to the master of the life-style she has and continues to covet (or thinks she does). Perhaps the notion is fleeting, but I think it’s revealing. To deny the desire for a thing is to admit the thing’s desirability. We don’t talk about things that we don’t notice.
And this is the curious and most enjoyable facet of this book. None of the characters are likable and, in truth, (and from a twenty-first century perspective) none of them probably were likable. Even Anne Hutchinson, who was tried for loudly condemning a vindictive Puritan patriarchy, comes off as gratuitously combative when she states in Potter’s words: “it came to me by direct revelation”. Here is what Hutchinson, according to sources at the time, actually said:
“You have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm—for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah, my Saviour, I am at his appointment, the bounds of my habitation are cast in heaven, no further do I esteem of any mortal man than creatures in his hand, I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold me of these things, and I do verily believe that he will deliver me out of our hands. Therefore take heed how you proceed against me—for I know that, for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity and this whole state”
This sounds like a woman in the throes of a self-destructive delirium (and Hutchinson had good reason to be delirious given the hell she was put through). Meanwell idolizes Hutchinson (rather than Bradstreet) but is too cowed and has too much to lose to cheer Hutchinson on.
Hutchinson and her family, a number of her children included, were to be brutally murdered by the Siwanoy of New Netherland (in and around present day Bronx and New York City). Her children, including the youngest, were scalped and beheaded, then incinerated in their own house. The Siwanoy chief, Wampage, had forewarned the settlers. Whether because she felt a false sense of security or because of the same courage (or stubbornness) that characterized her dealings with the Puritan ministers, she foolishly stayed behind. To commemorate his courage and bravery in slaughtering an exhausted middle-aged woman and her children, the Siwanoy chief adopted Anne’s name, becoming known as Ann Hoeck alias Wampage.
The various ministers, who had excommunicated Hutchinson, also “celebrated” Hutchinson’s murder by treating it as a sign that God agreed with them and had undoubtedly lent a divine hand to the gruesome and just slaughter of Hutchinson and her children.
Not Faithful But True
Bradstreet was born, 1612, when Elizabethan poetry and theater were at the pinnacle of their glory. At the hands of Shakespeare, Jonson, and the deceased Marlowe, blank verse had matched and exceeded the accomplishments of the classical Greek and Roman poets. John Donne was inspiring a whole generation of metaphysical poets. Though somewhat more constrained in subject matter, women were also among the poets being celebrated, admired and published — Mary Sidney being the foremost example, though there were others (see the comment section in my post on Bradstreet). For all that, Bradstreet’s verse doesn’t inherit the brilliance of the times. Her Iambic Pentameter is as conservative as her religion, stuck in the 1590′s, and she never tries the sonnet or imitates the brilliant lyrics of Donne.
Bradstreet’s only mention of a near English contemporary is in her poem: An Elegy Upon That Honorable and Renowned Knight Sir Philip Sidney, Who Was Untimely Slain at the Siege of Zutphen, Anno 1586. She references Arcadia, a prose work, but also describes him as “the brave refiner of our British tongue…” This makes me think that Bradstreet must have been familiar with Sidney’s poetry (and some of it very erotic). Bradstreet writes that “[Sidney in his] wiser days condemned his [own] witty works”; but that many “infatuate fools” were caught in the “gin” [the snare] of “his rhetoric”. In the most revealing moment of all, she writes that, nevertheless, “a world of wealth within that rubbish [lies]“: “learning, valour and morality,/Justice, friendship, and kind hospitality, /Yea, and divinity within his book…”
Bradstreet reveals that she was exposed to the erotic wit of the Elizabethan era, but also reveals her own tastes and what she values. She was a Puritan, first and foremost, by choice. How much was Bradstreet exposed to during the early 1600′s? Donne was circulating his poetry privately and among his peers. It’s possible but unlikely that Bradstreet’s father (let alone Anne) would have been in that circle of readers. Most of his poetry, on top of that, was considered erotic. Donne would die in 1631, a year after Bradstreet arrived in America. Neither Shakespeare nor Jonson’s plays were published in Folio form. It’s highly unlikely that Bradstreet’s Puritan family would have attended the theaters (which the Puritans would later shut down in a fit of self-righteous probity). It’s also very unlikely that her family would have read any of Shakespeare’s published works, like Venus & Adonis or the sonnets, which were considered erotica by just about everyone. Marlowe, likewise, translated Ovid’s erotica. The theater was considered the den of iniquity. What did that leave? Pious and dull verses by pinch-lipped religious men and, especially, women. Women were encouraged to translate or write pious verse. As Christina Rosetti would demonstrate a couple hundred years later, some women need no encouragement to dip their quills in the venomous ink of self-righteous rectitude. It wasn’t all men making them do this. There was also Du Bartas, who Bradstreet read and eulogized, the French poet and Hugeonot famed for his religious epic poetry (which had been translated into English).
The older verse of the 80′s and 90′s along with translated religious verse (always more conservative) is probably what Bradstreet read and used as a model. It’s a miracle that she later wrote the kinds of poems she did. They start out bland and pious, but at some point she seems to have drained that cup. She begins to write about her life, her husband and her children.
So, with all that as a background, I was interested to see how Potter would “write” Meanwell. What would she imitate? Would she imitate the language, the verse forms of the era, Bradstreet? The questions are fraught with pitfalls. Should a modern poet avoid anachronistic verse and language, or dive into it, producing not only the voice of the period, but its literature? If so, to what degree? Should an illiterate servant be reciting her narrative in brilliant metaphysical rhymes and Shakespearean sonnets? Logan’s issue with Trethewey, after all, isn’t that she put the words of a white slave owner into a slave, but that she did so with a bias for the pretty (rather than profane). Potter, I think, avoids that pitfall. Meanwell describes the facts of life, sickness and death with a brutal factuality 
that I found believable and true. In an era that had seen the plague, saw executed prisoners hang until they rotted from the rope, and the amputated hands and legs of traitors nailed to the walls of the Thames.
We, today, would have been horrified. In Meanwell’s world, that’s just the way it is. Get used to it. Get over it.
Heaving and setting with such force that the ocean might spill
from off God’s earth makes it a great wonder
to behold our sister ship the painted Jewel
for we need her midwife most urgently to disencumber
a good-wife retching under her bloody cloak on the shit-slick boards
where fearful ladies huddle under the hatches from the storm
though I mean well I cannot bear to look on her
small head where a twist of hen-scrapings might be her face
for she appears not a creature of a human nature
rather then entrails of an animal gouged alive from its earthly form
the shrieks swelling over its foul-smelling mire…
~ The Death of the Lewd Seaman Attends a Sea-Born Child
The quality of Potter’s poetry that impressed me in Birchsong, it’s concreteness of imagery — tangy, evocative and fresh — continues in Meanwell, and is the quality that saves her free verse from the generic dullness of her peers. I tried to discern whether any of her poems were in any sense formal — if there was any accentual, syllabic or accentual-syllabic verse. If there was, I have missed it. There was no rhyme but for the occasional off-rhyme (so unpredictable and occasional as to feel accidental rather than deliberate). I confess a little disappointment in this regard, but only a little. It probably wouldn’t have been appropriate. Her poems do resemble, in their shape and rhetorical compactness, the flavor of 17th century verse.
As it is, Potter does dress her verse with the kind of extended metaphors and poetic personifications we’d fully expect from poets of the era:
Ruined as I am the sea makes no mind
as it leaps and licks higher by the moment
with the icy winds that hound us
like dogs baring long teeth at our bellies
and where is our God I wonder
who would seem to punish the revolt
of dour Puritan men against the prelates
with slanderous blows of the great water…
…as if a servant might possess a low power
to save souls from the monstrous jaws
of the watery beast that wing-spread doth
rise and bend over our whole company…
As the rough sea licks out bitten skin with salt tongue…
…and a great whale drifted along our side spouting water
as if it were God’s leviathan sleepily smoking his pipe at twilight…
Potter really seems to let her hair down when describing the animalistic gyrations of the ocean. I can’t help thinking she revels in the excuse to use the extended metaphors, auxiliary do forms, grammatical inversions, and personifications that contemporary poets, otherwise, wouldn’t dare use lest they sully their unassailable reputation for the boring. It’s in Potter’s use of language and imagery, rather than meter or rhyme, that she reminds us we’re in the 1600′s. That’s okay. I think it works and I think she manages the effect beautifully, not too much and not too little. Admittedly, it’s highly unlikely that a Jacobean servant would have narrated her life with such trenchant imagery or in such a poetic voice, but at some point one must grant that art’s job isn’t to be faithful but to be true.
Other than that, the reader will notice that poems aren’t punctuated. I’m not sure why Potter chose this affect, but I can theorize. One reason may be that she wanted to suggest Meanwell’s lack of education, that she’s not “booked”. Meanwell’s monologues plow from one thought to the next the way, perhaps, such an uneducated woman would speak. Another reason might be that Potter wants to make the reading a little more difficult, as if to suggest a different period of time and way of talking. Another is that Potter simply prefers to write that way. Some readers will be put off by this. I wasn’t.
When Meanwell is finally free to live her own life, the verse follows suite. The lines no longer imitate, in appearance, the blank verse or stanzas of the 1600′s, but the open and unstructured free verse of contemporary poetry.
Westward
In the back matter of the book, we’re told the following:
“Through Meanwell, the feelings of women, silecned during the midwife Anne Hutchinson’s fiery trial before the Puritan ministers, are finally acknowledged. In effect, the poems are about the making of an American rebel. Through her conflicted conscience, we witness Meanwell’s transformation from a powerless English waif to a mythic American who ultimately chooses wilderness over the civilization she has experienced.”
My own reading of Meanwell isn’t quite so pat, and that’s a good thing. There are no heroes in the book, least of all Meanwell, and that reminds me a little of Robert Frost and the characters in North of Boston. There’s a meanness and pettiness to Meanwell that makes her appealing and human. How could she be otherwise? In the poem Two Annes Have I served Half-Faithfully, Meanwell tells us something that Bradstreet Hutchinson has said.
once I heard her proclaim
that to be a woman was to be
blessed
that to be a woman was to possess mastery
of one’s own
body········one’s own
········mind
Jan, 25 2013 ~ Note: When I originally wrote the review, I incorrectly remembered that the above lines were spoken by Bradstreet. Potter sent me an E-Mail to correct me. She wrote:
“But I should point out one minor but intriguing misreading. I confess that I like your misreading because it opens a fascinating view down the road not taken. It is actually Anne Hutchinson who says (and did say in real life) that to be a woman is to be blessed. It’s part of her feminism, of course, and another reason why she so enraged the ministers. But–what if Bradstreet had said it? What a delicious irony!”
And that led me on a very interesting diversion. Did Bradstreet never once refer to her identity as a woman? So I got out my copy of Bradstreet’s writings and searched through them. The closest Bradstreet comes to referencing her own identity as any thing other than a Christian, first and foremost, or “soul”, is in her short prose autobiography To My Dear Children. She writes:
It pleased God to keep me a long time without a child, which was a great grief to me and cost me many prayers and tears before I obtained one, and after him gave me many more of whom I now take the care, that as I have brought you into the world. and with great pains, weakness, cares, and fears brought you to this, I now travail in birth again of you till Christ be formed in you. [The Works of Anne Bradstreet: Edited by Jaennine Hensley p. 241]
But for these brief words — “I now travail in birth again” — we might imagine a father writing this. That Bradstreet has so subsumed and suppressed (if that’s the right word) her own identity as anything other than a Christian whose identity exists only in reference to her husband and patriarchal faith, makes her contrast with Hutchinson all the more striking. It’s tempting to say that Bradstreet’s sensibility would be utterly foreign to a modern and secular woman. I’m not so sure. Meanwell, from this perspective, not only straddles two different paradigms of womanhood in her own day (with an ear to both and drawn to both worlds) but also, perhaps, speaks to modern women who, though now firmly in Hutchinson’s world, are nevertheless compelled, in some small way, by the perceived safety and certitude of a “traditional” woman’s role. Does a woman seek the solace and approval of children, family and faith, or does she risk independence, potential isolation and disapproval (excommunication). Anne Hutchinson’s isolation led to her murder and was understood by men( and probably women too) as a just warning to any woman desiring to reject the patriarchal roles assigned to her.
All that being said, I still wonder that Hutchinson’s words didn’t put it in Meanwell’s mind to burn a house down — she who had never possessed mastery of her own body — her fate.
Jan 27, 2013 Potter, via E-Mail, brought to my attention another passage in which Bradstreet briefly describes her position as a woman writing poetry:
“I like her poem, “Prologue,” for her musings on what she faces as a woman-writer. I feel her taking a deep breath, and then diving into the wreck. Especially pointed is part 5:
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.
Nevertheless, by the end of the poem, she bows once more to male superiority. (I think she was politically astute.) The only public acknowledgement of herself as poet that she claims to seek is a modest wreath of thyme or parsley, rather than the bay wreath, or laurels of famous men. But she clearly wants some credit, and she wants it as a woman.”
The only observation I would add is that Bradstreet reveals some ambition, in addition to wanting credit. My own feeling is that she shows some awareness and pride in her own talent and is excited to write poetry. The passage also reveals the kind of thing she must have heard from men and women. Mainly, they didn’t believe women were capable of accomplished poetry, dismissed their efforts or accused them of plagiary or dumb luck. Elizabeth Cary, another female poet and contemporary of Anne Bradstreet, was most forcefully discouraged from poetry by her own mother (who didn’t approve of Elizabeth’s “devotion to books”. We can’t necessarily conclude that the “carping tongue/Who says my hand a needle better fits” was solely the tongue of men. Nevertheless, what the passage does tell us is the difficulties and discouragements Bradstreet must have confronted and how lucky she was to have had (what must have been) a supportive husband and children – something Meanwell sorely envied.
Meanwell desired the outward privileges, as she saw it, of Bradstreet’s world, but did she ever fully comprehend it? I think it’s only when Meanwell is finally freed from servitude, in my reading, that she reveals something like admiration and compassion for Bradstreet and only then begins her search for her own identity and meaning.
…what a fool I was
to believe········to believe
rhymes with Eve so what if those
ministers may be right
no I believe········with two Annes
it is blessed to be
woman
My feeling is that this book is a keeper and well worth reading. The poetry is some of the best around and Potter’s trenchant, concrete imagery is perfectly suited to evoking the hard and cruel landscape of the old world in the new. There are other moments and nice details I haven’t mentioned, but you will have to read the book. My advice is to buy this book and buy Bradstreet’s poetry with it. The two go together beautifully.
Reviewed and added the following books to Erotic Poetry, Love & Passion • A review of Poets & Anthologies:
You will find them appended to the larger review linked above.
❧
Reviewed and added the following books to Erotic Poetry, Love & Passion • A review of Poets & Anthologies:
You will find them appended to the larger review linked above.
A Review of Birchsong
And the excuse it gives me to digress on anthimeria, the difficulty of accentual-syllabic verse, Animism, Mary Oliver, etc…
Here’s the book that’s been burning a hole in my conscience. This was forwarded to me in April. I promised to review the book and right about that time I was swamped with work. The book is Birchsong Poetry Centered in Vermont, edited by Alice Wolf Gilborn, Rob Hunter, Carol Cone, Brenda Nicholson, Monica Stillman. If you’re wondering whether there are more editors than authors, there are not. The book is an anthology of fifty-six contemporary poets “intimately acquainted with Vermont”. I’m not one of them. I don’t normally like anthologies, but this is a book to which I would have submitted poetry.
Whether because of the editors’ tastes or because poets in Vermont are more predisposed to draw on the natural world, readers familiar with New England (and the world evoked by Robert Frost) will recognize the landscape and certainly be reminded of the poet. A sense of season and place is strongly evoked in nearly all the poems. Maybe it reflects my own predilection, but I prefer the earthbound imagery of these poets to the more discursive abstractions typical of many (if not most) contemporary poems.
The very first poem, Ah, Spring, by Pamela Ahlen, lets the reader know what they’re in for. They’ll be muddy knee’d, caught in the rain, and end up with a thorn in the thumb. These poems are all about a state where the total population isn’t even half the nearest city.
sweet meadow pranked with green
the red-winged blackbird
yessing a sweet potato sky.
But Mama Nature’s playing
two-stick tricks, paradiddle
pandemonium all shake, rattle
and rain, all flash-frozen roof.
Sweet Mama’s come undone,
her arctic face unsheathed…
What do I like about this poem? What can you learn from it? First off, she uses my favorite poetic technique, anthimeria, to turn ‘yes’, normally a noun, into a verb: “the red-winged blackbird yessing a sweet potato sky.” Historically, especially during the Elizabethan era, the poem was a chance for the poet to show off his ingenuity with language. The coinage of new words and phrases was a point of pride. That original burst of linguistic ingenuity flavored poems for the next 300 years. If new words or phrases weren’t being coined, the poem was nevertheless understood as intrinsically different from prose precisely because its brevity and concentration all but demanded linguistic and metaphoric ingenuity. If not that, then how was the poem justified? So, even though Keats (and later Frost) were no longer coining new phrases and latinisms, they both took great pride in the linguistic ingenuity of their meter and rhyme.
That’s something utterly missing in the vast majority of contemporary poems (which really do little, in terms of language, to justify their existence as anything other than a minor species of prose). So, when I see the kind of linguistic play and inventiveness demonstrated by Ahlen, I enjoy and admire it. I hold it up to the light like a new-stamped coin, all shiny and golden. It’s for poems like these that I write and read poetry.
I also like wildflowers; and Ahlen, in her other two poems, revels in them. I would write more but there are fifty-six poets in this book and 50 of them are liable to wonder why I didn’t mention them. I honestly think there’s something in all their poems worth recommending.
Another enjoyable technique you will find in these poems is an inventive use of imagery. Neil Shepard closes his poem, The Source, with a nice example:
Down at the bottom of the pasture
Where birches bend under all this
White weight, the swamp begins.
And nothing but willows grow
In the boggy hummocks, iced up now,
Their roots lifted up
As if trying to take a first, slow step
Out of the rime and ooze.
To me, it’s those last three lines that ring with the magic of poetry. The poet transforms the land, not just by telling us what he sees, but by going just a little further than Pound’s call for the “direct treatment of the ‘thing’.” Animism is probably the oldest religion in the world – the doctrine that all natural objects and the universe itself have souls. It’s my opinion that the best and greatest poets are all animists. Everyone to an extent, I think, imbues the landscape with their inner emotional lives. When we’re in a bleak mood, the fields look desolate and the woods look dark. When we’re upbeat, the grass is green and forest is light.
Poets go a little further, the best being able to capture our inner lives in the natural world:
From Robert Frost’s Bereft:
“Leaves got up in a coil and hissed
Blindly struck at my knee and missed”
From EA Robinson’s Sonnet The Sheaves:
“A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,
Shining and still, but not for long to stay —
As if a thousand girls with golden hair
Might rise from where they slept and go away.”
TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky|
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Neil Shepard’s poem and imagery is written in that tradition. He possesses the poet’s ability to transform what he sees, to imbue it with his own inner emotional landscape, and write it. And although I think Dianalee Velie’s poem, Maple, could stand to be a little subtler, I still appreciate the lovely metaphor at the heart of the poem.
…now the big maple is down
The six sap buckets, once
clinging to her like children,
brimming with her collected
nectar, lay orphaned
in the sugar-lot…
This is a kind of extended metaphor that I see all too little in modern poetry – it doesn’t always work and may seemed forced, but I admire the poet (the poet-animist) who tries. After all, the extended metaphor is at the heart of nearly every great poem prior and into the 20th century.
Although I didn’t pointedly scour each and every poem, all but two of them appear to be free verse. I find that to be a disappointment, but the quality of the verse holds up in other ways. There are some poems that appear to be syllabic, meaning that each line keeps to the same number of syllables, but I’ve never been persuaded by that kind of “formalism”. Syllabics is to accentual-syllabics what staying off the sidewalk’s cracks is to tight-rope walking. It’s a whole different game. When the poet misses a step, the fall goes further and the landing is harder.
Jean L. Kreiling gives the reader a Shakespearean Sonnet and does it with the skill of a poet who knows what she’s doing.
Wishing for Snow
If only winter’s knife-edged cold would bend
and break and finally disintegrate
in tiny crystal fragments, we’d defend
our driveways, and our walks, and celebrate
our strength. If only this unyielding sky
would soften and dissolve into a mist
of icy flakes, we’d raise an awestruck eye
to watch their fall. But winter likes to twist
the knife, to maximize its penetration
and coolly signal its supremacy…
I have my complaints. For instance, the adjective unyielding is metrical padding and unnecessary given that the same idea is implied by the poet’s plea that the sky “soften and dissolve”. The phrase “we’d raise an awestruck eye” also feels contrived, in a 19th century sort of way – something for the sake of the meter and rhyme. These are the challenges that make rhyming accentual-syllabic verse a walk on a tight-rope; they’re obstacles that free verse poets just don’t confront.
However, there’s praise for Kreiling too. This is a poet who thinks beyond the line. The majority of the lines are enjambed and that gives the poem flexibility and momentum. There’s nothing wooden about this verse. Some close readers might even suggest that the shifting and moving lines are trying to invoke the wind-blown weather that the poem pleas for. I would hesitate to make that interpretation without reading more of Kreiling’s poems.
Kreiling’s next poem, To a Hummingbird, also written in Iambic Pentameter, is near perfect:
…Please teach me how to hover weightlessly,
exquisitely escaping gravity,
and how to reach the speed of shimmering
and shapelessness, so that my movements sing…
My only complaint are the short lines that begin and end the poem: the first line: Oh, blur of bird!; and the last: with pleasures blurred. The exclamation, Oh, strikes me as a bit precious and quaint these days, while the grammatical inversion of the last line (as though solely for the sake of rhyme) feels old fashioned. They feel out of place, to me, given how Kreiling otherwise so beautifully unites a modern vernacular with meter and rhyme – no easy task.
Anyway, these are some the things I think about when I read poetry.
Not all the poems are specifically about Vermont. I assume that some poets are represented because they live in Vermont. Regina Murray Brault gives us a nice little poem that could have been written anywhere. It begins:
In the trailer park
where diapers snap on clotheslines
like flags in semaphore
the child cradled in my arms
lies swaddled in
the rhythms of her world.
She hears a thrust song
from the thicket
and searches with her eyes.
Bird I tell her
and wish her wings…
The tone veers uncomfortably close to mawkishness, but I like the little touches of imagery – the diapers snapping like “flags in semaphore”. And this gives me an opportunity to fire off a shot at William Logan (who’s acumen I worship near idolatry). God knows what Logan would say about some, if not many, of the passages in this anthology. His critique might echo his criticism of Mary Oliver – a “bland, consolatory poetry [that] is a favorite of people who don’t like poetry”. But what Logan criticizes in a poet like Oliver is analogous to what critics have said of Vivaldi. (You readers who listen to Jazz or modern music will have to 
substitute your own analogy.) Stravinsky once quipped that Vivaldi was the only composer to have written the same concerto over a thousand times. And, in a sense, if you’ve listened to one concerto by Vivaldi, you’ve heard them all. The emotional range from one to the next is as varied as the yellow in dandelions. It was said that Vivaldi could write an entire concerto faster than his copyists could copy them. His trademark was the sequence (or sequencing). This is when a musical phrase is repeated again and again (essentially) up the scale and down the scale.
But, know what? – no composer, before or after, could do sequencing the way Vivaldi could. As another critic once wrote (paraphrasing): It’s true that Vivaldi’s music might be one sequence after another, but they’re good sequences. Similarly, it’s true that a Mary Oliver poem might be the same one written a thousand times, but what’s good in one is good in another. Here’s what I mean: all of Oliver’s poems, I’ve noticed, are really composed of two very simple types of metaphor – the simile and the prepositional metaphor. (As with the sequence in music, the prepositional metaphor “is the quickest and easiest kind of metaphor to construct” [The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms, p. 181].
Here is the simile (from Their Wings) [italics are mine]:
In summer the bats
fly like dots and dashes…
Here is the prepositional metaphor (from the same poem):
I carried it off into the woods and laid it
in a mossy place, in an old stump, where it died
heart-thumping and hissing
in the slump of its wings…
What the sequence was to Vivaldi, the prepositional metaphor is to Mary Oliver. I think that Logan misses this when he is befuddled by Oliver’s popularity. Yes, Oliver has written the same poem a thousand times and, yes, they are full of the formulaic structure that defines the simile and the propositional metaphor, but they are good similes and they are good prepositional metaphors. They are the stuff of poetry; and if readers don’t read Oliver for her intellectual rigor or depth, reading her for her poetry is every bit as good a reason (and something Logan could stand to learn from in his own poetry). Contrary to Logan’s snarky dismissal, the readers who read Oliver are precisely those who like poetry. There’s something to enjoy in her lines that is missing from, as far as I know, almost every other modern poet. There’s a reason why she can make a living writing poetry and Logan can’t, except by criticizing it. Basta,
If you read Birchsong, you will find some of this same poetry:
Jack Gundy, Spring Harvest:
Their voices marry
with the thin blood of trees
boiling down
to sweet liquid amber.
Arlene Distler, The Case Against Mums:
I prefer autumn’s tawdry mix
of unkempt rows,
sunflower’s swollen prose,
stripped-down lily’s
arcs of green
turned shadowy wisps…
Partridge Boswell, Just I Remember I Knew You When:
…Could he hear his own
lightly dredged laughter at parties, cynical
lemon twist of luck he wished a recent graduate
brace enough to admit she was trying her uncalloused
hand at short fiction? Could he taste the gelignite
of early fame rising in the back of his throat…
Ivy Schweitzer, Snow Day, February 14,
They come, then, smoldering
orange petals with blazing yellow
throats, pitch black at the center,
erect three lobbed stigma
ringed by six slender stamen,
their anthers dusty with pollen and curved daintily outward,
splayed cups of exultation
penned in for their own protection.
Naturally, readers will find some examples better or worse than others, but this all stuff of which poetry is made.
However, having written this much, here is what I like most about the poetry in this anthology – and the kinds of poems I like best: the poetry of the concrete, tactile, and sensual, poems joyfully aware (as I wrote at the outset) of season and place. Here is the close to Janice Miller Potter’s poem Potato Paradise:
One evening, then, when burnt yellow vines
had fallen in tangles upon the ground,
you pulled the fork from where it stood
like a scarecrow among the corn,
and called me to come and to share –
you could not harvest this work alone.
Mapping a circle around a stem,
you plunged sharp tines into the earth
and gently parted its fragrant threads.
Where one potato eye had lain,
now lay a multitude of dusky forms.
So on we fared – with fork and with hands,
exclaiming at our row of new potatoes.
From slivers, I sang the miracle of girth.
But you, with your tenderness for lesser gods,
bade me to gather in the small ones, too.
If this kind of poetry is to your liking as well, then you will find more like it in Birchsong. As the subtitle states, these poems are Poetry Centered in Vermont. If you live in Vermont, then reading this anthology will be like an afternoon talk with your neighbors about familiar things; and if you used to live in Vermont, then the poems will feel like a visit to a familiar place with its cold winters, short summers and the ever present presence of nature:
Harvest Time by Kimberly Ward
Red moon this morning.
I am walking barefoot
in puddles and find
the hogs have been killed
uphill.
In terms of the book itself, the poems are beautifully presented, a poem to a page, readable and accompanied by the occasional artwork of Betsy B. Hubner. The height and width of the book is generous, meaning that the poems don’t feel cramped. There are a 112 pages and brief biographies of all the contributing poets is included in the final pages. Enjoy.
Published by:
Free Verse: an essay on Prosody by Carles O. Hartman
March 9, 2012
First Things First: What is Prosody?
I remember, way back when, I knew a poet who favored free verse. As his writing developed, he struggled with a question that confronts many writers of free verse. Where does the poet break his or her lines? You can find this same question frequently posed on the internet. In traditional poetry, the line ends where the 
iambic pentameter ends, basta; but, as far as my friend knew, there was no such rule pertaining to line lengths in free verse. Me friend declared that he was going to systematize lineation in free verse. I never heard back from him. What he was really saying was that he wanted to develop a Prosody, one that he and his readers could mutually understand.
So, when I discovered Hartman’s book, I was excited. Here was a book that tried to answer the question: Is there a prosody of free verse and, if so, what is it?
The definition of prosody (or at least the one with which this book is concerned) is as follows: A system of versification. This is problematic when applied to free verse. What this means (and what Hartman must argue) is that free verse isn’t free, but is a systematic form as rigorous as traditional verse. He must argue that once a reader understands that prosody, he can apply that knowledge to any free verse poem in the same way that a reader of traditional poetry applies the prosody of meter and rhyme to her reading of traditional poetry. Take Shakespeare’s famous line, To be or not to be, that is the question, as an example. If we read the line according to the prosody of traditional poetry, the verb is receives the stress, rather than that. That is, knowing the rules of meter, the line reads: To be or not to be, that is the question. We can assert the likelihood of this reading because the prosody of meter (and blank verse in particular) suggests it.
The first thing Hartman had to do, given that he’s writing a book on the prosody of free verse, is to re-define the word free. Clearly, if something is free, implying in this case that it lacks form (is not formal) then there can’t be, by definition, a prosody. One can’t go writing a book on the form of free verse when the free in free verse is understood as implying a lack of form! Prosody implies a regular and recognizable system that is applicable to all poems (and that is more than a niggling problem for Hartman). He wastes no time explaining what we really mean by free in free verse (or prosody for that matter). First he defines prosody:
The prosody of a poem is the poet’s method of controlling the reader’s temporal experience of the poem, especially his attention to that experience. But how can the poet control the reader’s experience? How does the reader know what to pay attention to, among the many linguistic events the poem comprises? The prosody, to function as a prosody, must be shared. [p. 13]
The italics are the author’s. The underlining is mine. While Hartman emphasizes the intentions of the author with italics (which will be extremely important to his later arguments) the thing that makes prosody, well, a Prosody, is that it “must be shared” – a contrivance understood by both reader and writer. The poet can tell himself that he is controlling the “reader’s temporal experience” until the moon grows grass, but unless the poet’s methods are understood by the reader (unless it is shared) he might as well be writing letters to his dog.
The difference between Poetry & Prose
Anybody who follows my blog knows my opinion on free verse. I do think it’s much easier to write than traditional verse (which has led to its near total dominance), but that doesn’t mean free verse can’t be written with a greatness equal to traditional verse. The qualities of greatness are the same whether the poem is free verse or traditional. That said, traditional verse offers the poet effects that free verse doesn’t and never will. And so begins my many disagreement with Hartman.
At the outset, Hartman states what I have stated many times:
“…it has often been shown that any mode of organization found in any poem (except lineation) will also occur in some passages of prose – usually many, though rhyme, for instance, had a short and relatively disastrous career in English prose.”
The problem is that Hartman means this to include traditional verse, which I don’t. As Hartman himself states (curiously) rhyme’s appearance in prose was “short and relatively disastrous” (meaning that it didn’t work). That’s because internal rhyme isn’t the same as end rhyme. In other words, one can’t separate end rhyme (as it is practiced in the traditional poem) from lineation. And the combination of end rhyme, combined with meter, is also not the same as end-rhyme alone (and is not something that appears in prose). My point is that there is a continuum. As regards free verse, Hartman’s statement holds water. The only feature that separates free verse from prose is lineation. As regards traditional verse, Hartman’s statement doesn’t (as he himself unintentionally admits). Traditional verse adds extra layers to lineation. The metrical line and end-rhyme don’t and have never appeared in prose. For example, regular metrical feet may appear in prose, but a regular metrical line never has and never will.
It’s a curious facet of Hartman’s dialectic that he eagerly (and rightly I think) emphasizes the importance of lineation in free verse, but consistently downplays or fails to recognize the compounding effect of lineation when combined with meter and rhyme. He can’t have it both ways (though he tries) and that’s part of the problem. Hartman wants to establish a prosody of free verse that is equal to traditional verse. That’s a mistake. He can’t do so without altogether disregarding the compounding effect of meter and end-rhyme.
He knows that. It’s the only direction his thesis can take him. That’s why, at the end of chapter three, he triumphantly announces that “what rhyme and meter can do, lineation alone can also do”. We’ll return to that. Yes, we will. By the time Hartman makes this pronouncement, a fairly simple word like rhythm has been turned inside out and upside down and many a reader (to judge by other reviews) becomes lost in the maze of his baroque re-definitions.
Of Rabbit Holes and Rhythm
Unfortunately for Hartman, the one word he fails to accurately define is rhythm. I’ve had this discussion elsewhere (on this blog) with readers who style themselves defenders or proponents of free verse. Most of us use rhythm in a literal and a figurative sense – but mixing these two uses in a book which professes to establish a prosody (and which takes great care to carefully define words like free and prosody) is a considerable oversight that undercuts the entire argument.
We regularly refer to random events or objects as having a rhythm. We can watch the wind on a wheat field and describe the rhythms of the wind – but these are random events. They’re not rhythmic. The human brain, as science has amply demonstrated, is designed, by default, to find rhythm and pattern where none exist. This is important because we also commonly refer to the rhythms of language when, in reality, we’re describing not the rhythms, but the arrhythmia of language. Likewise, listeners and poets will frequently refer to the rhythm of this or that free verse poem when what they’re really describing is the arryhthmia of the poem’s language (which isn’t to say that a free verse poet isn’t making conscious choices — only that the choices result in an irregularity that is unique to the poem).
Strictly speaking, arrhythmia is a medical term, but in this context it’s useful. Here’s how it’s defined by the Farlex Free Dictionary:
The most useful meaning for our purpose is the idea that language is “irregular in beat” (though different languages are obviously irregular in unique ways). Language has no rhythm (in the literal sense of the word) because the rhythm of any given language isn’t regular. However, each language has a unique rhythm in the figurative sense if we understand that to mean arrhythmical — uniquely irregular. Rhythm, on the other hand, means something regular, recurring, having a beat or pattern: “of, relating to, or characterized by rhythm, as in movement or sound; metrical, periodic, or regularly recurring“. Wikipedia makes the link between rhythm and pattern explicit:
Rhythm (from Greek ῥυθμός—rhythmos, “any regular recurring motion, symmetry“[1]) may be generally defined as a “movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions.”[2] This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or frequency of anything from microseconds to millions of years. [March 3rd, 2012]
So, when readers, and Hartman himself, refers to a free verse poem as having a rhythm, he’s using the term incorrectly. If a free verse poem has a “regularly, periodic and recurring pattern,” then it’s not free verse. As I’ve written many times before, if the verse isn’t free, then it’s not free verse (unless we change the definition of free).
Hartman’s failure to adequately define rhythm (or his misunderstanding of the word) sets him on the wrong course from the get-go.
What I have already said about the temporality of poems suggests that prosodic organization is rhythmic. Rhythm, in poetry, is the temporal distribution of the elements of language. According to this definition, all language unavoidably has rhythm. [p. 14]
The italics are Hartman’s. Temporal means “of or relating to or limited by time”, but not necessarily recurring or periodic. This is a nice dodge. Hartman himself realizes that this definition won’t do, but he fails, utterly, to acknowledge the importance of “pattern” to rhythm because he doesn’t want to. To do so would be to undercut his dependence on the word rhythm as it describes free verse later in the book. Instead he offers up an object lesson in tortured, baroque avoidance that leaves him right where he started. (Remember, he refuses to use or acknowledge the word pattern or recurrence.) He settles on the neutral word: organization. (You might object that he includes the word rhythmic in his definition, but remember that he’s just defined “rhythm in poetry” not as recurring or regular but as temporal.
This suggests a form of my definition of prosody that approximates and includes the traditional one: It is the system of rhythmic organization that governs the construction and reading of a poem. [ibid]
Now that he’s settled on the generic organization, he needs to define it:
“Organization” implies elements to be organized, and prosodic organization will employ the elements of speech: (1) timbre (in recurrences such as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme); (2) duration (which, when applied as it commonly is to syllables, is called quantity); (3) pitch or intonation; (4) intensity or volume (these two being distinguishable acoustically but not psychologically, and so not prosodically); and (5) boundary. [ibid]
Nowhere does Hartman acknowledge the one thing that is part and parcel of rhythm — regularity, recurrence and pattern! In fact, nothing in Hartman’s further definition of prosody distinguishes it, in any way, from his first definition. That is, Rhythm, in poetry, is the temporal distribution of the elements of language. And, like he said, his definition of “rhythm in poetry” does not distinguish it in any way from “all language”. So why make it? All of the 5 elements he lists (as elements implied by “organization”) are occurring, right now, in this paragraph. Without the stipulation that rhythm implies a regular and recurring pattern, the word becomes figurative at best and meaningless and worst (to be applied to anything). That’s going to cause problems for Hartman, problems from which his argument can’t recover.
The first problem is that his definition of “rhythm in poetry” cannot account for meter. This is intentional but it’s still a problem. Since Hartman still has to account for meter, and since he rejects the word rhythm, he has to come up with an alternate that avoids being conflated with rhythm. He does so in spades:
The linguistic elements a poet organizes prosodically are largely chosen from him by the conventions of his language, but each poetic tradition also dictates, by establishing more-specific conventions of verse, what he does with those elements. In almost every case, this traditional mode of organization is or depends on a numerical rule. When this is the case, we call the prosody metrical. A meter is prosody whose mode of organization is numerical. [p. 17 - Hartman's italics]
Numerical? This is so generic and bland as to be cynical. Hartman’s definition completely ignores the aural effect of meter and treats it (and poetry in general) like something that only happens on the silence of the page. (This, in fact, will be a tendency that appears elsewhere.) Hartman’s definition of meter fails on such a grand scale that refuting it is as simple as the humble limerick. I’ll explain what I mean shortly but first, we continue on our tour of Hartman’s logic.
Now that Hartman thinks he has firmly excised rhythm from meter, he goes for the kill in one of the most confused and nonsensical paragraphs I have ever read. I’ll print it in full:
Crude as it is, scansion — the simple diagrammatic indication of stresses and slacks — tells us all we have to know about a poem’s meter. The meter itself, like the scansion, is an abstraction. It is the rule to which a line more or less conforms, and not the line itself. It is not rhythm, but a pattern imposed on rhythm. Not only the unmetered elements of language (such as timbre and quantity), but also the actual instances of the metered elements, the particular stresses and syllables of the line, continue in some sense to occupy the more general area of rhythm. “Rhythm is not metre,” Own Barfield remarks. “It is not another name for metre, but something far subtler. Rhythm is variable about its underlying regularity, whereas metre is invariable” (12,793). Meter is the “underlying regularity” played against by rhytyhm. These two maintain a continual and fructifying tension, like any actuality and the abstraction that shape it. [p. 22]
Where do I start? Let’s begin with the underlined sentence. This sentence is precisely where the previous 21 pages collapse: It is not rhythm, but a pattern imposed on rhythm. Hartman has so separated rhythm from its central meaning of recurrence, regularity and pattern, that he fails to see the absurdity of his statement. I’ll be blunt: A rhythm implies, by definition, a pattern! You cannot, quote-unquote, “impose” a pattern on a rhythm because a rhythm already implies a pattern! This is his attempt, I think, to fully separate rhythm from pattern (essential if he wants to divorce rhythm from meter and leave it nothing but the dry numerical) but the effort defies simple logic.
He follows this with a quote from Own Barfield meant to drive home his point: “Rhythm is not metre.” Barfield then explains this by implying that metre is something separate from language. He too makes the bizarre assertion, counter to every definition of rhythm, that rhythm is distinct from meter’s “underlying regularity”. I just popped up Artha (my linux system’s dictionary) to drive home the point I’m making.
Rhythm:
So, if rhythm is defined as something that recurs “at regular intervals”, how on earth is this distinct from meter’s “underlying regularity”? Between Hartman and Barfield, if there was ever a textbook example of a distinction without a difference, this is it. The whole mess could easily have been avoided if Hartman had simply conceded that meter is, in fact, rhythm; that the link between music and meter is not isochrony but a recurring and regular pattern; and that if there is a distinction to be made, it is not between meter and rhythm but between the rhythm of metrical verse and the arrhythmia of non-metrical verse.
But the proof is in the pudding, and that brings me back to the humble limerick.
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were caught, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “Let us flee.”
“Let us fly,” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
The meter of all limericks essentially alternates between anapestic trimeter and anapestic dimeter. It’s that simple. The whole reason limericks are so catchy is because of their rhythm, yes rhythm; and their end-rhymes. To call a limerick numeric is to be obtuse. Yes, it’s numeric, but limericks work not because you can count the stresses in their lines but because you can hear the rhythm created by the anapests.
What is Hartman’s answer to the limerick (or any of the hundreds of nursery rhymes)? He wants us to know that a limerick’s effects are “not a meter in the poetic sense”!
This prosody originates in music. It depends on a beat or pulse–not counting the accents, but equalizing the time between them: isochrony, it is called… But though it is a prosody–it controls the audience’s temporal experience more directly than most–it is not a meter in the poetic sense. It organizes rhythm not numerically but temporally. [p. 32]
Poems like limerick’s “organize rhythm not numerically but temporally“. This is the rabbit hole Hartman must navigate because of his refusal to recognize the standard definition of rhythm. Remember page 14? Here’s what Hartman wrote: “Rhythm, in poetry, is the temporal distribution of the elements of language.” He then adds that “according to this definition, all language unavoidably has rhythm.” When you consider that Hartman is defining the effect of poems like limericks as temporally organized rhythm (and remember, he has already defined rhythm as “a temporal distribution”), then you must conclude (based on Hartman’s earlier definition of rhythm as, from what I can tell, the same thing) that there is no difference between a limerick and “all language” (since all language unavoidably has rhythm). Did you get that? I’ll make it clear. According to Hartman:
Now, since he’s already told us what rhythm is (according to him) let’s replace the word rhythm with the definition he provided:
Right, I’m not making this up. These are his own words. This is where Hartman’s baroque definition of rhythm (absent it’s dictionary definition of recurrence and pattern) lands him – in sheer tautological absurdity. He just can’t bring himself to admit to the rhythmic effect of meter. He can’t because he wants to reserve the word for his prosody of free verse. However, his gymnastics just don’t work. For all intents and purposes, he seems to deny that poems like limericks are written in meter or even exist! This is what allows him to say that line breaks can do anything that meter and rhyme can do. He has written off the very things that meter and rhyme do!
But enough argumentation. Let Hartman write a limerick that doesn’t use meter or rhyme — only line breaks.
Right. I didn’t think so.
Anyway, Hartman is now forced to distinguish between meter “in the poetic sense” and meter in the “temporal” sense. Does that mean, then, that any time one begins to hear the rhythm in meter that it’s not really “a meter in the poetic sense”? Then what does he make of the entirety of Spenser’s Fairy Queen? Here are just two of the hundreds of stanzas:
XLVI
Now when that idle dream was to him brought,
Unto that Elfin knight he bad him fly,
Where he slept soundly void of evil thought,
And with false shows abuse his fantasy,
In sort as he him schoolèd privily:
And that new creature, borne without her dew,°
Full of the makers guile, with usage sly
He taught to imitate that Lady true,
Whose semblance she did carry under feignèd hew.
XLVII
Thus well instructed to their work they haste,
And coming where the knight in slumber lay,
The one upon his hardy head him plac’d
And made him dream of loves and lustful play,
That nigh his manly hart did melt away,
Bathed in wanton bliss and wicked joy:
Then seemèd him his Lady by him lay,
And to him ‘plain’d, how that false wingèd boy,
Her chaste hart had subdued, to learn Dame Pleasure’s toy.
Anyone, and I do mean anyone, who actually sits down to read Spenser’s Fairy Queen, cannot fail to hear the steady, near incessant tum-te-tum-te-tum of Spenser’s iambic pentameter. According to Hartman (since it’s obviously rhythmic in every sense but his), this doesn’t count as meter “in the poetic sense”. How about Shakespeare’s blank verse? The meter’s rhythm is subtler, but it’s there. Ask anyone who can hear the difference between Shakespeare’s blank verse and his prose passages. They won’t answer that “the blank verse sounds organized numerically.” That’s just nonsense. They will answer that there’s a rhythm to the blank verse that isn’t heard in the prose passages.
Hartman’s description of meter, at the close of chapter one, comes as no surprise. He describes it as:
…an abstract pattern [the reader] can transfer in detail from poem to poem and codify in a formally closed, quasi-mathematical system that bears only incidentally on the experience of poetry. [p. 28]
Any reader who states that meter is a system “that bears only incidentally on the experience of poetry” doesn’t know how to read it. To Hartman’s credit, some 26 pages later however, he essentially contradicts himself when he writes that “in traditional verse the metrical determination of accent helps to control the interpretation of meaning…” How can meter help to determine the poem’s meaning and yet bear “only incidentally on the experience of poetry”? Hartman’s book is full of contradictions like these, but then again, maybe he has re-defined the meaning of “experience” vis-a-vis poetry.
All these theorists and theories tended to converge on the word cadence. The convergence was more lexical than semantic, since the word came to mean whatever a writer liked. [p. 46-47]
Ironic that he would write that, since this is precisely what he does to the word rhythm. Also ironic in that, by the time he’s done re-defining what he thinks rhythm should mean he’s all but re-defined it as cadence!
Rhythm, Symmetry, Counterpoint and the Free in Free Verse
Like I wrote earlier, one can’t go writing a book on the form of free verse when the free in free verse is understood as implying a lack of form. Hartman has to change the meaning of free. His first stab at this is to argue that we only think it’s free because we’re ignorant of its conventions.
In some sense any verse form is “free” with respect to any other, as the rhapalic line I invented is free if measured by the rules of iambic pentameter. It is “free” until its prosody is discovered. The reader easily discovers the prosody of a poem that belongs to his own tradition. But when the prosodic conventions on which a poem depends are alien to his experience, the poem will puzzle or completely mystify him. [p. 18]
At first glance this seems like a reasonable argument, but the argument is weirdly self-defeating. Hartman’s reasoning would seem to go like this: Poem X only looks like a free verse poem, but it’s not. In fact, once you closely examine it, you realize that it has a form. By way of example, Hartman gives us Marrianne Moore’s “Bird-Witted”. He points out that each stanza is “flawlessly divided” into syllables that count: 9,8,6,4,7,3,6,4,7,4. But what is he saying? Is he saying that Moore’s poem is still free verse, or is he saying that it’s not? If he’s saying it’s not, then what is the point of his argument? Is he saying that some free verse poems are free and some are not? Then what does free mean? What do we call these other “free verse poems”? He does, at least, have an answer to this last question. He divides free verse into vers libre and vers libéré.
On comparing French and English theories of verse, “we discover at once that French distinguish between vers libre and vers libéré — verse which is born free and verse, so to say, which has been liberated from some pre-existing chains. We have not this distinction in English — party I suppose because the neat verbal antithesis between libre and libéré is not available in English language. J.V. Cunningham helpfully provides a full idea of the resources of what Hough calls verse libere: “in general, the lines of a poem [of this kind] will be partly in standard meter, at times parts of what would be a standard line, or they are felt to be equivalent in some aspect of sound or feeling to a standard line, or they exhibit some marked variation of a standard line, or some other principle of meter is used intermittently and supported and given authority by the presence and recurrence of standard lines.” [p. 113]
Even so, these distinctions seem tangential and unhelpful. What exactly is Hartman discussing? For that, we go back a hundred pages:
“Free” is properly a synonym for “nonmetrical,” and it follows that the prosody of free verse is rhythmic organization by other than numerical modes. [p. 24]
Ultimately, “free verse” is “free” only in a special sense. Poems are written in verse so that the rhythms of language can contribute to the whole meaning of the poem; and it is prosody of one kind or another that turns rhythm into meaning. [p. 27]
“A second mode is symmetry. Free verse rarely uses a symmetrical prosody in a primary way. It would give the poem too tedious a stability. But when such elements as accent function at all prosodically in free verse (as they usually do, because of the nature of the langauge), they often adopt a symmetry that seems to arise out of the actual line, unlike an imposed numerical quota.” [ibid]
Chapter Four is called Counterpoint. Chapter 5 is called the Discovery of Form ( touches on Symmetry) and Chapter 6 is called the Discovery of Meter (this is where he makes the distinction between vers libre and vers libéré .
These three chapters are the heart of Hartman’s book, the chapters where he actually tries to establish and demonstrate a workable prosody. Of the three, the fourth chapter is the most interesting and the most useful to anyone who is writing free verse. In my opinion, the book would have been much better if he had started with Chapter 4, resisting the Aristotelian reinvention of the wheel in the first three. I think I can briefly summarize the gist of the three chapters.
Lineation allows the free verse poet to emphasize not just words (by choosing their placement at the ends of lines) but allows the poet to counterpoint linebreak with syntax. Where Hartman fails is in establishing counterpoint as a prosody. Remember that a prosody is something that “must be shared”. The principle error in these three chapters is a categorical one. Meter is numerical in the sense that one can objectively scan it and objectively observe where words are demoted or promoted. The meaning of a promoted word doesn’t necessary change from one poem to the next because syllabic emphasis is a part of our language. For example:
How did you do that?
How did you do that?
Depending on how these words appear in a metrical poem (one way or the other) their meaning subtly changes. Because meter is a prosody and because we all speak the same language, we will know which way to read the line based on its appearance within the metrical line. We can safely assume that the poet means us to read it one way or the other – and our interpretations of these lines will be more alike, than not. Hartman would have us believe that line breaks are no different. So, by contrast, here are the first lines of a poem he analyzes:
Shadows cast by the street light
·······under the stars
··············the head is tilted back,
the long shadow of the legs
·······presumes a world
··············taken for granted
on which the cricket trills.
Now what is the reader to make of these line breaks and indents? Hartman has an explanation and analysis for all of it, but all of it flirts too dangerously (when it doesn’t cross the line) with Intention Fallacy (in a limited sense) and Enactment Fallacy. Hartman must presume to know what the author intended when he used X number of syllables in a line, broke the line at this or that word or phrase, and indented. There’s no way around this. There just isn’t. If Hartman can’t speak to the author’s intentions, then there’s no prosody, there’s no certainty that the poet and reader are sharing a common interpretation of the techniques used. (That is, there’s no common interpretation of the techniques being used.) If Hartman denies this, then his interpretations may or may not represent the intentions of the poet. That, in fact, is precisely what happens. Although Hartman’s interpretation of lineation in this or that poem is interesting, he offers no reason to think the poet actually intended any of it (other than Hartman’s say so).
Likewise, any poet who writes free verse may have her reasons for breaking a line where she does, but how is the reader to know whether to give all line breaks equal weight, some less, or some more. How is the reader to guess at the poet’s meaning? It’s extremely doubtful that any two readers would ever give the same weight or the same meaning to a given line break, let alone a poem. By contrast, the majority of readers will similarly interpret: How did you do that?
In this respect, Hartman’s “prosody” does not withstand comparison to the prosody of traditional poetry. In fact, Hartman’s arguments and assertions can become so diffuse as to be a kind of proto-academese:
“If one distinguishes the constant interval of time measuring each line from the variable pace within it, the relation between them itself appears as a kind of counterpoint. That relation, incidentally, resembles the one between meter and rhythm in accentual-syllabic verse, suggesting that the traditional meter, too, inherently involves counterpoint. But Williams’s poem derives much of its rhythmic interest from a more complex counterpoint, changing the relation between its isochronous lineation–comprising both interval and pace–and its syntax.” [p. 68]
But, as with the limerick, rather than speculate, there’s a concrete test for Hartman’s claims. Prosody has more than one definition. Here’s Wikipedia:
“Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody. (Within linguistics, “prosody” is used in a more general sense that includes not only poetical metre but also the rhythmic aspects of prose, whether formal or informal, which vary from language to language, and sometimes between poetic traditions.)” [March 9, 2012]
We’re going to use the first definition of prosody – the study of poetic meter. This is fair. Hartman himself invites the comparison. Throughout the book he compares his prosody the that of rhyme and meter (rather than to prose). At the end of Chapter 4, Hartman tells us the following:
“For an introductory course in modern poetry, I had typed out and mimeographed a set of free-verse poems as if they were prose. My purpose, of course, was not to pretend that the two forms are equivalent, but to broach the fundamental question of how free-verse lines are divided or determined. I asked the students to mark the line breaks. The only additional information I gave them about Auden’s poem [Museé Des Beaux Arts] was that it contains two stanzas of unequal length.”[p. 75]
The results, predictably enough, were nothing like Auden’s. What this proved, other than that the students aren’t as good at Auden’s poetry as Auden, is unclear, but Hartman has a method. He means to demonstrate that if the poem is written in any other way, the poem won’t carry the same meaning as that implied by Auden’s original lineation.
In several cases, Auden’s lineation generates quite specific effects which one might call semantic. Some of these depend on what I described in the last chapter as a principle of antithesis, that changing elements take stress and constant ones do not. The reverse applies as well: Where a word is unexpectedly stressed, it suggests the alternatives from among which it has been chosen. [p. 77]
So says Hartman. He may or may not be right in his interpretation of these typographical features. But then what does right mean in this context? There’s no way for him to know whether his thinking reflects Auden’s and what does it matter? It only matters if you’re claiming that your interpretation is based on a “shared” prosody of free verse. With that in mind, the larger purpose of his classroom experiment was, I think, to suggest that Auden’s poem obeyed certain recognizable principles. While I enjoyed Hartman’s detailed examination, it hardly added up to a prosody comparable to that of traditional poetry. I’m willing to offer the following test. If Hartman is so sure that his prosody is the equivalent of meter and rhyme, then I will remove the line breaks in any of Auden’s other poems (presumably one he’s not as familiar with) and let’s see if he can reconstruct it? Or how about William Carlos Williams or any of the other major free verse poets? I’ll bet he can’t reconstruct a single one of them. This tells me that his claims to a “shared” prosody of free verse don’t hold water.
On the other hand, he’s welcome to pick any passage from Milton, any Sonnet, any poem by Donne or even a passage from Shakespeare, and based on the prosody of traditional poetry I, the carpenter from up in Vermont, will reconstruct them exactly as the poet wrote them. Not only that, but give me a sonnet (one that I’m unfamiliar with) remove the line breaks and mix up the order of the lines. I’ll still reassemble the sonnet exactly as the poet wrote it.
I defy any one, using Hartman’s prosody, to reconstruct the randomly scrambled and de-lineated free verse poem. Again, what this tells us is that Hartman’s prosody fails the standard he, himself, set for it, that a prosody “must be shared”.
Hartman’s repeated claims to a free verse prosody (equivalent to that of traditional poetry) are baseless. He does his argument no favors by making such comparisons. Besides that, there’s no reason to. I just don’t see why he feels the need to constantly compare free verse to traditional poetry? Is the book nothing more than sibling rivalry? Why can’t a prosody of free verse be like a prosody of prose?
Hartman describes how the subject of a poem, in this instance at the hands of William Carlos Williams, helps shape the poem itself (its counterpoint) — phrasing and lineation. The poet “discovers” the form of the poem as he writes it. This chapter is probably the weakest and least convincing of the three. Hartman, at the chapter’s outset, seems to anticipate this weakness:
Using free verse did not simply mean discarding metrical principles but substituting new ones. Often the conventions on which these new principles rest, such as lineation itself and its relation to syntactical rhythms, are at once less obvious (less explicitly systematic) and more fundamental that the special conventions of meters. [p. 81]
And then later:
Meaning arises not from what the poems says, but from what it does and the doing that it represents. It cannot be reduced to either a content (a set of propositions) or a form, in the sense in which that word complements “content” — an achieved product, a static stature. Nor, indeed, can meaning be reduced to an accomplished combination or unity of form and content. We comprehend the poem only as a process, not as an object. [p. 85]
This gets to be so rarefied, and the air so thin, that some readers may need oxygen. One begins to notice with Hartman that there’s an inverse relationship between the thinness of the sand under his castle and the academese of his argument. By the time we get to the middle of the chapter, his attempt to describe anything like a prosody of “discovered form” has become so generic, general and diffuse as to be meaningless:
When rhythm renounces the support of abstract or independent systems — meter or isochrony — the basic principle of the line emerges and takes absolute control: Not time alone, nor accent alone, but a combination from among all the elements of sound and of sense must give the line some special twist to justify its individual existence. The details of its rhythm are discovered (by poet and reader) with what it says; they are “organically” united. [p. 92]
So, a combination of all the elements give the line some special twist? Hartman follows this up with the two short poems by William Carlos Williams. In both instances, Hartman’s observations are so specific to his own interpretation that it’s hard to see how any general prosodic conclusion can be drawn. Yes, we can go so far as to impute meaning in the symmetry or lack of symmetry between two scanned lines (which the poet may or may not have been aware of), but that’s nothing two readers are likely to agree on or even recognize.
This chapter is stronger. As with the previous chapter, he argues that the poem’s subject can shape the use or absence of meter. (This is the chapter where Hartman makes the useful distinction between vers libre and vers libéré.) Hartman focuses on vers libéré — the way a free verse poet can fuse elements of traditional poetry with free verse. To me, the most interesting passages in the chapter are not those by Hartman (who like a nervous Putzfrau spends his time fussily admonishing, correcting and revising the words and intent of deceased poets) but those of the deceased poets themselves, like T.S. Eliot:
The most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. Is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse… We may therefore formulate as follows: the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the ‘freest’ verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation. [p. 112]
This passage by Eliot is like a breath of fresh air compared to Hartman’s abstruse and byzantine argumentation. But Hartman just can’t leave it alone. He has to tweak it. He writes that “Eliot’s ‘simple form’ is a traditional metrical one. Thus it must precede the poem, and in this sense it is more accurate to say that the poet withdraws from it rather than that he approaches it.” Why Hartman felt compelled to make this completely gratuitous observation is beyond me. What does it matter if the poet is “approaching” or “withdrawing” from meter? My only guess is that Eliot’s description rattles Hartman’s preferred sobriquet of meter as a “received form”, a term he pointedly uses in the very next sentence. The terminology has always seemed like a political one, and one can’t help sensing a chip on Hartman’s shoulder whenever he writes about traditional poetry –but I could be wrong. One wonders what Eliot would say if he could be roused from his slumber.
More importantly, as with the preceding two chapters, Hartman is the least convincing when he tries to portray the use of meter (or its approximation) as something like a convention that can guide our reading and understanding of a poem. He can write for instance, that
“The end of the passage [Burnt Norton] shows how the metricality of the fragments can control meaning most directly. It is Eliot’s evocation of meter that makes us shift stresses in the repeated phrases of the final two lines.
…will |not stay |in place,
Will not | stay still.
[And here is the larger portion from which these two lines are extracted:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.]
In other words, Hartman is claiming that Eliot’s “evocation” of meter is somehow enough to cause readers to shift the emphasis from will in the first line, to not in the second line. At this point, I’m almost feeling like I should concede the argument out of apologetic generosity (because I’ve been so unconvinced elsewhere) but, in truth, I can see no reason why, at this particular moment, any reader should be compelled to suddenly invoke the prosody of traditional poetry. As for myself, I read the second Will as emphasized, just like in the first occurrence. What would T.S. Eliot say? Well, guess what, we have a recording of T.S. Eliot reading Burnt Norton. I smell a smack down. I went looking for it as soon as I wrote this paragraph and after I had read it myself. Here it is:
T.S. Eliot begs to differ. He reads it the way I do, not the way Hartman does. (Or rather, I read Burnt Norton the way T.S. Eliot does.) Nothing so illustrates the limitations (if not failure) of Hartman’s prosody. Eliot’s evocation of meter makes us shift stresses? He states his prosodic opinion as though he spoke for all readers and as if his conclusion were self-evident (a habit of academics). He turns out to be wrong. (It’s one thing to speak for and correct poets who can’t talk back, but when they do talk back, it’s almost always trouble) If he can be wrong about this, then why are we to believe his assertions concerning Auden or WC Williams? We have no compelling reason because he has no established or compelling prosody (his authoritative tone notwithstanding).
An Unnecessary Distinction
Why does Hartman spend so much time trying to prove that free verse is the prosodic equal of traditional verse? The effort turns out to be wasted. Wouldn’t it have been better to discuss free verse on its own terms, without reference to traditional poetry and without attempting baroque redefinitions of rhythm and meter? The old prosodists were probably much better at it than Hartman.
The more obvious issue readers are likely to have with Hartman is the often near impenetrable opacity of his prose. He veers in and out of academese.
“A striving toward concreteness in language — the subordination of other linguistic processes to that of naming — is one corollary of the doctrine of the objective correlative. On the other hand, the poem’s method partly conflicts with the purpose of that doctrine, which is finally to facilitate communication between poet and reader by giving them a common ground. If sense in language inheres in the connections among units of sound, meaning inheres in the connections among units of perception, not simply in the units themselves. The poem’s linguistic fragmentation, besides emphasizing sound, tends also to atomize experience into isolated glimpses, and thus to fragment the meaning that the reader is asked to share.” [p. 154]
Right. One can only marvel at the irony of beginning this passage with the phrase “concreteness of language”. The first time you read this you need a Babel fish. As far as I’m concerned, it’s terrible writing. If an argument is clear and concise, then it will be made concisely and clearly. While Hartman makes some interesting and valid points concerning the uses of lineation in free verse, he fails to create the prosody he defined in the first pages of the book.
❧
Reviewed and added the following books to Erotic Poetry, Love & Passion • A review of Poets & Anthologies:
You will find them appended to the larger review linked above.
Troy asked me to review his blog, Thyme and Time Again, and, by extension, his poetry. The first thing to say about Troy’s blog is that it’s well-presented. Nothing can be more off-putting than a slipshod blog (doesn’t encourage readers to take a 
blogger seriously). His brief little autobiography tells us that he has a Ph.D. in the Humanities from UT-Dallas, an M.A. in English from the Univ. of S. MS, and a B.S. in Recombinant Gene Technology. He writes: “I specialize in spontaneous order and self-organization theory (from the brain to cities), network theory, Austrian economics, aesthetics, and cultural studies. I also write plays and poems.” Wow.
The libraries of poetry are filled with books by educated and well-heeled Ministers, Physicians, Diplomats, Aristocrats, etc… They had a love of literature, poetry and some spare time. John Donne is the most famous. There are also poets like John Collop and Edward Taylor. Edward Taylor was a minister but it’s John Collop who would be Troy’s spiritual and professional antecedent. Collop was a physician who didn’t suffer fools gladly, including other physicians. The editor writes that Collop “rejected as ignorant folly the most popular remedies of his time — phlebotomy, purges, fontanels — and the accompanying theories of defluxions and bodily humors. His poems attack quacks in all varieties: the astrological quack who assigns each herb to a house in the Zodiac and reads its properties in the stars…”
Hillberry, the editor of The Poems of John Collop, writes that Collop was no John Donne (a poet who Collop admired and imitated in some ways) but his poems are nevertheless rugged, avoid sentimentality and are intelligently alive with observation and wit. Camplin writes in this tradition – the gentleman poet. If he doesn’t already, Camplin should have some Collop on his shelf.
Camplin is doggedly prolific, writing one poem a day, and they range from free verse to traditional. No creative artist, can keep that pace and produce lasting work unless they possess surpassing ability. Since today is today, and that would be December 29th, let’s take a look at his current poem:
I know when roses fill her breath,
This morning she’s been drinking tea.
I wonder then what were her thoughts -
Of house, of work, or even me.
As honey drips slow off her spoon -
An amber made, not trapping bees -
Under the shade of old live oaks,
Her chair well-set on roots of trees,
She dips her spoon into the cup
To stir the light brown liquid sweet
And closes eyes to hear the air,
Relaxing back in plastic seat.
I see a smile spread through her eyes
As any fear within her dies.
Morning Tea is safely representative of the kind of poetry you will find — accomplished but showing the hallmarks of quick writing. The imagery is fairly straight forward and moves line by line. One doesn’t find the carefully planned imagery or conceits of more considered poetry. All but one of the lines are end-stopped. This is commonly the mark of haste – get the lines out and get them to rhyme. However, in fairness to Troy, I actually find this poem to be atypical. Many, if not most, of his other poems show greater freedom with enjambment and end-stopping. Another mark of speed, perhaps, is a willingness to invert grammar for the sake of rhyme:
To stir the light brown liquid sweet
One’s not sure whether we’re to treat liquid as the noun, or sweet as the noun. Troy has chosen not to punctuate the line so we’re left to our own devices (and this may be deliberate). I think most readers would read liquid as the noun and sweet as the adjective. There’s some grammatical awkwardness earlier in the poem as well:
I know when roses fill her breath,
This morning she’s been drinking tea.
Normally, we would probably say: She’s been drinking tea this morning. We would also, probably, more normally order our thoughts as follows:
She’s been drinking tea this morning,
I know it when the scent of roses is on her breath.
Something like that, but Troy has a rhyme scheme to keep. His lines aren’t exactly ungrammatical (though they flirt with poor grammar through their lack of punctuation), but there’s frequently something a little off kilter about them. They don’t feel organic. Rather, it frequently feels as though the form wrote the lines rather than the lines writing the form. A poet who isn’t writing a poem a day might be less willing to let such lines slip by. He might not close the line with the inverted grammar of:
As any fear within her dies.
Rather than:
As any fear dies within her.
Another mark of haste is Troy’s willingness to discard articles for the sake of meter (rather than re-write the line so that standard English is preserved). Poets up to the 19th century had the luxury of synaloepha when they needed to keep their lines iambic. These days, about the only shortcut left to poets is the omission of articles, but it’s not really an effective shortcut. It almost always risks making the lines sound amateurish.
And closes eyes to hear the air,
Relaxing back in plastic seat.
Should read:
And closes (her) eyes to hear the air,
Relaxing back in (the) plastic seat.
Haste can also be revealed by logical oversights. In the lines just quoted, Troy observes that the woman, as she sips her morning tea, has just closed her eyes. And yet, two lines later, he tells us that he sees “a smile spread through her eyes”. I’m not sure how this is possible since her eyes are, presumably, still closed. It’s possible that he’s speaking rhetorically and figuratively, using eyes as a catchall for closed eyes, eye brows, facial expressions, etc.; but in either case the lines don’t feel thoroughly thought out. All these little flaws, to a greater or less extent, can be found in all his poems.
But it wouldn’t be fair to leave it at that. Just as with Edward Taylor and John Collop, Camplin’s better poems show a poet’s grasp of metaphor and imagery. Consider the following:
In all my travels I have noticed God
Is fond of filling fields with yellow flowers.
There’s blue and red and pink and white – how odd
It’s golden yellow glowing after showers
Sow fields with water blown in flowing sheets
To dew the sod anew. No matter where
I look, I note that God both greets and meets
The eye with golden threads He’s sewn with care
Into the blooming fields. Indeed, in fields
He fills with lupines, blue in sun and shade
Of pines, some yellow shines. The yellow yields
A sharp define to all the mellow grades
Of blue and green that wave as warm winds blow.
It seems He couldn’t help Himself – He felt
He had to throw in just a note, to show
That sorrow’s blues and greens would always melt.
And even when I tried to plant a plot
Of only purple flowers, God slipped in
A golden dandelion that would not
Let me get lost within the purple din.
So now I look upon the yellow glow
Of God’s gold fingerprints upon the earth,
And know I owe him all I own – I grow
And glow with yellow petals from my birth.
Now, compared to the broken glass of a poet like John Ashbery, this is going to feel simplistic, mawkish and sentimental but, for all that, the poem is well put together. And, to be honest, it’s no more mawkish or sentimental than the free verse of Maya Angelou. I’d rather read Camplin than Angelou. Complin works harder. There’s nothing safer or easier than free verse – like putting up the frame of a house and calling it done. Meter and rhyme is the finish work. Even if his efforts aren’t always successful, I know far more about his stature as a poet than Angelou. I know that if Camplin took just a little extra time he could, potentially, write some spectacular stuff:
····················Indeed, in fields
He fills with lupines, blue in sun and shade
Of pines, some yellow shines. The yellow yields
A sharp define to all the mellow grades
Of blue and green that wave as warm winds blow.
The sense of rhythm and structure in these lines is strong. I’d like to see him think twice about the alliteration and internal rhyme of words like lupines, shines and define – mainly because they feel contrived. I’d like to see him loosen the meter. If I were to re-think the lines, here’s how I would do it:
····················Indeed, in fields
Filled with the lupine and the blueish shade
Of fir, there’s a yellow of the kind that yields
Nothing to any of the mellow grades
Of blue or green blending where the warm winds blow.
To my sensibilities, this gives the lines a more vernacular, less halting feel. The meter, while still strong, feels less forced 
into the mold.
All in all, I find Troy to be one of the stronger traditional poets on the Internet. The inquisitive reader will find poem after poem by this prolific scientist/poet, all in need of comments. I encourage any reader with a taste for traditional poetry to visit his site and comment. Interaction is the artist’s life blood. If you like his poems, say so. If you think they can be improved, share your thoughts. Camplin writes in the same tradition as a Taylor, Collop, or a Thomas Traherne, who, as they made their living in other ways, wrote poetry for the sheer joy of it. Traherne would have immediately appreciated Camplin’s more devout poems, and shared Camplin’s child-like contemplation of God. The accessibility of so many voices on the internet is as promising as the self-published poetry of an earlier ra. Take a look and see if you like it.
And why not end the post with a poem by John Collop, the poet who Troy most reminds me of.
On the Atrologicall quack.
As th’Colledge of the stars he did commence,
And Statesman-like will speak the houses sense,
Each house for mans use stranger herbs hath got,
To them they essence property, seed allot.
But is’t not strange; when they so numerous be,
How all do with a fewer stars agree?
Each pil and potion too hath diff’rent sign:
Nature ith’ stomach sure now can’t refine.
Or ist since Heav’n stands still, and earth turns round,
We here are giddy, there no truth is found?
The Heav’ns a book is, where men wonders read,
The stars are letters, most a Christs Cross need.
