In defense of William Logan’s criticism

Eight years ago I wrote a review of Logan’s poetry and part of the reason was that while Logan has made a career of critiquing contemporary poetry, and infuriating just about every last contemporary poet, his own poetry, for whatever reason (though I have my suspicions) seems all but ignored (though I did find a review of Rift of Light here).

“William Logan is widely admired as one of our foremost masters of free verse as well as formal poetry; his classical verve conjures up the past within the present and the foreshadowings of the present within the past.  In their sculptural turns, their pleasure in the glimmerings of the sublime while rummaging around in the particular, the poems in Rift of Light, Logan’s eleventh collection, are a master class of powerful feeling embedded in language.”

This is the ad copy from the back matter of the book. Like so many poetry books these days, the ad copy has become so overstated as to defy satire—each having to outdo the last with ever more grandiose claims of unrivaled importance. The staggering testaments to heartbreaking genius are legion. But I can tell you with staggering certainty that Mr. Logan is not widely admired as one of our foremost masters of free verse nor, heart breakingly, as a master of formal poetry. Of the public who has read Logan’s critical work, I would be surprised if more than a small fraction knew that he is also a published poet; and that fraction probably represents every poet he has ever barbecued.

And what does it even mean to be a “master of free verse”? There’s an argument to be made that one can be a master of formal poetry because there’s a prosody attached to traditional forms like rhyme and meter. One can objectively compare one poet’s skill with rhyme and meter with another’s, but the same can’t be said for free verse. There’s no prosody of free verse. Each poet makes up their own “prosody” along with their own valuation of said prosody. In short, to be a master of free verse is akin to making up ones own quiz and scoring an A+. Are we shocked? William Logan himself beautifully addresses this very sticking point:

If we took poets at their own valuation and judged them by their own methods, every scribbler would be a genius.

With a traditional poet, one can say that while the content of their poetry may be compelling, their skills as a formal poet are mediocre. Avoid. But all that’s left to free verse is the poem’s content. What else is there? Is the critic going to critique the lineation? There are other arts common to both poetry and prose, all the various techniques of figurative language including simile and metaphor, but if the writer of lineated prose (as is generally the norm) bypasses figurative language too, then there really isn’t anything to critique other than content. And that’s precisely Logan’s meat and potatoes. Logan is a bitingly brilliant critique of content. And that also probably explains why so much of his criticism can feel personal. It’s one thing to be told that your rhymes are clichéd and your meter thumps like a dog’s hind end, but another that not only is your clever repartee as dull as dried paint, but you are too. Take Logan’s opening paragraph on Billy Collins:

Bill Collins has a sideshow owner’s instinct for hoopla and a taste for one-ring-circus ideas; but his poems are gentle, mild, and awfully dull. It’s like finding that the weightlifter is an accountant and the bearded lady a housewife. He has an unthinking passion for nature that makes you long for a few polluters—his is a nature of continuous and helpless loveliness. In his peaceable kingdom, the mourning doves look like Robert Penn Warren and the titmice like Marianne Moore. Desperate Measures p. 133

I mean, yes? Logan nails Collins; and surely anybody not named Billy Collins has to laugh at that devastating coinage: “one-ring-circus ideas”. Everything after that is piling on. Logan could have stopped there secure in the knowledge that he had summed up the corpus of Collins’s works. That said, Collins gets the last laugh. Americans must love one-ring-circuses. Collins is one of only two contemporary poets, to my knowledge (the other being the late Mary Oliver), to make a living writing poetry. In the late 90’s Collins snagged a six-figure contract from Random House, surely due to the fact that Collins was one of the few poets to write with a sense of humor (hence Logan’s circus-jibe); (and also Kim Addonizio who is fun as all get out). But Collins would probably make a dull critic—much too nice. Logan’s sense of humor is a lowdown dog, a dog that knows just where where the ass-end of his victims’ pretensions are, and how to make us all laugh when he bites. We like that in a critic. We do. In a sense, I suppose, one could argue that the very poets who complain the most bitterly about Logan are the ones most responsible for his creation. And this is my point (and defense of Logan): 20th century poetry, with its naval gazing insistence on the primacy of content—as opposed to the aesthetic qualities of a poem’s language—makes the ideal hunting ground for a critic like William Logan.

But if I were to object to that last paragraph, I would write: Come on. When have poetry critics not addressed the content of poetry? But there was a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) difference. Take Blackwood Magazine’s hostile reviews of Keats, Hunt and the other, as they called them, Cockney poets. The reason for the hostility had to do with the “pretensions” of poets like Keats and Hunt (who had the temerity to think that they could write among the ranks of the nobility, think George Gordon Lord Byron or the aristocratic Shelley). The criticism of Blackwood was an attack on their lower class, cockney, background. That said, the criticism was couched in terms of their poetry’s formal features and less their content—their choice of rhyme and diction. When Coleridge critiqued his erstwhile friend Wordsworth in his Biographia Literaria, it was largely for Wordsworth’s theory of poetry and poetic diction. If you go back further, to the Restoration, you will find Alexander Pope more concerned with technique that content:

    And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,
    While they ring round the same unvary'd Chimes,
    With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
    Where-e'er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
    In the next Line, it whispers thro' the Trees;
    If Crystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
    The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep.[5]
    — lines 347–353

He criticizes lazy rhymes, pat images, and clichés like “crystal streams”. During the Elizabethan Era, Jonson took umbrage not at the content of Donne’s poems, but that Donne’s Iambic Pentameter was too fast and loose. But getting back to the primacy of content in 20th and now 21st century poetry, there’s an added twist. It’s when the content of a poet’s work is so identified with their politics that critiquing their poetry is tantamount to critiquing their politics and identity. I notice that Logan has never reviewed Maya Angelou. He has reviewed Rita Dove and Logan is very careful to keep his criticism strictly confined to her poetry. He gets her prerogatives as a black poet but her poetry really isn’t that good. Anymore.

Logan has never criticized Maya Angelou, that I’m aware of, and that’s probably because he doesn’t consider her worth reviewing. Another reviewer, Helen Razer, has though. Razer goes to great pains, for example, to reassure the reader that she greatly respects Angelou’s courage, intelligence and activism but, let’s face it, her poems are “almost uniformly shit”. Razer spells it out:

…if I don’t mention how great Angelou the activist thinker was, someone will have me admitted to a hospital for the dangerously miserable. And I won’t effectively urge you to critically read her poems, which are almost uniformly shit. Unlike her activism.

I agree, by the way, with Razer’s estimation of Angelou’s poetry. Every time I hear someone swoon over her poems I cringe for the sake of the art. And yet many do swoon and one has to wonder whether it’s because they know so little about poetry or simply praise the poem because it’s “an Angelou”. One gets the sense that to criticize her poetry is to criticize Angelou unless, like Helen Razer, one goes out of their way to separate their admiration of the person from their condemnation of the poetry. With poets making poetry about themselves, is it any wonder then that they take Logan’s criticism personally? In some sense, can he really even avoid it? In the 50s and 60s confessional poetry was coined both as a genre and as a sobriquet. Poets learned to make their personal lives grist for their poetry, to expose all; and that confessional element continues to inform contemporary poetry. But do poets then get to complain when their personal lives are critiqued? It’s not an ad hominem attack to criticize a poet’s character if that poet has made their character the subject of their poetry. To restate, it’s not resorting “to ad hominem accounts of poets’ personal lives” if those same poets have made their personal lives their poetry. Many poets point to Logan’s ad hominem attack of Stephen Dunn: “Stephen Dunn is a rational man, probably a good husband and father, a generous and genial neighbor, homo suburbanus at his best.” But isn’t this precisely the confessional portrait Dunn has cultivated in his own poetry? I would give examples but Logan does so himself in The Undiscovered Country, p. 184. Likewise, one can’t critique a poet like Sharon Olds, if one gives the least attention to the content of her poetry, without critiquing the poet herself.

Missapplication of intensity is her cardinal vice: everywhere brute shock is taken as a sign of honesty (shock eventually makes the reader shockproof); finally, it becomes just a form of self-promotion. Olds has as many teases as a strip show, and the psychology that drives her poetry is dourly exhibitionist: that is, a form of punishment and abasement. “Loot at me! Look at me!” the poems say, poems of someone never loved enough. ~ The Undiscovered Country pp. 99-100

So, this is in some sense a defense of Logan’s criticism—which I mostly agree with (I do not agree that Frost’s Birches is sentimental tripe for example). If a poet writes formal verse, as AE Stallings does, then Logan will largely critique the verse, but if all a poet gives Logan is their own lineated psychodrama, then their psychodrama shall be Logan’s main course. And rightly so.

upinVermont | April 27, 2021

The Poetry of Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia published Interrogations at Noon in 2001.

He’s primarily known as an essayist and critic and especially for his defense of Formal Poetry. In his Notes on the New Formalism, he wrote: “the real issues presented by American poetry in the Eighties will become clearer: the debasement of poetic language; the prolixity of the lyric; the bankruptcy of the confessional mode; the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative and the denial of a musical texture in the contemporary poem. The revival of traditional forms will be seen then as only one response to this troubling situation.”

He was a contributing poet to the anthology “Rebel Angels”, which I hope to review at some later date.

Selections of his poetry can be found at his web site.

With Interrogations at Noon, Gioia is true to his preference for meter and rhyme and offers a variety of verse forms and rhyme schemes. The first poem, Words, appears to be an accentual poem; which is to say: whereas the syllables per line vary, one could read each line as having 5 stressed syllables. I’m guessing that most readers will feel and read the poem as free verse. (Accentual verse is frequent in nursery rhymes, where the accentual rhythm is more easily discerned in the shorter line lengths.)

The world does not need words. It art-ic-ulates it-self
in sun-light, leaves, and sha-dows. The stones on the path
are no less real for ly-ing un-cat-alogued and un-count-ed…

In any poet’s favor, accentual verse isn’t remotely as demanding as accentual/syllabic. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the line between accentual, free verse and prose is thin to naught. The poem succeeds or fails in its use of imagery, phrase and content.

Beyond that, the first poem greets us with many of the traits typifying the poems that follow. Gioia doesn’t possess the same gift for imagery & language as his contemporary, A.E. Stallings. His imagery, such as it is, is generally abstracted and literary, lacking sensuality, texture, smell, feeling; one very seldom wants to linger over a given image or combination of words; and his imagery and language tends to be on average, pedestrian, sometimes verging on cliche.

Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping the shoulder, the slow
arching of the neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

There’s the abstraction of “articulates itself/ in the sunlight”, while phrases like “glancing the skin”, “gripping the shoulder”, “slow/arching of the neck or knee” are the stuff of every day prose. The phrase “silent touching of tongues” flirts with cliché. The poem concludes:

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always —
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

The sun “piercing” anything is a stock image. We have some poetic language in “painting the rocks… then dissolving each lucent droplet..” but there’s no color, sense of touch, motion, sound or even sensation. Neither does one see the world in new ways as when Frost writes: “But I had the cottages in a row/ Up to their shining eyes in snow.”  Such moments of transcendent imagery are a pale rarity in Gioia’s palette. He favors the straightforwardly visual, conceptual and intellectual: as in: “The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always…” which has an elevated, antique ring to it, though not so archly archaic as A.E. Stallings’ excesses. (Gioia generally avoids the archaisms favored by Stallings.)

In Gioia one hears the voice of a skillful essayist writing poetry. What do I mean by that? Read Robert Frost’s essays and you’ll hear a poet writing essays—indirect, playful, coy. He would write lines like the following: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” Gioia’s favors the direct, intellectual and explanatory in both his poetry and prose. (When I was dating, I once played the piano for a girl I was trying to impress. Her friend sniffed: “He plays the piano like a typewriter.”)

In a nutshell, Gioia frequently writes poetically, but doesn’t write poetry.

 

Blank verse is what I’m most passionate about and Gioia offers us a sampling of his skills in the poem Juno Plots her Revenge.  The poems first lines:

Call me sister of the thunder god.
That is the only title I have left.
Once I was wife and queen to Jupiter,
But now, abandoned by his love and shamed
By his perpetual adultery,
I leave my palace to this mistresses.
Why not choose earth when heaven is a whorehouse?

Even the Zodiac has now become
A pantheon of prostitutes and bastards.
Look at Callisto shining in the north,
That glittering slut now guides the Grecian fleet.
Or see how Taurus rises in the south,
Not only messenger of spring’s warm nights
But the gross trophy of Europe’s rape!
Or count the stormy Pleiades — those nymphs
Who terrorize the waves, once warmed Jove’s bed.
Watch young Orion swaggering with his sword,
A vulgar upstart challenging the gods,
While gaudy Perseus flaunts his golden star.

My first reaction is to find Gioia’s blank verse conservative. For instance, most of his lines are end-stopped, 16 out of these first 19, (meaning that the end of the lines are either marked by punctuation or reflect a normal pause in speech patterns or phrase). And it’s a representative pattern. Not even pre-Shakespearean writers were as conservative with enjambment. Generally, it marks the poet as inexperienced, very conservative, or having been born in the mid 16th century. It marks a poet who isn’t at ease with the form and whose thoughts don’t move freely through the lines. The poem marches line by line instead, each thought fitted to the line (the Restoration deliberately wrote their Heroic Couplets this way). Since Gioia’s neither an Elizabethan nor a Restoration poet, I’d have to say that his skills aren’t equal to the verse form.

In the first seven lines there’s only one line, the first line, that disrupts the iambic rhythm, the first two feet being trochaic. Some might read the first foot of the seventh  as being trochaic, but it could as comfortably be iambic. The line ends with a feminine ending (one of the few variations). The next twelve, like the first seven, posses only one line that varies the iambic beat. All in all, the effect produced is stodgy and wooden. The natural rhythms of the language, which skillful poets use to counterpoint the iambic rhythm, are missing. Too much efficiency.

Lastly, one meets with the same sort of imagery as in the book’s first poem. There’s an over-reliance on adjectives and, inasmuch as he uses adjectives, they’re repetitive (as in the 4 line proximity of “warm nights” and “warmed Jove’s bed” and they are unimaginative – gross trophy, stormy Pleiades, young Orion, vulgar upstart, gaudy Perseus, golden star. They all serve their purpose, but they’re stale and overused. They evoke nothing and end up feeling more for metrical padding (making sure there are enough syllables in a given line). One hopes that if Gioia writes more blank verse, he eschews such adjectives. The effect might be to add more flexibility to his line, favoring enjambment.

A more successfully attempt at blank verse is found in Descent to the Underworld. There’s greater flexibility as thoughts freely overlaps from one line to the next.

At first the way is not
Entirely dark. Some daylight filters down
And gives the cave that same bleak iridescence
The sun shows in eclipse. But gradually
The path descends into undending twilight.

The lines are still relatively conservative (perhaps too much so) but by Gioia’s standards, even here, there’s loosening.

There are no grassy meadows bright with flowers,
No fields of tassled corn swaying in the wind,
No soft green vistas for the eye…

Gioia probably means to elide the word swaying so that it is read as one syllable, but a trochaic fourth foot is a daring departure.

Gioia’s rhyming gives a similar impression—a poet who writes line by line. In the two poems considered, The End of the World and The End of Time, both poems are end-stopped.

“We’re going,” they said, “to the end of the world.”
So they stopped the car where the river curled,
And we scrambled down beneath the bridge
On the gravel track of a narrow ridge.

This first poem is written in heroic couplets – though some prefer to reserve that term for longer, narrative poems. (It is written in rhyming couplets.) The latter poem follows an ABAB rhyming pattern. Because each phrase and grammatical unit ends neatly with the end of each line, the reader will probably pause with each line as though each were its own independent accomplishment. Here again, the natural ebb and flow of the language is overruled by the demands of the form – the very sort of writing that prompts scorn from poets who prefer free verse.

Gioia is at his best in shorter, pithier poems, and more so in that indistinct syllabic poetry or accentual poetry that exists somewhere between free and formal verse (when he doesn’t have to hew to meter or rhyme. 

Neither the sorrows of afternoon, waiting in the silent house,
Nor the night no sleep relieves, when memory
Repeats its prosecution.

Nor the morning’s ache for dream’s illusion, nor any prayers
Improvised to an unknowable god
Can extinguish the flame.

We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost,
And our innocence consumed by these implacable
Tongues of fire.

Comfort me with stones. Quench my thirst with sand,
I offer you this scarred and guilty hand
Until others mix our ashes.

~ Pentecost

This is the poetry of a direct and unpretentious voice, freed from the constraints he imposes on himself in other poems. He speaks directly and simply. His thoughts move freely from line to line. Written on the death of his son, the poem is poignant in its directness. And other poems like this: After a Line by Cavafy, Accomplice, (and my favorite) Homage to Valerio Magrelli—a series of short, direct and well-turned free verse poems. While his imagery remains mostly pedestrian, he does occasionally manage to startle:

…stranded in thought,
on the lonely delta of the spirit
as entangled as a woman’s sex.

Or

..in the equilibrium of their design
untouched and overlaid like the wooden pieces
in a game of pick-up sticks.

In truth, he’s a poet able to shape his thoughts to the demands of whatever form he undertakes, but he fails to create the illusion that the form has grown organically. Writing formal poems is a tricky businesses, requiring the poet to both follow and lead a form’s constraints. Gioia’s best poems lie just a little outside those constraints.

Edited August 1st, 2021 | up in Vermont

Paul Muldoon: Poems 1968-1998

[Like the review below, this also was originally written on Amazon.]

If glibness can be elevated to greatness, then (as critics like to say), Muldoon has no peer. But that’s a big “if”. I picked up this volume based on a recent New York Times article where I read that (just in case you haven’t heard yet) he is a Professor of Poetry at both Oxford and Princeton, having been inducted into the former at the tender age of 20. Surely, dear reader, you must know by now the unparalleled list of professorial poets produced by Oxford & Princeton? Need I name names?

I nevertheless like Pual Muldoon’s poetry. I recommend it and it’s fun to read, but his book of poems from 1968-1998 could hardly be considered a string of pearls.

What you will and won’t get.

His is like snapshot poetry. Don’t expect extended metaphor, conceits, or any overall development in the way of imagery or narrative. His is a quick wit and quick eye. Reading his poem is like setting fire to a box of matches. There’s no smoldering pathos hear. His fire leaps from matchtip to matchtip, word to word, until the whole of it goes up in an exciting little burst of flames.

His poetry has been compared to Donne, but similarities are thin. For example, Donne was singularly known for the difficulty of his metrical writing. Expect no metrical daring from Muldoon. He doesn’t write by numbers. Muldoon’s difficulty can be summed up, I think, by this tidy comparison. Reading Muldoon is like listening to someone else’s phone conversation. You will only ever hear half the conversation.

The earlier books in this collected poems are the most accessible and, in certain ways, the more enjoyable. You’ll find those matchtip lines like: “Once you swallowed a radar-blip/of peyote/you were out of your tree…” This makes for fun reading.

The book “Madoc: A Mystery”, however, dating from 1990 indulges in a stellar example of poetic onanism. Clearly, the writing of Madoc brought great pleasure to the author, but I personally doubt this book will mean much to anyone not having a fetish for erudite cleverness. Clearly, the Princetion professor Muldoon is having a long distance conversation with his Oxford counterpart. You will have to wiretap if you really want to get this stuff. For example:

“[Galen]
“It transpires that Bucephalus is even now
“pumping jet
“of spunk into the rowdy-dow-dow
“of some hoity-toity little skewbald jade.”

Get it? If you do, this bud is for you.

The final book “Hay”, is the best of them. Even if a portion of the poems strike one as little more than deliciously worded doggerel, the fun of Muldoon’s wit evens the whole of it out. “I’ve upset the pail/in which my daughter had kept/her five-`No, six’-snails.” Substitute “reader” for “daughter” and you get the idea.

By the way, did you know he was professor of poetry at Princeton AND Oxford???

Vernacular, Colloquial, Common, Dialectal

[This is a relatively old post and there has been a lot of interest in it (given the number of hits it receives per day). The article has undergone a drastic revision but even now I think one could dedicate a book to the subject. This post is thin gruel, all considered. I give just a few paragraphs to each poet but at least this may serve as a starting point. My apologies to those looking for a far more detailed and thorough treatment. Maybe on some upcoming posts I’ll go into more detail with specific poets.  Last revision Jan 1, 2009]

Wikipedia, as of my writing this, defines Colloquial as language “considered to be characteristic of or only appropriate for casual, ordinary, familiar, or informal conversation rather than formal speech or writing.”

The Challenge

A number of modern poets have said that they consider the proper voice for poetry to be ordinary speech. Some phrase this as the responsibility of the poet, others equate this choice as a political statement and for others it is a gender issue.

The reasons poets give, however, is not so interesting to me as the practical exercise, especially when it comes to the fusion of colloquial rhythms with metrical poetry. So my focus is on poets who write metrical (or formal) poetry with the hope that what I write can be applied to free verse poets as well.

The question is why, over a stretch of four centuries, there have been so few poets who write colloquially in metered verse. The answer, in part, is that it takes a special confluence of talents – the ability to work within meter with ease and mastery along with the talent to hear and reproduce the tone and inflection of ordinary speech. The two abilities don’t always go together. Add to this the circumstance of time and place, and it’s no wonder such a poet is so rare.

Back in the Day

What makes writing colloquially in metered verse so difficult is that the rhythm of colloquial speech frequently runs counter to the regular patterns of accentual syllabic verse. It didn’t always used to be so difficult. When Shakespeare needed to write colloquially or dialectally, and needed to do it in Blank Verse, he could use all sorts of metrical cheats and did – elevating such devices to an art form. Here are just some of those tricks, drawn from Shakepeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, by Sister Miriam Joseph.

If Shakespeare needed an extra syllable, he used prosthesis to change rattle to berattle.

If he needed to change a trochaic word to a dactyl, he used epenthesis, changing meetly to meeterly.

If he needed to omit a syllable he could use aphaeresis, changing against to ‘gainst.

If he needed to omit a syllable from the middle of the word he used syncope, changing prosperous to prosp’rous.

In short, Shakespeare could freely omit or add syllables as necessary. It was the norm and was prized in Elizabethan times when done skillfully. It was through the use of prosthesis and proparalepsis (adding a syllable to the end of a word), that many of our modern words were coined by Shakespeare. The bottom line is that using these techniques made writing colloquially and dialectally, in meter (Iambic Pentameter), much, much easier. Consider the Nurse in Romeo & Juliet, one of the most memorably colloquial characters in all of Shakespeare:

Lord, how my head aches! what a head have I!
It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces.
My back o’ t’ other side,–O, my back, my back!
Beshrew your heart for sending me about,
To catch my death with jaunting up and down!

In the second line Shakespeare uses the figure elipsis or eclipsis to eliminate the word if and the figure apocope to eliminate the last syllable of the preposition into. In other words, the line should read: It beats as if it would fall into twenty pieces. However, this would introduce two anapests (in the third & fourth foot) into the Iambic line, an embarrassing disaster in Shakespeare’s day.

I’m not sure a modern poet would dare to use the same techniques. Then, in the third line, the nurse’s colloquial speech once again threatens to rupture the Iambic Pentameter pattern.

This could probably be scanned differently, but this is my stab it. I’ve chosen to treat the third foot as a heavy feminine ending before a midline break (the comma after O). One could argue, perhaps, that the midline break really comes after side. In which case it would read:

In this case, the fourth foot would be a kind of double-onset after the midline break (after the word side). In both cases, the scansions are easily within the realm of acceptable iambic pentameter variants. In fact, the lines are mostly iambic. Shakespeare, of course, pulls this off by using the figure syncope, removal of a letter or syllable from the midle of a word – o’t’other side. If he hadn’t used this figure, the second foot would have been an anapest. In Shakespeare’s day, this anapest, along with the heavy feminine ending or the double onset (however you choose to scan it) would have exceeded the bounds of a tolerable variant.

A brief note on Shakespeare’s use of Proverbs. Of all the poets who put pen to paper, Shakespeare is the most conversant in the proverbial lore of this day. His mind was filled with proverbs and their use is like a multi-colored thread through the entirety of his output. At some point I may write a post on his use of proverbs. They give to his verse and to the voice of his characters an earthiness and familiarity that we hear as colloquial  and vernacular. But Shakespeare wasn’t unique in his love of proverbs. The Elizabethans were avid collectors of proverbs and they were taught them from their childhood schooldays. All the great Elizabethan playwrights sprinkled their writing with proverbial lore – if not so skillfully as Shakespeare.

Robert Burns

One of the most dialectal, as opposed to colloquial, of English poets is Robert Burns, so much so that some of his poems are almost incomprehensible without annotation.

The night was still, and o’er the hill
The moon shone on the castle wa’;
The mavis sang, while dew-drops hang
Around her on the castle wa’.

Sae merrily they danc’d the ring,
Frae e’enin till the cocks did craw,
And aye the owerword o’ the spring
Was Irvine’s bairns are bonie a’.

This wonderful little tetrameter poem was written in rhyming couplets. Burns uses several metrical “cheats” to fit the dialect within the feet – all the same as those in Shakespeare’s day. He uses syncope to change over to o’er and evening to e’ening. In both cases he avoided an anapest. Notice that he doesn’t elide the word merrily. Even though we might, ourselves, be tempted to pronounce it with two syllable – merr’ly – Burns clearly wants it pronounced as a three syllable word – mer-ri-ly – otherwise the solidly iambic patter breaks down.

Now, there’s one line that is especially tricky. How do you read: And aye the owerword o’the spring? One might be tempted to read the line as follows:

However, this would give us a dactyl in the third foot – something which, up to now, Burns has studiously avoided. The elipsis o’the, reducing two syllables to one, gives us a clue as to how Burns would like us to read the line.

With this reading the perfectly iambic pattern of the lyric is preserved. In fact, Burns (for all his dialect) is far, far more conservative than Shakespeare ever was and even Milton! His poems are all, by in large, strictly iambic.  And he accomplishes this feat using a variety of metrical “cheats”. Burns, it seems, valued metrical regularity over the irregular pull of dialectal diction. Another interesting facet of Burns’ poems is that, for all the dialectal vocabulary, his use of colloquialism or the vernacular voice is relatively normal. He may use colloquial or proverbial phrases, but not in any way that truly sets him apart from other poets. From A Dedication:

Be to the poor like ony whunstane,
And haud their noses to the grunstane;

The phrase the poor like ony whunstane has a proverbial ring to it. The colloquial expression hold their noses to the grindstone is typical of Burns’ use. Unlike Shakespeare, who poetically enriches his proverbs, Burns writes them out as he’s heard them. Having said all that, his use of these effects, when added to the rich dialectal voice of his poetry, unquestionably lends his poetry (despite their strict metrical devices) an air of the commonplace and the common voice.

But my point, in all this, is to demonstrate just how many metrical cheats poets were able to employ when writing colloquially or otherwise.

John Clare

John Clare’s career began as Burns’ ended. Like Burns he wrote about common things, but did so without  Burns’ virtuosity.When other poets were writing (or attempting to write) with a more elevated and heightened style, in a High Mimetic Mode, Clare was writing about common things in a common voice.

From The Nightingale’s Nest:

Hush! let the wood-gate softly clap for fear
The noise might drive her from her home of love,
From here I’ve heard her many a merry year —
At morn, at eve, nay, all the livelong day,
As though she lived on song.

The phrase many a merry year is colloquial, as well as all the livelong day – an idiomatic & vernacular English (as opposed to uniquely American) expression. Like Burns, though, Clare is very careful to stay within the metrical foot – archly conservative in his use of variants. The only variants I could find were trochaic first feet (blank verse).  In the lines above, one might be tempted to read the third line as a variant.

This reading would create an anapestic fourth foot. In the entirety of the poem, no line veers from ten syllables and hardly veers from Iambic. Although Clare hasn’t used syncope or elipsis to slur the syllables, the correct reading is almost certainly as follows:

This reading retains the strong Iambic Pentameter pattern of the poem. It again shows how poets, writing in meter, expected to fuse colloquial diction with the demands of meter. Clare’s omission of elipsis was a sign of the future – when more modern poets, writing in meter, would omit the visible indication of slurred syllables on the presumption that a knowledgeable reader of metered verse would slur the syllables without prompting – other modern poets – not aware of this tradition – simply read their lines as anapests and see up to two or three anapests as an acceptable variant. My own feeling is that more than two anapests in a line tends to be a departure from Iambic Pantameter rather than a variant.

At other times, there was no need for Clare to use such figures of grammar. His colloquial speech fit effortlessly into the pattern of whatever meter he was writing:

Hark! there she is as usual- let’s be hush –
For in this blackthorn-clump, if rightly guessed,
Her curious house is hidden. Part aside
Those hazel branches in a gentle way
And stoop right cautious ‘neath the rustling boughs…

Such colloquial phrases as if rightly guessed and stoop right cautious fit neatly in the iambic pattern. Clare’s only concession was use aphaeresis when changing beneath to ‘neath – the only such figure in the entirety of the blank verse poem.

Most of John Clare’s poetry follows this similar pattern. An attentive reader can deduce that he wrote quickly, his verse frequently filled with words that do little more than fill out the meter, but his voice is always at ease and filled with the sort of speech and rhythms that seldom found their way into the more rarefied poeticizing of his contemporaries.

That said, and like Burns, Clare’s meter always remains rigid and archly conservative.

In fact, after the Elizabethans, the history of meter is one of ever increasing rigidity. The plasticity of a developing language hardened. By the end of the 17th Century words and their usages were all but standardized in comparison to the free-wheeling heydey of Shakespeare’s period. What this meant was that these techniques, rather than being an outgrowth of (and contributing to) a developing language, were becoming tools of poetry rather than of language. The coinage of new words declined rapidly and was even frowned on. Concomitant to this reining in of loose canons was an increasingly formal tone in poetry. Erudition, refinement and dignity were the bywords of Restoration Poetry – the stuff of Pope, Dryden , Davenant, Milton – not colloquialism. The malleable freedom of blank verse gave way to the strict accounting of heroic couplets. So, even though poets had the tools available to them, the times weren’t right. Colloquialism no longer found its way into the poetry of the leading poets.

After the restoration, even as the tyranny of heroic couplets finally began to give way, the rigidity of the restoration left its stamp of the following generations. The extravagant adventurousness of the Elizabethans were all but forgotten and seldom imitated, even as the nineteenth century fell under the sway of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and the great Victorains – Browning and Tennyson.

By the end of the nineteenth century many of the techniques used to fulfill the demands of meter and rhyme had become no more than mannerisms. It was to this that Pound was reacting when he rejected the sing-song meter of the Victorians. He believed that the only way to liberate poetry from the stale exigencies of meter and rhyme was to liberate it from meter and rhyme. Free verse was born and the exigencies were thrown out the window. They were no longer needed.

To some poets, though, Pound was taking the easy way out.

A few Poets looked for a new way to fuse the colloquial voice with metrical poetry.

Colloquialism without the Cheats

E.A. Robinson was already meeting the demands of meter without recourse to the tired devices of his contemporaries — the tired metrical cheats, the flowery language and expostulations. Robinson’s poetry, for the first time in English language poetry,  reunited the common, colloquial voice with the demands of formal poetry.

The Blank Verse poem Aunt Imogen is a fine example of Robinson’s more vernacular and supple style. There are no thees or thous, no syncope, no elipsis, no aphaerisis.

The verse begins with an informality that was, up to this point, unheard of .

Aunt Imogen was coming, and therefore
The children—Jane, Sylvester, and Young George—
Were eyes and ears; for there was only one
Aunt Imogen to them in the whole world,
And she was in it only for four weeks
In fifty-two.

Knowing that the verse is iambic pentameter blank verse, we know a few things about the first line:

The first is that the first & last syllable of Imogen receives the strong stress, not the second syllable. The second thing we know is that therefore is pronounced differently than nowadays, with the second syllable receiving the stress – there-fore’. A quick search in Webster’s (not the dinky collegiate version but the old one the size of a cinder block) confirms that the older pronunciation of therefore was more prevalent in Robinson’s day. (Trochaic feet, in the fifth foot of an Iambic Pentameter line, is extremely rare before the middle of the 20th Century.) Robinson doesn’t mind the Pyrrhic fourth foot, willing to exchange metrical rigidity for phrasal flexibility.

After the informality of the first line Robinson offers up some American vernacular. “Were eyes and ears” comes from the expression all ears, a uniquely American Idiomatic expression. Then the next lines seek to echo the voice of the children saying that  “there was only one/Aunt Imogen to them in the whole world. It is the kind of exaggerated expression children are prone to but which, up to now, rarely found its way into serious poetry. Robinson ends this first sentence with the following: “And she was in it only for four weeks
In fifty-two”. The closing words have the feeling of a conversational aside, adding to the air of informality and colloquial speech – something which Frost was to develop even further. There is, deliberately, no rhetorical heightening in any  of these lines.

In terms of the meter, Robinson relaxes his strict accounting, allowing the colloquialism to disrupt the iambic pattern.

I read the first of the two lines as containing what’s called a double foot – a Pyrrhic-Spondee. (The double foot is an Iambic Pentameter variant which Sidney, an early pioneer of Iambic Pentameter, made frequent use of.)  The next line mirrors the first, though this time I read the line as having five feet. Though it probably was not deliberate on Robinson’s part, the second line helps re-affirm the Iambic Pentameter pattern without sacrificing Robinson’s colloquial effects. The effect is supple and flexible. It is a new voice in the poetry of blank verse.

There’s more to say about this poem but I think another poem will better demonstrate the other salient feature of Robinson’s verse – his magnificent Sonnet “The Sheaves”. He generally resists altering the natural grammar of spoken English for the sake of rhyme or metrical rhythm. He finds ways to preserve normal speech patterns while preserving the integrity of the Iambic Pentameter pattern. This is significant. Up until Robinson, poets regularly reversed grammatical units depending on what Iamb or Rhyme they needed.

For example, consider Wordsworth’s Scorn not the Sonnet:

“the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound”

The last line reverses the normal grammatical order for the sake of the rhyme wound/sound. Allowing that we don’t use the auxillary verb do as an expletive, one would normall say: Tasso did sound this pipe a thousand times or Tasso sounded this pipe a thousand times.

Robinson tries to dispense with such devices, rhetorical heightening, the use of the antiquated pronouns thee or thou for a much more familiar and “low American”  colloquial voice or or “low mimetic style” (See my post on the Oratorical Style for a discussion of high and low mimetic styles – the discussion is in reference to Fantasy Writers but applies to poetry as well. Apart from the poets mentioned in this post, and up until the 20th Century, most poets writing in meter chose to write in a high mimetic style, including Emily Dickinson.)

Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That tells the more the more it is not told.

So in a land where all days are not fair,
Fair days went on till on another day
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.

Robinson’s concessions are change assigned, magic undivined and long to stay (where one would normally expect assigned change, undivined magic and to stay long. Other than that, the poem sounds thoroughly modern to an American ear. Whitman can sound modern to an American ear, but Whitman set aside meter to do it. Robinson didn’t and that, and if only in this respect, is all the more impressive.

Robert Frost: A Master of Colloquialism in Poetry

After Robinson, Robert Frost became the unrivaled twentieth century master of the colloquial. Frost, through skill, genius or sheer determination, dispensed with any metrical concessions. His verse is free of grammatical inversions, syncope, elision or any of the other metrical concessions. And there are no wasted words – words merely to pad the meter. His colloquial phrases strain the meter (and he was criticized for it even by his students – Robert Francis). But nonetheless, he mastered both the demands of formal poetry and colloquial sense and discursiveness – the halting, digressive, deliberative and informal pattern of our daily talk.

We don’t speak in five paragraph essays, but feel our away forward, our thoughts shaped by what we build on. This is the tone that Frost mastered.  His uniqueness, in this respect, and the difficulty of his art is attested to by the fact that, so far, few poets and fewer poems have achieved anything comparable.

‘The wonder is I didn’t see at once.
I never noticed it from here before.
I must be wonted to it – that’s the reason.
The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it.
Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?
There are three stones of slate and one of marble,
Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight
On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those.
But I understand: it is not the stones,
But the child’s mound’

~ Home Burial: Robert Frost

Notice how Frost imitates the deliberative pattern of colloquial speech. The husband says: “I never noticed it from here before.” Then, colloquially, he reflects: “I must be wonted to it“. The poem is written in Blank Verse and the phrase fits neatly within the meter.  Outside the sphere of Dramatic Verse, no other poet before Frost ever introduced the everyday pattern of speech into verse.  This was Frost’s innovation. Notice the dialectal effect of “We haven’t to mind those.”

Dictionary.com defines Dialect “as a variety of a language that is distinguished from other varieties of the same language by features of phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, and by its use by a group of speakers who are set off from others geographically or socially.”

The pithiness of “We haven’t to mind those” is characteristic of the New England dialect still alive and well, up in Vermont – a tight, clipped and northerly accent. However, the dialectal language strains against the meter.

This is a hard line to scan and don’t hold me to it. “We have” is iambic but from there, the dialect of the voice plays against the meter – the sort of liberty that Frost was criticized for by more traditional poets.  Nevertheless, Frost just manages to fuse the colloquial tone with the overall Iambic Pentameter pattern (the variant feet are an allowable variant).

That’s hard to do, especially for modern poets. One has to have an ear for colloquial language, for meter, and how to fit the two together. My own poetry shows the learning process. In my poem Come Out!, the first of my poems where I was able to fuse colloquial speech and meter, there are still some poetic turns of phrases that, if I were to write it now, I might avoid.

But I might be taught,
I should suppose.  I can’t say I see how.
A man must partly give up being a man
With womenfolk.  We could have some arrangement
By which I’d bind myself to keep hands off
Anything special you’re a-mind to name.

The phrase I should suppose is a Frostian touch followed by the colloquial asseveration  I can’t say I see how. It’s worth noting that he could have written I can’t see how but he needed the extra iamb |say I| to fill the meter. Because the phrase is speech-like and feels natural, the filling out of the line feels natural. But there’s another Frostian feature of the line, and that is the tension between natural speech pattern and the Iambic Pentameter pattern. A colloquial reading might go something like this:

This, at least, is how I would expect a local to say it. But something Frost is renowned for, and probably because of the tension between phrase and meter, is his tendency to put the expected metrical stress on words that normally might not receive stress. Here’s how the phrase reads if one takes the meter into account:

With this second reading, should takes empasis. The husband knows he should be more cognizant of his wife’s experience. And we know that this is how Frost meant the line to be read because the husband immediately avers, reconsiders, saying I can’t say I see how. In this phrase the iambic stress is on can’t and I. The husband has already determined that he can’t see through his wife’s experience and probably won’t. Not I he says.

The effect finds parallels in A Swinger of Birches, among other poems. The speaker seems to turn back, aver, reconsider what he’s spoken just as we do in everyday speech.

You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them

The colloquialism of the italicized lines, like many of the lines, plays hard against the meter. In this sample, there is only one line that is indisputable Iambic Pentamter: Like girl on hands and knees that throw their hair. Taken at face value, the iambic pattern is lost, breaks down in these lines, but there is the echo of an older reading in these lines (and it is with this knowledge that Frost allowed himself some variance).

For instance, in Shakespeare’s day a little syncope and elipsis would have regularized the line :

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun
Before them o’er   their heads to dry i’th’sun

But he was going to to say when Truth broke in

[Where going is slurred via elision to read as one syllable.]

On the other hand, Frost allows himself a more flexibility, willing to end a final foot with a trochee: bend them; willing to vary the Pentameter with a Tetrameter line having two anapests.

In short, Frost was skilled at matching colloquial phrase to the metrical line, but he was also willing to deviate from the pattern when the phrasing mattered more than the meter. It was a flexibility that served him beautifully, and which he seemed to beautifully balance (never completely losing the iambic pentameter feel) – a flexibility which, as we will see, no modern poets writing in meter seem to have absorbed from Frost – despite their study and admiration of the poet. As for myself, my own poem All Hallows’ Eve works toward that ideal, along with some newer poems I have’t posted yet.

[For a look at meter and colloquialism in another Frost poem, check out my post on A Road Not Taken.]

After Frost

Richard Wilbur , probably considered the natural heir to Frost, seldom touches on the colloquial voice the way Robert Frost does. His voice and technique harken back to an older poetry – to Robinson mor than to Frost. Not only are Wilbur’s poems frequently formal in structure, but they mostly sound formal, even his free verse. The are spoken with an air of formality or literariness that works against the colloquial voice. Consider “Seed Leaves”, dedicated to R.F. (Robert Frost?). The poem begins:

Dislodging the earth crumbs
Here something stubborn comes,
It comes up bending double,
And looks like a green staple.
And making crusty rubble.

The inverted grammar of the first line, for the sake of the rhyming “comes/crumbs” firmly undercuts the feeling of a colloquial voice. The subject/verb inversion as much as announces the presence of Poet, much as one clears his throat before he speaks. In his latest collection, “Mayflies”, perhaps the most masterful , none of the poems are written in a voice other than his own — always the poet speaking. “The Crow’s Nest” begins:

That lofty stand of trees beyond the field,
Which in the storm of summer stood revealed…

Once again, this time in the second line, the normal order of subject, object and verb gives way to the exigencies of rhyme. And this is the trap of formal poetry, which only Frost seems to have overcome– how to write a metrical and rhyming poem while preserving the vernacular, colloquial voice.

Timothy Steele

Timothy Steele, a contemporary poet well-liked for his skill in formal poetry, succeeds in areas where Wilbur does not. In one of his most Frostian poems, he largely succeeds, but Steele pays a dear price. It is excessively derivative both in voice and subject matter, as though Steele couldn’t write a colloquial poem without adopting not just Frost’s voice, but also his subject matter. Consider “Timothy“:

Although the field lay cut in swaths,
Grass at the edge survived the crop:
Stiff stems. with lateral blades of leaf,
Dense cattail flower-spikes at the top.
If there was breeze and open sky,
We raked each swath into a row;
If not , we took the hay to dry
To the barn’s golden-showering mow.

Compare this to extracts from Frost’s poems “Mowing” and “Tuft of Flowers”, written, probably, a hundred years earlier:

[Notice the echo of gold in the poem above and below…]

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

Or easy gold…

[Or the echo of “row” and Frost’s “swale” with Steel’s “swaths”…]

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows…

[Or compare how flowers and spikes show up in both poems…]

Not without feeble-pointed spokes of flowers…

Or compare Steele’s “we took the hay to dry” with Frost’s “to toss the grass to dry“…

Steel’s poem is rife with Frostian parallels, so much so that one suspects that Steele either deliberately imitated Frost in style and subject as a way to learn , or that Steele is altogether too pickled in his admiration. His reverence borders outright theft. Thankfully, Steel’s other poems are not as pickled, but he does not, to my knowledge, ever write in another’s voice – something which lends itself to colloquial or dialectal diction. It were as though none of the formal poets had ever read anything beyond Frost’s very first book?

[Current revision ends here – Dec 21 2008]

Rebel Angels

[My intention is to provide some fuller examples from Lea’s poem – Dec 21 2008].

Sydney Lea

I paged through “Rebel Angels” a compendium of 25 poets: “Poets of the New Formalism”; and I could not firmly identify any poem as being written in a voice other than the “poet’s”, as opposed to say, Frost’s The Housekeeper, or The Witch of Coos or The Pauper Witch of Grafton. The only poet who might count is Sydney Lea and the poem The Feud. Lea comes the closest to a distinct (which is to say not Frostian) colloquial voice. His poems begins:

I don’t know your stories. This one here
is the meanest one I’ve got or ever hope to.
Less than a year ago. Last of November,
but hot by God! I saw the Walker gang…

In an earlier version of the post, I remarked that Lea’s meter was too variable to be true blank verse.

No longer. In fact, I find Lea’s meter to be somewhat conservative; and reading it now, I sometimes wish the colloquial phrasing conformed a little less to the Iambic pattern! That said, I wish the same for some of my poems. Lea’s poem is an admirable  effort – more so now that I’ve given it a second consideration.

My only disappointment remains the use of Italics (in the second line) – and something Sydney uses elsewhere in the poem.

One of the great advantages of meter, which free verse is incapable of, is in the ability to stress words that otherwise might not be stressed, according to their place in the metrical line. Consider Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet that begins “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments…” The temptation is to read it as follows: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds…” However, Shakespeare’s sonnets rarely, some say never, deviate from the iambic norm. A safer bet is to assume that Shakespeare is playing against the meter, expecting us to read it as follows: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds…” Admittedly, the prepositions [to] and [of] should not receive much stress.

The meaning of Shakespeare’s poem is very different when the meter is kept in mind. Lea, on the other hand, fails to use the meter to advantage. The italics, in fact, vary from the meter and act as a sort of cheat. In Lea’s poem we’ve come full circle. Only now, the effect is not to preserve the meter but to ignore it!

Coda

There’s more to write on this  subject, and I will.

It would be interesting to consider how colloquialism has been used in differing forms. For now, I still hope to find the formal poet who can re-unite the colloquial, common and vernacular with meter, verse and rhyme.

The Shape of Poetry

It used to be that what separated poetry from paragraphs were the shapes poets poured their words into. Poets worked the miraculous, transforming water into wine. Gilgamesh, though it wasn’t verse, was written in grammatic parallels. Homer wrote using the Classical Hexameter. The earliest poetry from what became the English Language is found in the few and rare poems of the Anglo Saxons. In his introduction to “The Earliest English Poems”, Michael Alexander:

“Old English prose never achieved the sophisticated word-order or complex syntax of Greek or Latin…. This does not apply to verse. Poetry is a much older human accomplishment than prose, and the poets used a special archaic diction inherited from days when their art had been purely oral.”

When Beowulf’s telling rang in the halls of the Anglo Saxons, the shape of it took from an extempore oral tradition. The bards were like the great musical composers who riveted audiences with their skills at extempore performance. Today, the best rappers come closest to the story telling of the ancient bards, mixing improvised rhyme and rhythm with its own rhetoric and grammar. The elemental recognition of language’s rhythm and music, the source of poetry, is alive and well in rap.

Not so in modern poetry.

Twentieth century poets redefined poetry. Poetry was no longer known by rhyme, rhythm, meter, rhetoric, or metaphor. The old forms out of the oral tradition were brittle and stylized by the end of the nineteenth century. The oral roots of poetry were suffocated under the weight of literary tradition. What was changeable and malleable in the oral tradition turned rigid and stultifying under the Victorians.

The “free verse” poems were a gust of fresh air. The formless form was taken with fresh ideas. However, unlike the changing before it, free verse has remained the same for over a century. The first impulses that made it have, like the poetry it replaced, stagnated and suffocated. It is an aesthetic that dominates even a hundred years (or more by some accounts) after its beginning. Arguably, no other aesthetic has so dominated poetry for so long and so absolutely.

The shelves of our bookstores are filled with it. (It’s hard to find a contemporary Formalist on a store shelf.) Hundreds of new free-verse books are published every year. Every college houses its poet who makes and teaches the free verse poem (soon to be a decade into the twenty-first century). The pot is full. The roots are rotting.

Where is poetry going?

If there is a transition, what will it be and what will be the greatness of it? Free verse may go on or it may not, but it’s gone flat – the ground is fallow and ready for a new planting.