[New-Poetry] Bill and Andy

Thu Sep 28 12:37:01 EDT 2006

I like the Shakes - though I think some of his later sonnets move more subtly -
 and I think I quite like the Marvell too. But that's not my point. 

I feel a necessary distinction coming on between the metrical facts of the 
poem and the poem's qualities as a whole, including auditory properties, 
including rhythmic properties. Though these subsets keep narrowing even the 
last one comprehends far more than the metrical facts, which I should say are 
only those that are metrically relevant - e.g. to whether it keeps within 
certain rules - and these can be fairly adequately described by traditional 
means. Each of these extracts could be given a diagrammatic metrical 
description but these would not tell you anything about whether the poetry was 
good or not - I doubt if any metrical pattern is intrinsically vicious though 
crusty scholars have sometimes implied the opposite. 

Metrically I see no distinction between the extracts other than different 
intralineal pauses and some trochaic inversion in the Marvell - they're both 
iambic pentameter, though the rhyme patterns are different. Yet of course 
there's a world of difference between the two in rhythm, colour, heaviness vs 
freshness, perkiness vs. effort, and so on, but this I think must be 
approached by going far beyond what is metrically significant. Indeed I don't 
think you can even draw a definite boundary to the discussion of these 
differing effects by limiting it to what is auditory - you are bound to start 
thinking about how the language itself had changed in those 70 years, and 
about cultural changes and how each author thought his verse signified against 
the broad backcloth of the other cultural and linguistic expressions around 
him. It could be that these wider areas of discussion would benefit from some 
agreed terminology but there are so many variables that few have ever become 
established. Whereas the metrical descriptions have very wide currency, but at 
the expense of only being descriptive of a small aspect of what's happening. 

Quoting jfq at myuw.net:

> I think you're over reading into the things I've said to assume I think a
> writer should have one kind of life or another. Like i said, what kind of
> work a person does is pretty much neither here nor there. I'm glad you've had
> a good life. It sounded like you'd had a pretty shitty time from the events
> you described. But just to be clear about it, the fact that I think being a
> creative writing teacher is kind of a cushy job without a lot of value to it
> doesn't mean I don't think there isn't a log of good work to be done in all
> sorts of fields, including academia, by all sorts of people having all sorts
> of lives. That having been said, do you want this to continue as a flame war
> or do you want to talk like grown ups? Because if you want to continue the
> flame war, that's fine, I have no problem meeting fire with fire, it's just
> it gets kind of boring after a while and I get the feeling you're 
> a smart guy with well considered ideas about poetry and therefore might be
> worth talking to if you could get over the urge to call my ideas pompous and
> inane just because you don't agree with them or like them or whatever.
> 
> More to the point and in the interests of talking about something that's less
> of a waste of time than whose daddy's MFA program can kick whose Daddy's real
> world experiences' ass or whatever, i think it's interesting what you say
> about meter, particularly taking iambic pentameter to be a standard line. My
> problem with it is that it's always seemed really artificial to me and that
> unless it's done in a very particular way it sounds really clunky. an
> example:
> "Such did the manna's sacred dew distil ;
> White and entire, though congealed and chill ;
> Congealed on earth ; but does, dissolving, run
> Into the glories of the almighty sun."
> 
> which is Marvell and to my ear sounds like a flat tire thumping along on a
> bad road, and I think because the largely mechanistic application of iambic
> pentameter does that when a poet pays too little attention to his unstressed
> syllables, which is what thinking in terms of a stressed/unstressed binary
> causes a poet to do. Compare that to a piece of Iambic pentameter that's done
> well:
> 
> "I love to hear her speak, yet well I know   
> That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
> I grant I never saw a goddess go,—   
> My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:"
> 
> Which I'm sure you recognize and I think illustrates well what a poet with at
> least a more intuitive understanding of the rhythms of natural language can
> do if he or she is more attendant to the subtleties of the true multistressed
> nature of English. Scan those with traditional english poetry and it looks
> like they have the same metrical structure. Yet it seems patently obvious to
> me that there is more going on with Bill than with Andy. Which is my
> criticism of traditional prosody that I was trying to level in the essay
> you're rejecting without much support: traditional prosody clings too much to
> classical linguistics which is far less sophisticated than the subtleties
> produced by the research of modern linguists who've produced many solid and
> scientific accounts of english prosody, which bear not a great deal of
> resemblance to the organizational structure offered by the aspect of poesy
> that's long gone by the same name.
> Which, incidentally, is also what I mean when I say it's derived from old
> dead languages, I don't mean that the quantitative verse of greek from which
> classical prosody derives its terminology has been grafted directly onto the
> language, it means I think that critics trying to come up with a good way to
> analyze the rhythm of poetry look too much to the past and to poems composed
> based largely on linguistic ideas founded on, in particular, anglo saxon and
> the romance languages rather than looking to the linguistic prosody of their
> own times and seeing what we can do with that.
> 
> 
> On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Mike Snider wrote:
> 
> > I've had a damned good life, actually, and I told you something about it in
> response to your inane and pompous assertions about what kind of life a
> writer needs to live because, beyond talent, all that really matters is
> willingness and opportunity to do hard work /at writing/.
> >
> > Concerning meter and stress, a sophisticated linguist such as you should
> know that the signifier is not the signified, and that the accident that we
> use names derived from classical quantitative meters has almost nothing to do
> with the practice of English language poets. We could call the standard line
> of the last 500+ years a thwarptingle and it would still be ten syllables
> with each of the even numbered syllables more strongly stressed than the
> syllable immediately preceding it, and an inversion in the first foot would
> still be a standard variation on that line if we called it a swayback.
> >
> > On Wednesday, September 27, 2006, at 09:28PM, <jfq at myuw.net> wrote:
> >
> >> wow, you've had a hard life. that's rough. why are you telling me all
> this? i'm tempted to flame you back because you're being rude for no reason,
> but whatever. this has gone on far too long and there are far too many
> assholes on this list being far too defensive about offhand remarks that were
> never in anyway intended as a challenge to anyone's life who is not currently
> living in an MFA program, and which themselves only apply to the domain of
> "whether or not a certain kind of thing is good for writing."
> >>
> >> i'll just say what I say to everyone who disagrees with me about meter:
> you're wrong, the reason you're wrong is that poetic prosody is an old
> fiction based on languages other than modern english and should be replaced
> with linguistic prosody. and that's all I have to say about that beyond what
> I said in the essay you read but didn't understand. If you'd like to talk
> about this further, you can stop being such a dick and i'll happily talk to
> you like a human being. As of right now, though, you're hardly worth my
> time.
> >>
> >> On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Mike Snider wrote:
> >>
> >>> I see you know as much about life and work as you do about stress in
> English accentual-syllabic poetry.
> >>>
> >>> I've taught freshman comp and creative writing (7 years) and
> middle-school Spanish (1 year), been a tool-and-die maker's apprentice (2
> years), a roofer (one year), a carpenter (mostly framing, 5 years), a
> programmer (three times, for 7, 3, and 5 years), a dishwasher (one year),
> played music semiprofessionally during almost all that time, attended at
> least one class every semester from first grade (1959) to 1991, studying
> everything from metallurgy to prosody, been married twice (12 years each
> time), raised two stepchildren, had my daughter and first wife stolen from me
> by recovered memory fetishists, lost everything I owned twice (even my dog
> died the first time that happened), and watched my father take 9 years dying,
> during five of which he didn't know who I was.
> >>>
> >>> The only thing that makes better poems is working on poems, and that's a
> hell of a lot easier to do when you're well-fed and rested.
> >>>
> >>> And however many phonological stress-levels there are in English, there's
> only stressed and unstressed in English A/C poetry (except dipodics), and
> they dance with phonological stress.
> >>>
> >>> On Wednesday, September 27, 2006, at 10:41AM, <jfq at myuw.net> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>
> >>>> i never said i had an interesting job, i said I have a full time job.
> unlike part time assistant college professors who babysit workshops full of
> bad poets. Any job is more real than that. even shuffling papers and
> particularly trying to teach people things, because if that were the goal,
> one wouldn't get an MFA in order to try to reach it.
> >>>>
> >>>> As it happens I do find my work very interesting and intellectually
> stimulating, but that's neither here nor there. The fact that you consider a
> grueling fifteen hour work week on top of the trials and tribulations of
> deciding what to have for dinner and doing your laundry to be living anyplace
> other than fantasy island really castrates your snark before it has a chance
> to get going.
> >>>>
> >>>> On Wed, 27 Sep 2006 almaginnes at aol.com wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>> I'm assuming that jfqz or whoever he is has a real world job like
> mercenary soldier, underwater demolition expert, ER surgeon, helicopter
> pilot, large animal tariner, something spicy and dangerous, unlike the rest
> of us drones whosimply shuffle papers and try to teach people things.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> -----Original Message-----
> >>>>> From: jimgoar at yahoo.com
> >>>>> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> >>>>> Sent: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 9:34 AM
> >>>>> Subject: [New-Poetry] I hate everyone with an MFA
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Just an FYI, an MFA only lasts for 2 or 3 years. After that, and maybe
> even during it, we work like any other stiff. What do you think an MFA does
> after s/he graduates? After I graduated I went to Bangkok for a year and then
> to Seoul for two years. Am going back in a few weeks. Hell guys, this
> argument is lame. You'll miss out on some good poems if you only read folks
> that have/have not gone to an MFA program. Lots of bad poetry being written.
> Just glad that I write the best poetry in the history of the universe.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> A question. What sort of job should I take so that my poetry can be
> even better? What job do you have that makes your poetry so good (though,
> obviously, not as good as mine)?
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Jim
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Get your email and more, right on the new Yahoo.com
> >>>>> _______________________________________________
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> >>>>>
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> >>>>
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> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> -----
> >>> Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer.
> >>> http://www.mikesnider.org/formalblog for the Sonnetarium
> >>> _______________________________________________
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> >>> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
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> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> > -----
> > Sent from webmail, so I'm not at my computer.
> > http://www.mikesnider.org/formalblog for the Sonnetarium
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> 
> 
> 
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