Perhaps the opaque/transparent distinction is helpful here. Meter allows us to enter into the dream of the poem, a more instinctive, imaginative place…
yes, it perhaps has deep roots in shamanic techniques of ecstasy, where repetitive sound & motor drive trance, induce us into the "imaginative place" where gods & ancestors reside. [I'm drawing from John Haule's survey of the ethnography in his Jung book]
the rhythmic rule is, on the one hand, an extra demand, unnecessary as the peacock's tail, so the poet displays linguistic facility when abiding by the rule. it's like reciting a speech while juggling. Geoffrey Miller has a whole chapter on this sort of thing in The Mating Mind, the roots of artistic performance in sexual selection.
the rhythmic rule, on the other hand, might help verse flow for the practiced versifier. the rule in effect renders prosody autonomic, so frees up neural resources for word selection, narrative logic, et cet. and once we get into the rhythm, it induces us into a trance state where words come easily and we, shaman-like, narrate to the tribe from our place in the Dreamworld.
ha! that's the ideal, I guess. mostly we're chewing the end of our pencil, alone at the escritoire.
Monsieur Justice sounds highly worth reading, real insightful!
OK, a few thoughts in response to the larger essay, "Meters and Memory." I'll reiterate that I love Justice's poetry. He's criminally under-read. Really one of the best American poets of the 20th century. But his instincts on meter do seem to me quite wrong. (1.) He's not wrong that, in simple terms, our minds find it easier to remember two related things than one thing on its own. Memory experts and competitors make use of this principle all the time. The memory palace, etc. His relegation of this tendency to mere ornament seems, however, unnecessarily limited. Not to mention his surprising insistence on distinguishing ornament from denotation, which seems in the context of poetry--or maybe art in general--like a pretty basic misapprehension. Surely not suitable to the man who wrote "I say the song went this way: O prolong / Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong." Where, exactly, does ornament end and denotation begin? Or as Yeats put it "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" More on that later. (2.) I agree that it's silly to object to meters as being unrealistic, but it doesn't seem at all true that their function lies in distancing the reader from his reading material, let alone doing so in the goofy and ostentatious manner of comedian's conventional costumes. Very often the meter of a line of poetry makes it feel more rather than less intimately necessary to our experience of life. As Alan Alda has pointed out, people in daily life often speak in a showy, theatrical, expressly artificial fashion, depending on the professional or social context. A Method actor's marble-mouthed grumble is not necessarily any less a confection than the screwball heroine's mile-a-minute patter. Likewise there is no particularly compelling reason why "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow..." should be considered more natural, authentic, or close to experience than "Candy is dandy... / but liquor is quicker..." Sure, some poets endeavor "to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition," but it isn't at all obvious to me that this happens more often in metrical poetry than in free verse. Eliot's vers libre Waste Land comes to mind, of course, and on the other end of things maybe something like Larkin's "Wild Oats," but to return to Justice, I'd offer even the subtle contrast of two of his own (excellent) poems; say, the free-verse "Men at Forty"-"At rest on a stair-landing / They feel it moving / Beneath them now like the deck of a ship, / Though the swell is gentle"--and the metrical, rhyming "The Young Composers's Concert"--"...not that we are awed, exactly; still, // There is something to this beyond mere adult skill. / And if it moves but haltingly down the scales, // It is the more moving just because it fails." (3.) And I'll stop at this point because, as I said, I love Justice and I don't want to belabor (any more) my disagreement with him on this critical question, but he seems to me wildly mistaken when he claims that meters "seem to propose that an emotion, however uncontrollable it may have appeared originally, was not, in fact, unmanageable," though in the complete essay he qualifies this claim almost enough to make it sound reasonable. I could cite here any number of cases, but one that comes immediately to mind is Donne's celebrated Holy Sonnet X, in which he addresses Death directly, making--in meter and rhyme--a series of increasingly desperate and unconvincing boasts and claims, all of which achieve the effect not of persuading the reader that, say, "from rest and sleep, which but [Death's] pictures be, / Much pleasure, then from [Death] much more must flow," but rather that the poem's speaker (and probably the poet as well) is a man caught in an agony of denial and longing in the face of a loved one's death. It moves us--as does, say, Auden's "Funeral Blues"--not so much by its mastery of the subject as for the tension between its failure at mastery and the elegance of the attempt. And again, the longer argument in Justice's essay comes nearer this point than the except alone suggests (not a criticism, Brad--such is the nature of excerpts!). But Justice does seem strangely to believe that there really is an clean distinction to be made between the poem's truth (which he seems to identify with its extractable denotative meaning) and its "ornament." On the contrary, meter is not an obstacle to meaning or a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down (as Lucretius and Mary Poppins would have it). It is rather part of the larger lyric composition that produces an emotional effect in the reader, an effect caused no less by the ring of truth than by the "truth" itself. All right, got to get my daughter into bed. Thanks for this essay and for pointing me to Justice's piece. As I said, I disagree with him here, but he is one of my very favorite poets. Maybe Plato was right, and poets, like athletes, tend not to be the best authorities on their own work.
This is fascinating. I adore Justice’s poetry and am a devoted student of meter, but it seems to me that he gets its use and merits almost exactly wrong in the excerpted quotations. What is the name of this essay?
Brad, I just replied to your comment to my comment on Henry Oliver’s comment on Nabokov. So let me add here that I am also long-time fan of Donald Justice. And you’ve put your finger on one aspect of his appeal for me. The constraints of form, meter etc heighten the beauty of his poetry.
I think that is precisely why jazz works: like metre, the jazz standards, for example, are the stricture without which the emotional content would not flourish meaningfully. (Much jazz is remarkably conservative in that respect, happily.)
Perhaps the opaque/transparent distinction is helpful here. Meter allows us to enter into the dream of the poem, a more instinctive, imaginative place…
yes, it perhaps has deep roots in shamanic techniques of ecstasy, where repetitive sound & motor drive trance, induce us into the "imaginative place" where gods & ancestors reside. [I'm drawing from John Haule's survey of the ethnography in his Jung book]
the rhythmic rule is, on the one hand, an extra demand, unnecessary as the peacock's tail, so the poet displays linguistic facility when abiding by the rule. it's like reciting a speech while juggling. Geoffrey Miller has a whole chapter on this sort of thing in The Mating Mind, the roots of artistic performance in sexual selection.
the rhythmic rule, on the other hand, might help verse flow for the practiced versifier. the rule in effect renders prosody autonomic, so frees up neural resources for word selection, narrative logic, et cet. and once we get into the rhythm, it induces us into a trance state where words come easily and we, shaman-like, narrate to the tribe from our place in the Dreamworld.
ha! that's the ideal, I guess. mostly we're chewing the end of our pencil, alone at the escritoire.
Monsieur Justice sounds highly worth reading, real insightful!
OK, a few thoughts in response to the larger essay, "Meters and Memory." I'll reiterate that I love Justice's poetry. He's criminally under-read. Really one of the best American poets of the 20th century. But his instincts on meter do seem to me quite wrong. (1.) He's not wrong that, in simple terms, our minds find it easier to remember two related things than one thing on its own. Memory experts and competitors make use of this principle all the time. The memory palace, etc. His relegation of this tendency to mere ornament seems, however, unnecessarily limited. Not to mention his surprising insistence on distinguishing ornament from denotation, which seems in the context of poetry--or maybe art in general--like a pretty basic misapprehension. Surely not suitable to the man who wrote "I say the song went this way: O prolong / Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong." Where, exactly, does ornament end and denotation begin? Or as Yeats put it "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" More on that later. (2.) I agree that it's silly to object to meters as being unrealistic, but it doesn't seem at all true that their function lies in distancing the reader from his reading material, let alone doing so in the goofy and ostentatious manner of comedian's conventional costumes. Very often the meter of a line of poetry makes it feel more rather than less intimately necessary to our experience of life. As Alan Alda has pointed out, people in daily life often speak in a showy, theatrical, expressly artificial fashion, depending on the professional or social context. A Method actor's marble-mouthed grumble is not necessarily any less a confection than the screwball heroine's mile-a-minute patter. Likewise there is no particularly compelling reason why "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow..." should be considered more natural, authentic, or close to experience than "Candy is dandy... / but liquor is quicker..." Sure, some poets endeavor "to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition," but it isn't at all obvious to me that this happens more often in metrical poetry than in free verse. Eliot's vers libre Waste Land comes to mind, of course, and on the other end of things maybe something like Larkin's "Wild Oats," but to return to Justice, I'd offer even the subtle contrast of two of his own (excellent) poems; say, the free-verse "Men at Forty"-"At rest on a stair-landing / They feel it moving / Beneath them now like the deck of a ship, / Though the swell is gentle"--and the metrical, rhyming "The Young Composers's Concert"--"...not that we are awed, exactly; still, // There is something to this beyond mere adult skill. / And if it moves but haltingly down the scales, // It is the more moving just because it fails." (3.) And I'll stop at this point because, as I said, I love Justice and I don't want to belabor (any more) my disagreement with him on this critical question, but he seems to me wildly mistaken when he claims that meters "seem to propose that an emotion, however uncontrollable it may have appeared originally, was not, in fact, unmanageable," though in the complete essay he qualifies this claim almost enough to make it sound reasonable. I could cite here any number of cases, but one that comes immediately to mind is Donne's celebrated Holy Sonnet X, in which he addresses Death directly, making--in meter and rhyme--a series of increasingly desperate and unconvincing boasts and claims, all of which achieve the effect not of persuading the reader that, say, "from rest and sleep, which but [Death's] pictures be, / Much pleasure, then from [Death] much more must flow," but rather that the poem's speaker (and probably the poet as well) is a man caught in an agony of denial and longing in the face of a loved one's death. It moves us--as does, say, Auden's "Funeral Blues"--not so much by its mastery of the subject as for the tension between its failure at mastery and the elegance of the attempt. And again, the longer argument in Justice's essay comes nearer this point than the except alone suggests (not a criticism, Brad--such is the nature of excerpts!). But Justice does seem strangely to believe that there really is an clean distinction to be made between the poem's truth (which he seems to identify with its extractable denotative meaning) and its "ornament." On the contrary, meter is not an obstacle to meaning or a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down (as Lucretius and Mary Poppins would have it). It is rather part of the larger lyric composition that produces an emotional effect in the reader, an effect caused no less by the ring of truth than by the "truth" itself. All right, got to get my daughter into bed. Thanks for this essay and for pointing me to Justice's piece. As I said, I disagree with him here, but he is one of my very favorite poets. Maybe Plato was right, and poets, like athletes, tend not to be the best authorities on their own work.
Oh, and I almost entirely agree with his case against both positive and negative arguments from metrical “imitation theory”! Hear, hear.
This is fascinating. I adore Justice’s poetry and am a devoted student of meter, but it seems to me that he gets its use and merits almost exactly wrong in the excerpted quotations. What is the name of this essay?
What's your view about its use and merits?
Just found the essay, so I’ll read it before replying…
"Meters and Memory"
Brad, I just replied to your comment to my comment on Henry Oliver’s comment on Nabokov. So let me add here that I am also long-time fan of Donald Justice. And you’ve put your finger on one aspect of his appeal for me. The constraints of form, meter etc heighten the beauty of his poetry.
Thanks!
I think that is precisely why jazz works: like metre, the jazz standards, for example, are the stricture without which the emotional content would not flourish meaningfully. (Much jazz is remarkably conservative in that respect, happily.)