Guest Post for
Michael Brookes
Goodreads Writing
Group
On June 1, 2013, I was honored to be named the
Featured Poet for the 12th Annual
Allen Ginsberg Memorial Open Mic Poetry
Marathon in Seattle. For the past twelve years poet and archivist Paul Nelson has
engineered this event. Paul has the pulse of poetry in the universe. He’s been
a guest poet in China, he’s interviewed Ginsberg, McClure, and has written
about the Projective Verse poets of the Black Mountain school—Charles Olson,
Creeley, and Duncan among others. His two books: Before Slaughter, poems, and Organic
Poetry—American Field Poetics are landmark works. Paul’s goal is to keep it
coming—poetry is the heart beat, the blood, the juice of the modern idiom. The
marathon is just one aspect of his dedication to poetry.You want to evoke extraordinary images using ordinary words.
Modern Poetics
Are
all modern poetics personal?
By
Jack
Remick
Ask
most poets about their poetics and it’s hard to get an answer.
Is
there an esthetic base we can all use, or has the notion of free verse broken
us loose so that each poet has a poetics that serves that poet alone? Rather
than sit down with pen and “critique” holding to some phantom notion of “poem”
can you start with a set of elements and write from it?
The
Imagists—Pound, HD, Amy Lowell, Aldington—searched for luminous details—gave us
“free verse” Almost all modern poetry is “free verse.” Imagists looking for a
new poetics attacked the old work:
Take
away strict meter.
Take
away poeticisms.
Take
away stanzaic structure.
Take
away blank verse
And
they said you end up with the image.
Where
does a modern poetics start? Three
words—
Tell. Show.
Evoke
What
is an image? An image is something
you can see.
Two
phrases from Latin remind us that this isn’t a new idea:
Poema pictura
loquens, pictura poema silens—a poem (poetry) should be a speaking painting, a
painting should be a silent poem.
Ut pictura
poesis-- As is painting so is poetry.
Pound
calls it the luminous detail. It SHINES, we SEE it.
You
start with the line. What is a line?
Pound
writes about the Image as LUMINOUS DETAIL.
Ezra
Pound was half-right. Image is the center of the poetic line just as the verb
is the heart of the sentence.
A
poetic line possibly and I say possibly
starts with two elements:
Image and Action.
Image
means Concrete nouns, Action means strong verbs. It’s hard to evoke an image
using abstract nouns.
For
example: if you write—
She
believes in Jesus. Belief isn’t action.
But
if you write: She carved a cross on her chest. You can see it.
Concrete
nouns are objects you can see.
Strong
verbs evoke action.
The
modern poet is looking for an economy of means (the relationship of
screenwriting to poetry here) You want to do the most with the least.
Is
there something in the English language that will point us a way to get the
modern line without relying on the elements that Pound and the Imagists rejected?
Today,
some writers, are hungry for something to hold onto because, just maybe,
they’re disillusioned with Free Verse—What Is It?—and those writers are turning
back to rime and meter.
There’s
nothing wrong with that, the poet needs to use all the tools available,
BUT…I
think the language is still alive and can give us everything we need to work up
a modern poetics—that is some techniques that go beyond the personal.
The
modern poem, if it's not built of meter and stanza, might, after settling on
Image and Action, have these elements:
BEAT
BREATH
RHYTHM
Beat
(does not equal meter. but is related to hammered stress) We take advantage of
the floating stress pattern of English to focus on the strong beat.
Breath. (Turn the line
on the vowel, you can only sing vowels.)
Rhythm (rhythm can be
built on rhetorical devices—a couple we use are:
Anaphora—repetition
of a word at the beginning of a line
Epistrophe—repetition
of a word at the end of a line
Conduplication
– tracking a noun or a verb through the
poem.
If
we accept the rhetorical devices as rhythm-givers, we can look back to the
deeper past to see how the Bards and Skalds and Scops handled the image. We
take what we need from the past and adapt it to our modern voice.
We
go forward by looking to the past—
So—I
offer this: A poem is a musical moving picture
We
look first for Music and Pictures…
We
work the beat –those strong stresses inherent in English
We
work the rhythm—we build lines using one or more rhetorical devices
We
work the breath line.
And
last, we look at story or the narrative line. (Echoes of MacLeish here: A poem
should be not mean.)
English
is still alive and very powerful and we can tap into that power if we listen to
the basics of English for word-formation:
We
create Kennings--metaphors of
metaphors. Tiny poems of two words that get beyond the sense of either word
separately. Kennings have strong evocative power:
For
example: the Nordic poets developed systems of kennings--
Battle=Arrow-storm;
Ocean=whale-road.
We
use kennings all the time in modern English but you don’t think of them as
anything special:
Sky-scraper;
air-plane;
space-craft
flesh-fish—what is
a flesh-fish?
word-wound—what is
a word-wound?
Summary
for the Beginning of a Modern Poetics: We develop Hard, concise, precise images –that Luminous Detail--and we Set them in motion.
We look at the natural stress pattern of English
which floats. Spanish has penultimate stress. French no stress so they count
syllables.
We
look at the strong beat on the word, do not build the line on meter but on
strong stress. Don’t care how many off-beats, so let the strong beats carry the
line.
We
Look at Three part alliteration or more if you have the guts to push it.
We
strive for Assonance instead of driven rime which often distorts the language
beat and rhythm and sometimes falsifies the hemistich.
We
search for vowel harmony which can derive from anagrammatic playfulness of
which the transposition doublet is the simplest example.
An
example: bardic froth gushes forth from my word-wound….
This
from Root of the Hoard:
I am horde-hammerer, shaper of the
unheard.
I am instrument honed flesh-fish
sharp.
Bardic froth gushes forth from my
word-wound
Sweep of swallow-singing. I am
rooted in this tongue.
Its words rise up a bulwark of
ancient rhythms
all that I am, it will make me--
What is mine, is not mine but power
given,
crafting in me, crush and
build—angle-image
seeks light and sound, fills this
Saxon-son
civilized by cogs, wheels, living in
sky-needles.
I carve word-roads through the
universe of rime
create maps of labyrinthine coil.
Claim the treasures locked in my own
dark cells.
The
kennings are: horde-hammerer, flesh-fish, word-wound angle-image, sky-needles,
word-roads.
The
transposition doublet is: Forth/Froth. I have a list of others I've developed.
Purpose--to develop vowel harmony or euphonic integrity which negates the need
for rime.
Three
part alliteration (highly modified): horde-hammerer/unheard; sweep,
swallow-singing.
Anaphora
is: I am horde-hammerer; I am instrument
Conduplication
is: I am, I am, all that I am. (note it dovetails well with anaphora for a
weaving effect)
Assonance
is: wheels/needles. (Read Wilfred Owen for an introduction to assonance)
All
of this, if you read it aloud shows you that you don't need either meter or
stanza to create hard hitting poetry. Breath, beat, rhythm, story. Music first,
story last.
Jack is also the author of his novel 'Blood', find out more below:
Ex-mercenary Hank Mitchell gets five years hard time for stealing a tubful of women's underwear. In prison, Mitch finds the peace he needs to write his own story—a saga of family deception, sexual obsession, and contract killing. Now his time is up and his family want him?out and back in the killing game …
Buy Blood now from Amazon
Affiliate links help fund the monthly short fiction contests on this blog
Ex-mercenary Hank Mitchell gets five years hard time for stealing a tubful of women's underwear. In prison, Mitch finds the peace he needs to write his own story—a saga of family deception, sexual obsession, and contract killing. Now his time is up and his family want him?out and back in the killing game …
Buy Blood now from Amazon
Affiliate links help fund the monthly short fiction contests on this blog
We were delighted to have Jack Remick feature at the 12th Ginsberg Marathon (see: http://splab.org/2013/06/12th-ginsberg-marathon/) and I am impressed with his take on poetics. I don't think there is anything I disagree with here and it is a good nuts and bolts for an poet writing in English today. Very well done, Jack.
ReplyDeleteI would add that there developed in 20th Century USAmerican poetics, from Williams and Olson, to Duncan, Levertov, McClure and the TISH poets of Vancouver, BC, a notion of Projective Verse or Organic Poetry. In this "the way to the universal is by means of the most intensely personal" (McClure) and it is "a use of speech at its least careless and least logical" (Olson) and it is where "form is never more than a revelation of content" (Levertov). More at www.organicpoetry.org
That the form of the poem would evolve as the poem is composed, or is one choice made as one is making a poem, is part of the charge of the organic approach. Robin Blaser's essay: "The Practice of Outside" also gives good direction and I just finished re-reading that and will get something on my blog here before too long. www.PauleNelson.com
That we should remember Pound's Logopoeia, Phanopoeia, Melopoeia is important, but also Noopoeia, which George Oppen suggested was sudden revelation in the poem, and other poeias collected by Ed Sanders in the Naropa Disembodied Poetics book of essays.
Thanks for this, Jack and for all you do.
Thanks for the comment, my knowledge of poetry is limited to my love of Paradise Lost, but it was a pleasure featuring Jack.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteMichael: Paul, the quintessential poet, always pays his dues. He knows we didn't get here by ourselves. He knows that without poetry, we're just a band of hunters.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting these pieces about poetry and thank you for including the link to Blood. For your readers who might be interested in connecting the words to a voice, here's a reading of the opening of Blood, the novel: http://blood.camelpress.com/?attachment_id=200
The driving force behind contemporary poety is concreteness. "Professional" poets tend to use concrete language and few psychological or emotional terms.
ReplyDeletewww.poetryassessor.com
Good comment, Michael D.
ReplyDeleteMichael D: I ran four poems through your calculator.
ReplyDeletePoem score
The Second Coming 1.6
Coyote 2.0
fugue for 3 AM 1.9
Memory of Wood 3.6
the three contemporary poems scored higher than Yeats' The Second Coming. The three contempo pieces are all written using the techniques outlined in the piece Michael B. posted. This is an interesting business.
I then ran Tetelestai which calculated out at 0.4.
even more interesting.