Poetry and Posterity V

The Practice of Poetry

This is the final part of the Poetry and Posterity series. The preceding parts can be found here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

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Towards the Enjoyment of Poems

Up to this point, the series has excoriated failure and lamented destruction. The present piece, however, looks to convalescence. Poetry really is a wonderful thing. It’s easy to indulge in agonizing over its demise. When the beloved’s face is marred, one naturally worries about the scar, and it is needless to mention the censorious wrath incurred by her mistreatment. The defacement of beauty is not merely an abomination but an injustice. I hope, then, that my indulgences have been understandable. What remains before us is much harder work than pontification or theoretical analysis. We are left to the Practice of Poetry. 

Fortunately, that is where the true gold lies. It’s in the lines, mingled among the rhymes, captured by the syllabic heartbeat pumping the lifeblood of poesy. Which is precisely where we must begin. We start by giving ample attention to the lines which amuse, embolden, pacify and amaze us. The crucial words being “ample attention.” A poem, above all, requires the chance to spring alive. Which means you must give it your time and energy—that is, contemplation. It must be considered and weighed. It must be felt and known. A man who has only read a poem once, has not truly read it. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also begets affection. The reader must reproduce the poem within himself. It must come to birth. Allow me then, to be the midwife.

Our goal is to enjoy poetry. Academic exercises are good and useful, but let them be subordinate. The Academy should supply aid and shelter for poetry. It can even critique poetry, but it should never engender poetry’s destruction. Indeed, critical standards are important, as men should have appetites for good poems. A man should consume what is befitting him; Neither returning to vomit as a dog or counterwise, ingesting the flower of the lotophage. By which I mean, neither the poetry of detritus and disgust, nor self-gratification and saccharinity. However with that being said, a man ought enjoy the good just as much as he ought not reckon bad as good. Then with our eyes trained on the horizon of delight, let us, east of Eden, make our way.

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The Simple Pleasures of Poetry

Now, let’s begin at the beginning with a moment of reflection and appreciation for the simple pleasures of poetry. The first delights of poetry are essentially those of song. It’s the jingle-jangle of connecting euphonious words. It’s the rhythmic recurrence of up-and-down’s—like bouncing a child on one’s knee. It’s the “ring of the bell” each time a rhyme goes off. It is in the auditory medium, the physical medium, where we paint our first strokes. The most immediately gratifying beauties are captured in the ear.

Philosophically, the physical medium of poetry correlates to the fact that we are a physical being. The invisible word is made material by the act of the tongue. Pronunciation manifests the immaterial into physicality. It recruits the teeth, the palette, the throat and the breath to fashion an actual thing—like an ark pushing off and sailing through the air. We are not mere minds, we are bodies, and poetry is a premier medium to express that fundamental truth.

If we wish to study a pure subject that explores raw embodiment, we must focus our vision where poetry initially enters our lives—the nursery rhyme. The nursery rhyme is the first rung on the poetic ladder. Even if we wish to climb higher, we must always take the first step. Nursery rhyme is sheer practice, sheer word, sheer convention. There’s no title, no author and no pretense. It survives on tactile joy alone. And some of them carry hundreds of years of editing and refinement. We’ll start with a favorite of mine—the concluding couplet of “Oranges and Lemons”:

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“Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”

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I’ve loved these two lines ever since the first time I read them. Encountering them first in text as opposed to song is strange, of course, but it wasn’t one of my nursery rhymes. It’s an English song and it only makes sense in England as it is about the various church bells around London. Here’s the line from which the title comes from: 

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“Oranges and Lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clemens”

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The final couplet has always captivated me. In addition to being amusingly morbid (which happens to be to my taste) the lines have several characteristics which make it good, and which I would like to draw your attention towards. Here is a scansion, so that you can see how it is supposed to be read: 

Also, this is basically how it is sung, you just have to add in the melody line. The slashes indicate where you place the accent, which is to say which syllables get more emphasis.

This couplet is almost hypnotic, and it’s certainly delightful. Initially, we can examine the logical organization. The first line is about going to bed and not only that, but having a candle so you can see where you’re going. It conveys peace, safety and rest. The second line achieves some breakneck irony as it is about being decapitated. The sharpness and severity of the reversal (the thrust-counterthrust) creates the effect which engages our attention. This irony could have multiple effects, but several prosodic features control the tone to achieve a comedic or amusing outcome.

The ironic juxtaposition of pleasing banality and sudden morbidity creates much of the effect. However we can see how the anapestic bounce of the meter helps craft the humorous tone. Also “chopper to chop” does a majority of the heavy lifting in this regard. 

As for the hypnotic quality, observe the repetition in these lines: 

Three hard “c” sounds, two here’s, three to’s, two chop’s and finally the rhymes. This repetition induces a spell-like fixation. You may find yourself randomly repeating these lines while you’re walking, doing dishes or taking a shower. Just like you might do with song lyrics. The heightening of repetition lends itself to a trance-like, attention grabbing conjuration of words. This poetic fundamental can be extended to larger patterns of repetition such as the stanza, or even buried in the sense units across long stretches of verse. Here we can observe it in an immediate and potent form.

I’d like to draw your attention to the fragility of this line. I would contend that the word “chopper” is necessary for the success of this couplet. Observe what happens when the word is changed:

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Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a knife to chop off your head!

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Even though the sense is maintained, “knife” spoils the line. For one, it drops a syllable, affecting the meter. It interrupts the anapestic gallop. Not necessarily a bad thing, but in this case, a negative change. Secondly, it’s not funny. Observe what happens when both sense and meter are maintained:

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Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a cleaver to chop off your head! 

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“Cleaver” keeps the sense and the meter, but the humor is still lost, as is the repetition of “chop.” Once again we’ve crafted an inferior line. When language is versified, it is heightened to a degree where words become very unique, to the point of irreplaceability. This feature of verse bestows words with a great deal of power and expressive ability. In competent hands, words begin to crack like thunder and blind like lightning. A good poet sharpens words to such a degree, that as the reader reads, he bleeds.   

Alright, here’s another favorite of mine:

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Hinx, Minx, the Old Witch winks,
The fat begins to fry.

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There’s something delightfully enchanting about this one. “Hinx, Minx” are like abracadabra words—talismans that can mean almost anything; And once again we have repetition. The meter is expertly controlled in this couplet. The first line has a relatively slow pace, which is then sped up by the second. The expectation set by the first line is opposed by the second, but it doesn’t break, and we’re left with a hypnotic little couplet. 

What I’d like to show with this example is that despite the particulars which we have been discussing, there is indeed something that we can abstract. There’s a pattern here which we can take out of the couplet and approximate. Here’s my attempt:

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Hip, Hop, the Fat Frog pops,
The toads all jump in time.

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It’s fairly close to a similar effect. At least it strikes me as having a formal similarity that “harmonizes” with the original. The first thing I’d like to note is what features have been abstracted and re-particularized in the new verse. The meter has been kept, and attempts at retaining the alliteration, rhetorical structure, sense order, and tone have been made. 

Secondly, I’d like to compare and contrast the two couplets in order that we might examine the sundry complexities that make up a verse.

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Hinx, Minx, the Old Witch winks,
The fat begins to fry.

Hip, Hop, the Fat Frog pops,
The toads all jump in time.

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Notice that I kept the “Hinx, Minx” structure with “Hip, Hop” however I dropped the rhyme in favor of rhetorical sense and alliteration. The alliteration of “Witch winks” was transferred to “Fat Frog.” “Fat” and “fry” were kept with the alliterative “toads” and “time.” “Begins” however was broken into two words with “all jump.” Additionally the logical structure was maintained in that the first line directly causes the second. However, despite how many features were kept, the two verses ultimately differ in tone and effect to no small degree.

I would like to drive home the fact that there are a great many little things going on, and precisely, that these little things serve to define the identity of these verses. All these little characteristics fashion the voice of poetry. Just in these short few lines of no great stature there are an abundance of complexities and shades of texture. Despite this cornucopia of particulars, we can still abstract a pattern from the verse, which means we can get a language out of it, and that this language allows convention and communication to emerge with the practice of poetry.

A few more for good measure:

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Ring around the rosie,
Pocket full of posies,
Ashes Ashes,
We all fall down!

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This one survived into my own childhood. Written in perfect trochaic meter. Notice again the repetition and alliteration employed. Might I draw your attention to the game of this poem? When you sing, in unison, the final line, everyone is supposed to throw themselves to the ground. In this case, we do not merely embody the verse with our speech, but also we materialize it in a bodily act. It’s a very dramatic and visible connection between body and word—action and poesy.  

The popular practice of simple prosodic pleasures continues even into the 20th Century:

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I do not like them,
Sam-I-am.
I do not like
Green eggs and ham.

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The hypnos of repetition in practice. Notice the effect Seuss achieves by taking a syllable from the second line and placing in it the first. He’s manipulating our expectations by fiddling with the line break. This is not to mention the repetitious and hexing “Sam-I-am.” Almost devilish if I don't say so myself. 

The point I wish to make with all this is to affirm the validity of the simple pleasures of poetry. I hope to have said a few words in favor of constructing basic pleasing sounds; And perhaps to have hinted at the transfixing power that these verses display. If one desires to say something, it behooves him to pay attention to how things are said. Also, as I think is apparent, these simple pleasures are not exactly so simple. Indeed, there are quite a few complexities at play. As I said before, we ought to give verse ample attention, and if we can attend to children’s rhymes, we can attend to more mature verses as well.

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Poetic Pleasures in Practice

We can observe that the poetic pleasures of nursery rhymes continue into more serious verse. Take a gander at this:

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Gascoigne’s Lullaby

And lullaby my wanton will;
Let reason's rule now reign thy thought;
Since all too late I find by skill
How dear thy fancies I have bought;
With lullaby now take thine ease;
With lullaby thy doubts appease;
For trust to this, if thou be still,
My body shall obey thy will.

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This poem has stuck around in anthologies 400 years after its composition. (This is only an excerpt, as many of the following examples will be.) Notice the employment of the techniques we’ve already discussed. 

Or how about this one, an even older, authorless ballad:

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Wife of Usher’s Well

There lived a wife at Usher’s Well,
And a wealthy wife was she;
She had three stout and stalwart sons,
And sent them o’er the sea.

They hadna been a week from her,
A week but barely ane,
Whan word came to the carline wife,
That her three sons were gane.

They hadna been a week from her
A week but barely three,
Whan word came to the carlin wife,
That her sons she’d never see.

*	*	*	*	*

“Fare ye weel, my mother dear!
Fareweel to barn and byre!
And fare ye weel, the bonny lass,
That kindles my mother’s fire.”

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Maybe these don’t strike you as beautiful, but I find them to be a delightful, deep well to draw from—both refreshing and sweet. They may lack the imagistic bewilderment of modern verse or the raw emotion of contemporary poetry, but do they not swell with beauty, on the language alone? Can we really discard ornament and rhyme for plainness? Can this language, in truth, be written off as cliché? Or would we be committing an injustice?

Let’s compare. Here are a few “up to date” poems. Ones that are certainly not cliché, no. Here’s a few “masters” of the craft. Tell me, is this preferable?

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A New National Anthem

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always, there is war and bombs.)

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Ada Limon, this is a Poet Laureate, mind you. I shudder in awe at the luminous profundity of “Always, always there is war and bombs.” I’m moved to tears. Yeah, tears of regret that this poem exists.  The reader is made to suffer pontification, petulance, and ugliness, all without a hint of delight. 

Tell me, is this a better poem than “Wife of Usher’s Well”?

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Apollo

We pull off
to a road shack
in Massachusetts
to watch men walk

on the moon. We did   
the same thing
for three two one
blast off, and now

we watch the same men   
bounce in and out
of craters. I want
a Coke and a hamburger.

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An Elizabeth Alexander beauty. Oh yes, scintillating. 

Those are bad poems. Here is my rejoinder—an actual good poem. I refute them thus:

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I Need, I Need
 
I wish I was a pifflebob
I wish I was a funny
I wish I had ten thousand hats,
And made a lot of money.

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With merely four lines of nonsense, Theodore Roethke triumphs over both of them. Roethke, with his pifflebobs, writes a poem that delights me, and one that I remember. His verse is fun, enjoyable, and sprightly. The previous two poems, frankly, are artless. They are indulgent and licentious. They offer me nothing. Roethke’s verse is a proper artifact. The other two are merely linguistic secretions from their authors. It’s not hard to vomit words that tangentially reflect the mood you are in; And worse, both of these simulate form in order to achieve validity. They are formal in appearance only, which is to say: They are fake—and stupid. 

And speaking of stupid:

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you have sadness 
living in places
sadness shouldn’t live

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A Rupi Kaur stunner. Take long pauses after each line to really enhance the asininity. The vapid, self-importance wafts off of this like hot air off a hog pen. Listen, you know this is crap. Her own audience knows its crap. It’s my understanding that at least some of her readership, upon retrospect, realized they got bamboozled. Fads fade, that’s a fact. If you want to read something worthwhile, that can stand the test of time, here:

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My bonny lass, thine eye,
        So sly,
Hath made me sorrow so:
Thy crimson cheeks, my dear,
        So clear,
Have so much wrought my woe.

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From Thomas Lodge. It’s got meter, rhyme, evocative language, punctuation—you know, the basics; And it’s leagues better than Kaur’s vacuity. 

Art compels judgment. Weaseling out of the responsibility to judge, to weigh, is a failure of courage, and an injustice. Now, we are imperfect beings, which means we will judge imperfectly. Do we then, to avoid that thorny problem, cast away judgment? Or, as we have done in the 20th century, develop a sterile criticism that can only make distinctions, devoid of the ability to determine value? Or, like what has arisen in the 21st century, succumb to the enslavement of a degrading, deranged, hostile invert-morality, which is governed by -isms spawned from the incestuous den of blood-eaters that is the Whore of Babylon’s nethers? I would say not.

We must judge art, even if imperfectly. We must find our courage and risk injustice by speaking wrongly of a piece of art. We can, of course, attempt to ameliorate this predicament by being humble, and speaking gently; But we must forge ahead. This advice may be of help: Strict in Theory, Lenient in Practice. We ought to adhere to the highest maxims of art, without even slight deviation, but in practice, it may be wise to be accepting of even moderate quality, if the art is indeed oriented towards and animated by the Good. Counterwise, a sort of preliminary prejudice will be of use, in order to weed out art which ought not be attended to, because certain art has been created for the purposes of destroying distinction and judgment. Poetry and Criticism must be protected to be fruitful—like a castle encompassing an orchard; Stern borders for a cultivated interior.   

Now, so that I might provide one last piece of evidence to prosecute my case against artlessness, I present you with the linguistic pleasures of a triumph in English poetry:

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Spenser’s Epithalamion

Loe where she comes along with portly pace
Lyke Phoebe from her chamber of the East,
Arysing forth to run her mighty race,
Clad all in white, that seemes a virgin best.
So well it her beseemes that ye would weene
Some angell she had beene.
Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre,
Sprinckled with perle, and perling flowres a tweene,
Doe lyke a golden mantle her attyre,
And being crowned with a girland greene,
Seeme lyke some mayden Queene.

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Refining the Instrument

Among the points I wish to make is that the formal elements of verse are not cumbersome strictures, but sensitive instruments. English verse has a long and rich history, the forms which have been fashioned therein, were made for a reason. The forms and various levels of linguistic organization coalesced to create a language. This is a heightened language that is more exhaustive of the language itself than straight prose or common speech. The purpose of verse is to say things that could not be said otherwise. It is to express something, using this heightened language, in a manner that imbues the words with a fuller identity and experiential thickness. When a good poet writes, he grants his words increased significance and an elevated emotional payload. He can do so to the point that words and lines achieve such thickness that they begin to feel akin to powerful material objects; Like a spell or incantation, the heightened words feel as more than they are, as if they have the ability to affect reality. 

Due to this power, poetic form implies responsibility. On a base level, the poet is a steward of the verse-form. It seems to me that recent English verse has faltered on at least two levels of importance. The first is the technical form of the verse. Poets have seemingly put less and less care into the composition of their verse, specifically the organization of their words. The contemporary practice of poetry is, bluntly, the projection of the self. It is about extending your own personage onto the page. The poet recites their verse to say, “This is me.” Gradually this procedure has developed increasingly pungent levels of autistic narcissism. I can look on in sympathy, as I believe the motivation for this is search for definition. This mode of verse asks the question, “Who am I?’ and attempts an answer in self-definition.

Unfortunately this is less the practice of poetry and more the practice of therapeutic self-affirmation. These goals motivate the organizing principles of our verse-forms. In practice, these motivations compel the removal of forms because they get in the way of the self expressing itself as itself. The “boundaries” of traditional verse-forms push against assimilation. As tools of distinction are removed from verse (such as even fundamentals like punctuation, capitalization, rhetorical patterns, or patterns in general), verse slips further into pure liquidity. The perfect fluidity of unbounded verse dissolves distinction. In an astounding answer to the problem of defining the self, a solution is found in the dissolution of definition itself. You don’t have to answer a question that no longer exists. The point I’d like to make is that technical form has been discarded because it is at loggerheads with the contemporary poet’s purposes.

The second area of stewardship that has faltered is the moral end of poetry. If the poet’s aim is “to teach and delight” the poet has a responsibility towards both parts of that statement. In the attention already given to nursery rhymes, I have meant to lay out the first steps of delight by encouraging a positive attitude towards the simple pleasures of verse. Now, as for teaching, the contemporary poet has adopted what could almost be called an ontological selfish cosmic position. If we wish to begin contemplating the moral purpose of poetry, that selfish position will need to be inverted to a selfless orientation towards the artifact. The poet’s vision must encompass not only themselves, but others, and also the past, the future, the present, the just, the good, the truth and God.   

The value of poetry is that it is “Everything, All at Once” this is also why it is difficult to practice. A poem is not merely its words, rhymes, conceits, meter or images; It is an organic unity that houses all these things. Poetic-form is one half of the partnership between Convention and License. These two “magnetic poles” engage in a dynamic, counterpunctual relationship wherein poetry can be birthed. This environment allows poems to climb higher towards “Everything, All at Once.” It is a finer instrument than either tired Convention or solipsistic License alone. 

We have received an inheritance of the English verse. We ought to look after it, and attempt to understand it better, both for ourselves and for those we pass it on to. We ought to task ourselves with understanding both verse itself, and its effect on us and language in general; With our aim being to leave it in better shape than when we received it. Refining our verse involves refining our language, which involves refining our contemplation. At this point, in our time and culture, we are a ways off from refining contemplation—you can’t improve something you don’t do. We can begin then, with our poems, with an attempt to thicken our language by the practice of poetry. 

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The Re-Birth of Belief

Beyond theory and practice is faith. Faith is a much more difficult ask than literary study. More clearly, what I am asking is this: Have faith in the poem. At some point we must have faith that the poem is capable of saying something worthwhile. It takes faith to constrain one’s self to rhyme or meter, and believe that on the other side, meaning will emerge. It takes faith to believe that there are mysteries in words and rhyme is a detective. Indeed, at base, one must have faith that language can say something real, and that poetically organized language can speak and discover truth. It takes faith to believe in the intelligibility and order of existence.

It is a matter of faith that inspiration exists; And that it comes from without. The true poet is driven by the divine mania, a blessed madness, to expression. His soul surges forth, as he is put out of his wits, into the numinous mode of exploration familiar to prophets and seers. The genuineness of this phenomenon insists interrogation of both materialist assumptions and the hubristic assertion that we write the laws of Nature. Poetry suggests that man is a receptive being, and more so, that he is receptive to a force that is actually external—a transcendent voice from beyond.

There is no salvation in poetry, that is true. No matter how hard we try, Poetry can’t rhyme away Death; And this is a blessing, if Poetry was salvation, then we would all be damned. The question is, if like ourselves, it can be redeemed, what role should poetry play? At the upper limits of poetry is the beginning of sacrament. After Poetry’s clarifying guidance through the sinful depths of the inferno and its cathartic pains upon the ascent of purgatory, it continues to thrust the soul upwards towards embracing the sacramental union of heaven and earth at the gates of paradise. If we wish for poetry to possess cosmic significance, I see no better model to proffer.

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