the rhythms
of the “language” poets
by Douglas Messerli
Charles Bernstein Parsing (New
York: Asylum’s Press, 1976)
Ted Greenwald The Licorice
Chronicles (New York: The Kulcher Foundation, 1979)
There is a recurring and
near-prevailing attitude in contemporary poetics—especially in the academy—that
a harmful disjuncture between prosody and American poetry has occurred. Writing
in a recent issue of Paideuma on Ezra
Pound’s metrics, Sally M. Gall exemplifies this attitude when she claims:
Over the course of a few
generations we have arrived at a dis-
embodied realm where students,
professors, scholars, critics, and,
I fear, some “poets” seem unable
to hear the rhythms of the spoken
word. Part of the blame must be
laid on an educational system that
has forgotten how to teach poetry
as an art. And part must be laid
on the proliferation of poets who
are completely uninterested in
musical values, and…practice a
fundamentally non-musical free
verse. (Paideuma, VII [Spring 1979])
As early as 1961 John Crowe Ransom
took a position very similar to Gall’s when he wrote, “It is strange that a
generation of critics so sensitive and ingenious as ours should have turned out
very backward, indeed phlegmatic, when it comes to hearing the music of poetry,
or at least, to avoid misunderstanding, to hearing its meters. The only way to
escape the sense of a public scandal is to assume that the authority of the
meters is passing, or is passed, because we have become jaded by the meters….
(“The Strange Music of English Verse,” in Hemphill, ed., Discussions of Poetry: Rhythm and Sound, 1969). And more recently,
Donald Hall has argued that “It is a characteristic flaw among young Americans,
however accomplished and innovative, to lack resourceful sound. Tin ears make bad alloy with golden metaphors” (“Reading the
English: The Continental Drift of the Poetics,” in Parnassus, Spring/Summer 1979). John Hollander has gone so far as
to describe our age, in terms of metrics, as being so stylistically anarchic
that “one almost feels that a poem need be defined as any utterance that
purports to be one” (“The Metrical Frame,” in Gross, ed., The Structure of Modern Verse: Modern Essays on Prosody, 1979).
Whether or not one agrees with these attitudes—and I should imagine that
any reader of contemporary (or, for that matter, of modern) poetry can point to
one or more examples of poets who have little sense of whatever one defines as
rhythm—what underlies statements such as these is the idea that prosody is a
dying art, and that critics interested in it have little choice but to turn
their attentions upon those few poets still writing in traditional metrics or
upon poets of the past.
This sense of contemporary American poetry having abandoned prosody is
reinforced, it seems to me, by the fact that when there have been attempts to
bridge the perceived “gap,” the tendency, as Michael Davidson has observed, has
been “to read contemporary verse in terms of what can be counted” (“Advancing
Measures: Conceptual Quantities and Open Forms,” a manuscript read at the
Modern Language Annual Convention, 1979). Paul Fussell, for instance, argues
that the best of contemporary American and British poets “have returned to a
more or less stable sort of Yeatsian accentual-syllabism,” which makes “the
metrical radicalism of the 1920s” look “every day more naïve aesthetically….”
(“The Historical Dimension,” in Gross, 1979). In The Book of Forms, Lewis Turco even defines English-language free verse as “more often than not…iambic,
or iambic-anapestic.” However, while such notions of metrics may be applicable
to a number of contemporary American poets working in a kind of vaguely
conceived free verse, these statements shed no light upon the works of a large
number of poets writing since 1950 who, taking their cue from Pound, have
sought not only to “break the pentameter,’’ but to break other metical patterns
as well. In fact, an “extreme” of this poetic tendency, represented by the
“Language” group (a broad gathering of poets such as Charles Bernstein, Ted
Greenwald, Bruce Andrews, Ray DiPalma, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Bob
Perelman, James Sherry, and myself), has struggled in its poetry against the whole
notion of counting, against any fixed metrical measure or structure. Bernstein,
one of the most vocal advocates of “Language” concerns, explained recently in a
telephone conversation of October 7, 1980: “I am not interested in counting,
but losing count. I want to so
involve the reader in the reading experience that he or she will lose all
count.”
As an alternative to “counting,” Davidson argues that in contemporary
poetry one must look at prosody not as a concept of measure, but as a concept
of “number,” “A play of ratios which occurs not at the level of the counted
foot or even line, but, as Donald Wesling points out, at the level of the
‘whole poem!” I think Davidson’s thinking here is basically correct; but in
arguing this, he really moves away from Melopoeia—the
traditional focus of prosody—into broader issues of genre and Logopoeia (what Pound described as the
“dance of the intellect among the words,” akin to Aristotle’s lexis), and through these concerns into
issues of meaning. Davidson admits that such elements “may fall more properly
within the domain of the linguist or literary theorist than that of the
prosodist….”
Poets of the “Language” group, in fact, do take poetry in a direction
away from melos into logos. Bernstein even describes “the
music of poetry” as “the music of meaning” (“Semblance,” later collected in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984,
1986), a music of content. For Bernstein, as Don Byrd has said of the poetry of
Louis Zukofsky, “the music of the poetry is just the experience of sound coming
to mean something” (“Getting Ready to Read ‘A,’” a paper delivered at the
Modern Language Association Annual Convention, 1979). Accordingly, issues of
prosody are seen as being inseparable from the overall structure of the poems.
This is not to suggest, however, that writers such as Bernstein or Ted
Greenwald are disinterested in prosodic values. It is only that, because no one
prosodic device is given primacy, it is impossible in some “Language’ poems to
isolate any one or series as such. To speak of prosodic “devices” belies an
attitude contrary to that of such “Language” works. Prosody in a typical
Bernstein or Greenwald poem does not support
or even contribute to the meaning,
but makes up the meaning, is meaning itself; it is less a device
than the very process by which the poem comes into being.
The following selections from Bernstein’s first book Parsing (1976), and from Greenwald’s
influential volume Licorice Chronicles
(1979) may better help one to understand how prosody functions in such works.
the snow,
flakes,
this parsing of the world
to make worlds & worlds
like atmospheres
a substance, of
gravity
that pulls apart
or back on
i slept then, i bathed on wednesdays also
the feta cheese
the mozzarella marzipan
the seedless eye brown pencils
was waiting for the
bust &
was on the
telephone
gyroscope, sleeping binge
was
hiding in a rock,
crystal, postcard
was a blue flame,
a grammar booklet, an asure
azalea
(Parsing)
coordinating cities gulls still
gull, and, arms binged with wine, as wine
pin roars in galeforce over lines,
horizon on gum letting loose a brack
of crickets by the door
near lowering eyes of a schooled
quench
begging for a glass of water, and I
sit watching
a jar of water with grass
in it watching amoebas swimming
around and, I conclude
everything far as jar or jars is
concerned is
plain dough staring to be known by a bad smell
heading bearing out conclusion airy as seams
that where there’s smoke
there’s and, whichever way you
burn
one, both, or one foot is still
flat on the ground
and, sunrising further in the
east wherever that is, each
day
leading to conclusions :
………….
(from Licorice Chronicles)
One perceives almost immediately that this poetry does not really
benefit from scansion.* Certainly several of the lines might be scanned; as
evidenced in the series of imabs in the three lines in the middle of the first
selection (“the feta cheese / the mozzarella marzipan / the seedless eye brown
pencils”), the Bernstein work might even be characterized as being dominated by
the iamb. Nearly every iambic grouping, however, is broken by radical shifts in
metrical patterns. The iambic “was on the telephone” is interrupted by the
anapestic “gyroscope, sleeping binge”; and the following iambic trimester gives
way to two dactyls (“crystal, postcard”). This irregularity of rhythm is even
more apparent in the Greenwald selection, where one observes a breakdown of the
iamb even at the level of the line. The first five words of line one, for
example, set up expectations for an iambic line, which are immediately thwarted
by a kind of caesura (indicated by the commas surrounding “,and,”) and by the
following spondee (“arms binged”). Although this first line returns to an
iambic meter that is carried into the second line, it is soon broken again in
line three by the shift from the iamb to the trochee; and the poem rarely
returns to the iamb for more than a half-line at a time. In other words, even
though one can find groupings of standard metrical patterns throughout both of
these selections, they are so irregular—they are so continually
interrupted—that it seems almost pointless to speak of measure or rhythm in these
works in the way one might discuss it in a poem by Yeats or even by Pound.**
It is just as obvious that these selections, however, contain a great
number of what are generally described as prosodic devices. In fact, it is
impossible to miss such obvious patterns at work in these poems like
alliteration (“mozzarella marzipan” and “an azure azalea” in the Bernstein
poem, and the s and w repetitions in lines 6-8 in the Greenwald selection);
assonance (the short e sounds of “seedless eye brow pencils” in Bernstein, and
the ä in the “water…watching amoebas…around” sequence in Greenwald); as well as
word repetitions (the “world/worlds & Worlds” group and the series of “was”
constructions in Bernstein, and the “gulls/gull,” “wine/wine,” and
“water/water” repetitions in Greenwald). In the context of such erratic
rhythms, the existence of these more basic prosodic devices may be puzzling. If
these poets, as they claim, are “attempting to avoid systematic prosody,” then
why, one wonders, do they employ so many language patterns that one associates
with Melopoeia?
The answer, perhaps, depends not as much on the rationale of these
particular writers as it does on the way in which modern and contemporary
critics and theorists have defined Melopoeia
and, in particular, rhythm. In his study of the roots of the lyric, Andrew Walsh suggests that in the past
couple of centuries there have been basically “two…versions of the roots of
poetic meter” (Roots of the Lyric:
Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics, 1978). One approach, rooted in the
ideas expressed by Wordsworth and the poets before him, and argued in this
century by critics such as John Thompson, “traces meter back to the rhythms of
speech” (Welsh, p. 191); as Thompson observes, “Meter is made by abstracting
from speech one of [the] essential features (phonomeic qualities of segmental
phonemes, stress, pitch, and juncture) and ordering this into a pattern”
(Thompson, The Founding of English Metre,
1961). The other version of poetic meter traces its roots back to the rhythms
of song, to the measures of music. M. W. Croll, who represents this viewpoint,
argues “Dancing and music are the arts of rhythm; they have nothing to learn
about their business from poetry; poetry, on the other hand, has derived all it
knows about rhythm from them” (Croll, “The Rhythm of English Verse,” in Patrick
and Evans, eds., Style, Rhetoric, and
Rhythm, 1966). The prosodists with whom I began this essay have either
implicitly or explicitly aligned themselves with one or the other of these
approaches.
Building on Northrup Frye’s discussion in Anatomy of Criticism of “babble,” Welsh posits the idea that, while
both of these approaches are legitimate, there is a third version for the roots
of poetic meter:
The third root—less well
recognized, perhaps, but no less funda-
mental—lies in the mysterious
actions of the closed, internal rhythms
of language, the echoing of
sound…called charm-melos. It is the
irregular rhythm of special,
hidden powers in language, quite distinct
from the commerce of everyday
speech and equally distinct from the
more regular rhythms of music and
song. (Welsh, p. 195)
To demonstrate this, Welsh points to
examples from Wyatt, Skelton, Shakespeare, Dryden, Blake, Poe, Pound, and other
poets.
What is most pertinent is Welsh’s discussion of the way in which
charm-melos or carmen functions.
Focusing on primate charms and magic incantations, Welsh, with the help of
linguists and anthropologists, characterizes the rhythms of the charm-songs as
being highly irregular and depending heavily upon assonances, alliterations,
rhymes (internal as opposed to end rhymes), and word repetitions in the
language of the poem (Welsh, p. 136). Such devices, Welsh explains, produce an
incantory effect, behind which stands the intention of the
charm-song—enchantment. In charm, language does not represent mental concepts, but is
a physical action and process. “Charms are meant to make things happen, to
cause action”; and, in connection with this, the charm-song consists of a
language apart from that of ordinary speech, a language wherein special powers
reside. “To produce an effect, the charms must use, along with ritual actions,
words capable of acting, words felt to be themselves actions…” (Welsh, p. 151).
As Welsh quotes Bronislaw Malinowski (from Coral
Gardens and Their Magic): the vocabulary, grammar, and prosody of
charm-songs
fall into line with the deeply
ingrained belief that magical speech must be
cast in another mould, because it
is derived from other sources and pro-
duces different effects from
ordinary speech.
These “different effects” are concerned with power. The language of the
charm-song, in its potential to enchant, to cause action, is derived, as Welsh
puts it, from “the old powers of sound and rhythm flowing into and shaping the
language…. The language of charms is a language of power, and that power comes
primarily not from lexical meanings, …but from other meanings hidden deep in
the sounds and rhythms” (Welsh, p. 153). The control of such powers, finally, depends
“not upon clear vision, but on obscure, esoteric knowledge, traditional or
personal, which no amount of vision alone can uncover” (Welsh, p. 160).
The parallels between the charm-melos that Welsh describes and the
contemporary experiments in “Language” poetry are striking. I have already
indicated the irregularity of rhythm in the Bernstein and Greenwald selections;
and I have pointed to how dependent these works are upon devices such as
assonance, alliteration, internal rhyme, and word repetitions. The effects of
such devices in these poems, if properly analyzed through more formal studies
of such works, I suggest, would be perceived as very close to what Welsh has
described as charm-songs.
Poets such as Bernstein and Greenwald, more importantly, are less
interested in the lexical meanings of their words than in how these words
function, in how they act or, as
Bernstein has argued again and again, how the words syntactically behave in a
series of “leaps, jumps, fissures, repetitions, bridges, schisms,
colloquialisms, trains of associations, and memories” to which they are
subjected and/or from which they are themselves generated (see “Thought’s
Measure,” in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, no. 4
[1981], collected in Content’s Dream,
1986). Such words are not the medium of some message, but are the message
itself.
To say this is not to completely deny referentiality, is not to ignore
the fact that “marzipan” is a confection made from a paste of almond and sugar,
or that “gulls” are aquatic birds. After all, both of these selections generate
ideas of sorts: the Parsing passage
speaks of the notion of “parsing” the world, of creating linguistic
relationships of experiences and things, of a “seedless” grape, an “eye,” and
an “eye brown pencil,” of a “bus” and a “bust.” Similarly, the selection from Licorice Chronicles suggests the
possibility of “coordinating” reality, of shaping reality like “dough” into
coordinates such as those implied by the relations of words like “glass” and
“grass,” of a “glass of water” and “a jar of water with grass / in it.” The
ideological content of these passages, however, is not where the vitality of
these poems lies. Rather, it is the process of these works that most matters.
That process, in turn, produces meanings that, like the charm-songs, depend
less upon the dictionary than upon the rhythms and sounds of the language, and
upon the author/reader’s private memories of, experiences, and associations
with them.
Even more compelling is the way these and related poets describe their
works. In notes from a series of eleven workshops Bernstein headed at St.
Mark’s Poetry Project in the winter of 1980, he argues that he and Greenwald
are indeed interested in music and rhythm, but less in the music of the rhythm
of speech and song than in the rhythms of the mind, “the music and rhythm of
contemplation” which, through the act of writing (or speaking words to paper)
becomes the form of the life, “a life as it is being lived in the body”
(“Thought’s Measure”). Such a poetry of activism carries with it, Bernstein
argues, a language which, in its self-conscious generation of the world—of
words as objects—is necessarily opaque, dense, and private because the order of
the poem is the order that comes from one’s “private listening, hearing.”
The very fact that this language is private connects it, in Bernstein’s
ideology, with issues of power.
One power of the concept of privacy for writing is that of an address
of intimacy (“truthfulness” rather
than “truth,” to use Wittgenstein’s
distinction) that allows the formal
requirements of clarity and ex-
position to drop away. “At home, one
does not speak so that people
will understand but because they
understand” (Fuchs). Confusion,
contradiction, obsessiveness,
associative reasoning, etc., are given
free(er) play. A semblance of
coherence—of strength or control—
drops away. In contrast to this, or
taking the idea further, the private
can also
seem to be the incommunicable.
Elsewhere, he speaks of his interest
in using words which “cast a spell,” an interest in words which are powerful
enough to bring the mind into their grip. Such words, such a language creates
an “intense experience of separation that is a part of the continuing power of
privacy in writing [which] can make tangible what otherwise seemed invisible.”
As Mac Wellman, another poet/playwright connected with “Language” writing, has
expressed it, there is behind these kinds of statements almost a “religiosity,”
“a religion of the word” (“Some L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Outlaws”), which reminds one of
the charm-poets who saw their words not as a literary work, but as a verbal act
“by which a specific force is let loose.” For the speaker of the charm,
Milinowski reminds us, language was believed to exercise “the most powerful
influence on the course of nature and on human behavior.” Measure for the
ancients, as for Bernstein, is not something to be counted, but something to be
“counted on” (Bernstein, letter to
Michael Davidson, September 30, 1979), a powerful force which lies in the
rhythm and sound of the mind revealing itself in the phoneme, morpheme, word,
phrase, or sentence.
Bernstein and others, in short, describe their poetry in terms that are
remarkably similar to the way in which Welsh characterizes the charm-song. I am
not claiming necessarily that “Language” poets such as Charles Bernstein or Ted
Greenwald are consciously (or even unconsciously) writing charm-songs; their
work is a complex of many contemporary issues of poetics. I am only speculating
that the rhythms of such poets may have prosodic roots in traditions other than
speech and song. The notion that most of contemporary poetry has abandoned
issues of prosody, accordingly, may be not only mistaken, but fails to
recognize the narrow way in which modern and contemporary critics and poets
define prosody—a narrowness that often ends in the dismissal of “Language”
poetry and other chance-generated works by poets as diverse as John Cage,
Jackson Mac Low, and David Antin. Robert Bertholf recently found fault with
“Language” poets, for example, because “contiguity predominates over image,
breath, and music” (“The Polity of the Neutral,” Montemora, no. 5 [1979]). Rather, I argue, breath and music (image
we must save for a later discussion) are in fact central to “Language” writers
such as Bernstein and Greenwald; it is only that the music and breath they hear
is from a source as old as language itself.
*I might add that this poem is a
more conservative example of Bernstein’s rhythms. Poems of his more recent
volumes, Shade, Poetic Justice, and Controlling Interests, are more
difficult or even impossible to scan.
**That is not to say that Pound’s Cantos, for example, can be spoken of in
terms of traditional metrics; to do so misses the point of how Pound’s prosody
functions.
Philadephia, 1981
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (September 2008).
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