Beginning with
my 1980 essay on Charles Bernstein’s Controlling Interests (see My Year 2004:
Under Our Skin), I focused a number of essays and reviews on what was then
referred to as “Language” poetry—poetry and poetics written by a community of
friends and acquaintances on both sides of the country—that, taking its lead
from various comments in Bernstein’s and Bruce Andrews’s New York-based
magazine, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Lyn Hejinian’s and Barrett Watten’s San
Francisco-based Poetics Journal,
centered on issues, formal, social, and political, surrounding the use of
language in poetry.
In retrospect, I now perceive these
“Language” poets, in the context of this volume, as not so much being “without
a voice,” as they were “without a singular voice.” And, in that sense, like so
many of the artists and others figures upon whom I focus in this volume, they
often went unheard and were sometimes even silenced.
THE
RHYTHMS OF THE “LANGUAGE” POETS
by Douglas Messerli
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 brow 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 azure
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 brow 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” (Walsh, 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 Walsh’s
discussion of the way in which charm-melos or carmen functions. Focusing on
primate charms and magic incantations, Walsh, 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 (Walsh, p. 136). Such devices, Walsh explains, produce an incantatory
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…” (Walsh, p. 151). As W 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 mold, 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” (Walsh, 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” (Walsh, p. 160).
The parallels between the charm-melos that
Walsh 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 Walsh 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 brow
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, Malinowski 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.
Philadephia,
1981
Reprinted
from Green Integer Blog (September
2008).
___
*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.
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