The Performative and the Authentic (3.31.21)

Reading some poems lately, I've been struck by how many come off as either "performative" or "authentic."

A little context.

The authentic in poetry was a thing in the 1970s and 80s.  A good poem was authentic.  Its voice was sincere and believable.  Its subject was worthy of art.  Its language and form were honest.  The poet was real and her work was innovative.  All other poetry was merely performative, for show.  It could be competent, polished, but it imitated the Moderns or the Ancients, and therefore was primarily for show.  

Performance borrows themes, works over old territory, trades in received ideas (and feelings).

Kenneth Patchen's love poems were declared to be authentic.  Rod McKuen's were not; they were mere show pieces of feeling and thought.  The implication was that authentic poetry was deeply felt and deeply thought; it came "from the heart."  Performative poetry was shallow, it was all bauble and ornament.  Allen Ginsberg's poems were authentic.  John Ashbery's were bauble and ornament.

Which is to say, in the 1970s and 80s, if you were a young writer of poems you chose sides.  You were either honing your authentic art (preferably in an MFA Writing Program, preferably at the Iowa Writers Workshop or UC Berkeley), or you dabbled.  Or worse, you didn't choose.  You were either up to the task or you weren't.

I, or my writing, was in this latter category: not up to the task of depth of feeling and thought.  And that's why I dropped out of my graduate MFA program.  It, the dropping out, was a form of self-silencing.  The other kids (and we were all kids, no matter how sincere and committed we were) read more poems and more widely in the genre than I, and so came to the program with a deeper knowledge of the art, what they wanted to become as poets.  They knew how to talk about poetry, the writing process, where poems come from, what makes a good poem.  And what makes a poor poem.  I felt reminded every week in seminar what makes a poor poem, and what a poseur looks like, the kinds of poems he writes.

Of course, the idea of "the authentic" eventually became tainted itself by the idea of "mere performance."  Authentic writing poured out of the academies and poetry became an industry of professionalized authenticity.  Conversely, it became a truism that all writing is performative, that in fact all art is performative, for show.  The poems of John Ashbery celebrated aspects of performance that once had been branded "mere": surface, playfulness, difficulty, materiality, shock.  In the end, there was little difference, effectively or affectively, between "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and "A Supermarket in California."  Roland Barthes cemented the performative in Theory.  Susan Sontag situated it in Culture.

In recent years, we've begun the swing back to authenticity.  We call it wokeness today.  We call it lived experience.  And we call it staying in your lane.  Authentic poetry explores authentic subjects that you are personally credentialed in, especially politically fraught subjects, like colonialism, privilege, power relations.  Authentic poetry chooses sides, commits to a politics before a philosophy.  It flies its flag.

To write merely to perform--to make art for art's sake--again feels hollow, superficial, beside the point.  Performance is production without content, and content is the cash of poetry once more.  

I feel a new silence coming on.  It might be a silencing (as in, cancellation), but I think it will be more or less self-imposed.  Perhaps the pandemic has had some impact in this regard, reorienting us to what is real and what is just for show.

And I should ask myself exactly who is "us."  Who should say something, and who be silent for now?  Who's allowed to speak, who's not.  And, finally, if there's to be silence, what does it sound like?  Small groups of writers (like Wednesdays@One) who gather to worship among themselves?  Tillie Olsen, who wrote a famously provocative essay on silence, thinking primarily of the silence of so many women, might have something to say about the art today, were she here to witness "us."  

I think I'll go find that essay and reread it.

A Slight Exaggeration - Adam Zagajewski 1945-2021 (3.26.21)

The Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski, has passed on.  An obit is in today's NYT.  He thought "a slight exaggeration" is a fairly accurate description of the art of poetry.  But see the Times obit for the origin of this curious notion.

Zagajewski was yet another East European poet whose life work reflected giving up home.  So many of us who write poetry, who have not had to experience such dislocation in our lives, can only read the work and try to imagine. 

Moving Out and In

We make the world perfect with our intellect,
a perfect place to be, and have no home,
 
not until we correct it, little by little,
make it better, a better place, more human.
 
It stands corrected then, our livable error,
a place we can move out of, into.

How to scan a line (3.15.21)

Why should we be talking about scansion in March, 2021, in America?  That's something you might do with a line of poetry written by Catullus or Bocaccio, Ariosto or Shakespeare, and, closer to our time, poets like A. E. Housman, even W. B. Yeats.

But after Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, after Adrienne Rich and Jorie Graham, why in this century and this nation would we even have an "ear" for meter?

The fact is, we no longer have the ear for formal meter, unless it's the stuff of our childhoods, the nursery rhymes read to us sing-song by our mothers and fathers.  I have books on my shelf devoting chapters to the subject of accentual-syllabic verse and how to scan a line of poetry written in that format.  They drill into stresses and variations and "substitutions," deploying the most technical terms for the simplest of poetic activities, that is, creating a beat.  Well, maybe not the simplest.  Because creating rhythm in a poem, a well-crafted poem that captures or recreates voice, tone and mood toward a particular end, is fraught with choice, trial and error.  

Sometimes--my observation is, most of the time--when we at Wednesdays@One write, we do it by "feel." We almost never stop to count our syllables and stresses in a line.  We don't consciously insert a spondee or an anapest into a flow of iambs in such a way that a reader can later on map the progress of the line.  We don't "read music" in that way; rather, we "play by ear."

And when we play by ear, what are we really doing?  Listening to our hearts beat?  Maybe, though that sounds a little bit melodramatic, doesn't it?  Hearing our breaths, as Dr. Williams argued?  THAT sounds a little too clinical to me!  No, the "ear" we play by, feeling our way through a line, listens to the way our family talked around the supper table when we were very young; to the pitch and rhythm, the cadence and space of chatter among our friends as we grew older and mastered the language we were given by our parents and our teachers; to the drawls, clips, dipthongs, slurs, staccatos, nasals, gutturals, wheezes, airinesses, marbles, and barks and whines and whistles and chirps and, even, mispronunciations we have heard in every conversation every day of our lives in every context, from breakfast chatter to school bus chant and office drone and sideline song, and yes, hymn, pop song, nursery rhyme, greeting card, and poetry reading, to the snoring of the one we love lying next to us in bed.

I want to argue that this is how we write and read a line of poetry in March, 2021, in America.  So try reading this . . .

It's funny how money change a situation
Miscommunication leads to complication
My emancipation don't fit your equation
I was on the humble, you - on every station
Some wan' play young Lauryn like she dumb
But remember not a game new under the sun
Everything you did has already been done
I know all the tricks from Bricks to Kingston
My ting done made your kingdom wan' run
Now understand L. Boogie's non violent
But if a thing test me, run for mi gun
Can't take a threat to mi newborn son
L's been this way since creation
A groupie call, you fall from temptation
Now you wanna ball over separation
Tarnish my image in your conversation
Who you gon' scrimmage, like you the champion
You might win some but you just lost one

You might win some but you just lost one
You might win some but you just lost one
You might win some but you just lost one
You might win some but you just lost one

Now, now how come your talk turn cold
Gained the whole world for the price of your soul
Tryin' to grab hold of what you can't control
Now you're all floss, what a sight to behold
Wisdom is better than silver and gold
I was hopeless now I'm on Hope road
Every man want to act like he's exempt
When him need to get down on his knees and repent
Can't slick talk on the day of judgement
Your movement's similar to a serpent
Tried to play straight, how your whole style bent?
Consequence is no coincidence
Hypocrites always want to play innocent
Always want to take it to the full out extent
Always want to make it seem like good intent
Never want to face it when it's time for punishment
I know that you don't wanna hear my opinion
But there come many paths and you must choose one
And if you don't change then the rain soon come

See you might win some but you just lost one

--Lauryn Hill, "Lost One"

So . . . if you're like me (past middle age, male, white, Midwestern, English Major), I dare you to try to scan this.   

Let me say it again, poems start with sound (3.9.21)

I said so once or twice or thrice before (see my blogs for "Voice and discovery 12.11.19"; "Voice, tone, movement and meaning 12.7.19"; "Reading poems aloud 11.21.18.") and and I'm here to say it again.  Poems begin in sound, pure utterance without the baggage of ideas like "music," "noise," "oratory," "feeling," "meaning."  They begin where all animal utterance begins, in the larynx, which in a human being--like you, like me--sits low in the throat where it can shape airflow into music, oratory, noise, drone, and poetry.

So said Darwin, if we're to accept the premise of this new book, reviewed in Sunday's NYT Book Review.  Here's what the reviewer has to say about the Darwin connection: ". . . the notion that the melody and rhythms of speech are what move us toward language."  The book is This Is the Voice, by John Colapinto, and its subject is the role played by the human larynx and lungs in the acquisition of language.  The thesis' implications for poetry couldn't be greater.

The reviewer writes,

Fetuses can't make out a mother's words from inside a womb . . . but they can hear prosody: inflections, accents, the rises and dips and pauses of a sentence.  Colapinto shares research that suggests we exit the womb with this scaffolding of language well in place.

We are born to sing!

We've developed this ability as a result of standing erect on two feet, an action which sank the larynx deeper into the throat, nearer the source of the air we use to refine sound--I'll have to read the book to get to the science--into speech, thus making human language possible.

Of course, what use this capability unless we turn it to expression, feeling, meaning?  Poetry is all these things or it's not really poetry, just jabber, just noise.  But it's reassuring, somehow, to know that our art is part of our biological history, our evolution as a species.

Forms of Rhythm (3.8.21)

Think of this post as the voice of a writer thinking out loud.

Think of this post as thinking finding a voice.

Think of it as an outloudness of the voice of a thinking.

Think of it as the voice of a writer thinking out loud.

The forms of rhythm are many and so they begin

Because like every beginning under the sun, 

They must begin if they are to begin.

The form is repetition, repetition, 

repetition and again repetition,

how something, a thing, a thinking repeats, 

as in a body's intake of air  

for an exhalation, a projection

to accomplish something more than 

a sigh, mere utterance, something

that pretends music: pitch, tone, module, 

scale, tempo, beat, the rush of the breath outward 

over the tongue that is folded or made 

into a trough, or extended and flattened 

or else rounded, or retracted, flapped or stilled, 

made rigid or flaccid to broadcast, to target

by constricting the out-rush ghosted

through the variable cavity of the lips, 

roses of the face, makers of rictus and pucker, 

pout and smile, and to accomplish something more 

than a sigh,

as we have said before . . .

A word, if you will: repetition.  

Sequences repeat or they are not. 

Breathe in, breathe out.  

And again . . .

                         In poetry, form is the stressed

breath against the un-stressed leaning,

chest-bumping, crashing, brushing, the signal knock

whap/dah/DUH, whap/DAH/duh, WHAP/dah/duh, 

which we shall call differentiation in relation, difference 

in proximity, relational necessity.  And you know that.

Your competence means knowing that.

Time as form.

A form of      first this            then     this,

the lapse from a beginning to an end.

No time unless that: sequences repeat.

And typography.

                                A space is pause.

Space a blankness for a time           an accommodation

for reconsiderations

        or a deeper thinking.

        or a not thinking.

Looks like [                            ],  but in typography

time is everywhere        b-e-t-w-e-e-n-a-l-l

u-t-t-e-r-e-d-i-n-s-t-a-n-c-e    .

And so        time is nothing        a formative nothingness

                                        a rhythm.

Of going    and waiting    and going    .    Again.

Then silence        for how else, 

with what else does one fill a space

so that it remains space?          Digitally 

a representation of silence [note it 

between the c and the e of the last word

before the bracket] unlike the bracket

which is space made for thought        or for

language     at least        uttered.           Digitally 

a representation of a coffin of language,

where one goes to bury the word.

Form, an accomplishment.

A thing done        a doing completed . . .

as we have said            .

Doctor Dactyl (3.5.21)

Wednesdays@One's latest project: writing accentual-syllabic poems.  Specifically, we'll be working on poems written with dactyls.  The dactyl is the three-beat metrical foot that "falls forward," its first syllable stressed, or accented, followed by two unstressed syllables.  Here are some examples of dactylic units:

syllable    multiple    capitol    yesterday            

underway    magazine    libertine    sophistry            

honeybee    poetry    quality    retrograde            

lemonade    Gatorade    colonnade    quantify          

qualify    amplify    feminize    womanize         

customize    demonize

Think of all the poems you can make out of these words!  Or how about phrases such as:

all the way    any day    flatter than        

better and    greater than    lesser than        

windy day    month of may

But making a line from dactyls isn't quite like laying bricks one after another.  A LINE of poetry will  determine the relations between and among the syllables deployed, the order in which they are deployed, the stressed and unstressed syllables deployed around the intended kind of metrical foot, and the particular dialect of (American) English you happen to be writing in or reading from.  More, TWO LINES of poetry will impact your pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables even further.

Dialect or regional speech pattern might determine where you put the stress in words like umbrella, insurance, and controversy.  Nearby syllables, word order or rhetorical emphasis might turn "month of May" from a dactylic foot into two iambic feet if the phrase is preceded by "the," probably one of the most UNstressed syllables in the English language!  

Dactylic meter can be of two measures (dimeter), three, four and so on.  Much ancient Greek poetry was written in Dactylic hexameter, six measures of a falling three-beat foot, like repeating the word "yesterday" six times.  Which is why poets writing in English have steered clear of the ancient Greek measures, opting for the briefer forms, especially the dimeter:

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

"Forward the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!" he said.

Into the valley of Death 

   Rode the six hundred.

As you can hear (or feel, in this famous case), the meter rushes forward, and foolishly, like the Light Brigade (whose charge directly into Russian cannon fire was executed, so to speak, because of a battlefield miscommunication).  It gallops.  Tennyson was fond of the dactyl.  Even when he fashioned his poems out of the noble and most British iambic pentameter, he could not resist hiding dactyls inside the line:

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky.

How inviting it is to read "river lie," "and of rye," "clothe the wold," and "meet the sky" into the opening lines of "The Lady of Shalott" like three-beat dactyls.  And here is how he described a basket of fish in "Enoch Arden," his long narrative of the life of an English fishing village:

Enoch's ocean spoil

In ocean-smelling osier.

This last example I get from my trusty Norton Anthology of English Literature, where the editor goes out of his way to repair any notions I might have of The Ridiculousness of Alfred Lord Tennyson.  And successfully so, I should add.  For the point about Tennyson and his achievements is that he is probably the most musical (i.e., measured) of any poet writing in English, ever.

Which leads me back to this project: making music the old-fashioned way.

There once was a time when "writing lyrical" meant adhering to the five metered or "accentual-syllabic" feet that the English language can reasonably support: 

iamb: to-DAY 

anapest: un-der-WAY, here-to-STAY

trochee: SURE-ly, WAN-ly, TEND-ed 

dactyl: PRES-ent-ly, BAK-er-y

spondee: MAY-DAY, MY-WAY

But the strictly accentual-syllabic forms--iambic tetrameter and pentameter foremost among them--come off as antique to a 21st Century American ear.  Still, occasionally practicing them in a poem  doesn't hurt us at all.  In fact, familiarizing ourselves with the older formalities of poetry lends facility when it comes to building lines of poems that start, move, pause, rise, fall, strike, flow and come to a full and satisfying (and this means meaningful) stop.

This is why dactyls for our new project.  Most of us are used to writing in iambic meters, usually tri- and tetrameter, sometimes pentameter, when we try to write more traditionally.  Let's add another tool to our rhythm tool box.  The dactyl will prove a little more problematic, but well worth the effort.

Speaking of problematic, the dactyl encourages, or maybe forces a number of problems on you from the get-go.  Here are some challenges you'll encounter:

1. The dactyl is a three-syllable unit.  Building it into a line of poetry won't feel as automatic or as "right" as when you write with iambs, partly because you don't use as many three-syllable words in a line as you do words of one or two syllables.  Contemporary, colloquial American English, or conversational English, isn't all that complicated when it comes to the words we keep in our personal vocabularies.  So you'll at some point in your draft be forced to work in as many as three words to make one dactylic measure.  That'll be interesting.
2. The dactylic accent is front-loaded, producing a driving or "falling forward" effect in the line.  When so much of the poetry we write strives toward rhetoric--that is, a well-constructed argument with a logical resolution; that is again, "content"--our voices want to rise to the occasion, literally.  The falling pitch of dactyls goes in the opposite direction.
3. Lines based on the dactyl are harder to extend beyond two or three measures.  The English language tends to run out of gas (that is, its available propulsive intensity) after a measure or two.  Try extending a line through four dactyls and you'll experience what I mean.  But I'm cutting you some slack here; see below.
4. Your choice of subject matter might be more limited when the rhythm behaves more like a drumming or a falling down/forward.  Hard to imagine an elegy, a lullaby, a reverie, a prayer or a metaphysical inquiry done well in dactyls!  A charging Light Brigade, on the other hand . . . 

You'll find the dactyl problem even trickier in light of our other stipulation in this project: to limit each line to eight syllables.  There is room for at least two stray syllables in every line.  What are you going to do with these?  Where will you place them?  How will they impact the unfolding of the strong and weak accents of the dactyl?

And for this reason, I am amending the project.  You must limit each line to eight syllables . . . but you can build with fewer if you wish.  I do not recommend, however, just writing lines of only three syllables (that is, one dactyl).  That's a recipe for stiltedness.

Your objective is to write well-honed LINES.  

. . . . . . .

So, you're going to run into two needs right away: 1) to count syllables; 2) to distribute the strong and weak accents so that each line has at least one dactyl.  You're going to try less than effective strategies, like mispronouncing words in order to fit them into a dactylic stress pattern.  And you're going to end lines with weak words (the, a, an, on, etc.) just to get the eight count in or to come up with a proper dactyl.  Fine.  Go ahead and do that in a first draft.  But don't stop there.  Keep revising until each line stands well on its own as a line with a beginning, middle and end (even if that end word flows into the first word of the next line).

As an example, here is how I began my poem (still not finished, by the way, as of this post):

Yesterday I made my way to

Onaway, that leafy street in

Idaho, desperate and lone-

Ly . . .

Not a bad beginning.  I thought of some neat words with the right number of syllables and strong/weak accents in the right spots (underlined).  But you can also see that I've written myself into an awkward little line break at the end of the third line, not to mention the weakling endings of "to" and "in" of the first two lines.  That's because I'm trying to adhere to the eight-syllable rule.  

How have I improved upon this first draft?  Can't tell you that quite yet, because I'm still working on it.  I may not get to something better, and if I do, I might wind up changing the poem altogether, subject matter and all.  That's okay, too, because what I'm really hoping to do with this poem is to bend my notion of the line, the syllable, and the accented voice a little beyond my usual limit--and to write a decent poem as well, technically speaking.

I'm having fun, too!  I'll show you what I've come up with this coming Wednesday.  I hope you have some fun with this project like I am having.  Don't worry if your poem doesn't turn out perfect or exactly as you planned it.  Do worry about how you solve the problem of accentual-syllabic writing.  :-)