Ads for Absurdum
Paper is white desire in need
of something vegetable or blue,
historical supremacy
produced for bitter revenue
and publication. Throw it out!
No books or magazines: we’ll shout
it out. Who cares who understands!!!
The acid rain in Timbuktu
hallucinates upon the trees,
deciding spiders curlicue
like monkey tails or lemonade.
The past is just a marinade
and I’d prefer mine teriyaki...
Gregory Perry 2004
There's a poem posted at A Parsnip that sounds awfully like a response to my earlier posting today. I could be just paranoid, hell, I am paranoid, but seeing that I was just added to its blogroll today gives me reason to think the former.
7 comments:
I don't think it's a rejection of rhyme and meter per se, but a feeling that rhyme and meter have guardians who have rejected everything postmodern, so that rhyme and meter have been claimed for a program at odds with the postmodern project (whatever that may be). I'm not exactly sure why we don't just go and steal them back; rhyme and meter have uses for postmodern poetry--a sing-songy rhythm supplemented by rhyme, or off rhymes, or rhymes that don't complete in even lines, or even perfect meter and rhyme built around not-quite-straight sense, can heighten a poem's tension and flow without necessarily dragging it down into a sober reflection on, say, butterflies or Virgil.
As in:
The acid rain in Timbuktu
hallucinates upon the trees,
deciding spiders curlicue
like monkey’s tails or lemonade.
Nice. Stevensy. He knew that rhyme could make you accept the nonsensical and love it, like a spell. Like the Emperor of Ice Cream. What the heck does that poem mean? I don't know and I don't care. All I know is it's powerful and I'll keep reciting it.
I think there's something even Bloomian about their "rejection" of rhyme and meter, as if they're trying to slay the father they can't escape. But from time to time meter (see my blog post) and rhyme will creep in, I suspect unconsciously. It's like Pound bashing Wordsworth in his "Retrospect," which actually contains very striking parallels to "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"; even as he denies Wordsworth, he implicitly sympathizes with him at key points.
Reen, that's exactly what I'm beginning to think. I'll admit I've been hanging with people who think that way: rejecting everything postmodern (and have been rescuing myself from similar prejudice.) Myself, I think I'm on the fence a bit. I love that Stevens poem and feel much the same as you. But Language poetry? Well, if they like it, then good for them. But O'Hara, Ashbery, half-of-Koch, and even Berrigan say lots to me (more than Richard Wilbur and I'd be stoned (the bad kind) in certain quarters for admitting that. But meter itself really is neutral. And like you say should be stolen back.
Jodie, that's why I think some therapy might be needed here. Denial, as they say, is more than just a river in Egypt.
I like Reen's take and Jodi's, too. There is no need to reject or accept language as it is written or spoken since it is spoken and written regardless of the kind of authorization. Furthermore, rejection is an implicit acceptance and explicit denial of certain qualities for any given event or thing.
The cause for rejection is often and admittance into being "real" or "necessary"--in other words, we reject the things that are there which we do not like.
I beg that we resist moralizing meter. There is nothing esteemed in using it at all. Reen is correct, what is rejected is an authority that demands credibility, an authority that has no stake in meter itself, or rhyme for that matter, rather a stake in dominance within the poetry community.
I think of the classic and crass attack that high romantics made on the della cruscan poets. A possible argument that you miss when you pitch a fit about meter and its detractors or its redactors or whomever: the move away from traditional stanzaic forms had a lot to do with elitism in poetry: people can learn rhyme and meter, prosody is intuitive even for the most unpoetic of writers: and there was a lot of un-masculine poetry being written in traditional form--love poems, erotic poems, political poems, poems by women (oh my!): so, dropping meter and looking for a more plain verse that focused on the mental ability to contemplate and philosophize became the style most revered. Get it: everyday, ordinary language became the refuge for masculinist rhetoric and authority, and meter became effiminate and easily accessible, child's play. Now things have changed since the 18th and 19th centuries, a bit, but the game is being played. THAT is the more interesting issue; not whether meter is good. Who gives a shit.
There is, quite frankly, a lot more at stake in a line: decisions are made about crafting verse that presuppose whole ideological structures and historical debates. And that is where I bring in a criticism of those guardians of meter who are more concerned with trashing a misreading of prosody than addressing the actual critical concerns at stake. Sure, it is silly when authorities cannot even scan properly, but it isn't because they aren't trying; it is because scanning some lines are extremely difficult, especially when written using everyday speech patterns rather than rigidly accurate and grammatically correct English.
Gary, wait! I am not pitching a fit. I've pitched fits in my life and this is not one. I am honestly posing a simple question that your response, for all its academic posturing fails to answer. But thanks for the response nevertheless.
I am specifically NOT moralizing meter here. I may have in the past, and for those sins I ask forgiveness. Mea culpa times three. But I am trying to understand one simple position of postmodern poerty vis a vis meter.
You probably answered it (as did Reen did more directly albeit:) "the move away from traditional stanzaic forms had a lot to do with elitism in poetry." So get over the past my friend. Or elitists.
Look I'm not arguing for meter as the meaning of poetry or the lost kingdom of poetics or the shangrila of sha-na-na. It's one f*cking tool of MANY at a poet's side.
I agree: who gives a shit about meter being good or bad, although your feminist/masculinist argument: frankly I don't give a damn about that either. God that's so twentieth century.
And about someone not scanning properly, I agree with your take and vehemently disagree with the formalist's high-school snickering.
Still your defensiveness about meter speaks volumes in itself. But the question remains: why the postmodern hard-on over meter? And living in the past wouldn't satisy any half-brained pysychoanalyst. So don't tell me because your forefathers used it. Or some rich neighbor is obsessed with it. If that was the case, why were you drinking all that wine the other night. Have a Bud. Peace.
i'll respond to your commentary later tonight. for now, I want to apologize about the use of the second person...the debate is a large one and I referring to you in that rhetorical sense, as in if you, when you, more of a universal you. I didn't mean to offend and can understand how I was misunderstood.
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