I.

When I was young and staying with my father's parents in rural Georgia, I used to anticipate sitting in our rockers on the side porch after dinner, sipping soft drinks. My grandfather was tall and angular as a mantis, but he kept a leisurely cadence, while my stockier grandmother in her stuffed and upholstered rocker was more nervous and active. I was the only one who seemed not to have a signature rhythm. Sitting far to the north on my Virginia porch in a wicker rocker, I listen tonight to the woven rushes and jointed wood and feel the rhythm I now recognize as my own. It has to do with my breath, my heartbeat, the length of my shank and spine, my mood. Meanwhile, the cicadas ratchet away, the interstate hums irregularly in the distance and the clock in the livingroom clicks off the seconds. This is the end-of-summer nocturnal dynamic I love to participate in, as the wordless voices converse, and my rocker is more than an engine of nostalgia: it would be almost impossible for me to sit still among all these pulsations, as it now seems impossible to distinguish my motions from those around me, the dancer from the dance.

Reminders of the elements of poetry are all around me, as they have always been. Some of my earliest lessons in rhythm, diction and imagery come from church, and those sank in deeper than many of the lessons from the classroom, but books have been the most reliable vehicles of information about poetry for a long time. When Poetry Daily first invited me to comment on the new books concerning both prosody and the teaching of writing, I was a bit puzzled. After all, my poetry does not invite traditional scansion, and I no longer teach creative writing on a regular basis. I don't consider myself an expert on the various techniques of writing poems or pedagogy, but I am deeply concerned with ritual and pattern in poetry, as well as with passing on what I know about the craft. Perhaps it helps that I try to stand outside as many of the constituencies and schools of contemporary poetry as I can recognize.

This does seem a particularly interesting time for taking stock of how poetry writing is taught because I perceive a kind of yin-yang effect on the scene just now. On the one hand, this is the era of unlimited permission when students are often encouraged to say what they feel before they think about what they feel. This trend is augmented by the ineffectiveness of subtle effects when poetry is performed in bars and contests, both of which seem to me to encourage unmediated indulgence and exhibitionism. In counterpoint to this, formal verse is again in vogue; many poets are writing pithy quatrains and terza rima while suggesting that anyone who doesn't work this way is lazy or sloppy or just plain ignorant. Although I'll have to go along with Henry Taylor, who said at a conference last year that he didn't see anything new in the versification he and others (Wilbur, Voigt, Huggins) have been practicing all along, I don't think a new surge of interest in prosody will damage anyone, so long as it's understood as a surge and not a second coming.

In this first of four articles I hope to remind readers about some of the standard texts that have been in use for a long time; in the next two weeks I plan to examine some newer books intended as class texts or handbooks; the final week I plan to discuss the books — old or new — that I think would serve me best if I were to resume teaching poetry writing in January. My basic question on approaching all these books is simply: what important discoveries do I wish I had made earlier, and what books would have led me to them?

One difficulty involved in this enterprise is that traditional prosodies are based, as Sarah Miller has reminded me, on assumptions of regularity similar to Latin prosodies, while much, perhaps most, contemporary poetry assumes a dramatic infusion of the speech rhythms that would have once been called cadenced prose. The old terminology has proved so handy in describing metrically regular verse that it is tempting to try to explore newer lines with the old tools. I don't think this has to break down, as long as the writer provides us with an effective conversion table, but that usually doesn't happen, and the terminology gets snarled.

I was in graduate school and teaching freshman composition and literature when I first began to work at writing poems, and I'll admit that I didn't even know very much about reading them, but many of my misconceptions were corrected by Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1976). The two great teachers who compiled this text wrote with unapologetic passion about the naturalness of using artifice to express oneself, and they described the ways that poetry sounds different from prose as a "tangled glitter of syllables." From them I learned how mysterious metaphor is and how high is the value of employing information and language with fierce precision. These standards still provide me with a difficult goal as I hammer out my sounds.

Brooks and Warren also went to great pains to show readers how much can be at stake in a poem, a line, a word. Their analysis of Donne's "The Canonization" still rings in my head, reminding me how the words in a poem can talk to each other and how connotations and etymologies have a way of trying to braid together, to the detriment of any poet who doesn't take an alert and active role in the process.

As my continuing enthusiasm for this book suggests, I am convinced that some of the best books about writing poetry are intended as books about reading it. Brooks and Warren say in their introduction that a more proper title might be Experiencing Poetry, as "understanding" may imply too much of the cerebral. Although I cannot say that I was really ready for Understanding Poetry any sooner than I encountered it, I do wonder if I would have continued to give myself to the making of poems if it had not found me. Of course, it is a book with limitations, as its authors predate the current emphasis on gendered readings of poems and were so dedicated to the internal dynamics of poems that they didn't pay much attention to poems as public documents. (Although, again, I can't dismiss the perhaps naive suspicion that a more forceful examination of their notion of irony would have led them to all the useful distinctions sponsored by deconstructionism.) My one real quibble with the book is that its discussions of audial effects were not knitted tightly enough into analyses of the poems to convince me that I needed to embark on an exploration of every kind of rhythm I could find. I am still trying to recover from that shortcoming.

"The pretty, by a first law of art," John Ciardi reminds us in his classic work How Does a Poem Mean? (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975), "is never the beautiful." Although Ciardi could come off as pedantic and impatient, his emphatic inclination seems justified in the context of so much careful explanation and so many well-chosen examples. In this text/anthology he reprints so many poems by Frost and Donne that one can forgive him the poems by Bukowski.

Actually, the Bukowski poems may point to one of the virtues of the collection, as it presents, in spite of its general seriousness, an abundance of whimsical and witty, often small, poems. Ciardi's book is important for other reasons, as well. When he takes the author of "Invictus" to task for weakness of character, he reminds us of an important component of the art, one which the consumer-driven classroom situation discourages. He also sponsors a language that is "muscular, irreducible, and memorable" and reminds us of Frost's endorsement of "the pleasure of taking pains."

Although many of the twentieth century poems in How Does a Poem Mean? seem less memorable than they did in the Seventies, I will never forget two features of the book. One is Ciardi's provocative description of a poem as a feeling, something that involves the whole body, a history and a picture. He keeps turning each poem over in the light, looking at it and listening to it. This practice led him to his title, which carries more wisdom than most of us will ever have about poetry. The "how" instead of "what" in this question can completely alter one's way of looking at poetry and signal the end of symbol-hunting and answer-mongering. Although the poem is a product, Ciardi will not let us forget how it is a portal into its own process — not the process of its composition, but the process that it performs for every skilled reader.

When I first began to consider which of the older books I felt were essential to fencing in the territory, I expected to give Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town (W. W. Norton & Company, reissue edition 1992) short shrift. After all, it's a short book, nearly two decades old, and many of the authors of subsequent books have absorbed the ideas and examples to be found there. It didn't work out that way. Hugo's conversational candor and willingness to dispense commandments are difficult to pass on second hand.

Hugo begins by telling the reader that everything in the book is right for the writer, but wrong for the reader, though the suggestions he makes should be worked through before being discarded. Some of his rules in "Nuts and Bolts" are famous for their bluntness and arresting common sense:

Some of the essays in the book are quite closely focused on his own methods and madness, but the essay "Statements of Faith" is indispensable. In it, Hugo reminds us how multisyllabic words make us more "civilized" and may lead us away from experience and the senses. He insists, with Auden and Valery, that "the self as given is inadequate and will not do." This seems one of the most important discoveries a young writer can make, that the self on the page is always a created self, that the poem is never merely a vessel into which the self is poured. Although, as Hugo says, "An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance," this is not an endorsement of literal confession or raw catharsis.

And what a beautiful thing Hugo says about the ultimate value of scrupulous craft: attention to the small, even mechanical, facets of a poem does not stifle the imagination, but frees it. One of the book's most useful passages offers an anecdote I must have quoted a hundred times, half of them to myself. He tells the story of Jack Nicklaus knocking in a difficult chip shot from the sand trap. "That's pretty lucky," announces a spectator, to which Nicklaus replies, "Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get."

Although this slim volume leaves much unsaid, unviewed, it's as good a book as I know of to sit down with for a weekend and read hard, making notes and actually performing the nutty exercises. The final essay, "How Poets Make a Living," is really a modest suggestion about how we might make a life, and that essay has no expiration date.

Another miniature classic of similar vintage is John Hollander's deft and witty Rhyme's Reason (Yale University Press, new enlarged edition 1989), a manual of formal self-description. The author offers examples of tactics like anacoluthon and zeugma and verse forms from ballades to villanelles in clever self-referentiality. It's a book I've always enjoyed and often assigned, but my students have had little success with it, as it seems more a reminder of what Hollander thinks of as the garden of verse for those who have already strolled and languished there. For the new guest, its twinkling asperity may be too daunting, but the familiar reader will benefit from remembering Hollander's astute and graphic explanations of, for instance, "chiasmus." Perhaps the most effective way to use this book, since many of us are not attuned to such a virtuoso performance, is as a model for one's own self-descriptive blueprint, just as one should probably follow Strunk and White's lead and compose one's own Elements of Style.

One more rigorous, but less compact, reckoning of questions of structure and rhythm is Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (McGraw Hill, 1979). Although the author claims he designed this text less for those who wish to write poems than for those who wish to read them, it's hard to imagine how one could write very accomplished poetry without coming to grips with most of the issues Fussell raises. This is not to say that I agree with him that "meter is the prime physical and emotional constituent of poetic meaning," nor that I agree that the study of meter and of rhythm are identical, but it is hard to resist his insistence on Pound's sense of art as the interplay between a constant and a variable.

Fussell also argues persuasively for stress as the element that makes English poetry, due in part to the normative iambic of English speech, but I think it's possible that American poetry and English verse may run on different fuels, so the contemporary American poet may find Fussell's analyses restrictive. Still, he applies a powerful intellect and hard-hitting common sense to the general premise that one must take rhythmic matters quite seriously and employ both the good ear and a mind for meter to the question of how to heighten the language of poetry beyond the conversational and practical. His phrase "the strange power of meter to burnish the commonplace" would hold great sway if only he had said "orchestratred rhythm" instead of "meter," but he is working with assumptions of numerical regularity and a reader's familiarity with Latin verse, premises which might have been quite reasonable a quarter of a century ago.

His chapter on "The Historical Dimension" provides quick a overview of English prosody, without which it seems to me a poet would be bound to walk in confused circles, but he is not so hostile to the practice of "free verse" as one might imagine from what I've said so far. In fact, in his chapter on that practice Fussell gives an astute and sympathetic account of Ammons's method in "Corson's Inlet." He follows this with a statement I could stand to have on my writing desk: "a free-verse poem without dynamics — without, that is, perceptible interesting movement from one given to another... will risk the same sort of dullness as the metered poem which never varies from regularity."

The half of this volume devoted to poetic form seems not nearly as cogent nor original in its language as the former, but his echo of Ransom's distinction between the local effect of texture and the extending nature of structure is still worth following, and he provides a quick run-down of the most common verse forms with set numbers of lines (the 5-line mad song, the 6-line rime couee, the 7-line rime royal, the 8-line ottava rima and so on). Fussell is demanding and does not ever attempt to apply all his concerns to a single poem, but he is still a force to be reckoned with among those whose primary familiarity with poetry runs from Latin to the English verse of Auden.

The ceremony of the cicadas, accompanied by the renegade chivaree of one whose lower pitch forms an undersong, has finally diminished, and the pace of my rocker has slowed down to cradle rhythm. Next week I will ruminate on two books edited by Michael Bugeja — Poet's Guide: How to Publish and Perform Your Work and The Art and Craft of Poetry — as well as two newer volumes — Kenneth Koch's Making Our Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry and The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux.

R. T. Smith
Lexington, VA

Copyright © 1998 by R. T. Smith.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.