III. O Body Swayed to Muses

Half a century ago a young man went to an older one to discuss poetry, and the advice he received included this:

The algebra of craft, and the fire. The older poet also said that "the great presence... in poetry was passion / passion was genius and he praised movement and invention" to the younger poet, William Merwin, who later recorded the episode in his poem "Berryman." Not many of us can realize the implications of a simple suggestion; most of us need more prodding and pulling, and the appearance of all the current books about writing poetry suggests that there are many who are qualified and willing to point out things more than once.

We need to hear the "secrets" of the guild early and often, and one such "secret" I wish I had known long ago is that disagreement over both metric theory and the scansion of particular (even quite famous) lines abounds among accomplished poets and teachers. It's more important for the beginner to learn basic nomenclature and begin one's dialogue with the tradition than it is to subscribe to the nuances of a particular method. I also wish I had known that fifty revisions might not be enough and that the process of re-visioning a poem is the process of inhabiting it and the greatest source of pleasure poetry affords. I wish I had learned much earlier the difference between writing words down and presiding over them. I wish I had known twenty years ago how helpful it is to construct some sort of regular trellis over which a poem might be espaliered.

Most of the poets who have written texts for poetry writing classes answer these questions and more, and Peter Sansom's slender Writing Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1994) is no exception. It discusses fixed forms, meter (briefly), workshops and the current climate of the poetry biz and seems aimed more at the individual working alone than a member of a workshop. It's a good beginner text, an introduction, with some valuable features to recommend it.

Four years ago I did not know Carol Ann Duffy's work, and Sansom's book brought me two of her poems, "Terza Rima SW10" and the brilliant "Warming Her Pearls," with its unforgettable marriage of decorum and sensuality. For an example of a villanelle, he reprints Derek Mahon's excellent "Antarctica," and he gives one of the better analyses of Stafford's "Traveling through the Dark."

Sansom also knows good advice when he hears it, so he quotes Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, Keats (on "diligent indolence") and Coleridge ("metre ... tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention"). Although I am much in sympathy with his recommendations on the "empty-headed approach" of being afraid of influence, I think his advice on publishing and self-publishing is premature, especially for the beginning of the book. Flaubert's "long patience" might be more pertinent to readers of this volume.

Michael Bugeja is an active crusader devoted to familiarizing people with poetry and breaking things down into small increments to make the act of creation less intimidating. Two of his books, The Art and Craft of Poetry (Writers Digest Books, 1994) and Poet's Guide: How to Publish and Perform Your Work (Story Line Press, 1995) belong to this dialogue. The first of these is a noble and extensive attempt to bring the components of poetry before the hopeful beginner, but I am wary of the second, though I will admit to having had some small part in it.

Poet's Guide is filled with solid and useful advice, some of it even wise. Andrea Hollander Budy's acknowledgment that five years of work followed by praise from Richard Hugo in a workshop did not mean that her work was ready for publication strikes me as Confucian — stern and correct. Neal Bowers's comment that constructing a book is an opportunity to learn about your own work is equally responsible. I'm less convinced about Jonathan Holden's conviction that the poetry of the future "is going to have to be about" TV news and other media. I also find Bugeja's willingness to include so much from the business side of his own career as a poet and editor — correspondence, revisions, publishing credits — a little strange. The book seems to suggest that becoming a poet has a lot to do with pursuing a career, being a professional. No doubt this is all useful and full of answers to questions every editor and teacher has been asked and asked, but it's still a little creepy to see it examined so systematically. I'm fairly convinced that these marketing and promotional skills are best learned by trial and error, even at the expense of time and anxiety. Better to focus on the life of a poem in the heart and on the page.

The Art and Craft of Poetry is a valuable resource book, filled with interesting and instructive poems, wary of useless generalizations, riddled with lists, outlines, experiments and exercises. Bugeja again takes a very personal approach, revealing much about his own poetic process and the methods of others. I can see how this personal approach would work for students who may feel that the intellectual and academic aspects of poetry are forbidding. It would not have worked so well for me, as I had already found an excess of the confessional, the circumstantial and casual in the poetry of today. His comments are meticulous and colorful, though I could do without the imprecision of some of his figures of speech, such as, "The line is the jugular vein of poetry."

Bugeja divides his book into three sections — "Journals and Genres," "Tools of the Trade" and "Formats and Forms." In the first section, he introduces poems by thematic category — love, nature, war, political, occasional. Part two emphasizes, in turn, voice, line, stanza, title, meter and rhyme. The final section presents the narrative, the lyric, the dramatic poem, free verse, the sonnet, form poems, the sequence and "the total poem." Although these categories overlap, I can't see any great fault in that.

This may be a good place to note the audience for whom this book appears to be intended. Extensive discussions of what may seem to some obvious — such as the reminder that a particular poem about injustice is political without advocating revolution — and repetitions may be aimed at the Writer's Digest audience, which I assume to be comprised of people who would like to be writers but who do not have access to writing workshops or mentors. I hope this does not sound dismissive, but this is the most complete book for poetry hobbyists, who overlap with "poetry professionals" just as professional and amateur archeologists overlap, the astonishing discoveries often emerging for the enthusiastic weekend digger, whose class, "amateur," comes from the Latin "to love."

Even granting that this book is probably not for MFA students, I have a few quibbles, but first I want to cite an example of its usefulness. The last time I taught a class of undergraduate poetry writing students, I was disappointed in their performance in an exercise in received forms, so I decided to have them write an exercise in class, under my supervision, much like a composition class exercise. Not a very innovative strategy, but one I'd generally been opposed to. I assigned several villanelles, — from Dylan Thomas to Derek Mahon, Jim Whitehead, Elizabeth Bishop — then I gave them Bugeja's section on that form, in which he breaks down the process into mechanical sub-steps, right down to looking up words in his rhyming dictionary. For some theoretical and historical grounding, I assigned the section on the villanelle in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, and in the next class meeting, we all wrote one. Yes, the students were frustrated at first; yes, they had to help one another out; yes they asked me a lot of questions; and yes, the results were a little stiff, but the students were amazed that an hour of concentrated work could result in their making something that felt like a poem but was not ruled by their consensus notion that complete freedom was completely liberating. It was one of our best days in class.

The Art and Craft of Poetry offers plenty of sections as useful as the one described above, but I would not use it as a textbook for several reasons. Chapter one opens: "The most important element of any poem is not its structure, rhyme, meter, line or language. It's the idea." I disagree, and I believe that this is a misleading premise to begin the play, the serious mischief of making poems. Although Bugeja's approach can certainly be defended, the drama of this beginning would make it hard for me to teach from this source. The accompanying tone, which discusses both simple and complex issues as if the reader had not thought about them before ("Don't Forget to Plug in Repeating Lines"), might offend some readers, and one of my students who borrowed my copy pointed out that, while Bugeja records his attempt to find the best examples to illustrate his points, the book contains only one poem by Yeats and almost two dozen by the author. Although there's considerable value in using an occasional poem of one's own (in order to speak authoritatively about process), the proportion here is a little unsettling. While this book offers substantial stimulus for discussion and some useful guidelines for making some kinds of poems, it may sacrifice too much of the historical sense and the mysterious pleasures of poetry in order to de-mystify the art. Bugeja appears to be working from the democratic assumption that anyone who can follow instructions and has the time and energy can be a poet, a good poet, maybe a "successful" one. I'm not so sure.

Poetry, Robert Pinsky tells us, is a bodily art, each poem coming alive in the body of anyone who speaks it, and it operates in "patterns in speech we have known to hear since we were infants." This resonates with Keats's "leaves to the trees" (though Michelle Boisseau reminds me that he wrote "naturally," rather than "easily," which raises other questions about sonnets and alexandrines coming naturally). Pinsky's overall intention in The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998) is to demonstrate that poetry is "an ancient art or technology" that employs the human vocal mechanism to "achieve intensity and sensuous appeal; to express feelings and ideas rapidly and memorably" and to sustain them beyond the human life span. I honestly find this only one step away from saying that poetry is the way God keeps up with important things, which I can almost believe now and wish I had suspected twenty years ago, but the thesis of this book would involve an intricate theolinguistic eugenics for its demonstration. Perhaps I'm going over the top, but The Sounds of Poetry begins with an optimistic prognosis — we can learn to experience rhythm if we'll just relax like Meno and allow ourselves to be reminded of what we already know — but it proceeds through fairly orthodox, though sometimes less than clear, lessons in scansion.

Sometimes Pinsky states the standard views as if they were new discoveries: "one of the most important principles of this book: the line and the syntactical unit are not necessarily the same." This is something most readers already know. A more subtle and interesting contention is that all rhythm is binary, based on a series of oppositions in matters of stress, duration, pitch. Although I do appreciate his discussions of actual lines, I yearn for a discussion of a poem involving its images, symmetry, themes, tone and form, amplified by a discussion of the rhythmic effects of the same poem, a complete integration of the lexical, experiential, historical and "musical" effects. Although such a discussion would require that the book be half again as long, it would provide the missing support for Pinsky's argument. His excellent discussion of the normative and highly evocative nature of iambic pentameter and of free verse as "the most successful alternative to pentameters" makes it clear that this extended analysis is within his means.

The Sounds of Poetry, however, is marred, despite its aim of clear speech and thought, by sentences that fairly scuttle the enterprise. At the end of Chapter 2, he describes the goal of the book as "the justification for the terminology which has been generated so far, and which will be elaborated in the next chapter." This feels like quicksand. On the other hand, this feels like much slower sand: "In different ways, and in varying degree, the sounds of words are similar and different."

The book is rescued by an appreciation of the dynamic between Germanic- and Latin-rooted words and by shrewd study of poems by Jonson, James Wright and Glück. He also reveals some intriguing preferences, such as his lack of interest in "received forms" like the sestina and villanelle. His combined glossary and index helps with the terminology, but there I found probably the single most startling assertion in the book. To posit a starting point for discussion, Pinsky says he "will be content in this book to accept" that "poetry is what a bookstore puts in the section of that name." This is a long way from poetry as the beautiful and necessary expression of the crucial that much of the book attempts to explain, and it seems an abdication to the voice of the marketplace, which I believe seems like vox populi only through a ruthless ventriloquism.

In his introduction Pinsky directs the reader to "more exhaustive approaches" to the rhythmic elements in poetry, and the newest and one of the most rewarding of those is Alfred Corn's The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody (Story Line Press, 1997), which is packed with information I had forgotten, never knew or don't yet know. Some of his analyses of metrical variations will require re-reading for a handy understanding, but I believe he succeeds in moving the uninitiated reader several clear steps in the direction of mastery.

Corn begins by comparing, then contrasting, poetry and music as they operate across time. Then he discusses (echoing Pinsky) the types of rhythm (from the Greek, he reminds us, for "measured motion") humans experience from conception on, our feeling and ear for rhythm becoming more subtle as we experience varieties. This results in the artist's perception that "rhythm arises from the tension between regularity and irregularity, monotony and variety." This is one of two fundamental precepts that Corn never seems to lose sight of, no matter how intricate the line in question. The other precept is that prosody depends both upon astute hearing and a knowledge of the conventions, which by definition are what must be learned, memorized and taken to heart. Because of the demands of learning, many young poets lose interest before they have an opportunity to take to heart what they have nearly understood.

I am gratified that Corn admits to a procrustean element in prosody, for that allows him to demonstrate how conventions are stretched or subverted with grace. He admits that metrical debate is related to the degree of precision sought. I recommend his analysis of the four sources of stress in English — etymological, syntactic, rhetorical and literary — and I think his references to the ways that Greek, Latin, French and Japanese prosodies operate help the reader to understand how English prosodies developed, though of course, there's no substitute for a course in the history of English.

I'm going to abandon my systematic discussion here to confess that two facets of prosody long ago encouraged me to become a free verse poet (a path I often regret and keep trying to alter now). When prosodists start talking about how the metrical and lexical elements of a line reflect one another, I get skeptical. When they say that the sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables here resemble the flight of the bird under discussion and there mirror the fall of a persimmon, I wonder how the abstractions might be reflected in the rhythm. What meter suggests truth, or beauty? I am less antagonistic to suggestions that some metrical effects are ponderous, others agile, and I do accept and try to embrace the way that rhythms convey mood, affect pulse and breath. Corn's discussions of these matters are among the best I know, and I have confidence in his insights.

My other nemesis was the notion that variations were failings in the pattern. I suppose that was encouraged by some of my early literature teachers, and I didn't read widely enough to correct it, but my early attempts at metered verse were driven by the belief that every variation had to be a powerful node of meaning and that the reason for the variation had to be obvious to every reader. That was doomed to failure, and I was convinced that my only recourse was to learn a supple kind of free verse that relied far more heavily on my ear than on a knowledge of conventions. It was a mistake of proportion, and one that this author seems to anticipate in his chapter on variation.

Corn devotes a chapter to the history and nature of verse forms, and when he explains how a form such as the villanelle operates, he provides valuable, even simple, insights: "The villanelle can be thought of as the 'story' that explains the final juxtaposition of the two refrains."

To my delight, Corn is equally helpful in recounting the early history of vers libre in France and the U.S., and he explains the way many verse libre poets use the shadow of metric verse or approach an iambic pentameter line "to invoke the mysterious power of number, which inspires unconscious respect in both poets and their audience."

The Poem's Heartbeat would be well worth reading if only for Corn's enumeration and discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of both metered and unmetered verse, though he understands how quickly a splendid poem can shatter the usual expectations or turn liabilities into assets. Alfred Corn concludes his account by admitting that his balance sheet of pros and cons is inconclusive, but it leaves us in the "creative dark," with no recourse but to turn again to poems whose spells we yearn for. This informed turning away from theory to actual poetry is perhaps the one step I needed to know about, though I was far from ready for it, two decades ago. That, and the willingness to pray to the Muse, on my knees, right there in the corner. And I mean that literally.

R. T. Smith
Rockbridge County, VA

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