Jonathon Wilcke, a Canadian poet now living in Japan, noticed my complaint that I’m almost invariably unable to “hear” the poetry of so many poets of the British Commonwealth unless they are part of that particular subset who took particular interest in post-avant writing in the United States. He, however, had a different take.

I also have a comment/question about your notion of "writing for the ear" and "music" that you used in your blog from Wednesday, November 06, 2002. You say that there aren't many poets from English-speaking countries (with exceptions like Fred Wah, Tom Raworth, etc.) that write in such a way that the music in their writing reaches your ear. But thinking back to Bob Perelman in his portion of the Writing Talks book, wherein he states (roughly – I don't have a copy of the book here in Japan) that "hearing is not a matter of sounds passively entering the ear but rather the brain being able to grasp and interpret sounds that it has already been trained to grasp," I wonder if being able to "hear" certain poetry depends more on what the "ear" is ready to grasp rather than the "music" contained within the poetry. So, with Fred Wah, for example, who was a jazz musician and tends to write out of jazz, especially in his prose work, like Music at the Heart of Thinking, is a very audible text for me because I also was a jazz musician, and I am attuned to the American tradition of poetry. I've noticed that among musician friends of mine who try to listen to jazz (especially Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton) or 20th Century "Classical Music" (like John Cage, Steve Reich) for the first time claim that they can't "hear" the music or understand what's going on until they've listened to the music several times and given their ears time to create a cognitive structure for interpreting the sounds. So I wonder how you would respond to my saying that your not having an ear for certain poetry is conditioned upon not having yet generated a cognitive structure that grasps the music within?

Sincerely,

Jonathon Wilcke

This analogy with music both rings a bell & puzzles me. Rings a bell in that it cognitively makes sense as a plausible explanation. I can think of examples.* Puzzles me in that it gives me no particular handle to account for my own interests, either in poetry or in music. I was raised in a home with so few records that I can, nearly 40 years later, virtually name them all.** I never had a music class even in grammar school. But for my 21^st birthday, I went to hear the west coast premier of Steve Reich’s Violin Phase, Paul Zukofsky on the violin. When I began working on my first booklength poem, I chose both a title & a structure borrowed from musical models: Ketjak.

How does one “get ready to listen”? Why do some people seem to be more receptive to certain modes or tendencies within art than others? Some of this I suspect is as simple as the sort of schoolyard personality traits that will drive one child at recess to stand atop the most rickety jungle gym, another to become the center of a crowd of children in some organized activity, still a third to sit off in a corner, nose in a book. All three types (& a gazillion more) can end up as writers & if it should turn out to be the quiet kid in the corner who evolves into the risk taker as a poet, she or he can probably explain to you what the specific reasons might have been. Certainly in my own life I must have decided very young that I would be different from the unhappy adults I saw around me – what different meant really didn’t matter for quite a few years. By the time that it did, so many other decisions had fallen into place that it was “obvious” that I would pay more attention to the music of Tuva than to that of Gilbert & Sullivan.

What is more problematic, I think, is deciding where in the process the question of regional dialect comes into play. It is one thing for me to say that I can “hear” a British poet such as Lee Harwood or Thomas A. Clark, but not a Glynn Maxwell. That at some level is very close to the discrimination that draws me to the work of a Barrett Watten, but away from the work of a Timothy Steele or an Alan Shapiro. I have, it’s worth noting, no particular trouble with the rhyming poets of the former Soviet Union, such as Ilya Kutik or Ivan Zhdanov – though frankly I prefer both in their original language, even if I can only make out snatches of what is being said. Rhyme in a language with such modular suffixes & flexible syntax as Russian has a different function, both formally & socially. Rhyming nouns in Russian is not unlike walking around with your fly open. As, frankly, it is in English also.

But what about the distinction between a Tom Raworth – clear as a bell to my ear – & J.H. Prynne, Mr. Opacity? How, for example, am I to hear this first stanza of “On the Matter of Thermal Packing,” one of Prynne’s best known poems?

In the days of time now what I have

is the meltwater constantly round my feet

and ankles. There the ice is glory to the

past and the eloquence, the gentility of

the world’s being; I have known this

as a competence for so long that the

start is buried in light

This many enjambed lines over such a short terrain cannot be accidental. Indeed, that hard ending at the end of the second line itself conceals what we discover immediately upon starting the third – that it too is enjambed (a tiny formal joke that is paired with its opposite when “this” at the end of the fifth line turns out not to lead to a noun at the head of the sixth). I hear all the caesurae alright – the stanza appears to be built around them, starting with that careful cleaving of the “m” in ”time” in the first line from its nearest cousin “n” in “now,” the stanza ending in the seventh line right where the caesura should fall. But unless I want to draw a clunky analogy between the this chronicle of minor effects & the weightiness of Prynne’s subject, the rationale for a stanza that, read aloud, sounds this awkward just is lost on me. Is he doing something I don’t see or hear, or is there a way to read that third line so that the period after “ankles” doesn’t completely stop all flow?

Yet it is apparent, here & elsewhere, that Prynne’s sympathies are not that far from my own & that he is decidedly a poet of the ear, related in this aspect to such writers as Duncan, Creeley, Olson or Dorn. Reading him, you cannot doubt that you are in the presence of man who knows exactly what he is about & is after in his poetry. The intelligence is palpable. This is why Prynne, for me, is such a good example. Everything about his work tells me that I should love it unreservedly, but I spend so much time scrunching my nose & furrowing my brow as I read it that I wonder sometimes at what level he & I are practicing the same language. & that seems very different than the question of preferring Anthony Braxton to John Tesh or Yanni.

* When I taught a graduate seminar in 1981 at San Francisco State, using what would become the core of In the American Tree as my reading list, one student swore in her journal that the first several poets we read – Bob Grenier, Bruce Andrews, Rae Armantrout, Clark Coolidge – were complete gibberish. But with Steve Benson’s work, something clicked. She later went back to the books we’d used by the first four poets & suddenly discovered that they were completely lucid, even brilliant. In her journal, she openly worried about somehow having been brainwashed.

**A set of King Cole Trio 78s, the equivalent of a modern album; a couple of Johnny Ray singles, also 78s & Volare by Dominico Modugno, a 45.