There is an interesting – if a tad strange – debate visible in the comments section to my review of Lisa Lubasch on Monday. Eric Elshtain, who is critical of Lubasch’s writing even though he’s published some himself, wants to contrast Lubasch’s poetry as being driven rhythmically through “dramatic” timing in contrast with the “comic” timing of poets like Armantrout, Hejinian & R. Waldrop: “they use a comic's timing, a footed time that is carried forward by not only a thought logic but a sonic one.” The implication is that the latter three are “good” or at least “better” for their approach to this issue: “There is no robust embodied element [in Lubasch’s poetry], in either the rhythms, the aphorisms, or the intellectualisms.” Curtis Faville – who may be my most frequent commentator – challenges the contrast and asks further about Elshtain’s characterization of “footed,” to which Elshtain replies “I just mean that one can tap one's foot to the times of an Armantrout poem, much more so than w/ Lubasch.”

 

Ignoring for the nonce the minor detail that Armantrout, Hejinian & Waldrop have radically dissimilar senses of time & sound in their work, the issue that Elshtain raises for me is one of what constitutes a music in poetry. If I think of the generation before mine, for example, the poet who comes first to my mind as a writer driven by sound, a “sonic” logic, is also the poet who most distinctly conceptualizes sound dramatically, even theatrically – Robert Duncan. And, indeed, when I characterized Lubasch “something of a formalist, in the sense that one might characterize Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan & Robert Kelly as formalists,” it was exactly her sense of sound as dramatic that brought Duncan to my mind.

 

Part of what resonated for me in this exchange was a glance the same day at the latest issue of that living oxymoron, the Contemporary Poetry Review, in which Jan Schreiber writes not one, but two mostly positive reviews of the critical writing of Timothy Steele, a poet with a comically tin ear –

 

 

From breezeway or through front porch screen

You’d see the sheets, wide blocks of white

Defined against a backdrop of

A field whose grasses were a green

      Intensity of light.

 

(from “The Sheets”)

 

Here is a stanza whose prosody’s awkwardness discredits itself before it completes the first line & whose next-to-last line is virtually all stuffer in order to set up green as a cringingly predictable rhyme, a text that takes 30 words to say what a poet like Larry Eigner could have communicated in less than five – & with greater force & specificity. It’s almost a textbook example of how not to write, prolix and intellectually sloppy. Perversely, Steele has written at least two textbooks & it is these that Schreiber examines. Confronting Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter, a 14-year-old volume, Schreiber notes:

 

Steele examines many of the reasons for this state of affairs [the abandonment of metrical conventions by the high modernists], among them the influence of aesthetics as a discipline (which worked to homogenize thinking about poetry, music, and painting), the prestige acquired by science in modern times, tending to validate anything seen as experimental, and the evident despair of many writers that they could ever achieve the power of their forebears by using the same methods. He is particularly acute in describing the efforts of twentieth-century writers like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams to reconceive the structures of poetry in musical terms of phrasing and breath. He might have observed further that these writers seem limited in their understanding of underlying musical principles. First, music depends deeply upon a fundamental beat, analogous to the metric pulse the revolutionaries were trying to discard. Phrasing in music works in relation to the beat, not as a substitute for it. Second, although it lacks the denotative elements of poetry (elements the revolutionaries were doing their best to obliterate), music has unavoidable melodic and harmonic qualities inherent in the scale, qualities that can be reduced in importance by adopting certain compositional strategies but never abandoned altogether unless one gives up all instruments except the drum - and then we are back to a fundamental beat. So the yearning for music as a model for a new structural principle of poetry is a wistful and romantic yearning founded on ignorance of music and a rather surprising lack of insight into the resources of one’s own medium.

 

Schreiber’s comments are worth citing here just to highlight what a bollocks he makes of the idea of music.* He proposes a single, narrow (& in his mind no doubt “classical”) definition & then attempts to imply that all deviations reflect a “limited . . . understanding of underlying musical principles.” Such an approach is not only tautological, but would suggest even that the likes of Wordsworth & Coleridge, attempting to shift poetry toward an aesthetics of speech – exactly the same project that preoccupies Olson 150 years later – were likewise part of the problem. It’s a strategy that basically is forced to define anything written since Pope as either part of a long narrative of decline or else as a (failed) attempt to counter what must appear to be a confounding historical tendency.

 

Schreiber’s position is nonsense – any attempt that is forced to explain away two entire centuries ought to be laughed off stage at the outset – but it is the kind of nonsense that it is that intrigues me. Not unlike Elshtain, his stance is predicated on accepting one, and only one, conceptualization of prosody as “correct,” which then allows each at least theoretically to map out how all poets – past, contemporary & even future – by their distance with this miraculous bindu point of poetic sound. That Elshtain & Schreiber would disagree entirely as to what that point should be only underscores their problem.

 

What we have here is a question of how to think about at least five separate realms of human possibility when they appear to come into conjunction at once:

 

·        Language

·        Speech

·        Writing

·        Music

·        Sound

 

Not one of these realms is identical with any of the others. An entire critical tradition, for example, has evolved out of the nonidentity of language with either writing or speech. Further, it is humanly possible to think about each of these dimensions in radically dissimilar terms. In Schreiber’s formula, there is only one kind of music & no other permissible relation to sound for the poem, which is constructed out of a tradition of writing with no particular regard for either language or speech. But there, at bare minimum, 24 other combinations of these dimensions that are possible, each of which is subject to an almost infinite number of human interpretations. Even another poet with as rigidly prescriptive an idea of music might have a thoroughly dissimilar concept of what, exactly, is being prescribed.

 

In practice, Louis Zukofsky’s definition of an integral – upper limit music, lower limit speech – has always struck me as being “sort of” accurate, in the sense that I think most poets tend to have a personal range that they sense or hear. In Duncan’s work, the lower limit tends very much to be a prose writing that I would associate (as I think Duncan did) with a personal journal. The upper limit for him was a “music” very close to Miltonic declamation. In Robert Creeley’s work, however, the lower limit is very close to a music one might associate with hard bop sax solos, but the upper limit, visible in his prose & in the longer verse compositions of Words, is writing. One can organize one’s work along a virtually infinite number of such coordinates.

 

All of which is to say that Lisa Lubasch definitely has an ear. One element in her integral may move toward drama – as I think happens with Duncan’s Miltonic mode – but that doesn’t make it better or worse than Hejinian or Armantrout or Waldrop. What makes Timothy Steele’s ear “tin” is not his conception of what poetry should do, but his inept execution of same, like a player piano trying to work through a crumpled score. You can see what he wants to achieve, but he has to add so much extraneous verbiage to get there that it all breaks down. There’s a difference, and readers as well as writers should pay heed.

 

 

 

 

* Schreiber’s mangled conception of science & its influence on modernism & the arts is another story.