I was reading an Allen Curnow poem from the early 1960s, “A Small Room with Large Windows,”* when the prosody of its fourth section struck me:

A kingfisher’s naked arc alight
Upon a dead stick in the mud
A scarlet geranium wild on a wet bank
A man stepping it out in the near distance
With a dog and a bag
                                        on a spit of shell
On a wire in a mist
                                    a gannet impacting
Explode a dozen diverse dullnesses
Like a burst of accurate fire.

This passage, by no means Curnow’s best, stood out in contrast to the section immediately preceding, which carried an AABBCC… rhyme scheme, a relatively rare occurrence for the late New Zealand poet. I like the prosody here, even if words such as “naked” & “dead” in the first two lines appear to have been inserted solely for the sake of sound. I can hear it – the music of this passage reaches me just fine.

Which reminded me of how seldom this is the case for me with poets from English-speaking countries other than the United States. With the very notable exception of Basil Bunting, I find there to have been shockingly few poets from the old Commonwealth on either side of the equator whose work I would characterize as having a strong ear. More often than not, I can’t hear it at all, not even in Hopkins’ so-called sprung rhythms. Whatever the other values the poem might propose – & often enough they are many – the prosody of so much non-Yank Anglophone verse strikes me as jumbled, prosaic, “a dozen diverse dullnesses.”

There are of course exceptions, but I notice how many of them are poets who seem to have taken a particular interest in the American tradition of poetry – Tom Raworth, Thomas A. Clark, Fred Wah, Jill Jones, Lee Harwood, Gerry Shikatani. Yet the whole idea of poetry’s relationship to spoken English – & through speech to sound – is one that invariably leads back to Wordsworth & Coleridge. This makes me wonder if there isn’t some disability within me that just can’t hear it, whatever “it” might in this instance be, rather like the Kansan watching a British film with North Country accents who longs for subtitles.

I also wonder if there isn’t something specific about U.S. verse & its history that isn’t turned toward sound & might not be peculiarly tuned to the tones & rhythms of speech – at least of American dialects. While Whitman clearly had some desire to relate his writing to speech, Dickinson had a more charged push-pull relationship towards the possibility. In fact, the often intrusive editing that her work received can be viewed as an attempt to normalize her poetry on a model more identifiable as speech. Pound & Stein likewise bring their own strong sense of melopoiea to the party, though incommensurate with one another’s. Where Stein often seeks a cubism of the ear, Pound’s remarkable prosody turns on a wide range of models, from Beowulf to the Bible, proposing speech as such usually as satire:

“an’ doan you think he chop an’ change all the time
stubborn az a mule, sah, stubborn as a MULE,
got th’ eastern idea about money”

Something Josephine Miles once said to David Melnick & myself jumps out at me here. Recalling William Carlos Williams’ poetry in the 1930s & ‘40s, she noted that she could not – these were her words – “hear him,” she and her friends had no idea how to read those texts that today seem so self-evidently the paradigm for spoken English. The very features of his verse that today seem so obvious as to be boring – a level of acceptance that has come to hurt Williams’ reputation – were in fact impenetrably opaque not that long ago.

In fact, in spite of his own critical comments, these features may have been somewhat opaque to Williams as well. Robert Creeley, one of the first to recognize Williams’ poetry as an apotheosis of transcribed speech, has commented on how surprised he was to discover that Williams himself did not respect his linebreaks when reading the poems in public.

Olson in theory took care of that. With the Projectivists proposing a hard or rigorous version & the New York School and the Beats offering “soft” ones, U.S. poets from the 1960s onward have had a ready toolkit available for what speech might look like translated into line & stanza. & for the past 20-odd years, these have been supplemented by a variety of post-avant text strategies intended to problematize a too simplistic one-to-one correlation, ranging from sound poetry at one extreme to visual poetics at another.** What these various interventions have not done is to add significantly to the prosodic vocabulary of the poem.*** The number & potential combination of sounds in English is not infinite, even though the number of possible meanings & utterances is. Thus the elaboration and expansion of poetic forms over the past 30 years, impressive as it has been, has not been accompanied by much in the way of a new cadence.

The limits of prosody are a major motivator behind the technological augmentation of poetry, substituting a divergence in lieu of an advance. To paraphrase Robert Grenier, all technologies say the same thing: hummmm. The margins of poetry have been littered with attempts at expanding the terrain of verse at least since Hugo Ball and the Russian zaum poets aimed at writing beyond language, but to date no one seems to have noticed that such projects age at an accelerated rate, moving from startling to quaint in something less than 30 years. This difficulty is not coincidental and promises only to get worse the more closely it attaches itself to Moore’s Law.+

A by-product of this phenomenon is that books that do think seriously about the question of poetic sound, such as Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford, 1998) or Stephen Ratcliffe’s particularly excellent Listening to Reading (SUNY, 2000), have yet to tackle the problem of prosody as it impacts the relative impenetrability of different variants of English. It may be easy enough, outside of Boontling, Gullah or Hawaiian pidgin, to envision American English as one language, but the minute you cross national borders it patently is a problem of another order, a larger & radically different context. In Close Listening, the essays that do focus on the poetics of specific communities do so in terms that are more social than linguistic, with the pointed exception of Dennis Tedlock’s “Toward a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability.” Nick Piombino, Marjorie Perloff and Bruce Andrews all consider the role of sound within different sectors of the U.S. poetry community, but nobody appears able to consider the possibility that a poem by Tom Raworth or Allen Curnow, might mean something quite different in Oxford, UK, at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, at New College in San Francisco’s Mission District, at the Iowa Writers Workshop, in Algiers, Louisiana, or at the Northern tip of the Southern island of New Zealand.

* Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems, 1941-1997 (Auckland University Press, 1997), pp. 177-178.

** “Who would have thought that fewer than forty years after Olson celebrated the ‘LINE’ as the embodiment of the breath, the signifier of the heart, the line would be perceived as a boundary, a confining border, a form of packaging?” Marjorie Perloff, “After Free Verse,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, edited by Charles Bernstein (Oxford, 1998), p. 99. But that was exactly the condition that created this reaction.

*** The two writers who perhaps represent the most aggressive attempts to expand prosody would probably be Ted Enslin with his endless (or very nearly so) variations on the line in his long works from the 1970s and, somewhat more recently, Clark Coolidge, whose sense of jazz rhythm, from bebop to pomo, clearly informs his sense of line and stanza.

+ In this sense, the move away from something that is simply “the verse print bred” that makes the most sense to me are Grenier’s hand-lettered scrawl works.

Most of the time, when I read poetry – by anyone, even Billy Collins – I read it aloud. The prosody of the text is for me always an essential aspect and I’m often dismayed at younger poets who seem to take to the genre solely for its conceptual potentials (substantial as they may be). Not too surprisingly, one of the greatest pleasures for me is hearing the authors read their own works aloud.

Three superb resources for modern poetry sound files:

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Joel Kuszai’s growing collection of sound files in Real Audio. The only problem with the Factory School site is that it doesn’t permit you to download the file, only to stream it over the net, so there are inevitable (and regrettable) pauses for rebuffering throughout unless you have a broadband connection. The site has some excellent African-American recordings (Countee Cullen!) and genuine rarities, including Robert Browning and a reading by Larry Eigner.
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Laurable has put together the best index of poetry sound files on the web that I’ve encountered, including all the Factory School materials. In addition, this site also has the best poetry weblog out there – by far. When I started this project, I wrote “Blogs have been around for awhile now, but to date I haven't seen a genuinely good one devoted to contemporary poetry….” Laurable proves me wrong.

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Ilya Kutik and Andrew Wachtel’s site for Russian poetry is called From the Ends to the Beginning. The text is in both Russian and English (although I have not been able to get the Cyrillic to work on my XP system, which is slightly maddening). If you want to hear Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak or Esenin read their own poetry aloud, this is the place. There are also some poems of Mayakovsky’s read by his lover, Lilly Brik.