Requests for Porno / Silliman on the English

I got my first request for porno today... see the comments bar on the right, under the heading "Wazzup." Of course I'm terribly flattered, but my boobs are not for sale.

This is quite a koinkidink, as Rachel and I just watched Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy last night, which was pretty amusing. The idea that one could become rich and famous simply by the ability to maintain an erection on film is a life lesson I will not soon forget.

"Wazzup" -- I didn't care much for informative titles, then -- also includes some commentary I had written ages ago but had forgotten about, regarding two paragraphs of Silliman's Blog that I mentioned in the more recent commentaries. RS's original blog post is from November 6, 2002.

(BTW, RS MUST take that author photograph off of his blog, or at least integrate it into the design. It looks like a communist bloc "great leader" poster -- but closer to Solznyetsin than Mao -- flapping over the town square. Be happy you only have the Madame here!)

My entry below, from November 7, 2002, is not particularly well-written but I did get to use the word "hamstrung," which, like "handcuffed," is a word I picked up watching tennis on TV. I'm reposting it here since I still think it's kind of relevant and it never had it's day in the sun.

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I was reasonably perturbed about a recent post on Silliman's blog (what follows is two paragraphs of a longer one):

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 Shikatomi [sic]. 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 think it's been a little too fashionable to knock on the English for not producing too many "great" poets in the 20th century, and certainly if one is going to look through the frame of "speech based" poetics one will not find many satisfying English writers -- Charles Tomlinson, for example, who was very close to Williams' poetry never really, to my mind, understood the implications of his metrics. And certainly if one doesn't enjoy Gerard Manley Hopkins, probably as great an innovator in my mind as Williams, then one is really going to be hamstrung when it comes to reading poetry that has any attention at all to a formal tradition that goes beyond "speech based" poetics.

I actually think the value of speech-based meters was understood by too few writers, and led to a lot of very sloppy, boring stuff (the bit that Silliman quotes in his blog from Curnow is pretty bland to me). Part of the reason I've taken on a reading of people like Drew Milne and John Wilkinson -- even though I find these writers a bit recalcitrant when it comes to the candor that I enjoy in, say, Williams or Coleridge, or Raworth for that matter -- is because of their attention to sound patterning, verse forms, linguistic experiences that are "other," beyond the scale of what a human normally exerts when engaging in speech. Which is to say the artifice of their work, the way sound plays against each other over several lines, echoes returning from several lines previous and foreshadowing what is to come. This is one of the many virtues of the lyric, that there is a certain promise of return with every syllable included -- a sound sets up the context for another sound, which may occur several line away. It's poems that exploit these features that usually astound me as being much beyond anything I would expect language to do.

Much "speech based" stuff -- or at least the language used to discuss it, such as the idea of a "good ear," which I think is a term that needs to be retired -- does not play with these potentials. What we are left with, quite often, is meter -- sounds included to fill out some motion that it supposed to send the line across the page. Sure, it's a type of meter unique to the 20th century, but it's gotten quite conventional, not to mention disengenous as we've grown to realize that so called "natural" rhythms sprung from "breath" are certainly as learned a behavior as, say, greeting someone with a kiss of each cheek. What also happens -- in the case of Olson especially -- is a lot of bluster that is perfectly impenetrable in terms of "content," and uninteresting in terms of language itself.

Ok, I'm being vague. But I would take Hopkins, Prynne, Auden, Riley, Finlay (he did "write" poems once), an Australian named Martin Johnston, etc. over several of the writers Ron names in terms of "ear", and I'm an American damn it! John Wieners probably had one of the best ears going, but his metrics are about as indebted to folks like Herrick and, say, Verlaine, as they are to "speech." I'd rather see us be colonized for once rather than view the entire range of Anglophone poetry of the previous century through the frame of "speech" -- or anti-speech, for that matter, which I guess is where the real game for Silliman lies.

[As a last note, it's worth observing that despite what Creeley says, Williams' line went as against speech as "for" -- a poem like "The pure products of America" from Spring and All is as motivated by having a short line in the middle of a three-line stanza, a very couunter-speech tactic, as it was by listening to his speech rhythms. In fact, this poem is as far away from breaking the line based on speech patterns as any I know (I mean, of poems that pay attention to "metrics" at all), which is why I think WCW's metrics have yet to be very understood. No one talks like the voice in this poem -- it's one long ramble, and to keep that it alive one had to estrange the language continually, not naturalize it, hence the often choppy nature of the line breaks, use of commas, etc. Other poems like "As the cat..." are very regular metrically, which is why one would read it aloud without paying attention to the line breaks, the same way one would read a good lyric poem without a huge pause at the end of each line. A poem "In Breughal's great picture" are as motivated by conventional metrical concerns as, say, Pound's Usura Canto -- a relationship to rhetoric as much as lyric -- and a poem like "Old age is..." is as motivated by visual skinniness as constraint -- James Schuyler wrote "skinny" poems, according to F O'H -- as by anything like a speech based line. I guess the problem is that each poem presents its own issues, especially for WCW for whom each poem was a new venture into outer space. End digression.]

I wish I had time to touch up these lines -- I'm really just providing a little content now that my shoulder's back in shape. Stay tuned.

Posted by Brian Stefans at August 7, 2003 10:33 AM | TrackBack