WILLIAM S. WILSON

FOCUS, METER, AND OPERATIONS IN POETRY

l. focus and meter

Anything written 0n a page has two focal of poetry; so when Chaucer goes t0 wrap up planes-one of them distant and conceptual, be' Troilus and Creseida, he says good'bye to his yond the words in the meaning as it could be little book, dedicates it, misinterprets it, and con- abstracted from the materiality of the signs it as a verbal artifact to posterity. But he words-and the other close and physical: the alio invoks Christ and Mary at the last moment. paper,'color, texture, ink, typeface, and margins. Since they cannot be asimilated to the poem as the This doubie focus .is'inherent'in literature: how a thing of words, focusing on them shrinks as within the drily curious vvhen a beautiful story is read in a scale and scope of the'poem, even seen fr-om abwe drhb volume; how difficult for Wallace Stevens t0 poem the world shrinks ndren focus is beyond the get his .books designed and bound in a style by Troilus. Chaucer's final wftich is the reciprocal of the contents; how page, on God. ideas, there pleasiag Ohinese calligraphy is t0 one vuho cannot So while words are designating within even read Chinese. When Monkey, in the remains some undesignated materialitv poetry has always used this-for sixteenth+entury Ghinese nove! of that name, the words, and good luck of a rhyme-al' opens the scroll and finds it blank, he says t0 example the irrational there have been attempts t0 Buddha, ". . .what is the good of that?" Buddha though for a century part words the primary replfes, "As a mattsr of fact, it is sqch blank make this 'physical of plane. instead of an imposed and scrolls as these that are the true scriptures. But I focal So too as the local embodiment quite see that the people of China are too foolish metronomic regularity; has been on and ignorant to believe this, so there is nothing of a distant ideal order, the emphasis thought, it but to gitve them copies with some writing the rhythms immanent in emotion, for 'breathing. on." A work of art typically lets attention go speech, and The iambic foot comple- of back and forth, occasionally fixing it in the mented ages in which the world consisted space materiality of the materials, often letting it float solid bodies in motion within an absolute syllables freely beyond the visual or aural surfaces. and rtime. The necesary succesion of as a regular When there is writing on a page. there is fric' went with a piiture of the universe his tion between the physical expresivbnms of the and measurable succesion. Nabokov has words and their conceptual or referential John Shade write in Pale Fire, meaning. This fiiction hetween two planes of attention has been used as one of the resources And if my priYate universe scans right,

378 statement: The frage for Chaos, "Consider this the verse of galaxies divine So does Milton's Paradise l'osr is iambic I suspect is an iambic line' uri*e tot* of Which five pentameter. This means that it consists of foot by a of tvvo syllables, and that in eaeh The opposite of this order which is shared feet, each in is stressed'' " He then scans *un, ih* universe, and iambic verse, is shown the second syllable six lines in ordet to disprove that state' lines which the editor inserts in a footnote: the first ment. Here is the first: I must not forget to say something Ah, I That my friend told me of a certain king' x I I I xlx x x x Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit merely Here the unconvincing exclamation "Ah" an for several reasons' First' the fills out the iamb, and "something" receives This is nonsense the mad' disobedience conlains a consonantal aiien stress on thing. These lines reflect word define y: dis o hed yence' The line is not" ittr, it self-serving, ego of Kinbote' and sounded like a Peckham uses the mme inr Uitt*t*ntes between him and John Shade' hypermetric.'Second, Pitt' on Mans Firct Drs as though the stress were lambic has been so pervasive that William stress 0n shades stress is entirely relative to the tris OeattrUeU in 1778, could say, "What absolute. But the syllables, so that all *, ,rr, what shadows we pursue," which resolves preceeding and succeeding in the second syllable receive u tif, brurt than the words of a Mr' Coombe itrat is required is that what shadows than the first' The third 1780, "!Vhu, shadows we are, and relatively more stress receive more stress than the we pursue." syllable can even still more dimpty scanning verse is growing more second, as long as the fourth receives a Dis, 0f Mans ior several reasons' chiefty because than the third' So in 0f Mans First Oittitufi more has been withdrawn from the is a perfect iamb, and First can receive ro**iirt., unstressed relative ;t-itt ,t galaxies divine'" So Marianne Moore's stress than Mans, and still be not scanned: is entitled to emphasis since syllables can be counted but to D is. Ois "Proserpin gathring flours/ Her self a fairer (lV' 269)' At all events there is in BrooklYn Ftoure by gloomie Dis/ Was gathered" me feel at home' sometning that makes Muse' Peckham then scans "Sing Heav'nly gets three syllables pattern of iambs that on the secret top" and Wallace Stevi while a And in 'ts, another hypermetric line' word like something will oui of Heav'nly, for ,igt t t.unt a line, a is g,ut Hnv'nly is disyllabic' What has happened not support an iambic pattern: the that in a book called Man's frage for Chaos' overseas the commitment t0 order had been real' lt was something author has withdrawn It earlier ri"i-r t"."tnbered, sometnt"n t?:;'"r*,-o itquitrO by earlier art; and reinforced. by perfectly metrical .O ,.4 has made chaos out of stood in an external world' theory' Overseas, that verse. This is useful propaganda for a perhaps, but it bears no relation to the truth' the rhythms of The problem of describing A similar way of thinking about earli€r intrinsic metric can *oOrrn verse which lacks an poetry-withdrawing commitme.nt to.iu iambic U, ,*prru,rd from the problem of scanning puiirtn, and thln watching things fall .rrfi*r'work. Morse Peckham writes' in Man's

379 apart-appears in Bavid Antin's "Notes for an Yit make hyt sumwhat agreable, Thougtr som vers fayle in a sillable; Ultimate Prosody," in Stony Brook 112, p. 173. (House of Fame lll, 1096) Antin is notable as an editor of a magazine called Some/Thing, and as a poet with a knowledge of And in Troilus and Creseide, he prays that no linguistics. He finds irregularities almost as easily one mismeter the poem: as Peckham does. But consider the hypermetric line from Wordsworth, 'lJ\lent hurrying o'er the So prey I god that non myswrite the, V. 1795 illimitable waste," where Antin scans "the Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge. illimitable" as six syllables the il lim it a ble. point is that if y0u are not committed t0 But the pronunciation is "th'illimitable" if you The a higher and informing order, then you fragment are committed to the regularity. "Even Milton, mutilate that order. may be that modern whose blank verse in Paradise lost is clearly and lt must destroy or fragment old orders. This decasyllabic, has lines which can only be resolved artists purposes, like using by some accent-counting convention," Antin is easy to do and serves many holes. But it writes. But there are not ten hypermetric lines in stones from the Parthenon t0 fill up preserve as frag' Paradise Lost, and not five outside of speeches is difficult to the fragments where they are part of the characterization, as ments, they keep being recombined in a specious when Adam overflows with indulgent sentimen' unity. What has to be sorted out are the rights of past.to style which is the tality in an easy Paradox: in the find a correlative of their moral, philosophic, or reli- gious order, and the rights of poets today to societie, For solitude somtimes is best write without intrinsic metric, and to focus on And short retirement urges sweet returne' (1x,249) the hitherto subsidiary planes of materials, tools, and operations.

The point is not t0 debate Peckham and Antin ll. concrete operations in poetry 0n every foot of English poetry. The disagree- ment is not on the level of facts; it is that I see When there are scarce any poets who "speak and hea' Chaucer and Milton and Wordsrvorth the tongue/ That Shakespeare spake, the faith distantly focused on an ideal order which some' and morals hold/ Which Milton held," and penta' times coincides with the nearer focus of the im- accordingly not much reason for iambic perfect words. Antin quotes Gascoigne on meter, there are many alternatives, among them art Chaucer, but Gascoigne did not know that the use of well-defined operations. This is an acts which Chaucer was writing iambic verse, and thought not made by mysteri0us mental impose a on emotions, but made by, and that he vrms writing a four'stress line. So also form mental opera- Spenser in his imitation of Chaucer in the illustrating, acts that can be called is an abstract act which uses February eclogue. These matters are excellently tions. An operation information discused by C. S. Lewis, "The Fifteenth-Century tools and signs in accordance with simplici' Heroic Line," Essays and Studies XXIV (1938), and instructions, satisfying standards of Examples of opera- 2841. Chaucer himself calls attention to the fact ty, economy, and efficiency. reversal, that his verse is sometimes irregular- tio ns a re amplif ication, reduction,

380 gency. . ." This economist's operational defini- inversion, rotation, differentiation, addition, and tion of /ass, used ironically in a poem about the repetition. The meaning of the poem depends on loss of a life, sets the tone for a precise and the meaning 0f the particular abstract act or graphic interest in operations. Antin's sensibility operation which the poem figures forth' is not particularly concretist, but it is related to Some obvious examples of what I will now what I am calling operational, even when it is call operational poetry hoth identify and working in an elegiac and perhaps counter'opera' illustrate oPerati ons. tional . mode. The graph paper, that aid to paintings by "rendering the legible illegible operations, susgests an affinity with rendering the illegible Agnes Martin, Jaspar Johns, Alex Hay, and many Claus Bremer' renddtlqih rtffiit-C" - others working with grids, rather than an affinity with rhapsodic poetrY. A pageJong column by Btemer-"immer schoen 0ne ambition of concrete PoetrY is the opera' in der reihe bleiben"-demonstrates uniqueness. Ernst Jandl writes, "There must be prescribes an tion of typing a straight margin, an infinite number of methods of writing experi- one. Bremer operation, but also interferes with mental poems, but I think the most succesful hardly write a text in notes, "For iust as one can methods are those which can only be used once, line for line' this form, one can hardly read one for then the result is a poem identical with the one not The keep-in-line of'keep in line'causes method by uvhich it is made." Emmett Williams get to keep in line, but, on the contrary, t0 out quotes this remark as the note to one of his provokes an of line. This kind of organization posms, "like attracts like," in which the words reason." The suggestion of urge for freedom and appear t0 attract each other as they move closer when operational re' this note is anti-operational, and closer across the page. Here the poet has principle' presents a rigid, arbitrary, impersonal found an abstract act, an operation, and the achieved by means of But anti-opeiational is specific illustration of that operation- This opera' 0perations.-'-Oitttt tion which is performed on the words is signs of the operational are the direc- experienced as immediately, as sensuously, as the that accompany some works' Jackson tions words themselves. describes the opera- MacLow, in "2nd Gatha," poetry is part of its (empty The tone of operational tions: "The reader begins at any square meaning, and the implications of the words are squares are silences). He moves to any adiacent controlled that they are cool, clear, vertically, or diagonally, and usually so square horizontally, of piece' and something like the designated implications continues this proces until the end of the for satire. When ike does in fact attract like, when Letters are read as any sound they can stand the legible is rendered illegible, when the order to language." His use of graph paper suggests in any until linearity is sub- precise mental operations, or exact keep in line is repeated verted, the effect is comically self-destructive' paper-and-pencil operations, and graph paper has Even in a lyric mood, or what might be called the Leen used throughout a volume by David Antin' operational lyric mood, satire enters' Edwin designed in a spiral school notebook Definitions, Itliorg.n writes, in "The Computer's first by Eleanor Antin. The first poem begins with a Christmas card," "iollymerry/ hollyberry/ quotation, "loss is an unintentional decline in or jollyberry/ merryholly/ happyiolly/ ' '" but ji*upprutunte of a value arising from a contin' '

381 ends,"asM E R RYCH RY/SANTHEMUM.,, Morgan reducing and magnifying a te)fi below and above notes, "The eomputer's final triumphant solution legibility. ln these operations the poet cannot is relevant though wrong.,, So while this per- conyey a p-oint of view about anything without mutational poem is lyric, its lyricism concludes simultaneodsly conveyinii a point of,ri-r* ,Uur, with the mock-operational. Morgan,s simulaled operations. And the operations computer poems have much in common with the themselves-mirroring, ranersing, reducing, ampli. mood of Donald-Barthelme, a badly misunder- fying-are rnmys of adjusting the readers point stood writer. tii tris story, rThe of Explanation,,, view. These poems attempt part t0 achieve a coordi- of an interview which alternates betWeen the nation of the parts of the pocm, wherein the size lyrie erotic and the comic operational goes like . and shape of a letter is not subordinated to any this: "0: There are ten rules for operating the literary meaning. Attenlion is given an equitable machine. The first rule is turn it on. A: Turn it and lyric distribution. on. O: The second rule is convert the terms. The This flexible point-of-view go* with a tenden_ third rule is rotate the inputs. The fourth rule is cy toward the potentially endles. Haroldo de you have made a serious mistake.r, A more recent Campos writes of a poem by Ronaldo Azeredo, story, "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel,,, which "ln the last line, the blank conveys the sotar in- concerns irony as a mental, operation, as an ab- formation, and the s, first letter of sollsun; stract act which has the effect of abstracting the plu ralizes /uaslstreets. The proces becomes ironist from the world, wsrksrwith the relations endless." He writes of a poem by Augusto de between emotions and operations: ,,youte been Campos, 'The reduction of a ploi (love? pretty hard on our machines. you,ve withheld murder?-'once upon a time. your . .,) to a dynamic enthusiasm, that's damaging. . .,, One sec- iterative endles process.,, This potentially end_ tion of the story is a solid black square, les operation is in the mode of the operitional sufficiently concrets, and sufficiently in the in the plastic arts, the mile-long sculpture of operational mode. bricks which could be longer, the fifty-mile The vocabulary of criticism have paintings will to in_ sprayed 0n the snow, Closer to po*try, clude, if it is t0 come to terms with the meaning a machine called Ward Works made by Bici of these operations, such words as permutation, Hendricks lights up words that move in apparent conversion, and rotation. lt will have to consider endlessness: word, tiltisper, wind. .. . . In an the meaning and value of operations such as episode of StarTrek-, the computer u,as $ven the differentiation, amplifieation, and reduction. task of cornputingfl,an endles operation. While One operation frequently used is the enlargement that example is somewhat melancholy, the. or reduction of type. Amplifieation introduces general effect of the use of operations, relatdd to chance raggednes and random variations, so that the positle endlesnes, is the cheerfut and one B looks different frorn anothsr B when optimistic emphasis 0n continuing posibitity. magnified. Butthe meaning isnotonly in the B, When art has been thought of in organic meia_ but in the operation of magnification. Con- phbrs, with a beginning, middle, and end like the versely, reduction often introduces a flawles beginning, middle, and end of life, the structure Lilliputian prettiness, a charming miniaturiza- uras likely to proceed from posibility into tion. Jean Francois Bory illustrates the range of prohability and then into necesity, which rneant 0perations from Lilliput to Brobdignag by both an exhaustion of alternatives, and a

382 structural closure. 0perational art can maintain a sense of undiminished possibility: it is the art 0f the posible. EDITOR,S NOTES ON PUBLICATIONS II The Problems of describing poems and simplified for working methods are somewhat AGAINST THE CRIME OF SILENCE: Proceed- these poets. Dom Sylvester Houedard: "there are ings of the Russell lnternational War Crimes 86 typeunits available 0n my machine for use Tribunal (Stockholm, Copenhagen), ed. John w/2-colour or no ribbon-or with carbons of Duffett, lntro. Bertrand Russell, Fore. Ralph various colours. ." Aram Saroyan: "my Schoenman, Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation (O'Hare Books), 1968, pgs. Cloth. This machine-an obsolete red-top Royal portable-is 662 book is a major document. lt will have a perma- influence This the biggest on my work." nent place in the conscience of America. emphasis 0n the machine or instrument might justify a definition of instrumenfal poetry, but NOTATIONS, by John Cage, Something Else the instruments themselves would have to be Press, 1969. Cloth $15. defined in terms of operations. A collection of contemporary musical mss. or- Since some of these poets work in other ganized, & infused with statements, according to l-Ching chance operations. A beautiful, impor- media-Daniel Spoerri, Diter Rot-and use some tant, & enormously engaging book, cheap at $1 5. of the same operations, we might look upon a medium not as a physical stuff, but as a set of operations. Then some of the problems about 2O Fitzroy Square Wl relations between the arts could be forgotten, while we saw resemblances between the opera' tion of amplification in music, poetry, painting, Collected Poems 35/- and photography. The materials of poetry are Basil Bunting Briggflats 21 /-, 1O/6 Pete Brown Let'em Roll Kalka 21 /-. 10/6 not merely words or emotions 0r ideas, but are Edward Dorn North Atlantic Turbine 25/-, 15/- also a set of operations that can be performed on Edward Dorn Geography 28/^ Ednard Dorn ldaho Out 1O/- performed on sounds and words, and that can be Robert D.uncan The First Decade 35/- images. Thus poetry, even as it is defined opera' Robert Duncan Derivations 35/- as what poets do, finds many new Larry Eigner Another time in fragments 35/- tionally Collected Poems 28/- posibilities for meaning outside of words, in the Boy Fisher The Ship's Orchestra 21 /- implications of operations. lan Hamilton Finlay The Dancers lnherit the Party 21 /- lan Hamilton Finlay Canal Game 10/- Allen Ginsperg Ankor Wat 25/-. 15/- Lee Harwood The White Room 28/- Some Anthologies of Concrete Poetry Lee Harwood Landscapes 21 /- , Spike Hawkins fhe losr Fire Brigade 21 /-, 10/6 Eugene Wildman, ed. Anthology of Concretism, Alan Jackson The Grim Waylarer 25/- Swallow Press, $7.50, Pa $2.50. David Jones The Tribune's Visitation 25/-,15/- Emmett Williams, ed. An Anthology of Concrete Stuart Montgomery Cbce 21 /- Lorine Niedecker North Central 25/- Else Press,.$ 1 0. Poetry,Something Jeff Nuttall Pig 28/- "A World Look at Concrete Poetry," Mary Ellen Tom Pickard High on the Walls 21 /-, 1O/6 Solt, with Manifestoes and Statements about Tom Raworth A Serial Biography 28/- Concrete Poetry, A rtes H ispan icas/H ispan ic A rts, Jerome Rothenberg Between 25 / -, 15 / - I (Winter-Spring, 19681, lndiana University. Gary Snyder A Range of Poems 42/- Gary Snyder The Eack Country 30/-,151- Gary Snyder 6'Sections lrom Mauntains & Rivers 21 / ", 10/6 Mr. Wilson teaches at Oueens College'

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