Ran across this little nugget this morning:
"In America blank verse has become something of a rarity toward the end of the twentieth century. The reason may have to do with the favor that plain speech enjoys. The poetic line has become shorter, so short that even a tetrameter line at times seems long. Today's poetry has taken on the directness of journalism and the simplicity of speech. Elaborate sentences are considered part of mandarin speech - inauthentic, self-involved, not committed to communication or at the very least not committed to delivering what might be easily, quickly acknowledged as the truth of a mood, say, or scene, or action. Our present-day preference for directness means fewer adjectives or adverbs, fewer subordinate or qualifying clauses ... that might lengthen the sentence."
This comes from The Making of a Poem, edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland - specifically it's from the primer to the section on Blank Verse. (My guess as to the author would have to be Ms. Boland; the text is Barthesianly non-specific on who penned what chapter introduction.) And I'm not so sure that I agree with it. Or rather: if it is the case that poetry has come into contemporary vogue, if plain speech does enjoy a heap of favor, it is but a single heap of favor, it is but one pole of the modern poetic spectrum. Or this: if it enjoys a vogue, it isn't because of any mass movement within the art but rather that the art uses it (the poetry of plain speech) as a wall by which we're bounded as - if I might make a metaphor here - we descend the staircase. To extend that, if the plain speech is the firm, reassuring wall on the left of the flight, then the bannister on the right is the elusive, allusive work of the avant-garde - Language poetry, say, or generally the poetry of postmodernity - beyond which is the open dust-filled air of the stodgy foy-yay. I apologize for that. But I can't dig the suggestion that any given voicing or approach dominates the mainstream, if indeed poetry might be said to have such, for two reasons: one, the field is just too varied to make such a pronouncement mean much, and two, we're in the contemporary scene and don't / can't possess the perspective to so qualify what poetry's doing.
I react to this because the notion of plain speech - the conversational, as I'll probably refer to it more than once - hits close to home in my own work and my thinking about same. See, the above writer treats plain speech and elaborate diction (for example) as antitheses. Although it'll sound for a spell as though I'm saying that black = white, I want to suggest that there's a method out there, a way possible, to blend together those colors. The conversational aspect doesn't necessarily have to obviate verbal fireworks; much as there's a middle space between the wall of the conversational (say Frost, say Collins) and the rickety rail of wrought & ornamented poetic language (say Graham, say Ashbery), so too is there an intermediate region between plain speech and heightened diction* - after all, if this is a staircase, and I do say it is, then it's that space by which we travel between floors.
Plain speech as a designation belies what may be a far more useful descriptor, which is the vernacular. Let's try this, to arrange a series of what'll probably look like synonyms for a time but (I hypothesize) will as we move across the page begin to marry the originally-dispararte concepts of "plain speech" and "elaborate diction," which terms we've borrowed from the Making of the Poem editor.
plain speech <--> vernacular <--> public phraseology <--> jargon <--> elaborate speech
I don't want to get ahead of myself and in so doing skip some step in this budding logic, but the basic point I want to make here, which is part & parcel of the burgeoning poetics that are ever nearer to getting their manifesto writ and strewn wide, is that plain speech, which is to say that vocabulary & rhythm that one uses at the checkout line and reads aloud in Clifford books blurs into common linguistic structures the simplicity of which is not a given, but is only the way it tends to be construed - i.e. plain speech does not equal simple speech, not quite. The plain speaking of your say Frost ("Whose woods these are I think I know") is only a more poeticized yet still defined as "simple" version of the prosaic Joe-speak, say, "Oh, this looks like the Wellingtons' woods" (i.e. the vernacular) which bleeds into something like "I've miles to go before I sleep" ** and from there perhaps to some being versed in country things such as the type of fence on the outer limits of the speaker's vision (what with the snow) (that's the jargon example, btw), and then the heightened diction I suppose would have to be something complex but not needlessly so, rather some achievement of overdescription of that fence, perhaps, which makes it Poundishly new - it's central to this discussion that that latter overdescription is not dialectically opposed to the plain speech from whence we set out but rather apes the public & specialized vocabularies so as to further enliven & color that otherwise run of the mill fence, but rather builds upon the instances of plain speech and the other kinds in order to better attend to the image, to the idea, to the poem's core import.
Is this mere adornment? Filigree with no real work to do as far as making the poem mean something? No. It's more than that, although I suspect I'll have to revisit this soon. Suffice to say, at the least, that instances of say an overdescribed fence won't do jack for a poem unless something in that overdescription advances some thematic or imagistic point in the poem we've just invented. Fancy for fancy's sake, I don't brook that, and neither do the readers I have in mind - such ornament would be so much and I'm with my craft's elders (Fussell, for one) that a poem when it may rightly be called such will waste no words or syllables. (As to how this affects our discussion of this new vast poetry, keep your navbar here).
But so it's about here that you realize that that set of speech descriptions above is no continuum, but a fucking circle. It's a fucking circle with points for each of these qualities of speech and more along the circumference, and the best possible poem, I think, at least w/r/t the kind of poem that is best equipped in terms of addressing / chronicling the way the culture's going (another post, that) is going to arc between these fashions of speech according to the demands of the poetic moment, caroming pinball-like from plain to jargon to vernacular to heightened to overwrought bombast to Great Aunt Millie's favorite cliche to et cetera.
Lots I didn't talk about tonight. Solomon Burke: "There's always tomorrow, and tomorrow night / Hang in there baby, sooner or later / I know I'll get it right.
* There's a potential oversight in what I mean by these terms: "plain speech" isn't meant to exclude any sense of it too being "heightened." Which is to say that although the effect of this poetry is to mimic & enact some quality of the mundane human voice in its verses, the structure of that poetry remains a highly produced, studied, & considered artifact (in the sense of the expert artisan). The poetry of say Graham, say Ashbery stands opposite to Frost's in several aspects but chiefly in that the intended effect is either to or not to replicate, within the illusive possibilities of verse, the rhythms and tambors of spoken words.
** Which I REALIZE is another Frostism, but the convenient & possibly confusing thing about Frost and the way I'm discussing him in particular is that his lyrics have attained the airie heights of cultural suffusion shared only by such all-star product of the zeitgeist as Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" commerical and Sara Lee jingles; you sometimes can't be sure if you're quoting Frost or some pre-Big Bang humanistic truism. So it isn't a perfect example. But this line moves us from the vernacular to the precincts of public voicing & common phrasings that I think still works w/r/t the continuum between plain speech and heightened diction.
This comes from The Making of a Poem, edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland - specifically it's from the primer to the section on Blank Verse. (My guess as to the author would have to be Ms. Boland; the text is Barthesianly non-specific on who penned what chapter introduction.) And I'm not so sure that I agree with it. Or rather: if it is the case that poetry has come into contemporary vogue, if plain speech does enjoy a heap of favor, it is but a single heap of favor, it is but one pole of the modern poetic spectrum. Or this: if it enjoys a vogue, it isn't because of any mass movement within the art but rather that the art uses it (the poetry of plain speech) as a wall by which we're bounded as - if I might make a metaphor here - we descend the staircase. To extend that, if the plain speech is the firm, reassuring wall on the left of the flight, then the bannister on the right is the elusive, allusive work of the avant-garde - Language poetry, say, or generally the poetry of postmodernity - beyond which is the open dust-filled air of the stodgy foy-yay. I apologize for that. But I can't dig the suggestion that any given voicing or approach dominates the mainstream, if indeed poetry might be said to have such, for two reasons: one, the field is just too varied to make such a pronouncement mean much, and two, we're in the contemporary scene and don't / can't possess the perspective to so qualify what poetry's doing.
I react to this because the notion of plain speech - the conversational, as I'll probably refer to it more than once - hits close to home in my own work and my thinking about same. See, the above writer treats plain speech and elaborate diction (for example) as antitheses. Although it'll sound for a spell as though I'm saying that black = white, I want to suggest that there's a method out there, a way possible, to blend together those colors. The conversational aspect doesn't necessarily have to obviate verbal fireworks; much as there's a middle space between the wall of the conversational (say Frost, say Collins) and the rickety rail of wrought & ornamented poetic language (say Graham, say Ashbery), so too is there an intermediate region between plain speech and heightened diction* - after all, if this is a staircase, and I do say it is, then it's that space by which we travel between floors.
Plain speech as a designation belies what may be a far more useful descriptor, which is the vernacular. Let's try this, to arrange a series of what'll probably look like synonyms for a time but (I hypothesize) will as we move across the page begin to marry the originally-dispararte concepts of "plain speech" and "elaborate diction," which terms we've borrowed from the Making of the Poem editor.
plain speech <--> vernacular <--> public phraseology <--> jargon <--> elaborate speech
I don't want to get ahead of myself and in so doing skip some step in this budding logic, but the basic point I want to make here, which is part & parcel of the burgeoning poetics that are ever nearer to getting their manifesto writ and strewn wide, is that plain speech, which is to say that vocabulary & rhythm that one uses at the checkout line and reads aloud in Clifford books blurs into common linguistic structures the simplicity of which is not a given, but is only the way it tends to be construed - i.e. plain speech does not equal simple speech, not quite. The plain speaking of your say Frost ("Whose woods these are I think I know") is only a more poeticized yet still defined as "simple" version of the prosaic Joe-speak, say, "Oh, this looks like the Wellingtons' woods" (i.e. the vernacular) which bleeds into something like "I've miles to go before I sleep" ** and from there perhaps to some being versed in country things such as the type of fence on the outer limits of the speaker's vision (what with the snow) (that's the jargon example, btw), and then the heightened diction I suppose would have to be something complex but not needlessly so, rather some achievement of overdescription of that fence, perhaps, which makes it Poundishly new - it's central to this discussion that that latter overdescription is not dialectically opposed to the plain speech from whence we set out but rather apes the public & specialized vocabularies so as to further enliven & color that otherwise run of the mill fence, but rather builds upon the instances of plain speech and the other kinds in order to better attend to the image, to the idea, to the poem's core import.
Is this mere adornment? Filigree with no real work to do as far as making the poem mean something? No. It's more than that, although I suspect I'll have to revisit this soon. Suffice to say, at the least, that instances of say an overdescribed fence won't do jack for a poem unless something in that overdescription advances some thematic or imagistic point in the poem we've just invented. Fancy for fancy's sake, I don't brook that, and neither do the readers I have in mind - such ornament would be so much and I'm with my craft's elders (Fussell, for one) that a poem when it may rightly be called such will waste no words or syllables. (As to how this affects our discussion of this new vast poetry, keep your navbar here).
But so it's about here that you realize that that set of speech descriptions above is no continuum, but a fucking circle. It's a fucking circle with points for each of these qualities of speech and more along the circumference, and the best possible poem, I think, at least w/r/t the kind of poem that is best equipped in terms of addressing / chronicling the way the culture's going (another post, that) is going to arc between these fashions of speech according to the demands of the poetic moment, caroming pinball-like from plain to jargon to vernacular to heightened to overwrought bombast to Great Aunt Millie's favorite cliche to et cetera.
Lots I didn't talk about tonight. Solomon Burke: "There's always tomorrow, and tomorrow night / Hang in there baby, sooner or later / I know I'll get it right.
* There's a potential oversight in what I mean by these terms: "plain speech" isn't meant to exclude any sense of it too being "heightened." Which is to say that although the effect of this poetry is to mimic & enact some quality of the mundane human voice in its verses, the structure of that poetry remains a highly produced, studied, & considered artifact (in the sense of the expert artisan). The poetry of say Graham, say Ashbery stands opposite to Frost's in several aspects but chiefly in that the intended effect is either to or not to replicate, within the illusive possibilities of verse, the rhythms and tambors of spoken words.
** Which I REALIZE is another Frostism, but the convenient & possibly confusing thing about Frost and the way I'm discussing him in particular is that his lyrics have attained the airie heights of cultural suffusion shared only by such all-star product of the zeitgeist as Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" commerical and Sara Lee jingles; you sometimes can't be sure if you're quoting Frost or some pre-Big Bang humanistic truism. So it isn't a perfect example. But this line moves us from the vernacular to the precincts of public voicing & common phrasings that I think still works w/r/t the continuum between plain speech and heightened diction.
posted by Wil at
8:13 PM
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