VRZHU (pronounced ver-zhoo) BULLETS OF LOVE BLOG - THE BLOG THAT WHEEDLES ITS WAY INTO YOUR HEART. This Week: The Line -- Threat or Menace?

THE SOLUTION: A MYSTERY SOLVED

I was whingeing a couple of weeks ago about prose poems: how can I evaluate them? What are the criteria? Is it prose? Is it poetry? Is it fish? Is it not-fish? A man knows not where to have her. Ookie moigay, woe is, etc.

Thankfully for all, the scholarly and ubertalented Elisa Gabbert came to my rescue. Evaluate the prose poem using criteria suitable for it, from your prose or poetry toolbelt. That is, you can go after the prose poem using everything BUT the line.

Thank you and a tall frosty one for Ms. Gabbert.  March comes in like a poem and goes out like a prose.

BUT NOW

So what about the line anyway?  Wasn't it Boom-Boom Grenier who said "I Hate Lines."  Well, "Speech." Close enough. 

Turns out I picked up a copy of A Field Guide to Contemporary [c'right 1980] Poetry and Poetics, edited by Stuart Friebert and David Young for 3 bucks at Books for America. And the second section in it is The Poetic Line: A Symposium (aside: I oppose the use of the word symposium unless the dual purpose of the event is to make speeches and get blue blind paralytic drunk) with salvos by Sandra McPherson,  James Wright,  Louis Simpson,  John Haines, Donald Hall, Shirley Kaufman, William Matthews,  Charles Simic (aside: It does not of course live up to its brag of being a "Field Guide," unless you consider it along the lines A Boy's And GIrl's Golden Book of Tame Passerines in Your Backyard, but, as that, pretty ok).

SUDDENLY

It is nice to see that all of the above poets heap scorn on the old scam of "write out this free verse poem in a paragraph and -- see! -- you can't tell where the line breaks were, so it's not REALLY a poem. Is it now, class?"

Simpson's reply to this is the most cogent and direct:

The poet is charged with failing to do something that he (sic) never intended. What the poet intended was for the reader to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, the divisions of the lines where they were placed, nor for the reader to guess, from the order of the words alone, i.e., a prose paragraph, where the lines of verse should end. For writing to be read as lines of verse, all that is necessary is for the poet to indicate that they should be read so. If you aren't willing to submit to th poet's judgment, you needn't look or listen. There is no need to explain your unwillingness by trying to show a relationship between divisions of writing into verse-lines and the kind of language the poet is using.

I think we can shake the dust off our sandals with that.

AND THEN

Sandra McPherson says:

The line is a unit of rhythm. The poet is moved by impulses of rhythm which he expresses in lines of verse. Impulse determines where each line breaks, and the impulse of the poem as a whole determines the look of the poem on the page or its sound in the air.

End quote.

I guess I would say that the line, regardless of how you measure it, is a matter of pulse, not naked necessity.

MEANWHILE

James Wright rants a little incoherently, but if you squint your eyes, some things wouldn't sound completely out of place arguing for some our innovative poetries (though I think he would not be happy to hear me say so):

We have, in a lonely time, a limp surrender of intelligence to the rhetoricians of the government.

There is no poetry without its own criticism.

I have nothing against the minor elegance, because I have nothing against the failure  to think.

There is no poetry without criticism. The language dies without intelligence . . .

LET US SAIL TIL WE COME TO THE EDGE

And I always like the way William Matthews says things.  I have the essay where he says there are only four subjects of poetry (1. I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious. 2. We're not getting any younger. 3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey. 4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not.) around here somewhere.

And this is where I tie it all back to the whole prose poem enchilada. Matthews:

John Haines . . . asks, "Is this why the prose poem is so much in evidence these days? There you don't have to justify your lines, just make the paragraph and let it go."

Haines uses "justify" not in its typesetter's meaning, but in its religious meaning; writers of prose poems are like the lilies of the field.

I imagine one is drawn to write prose poems not by sloth, more purely practiced in a hammock, but by an urge to participate in a different kind of psychic energy than verse usually embodies.

Here are excerpts from etymologies of "prose" and "poetry" in Webster's Third International Dictionary. Prose is "fr. L prosa, fem. of prosus, straightfoward, direct." Verse is "fr. L versus row, line, verse; akin to L vertere to turn."

End quote.

All I can add is: America! Your utter and complete indifference only makes us stronger!

And my thanks to Kate Beaton, amazing smart funny comic artist up there in Canada, for the comic.

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Pshares blog was interested in Seth Abramson’s take on an article in the online journal Jacket about the New Sincerity.

But what is the old sincerity?

Ah, Best Beloved, by happenstance this tumbled onto our screen, Herbert Read in the Hudson Review on the Cult of Sincerity.

Read says:

What then is sincere?—perhaps only an unwitting naivety: the naivety of a child before it has eaten of the fruits of the tree of knowledge and still lives in an unreflecting state of innocence. Some rare geniuses may be able to recall a momentary awareness or retain a memory-trace of that state and then endeavour to establish its existence in their own hearts and minds—Traherne and Blake are examples from English literature, but even their innocence is suspect. The very consciousness of innocence is at the same time a consciousness of experience. We may make the distinction and cultivate innocence; but such a conscious decision is sophisticated and therefore no longer sincere.

And he goes on to pin the whole sincerity thing on Rousseau, who still sets the agenda today. And which means that sincerity in art (including poetry) has a historical connection to confession, e.g. Rousseau’s Confessions.

But of course sincerity has a more fundamental, cortical connection to childhood. Children up to a certain age are sincere. Read says:

Included in this childhood experience are not only sensations in the normal sense—sights and sounds, tastes and smells, graspings and gropings—but the first hearing of words, the first association of a particular word with a particular thing, the word itself as a thing. Poetry is nothing but the recovery of that magical experience. We may use words to describe events, to express thoughts, to establish reality, but their peculiar poetry is derived from the associations they have with our childhood experiences, when we first discover that things have names, and that these names fit them with poetic justness.

I think it’s clear this means that all poetic sincerity is disingenuous, since it requires conniving to produce its effects.

Read’s little essay is ultimately concerned with sincerity in our lives, its moral value, since the above dispenses with sincerity as an aesthetic category. Arguing about whether a poem is “sincere” is arguing about the appearance of things and not the things themselves.

So while the Jacket essay is interesting, and Abramson’s take on it isn’t exactly wrong, there’s another, prior analytic that needs to take place.

Pshares is right to associate the New Sincerity with the New Childishness, see above. And the New Sincerity is always already the Old Sincerity, and attempts to congeal it or set its parameters cannot ever be definitive and convincing, since aesthetic sincerity (which is all about style at bottom) is a non-starter.

But Read does end with a poem by George Herbert, that contains in it much of the elements of sincerity: confession, passionate conviction, and a kind of innocence of intent.

Here is thy new sincerity, may you be well-pleased with him:

Speak to us, oh beautiful one, tell us how you make that glorious sound, that even now an anticipation of it has reduced me to a snarling, raging, panting, jungle beast!

Birdie:

You gotta be sincere!
You gotta be sincere!
You gotta feel it here,
'Cause if you feel it here,
Well, then you're gonna be honestly sincere!

If what you feel is true,
You really feel it you
Make them feel it too,
Write this down now

You gotta be sincere,
Honestly sincere!
Man, you've got to be sincere!
If you're really sincere,
If you're really sincere,
If you feel it in here
Then it's gotta be right!
Oh, baby! Oh, honey!
Hug me! Suffer!

In ev'rything I do,
My sincerity shows thro'
I looked you in the eye,
Don't even have to try,
It's automatic!
I'm sincere!
When I sing about a tree,
I really feel that tree!
When I sing about a girl,
I really feel that girl,
I mean I really feel sincere!

If you're really sincere!
If you're really sincere!
If you feel it in here,
Then it's gotta be right!
Oh, baby! Oh, honey!
Hug me! Suffer!
You gotta be sincere!
Oh oh, you gotta feel it here!
Oh, my baby, oh, my baby, oh yeah!
Oh, my baby, oh yeah!

Well, you gotta be sincere!
Well, you gotta be sincere!
Well, you gotta be sincere!
Well, you gotta be sincere!
Well, you gotta be sincere!
Well, you gotta be sincere!

Oh, my baby, oh yeah!
Oh, my baby, oh yeah!
Well, you gotta be sincere!
Well, you gotta be sincere!
Oh, my baby, oh yeah!
Oh, my baby, oh yeah!
Oh, my baby, oh yeah!
Oh, my baby, oh yeah!
Yeah, YEAH!

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Perhaps this is pathological, but I am tired. Of submitting poems to journals. Of submitting books to contests. I admire other's work ethic, their industry in what is after all a generosity in sharing.  I do not have it.

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Excerpts from Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People – the Dynamics of Torture by John Conroy, published in the year 2000.

In democracies of long standing in which torture has taken place, however, denial takes hold and official acknowledgement is extremely slow in coming , if it appears at all, the response of those societies is fairly predictable and can be charted in thematic, if not chronological, stages.

The first stage of response was absolute and complete denial, accompanied by attacks on those who exposed the treatment.

The second stage was to minimize the abuse. The [British] government referred to it not as torture but as interrogation in depth.

The third stage is to disparage the victims . . . Reginald Maulding proclaimed, “It was necessary to take measures to fight terrorists, the murderous enemy. We must recognize them for what they are. They are criminals who wish o impose their own will by violence and terror.

A fourth stage is to justify the treatment on the grounds that it was effective or appropriate under the circumstances . . . the methods employed had produced “invaluable” information about a brutal, callous, and barbaric enemy.

A fifth component of a torturing society’s defense is to charge that those who take up the cause of those tortured are aiding the enemies of the state.

A sixth defense is that the torture is no longer occurring, and anyone who raises the issue is therefore “raking up the past.”

A seventh component of a torturing bureaucracy is to put the blame on a few bad apples.

An eighth stage in a society’s rationalization of its policy for torture is the common torturer’s defense . . . that someone else does or has done much worse things.

The final rationalization of a torturing nation is that victims will get over it.

. . . there are many who believe that information received from someone tortured is tainted at best, and often sheer fabrication . . . Don Dzugulones, who served as an interrogator with the Americal Division of the United States Army in Viet Nam and who witnessed and participated in torture . . . told me that he could not recall a single incident in which torture was used to a positive end . . . Dzugulones believes that torture did generate reports, and reports pleased the chain of command. "They can say, look what we've got. We developed information about a Viet Cong political school and we are going to go in there and bomb the piss out of it. SO you go in there and you bomb the piss out of if and you don't know if anybody is there or not. You don't know if the information is accurate, but there was information and there was an action based on it, so everybody is happy. You had a reason to go drop all these bombs instead of just dropping them on empty jungle. you had a target. That is what they looked for -- body counts and hard targets. Show them a Viet Cong stronghold -- God damn, that was great, because here we have all this military might and we are spinning our tires, we are pissing in the wind. Give us a hard target. Give us  something to go after. It doesn't matter how you get it, just gie us information and we will go after it full bore."

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Coming up soon at the VBofL blog:

• The Vrzhu Research Bureau addresses the skyrocketing price of crude poetry, and searches for safe, renewable sources of poetry for the sake of all our children
• Unmanned poetic vehicles  and applied robopoetic science - More from the Vrzhu Research Bureau
• Some words from us on two poetry books by Tom DIsch - our Twofer Review feature
• A  plan for the upcoming National Poetry Month Write a Poem A Day Events
• Doubts about my matzoh ball making ability
• All posts will be in green for St. Patrick's Day
• Poetry and Opening Day - Baseball poems the Poetry Foundation website overlooked last year and I'm not surprised
• Poetry Marketplace - Don't squeeze the sonnets or you'll get a bad one in the bottom of your shopping bag