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tags: Lyricsy2024poetry
NOTE
Ok. This is really interesting.
Rethinking Adjectives
Ornament of poetry. Modifications and adjectives.
T.S Eliot, “Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thoughts as immediately as the odour of a rose.”
“Padding out a metered line”
Of course, ornament had been around for centuries before Tennyson; bad poets and good had found it handy for padding out a metered line, for inflating the subject matter, for convincing the reader of the poet’s earnestness or sensitivity.
Nouns are the strongest part of speech. Without nouns there is no poem - perhaps one would venture there is no language: if language points to, or names, then the nomen is language at its most functional.
The power of naming confirms the world: …every new Adam comes into speech and into the world beyond the self.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
Adjectives, dispensable? “Tender” is more amorphous than tenderness, “thirsty” less commanding than thirst. “wonder” more solemn and convincing than “wonderful”.
William Carlos Williams lets adjectives carry the crucial information in the following lyric, thereby forcing subjective, sensory response into significance, insisting that it is what is, and what matters:
This Is Just to Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox And which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
Without that last sentence, there is no poem
Adjectives, then, restore the eye, and the “I,” to the poem; they supply tone, the context without which nouns can be imprecise, incomplete, and misleading
Image
the reproduction in the mind of a sensation produced by a physical perception… When Archibald Macleish says in “Ars Poetica” that a poem should be “Dumb/ As old Medallions to the thumb,” he note only means that the language of poetry should make important use of imagery, he also exemplifies what he means by expressing it in terms of imagery… When, however, he says “A poem should not mean / But be” his meaning is the same but his language is not, for this statement is abstract rather than concrete and imagery-bearing, dealing as it does with an idea or concept rather than a perception or sensation.
When poetry aspires to mirror the world, the image is valued for its representational power - its ability to suggest to the reader a color which is an ostensible copy or replica of the color itself.
The mind, with whatever passion it be agitated, remains fixed upon the object that excited it; and while it is earnest to display it, is not satisfied with a plain an exact description, but adopts one agreeable to its own sensations.
Sylvia Plath’s (edited) Poppies
Little poppies, Do you do not harm?
I cannot touch you, and it exhausts me to watch you…
There are fumes that I cannot touch. Where are your opiates, your capsules?
If your liquors could seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling.
Sylvia Plath’s actual (with restored imagery and figuration) Poppies In July
Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm? You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns. And it exhausts me to watch you Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth. A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts! There are fumes that I cannot touch. Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules? If I could bleed, or sleep!— If my mouth could marry a hurt like that! Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling. But colourless. Colourless.
Romantics view “objects signified by a poem.. were no more than a projected equivalent.. for the poet’s inner state of mind”
“I am a Camera”
Too much has been made of his phrase “I am a camera,” as Isherwood himself knew, but nevertheless—given the fact that humans are creatures of almost uncontrollable bias— a camera is not a bad thing to emulate. Even the practice of analogy is not completely un-camera-like: cameras often record that one thing resembles another, a church is like a knife, for instance, or foam on a brown stream like stout. The attempt to represent with clarity is always worth making, however impossible it is to achieve in absolute terms. (We may call the attempt “fairness.“) There is no danger of the writer’s ever turning into a real camera, but the imitation of the camera may be good training. And its faithfulness of attention to physical imagery is valuable because through it we may learn about the appearance of the world outside of us, or in other words about things we didn’t know before. Doing so helps us to escape from the singleness of our minds, which, if lived in exclusively, become prisons (“Christopher Isherwood: Getting Things Right”)
Tone
Tone in a poem expresses the form of the emotion in that poem and is lodged primarily in the poems nondiscursive elements, especially in its music. Music is meant here to include both the broad units of repetition, sentence structure, and lineation and the small units of syllable, vowel, and consonant. As with “tonality” in a composition, tone instructs the attention of, first, the poet, then the reader, through a context of sounds working either with or against the discursive elements of the poem, and it may itself be an element of either unity or energy (plot) within the piece.
W.B Yeats
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories and sensations of the body.
The Flexible Lyric
W.H. Auden it is “a sheer waste of time to look for a definition of difference between poetry and prose” re: Found Poetry Found Poems, Being Observant
Genres can be used as tools that poets feel free to adapt to the particular demands of their subject. Openness to tradition, far from restricting their freedom, may help writers give shape to their concerns and free them from the dominant provincialities of their times.
The impulse to modify tradition is built into the tradition itself.
Just as meaningful scientific classification has come to rest on structure - distinctions in species from which Darwin could trace common ancestry - so too does any useful identification of the lyric. re: The Anxiety of Influence - Harold Bloom
Poetry’s kind of knowledge, which is radically or ontologically distinct from the reduced, emasculated and docile versions of which are found in scientific discourses.
poetic texture
Given an object, and a poet burning to utter himself upon it, he must take into account a third item, the form into which he must cast his utterance. (If we like, we may call it the body, which he must give to his passion.) It delays and hinders him. In the process of “composition” the burning passion is submitted to cool and scarcely relevant considerations.
NOTE
I cannot tell if these definitions are approved by Ellen. She labels them maddeningly, tautological from 1936
From An approach to Literature
- form: the arrangement of various elements in a work of literature; organization of various materials (ideas, images, characters, setting, rhythm etc) to give a single effect.
- structure: generally speaking, the structure of a work is its total make-up, its form. But there’s a tendency to use structure with special reference to the arrangement of episodes, statements, scenes and details of action as contrasted with the arrangement of words, for which the term style is specifically used.
- style: style is in the largest sense of the arrangement of material which the writer makes. More particularly, the term is used to indicate the arrangement of words for expressing special tone, attitude, manner, etc.
But though it is in terms of structure that we must describe poetry, the term “structure” is certainly not altogether satisfactory as a term. One means by it something far more internal than the metrical pattern, say, or than the sequence of images. The structure meant is certainly not “form” in the conventional sense which we think of form as a kind of envelop that contains the content. The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes and meanings.
Show don’t tell.
Art is forever unlike science, in the following respect. The sign which science employs is a mere sign, or “symbol” that is, an object having no other character - for the purpose of discourse at least — than that of referring to another object which is its semantical object.. but the aesthetic signs are “icons” or images. As signs they have semantical objects, or refer to objects but as iconic signs they also resemble or imitate these objects.
We know, for instance, that we process very quickly this observation: the flower is dying be-cause of a parasite. A more precise, more sensory noun—a daisy or a rose—triggers other synapses, in other language centers, accessing new information: open-faced, sturdy, plentiful, a weed in a field a bug might crawl across; or a swirl of delicate, fragrant petals, hybrid on the manor grounds, enclosing the worm. But in any sort of discourse the brain’s hardware and software are continuously, rapidly parsing the branching syntactical tree—deciding, for instance, that “rose” is a noun and not an adjective or a verb. A poem’s rhythms work, in part, to reinforce, to punctuate, a branch at a time, allowing in more of the cultural history of “rose,” beyond the empirical memory bank. And there is that heft in the word itself—its one syllable and long vowel extended by the sibilant consonant; in clear syntax this sonic stress can hold us at the fork long enough to retrieve, in what psycholinguists call “breadth-first search,” the flash of a woman’s name or a me-dieval lay or the Rose of Sharon before the sentence presses us into the “depth-first search” that “gambles … about the alterna-tive most likely to be true.”3 And there is, for a poem, the occa- sion of the utterance as well. Brooks would be right to contrast my bland paraphrase with Blake’s opening line, “O Rose, thou art sick,” which supplies—in its formality of diction and syntax, in its choice of pronoun, in its relationship of stressed and un-stressed syllables, in its dance of long vowels and hard final con-sonant access to the sensory and cultural information latent in the concrete noun, to the attitude in the observation (that is, tone), and to something very like a kinetic response to pitch and timbre, tempo and inflection.
All of this contributes to the texture of the line. The hardest aspect to translate from another language, texture is the easiest to alter in one’s own; most revision consists of such adjustments, which then open some newly visible patterns or another and more effective organization.
In elegiac verse, the unit is a couplet; and the couplet not only consist of two lines divided
Ruthless Attention
Perhaps the emotional life is finally all that connects us, one to another, in what used to be called the human condition, and even banal subjects (talking in bed, taking a piss) may become memorable speech in a musical context.
Great poems require neither the extraordinary life circumstances of Keats or Hikmet nor Bayley’s “romantic alchemy” but a relentless “striving to be accurate” and, sometimes, a certain ruthlessness toward the very sensibility that produces the poem.
One Art - Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spend. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.