Enjambment is the main way of going beyond the focus on the single line of verse. Enjambment leads to complexity, etc...
The paradox is that enjambment leads to prose poetry, in which there are no divisions at all. But, then, the effect of enjambment is lost, because the reader doesn't see or hear those divisions any more.
The paradox I'm trying to get to is this:
Extremely complex and varied metrical structures, transcending the individual line of poetry, tend toward prose, or the absence of discernible regularity.
It's only a paradox if we think of prose as not rhythmic, or rhythmically inert.
."... I do not think that it is by such means that we gain an appreciation of the peculiar rhythm of a poet. It seems to me also that Milton's verse is especially refractory to yielding up its secrets to examination of the single line. For his verse is not formed in this way. It is the period, the sentence and still more the paragraph, that is the unit of Milton's verse; and emphasis on the line structure is the minimum necessary to provide a counter-pattern to the period structure.
It is only in the period that the wave-length of Milton's verse is to be found : it is his ability to give a perfect and unique pattern to every paragraph, such that the full beauty of the line is found in its context, and his ability to work in larger musical units than many other poets -- that is to me the most conclusive evidence of Milton's supreme mastery. The peculiar feeling, almost a physical sensation of a greatness leap, communicated by Milton's long periods, and by his alone, is impossible to procure from rhymed verse. Indeed, this mastery is most conclusive evidence of his intellectual power, thrul is his grasp of any ideas that lie borrowed or invented.
To be able to control so many words at once is the token of a mind of most exceptional energy.
It is interesting at this point to recall the general observations upon blank verse, which a consideration of Paradise Lost prompted Johnson to make towards the end of his essay.
'The music of the English heroic lines strikes the ear so faintly, that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together; this co-operation can only be obtained by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another as a distinct system of sounds; and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme.
The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer; and there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton, who enable their audience to perceive where the lines end or begin. Blank verse, said an ingenious critic, seems to be verse only to the eye."
"The descent beckoned, / as the ascent beckoned." We know WCW thought he had come to a prosodic breakthrough with this poem, the "variable foot." But the language is oddly abstract. I have affection for the poem despite it not being Williams' best.
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Oddly, metrics seems sterile in most applications. For example, I would begin with the idea of a gestalt, and then point out that the final part of a line is going to be more constrained that the beginning, and the accents stronger there. Take the 11 syllable line in Spanish:
(uuuu) uXuuuXu
Accents can fall on any of the first four syllables, but not on 5, 7, 9, where they would be extrametrical stress clashes. So we could see it as a group of freely organized syllables (4) followed by a more distinctive concluding cadence. Another way of thinking about it that we don't know what it is until it is over, so the ending is going to be more significant than the beginning.
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We can think of a collection of lines, or the lines all together adding up to something more, a verse paragraph, where the real mastery comes. Yet if the line itself is devalued too much, then it becomes ... prose. The extreme is JRJ writing out all non-rhyming his poems in prose paragraphs.
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I wrote this as an article once and had it rejected because it was too "pedagogical."
Here are mine:
birdwatching
piano playing and choral singing
memorizing poems
running
crossword puzzles
I am looking at a recently published book on Spanish versification. It seems solid, but very little discussion of enjambment or metrical structures based on verse paragraphs (not just strophes). In other words, the line is the relevant unit, not the relation between lines.
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I composed a tune that has 64 bars, say. The basic structure is 32, repeated twice. Each of those units is composed of question and answer units of 8 bars, which in turn are based on four measure phrases that also answer each other, etc... It is a piece that I improvised and recorded. I am not claiming that is is particularly good, but I am thinking that what this means is that this structure is intuitive to me. That I could structure my improvisation in that form by knowing what it feels like, as a gestalt.
Let's think about the factors of metrical complexity in Don de la ebriedad.
Stress clashes: siempre la claridad viene del cielo / vida y labor propias
Enjambment and line internal pauses.
Frequent elision and syneresis.
The overall effect is the creation of verse paragraphs, rather than a sequence of end-stopped lines. Generally, the sentences are long; or rather, sentence length is varied. The rhyme is there, but the rhyming words don't always end the syntactic phrase.
Now, this is not particularly remarkable, except that it is, since Spanish poetry tends more to the end stopped line, and less to the development of longer structures. The exception is the development of the silva in the baroque, where the free combination of lines of seven and eleven create a fluidity that almost rivals English blank verse.
Así el deseo. Como el alba, clara [internal pause]
desde la cima y cuando se detiene [rhyme]
tocando con sus luces lo concreto
recién oscura, aunque instantáneamente. [rhyme] [syneresis]
Después abre ruidosas palomares [stress clash]
y ya es un día más, Oh, las rehenes [enjambment between adjective and noun!]
palomas de la noche, conteniendo
sus impulsos altísimos. Y siempre... [rhyme]
Así el deseo. Como el alba, clara desde la cima y cuando se detiene, tocando con sus luces lo concreto, recién oscura, aunque instantáneamente. Después abre ruidosas palomares y ya es un día más...
There is a kind of sculpted quality to Lorca's lines, like "desnudo torso romano." Claudio Rodríguez doesn't tend to write individual sculpted lines of this type. But Rodríguez excels at the sequence of lines. All the more amazing because he was 17 when he wrote this book. The book bears some signs of youthful inexperience, but overall the mastery of verse is astonishing.
I bought a package of rancho gordo beans. They are $6 so not cheap (for beans) but it makes a good pot of soup that will last several meals. I saw this brank at my brother's house, who is mostly vegan for health reasons. They were brown, maybe kidney type beans. I first made a sofrito with onions, celery, and garlic. I added other vegetables, like peppers, tomatoes, and various herbs and spices that I thought would go well. A dash of soy sauce and some bullion cubes, and a dash of balsamic vinegar. I cooked the soup about three hours. The broth was rich and flavorful. We ate it with sourdough garlic toast and a salad of arugula, olives, olive oil, parmesan, and more balsamic vinegar.
"Now a heptasyllabic pattern ... will be undistinguishable from the lefthand colon of a Type A hendecasyllable" (p.54 ).
I've been re-reading Carlos Piera's dissertation. In my car, I was listening to two version of Lorca's "Cuerpo presente," by Margarita Xirgu and Germaine Montero, both of whom worked in the theater with Lorca. I was able to hear very clearly the pattern of the alexandrine (7 + 7). A few lines were harder to assimilate into the pattern: "los hombres de voz dura," for example. (The stress clash of voz dura.) If you said "aproximadamente" was a 7-syllable line, you wouldn't be wrong, but normally we would have a pattern of two accents, one on six (mandatory) and the other typically on 2, but possibly occuring on 1, 3, or 4 as well. "para que se acostumbre" would be an example from Lorca. The accent on the first syllable is weak because it is a preposition.
A distinction between lines that reinforce the gestalt of the form and those that don't?
I'm thinking of project on Lorca's prosody, but I haven't thought it to be very interesting, or yielding of insights that everyone might not have had already. One insight: enjambment only occurs in very short lines. Another: rhyme is frequent in all but a few works. Maybe mastery of classical meters is not that interesting?
I was in a library; I found a suitcase and in it a book titled British Chess. (I don't play chess in real life but I sometimes try to solve the "checkmate in two moves" puzzles that appear on my Facebook page.) I took it out and went to the desk to check it out, though I knew it was wrong, since the suitcase wasn't mine. The library employee was giving me the side eye. There was something about the game shown on one page that had held my attention and was to be the basis of some fruitful idea later.
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There were a series of misunderstandings about books about Beckett and Proust. I knew I was dreaming so I tried to retain the narrative in my mind, but at the end there was only a book devoted to one of these authors signed by the author, that my father was showing me.
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Later, I had a pet python, with large diameter. I was gentle and I had no fear of it, but I resented having to carry it around.
There was another sister dream last night. I was in bed with family, and sister got pushed out on the opposite side where I was. (Next to my brother or daughter?). She had a black eye from the fall from the bed. Then I remembered she was not alive any more.
I've had many father dreams after his death, more than 20 years ago. It's not surprising to have dreams about my sister too. Usually, they are about trying to reconcile myself to their death. (Unsurprisingly).
https://digitalcommons.bau.edu.lb/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1173&context=schbjournal
I'm calling bullshit on this paper. I can't read it, but the abstract is enough.
There was an instruction sheet on how to recite our poems that was vague; then I saw another section that it didn't matter whether the poems were in published books or not.
Then apparently there was a huge gun that had to be assembled. I was grateful that a woman member or our team was doing this, quite efficiently. The result was something like an assault rifle, but larger. Something wasn't quite right with the assembly, however, and she was on the phone with customer service.
My sister appeared to me in a dream last night as a fourteen-year old girl. She explained to me that this is how I should remember her; I felt myself creating the image of her in my mind, knowing that I was dreaming but also accepting this as a genuine visitation. Her face was similar to that of a particular photo we had used for the funeral, when she was perhaps 18?
I was weeping and woke up, but woke up still in the dream. The woman sharing my bed was angry with me for crying and waking her, but fortunately I was actually alone, and that part of the story was also within the dream.
I was reading some Notley poems from Early Works that are based on dreams. It occured to me I could write up dreams as poems, but prefer to just accurately write them down without poeticizing them. Part of what I'm after is the banality and non-coherence of them, so the best ones might be the worst after a manner of speaking.
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In choir we are singing "O Taste and See," and thought of the Levertov poem (and book of that title), but the piece we are singing is based on the Bible verse Levertov took for her poem: "O taste and see! the subway bible poster said...." That is not a dream, just a (not very) interesting experience of finding two works of art based on the same text.
There was a strange instrument that I brought in to be tuned. It was an electric device played by plucking, but not in standard lute / guitar / mandolin like shapes. They were making fun of me for thinking it needed tuning, and I couldn't seem to get a note out of it, or know where to start. Then I saw that there were fruit shaped items inside of it, like bananas, representing different notes. I still couldn't really play it, and left without paying for the tuning, since we were interrupted by another dream event.
Now a dog was trying to go through a door. I solved the problem by opening the door, since the dog (a large white one) was theoretically allowed access to these other rooms.
It occurred to me that a meter is a gestalt. The word is usually used for visual information. Seeing a face, we don't see individual features, but a face. Of course, we can describe a nose, etc... but those 19th century description of peoples faces feature by feature don't work all that well.
Faces vary a bit, but fall into the same gestalt. The 11 syllable Spanish line is essentially a shape, not a collection of 11 syllables.
Here is the most canonical pattern:
x/xxxx/xxx/x [accents on 2, 6, 10, evenly spaced]
El dulce lamentar de dos pastores
Another common pattern:
xxx/xxx/x/x [accents on 4, 8, 10]
The other patterns are accents on 1 6 10, or 3, 6 10.
The gestalt is the feel of the meter, not the number of syllables, since we aren't counting them unless we are unsure. Even then, if we are off by a syllable, it shouldn't even matter that much.
Here's one with a stress clash:
Siempre la claridad viene del cielo: 1,6, 7!, 10. It's odd. We hardly ever get stresses on 5,7,9. Notice that there is still a stress on 6.
The grammar paradox: anyone peeving over grammar is more likely to be incorrect than the bad grammar being corrected.
Every date by definition is the latest date so far in human history. Nobody thinks of themselves as early folks. Of course to think at all of what position one occupies chronologically is already to think historically.
I’m coming back from a trip to Normandy. I asked the guy who invited me why I was invited. He said he had read an article I had published in PMLA on Guillen in the early 90s. He said 20 years ago but it is much more than that. Neither of us remembered what I said in the article though I’m sure I could if you gave me a few minutes. He also invited some of my favorite poets but a bit randomly since he didn’t know that I knew these poets and was friends with them.
