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June 29, 2004
This is just to say something that isn't about war or politics.
I don't know why I had William Carlos Williams in my head, but I did and I stumbled across this bit of nonsensical criticism: "It is interesting that Williams himself never quite understood the workings of his own prosody. Thus when, in an interview of 1950, John W. Gerber asked the poet what it is that makes "This Is Just To Say" a poem, Williams replied, "In the first place, it metrically absolutely regular. . . .So, dogmatically speaking, it has to be a poem because it goes that way, don't you see!" But the. . .stanzas exhibit no regularity of stress or of syllable count; indeed, except for lines 2 and 5 (each an iamb) and lines 8 and 9 (each an amphibrach), no two lines have the same metrical form. What then can Williams mean when he says, "It's metrically absolutely regular"? Again, he mistakes sight for sound: on the page, the three little quatrains look alike; they have roughly the same physical shape. It is typography rather than any kind of phonemic recurrence that provides directions for the speaking voice (or for the eye that reads the lines silently) and that teases out the poem's meanings." I hope you've anticipated me. The scholar is of course in the wrong, mistaking meter as solely the province of iambs and amphibrachs which themselves are completely arbitrary. WCW never said anything about "phonemic recurrence," but rather called the poem metrically regular. Put simply meter is anything by which poetry is measured. All poetry was originally oral. That's what happens when people haven't invented alphabets yet. And so naturally meter was determined by the sounds and rhythms native to a given language. Greek meter was based on syllable length, while Latin meter was originally based on stress and later succeeded through an unlikely synthesis of stress and syllable length (a success incidentally that English never duplicated, as evidenced by anything consciously composed of iambs and amphibrachs). Here the scholar, Marjorie Perloff, is oblivious to the fact that William Carlos Williams was not only literate (i.e. not an oral poet), but wrote with a machine that produced characters of fixed-width (i.e. a typewriter). Had she recognized this she quite easily could have concluded that the meter was dictated by the instrument used in creation, and that the printed poem, not it's sound, was being measured. Eureka! However, that too would be wrong. There is no illusion of metrical regularity in the tyopgraphy, as she claims. This is her coup against WCW, that he has tricked himself with his little visual play. In fact the "three quatrains" do not look much alike at all. When you read the poem it certainly seems metrical though. So what then? If Williams is not using word stress or syllable length, and is not mistaking typography for meter, what is it? It's sentence stress (present in Classical Greek, but little explored), which is elusive, but an infintely more sensible measure than word accent -- unless you're a robot. If you've any doubts about the metricality of sentence stress in the poem, read it straight through as though you'd found it on your refrigerator, then read any old piece of prose. There's a flow (in Greek: rhythmus) that sounds natural, not contrived, yet not prosaic. Incidentally Greek and Roman metricians often observed that people speak in the meters of tragic and comic dialogue without knowing it. The more native a rhythm is to a language the less identifiable it is as a "poetic" rhythm. posted by Dennis on 06.29.04 at 11:00 PM |
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