Possum Pouch

Olson, Quantitative Verse, "The Line"

I quickly want to respond to Ron Silliman's challenging blog comments today. I originally considered writing directly to him, but the more I wrote the more I found I wanted to say. So I thank Ron for the thoughtful words and for urging the following notes. For reference I quote the following from today's entry at ronsilliman.blogspot.com:

"And I sense, as I think Tom Fink must also, my own frustration here, that we find ourselves at the end of 2003 with so few choices available as to the line – either the metrically closed verse of premodernism, ranging from the hokey to the merely embarrassing, or the untheorized (& too often too slack, tho not certainly in Iijima’s work) "free verse" marriage of convenience, with maybe theories along the line of Austin’s or Olson’s to haunt us with their inadequate alternatives.*** Indeed, the absence of a good answer here sometimes has been used by critics to argue that poetry is, if not, certainly on the wane as a medium."

My first reaction is to say there is no problem with the line. Every possibility is available, from traditional metrics to a diverse range of free verse forms. But then I stop myself and realize what a difficult personal challenge the line always is to me in practice. The line--the very nature of the poem--is personal, so that measure becomes what I can live up to in the poem. What can be accomplished or achieved?

I take the line as a measure of energy, a syllabic circuit by which the tone and intensity of a poem are revealed. Olson's essay, "Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays," seems informative still. "Form is now as much an invention as it always is," he wrote. "What is missed is, that it is. Verse and thoughts are vernacular. Who would have thought it! The absolute, in all its guises, even the smallest—notion opinion self-assertion—has slunk away. A huge difference has come about, something previously unknown about the real and the natural has been disclosed: that the artificial (paradis n'est pas artificiel) the mechanical the arbitrary whatever you want to call the aesthetic, is not separate from them. It is what the felicity in these plays leads to, it does not lead to its own pursuit (this is the pathetic fallacy of humanism) it goes directly back to the real but in so doing a real and natural which are themselves transposed."

Olson wrestles the question of form here down into its gritty molecules. In a sense he's saying that we work with the materials at hand. Our own language in the context of our culture and past forms composing it all enter along with the tea pot's whistle, the sound of a child's blocks cracking on a wood floor and a distant low jet rumble through the roof above. Our own processes of attention are at stake in the line of the poem, as our own language also comes into being. This process of attention works with and against our assumptions of experience because we are bound by definite units of speech. A break comes when the line can hold no more--when the attention passes into its next stage. What the line retains in that mysterious movement--limit and boundary--is the surprise and shift of perceived limits toward the next unknown rush. Whether it's by chance, or by method, the unknown always in an instant gives a hesitation to our writing. That hesitant, instantaneous break is the poem's own means of registration, accepting, of course, that the poem is an unknown entity our own language appropriates from a day as mundane as this one--and as mysterious. Olson again:

If the intensity of the attention is equal to it, innocence ought to yield what it is made up of; and when it does, like water in a controlled vacuum, it is enormously more than it was in its apparent state."

It's a quantitative pressure even in the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare that Olson recognizes as an energized fixture. He continues:

"I am suggesting that some such understanding as this is what Shakespeare has reached, and the verse capable of, in these plays. He isn't picking up his objects (words), despite one hand is tied behind his back, either for their music or image. He gets both by going in further to the word as meaning and thing, and, mixing the governing human title and experience (which prompts him to bother with words at all), his effect is the equivalent of his act: the power, instead of peeling off, of being peeled off (as verse and plays had), without being disturbed from its place, twisted into turbulence and action (each not the condition of an element but weather from outside), suddenly moves as one has known it does of its own nature, without using any means or matter other than those local and implicit to it. It is molecular, how this power is, why it all multiplies from itself and from the element proper to its being. We are in the presence of the only truth which the real can have, its own undisclosed because not apparent character. Get that out with no exterior means or materials, no mechanics except those hidden in the thing itself, and we are in the hands of the mystery."

The "molecular" or syllabic range--"going in further to the word as meaning and thing"--is the essence of quantitative verse. The hesitant withdrawal and simultaneous conscious momentum out through "the hands of mystery", i.e., the unknown--just assuming I don't possess it all here and now--contribute to the dispersal of energy to create a system of weights and balances perceptible by each individual ear.

By showing how Shakespeare writes quantitatively, "despite one hand is tied behind his back," by iambic pentameter and all that Olson tells us our own approach to the poem is less about outer conveniences than inner tracking of each moment in words. So Silliman's conflation of outer form with inner reduces the scale of the problem. The problem isn't new formalists or exhausted New American projective forms. It's not only a problem of younger writers--though we don't have forty years of experience to call on to support our march through the word wilderness. The problem is an individual thing for which there don't seem to be any answers, only evocative pursuits and challenges. The vividness of our experience in words and out seems essential somehow. Perhaps another 10 or 20 years will lapse before present practice in verse is fully apparant. The only other thing I'd like to say is that hesitation marks our limits, throws us out into space before being drawn quickly back onto a track that leads where?--DMS

Posted by Dale at December 1, 2003 06:18 PM