Chekhov’s Mistess

On Improving Your Feet By Training Your Ear

In Garrick Davis’s article “The Innocent Ear” in Contemporary Poetry Review, he makes the argument that poets today don’t know how to read poetry. He says they have no sense of rhyme and meter, and for the very reason that they don’t think it’s necessary. This willful ignorance sadly results in the “aesthetic chaos,” as Davis calls it, that we have today.

His point though, is on the source of this state. He argues that it comes not from “a disagreement between the New Formalists and the Language poets a few years ago or, going back a bit further, between the Beats and the Academics, or the Sandals and the Tweeds.” No, he says, “the confusion began much earlier,” with Ezra Pound.

Now, I think what he is getting at is not so much that Pound was bad, but later generations took his departure from meter as claiming it dead, when instead they should only have been finding their own way out, that is the only way to work outside of meter is to have worked in it first, to understand what it is they are eschewing (he may also be crying for formalism, but I’m not entirely sure).

Davis says…

“Why our contemporary poets took to heart William Carlos Williams’ ”variable feet“ but never his warning that ”without measure, we are lost“ is curious—just as it’s odd Ezra Pound’s dictum that ”poetry should be as well written as prose“ was obeyed, only with ”as well“ removed from the instructions. They never listened to Pound’s admonition: ”Eliot has said the thing very well when he said, ‘No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job’“—they only heard Pound’s call to break the pentameter. Duly instructed, several generations of American poets can’t tell a dactyl from a dictum, and have published countless poems to prove it.”

I agree with this, only I would add that it is too simple to just blame Pound or his generation. Pound’s meter, as T.S. Eliot said, had a “law and order” of its own, but he was, arguably, successful. Also – arguably – many poets after him have successfully shunned meter. The issue of “aesthetic chaos” lies not in interpretations of Pound’s experiments with classicism (say, quantitative meter) and “vers libre” (so-called free verse), after all, his circle was trying to break the confines of the previous generation as it would be expected of the next.

The problem with poets today, if one could generalize so grandly, is less a matter of form and more a matter of ear. Although I don’t believe that poetry has to be written in strict form to be successful, I do believe a poet should understand form for the simple reason that form, like a negligee, creates expectations and makes breaking out of it a nice surprise (did I really say that?). But aside from arguments about the validity of free verse and such, I think this “aesthetic chaos” is due in part, dare I say, to modern culture’s affect on how we hear poetry.

Ana Maria points out in her own response to “The Innocent Ear,” that most people today don’t have the experience of reading out loud (that, I might add, would have been a course of education in earlier times). Granted, after listening to recordings of a hundred years or so of famous poets (Poetry Speaks), I would venture that even some of the greats don’t know how to read poetry – not even their own – very well. But reading out loud is not just important, it’s every bit as much of a skill as crafting metaphors and it’s the only thing that will give form meaning.

We don’t learn the sonic value of a poem merely from reading about prosody; the science of understanding “dactyls” and schools of poetry is only an intellectual construct. Pound says in his ABC of Reading (uppercase emphasis are his):

This is nevertheless the RIGHT WAY to study poetry, or literature, or painting… If you want to find out something about painting you go to the National Gallery, or the Salon Carré, or the Brera, or the Prado, and LOOK at the pictures.




For every reader of books on art, 1,000 people go to LOOK at the paintings. Thank heaven!

True and honest poetry does require knowing how to read poems, if you don’t know what a caesura sounds like, you probably aren’t going to be able to write one to any affect. But ears become trained through using them and that means reading out loud (if and when, as in my case, your wife puts up with it) and listening. Listening not just to your poems and other poets, but, in my opinion, to music, serious music.

In the same way that Hemingway said that only 10% of what you know goes into a story but it shows if you don’t know the other 90%, elements like music manifest themselves in your writing style. Paul Bowles was a composer before a writer and his music is just as distinct as his writing. I didn’t know this about him before I read The Sheltering Sky or The Spider’s House, but I wrote in my notes when I read those books that his writing had quite a musical sensibility to it. The music shows and it’s effective.

Equal to the “flaccid free verse” that exists so prevalently today is a culture with relatively flaccid music. I like “pop” music, but I don’t think that a steady diet of the stuff will do much for your writing. If I were teaching a class on poetry, or even prose, I would urge my students to listen to everything from Bach to Webern in classical music and Ellington to Mingus in jazz and to really listen, to spend time with it the way you would a great book and listen to that poetry. God help my poor hypothetical students!

comments

I regard my interest in poetry as stemming primarily from my musicianship, especially singing. (When I’ve worked out where the interest in prose comes from, I’ll get back to you.) However I would dispute the notion of flaccidity in modern popular music somewhat. We owe a great deal in terms of the opening up of the present generation to many genres of music, to ‘sixties songwriters, to whom so many of the young are returning for inspiration and (dare I say it) stronger lyrical content.

Nice little aphorism about the negligee there.

    – genevieve (09/16  at  09:41 PM)

Genevieve - I have a bad habit of being long-winded and a badderrer habit of cutting myself off before I’ve gotten into my point. I deleted several hundred words here just starting to talk about the music and I should have just started the post around where I mention Ana Maria posts.

Anyway, without getting into a big pop music thing, I can only say that all good music is worthwhile, not matter what type it is, but as far as thinking in terms of writing I think the subtlety, complexity and emotional force (not be confused with sentimentality) of jazz and classical music is unparalleled in pop or even so-called alternative music.

As I sit here at 2am writing this to you I’m listening to Lauryn Hill, and even though the music itself is nothing like it, she reminds me of Nina Simone in that she’s a story teller and she really brings her personality to the fore when singing and it’s pretty powerful.

Still, most (popular) music written today is either some sort of facile pastiche of past masters or made to be disposable. Miles Davis’s last album before he died was hip/hop. The man refused to ever look backward. There’ aren’t too many artists or songwriters that do that these days - they just aren’t creators. But, here I am going into a whole big thing...Goodnight Gracie.

    – Bud Parr (09/17  at  01:49 AM)

Makes sense to me. This business of writing verse librs without knowing why and what is exasperating. I have often asked many of my poet friends to see if there is any rationale musical or otherwise to their line breaks. Was a pleasure reading your blog.

    – Arvind JOshi (09/20  at  06:51 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: September 16, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Poetry

• Comments:3
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