"I think academic and literary theories and politics have weakened poetry..."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Only Connect: A Conversation With Paul Lake
Interview by
Joan Houlihan
Paul Lake's first poetry collection, Another Kind of Travel, received the Porter Fund Award for Literary Excellence. His essays on poetry have appeared widely in journals and anthologies and he is a regular contributer to the Contemporary Poetry Review. Lake is currently a professor of English and Creative Writing at Arkansas Tech University and lives in Russellville with his wife, artist Tina Lake, and their two children.
Paul, all of your essays are rich and thought-provoking. What is your
background, how did you come to make the connections you make between science
and poetry?
There’s really nothing in my academic background that might account for the ideas on
poetry and science in my recent essays. My undergraduate degree from Towson University
is in English and my M. A. from Stanford is in creative writing and English. My reading,
however, has always ranged over a wide array of subjects, and at some point I started
making connections between ideas put forward by various poet-critics like Ezra Pound,
T. S. Eliot, S. T. Coleridge, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and ideas I was reading about
in other fields. I’m strictly an amateur in the root sense of the word. I read and write
about things for the sheer love of it. I’m not an expert on anything, but sometimes being
an outsider is an advantage because it enables one to see what the already-initiated don’t.
For instance, I began reading about chaos and complexity in science about the same time that
I began reading some introductory books on Poststructuralist criticism—which I’d never studied
in college--and the two seemed to directly contradict each other on many of the same points.
I’m also passionately interested in poetry, and much of what postmodernism says about poetry
and what the literary avant-garde often embodies violate my deeply-held convictions about the
nature and importance of poetry. I think academic and literary theories and politics have
weakened poetry, lowered its estimation in the eyes of educated readers, and shaken the
confidence of poets. In writing the essays, I simply wanted to contest what I thought were
mistaken ideas.
While your essays are constructed as a defense of formalist poetry, I come away from them
with a much better sense of the poet’s creative process in general, and especially its larger
connection to all of nature. You make a compelling case in “The Shape of Poetry”, for example,
for the existence of a parallel between the laws of complexity in chaos theory and the
formulation of a poem, that form is not imposed from without but governed from within and in
response to many factors, most of them unknown by the poet. This effectively negates the idea
of the “authority-based” and top-down creation of a formal poem that Language and avant-garde
poets rail against. I wonder what you think though, about poems that devise their own form as
they proceed? In fact, there may be no such thing as “free” verse, only instances of form, some
recognized/recognizable, some too individual or quirky to be recognized as a form. If your
parallel is accurate in every respect, could it be that poets are writing in form all the time,
but the forms are not recognized as such—yet?
T. S. Eliot once famously said that no verse is free for the poet who wants to do a good job--
and there’s the rub. Of course there are all sorts of rudimentary forms and conventions in even
the most “free” verse. For instance, most free verse follows the convention of using the Roman
alphabet and the rules of English grammar and syntax, of writing in lines as opposed to paragraphs,
of using more figurative language than most prose, of paying more attention to the sounds and rhythms
words make. Using parallel syntactical structures or opening every line with the same words are
examples of form within otherwise “free” verse. This is a somewhat different thing, though, from
saying that all free verse, however seemingly formless and quirky, has some kind of deep formal
structure shaping it that we somehow, inexplicably, can’t perceive. A form that can’t be perceived or
described—that is, experienced or explained--can hardly be said to exist, can it?
As I tried to show in my essay “Disorderly Orders,” the best “free” verse of poets such as Whitman,
Pound, and Eliot employs rhythmical repetitions that can be loosely mapped with the conventional feet
of Greek and English prosody. As Pound pointed out, in some of his supposedly “free” verse he was freely
adapting (substituting stress for duration) the same Greek feet as those used by the early Greek
dramatists before Greek prosody had been formalized into a system. Your question about “poems that devise
their own forms as they proceed” is a good one. What I would argue is that that is precisely how the
Greek literary tradition--and later ones including the English—in fact originated: with poets fooling
around with sounds and rhythms until they cohered into recognizable patterns. Similarly, today when a
poet writes in a traditional form, such as a sonnet, he or she rarely begins by saying, “I think I’ll
write a sonnet.” He begins by fooling around with some lines until they coalesce into a pattern he begins
to recognize as a sonnet. Two terms from complexity science are sometimes useful for talking about
evolving forms: scaling and self-similarity—that is, the tendency of things undergoing feedback in a
dynamic process (like that of writing) to repeat certain patterns at different scales, from the large to
the small. It seems to me that that is exactly what formal poems—that is metrical, formal poems—do.
And as I tried to show in that essay, some “free” verse--such as certain poems of Whitman, Pound, and
Eliot--often shows similar, if somewhat looser, patterns. There might be said to be a continuum of
poetic form—at one end, a nearly “free” verse with few discernible repeated patterns, and at the other,
say, a Hopkins sonnet. Complex literary forms evolve over time. Though we later consider them
“traditional,” they started out by evolving from earlier experiments. No authority ever decreed them
into being.
In the same essay, you quote Coleridge as saying:
“…but a living body is of necessity an organized one—and what is organization but the connection of
parts to a whole, so that each part is at once end and means! This is no discovery of criticism, it is
a necessity of the human mind—..”
And I agree. But I also think that the “connection of parts to a whole” can be stretched very far in
contemporary poetry while still being part of a whole. For example, the so-called elliptical poets give
us points on a map, or partial routes and topography, requiring the reader to fill in the rest.
Do you think this is a valid idea, that the reader can be part of the creation of a whole, of an order,
of some coherence, in a poem?
I would say that the reader of a poem is involved in the poem’s meaning even before he picks up the poem
and reads it for the first time. While writing the poem, the poet has a model of his potential readers
in mind—or rather, a model of their minds, of how they might react to his various ploys and strategies.
The poet is also often surprised by how the language behaves, by what it does under his or her prodding,
and so he also uses his own mind as a model of how readers might react. But I don’t believe in what I
call the ink-blot theory of poetry—the idea that a poet should just throw out a lot of suggestive verbal
ink-blots to let readers construct from them what they may—to connect the dots, as it were. And I don’t
think the model you suggest—of offering a few points on a putative map for readers to fill in for
themselves—is a particularly useful poetic theory either.
One problem with using maps and collages as poetic models is that both are two-dimensional--and static.
To quote Pound again, poetry is, by contrast, “a shape cut into time.” It moves and flows. Likewise, I
would be very careful about trying to make poetry “elliptical”—in any sense of the word. Ellipses are
two-dimensional shapes on a page. Like many of the terms used by the avant-garde, “elliptical” is derived
from Euclidean geometry. What makes the two passages above work is not their elliptical quality or
collage-like juxtapositions; it’s the wedding of the haunting metrical music and imagery to induce a
certain mood in the reader. The problem today is that many poets do use static models for their verse,
and as a result, some, like Jorie Graham, become merely tedious and tendentious.
Here’s a passage from Stephen Burt’s article on elliptical poetry (he coined the term):
"Elliptical Poets are always hinting, punning or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory;
they are easier to process in parts than in wholes. Elliptics seek the authority of the rebellious;
they want to challenge their readers, violate decorum, surprise or explode assumptions about what
belongs in a poem, or what matters in life, and to do so while meeting traditional lyric goals. Their
favorite attitudes are desperately extravagant, or tough-guy terse, or defiantly childish: they don't
believe in, or seek, a judicious tone. Elliptical poets like insistent, bravura forms, and forms with
repetends - sestinas, pantoums, or fantasias on single words, like Liam Rector's 'Saxophone':
Is Burt talking about form in the same way you understand it?
Much of what you’ve quoted above from Burt’s essay "Shearing Away" is simply a list of Romantic and
Modernist techniques presented in more contemporary, hip language. A line like “Elliptics seek the
authority of the rebellious,” for instance, reflects the now long-held Romantic notion that there is
some special moral authority conferred by rebellion, even rebellion for its own sake. The Romantics,
however, were actually rebelling against something. Like the children of the Enlightenment that they
were, they were rebelling against monarchy and the established churches of their countries. They wanted
to start real revolutions, like the Americans and French, to create democratic governments. Byron died
leading a rebellion in Greece against the Turkish occupation of the home of Western democracy. The
Elliptical poets, by contrast, sound like poseurs who seek the “authority of the rebellious” (a rather
curious locution) because it’s, well, cool—as if moral and artistic authority were automatically
conferred by the act of rebellion. It’s an adolescent pose, which is fine if you’re an adolescent, but if
not, not.
The most interesting and illuminating part of Burt’s quote is the line about how Elliptical poets “are
always hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory.” This, too, is a
technique that goes back to early Modernism. Yvor Winters even invented a pejorative term to describe
T. S. Eliot’s use of “a never-quite-unfolded backstory” hovering behind the arras in lines like these from
“Gerontion”:
Winters called this technique of hinting at a non-existent backstory with narrative fragments peopled by
characters only sketchily-drawn or merely named “Pseudo-reference.” There IS no back- story, Winters argued.
Who is this Mr. Silvero? who is Hakagawa? and why is he bowing among the Titians? The names and barely-limned
scenes merely tease the reader with the idea that there’s a more fully developed narrative behind them when
in fact there is no such thing.
Other Ellipticist techniques Burt describes--like violating decorum and mixing high and low diction--have
been done to death by Modernists and later postmodern poets such as those of the New York School. Later in
his essay Burt adds that Elliptical poets “create inversions, homages, takeoffs on old or ‘classic’ poets.”
This again goes back to collage in the works of visual artists like Robert Rauschenberg, a contemporary of
the New York school poets, who mixed images from pop and high culture. The sudden shifts in tone Burt
describes are equally present in poems by Koch and Ashbery. Like retelling the same joke, the technique
doesn’t get better with repeated use.
I find myself much more in accord with Burt when, in his interview with you, he says that the question he
asks himself when confronted with a seemingly incoherent poem is “how much narrative or argumentative
work . . . am I willing to perform in order to make some lines which sound good seem to fit together?”
Like Burt, I don’t think the writer has the right to ask too much of me, to force me to do the poet’s work
for her. And like Burt, I’m willing to pay more attention to a poem if, as he says, the poem sounds good,
if its language is inviting and gives me pleasure. Unfortunately, the Elliptical poets like Forrest Gander,
Mark Levine, Jorie Graham, and others Burt names, generally fall flat, for me, for lack of this type of
verbal music. Unmetered and generally scanty in their use of sonic devices like rhyme, assonance, and
alliteration; often asyntactic, fragmentary, and choppy, the poems simply don’t engage my ear or compel me
to explore them more deeply. Reading an Elliptical poem provides an experience similar to channel-surfing,
where a scene from a classic movie is suddenly juxtaposed to a cartoon, then a crime drama, a deodorant
commercial, a rap video, a sixties sitcom. “That’s exactly right,” the argument runs; “that’s simply
postmodern reality, accurately rendered.” Well, in fact, it’s not: it’s only the reality of channel-surfing
rendered. When we as living human animals make love, engage in conversation with friends, talk to our
doctor, work at our job, watch our children compete in a race, we move to completely different rhythms,
with real narrative flow and emotional peaks and valleys, beginnings and endings, with real consequences,
as when your doctor tells you that you have a terrible disease or a lover tells you he or she still loves
you at the end of a difficult period.
As Burt himself points out, good lyrics often contain argument and narrative, to give them structure.
Both devices are ways of organizing time and focusing the reader’s attention. The problem with
elliptical poetry, as (for me, at least) with most so-called language poetry, is that the writers almost
entirely eschew narrative and argument, leaving the reader awash in a sea of seemingly unrelated—or
tenuously related--images and fragments. The human attention span is limited; it doesn’t have an infinite
capacity for focusing on a hundred different seemingly unrelated things. But if you link images and ideas
in a narrative or argument, a reader can flow with the rhythm of the story or argument and organize the
details in her mind. The great Modernists like Eliot, Joyce, and Pound were masters of the conventions
of their media like rhythm and narrative. Look at the verbal music in the opening of Ulysses or the
metrical parts of The Waste Land. On top of that, the Modernists also employed what Eliot called “the
mythical method.” Joyce in Ulysses not only employed elements of conventional fictional narrative in his
Dublin story but overlaid that on top of another richer, more mythical narrative, The Odyssey.
Eliot and Pound employed similar myths to hold together their fragmentary epics The Waste Land and The
Cantos (though in Pound’s case, the central myth kept shifting). By contrast, the fragmentary and
incomplete “backstory” of an Elliptical poem is generally too tenuous and broken a thing on which to hang
a poem or maintain a reader’s attention. Much of the poetry of the great Modernists remains wonderful to
read because of its beautiful music and large, mythic movements. By contrast, most postmodern poetry
seems to be little more than infinitely-reproducible nonsense once you’ve learned a few easy tricks.
Pound famously advised that poetry should be at least as well written as good prose. And much of what
goes under the name of various postmodern schools of poetry is abysmal judged by the standards of good
prose. The surface playfulness and random mechanical shifts can’t provide the same level of
attention-fixing or sheer aural pleasure as a more coherent poem using traditional sound devices.
It has often been observed that poetry tends to go wrong when it strays too far from conversation and
song. If someone called you up and spoke elliptical poetry to you for a while over the phone, you’d
soon grow weary and hang up. If, after several such calls, your Caller ID identified the caller as an
acquaintance known to babble elliptically, you’d soon stop answering. I wouldn’t pin my literary
reputation in posterity on a style of writing that makes people’s eyes glaze over at the mention of my
name.
If, as you contend, the poem is an organic form governed by rules from within as much as from
without, the way nature’s forms are governed, then maybe it’s impossible for a poet to write a “rule-less”
poem. Despite the poet’s intention to “stop making sense”, perhaps every utterance, like a deep grammar,
is governed in spite of that intention. As you quote from Hopkins:
“All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as a purpose.”
Could it be argued from your same principles that seemingly random, free verse poetry not obviously
connected or coherent, actually is connected, just much more loosely? That we don’t see the pattern,
but it exists because it’s not possible for an utterance to be without some order?
Of course, some vestige of sense will cling to any agglomeration of words or sounds, but why settle for
so little when you can make something super-charged with meaning and pleasure instead? Once again, it’s
a matter of degrees along a continuum. Let me make an analogy from science again. According to modern
cosmology, the universe itself started from nothing when a super-heated particle appeared, rapidly
expanded and cooled, developing rules and forms as it did. The rules don’t appear to have been imposed
from without, though by some strange paradox the possibility of the laws—such as those of gravity and
the composition of complex atoms—appears to have existed at least as potential within that original
particle. The rules of chemistry that make chemical reactions and bonds are pretty simple compared to
something like the rules that govern complex things like the bodies of higher animals. As Frederick
Turner has pointed out, rocks obey the law of gravity when you drop them; so do babies, but babies are
infinitely more complex than rocks and live at a higher order of being. There’s a continuum of levels
of order ranging from the pure randomness of absolute chaos, as in static, to simple physical and
chemical laws, to complex orders involving feedback like the forming of a human baby with its various
organs from two initial cells.
If you want truly “free” verse, that is, verse free from all rules, you’ll have to shatter syntax and
grammar and even the rules of spelling. But why stop there? Why not free verse even from the oppressive
rule of being written with letters, and make it from pure human sounds voiced into a microphone (as in
fact some language poets have done)? And why not free those sounds from the restrictions of the human
vocal range and electronically alter them? Sure, there’d be something left, some hint or vestige of a
human voice and maybe even language, behind the cacophony of whistles and howls. There may even be some
emotive quality lingering in the electronic sounds you generate. But what’s so great about making
language “free” in that sense? Why not reverse the process and add more rules to make language more,
rather than less, complex. Hopkins, like Coleridge, knew that it was rules or laws operating on
chance—not chance alone--that gave nature its designs. And so in making poetry, why not add more
rules to complexify language. To the rules of grammar and syntax and the need to make “sense,” why not
repeat and vary some of the patterns that your language makes, and repeat some of the sounds, to create
and fulfill--and sometimes defeat--an expectation of order in the reader. Why not let poetic language
make more, rather than less, sense than ordinary conversation or standard prose? Why not make language
like music, instead of like static? That, to me, is the ultimate rationale of poetic meter and form.
Would you say that blank verse, like formal verse, is the result of a self-organizing system of
rules? If not, what makes the difference?
Yes. Blank verse is a form that has evolved into being in the English-language tradition out of earlier
forms like the native four-stress line and the experiments of poets (versed in the classical tradition)
who began playing with patterns inherited from the Mediterranean cultures of the south. Some prosodists
argue that English’s original four-stress line can still be heard today inside our blank verse battling
with Greek iambics.
Why would anyone write formal verse today except as an exercise, as a way to understand the history
of poetry? It doesn’t seem likely that writing in received forms will advance the art. Comment?
I would argue that the notion that poets should “advance the art” of poetry results from linear thinking
and is based on the mistaken notion that literary history moves in a straight two-dimensional line.
This is precisely what the notion of a literary “avant-garde” suggests, that literary history is a
one-way arrow, with an artistic vanguard at its tip. Today the avant-garde has trapped itself at the
end of a dead-end street. Once you’ve broken things down to atoms and shattered the atom and its parts
in a process of reverse evolution, where do you go next? Why not try evolution in the other direction,
instead?
I would suggest that instead of a line, we think of the literary tradition as a winding stairway that
advances by continuously circling back on itself. Or think of the double helix of DNA. Ezra Pound once
urged that we “Make it new.” The “it” being the literary tradition. To make it new, you first have to
know it at the deepest level and move it—in whatever direction--by extending principles already inherent
in it. You get to the top of a circular stairway only by circling back to the point where you began,
each time with a different sense of where you are and where you’re going, as Eliot wisely pointed out in
Four Quartets, a poem whose very title suggests that its language aspires toward the condition of music.
Thanks, Paul, for sharing your insights on poetry with Perihelion.
____
You and I, our money. Their money.
Our pleasure and fist full of money.
Laughter over money, serious money,
over money. Too much, too little,
fluid money. The saxophone, color of wheat,
purchased through Hock Shop money, saxophone
splitting the night, our air, blowing money."In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering Judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madam de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall . . .