Lunch Blogging
No crew, no work. But the ceiling's (badly) painted so I put my things back where I can use them. They've taken more than a month to replace three sheets of drywall, and they can work around my stuff to finish.
Referer logs are wonderful things. Today mine led me to A New Broom, where N. Downing offers well-written, provocative commentary on poetics along with original poetry which, while generally not to my taste, is obviously the product of talent, intelligence, and work. And I really like the site motto: AND IF LUST EQUALS KNOWLEDGE, THEN I SIDE WITH THE SNAKE.
The referral was to my remark that langpo was a "retreat into a tiny, tidy formal world," and Downing's not happy with me about it, rightly pointing out that meter is also a set of formal constraints, and that no art is possible without such constraints. Here's the final paragraph:
Why should I be so partisan as to approve one form of structure and self-imposed limitation over another? Pentameter but not lipograms? Please. I may not particularly like backgammon, either, but I don't deny its value, charm, or existence. It's just a game. And life's too short.
Indeed, just as there is no intrinsic reason for spectators to prefer soccer to baseball, there is no reason, other than personal taste, for a reader to prefer pentameter to lipograms. However, if only because one may have a talent for kicking or for meter rather than for batting or for, um, avoiding the letter e, it's different for those who play games or make poems. And I argue that that's not the only difference.
It simply isn't true that "art begins with a 'tiny, tidy formal world' and contracts from there," and, from the evidence of the following paragragh ("I learn about one, and apply lessons to the other."), Downing knows that, too. If we didn't want our poems, songs, and paintings to extend our reach, to enable us to affect the thoughts and feelings of other people, we wouldn't share them. Meter (not necessarily accentual-syllabic meter) is peculiarly suited to that task, as Plato recognized, and it is, in one form or another, universal in human cultures. One source of its power is its lack of tidiness: just making the meter work is doggerel. To be successful, a metrical poem must simultaneously maintain the meter and imitate natural speech, and the rhythm of the poem comes from the interplay of the two.
BTW, that second requirement, that metrical poetry imitate natural speech, is an important reason for the shift from the alliterative/accentual meter of Old English to the accentual-syllabic meters of Middle and Modern English. Structural changes in our language led to structural changes in our poetry. Nothing of the sort happened in the last 150 years to motivate the dominance (at least in the academy) of free verse in the 20th century. Tim Steele's Missing Measures, as I've said before, gives a thorough account and critique of that change.
Blogged from webmail.
3:17:40 PM 
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