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Tuesday, December 20, 2005

In the last few days there's been a discussion at New Poetry about the impression some of us have that musicians are more open than poets to influence from work unlike their own and are more willing to acknowledge the excellence of such work. I've combined and edited two or three of my own contributions to that discussion in order to make this post.

One thing that I've mentioned before is that the web (along with some MFA programs) has made it possible to find lots of poets "just like you," so you never have to be confronted with any other practice. That's unthinkable in the music world, where instruments costs a lot of money and just to make a living (or even just to play) you've got to work with people of widely varying tastes and backgrounds. But I think there's more to it than that.

Western musicians, with the exception of serial and aleatory composers, work with a common set of rhythmic and harmonic structures. Melodies and chords are built (mostly) on standard intervals of time and pitch endlessly recombined. When composers like Bartok or Ellington or Simon hear something new to them—an unusual chord progression, a new rhythm, a new timbre from a previously unheard instrument or combination of instruments, whatever—they want to learn how to use that in their own music. It's the same when a rock bassist hears a nifty riff in a jazz piece, when a folk guitarist listening to blues starts to understand the expressive value of bent notes, or when a mandolinist wonders "can I do something like a banjo roll on this thing?" For a musician, other kinds of music are resources, sources of technique.

That doesn't usually translate into proficiency at many different kinds of music. At the highest professional levels technique is simply too demanding for any but a handful of performers to excel in more than one kind of music, and the same is true of composition, at least in jazz and, for want of a better term, classical music. It's probably also true for poets: it may be hard to be a really good sonneteer and a really good L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet.

But there's almost nothing like that kind of opportunistic foraging for poets of different schools. As a metrical poet, I can learn something about expressively used line breaks from a good free verse poet, how enjambment can create a suspension of meaning resolved in the second line. But the effect isn't nearly as strong in metrical verse since there enjambment rhythmically joins the lines while in free verse it separates them. It's not at all the same as the realization for a musician that you can delay tonic resolution by moving from the IV chord to the II7 before the V7, and that it works because the II chord in a given key is the V chord for the key based on the root of the V chord in the key you started in.

I could be wrong, but I don't think there's any analog in spoken (or silently read) poetry to chord progressions in music. But the blues as lyric/stanza form is a good example of the kind of cross-fertilization possible from one formal tradition to another. For another, Victor Hugo thought the pantoum, a Malaysian form, could be adapted to French verse, and by golly we now assign it as an exercise in Creative Writing classes. All those fabulous structures of the troubadours, the Italian sonnet, all have made English formal verse much richer because, I think, the structures are at a scale similar to the scale of chord progression in music.

Free verse seems to me to be much harder to learn from—the structural scale is either far too fine, so that every word, line break, whitespace, punctuation, capitalization and everything is deliberately chosen and it becomes overwhelming, or else it's just unjustified text and no choice really matters. Those are caricatures, but not too far off, I think. Free verse is damned hard to do well, because you get no help at the scale meter and stanza give you in formal/metrical verse. Paul Lake's essay (parts one and two) on fractal structure in formal verse addresses some of this; a few weeks ago, Kasey Mohammad talked about the difficulty of addressing craft in a discussion of a not-so-good poem by Mary Oliver.

Beyond that, according to Helen Vendler, these days one can get an MFA in poetry without ever learning to scan (imagine a performance or composition degree from Berklee or the Juilliard without basic harmony), a result of the general disparagement of technique, including not just prosody but logic, rhetoric, and narrative structure. What is a young poet taught to learn from other poets? Attitude? Politics? Bad linguistics? Worse epistemology?

Really I guess I think that there is a rich vocabulary, something like the musical vocabulary, for poets working in a formal tradition, and that vocabulary crosses cultures and languages to other formal traditions. But it doesn't cross, or only partly crosses, the lines between free verse and trad form and between the various kinds of free verse. All that may be just a way of saying I find free verse extremely hard to write. I think I've written a few decent free verse poems, but they seem to me like accidents.


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