THE SENSUAL EAR and THE MIND’S EAR

Alan Loney’s essay in remake2 – ‘What About the English Poetry Tradition’ – was a touching tribute to a dead friend, George South, but it was more than that – it explained how ‘the craft of poetry,’ the traditional aesthetics which South represented, remained deeply relevant to Alan, despite the ‘renewal of technical resources’ in which he had been involved since the 1960s. The essay was a vivid account of his ‘double debt, to Charles Olson and to George South,’ and the need he felt to ‘integrate those sources & resources rather than separate them or put them in opposition to each other.’

I suspect readers may have been startled to hear someone known as a highly progressive poet giving a shout out to traditional poetics. Some may even have felt that he was lending support to the wrong side, to those dismissive of ‘experimental poetry.’ But a lot has happened in recent decades – the context of poetry has changed in ways that make Alan’s essay timely and important. It reminds me of the French saying, Reculer pour mieux sauter – we need to take a step backwards as a run-up to our next leap forwards. The ‘renewal of technical resources’ can include not only new discoveries but also new insights from old, unfashionable models (as Alan has shown by his use of the pre-Socratics, or George South’s notebooks). l admire Alan and John’s mappings of history in remake2 and want to complement them with my own, to reinforce the issues raised.

Until comparatively recently, almost all poets in English received or sought to give themselves the same basic training. This involved a strong emphasis on sound texture and prosody (with well-known meters as the starting-point), and acute care in phrasing and lineation (with rhyme and established verse forms as options). Also expected were a wide-ranging grasp of language, the ability to control tone, and a detailed knowledge of tradition (especially the canon of great poets). To be accepted as a ‘poem,’ a text had to establish a sense of form and offer other aesthetic pleasures. The term ’10,000 hour rule’ was not known then, but in the same spirit it was assumed that a poet would accumulate many hours of practice.  

This set of skills was among the foundations of an education in literature in many schools as well as all university English departments, training readers as well as poets. Granted, the teaching was often routine or mechanical. But for poets, this was not merely an academic exercise. Understanding a sonnet or a spondee was as basic a training for poets as learning keys and scales for musicians.

Alan moved beyond this code when he chose new mentors such as Olson, but thanks to South he was well aware of the rules he was breaking. (Olson himself in his ‘Projective Verse’ manifesto used the 16^th century poem ‘O western wynd’ as a positive example, along with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare’s King Lear.) Other modern poets who engaged in ‘renewal’ have similarly sought to ‘integrate the new sources & resources, rather than separate them or put them in opposition.’ In New Zealand in the 1930s, ‘the Brasch-Curnow alliance’ (to use Geraets’s term) added new tools from W H Auden and T S Eliot (two poets with a thorough knowledge of the canon). Another ‘generation’ emerged in the 1960s – the Freed poets, for example – which also set out with traditional training but then developed a broader knowledge of modernism, including post-war developments such as ‘the New American Poetry.’ I could go on to talk about a further ‘generation’ influenced by Language Poetry, but locally that would be a much smaller group. What interests me here is the fact that all of these ‘groups’ began their work with a basic grasp of traditional poetry and poetics, although all questioned the adequacy of that inheritance. While they were most excited by the new resources they had discovered, tradition had at least provided them with a useful apprenticeship. As Alan says, the old texts he had used as guides ‘still resonate in my own hearing of the writing I do today.’ 

It comes as a major turning-point that the latest ‘generation’ – those who have grown up since the millennium – are the first cohort who are unlikely to have received a traditional training. The adventurous ones among them will certainly dig up earlier samples of poetry, but their coverage of history is likely to be patchy. This shift has occurred in today’s schools and even some universities. How did it happen? The canon was rejected after many attacks on its dominance. This dumping of tradition could be seen as liberation, shedding the weight of the past. But it could also be regarded as a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, discarding centuries of craft knowledge and the challenge that went with it, the challenge of aspiring to a similar level of achievement.

In the digital age, the analogue era has come to seem less relevant. Computer technology has brought a transformation as profound as the arrival of the printing press (Johannes Gutenberg, circa 1450). The computer and the mobile phone provide us with quick access to texts, but they also encourage a speed-up of reading in order to cope with the rapid stream of incoming material. As I discussed in my essay for remake1, the new style of top-gear reading is poorly suited to the challenges posed by intricate, ambitious forms of writing.

In my own experience (parallel in time to Alan’s), traditional training placed strong emphasis on sound. I remember the shock I received after arriving at the UC campus at Berkeley and began a poetry course with Thom Gunn. In the first lecture, Gunn analysed a sonnet by Shakespeare in terms of ‘four degrees of stress.’ I thought I knew all about scansion – about iambs, spondees, dactyls, etc – but the subtlety of Gunn’s response to sound send me back to primary school. He wasn’t merely being academic – rather, he was listening to texts with the fierce attention he felt essential for anyone who was serious about being a poet.

I subsequently learned that Gunn had once studied with the eccentric, opinionated critic and poet Yvor Winters; and I was blown away when I came across Winters’ essay ‘The Audible Reading of Poetry.’ To quote its first and last paragraphs:

      My title may seem to have in it something of the jargon of the
      modern educationist; if so, I am sorry, but I mean to indicate 
      something more than the reading of poetry aloud. I mean to 
      indicate the reading of poetry not merely for the sensual ear, 
      but for the mind's ear as well; yet the mind's ear can be trained
      only by way of the other, and the matter, practically considered, 
      comes inescapably back to the reading of poetry….

And:

      There will never be a first-rate poet or a first-rate critic who lacks 
      a first-rate ear; and no one will ever acquire a first-rate ear 
      without working for it and in the proper manner. Poetry, alas, 
      like painting and music, is an art - it is not a form of happy self-
      indulgence; and to master an art or even understand it, one has 
      to labour with all of one's mind and with at least a part of one's
      body.[i]

When Winters analysed poetry in terms of sound, he was scornful of readers who thought only in terms of two levels of stress, commenting: ‘The language [of a poem] does not divide itself evenly into accented syllables [since] there is almost infinite variation in degrees of accent. For this reason, the basic rule of English scansion is this: that the accented syllable can be determined only in relationship to the other syllable or syllables…. ‘[ii] And: ‘no two syllables bear exactly the same degree of accent: it is this fact which gives the rhythm of the best English verse its extreme sensitivity.’[iii]  He spoke of how rhythm ‘permeates the entire poem as pervasively as blood permeates the human body.’[iv] His emphasis on hearing a text (with ‘the mind’s ear’) describes a style of reading utterly different from today’s habit of surfing rapidly through digital texts.

Winters also explained the traditional reasons for using a definite framework: ‘the firmer the metric structure, the more precise can be the rhythmic variations, the greater the effect obtainable with a very slight variation; whereas if the structure is loose the variations lack significance.’[v] Today not many poets are interested in the old metrical structures. Other frameworks have become available, such as syllable-counting, or a focus on strong accents (such as Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung rhythm), or Olson’s ‘field composition,’ or the revival of other traditions (such as the pre-Socratics, one of Alan’s models).

Then there are many writers influenced by vernacular speech, such as American poets Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, or Amiri Baraka. Frank O’Hara’s ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ provides a vivid rationale:

      'I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go 
      on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with 
      a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it 
      up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."’ And: ‘As for measure 
      and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if 
      you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight
      enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s
      nothing metaphysical about it.'[vi] 

But though one cannot apply traditional metrics to their work, all of these poets had a sophisticated sense of rhythm – their pants were figure-hugging. Not that their experiments were always successful. For example, ‘Howl’ has marvellous musical qualities – ‘reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz’ – but some of Ginsberg’s later poetry feels baggy and loose-fitting. Today, a great deal of writing by local poets seems a diluted version of that vernacular tradition.

A problem for me with much local poetry today is its primary focus on subject matter, on its ‘message.’ This is an age in which confessionalism (with its emphasis on raw personal experience) and identity politics (race, gender and sexual orientation) have a very strong presence in the arts. Often a righteous message, the display of a group identity, or a confession relevant to one’s own life is considered more important than aesthetic qualities. Indeed, worrying too much about artistic aspects reminds readers of traditional poetry, and that leads rapidly to accusations of ‘elitism,’ ‘academicism,’ or even ‘racism.’ (The ‘OK boomer!’ and ‘Old white guys!’ jibes often follow.)[vii]

That is not to deny the importance of subject matter. The most extreme expression of that is a passage in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) where Brigge says ‘Ah! but verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good.’ Brigge then continues for most of a page to list the things and experiences that one ought to have known – roads in unknown regions, animals, birds, flowers, days of childhood that are still unexplained, many nights of love (‘none of which was like the others’), the screams of women in childbirth, time spent with the dying, and much, much more. He adds sadly: ‘all my verses had a different origin, so they are not verses.’

But Brigge also adds an important qualification: ‘it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us…, not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst….’[viii] Rilke is using this fictional character to emphasise the value of a deep knowledge of life, but he is not calling for confessionalism. As his own poetry shows, he was an extremely wide reader, and though he liked to present himself as ‘Dottor Serafico,’ a poet of pure inspiration, in fact he was (as Judith Ryan has shown) a writer who moulded his poems in a traditionally careful way.[ix] As he said in his Letters to a Young Poet, ‘it is the difficult that is enjoined upon us, almost everything serious is difficult.’[x] He also did not wait until his final days but published powerful volumes of poetry all through his life.

Today what is often lost or diluted is the sense of the poem as a constructed object. A recent film, The Worst Person in the World (2021), contains an eloquent speech by Askel, a writer and artist with a terminal illness, about the years he has spent in a world where ‘culture was passed along through objects’ – books, newspapers, magazines, comics, records, and so on. Askel speaks of the pleasure of living among these cultural objects, designing them, going shopping in search of them, and sharing the tactile and focused experience they encouraged. Alan Loney has a particularly strong sense of poems as objects because he worked as a printer, choosing type and physically reproducing the results. To print is to see words as objects, and placing them on the page is to be acutely aware of structure and layout. Earlier poets often spoke of shaping or carving verses (such as W B Yeats’s ‘such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enamelling’). On a computer screen one can still choose typeface, compose words, and print out the results, but our experience with computers involves forms of virtual reality or simulation. Also, the speed required to keep up with the flow of emails, tweets and posts does not encourage re-writing or re-reading.  Computers have many virtues but I believe they are one of the reasons why, over the last few decades, the mainstream of local poetry has been thinning out.

Aesthetic forms of perception are no longer valued highly in education – as shown by the down-sizing of arts and humanities in schools and universities. That is to neglect a large part of human potential. Everyone has aesthetic impulses, but they need to be exercised and developed, not necessarily by formal training but by artistic practice and by close reading.  That involves the ‘sensuous ear’ working with the ‘mind’s ear,’ since it is the nature of good art that the devil is in the detail (or ‘le bon Dieu’ as Gustave Flaubert and others have put it).  Poetry, like all the arts, is about extending human awareness.

There is a famous comment by Marx about history repeating itself as farce. Those writers who ditch the past tend to end up unconsciously repeating it in a diluted form. Today’s poetry is full of expressions of lyrical excitement and look-at-me individualism in loose free verse, which are essentially a re-hash of Romanticism. The most valuable thing a poet can do is to find a new way of using or relating to tradition; the least valuable is to churn out inferior copies of it.

The visual arts

Poetry is not the only form of art that has reached a difficult stage today in which traditional skills are no longer on display and customary pleasures are no longer satisfied. The visual arts have gone furthest towards the condition that Arthur Danto describes as ‘post-history.’ In his well-known 1997 essay ‘Anything Goes,’ he wrote:

‘What is an artwork?’ became part of every artwork belonging to the Modernist era, and each such artwork advanced itself as a kind of answer…. The history of Modernism was the history of scandals, as one after the other, works of art bumped some cherished criterion out of the definition of art…. Since anything could be art, the question arose why everything wasn’t art: what made the difference between what was and what was not? A number of fairly bad answers were given. One would be that whatever an artist says is a work of art is through that fact a work of art period. Or—this is the Institutional Theory of Art—whatever an artworld decrees is a work of art is one through that declaration.’[xi]

Those definitions could also be applied to poetry, but a more useful answer is to see any work of art – at least in one sense – as a reflection on the art which has proceeded it, with the artist bound (in Charles Altieri’s phrase) by ‘an awareness of filiation and responsibility.’ This is not an injunction to imitate the past but to respond to it. Poets may reject the past, but if the rejection is to be convincing, they need first to have made themselves at home with it. For many young writers today, a knowledge of poetry appears limited to the work of a few local friends and a few 20^th century moderns (William Carlos Williams’s short poems, for example). To demand more may strike them as ‘academic’ (‘I know what I like and I don’t want any “experts” telling me what to do’).  But being allergic to tradition is no sure path to originality.   

The root meaning of ‘amateur’ is amare, to love (as in loving an activity); and it is encouraging to see so much grass-roots production, so many people creating texts. The digital media have allowed many more people to create books, post poems on Instagram, make films, record music in their bedroom, dance and sing on-line. This has many positive aspects, but a diet – or a culture – of nothing but amateur work is ultimately unsatisfying.

A poet such as Alan was challenged for his heresy when he sought the influence of poets such as Olson, but at the same time he was perfectly aware of the rules he was breaking and the tradition to which he was responding, and I think that given a particular force to his poetry, and that of many other modern poets. This is not an argument for returning to the old modes but a reminder that the whakapapa one hopes to join has always maintained an intense interest in sound, rhythm, phrasing and form. A poem must include elements of some kind, new or old, which make it unique, surprising and well-made. As Alan quotes Igor Stravinsky: ‘Sincerity is no excuse.’

For some, the fact that I belong to an older generation may disqualify my comments. But I can speak as someone whose culture is clearly no longer ‘the establishment’ or ‘the status quo.’ Today’s dominant culture has a very different character, as shown by the priorities now promoted by the universities, or by organisations such as Creative NZ, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, or the Ministry of Education, or by the mainstream media and the ‘instapoets’ on social media. In this situation, I am happy to advance an alternative point-of-view. And now the appearance of remake has reassured me that I am not the only one who ‘considers much current New Zealand poetry intellectually and psychologically stuck’ and in need of being ‘revitalised.’

notes

[i] The Hudson Review, Autumn, 1951, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Autumn, 1951), pp.433-447

[ii] Ibid, p.438.

[iii] Ibid, p.442.

[iv] Ibid, p.434.

[v] Ibid, p.436.

[vi] O’Hara’s manifesto is widely available online, for example: https://genius.com/Frank-ohara-personism-a-manifesto-annotated

[vii] E.g. Vanessa Crofskey’s enthusiastic article about the poetry of Lang Leav in the Sunday Star-Times on 12 May 2018: ‘She represents the new occupiers of the internet…. It’s to say that reading a page [of her verse] felt like you had, for a second, been seen…. As a teenager…I couldn’t deal with Shakespeare…. Writing was predominantly by old white men who bored me half to death. Their poetry was mouldly bread.’  Similar sentiments are expressed more amusingly by Hera Lindsay Bird: ‘Lots of angry men didn’t like it [my poetry]…. Old men think I’m personally responsible for the death of T.S. Eliot or something.’ (Vice, 23 August 2016)

[viii] Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. M D Herter Norton, New York, W W Norton, 1964, pp.26-27. (My italics.)

[ix] Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism, and Poetic Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

[x] Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Reginald Snell, Mineola, Dover, 2002, p.21.

[xi] Arthur Danto, ‘”Anything Goes”: The Work of Art and the Historical Future,’ UC Berkeley Occasional Papers, 1997 (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5pf0q7w3)