This Thing We Call Literature by Krystal Arthur;

Author:Krystal, Arthur; [Krystal, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2016-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Five years ago, in the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson delivered a thoughtful paean to the work of Rae Armantrout, the 2010 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. After duly noting Armantrout’s sure touch with language, the finesse of her method, and the delicacy with which she handles the vagaries of experience, he fastens on her strong suit. Her poems are about consciousness, the awareness of being aware, which makes them reflexively chart the course of their own difficulty: “It’s the mind as problem-solving device, almost as calculator,” Chiasson writes, “though it is, of course, most drawn to problems that cannot be solved.” The insouciant assurance of that “of course” made me realize—not for the first time—that I am not interested in a poet’s mind; it’s not what draws me to poetry.

If I wanted to know what interesting minds think, I would pick up Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wilde, or the letters of Eliot and Keats as opposed to their poems. Yes, of course, Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, Eliot, Lowell, and Dickinson had interesting minds. That’s not the point. Readers didn’t read those poets just for the contents of their minds; they read them for the sound of their words. Even when poets were nominally “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” poetry consisted of lines that rhythmically fixed themselves in the mind. Do poets or readers today still take this on faith? Admittedly, I may be ignorant of many English-speaking poets whose compositions reverberate by rhythmic design—so far, however, I have not encountered them.*

Instead I run into Rae Armantrout. I don’t mean to single out Ms. Armantrout; I could just as easily have chosen Kay Ryan or Stephen Dunn or Mark Doty or a dozen other poets—proficient practitioners, one and all. When I read these poets, I discern intelligence, shrewdness, irony, and humor. I often admire the elliptical shorthand of their phrasing and the precision of their lines, and I’m tickled by the concentration of appellative nouns and their dispersal in lines that seem to have no give to them. In short, I believe I can appreciate their poetry. Yet, in the end, I remain unmoved by it.

Because there is no music.

Historically, English verse, depending on whom you consult, falls into categories of syllabic or accentual stresses. Deliberate patterns of alternation between stronger and weaker stresses or between shorter or longer syllables establish a regular meter based on the distance between accented syllables. Does that mean that lines must be read with equal emphasis by everyone? Not quite. Metrical invention sometimes follows and sometimes vies with natural speech. Nonetheless, accent and duration have accounted for the ascending or descending rhythms of English poetry since the early sixteenth century.

Generally speaking, poets manipulate natural prose rhythms, creating a base line whose recurrence in the poem gets us tapping our minds and feet. The pattern established, poets can then exercise some discretion. Although formal verse may smack of orthodoxy, a poet who has gone to school with Milton, Donne, Spenser, Browning, and Tennyson can perform rewarding variations on familiar meters and fixed rhyme schemes.

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