Week 2
I want us to be comfortable with the technical side of English meter: to get used to using its terms (iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl; tetrameter, pentameter) as a way of talking about the patterns that we hear in verse. Hollander is always there as a refresher, and we’ll practice in class. Here let me just play back a couple of fundamental ideas. Foot scansion, which is what we were doing in counting iambs etc., is a pretty crude technology for representing the complexity of spoken rhythm—but it helps us hear the fundamental pulse that organizes verse and makes it sound different from ordinary speech. Attridge’s point that “the natural response to rhythmic sound is muscular participation, whether in the tapping of a finger or the movement of the whole body in a dance” (77) is important to remember. Speech rhythm is in our bodies. Meter is the project of organizing that rhythm, so that we can sing with it, dance with it, and make meaning with it.
And meter means (or its scheme is troped) in two basic ways. 1) The choice of meter, and of form generally, is meaningful; so, the four-beat or tetrameter line brings us close to song, hymn, spell, while the five-beat or pentameter line brings us closer to conversation, argument, rhetoric. That’s a choice the whole poem makes, what Hollander would call the metrical contract it establishes with the reader, setting expectations. And 2) any variations of rhythm that test or break that metrical contract are potentially meaningful: when your expectations are violated, you ask, why?—which is to say, you have to interpret, to explain the variation. So that opening line of Paradise Lost, “Of MAN’S first DISoBEdience AND the FRUIT”—if instead we hear “Of MAN’S FIRST disoBEdience” etc., what does that make us think about the poem’s obedience to its own laws? So: the choice of a meter matters, and so do the moments when the poem tests that choice. The sound of a poem is the general sound of its metrical kind and the local sound of its rhythmic behavior in relation to that kind.
Some poets and some readers treat meter as a rule to be obeyed, and judge actual poems by their success or failure in upholding those abstract patterns. It’s good to be interested in those judgments: they mattered for a lot of poets in the past. But we don’t have to make them ourselves, or not that way. The variety of contracts a poem might make with a reader now goes well beyond the canonical types of verse—still I hope we will still find these terms useful for naming some of the rhythmic phenomena we encounter as we go.
I’m working backwards here a bit—we started by thinking about rhythm, with Lefebvre’s help. I loved our rhythm census: the footsteps, the laughter, the clock; the visible traces on the tabletop of the rhythm of labor, wiping it clean; the lovely account of the rhythm of writing, how you hear the enjambment when the pencil lifts from the end of one line and carries back to the beginning of the next; also larger rhythms, like the schedule of a seminar. And of course breathing, the rhythms of the body. This is the work of the rhythmanalyst as Lefebvre imagines it, who sees the world not as a collection of discrete things arranged in space at a particular moment; but rather as a network of overlapping rhythms, which carry from the past and project into the future. Try to take a few moments this week to see if you can hear or see the world that way! To do so is to recognize a special power in poetry, in its aspiration to make art out of such fundamental patterns of felt experience. We revolved some deep questions about whether keeping time with a rhythm is an act of agency (freedom) or submission (bondage); what might make it feel which way. We thought about daily life, bodily experience, attention and ADHD; about the rhythms of city and of country, mechanical and organic; about what would happen if we slowed down a city rhythm: does it become rural? (What is the experiential difference between mechanical and organic rhythms?) Poetry can affect us profoundly when we can understand its rhythms as both participants in, and representations of, this larger world of rhythm where we live (or better, when we live).
OK—I did a little better this week, length-wise. For next week, the exercise is in the sounds of words. Enjoy it! The reading from McGregor and the IPA overlaps a good bit, but it is worth encountering the material twice. After this week, no more tidal waves of technical vocabulary—but if we carry these languages with us, scansion and phonetic analysis, they will serve us well. For example, with Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West”—give some extra time to that poem, which we’ll take up in earnest in the second half of class next week.
The complete Alvin Lucier, “I Am Sitting in a Room”
Beethoven, slowed way down
Week 1
Thanks, everyone, for such a thoughtful start to class yesterday. I’ll write every Tuesday with a page or so of thoughts about our discussion, and those follow below. But first, plenty of start-of-term business!
1) Our class website is https://commons.princeton.edu/eng266-s25/. You’ll find all the readings, the syllabus and schedule, and details for the exercises there. (I will continue to hand out xerox copies of the readings each week, but there will be some framing remarks on the schedule page.)
2) Please sign up for an Amazing Sound of the Week!—particularly important to get people for next week; special thanks to the ice-breakers.
3) And please sign up for reflections/questions; here too, we need people for next Monday. Thank you! I’ll reach out to whoever is signed up midweek to discuss what you might focus on.
4) My office hours are 2:30-4:30 on Tuesdays; you can sign up via the link under my signature way down below. If that time doesn’t work for you, just let me know and we can find another.
5) Remember that going forward we won’t have screens (laptops, tablets, phones) open in class. I’ll try to contain any interjections from Siri or her associates.
OK! So, together we attended to four poems, first listening to them, then listening and reading together: Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate” (read by Jaap Blonk), Tongo Eisen-Martin’s “I Do Not Know the Spelling of Money,” and Susan Howe’s “Frolic Architecture.” We spent the longest time with the first, the Tennyson, and talked about the sound of it before we read the text. It was recorded in 1890, on a wax cylinder, and it was very difficult to make out the words. Without knowing the words, what did we hear?
Lines: discrete groups of words with (in this case) a regular, repetitive structure. How basic to poetry is the phenomenon of the line? It has a complex relation to the sentence and to the phrase, two other structures we detected. We’ll think more about this play between prosodic and grammatical structures as we go (i.e., between lines and sentences).
Music: a couple of people were tempted to talk about the musical quality of the speech, its unusually strong sense of pitch and of rhythm. And what is music, exactly? We’ll get to think about that—but something in the difficulty of making out the sense pushed us in that direction.
Affect: a catch-all term for emotions, and for what some of us called the sound of “urgency.” This is clearly a poem of heightened, and complicated, feeling. (The strangled pride in senseless sacrifice?—something like that.) We’ll want to think about how feeling gets into language.
Rhetoric: closely related to affect, in that several people pointed out that this poem also sounded preacherly or oratorical, like a public performance; and we will want to think about the relationship between rhetoric (the formal art of persuasion) and poetics, which have a long history in the West of ambivalent, mutual recognition and contempt. With the idea of rhetoric comes audience. Does an audience have a sound? The whole question of broadcast, of the difficulty in controlling the direction of sound, came up.
Medium: what to make of the sound of the wax cylinder? Was that part of the poem, or something we had to listen through, and set aside? Signal, or noise? When and how, and why, might a sound poem call attention to its medium? The medium might include the voice, the breath, etc., as well as technologies of transmission.
Some basic questions ran through all of it. One was a point made early and much developed, about the difficulty of making out the words, and what happened when they snapped into place (either in moments of aural recognition, or after, reading along). The associated affects were so interesting: some people reported a feeling of delight, of freedom from the semantic order; others frustration or even anxiety at not understanding. So important to recognize that a poem can occasion both. I want to cultivate as much as we can delight in perplexity—any new idea is going to begin there. But also not forget the frustrations and anxieties of difficulty, for they are real too, and poets may have an interest in exploring them. The analogy between this kind of recognition and higher-order interpretation (what does this poem mean?) is one we’ll explore a lot I expect.
Related was the signal-noise problem: is the poem an ideal text that we attempt to abstract from its occasion, its material circumstances; or is the poem the experience of the poem, everything about it, changeable from reading to reading? The ephemerality of sound pushes us to think especially hard about the latter possibility, but we’ll see lots of different attitudes toward this fundamental puzzle.
So, I am reading back into Tennyson some ideas that came up in discussion of the poems after; let me swiftly gather a few more impressions about them. The Schwitters, at another remove from words and any obvious about-ness, pushed us further toward music; its sonata form, its manipulation of a defined set of phonemes, felt musical, and yet, the text is punctuated as speech. Very interesting questions about whether we could hear a story, a narrative in it; also about the tension between a sense of it as improvisation, and its very exacting text, or should we say score. Similar questions about improvisation and script arose with Eisen-Martin, what makes a poem sound improvised when it is not. He seemed to raise the question especially acutely: is the poem complete on the page, or in its performance? What does it matter that he performs his work from memory? (Not reading from the page, as most modern poets do?) This poem was more clearly about something than the first two (at least, than the Tennyson recording was). The tones of rage, irony, resignation, were so flexible and unpredictable—how does the poem control them? And how does it position the audience—are we to sing along (as Schwitters pretty unproblematically invites us to do; there are so many recordings on the web of people trying the “Ursonate”)? Or not? How united or divided is that we—between people with experience of the anti-Black violence that he is working/thinking through, as victims, perpetrators, bystanders, if there are any bystanders? Finally the Howe. Were those fragments lines? How much can you fragment a poem and still have a poem (if it is supposed to be an “organic” whole)? What to make of that broken speech?—that refusal of fluency; the voice pressed toward forms of damage or pathology? A very different approach to activating the voice than Schwitters’: his, a playful virtuosity; hers, obstruction, limit, failure. Or is that the sound of the medium, of the archive that she has cut up, collaged? Is that the sound of historical distance in its assault on speech?
Well, I could go on—there was so much! I’ll just conclude with a brief comment on the last part of class. We talked about emphasis, or what next week we will formalize as stress or accent. Our great example was the found sentence, “That ice cream was goated, is all.” The main stress seemed to fall on “GOAT,” but we explored alternate patterns of emphasis, for example “That ice cream WAS goated, is all,” which would suggest that it is not goated anymore—a phenomenon known as contrastive stress (I emphasize WAS to make clear that it no longer IS), which we’ll discuss next time. And I made the suggestion at the end that rhythm IS intentionality; that what we miss in the more rudimentary voice synthesizers, at least, is the lively rhythm of meaning it. We can talk more about this idea next time; Mutlu Konuk Blasing gives a great account of the idea in these pages of her Lyric Poetry, if you want to follow up.
I meant to keep this to a page. So much for that. To close, just a few thoughts about next week. The Hollander makes an excellent basic introduction to scansion, the notation of meter in poetic lines. Attridge uses a different system of scansion, which we won’t learn, but will glance at—what’s important in those (difficult! coraggio!) pages is his sense of the difference between the four- and five-beat lines, between tetrameter and pentameter. The Lefebvre, finally, is an extravagant essay in the direction of seeing/hearing the world as rhythm. It’s sort of conceptual background for what, next Monday, will be a fairly wonky discussion of iambs etc. The poems over a traditional array of metrical possibilities. They’re amazing, all of them, but they will serve us mostly as examples of metrical effects. As the semester goes on, we’ll dive deeper into particular poems I promise.
Enough! See you next week!
JAD
