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Just gathering some of your thoughts here. James, Marlena and I discussed last week doing some workshopping of our papers sometime in the next week or so. This would give us all a chance to bounce around ideas and get other's opinions.

Not sure what everyone else is doing, but my project has a creative component, in that I'm writing several poems of my own, and then writing a more critical type paper about them using some of the articles (such as Eavan Boland's "The Woman Poet: Her Dilemna", Philip Larkin's "The Pleasure Principle and Writing Poems" and a few others) to discuss voice, what is poetic subject matter, how these work inside my poems, whether they are written with a new view to the audience remaking them (they are), humor in them, blah blah blah.

So I know workshopping for me would be very helpful, especially in the poems part of it. If anybody else wants to workshop some of their poems, whether for this class or just for fun, that would be great too. I think this would also be helpful for the more scholarly aspects of these papers as well. So if anybody's interested, let's figure out when and where before/after class or during break.

I'm still trying to decide if Bernstein's article was more or less understandable having been written in verse. Actually though, I get the impression it was written mostly as prose and then broken into lines. Either way, I read most of it as though reading prose. What stuck out to me, however, was the rather poetic writing of the last 20 or so pages where he is talking about poetry as an escape-
"...an image of release from captivity
in a culture that produces satisfaction as a means
of exploitation or pacification. The problem
with 'escapist' literature is that it offers no escape,
narratively reinforcing our captivity." (75)
He goes on:
"We never leave reality but neither do we ever
exhaust it." (76)
I've always thought that literature in general and poetry in particular, have the ability to heighten reality in such a way as to make the closer examination of it seem almost an escape from it. It forces us to view/see/examine little moments in our "realities" in such a way that they seem much more. I'm having trouble finding the word I'm looking for, as surreal doesn't quite cut it, and it isn't exactly an escape. It's a way of transforming those "realities" into their own escape, little parcels of time that seem to take us out of all the rest of the crap by making something seem more real than real. You'd think with as many words as there are in the English language, it wouldn't be so hard to make translate that thought into words. Sheesh. Hopefully you get what I'm saying.

But anyway, on to something a little less "out there"...

What I liked in Olson's article was how he relates the mind's making of poetry to playing with language. "It is true, what the master says he picked up from Confusion: all the thots men are capable of can lie entered on the back of a postage stamp. So, is it not the PLAY of a mind we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind is there at all?" (291). One of the things that breaks my writer's block is the idea that "there are no new stories to tell, just new voices to tell them in." He seems to be echoing that here.

I agree with Baraka that process is very important in the creation of art, and that we sometimes get too caught up in the final product. Or that rather, we don't always understand/appreciate what came before, that not everything is stamped out by a machine, and that that is part of its value. While Baraka can get a little soapboxy (and yes I do reserve the right to make up new words), he does make several valid points about the existence of object vs. the existence of the "unconnected zoom" that leads to the object. I don't know if it's more that we worship artifacts since the Renaissance, or that since then "things" have been easier to come by, so much so that instant gratification is seen as the norm, and perhaps we no longer hold a clear conception of the fact that "things" do actually come from somewhere, that they are actually created through a process, and are not just sitting around waiting for us to want them.

On Baraka, I was impressed by the first half of this excerpt, with all its great, quotable lines, and especially his distinguishing thought and the art ‘process’ (“its only form is possibility”) from the art ‘artifact’ (“only important because it remarks on its source“), and how the artist is “cursed with his artifact, which exists without and despite him.” This last quote is similar to our discussions on poems being interpreted and remaining “alive” when the poets are dead (or alive and authorial intent ignored). The first part, about separating thought and material is similar to the view that language is at best an inadequate representation of thought, although I never thought to privilege thinking itself over its product.

But, beginning with the second half, is the “imitator” all that bad (“eats garbage”?)? I understand that if the original production is garbage (as it is the remains of thought), the imitator is worse because he or she didn’t “think” (use the process) the garbage into material existence. But doesn’t the imitator preserve the work of those gone (whether it’s Charlie Parker or oral poetry)? Baraka’s value judgments are difficult (for me) to take at this point (although I did appreciate his defining form versus content, which I may finally understand as separate).

I originally thought I understood the “unnatural” versus “artificial” part, but I don’t. Perhaps I need an example of good art (versus the “bad art”) that appears to exist “without being made by a man.” Despite all the value judgments, again, the first part was very insightful and seemed to relate to our recent discussions.

It’s the Process of the Thing

Charles Olson – Projective Verse

I have to say that at first glance I liked what Olson had to say about poetry itself, especially the way he divided it up into three parts – Kinetics, Principle, and the Process of the Thing. I liked the idea of “kinetics” in which the poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it…by way of the poet itself to, all the way over to, the reader (289). Thereby meaning that the very poem itself is not really a product, the product is what is left over, but it is a process by which energy flows from the poet to the reader, the poem is merely a conductor for the energy. It really was a good use of figurative language, metaphor, to relate the process of poetry. He moves into principle from this point and again, gives a very unique definition by stating that the principle is the so-called “law” and that from is never more than an extension of content. Finally, we end up at the “process of the thing” which is the “how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished” (289). He further iterates this concept by stating that one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.

Basically, this is stating then that the content must thus shape the form and this is done by descriptively discussing a perception which then leads the reader to a further perception and thereby, provides for the timelessness of the poem. I think Wordsworth’s poem Daffodils might be an example, though I think for me a poem that does this for me are two poems by Frost, well actually several of Frosts poems but the two that come to mind as we just read them are “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” One final comment that Olson makes that I found to be pertinent to the discussion of poetry is the idea that all elements of the poem (syllable, line, image, sound and sense) must flow and work together to produce the over all energy – kinetics of the poem (292). I think this definitely is the case when discussing poetry as it seems the total energy of the poem can not be boiled down to just one element, it is all the elements working together, the process of the poem rather than just the poem itself. There were a few things that bothered me about Olson’s essay but the thing that bothered me the most is the asides in parentheses that Olson put throughout the essay, they didn’t seem to explain or clarify anything, and they were just an annoyance.

Imamu Amiri Baraka – “Hunting is not Those Heads on the Wall”

Baraka adopts the same idea as Olson in that the emphasis is on the “poem” as a process and not a product, which challenges the “academic Western mind” and its “artifact worship” (385). Academia seems to focus on the so-called “product” that they lose sight of what is important and that is the process, if a person does not understand the process, how, then, can they appreciate the product because we can not have one without the other. He notes that “Thought is more important than art” (386). He also comments that art is a by product of thought and comments that “A museum is a curious graveyard of thinking.” I really liked that quote because after all there has to be a thought before it is worked into a process, which forms a product that evokes the image of the thought that started it all and his calling the museum a graveyard of thought stands for the fact that these are all thoughts that are now gone but their so-called “products” are all that remain for us to visit, they are remnants of former thoughts, “urns” if you will. His argument is that the value of the poem is found by trying to understand the “why” – the process of the poem and notes that the form is the “how,” and the content is the “why” of the poem. He also argues that everything has both of these qualities. They are in essence synthesized within the poem and the poem would not exist without them, which is basically what Olson was saying when he noted that the elements of the poem all need to flow and work together in order to get the total energy out of the poem.

Bernstein – Artifice

I didn’t seem to get as much out of Bernstein and found the format to be somewhat annoying, I realize he was trying to make a point by doing it this way but it really bothered me which made it more difficult for me to read or to gleam anything from. However, with that said, I think his definition of “Artifice” seems to mimic what both Olson and Baraka were saying about the process of the poem. He defines it as a measure of a poem’s intractability to being read as the sum of its devices and subject matters (1). Again, this is the process or the “kinetics” of the poem where all of the elements work together in order to provide the total energy of the poem. I found it interesting when Bernstein discusses the “mark.” He comments “The ‘mark’ is the visible sing of writing. But reading, insofar as it consumes and absorbs the mark, erases it – the words disappear (the transparency effect) & are replaced by that, which they depict, their “meaning” (30). This then means that the reader, upon reading the poem, removes the words by providing their own interpretation or meaning to the poem, what they feel the poem is “saying.” He argues for a work that will empower the reader while at the same time make the reader aware of the dangers of absorption/domination/passivity that is implicit in the process itself. He notes that “Absorption or its many converses, reverses, is at heart a measure of the relationship between a reader & a work: any attempt to isolate this dynamic in terms exclusively of reading or composition will fail on this account” (41). Again, this seems to be finalizing the fact that the poem is a combination of all its elements working together, the process, coming together to produce the total energy of the poem, it is when you try to isolate or deconstruct the elements that the poem seems to fail in its process and purpose, which seems to go against, as Baraka notes, the whole concept or idea of Western Academia which teaches us to deconstruct the poem to find its meaning or rather its universal but the problem there is that sometimes there is not an overall or universal meaning to “decode.”

Olson says, "It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he had done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work" (293). Yeah, he is right. The typewriter allows a poet the ability to control the way his work appears in print and in doing so the poet can provide his reader with a glimpse of how a poem could be performed. I also find it interesting and I agree with the various ways that Olson thinks about poetry in relation to music. As poetry needs to be spoken and by connecting it to music is one of the ways to encourage the habit of performing poetry.

Speaking of music Baraka also makes connections between music and poetry when he talks about playing like Charlie Parker and understanding the way the Chralie Parker plays music. He seems to be getting at some of Olson's ideas, in particular the idea that what we need to be thinking about is the process of making poetry, rather than what we see on the printed page in front of us. I think this is one way to connect Olson's idea of poetry as kinetic energy to Baraka's emphazising of the making over the made.

The only thing that I found disappointing about Baraka's piece was the way that he flat out slams imitator's. Baraka says, "The imitator is the most pitiful phenomenon since he is like a man who eats garbage" (387). As some imitation can be a good thing, as long as it is aimed in the direction of doing something different with what is being imitated. Although, Baraka might not slam imitator's that are producing something new by copying someone else, as he might slam someone that is just trying to do the same thing as the person they are imitating.

This Thursday, I'll be leading the discussion of the Bernstein (e-reserve) article. In the article, Bernstein frequently refers to his own poetry (ideas he likes playing around with and such), but never directly quotes any of it. With that in mind, I thought some people might like to see Bernstein's ideas in action, so to speak. To that end, I've posted a sampling of some of his poems in the poem annotation section of the wiki. More are available at:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/index2.html#poetry.

Browse at your leisure.

While reading Tsur's article was a little...trudging...at times, I do think he made some interesting points about language and poetry. What I yanked out of it is the idea that certain phonetic sounds can carry the meaning of a word in a poem farther than its lexical meaning. The idea that we process different types of sounds differently, in speech and non-speech modes and that these overlap in "poetic mode" (although I'd like to see some brain scans to show that one), lends another level (color?) to how we interpret and enjoy poetry, perhaps in a way we are mostly unconcious of. After all, our brains are doing lots and lots of things that we are unaware of. If we were, most of us wouldn't make it out of bed in the morning.

Perloff's article, while easier to read, didn't fascinate me quite as much. What I took from it is that poets must find the form that fits where they are, who they are, what they're saying and what they're doing, and that this changes throughout history. Not really a radical new idea, but one that bears repeating. Sometimes it's easy to get bogged down in genres and criticism and forms and to forget that poetry, like all writing, is an organic thing, because it is created by organic changing creatures, so of course it changes to.

Jarrell made a similiar point in his article, relating the evolution from romanicism to modernism, and I agree that he is foreshadowing post-modernism. He comments on poet's individuality and originality:"..can no longer be recognized by, and condemned or applauded for, its obvious experimentalism" (273). Perhaps all the experiments have been conducted? Although computer-based holographic poems might have something to say about that. But I agree with his statment that "The Muse, forsaking her sterner laws, says to everyone: 'Do what you will'"(273). The field seems to be wide open, although free verse still reigns, mostly, it does seem to most fit our contemporary culture. Does this also mean that no subject is off limits for poetry? That would be wonderful. Does this mean we no longer have to categorize everything? Cuz that would be cool. My storage bins are full.

To be Free, To be Modern, To Be Whoever You Want to Be

It appears that to be a poet today, means discovery, discovery of who you are both as a poet and as an individual. Perloff made some excellent points about “free verse,’ and if I did disagree with some of her writing, I still found it very useful in its explanations. She argues the idea that verse basically came to be known as poetry, calling it language in lines. However, she went on to say that in prose, we expect to read to find out about a subject, where as in poetry, the language forms part of the subject (117). This line stuck out to me for some reason which I suppose is the very idea that in poetry it becomes increasingly difficult to separate a subject and object; the two are synthesized within the poem. This is an aspect of romantic poetry of which most of us are the most familiar; it became inherent in our own poetic discourse if you will, which is another concept that Perloff comments on in her discussion of poetry and free verse. She notes quoting Easthope, that poetry has always had a specific poetic discourse and that line organization {or nonlinear organization} has always attributed a specific historical form, and therefore is ideological (118). Thus meaning, that poetic discourse is part of our historic make-up as a human being and a poet, it is embedded, inherent as part of our poetic tradition and/or experience. She comments, “…we tend to forget that the poet is…inevitably ventriloquized by his or her tradition” (118). She goes on to note that what is true for the poet, that he is at one with the natural world, is true in general (122). Wordsworth’s idea that the poetic language should be that of the everyman is in essence what the romantic era of poetry was all about and what Randall says continues in the modernist era, but is a bit later in the posting.

For now, Tsur and What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive, was somewhat hard to follow for me, more than likely because it involves science, it wasn’t that I didn’t understand where he was coming from or what he was trying to say in sound making meaning but there were certain parts that left me wanting more of an explanation, such as a “Sound Patterns for Dummies” version. Tsur comments that various language sounds have certain general potentialities of meaningful impression and can be combined with other elements so that they impress the reader as if they expressed some specific meaning (1). I took this to mean that when you combine the various language sounds, for example with an exclamation point (punctuation) that changes the meaning and/or provides more of a meaning for the reader. For example, if I just wrote the word look without any punctuation, it doesn’t mean the same thing as if I wrote the word LOOK! with an exclamation point and capitalized all four letters of the word, that implies that I am saying the word with more emotion and emphasis, as if I am giving a direct order or as if I am yelling it out. It is also a possibility then for us to ascribe rhythm to words influenced by our apprehension of their meanings (4). This, then, implying that our understanding of the meaning of words influences the sound that we apply to them, and it also then gives way to the understanding that there can be a so-called “double-edgedness,” of the sounds where as in one poem a word might have a softer connotation, than in another poem it might appear more aggressive in its undertaking. Finally, Tsur brings in the concept of nature and comments on the fact that language cannot give an exact imitation of the noises of nature, which we discussed when examining onomatopoeia (18). This also brings us back to the discussion of the exclamation point and that in most cultures it is the speakers “pathetic fallacy” or attempt to bestow his/her feelings on surrounding nature (19). It brought to mind for me the idea of cultural differences in language, now I know that the idea of the language of the everyman in romantic poetry is so that all can enjoy poetry, everyone can reach this universal truth through poetry, this beauty of nature. However, it seems that I could possibly be limiting in its efforts, especially when considering cultural differences in languages, and even in translations of languages.

I think I found Jarrell’s essay to be one of the more enlightening essays in his comparison of romanticism and modernism. I particularly liked this quote, “The change from romantic poetry was evolutionary, not revolutionary; the modernists were a universe away from the great-grandfathers they admired; they were their fathers, only more so” (269). This gave way, for me, to Elliot’s idea that the past is forever present within the modern poet that it is in their historical poetic make-up, which also goes back to Perloff. Basically, stating that as much as we try to part or change from the past, it is part of our evolution, our very basis or starting point to move from or rather build upon. Really, the evolution of the poet has been evident since the time of Plato and his writing “The Republic,” and perhaps even before then. Modernism, then, as an extension of romanticism seems to be very clear when looking through the eyes of Randall and in fact, I could see some of those very qualities clearly in my own poetics but I would have to say that I am more of an hodge podge of poetics and poetic discourse, than of any one frame. However, I do like the evolutionary, rather then revolutionary quality that he applies to poetry, though I argue that in its evolution, isn’t it at the same time revolutionary because if not, would anything ever evolve or change, including poetry, without something to evoke it.

All of the readings were interesting in their own ways, but I especially liked Jarrell’s article. Tsur’s article lost me once it started getting into the very technical aspects of language acquisition, acoustic coding, etc. I have had so little experience studying these elements of language, and the scientific aspects of it lose me. However, I thought most of the sections on vowels (light and dark) and consonants were very interesting.

Jarrell’s article made the most sense to me, though. Of course, language and poetry are tied to other cultural and societal changes, and I like how Jarrell situates poetry historically. One thing I found particularly interesting were his remarks on French poetry and how it influenced poetry in English through Americans who were “particularly accessible and susceptible” and how they, in addition, “imported modernism into English” (271). I think I liked this tie-in of French poetry because, so often, what we read and study about poetry focuses mainly on American poetry and British poetry. It makes sense that other poetic traditions influenced American poetry, and it is not just tied to British poetry, considering especially the American writers who spent time in France.

I also appreciated Jarrell’s list of modern poetry’s characteristics. It seemed to really further his argument on the “resemblances” of modern and romantic poetry, since there are some definite connections between the list and what one would consider typical romantic poetry characteristics. I’m interested also in how Jarrell would have commented on today’s poetry. I wonder how he would trace the evolution and influences from the poetry when this article was written (1942) to today’s poetry.

While I don't know if I necessarily disagree that modern poetry is based or evolved from romantic poetry. I found Jarrell's argument to be less than persuasive. It seemed incomplete to me. While the characteristics of the two types of poetry were clearly outlined, that is where the argument stopped. I think a more in-depth comparison is necessary in order to successful link the two styles.

I found Perloff to be a very interesting read. Since she quotes Esthope it's less than surprising that this article is closely related to the reading from "Poetry as Discourse." I agree with her argument for the evolution of free verse. She closely connects it with the societal factors which, I think is a much more accurate summary of events rather than last week's reading's assumptions about the start of and the purpose of free verse.

While I agreed with most of Perloff's agreements regarding the structure found within free verse. However, I'm not sure if the mode of writing directly affects the style as she asserts in her discussion of Williams. I don't know if his use of a type writer affected the poetry in the manner she said. I do agree that he is a poet of an age of turbulent technological advancements and that this is certainly reflected in his poetry. However, I don't like the direct connection between the use of the type writer and the meter of his poetry.

I also agree that free verse is a misnomer as no good poetry is truly free of form and structure. However, I think the distinction between other forms of poetry is that the form is left up to the poet who is influenced by society. Free verse while not being truly free does allow for a variety of representations of poetry, which allows for a more accurate representation of not just society's influence as a whole, but the influence of particular sects of society has on the poet.

I thought the PAT article by Randall Jarrell was interesting. I'm a big fan of Romantic poetry; I've spent a lot of time with poets such as the Shelleys, Wordsworth, Keats and Blake as well as some time with Byron, Yeats and Colerage. While I have nothing against Modernist poetry, I haven't spent a lot of time working with it. The idea that Modern poetry isn't a revolutionary idea, but an evolution of Romanticism is a new twist on an old way of looking at the two forms of poetry. Personally, I've always considered them very different. I don't know that I'd go as far as to say that Modern poetry is "evolutionary" (here is an example of the popular argument over language!) because that word leaves me with the impression that evolution equals improvment; I don't think that Modern poetry is an improvement of Romantic poetry. Although, I would consider the argument that it is progressive, that is, Modernist poetry is a continuation or an addition to the poetry genre, I would not say it's evolutionary in the sense that it is an improvement.

I don't have much to say about the Perloff article. I thought she began to develop an interesting argument, but it got boring and wordy. I found myself amusing my own ego by translating the French poem before reading her translation. I eventually forgot what her point was supposed to be and I began to flip through the pages of wasted printer ink for a while. She did catch my interest again at the end when she started to sum up her points about free verse. I probably lost a lot in all of my page flipping, but I think I would have gotten more out of her writing if she had either organized it differently or had said more with less wordiness. I don't want to end my opinion of her article on a bad note so I'm going to say that I appreciated her point about lineation. I don't believe that a poem is a poem because it does not run from the left margin to the right margin.

Have a good day, everyone :)

I think Randall Jarrell's article makes a valid point, not only about Modernism, but about literary genres in general. That is, they are never as static as structuralists or teachers using a genre or period based approach to literature would sometimes like us to believe. This isn't to say genres are not helpful for our understanding of literature or in some way valid, but simply that they are not so much static categories but fluid entities developing in a historical continuum. Ironically, as Jarrell points out, however, we often like to break Modernism, in Jarrell's time the most recent entry in poetic genre, into its own category, largely because it seems, on a structural level, so different from the preceding dominant schools of neo-Classicism and Romanticism. I think this tendency also stems from the belief that so much changed in the twentieth century; so many new luxuries entered the marketplace. Jarrell notes this point, both in discussion of late capitalism and of the importance of the car in William's poetry. This is a valid point; it is also one of the first things I think of when I think of Modernism. But the development of industrial capitalism and the rule of the market had already begun in Blake and Wordsworth's time, so in a sense it was there already. Poets like Blake also shared the deep skepticism of the new industrialism that so greatly influences Modernism. The most interesting portion of the article, for me, was the list of the features of Modernism Jarrell compiles. I was somewhat surprised by the number of similarities with Romanticism, despite the fact that I kind of already felt this way about the Romantic/Modernist divide before reading the article.

Moreover, as someone (I think Tino) already observed in his blog, critics are beginning to pose similar questions of the divide between Modernism and Post-Modernism, a point I believe Jarrell also anticipates. That is, Jarrell calls Modernism "the end of the line," and declares the movement dead (273). "How can poems be written that are more violent, disorganized, more obscure, more --supply your own adjective-- than those that have already been written," he questions (273). Post-modernism has succeeded in this respect (being more violent and disorganized at least), and in this sense seems an extension of Modernism's (now very prolonged) death. The focus in post-modernism has moved away from the Modernist individualism Jarrell declares a product of late-capitalism, but I think you could make the argument that this is also endemic of now-even-later capitalism. That is, the extension of the media, internet, multi-tasking etc. in our lives has begun pulling us in so many different directions that maintaining a stable sense of self or attempting to make sense of the world has become more difficult. The number of choices we may make on a daily basis, as well as the number of people with whom we interact day-to-day, has exploded, and while on one hand this seems empowering of the individual, it also draws attention to the fragmented nature of everything. For anyone who isn't lazy or naive, maintaining a stable sense of the correctness or authority of our beliefs becomes more difficult when a contradictory opinion is never more than a mouse click away. Post-modern literature often reflects this fragmented world view we've all come to either accept as stable, retreat from or attempt to deny (conservativism), or somehow compromise with (pretending things are simpler than we know they are to maintain our sanity). Jarrell also argues that Modernist tendencies began in France thirty years before they did in England because English verse simply wasn't ready, thus implying a belief that genres arise from historical needs or are dictated by political needs for expression. In this sense, post-Modernism arose from the continued march of late-capitalism, but this is not to indicate that we can definitively mark the start of post-modernism or deny its similarities with Modernism. All literature exists along a continuum of historical influence and argument (the latter being related to the distinction Jarrell draws between neo-Classicism and Romanticism). Thus, I don't know that I believe Modernism ever died as Jarrell declares it has.

Well, Jarrell’s essay does outline romantic characteristics of modern poetry in terms of its form and content, and in relation to poets and their society. However, I resist Jarrell’s “generalization” of modernist and romantic poetry, though I don’t think that he attacks either modern or romantic poetry (which he worries his readers’ distaste). Such a brief overview of modern poetry seems to contradict the very characteristic of modern poetry Jarrell raises in this essay, namely, “difference.” For instance, Jarrell draws the link of “solitary individuality” between modern and romantic poetry, and poets’ tendency of turning toward “anything collective” (274). I think Jarrell is right in the respect that modernist poets “dislike” their society; however, they are not “unconcern” with their society. Otherwise, their fragmented language would not resemble so much to the chaotic social order in modern time.

I don’t have much criticism of Jarrell’s ideas, just unsatisfied with his “methodology.” For me, it is far more valid to illustrate how poetry reflects or responds to the contemporary social, economic, political, global situation, than to argue why modernist poetry is an “extension,” not a “revolution” of romantic poetry. I think that it is easily recognized that the “spirit” of the time distinguishes romantic poetry from modernist poetry. Accumulated from the liberating energy of French revolution, the former celebrates poetry’ unifying power between the past and the present. Contrastingly, the latter is burdened with the unredeemable past, and characterized as nostalgia and mourning of the chaotic post-war situation. From these, what unites romantic and modernist poetry is the mirroring between life and art (poetry).

Having studied linguistics, and having an entire semester long course on phonetics, I found this chapter by Tsur quite interesting. If you could see my copy of the article, you'd notice question marks, exclamation points, circles and lots of lines. It was rather difficult for me to read this article, to be honest, because for me vowels are not light or dark; consonants are not aggressive, tender or metallic.

I understand Tsur's comments about sounds having certain qualities and how people can classify sounds into categories. However, I wonder why the original phonetic descriptions cannot be used (i.e., high/low, front/back). Aren't these just different adjectives to explain the same thing?

I also wonder about the cultural specificity of such categorization. Would other languages and other cultures classify things in the same way? I do recall that there was some discussion of Hungarian here. However, I think this 'experiment' could be taken into other languages and other cultures to see if the sounds are classified in similar ways.

One final issue I have (for this blog at least) is regarding Tsur's statements about child language acquisition. He says, "since /pa/ is the first syllable acquired by a child for use as an arbitrary referential sign, and it contains the bilabial /p/, it is not implausible that precisely bilabial stops are more conspicuously associated with these nonemotional moods" (33). First of all, /p/ is acquired first because it is one of the easier sounds for a child to make. And while a child may use it as a referential sign, this is because the caretakers assign it meaning. If it did not have meaning in the language, it would be ignored. In English /pa/ may mean ball, bottle, father, or many other things. In many, many languages, the use of /pa/ because the referent for 'father'; this isn't arbitrary or nonemotional at all.

In addition to this blog about the Tsur article, I'm attaching my proposal for the final paper. Please let me know what you guys think about any or all of this. Thanks.

I find it quite amazing how tone, mode of the poem can be abstracted from the meaning of the words. Hrushovski’s description of expressive sound pattern is interesting as he describes it to be kind of grasping process of the tone, mood or general qualities of the meaning. In the same way, “tone, mood etc” are abstracted from the meaning of the words. These facts lead us to the realization that features of the same sounds may differ according to the context. I like how the sibilants /s/ and /‘s/ may have different features as explained in Poe’s line: “silken", "sad”, and in Shakespeare’s sonnet, “sweet", "silent", and the way they can be realized in each line according to the content.

How the sounds may be “double-edged” is also fascinating. Consider again the sibilants /s/ and /`s/, to express a hushing quality and a hush quality: “silken” and “sad”, “sweet” and “silent”. So, for me, the fact that these “double-edged” sounds can be opposing or “vastly different” is incredibly intriguing. It is the way poetry Masters can play with the meanings of the words through the noise of some sounds and sibilants as clarified in Hrushovski’s examples in Chapter one of Tsur’s book. What’s even more interesting is that this “double-edgedness” can be responsible for the distribution of other sounds in the poems.

I am amazed how sounds also have colors in the expressive way they are, and how each vowel sound is associated with a specific color in our people’s consciousness and how vowels can have oppositions, such as the association of the opposition front/back vowels with the opposition of bright/dark colors. The real experiment explained in Chapter one to find out whether subjects who perceive back vowels as darker than front vowels was a unique one, and its results were unexpected. It shows us how much energy vowels and consonants have in an emotional and mental way. I have found interesting facts in this chapter about how the sound units and meaning units are combined together in real profound ways.

Jarrell, arguing that modernism began as an extreme of romantic poetry, reminds me of the argument by some that postmodernism is really just an extreme within modernism; I suspect that Jarrell would have agreed with that as he states “[M]odernism is a limit which is impossible to exceed.” But while I like the evolutionary (“not revolutionary”) point, is he suggesting (consciously or not) that poetry itself has reached some evolutionary ceiling through modernism? The editorial intro states that Jarrell views modernist poetry as the “end of the line for a cultural form of poetry.” I wonder if this refers to Western culture or some smaller definition., such as the cultures of academia, the literati, or poets (knowing that there are multiple cultures within each).

Further on this evolutionary aspect, I find it hard to imagine that modernism could not eventually evolve into something else, something that is just difficult to foresee, even by poets and thinkers of poetry; here I’m just jumbling any postmodern contributions to poetry with those of modernism as I thought Jarrell’s thirteen characteristics of modernist poetry (272-73) were great and could possibly cover postmodern poetry (in form, not necessarily content [I know Brooks wouldn't split these two]).

I like Jay’s question about what does Jarrell want us to do with this evolutionary line; for me, it further lowers my defenses with modernist poetry (even though his thirteen points were presented unflatteringly) and has me thinking evolutionarily about all poetry (I was certainly thinking ‘revolutionary’ stages before, although these must exist at times, too). I very much enjoyed the Jarrell read.

See you all in class,
Tino

I was startled by the history of Modernist poetry in Jarrell's article. Until I read it, I thought Modernism was a Joycean invention and had its abode in time in the early twentieth century. So I was shocked to learn that the Modernist movement could be traced back into the 1870s (and perhaps further). I also thought that Modernism was strictly a response to nineteenth and twentieth century industry and commercialism, and although that may still be partially true, the fact that it was nurtured in France as early as it was, and without the industrial advantages that England had (271) which allowed the Victorian or Romantic age to hang on as long as it did.

Although I always knew in a subliminal way that modernism was related to romanticism (as post-modernism is to modernism), and also knew that they were somewhat related, it did surprise me that Jarrell was able to point out the similarities of theme and content to both styles. I am used to thinking that Modernism is related to Romanticism by being a binary opposition, like the discarding of poetical forms that the Romantics so adored, but when Jarrell notes similarities like "pronounced experimentalism," "a great emphasis on details," "irony," ect (272), I can see the value of the argument he is trying to make.

I might be confusing Romanticism with Victorianism. I was thinking they are of the same time period, and thusly synonamous. I feel, somehow, that this is a wrong assumption.

I propose to do a reading of the oral poem Drum Poem 7 from Technicians of the Sacred. What I want to do is talk about how the poem makes one take into consideration issues of sound and performance, as to read the beginning of the poem is to try and replicate the sound of a drum. Of course, I realize that issues of sound and performance must be taken into consideration when discussing any poem, whether it be from an oral or literate culture. I also want to think about how Eliot's essay Tradition and the Individual Talent and Reflections on Contemporary Poetry can be complicated when taking the drum poem into considersation because an American poet, Rothenberg, felt it necessary to not only bring attention to oral poetry but to incorporate elements of it into American poetry itself. I also plan on incorporating some ideas from Foley's How to Read an Oral Poem.

I liked Jarrell's article because of his idea that modernist poetry was connected to romantic poetry. Jarrell suggests that Modernist poetry evolved out of Romantic poetry and he supports this claim by listing various ways that the two can be shown to be connected, which include: originality, disorganization, emotions, emphasis on details, the unconscious, etc. All of which I can agree with when I think of say a Wordsworth poem and say an Eliot poem.

Jarrell seems to suggest that the reason why people have believed that the two poetic traditions are seperate is due to a tendency of critics to focus on how a Romantic poem is different from a Modern poem. It is due to this attention to difference that critics and poets were able to conceal what the two periods of poetry shared.

Keeping all of the above in mind, what is Jarrell's point? Is it to simply show that Modernism emerged out of a prior poetic tradition? Is it to suggest that Modernist poems have been read wrong or that Romantic poems have been read wrong? Is it to point out that it is a mistake to not read Keats next to Williams? I guess what I am trying to get at here is that I buy most of what Jarrell suggests but I am left with some questions about what am I supposed to do with the idea that Modernism evolved out of Romanticism.

Tsur brought up many interesting points in his article about the role sound patterns play in poetry. The relationship between sound and meaning is very complex. This article made me look at the expressive sound patterns in a poem and how they can add meaning to a poem. An individual phonological unit can evoke certain themes and moods in the poem. This is in part may be related to what kind of phonological units the consonants are. For example, /m/ and /n/, which are nasals, create a negative sound in many poems. Nasal consonants tend to rake across the ears, which results in these sounds to be viewed in a negative manner. Of course, the meaning of a word as a whole can affect a person’s perception as well. Looking at the phonemes can also help explain how and why the sound device of onomatopoeia works. For example, /p/ and /t/ are stops while /r/ and /l/ are liquids. I think that since /p/ and /t/ sounds make the air flow stop when pronounced they perfectly illustrate why onomatopoeia words such as “drop” and “hit” works so well. The individual sound of the consonants mimic the action of dropping and hitting since in both instances stops are involved. Another example would be the word “roll” since the liquid /r/ and /l/ flows along because of the tongues position when it is pronounced which creates a sense of rolling. I'm not if that makes sense or not.

Before this article I had never heard of sounds having color such as front vowels being bright while back vowels are considered to be dark. At first this seems a little far fetched, but I think that there is truth to this claim when I think about it. Do we pick up more from individual sounds than we realize? If so, I guess that would mean that we repress those things. What would be a Freudian explanation of why we would repress those things? Do people always associate the same color with vowels and how could such a difference be problematic? I suppose I have more questions than anything from this article.