The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide
by Robert Pinsky
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998
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The big move in Robert Pinsky’s primer, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide is the teeny-tiniest. By positing the iamb as the atom of poetry, Pinsky ultimately dispenses with dactyls altogether, calling them “thunketta.” Anapests survive: Pinsky sees them as the “first, unstressed part of an iamb divided into two,” “bouncing two quick syllables, often elided, into the place of one,” galloping rhythm. In a way, you could say Pinsky’s gone digital poetry, espousing a terminology that covers the maximum number of cases with the minimum number of terms.
Robert Pinsky was our Poet Laureate for an unprecedented three terms in 1997 - 2000, and he followed in the path of his predecessor activist PL’s: Robert Hass, Rita Dove, Joseph Brodsky. The centerpiece of his tenure was the Favorite Poem Project, audio and video recordings of Real People reading their favorite verse. Likewise, what’s important in this slender volume is not his theory of an iamb-based metrics, but the book’s dedication to poetry as a spoken art. At a time when performance poetry must fight for its right to be accepted as literature, The Sounds of Poetry makes the case that contained within the text is a performance yearning to be set free.
This can be tough going, which Pinsky himself acknowledges. “The laborious process of description, compared to the lightning apprehension [of reading a poem], dramatizes how efficient the form is, and how sensitive the ear.” But if the live art of the poetry reading is going to make it into the academy, this kind of exegesis is critical. Pinsky leavens his writing with playfulness, “Here is an English sound,” he begins, and then inserts “it,” as if you’ve just been tagged. Towards the end of the book, he even casually drops in words that I can’t use here, from Ginsberg “ultimate c_ _ _” (vagina), and in his description of the difference between Latinate and Germanic rooted words with “sexual intercourse” and “f _ _ _ _ _ _.”
On the whole, though, what Pinsky is up to is close listening. (See Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Worded. Charles Bernstein, Oxford University Press, 1998 -- compare prices). “The relation of syntax to line can express very fine shades of meaning in the voice. Sometimes the effect is like the extra signals we can give in conversation, with a change in our voice, or with a facial expression or hand gesture.” This is the clearest analogy I’ve seen to the text of a poem containing, mirroring, implying a performance -- not a score for an interpretation, but containing clues to the thing itself, the poem both spoken and written. What I infer from Pinsky is that the re-creation of the poem, each time it is read, makes for an improvisational mode implied in the text itself.
I learned to catch the trout’s moon whisper; I
Drifted how many hours I never knew
These wild two lines are brilliantly analyzed. “Sometimes the line is rather violently trying to slow down the line while the sentence is trying to speed up the line, as in this extreme run-over of the syntax in Hart Crane’s mystical, ecstatic poem called ‘The Dance,’” says Pinsky, and suddenly the whole dance of poetry opens a crack, as awkward and symbolic and intellectualization and mythologizing crash down in a way that can only be a poem.
