Near the beginning of his book on hearing more in poetry, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998 — Compare prices), Robert Pinsky defines his terms:
“Other conceptions of poetry might include flamboyantly expressive delivery, accompanied by impressive physical presence, by the poet or performer; or the typographical, graphic appearance of the words in itself, apart from the indication of sound. Those areas are not part of this book’s conception.”
I take this to slice the edge of contemporary poetry till all that’s left is the center, an orange to be sucked on by one person. “Flamboyantly expressive”? Hmm.... Ginsberg’s quoted in the book: Pinsky “winkles,” as he puts it, some pentameters out of “Howl” to bolster an argument. If Allen was not flamboyantly expressive, with an impressive physical presence, then...?
Why do I think Pinsky means a poet who doesn’t use a podium, a poet who does use (knows how to use) a microphone, a poet who’s memorized poems, a poet who uses voices when the poem switches personae? As well as poets who dare to have a graphic sensibility when it comes to laying out their texts.
He spends a long time with William Carlos Williams’ brilliant “To a Poor Old Woman,” especially the stanza (which, he also reminds us, comes from the Italian for “room”),
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
...as solid a point as exists for pointing out how line breaks define poems, and how do we read these lines to squeeze the plum juice of purity? Well, Pinsky is not a director, so we don’t get an actual line reading. His interest, in fact, is more with the hidden forms he asserts iambs give to most verse, and in general he suggests light breaks at line breaks, continuing over the rhyme.
“First we get the five-word phrase in its whole prosaic form, end-stopped. Then the analytic effect of the line cutting across the sentence emphasizes first the predicate adjective ‘good,’ then the verb ‘taste’ with the pronoun ‘they’ as its subject (the word ‘plums’ does not appear until two stanzas later), and finally at the end of the stanza the isolated phrase ‘good to her.’”
Yes indeed. But does this mean to pause at the line break? to emphasize the last word? No clue here. The act of performance seems an adjunct to the meaning. We are left with: Mystically, if you attend to the cross-cut line/syntax, the meaning transmits.
I am always pushing hard towards an agenda of respect for perf po, and this book does lay some impressive foundations in this regard. Not least of this is a delightful playfulness in the midst of all this beancounting seriosity, and let me conclude with one of Pinsky’s finest tweaks, in discussing Shakespeare’s splitting of pentameters among various speakers, as exemplified by this section he “winkled” out of Abbott and Costello:
C: Look — when the guy that plays first base picks up
His check, his name is written on it, right?
A: Of course it is!
C: Whose name?
A: That’s right.
C: What’s right?
A: No, what’s the name of the guy on second base!
C: Ah, bocka-docka, bucka docka baah!
~Bob Holman
