Timothy Steele's Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter: the case for a new Formalism Part 1

I've held almost as a sacred truth that academics make the worst poets, and generally they do. Examples are too numerous to mention. Convinced as I've been for the longest time that 'creative writing' professors, with the mainstream publishing industry at their beck and call, have literally dictated to the rest of us the terms of poetic style and suitability. And if there's anything we should have learnt from this debacle it's that teaching verse does not a Poet nor student of poetry make!

The only thing worse than academic-bards with their flatlined verses is the 'imitator'-poet, of which there are many in creative writing classes, who slavishly work to conform to prevailing 'aesthetic tastes. The result, in Canada at least, has been a proliferation not only of middling (state-sponsored) literary magazines catering for academic and imitative writing (Arc, Fiddlehead, Malahat Review, etc.) but a flood of dull, insipid verses anthologized and served up as models of good writing by the poet-teachers who perpetuate a vicious cycle of teaching, writing and publishing: the result of which is a product whose cultural hold on the general public is almost non-existent.

But there are exceptions and Timothy Steele, a poet writing in an emerging new Formalist tradition and a first-rate literary scholar, is among the few who admirably practice what they preach since in their writings there isn't the glaring disconnect between theory and writing proficiency (James Wright, John Berryman, Robin Blaser and perhaps today Louis Dudek, Rosemarie Waldrop and Annie Finch are other examples of skilful poet-teachers). In Missing Measures Steele outlines a history of a very basic verse/poetry misunderstanding (or perhaps misreading) to which can be attributed, in his view, the almost vehement hatred of anything in contemporary poetry that smacks of metrics, rhyme and traditional poetrywriting in general. And because deep, sensible scholarship is everywhere wedded to appreciation of the effect of literary tradition on contemporary practice, Steele's own  case for a sensible second look at the "anti meter revolt" is a very convincing one. There's a lot at stake. I don't think there's anyone at present who seems more qualified, in both theory and practice, to revive interest in traditional poetics.

I don't think Steele's intention is polemics but his handling of literary history and specifically his interpretation of the most important texts, modern and classical, tend to point to a vital reappraisal of the role of prosody in contemporary writing (or those elements such as rhyme, rhythm and other figurative devices most serviceable to poets). Steele is (and always will be) not a little antithetical to the modernist revolution in poetry (as his disparaging comments on Marjorie Perloff's reading of Aristotle's Poetics attest (168-170)) but he does answer the call to base the antimodernist(-postmodernist) case on pretty sound scholarship:

   As will become evident in this study, certain confusions in modern discussions of verse have resulted from the fact that the legacy of the Greeks has not been adequately recognized and that the difference between their situation and ours has not been sufficiently appreciated. We cannot ask of others or ourselves absolute precision when we speak of "poetry," and we should not damn such terminological imprecisions as must inevitably attend any general discussion of the art. Yet we should be aware of something of the history of the word and should bear this history in mind when we use the word. (Missing Measures 21)

Not just citing sources ( from Aristotle, Quintilian, Plutarch to Pound, Eliot and Williams) but drawing vital connections between theory and poetic practice everywhere is Steele's métier. I get the feeling as I read him that this may have been the way the Victorian defenders of traditional prosody felt when confronted with the modernists: always a little overawed by the attractiveness of novelty conjoined to sound literary understanding and, as a result, even a little disoriented.

The modernist contention (as expounded in varying forms by Eliot, Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Williams) is, simply put, that meter is stultifying, a gross distortion of the looser, more natural 'rhythms' of poetic language. In Eliot's and Pound's formulations it amounts to saying that instead of meter and syllables crammed into place (Pound's famous "ti-tumming" parody of iambic lines) the poet's primary concern should be with the natural 'rhythms' of language itself, subordinating form to subject matter at hand. Metrics came to be disassociated from the modern world in which they lived. Poetry as a vehicle of real life and language, unfettered by Victorian diction and mannered sensibilities. Always something approximating to well-written prose. In Ford's words,

I wish I could take for granted the Reader's acceptance of the doctrine that Poetry is a matter of the writer's attitude towards life, and has nothing in the world to do—nothing whatever in the world to do—with whether the lines in which this attitude is put before him be long or short; rhymed or unrhymed; cadenced or interrupted by alliterations or assonances. One cannot expect to dictate the use of words to a race; but it would be of immense service to humanity if the Anglo-Saxon world could agree that all creative literature is Poetry; that prose is a form as well adapted for the utterance of poetry as verse (cited in Missing Measures 160)

But it's that crucial substitution of meter for 'rhythm' Steele finds problematical and worthy of the detailed historical study that forms most of Missing Measures. Problematical because all too many interested readers and writers of poetry take for granted a distinction that's had to endure many flights, reformulations and digressions throughout literary history to arrive at its present form. To trace that anti meter rhetoric to a  verse/Poetry dichotomy is the book's primary task:  beginning with the Poetics and chronicling the myriad ways in which the primary Aristotelian verse/imitation dichotomy gets reappropriated (and at times reinvented) by scores of writers, theorists and literary exegetes. So that by the time we get to the age of vers libre it's hard to pin down what exactly is in 'prose' that's preferable to verse, Eliot referring to it in his celebrated essay on Kipling as "the musical impression upon the sensibility" (cited in Missing Measures 162),  Williams as a "variable foot" & Ford as the "intimate ear.

Scholar Timothy Steele is an invaluable resource for a correct understanding of scope and nature of the verse/Poetry distinction on which his work hinges:  so many misdirected notions of the nature of poetry, as he rightly claims, have resulted from not acquainting ourselves properly enough with the classical sources.

But as poet he's also faced with elucidating a predominant free verse milieu to which traditional metrics is almost considered anathema. As practitioner of a new Formalism in America there's a lot at stake here for him. How do history and literary theory resolve the tension in the poet's soul? How does the academic keep a cool enough distance from the subjectivities of his craft to write in a form that, as Eliot says, reconfigures and revolutionizes the very paradigms he eschews? To lose that crucial arm's-length separation from self-promoting theory is to produce a highly compromised poetry, such as characterizes the literary output of many academic poets & their students today.

So in a remarkable way Steele's book is directed as much against a shoddy understanding of 'free verse' as against the shoddy writing that results from it: a silent condemnation, after all is said and done, of the writing institutions to which he belongs. The greater the critique, the greater the demands placed on the teacher to offer a markedly superior poetry. And, of course, it follows only the very best teachers can add the advancements made by their own exemplary researches to the creation of greater writing standards. Ironically our greatest modern poet-teachers (Pound, Eliot, Williams and Yeats) weren't academics at all.

Poetry for face-landscapes: Heart Lake

How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the wall? How do you dismantle the face" (Deleuze-Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 186)

"Heart Lake"

withdrawn, & stripping down to its sides
stirs longingly
just the way a kettle lake ought

(gone the
fake furbished hold of its ol' 'shores-in-a-mesh',
& dinky algae), &

sticks dibbled in mud like cattails, with some sun
of silvery-gray & clover
The real, glacier-ript lake is its mammoth-

heart that lives by sliding
into itself, its very murky nullity But lake in a
wood,

for the gray-haired
can bloom in profusion without any (of that)
trefoil confusion, here

shiningest example to me yet of an end deader
than shaky ashen creepers
(like witchhairs!) strangling overhead

Poet in his woods

—or in just that imaging green head of his,
passional with rain—

runs with tragical eyeing of all gristly shores,
a wasp's-breath of water,
and bug-eyed frogpond with invisible mate

And lone-stalking
like loons to out-thump the sun won't mean you're
any more real, here 

than a fusky bark coat, & roots lying red under
your feet
Witches say the run makes soul-leaving easy

Blaser's "Image-Nation 8 (morphe" as a poem of faciality, becoming-imperceptible and transversals

Only across the wall of the signifier can you run lines of asignifiance that void all memory, all return, all possible signification and interpretation. Only in the black hole of subjective consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed, heated, captured particles you must relaunch for a nonsubjective, living love in which each party connects with unknown tracts in the other without entering or conquering them, in which the lines composed are broken lines. (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP, 189)

A white wall/black hole poetry. If the poem could be regarded as itself only and the meanings scattered throughout as visible 'black' points, the text's obviously become a face: and Blaser's verses an abstract 'faciality' or this particular poem "a single substance of expression", perhaps outwardly recognizable at first only by the "Image-Nation" title (ATP, 179) And if the face is punctuated primarily by black holes, then we are also dealing with a type of landscape since subjects ("subjectification") and what they propose as meanings ("signifiance") have to appear somewhere in the poem. And what a poem says can appear not in just one place but anywhere on the body and its surrounding landscape.

And if they occasionally don't and linear senses that love binary truths become transversals that don't, taking a turn towards polyvocality (multidimensionality), then we have a case of landscape with imperceptible markers of meaning. What a place! It's in transit to one of a "thousand plateaus" of other accompanying "subjacent" meanings that the textual face, and its signifying streams, change course and even topography. Intensities of flight, caught always at mid-point, cannot be registered at the spots where they first appeared; they remain both elusive and always devastatingly on the go. And so a semiotics of white wall/black hole making the poem into something that's essentially bodiless.

We do have to read a poem's "holey surface" now. And more significantly that perpetuum mobile of signifier and subject whereby the poem reinvests its former assemblages with numerous new reconfigurations (deterritorializations). We read the "morphe" into faciality that Blaser's poem now is (this or any in his "Image-Nation" series) as both a fate ("destiny") and choice. It's initially perhaps "as a politics" (ATP, 181) that we understand the changing faces of the text and the need to overthrow sovereign organizations that initially try to define it. And we see as the poet's greatest option the radical ease with which the "silver thread" running through Blaser's poem takes any assemblage it wants and moves it towards radically different (and at times divergent) destinies.

Image-Nation 8 (morphe

And now for the poem. "8" is not just a serial marker, to begin with, but a meaning about to be swallowed whole. Perhaps it's best to see Blaser's title as the residue of an initial "star-collapse", signified only now weakly as the trace of an original sign regime and whose fragments lie visible as real black holes throughout the text. The title is the eighth in a flight of possible assemblages that can be read only against the amorphous 'sameness' of signifiance in general (such as "Image-Nation" and even "The Truth is Laughter"). And the errant vector of every subject of poetic discourse with a penchant for "morphe" is its strength and vitality .

Nomadic, open-ended, the Blaserian subject that can't keep still and makes the poem go, beginning now in the middle of something like (of all things!) tea-coloured beads 

my beads are the colour of the tea

in the cup

                 I lean forward
to let them hang free
and watch the light run
in and out

and ending, up to the first visible 'black hole', in a morphing of spectacular dimensions. A colour's weightiness as tea-coloured beads "hang[ing] free" and the speed at which light carries "the colour of the tea/in the cup" along a single flight towards origins, a place in China and reminiscences of youthful days that seem to have occasioned the poem itself: both these forming a first composite-image, reterritorialized on some original impetus, that takes shape as a figurative representation ("like a sparkling jade tree") he thought, wrongly, was the poem's primary meaning ("a gift"). The poem has so much more potential than that.

resin of pine or fir
washed from the riverbanks
of China

                      as the tree was,
of green needles,    it seems the friend
is left in the bead resin    there is

a suddenness    these days    startles,
young and handsome    fragments
of what he thought,    he stands

like a sparkling jade tree
in the west wind    I thought

a gift    •

A black hole swallows intentions since it is no respecter of objects—"all out/of one's self"— nearing its fatal horizon. Perhaps the poet intuits the necessity to release a more passional ("nonsubjective") side of things in order to create forms not "of [our] own doing", the "relaunched particles" of a new meaning assemblage, minus the clinging ego-poet, that won't just signify and subject us to perpetual origins. Resins, refracted teacup light and perhaps "fragments" of an early memory now regroup into newer, more "broken" lines of flight

                    I know nothing of form
that is my own doing    all out
of one's self    our words were
the form we entered,    turning intelligible
and strange    at the point of
a pencil

the words were the attributes
of what we were out there
watching    the sun swim

●

   

                a black hole is the name
given a star-remnant    out of
the idea that a star may collapse
into a dense object,    what is left
over,    and from it no light escapes
because, The New York Times explains,
the waves of 'the struggle' you named
lengthen infinitely,    and become
invisible

●

If black holes on the text's white page form a faciality, morphed initially into an assemblage of tea-coloured beads, Chinese riverbanks and a final unsatisfying "jade tree" image, eventually the signifying poem will disappear. How? Black hole is not a metaphor nor a typographical feature but rather a becoming-imperceptible of the poem itself, radically asignifying, memoryless and, as Blaser says in the poem "Anecdote" (274), "pull[ing] me into/and out-of, upwards-of/and downwards-of, the/side-by-side, serpentine friendship" til everything disappears in language itself. And perhaps he says it even better in the poem, "Pain-fountain"(301) where the mind is said to be indistinguishable from space, becoming a "dangerous freedom", and where like the tea-coloured beads in "Image-Nation 8 the light "let[s]the gathering heart splash/on a glittery pavement".

The interchanges between words and the collapsing star the text is, always somewhere between the "visible and the invisible",whether locked within the tree or suddenly loosening from the poet's hand—it's there that "the intricate movement of events" , a poetry, happens. 

it is the interchange the form took
like walking in and out of a star
the words are left over    collapsed
into themselves    in the movement

between visible and invisible
I like to tell the story of the man
with a heart in each hand    the
intricate movement of events,    the
startling    outwardness    of where
they were    would give you the key
to what he took    and what
he gave away    but these are
invisible words:

for a moment he stood within
the tree    startled

when he came to the gate,    he bathed
his face

when he lifted his cup,    he let the sky
go free    out of his hands

P.K. Page: 1916-2010

P.K.Page was poet and painter, novelist and scriptwriter. But more importantly she was the voice of  tradition and 'modernism' in Canada, unique, daring and always relevant to a real Canadian sensibility. Along with Irving Layton,Alden Nowlan, Earle Birney, Raymond Souster and Al Purdy, Page was Canadian poetry and I fear, in the age of outrageous experimentalist poetries and declining readership, we'll never see artists like her again.


Among the many favourite passages of mine:

"Now all the scene is flying. Before the face
people and trees are swift; the enormous pool
brims like a crying eye. The immediate flesh
is real and night no curtain." (from "Summer Resort")

Indeed, "all the scene is flying", and a once meaningful poetry of the Canadian people & landscape fading from view. I feel a part of me is fading too, the impressionable 70s English undergraduate in love with tradition and thankful to the great modernists like Page, Nowlan and Layton for gracefully taking us into the fragments of the postmodernist age. Only Nowlan could move me to tears; only Layton could move me to righteous anger; and only Page (and Purdy, Milt Acorn)could move me to love of my country.

I feel I've lost a teacher, friend and guiding spirit. I feel with P.K.Page's passing we've lost a part of Canada. 

The almost perfect poem: Robin Blaser's "Image-Nation 2 (roaming"

we are journeying in company with the messenger


     but there, it was
there     'you' saw
the head of a horse burn,
its red eye flame     'you' stepped
to the fireplace where the meta-
morphosed log lay without a body
and put 'your' hand over the seeing

turned by that privacy
from such public peril as words
are, we travel in company with the messenger

the name of the bird who fell
from the hands of O-moon
is Naught     if following
angels, shaped tears, nourished by
Sodom apples, we draw darkness,
a kind of mud     (in the moonlight
white blossoms hastening to fall
are cut free)

then we, the apparatus, burned by a night
light, are travelling in company with the messenger

To continue the Deleuzian reflections on poetry and poetics.

If a poet draws a line between two points, any beginnings tied to ends, or  readable coordinates we gather on a horizontal plane, won't really amount to much.  Even the conquering vertical that is a poem's title, standing stanchion-like over the text and reader, leaves us cold in its shadow. Best not to erect it like a cross. And because Blaser's poem won't connect the dots in this way nor obey straight linear impulses—primary cause of weak poetry!—nor even give an unbroken title it leaves us "roaming" instead. Perfect and impervious to the punctuality of mediocre writing.

Better to be nomadically errant in Blaser's perfecting sense than predictable. After all, if you follow the footsteps, laid fresh in the morning snow, do we find the poet or "Naught"? No, the poem. Flawlessly knit, with no single "flight" here (or messenger) that doesn't at the same time open up one of a myriad sites, such as that ranging from invocatory 'you' to the "O-moon". The first of many but it's always best to work somewhere between that 'you' and the moon to find the true poem, the true 'you'.

What counts as "flight" anyways? It's the turn toward the initial view of a flaming red-eyed horse or the transforming fire itself. Marvelous epic origins but resulting in the death of origins. The fire, for instance, is not a cause of real horses, imaged or not in the sacred flames: any more than to pass your hands over Blaser's embers is to feel the heat of divination, "kindling the heat of the father" as he says in his translation-poem "Pindar's Seventh Olympic Hymn". The impulse is divinatory but nothing rises through the smoke, not even "the name of the bird".

What doesn't exist can emit only shifting particles or make meaning out of "metamorphosed logs", fading to the point of becoming imperceptible, as already a new assemblage is about to be released over the poem's plane of immanence. Now fake birds of paradise appear in the moonlight: hearth embers dimmed into a late day of transgressed hope, "Sodom apples" and fields turned to mud. White embers are a becoming-blossom hurrying to their fall.

The reader, intuiting the poem's own machinic assemblage, or because it takes one to know one, is also an "apparatus" of sorts, every bit the molecular (never a 'molar') text that is the measure of the poem's speed and significance. So that we end with an apparently ironic inverse of heatless fire:  a night light that actually burns. Unopposed by daunting titles (verticals) or sweeping localizable events (horizontals), Blaser's "Image-Nation 2" cares only to run diagonally between (& through) the most disparate languages, myths and cosmologies.

A perfect block. Without beginning or end, always at work in the middle, the poem that roams is perfect. Initial mythic pulsions become "nonpulsed", memories fade since travelling with the messenger dispenses with permanent sites and opts for a regime of molecular becomings: as how else is it possible to move from the red-eyed horse to metamorphosed logs to dying blossoms.

 In fact, the log lying without a body may be a quasi-true symbol of the unorganized, disarticulated body the poem is: in fact, Blaser's poem may be in the most generalized sense possible the only body it has, a body without organs (logs, heat, names), destined only for pure abstract movement. And the poem that roams completely unhindered by bodily trappings of time, memory and sense  (the broken, curvy and ruptured poem) is perhaps the most perfect of all.

Reading Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: I"

                     I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Some procedural principles of my own:


(a) a reading shouldn't exceed 500 words;
(b) I choose the following passage from Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus to serve as a general 'paratext' for my reading of Stevens's opening verse:

But to break the becoming-animal all that is needed is to extract a segment from it, to abstract one of its moments, to fail to take into account its internal speeds and slownesses, to arrest the circulation of affects. (p. 260 from Chapter 10. 1730: "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible...");

(c) I choose to talk not about linguistic units but rather more interesting lines of flight or deterritorialization;
(d) I view the poem (and its first verse) as a map "with multiple entryways and exits"; and
(e) I regard the critic's language as always "acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying".
______________________


Twenty mountains and thirteen ways. Snowy habitat and a solitary blackbird distinguishable not by wing, tail but eye only. The poet's first verse is a bird's moving eye. The significant question is whether the poem's a "program" for transformative viewing or a lyricist's plain and simple address.


To me it's clear. We don't ever dare to take from the bird's true motion a single identifiable (read codifiable) moment and treat it as Stevens's true poem (haecceity): we continue the rêve, transported by the object's physicality and potential to move freely over the white plane of true flight. It's potential to mix flight and feeling at the same time is something which will be eventually regarded as its primary "becoming-animal" experience.


Snowy mountains don't form a backdrop for flying blackbirds as much as simple speeds do, & rates of descent and slow-moving flight formations across the sky. An interiorized type of flight, in particular, that can't be expressed initially as anything but a synecdoche. But more than that. Landscapes over which the eye of flight roams can't (like aerial photography) really be plotted as points, depressions or peaks for a bird's eye in flight is a total of "speeds and affects". Stevens's first way is then an assemblage and not a set of decipherable coordinates.

Furthermore, it's a question of eye for eye: the slowing, transformative power of bird-vision in place of an authoritative (which in the case of humans may even become voyeuristic) viewing that's always centered, always full of meanings. Eye does not co-opt eye. Slowing with the blackbird in mid-flight over snowy valleys is not a type of arrested activity, tracked on the viewer's sensory radar And since this type of bird flight's been interiorized, the only way to distinguish the moving eye from its environment is to the see the bird's body as a smooth planar surface over which the viewer and viewed pass as flights towards a new deterritorialized 'site' .

Stevens's bodiless eye is permissible only because of a truer body of which it is part. The moving eye can be said to belong to a much more general Body, organless, smooth and always tied to flows, a site for traces of flights rather than a knowledge grid. Lines in Stevens's opening verse are striations ("schizzes"). The flying eye is where one among many entryways into (and exits out of) the essentially heterogeneous Body of flight can be envisaged: with space always for one more ( n+1) Viewing the blackbird's flying eye is a becoming-animal, a radically liberatory sense of engaged reading.

What does "the eye of the blackbird" signify? Nothing that frees us this easily from the rooted strictures of 'text' need fear stoppage of bird flight (poem's primary flow) or the threat of lexical units  supplanting flights and entryways altogether. Or even twenty mountains and thirteen ways

Reading two poems 'with' Jack Spicer, and one longer 'Sophia' piece inspired by my reading of the Nag Hammadi Library

Below is a YouTube video of me reading at the 'Poets for Peace' Artword Artbar event about 2 weeks ago.

Canadian poet and social activist James Deahl read the Jack Spicer verses.