After reading "Tess of the d'Urbervilles", again

Tess

(for William Michaelian, who helped me write a better poem)

And as being sadly tall among the misty swedes & turnips
     she goes to the summit where weeds
spill over an abbey wall, like spidery froth pulled to right or
    left in the breeze,

and she sloshes through the mud (to right or left)and is taken
   for an elegant heron in heels,
revelatory without a cause & groundbreaking without a sigh,
   and rises like an early apple blooth,

like the most expert bird in the world, & hides in the withy bed
   and avoids every lure imaginable—
Tess the sexless, spotless in one last desperate plea for seed
   And as the nature of things is mean,

(certainly as regards the cliffs, milk-thistles and finches)
   and she goes angrily but with determination,
blindly but with angels, and as sins of the young shine in streams,
   like hontish stars, and lovers

thrash in the wind, like Tess and her angel, and grieve as if
   the skies can squint and glane at them both
& could even melt her down to the shadow of a ring,
   shame-faced girl, in her best boots

who looks away from insane abbey walls, veiled, just loved
   and lost again in the woods
And as singing her thresher's song she runs and runs again,
   til the rains finally fill her

and a four-poster at home, with mistle-toe, can't still the winds,
   slipping in through the cracks
and the figure of a finch, playing at his harp, awaits outside
   and Tess's taken from her stone

The "empire of illusion" and Canadian poetry

The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectual, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps as educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. (Hannah Arendt cited in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle)

As I was reading Chris Hedges's very interesting book on the Orwellian or Huxleyan (or should I say Debordian) nightmare that is early twenty-first century life, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), I was struck by the way the spirit of its "triumph of spectacle" thesis could apply to the contemporary poetry scene in Canada provided I only transform the idea of democracy in America "as outgrowth of free markets" (185) and corporate power into the idea of literacy as the product of state-run Arts complex (of the kind we have here).

A simple substitution of 'corporatist' (America) for 'socialist' (Canada) would do the job. And so I make the same death of "complexity and nuanced language" thesis for much poetry written,  fêted and anthologized today. Socialist Canada seems to have created the same type of "end of literacy" scenario as corporatist America. And, interestingly enough, I can faithfully employ the same critical language as in Hedges's book without too much detriment to believability of my own position. Though Hedges doesn't address poetry directly he very well could have done so. What follows is a reflection on contemporary Canadian poetry along the lines of an "end of literacy" critique as developed in Empire of Illusion. I've kept the spirit and impetus of Hedges's book but steered them towards a more uniquely Canadian poetry experience.

The literacy illusion can be traceable to the same socio-political and cultural causes of the narcissism, entertainment fetish, sense of entitlement and addiction to "commercial commodities" (whatever form they take) that characterize the post-millennial world. That is the general claim. I strongly commend Hedges's book for its well-rounded exposition of the scope & origins of what he aptly terms the empire of illusion. Applying its basic premises (& insights) to literacy alone seems to work just as well: in fact, I'd have to say a society of spectacle has snared even poetry in its net, its traditional (mostly lyrical) voice reduced to more entertaining "concrete, sound, list, translation, performance, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, narrative, conceptual and long poems" varieties (as the Toronto New School of Writing advertisement goes).

The Word (as much as the World) has been fragmented beyond repair into a myriad of faux copies of some original ideal from which we've strayed. It's my contention that digitalized, visual, video and poetry slam spectacles performed  today in Vegas-like fashion offer the only available venues for hordes of poet-graduates who've been encouraged to mix artistic genres like literary libertines: making the cultural present into a sort of ahistorical arena for a collage of  modes of expression that are an extension of the personal narcissism and techno-fetishism of its chief exponents today. Only the semblance (simulacra) of poetry has been kept because illusion is all that's remained and all that is now necessary. Perhaps the most devastating indictment of contemporary poetry is its reduction to what I regard as its "commodity fetishism": an array of spectacularly commoditized "pseudo-poetries".

Spectacle, once set in any socio-political or cultural arena, brooks no opposition. Look at the sense of outrage at a recent Canadian Heritage Department proposal to cut back funding to small magazines . In an age of declining readership in general and of traditional hardcover books in particular, coupled with the growth and dominance of e-books technology, the whining of the traditional mainstream mags (Arc, Fiddlehead, Malahat Review, etc.) over their share of taxpayer dollars is almost unpardonable. There's a sense of entitlement to funding and fierce resistance to any idea of having to prove their mags through established readership.

Large-circulation magazines continue to receive current funding levels while small mags get no more than a proposed allotment of 1.5 million dollars. Their charge of subsidy cutbacks to the Arts as an assault on the country's cultural viability is ludicrous in the face of the normal financial assistance most magazines up to now have been eligible to get from no less than three governmental agencies: a Canadian Magazine Fund, a Publications Assistance Program and a Canada-Council literary-and-arts magazine fund. The arts-funding controversy adopts the language (to which we've recently been accustomed) of bailouts and the need to keep a literary "corporate" model of institutionalized writing in place: one that (the proponents of state-run Arts claim) can't be left to the forces of a market economy alone.

The debate on publicly-funded arts in Canada is virtually a non-issue, so used have we become to the idea of state-run culture: consequently the capacity for independent thought and, more importantly, self-criticism go by the wayside just when it's most needed. Open-ended debate, a sense of social responsibility, and indeed anything that curbs self-will in the interests of a greater good take a back-seat to the demands of spectacle. To dare to question this "culture of illusion" is to risk being seen as a malcontent or, worst of all, an anti-Arts ogre bent on ruining free artistic expression. With criticism of Canada Council practically non-existent in mainstream media, the fairest discussion seems to be reserved for the blogs, the only sites available for "otherstream" discussion.

How did this "empire of illusion" ever come about in Canada? Internet technology and the poet seemed to have morphed into a creature of pure spectacle, but it's something that was a long time in the making.The hordes of writing students, for example, spilling into the writers' market today have been sold a bill of goods in the classroom & in the  world of real writing: the 'mainstream'  marketplace, funded by taxpayers' money, create an illusion of standards, literary opportunity and vibrant cultural tradition. It's the illusion of Arts Canada, one orchestrated by legislative fiat (Canada Council, Canadian Heritage and all the provincial arts council bureaucracies), and enforced by academics and the mainstream publishers they control. And of the above-mentioned three I'd say academic institutions have done the most to create the illusion of literacy. It goes something like this.

Financial support for the academy always has both curriculum and administrative implications for the Arts. Teaching style and content chase after money and connections, with ever rising student enrolment becoming a lucrative publishers market. Rather than a place of inquiry and ongoing critique of the economic, social and political conditions of all institutional structures, the university is a micro corporatist entity: in particular, a bastion of blinkered specialization & technical expertise in every subject area. Even in the humanities students must decide on a very narrow thesis-friendly subject area if they're to be received into academic practice, restricted as they must be at a very early age to a world of coded (almost masonic) language and writing ritual. In the minds of young student-writers success is bound to be equated with commercial viability: they feel necessarily entitled to reap the rewards of patiently jumping through all the prescribed academic hoops. Literary bang for their buck!


Acceptance into the profession creates a sense of wanting more of the same even long after graduation. If universities have become corporate institutions among others, vying with the marketplace for student tuition dollars and government research loans, then academic standards of excellence in general usually subserve a wider corporate & bureaucratic ideal of "good governance". And that ideal of "good governance" means in Canada a commitment to a means of literary production that is both taxpayer-based and run by bureaucrats in Ottawa.

Even liberal arts grads (say creative writing students) cannot be any less aware of the necessity for bringing 'marketable' skills into a very specialized work world than doctors and engineers: the bohemian campus Arts crowd having died a long time ago with the Beats (if they ever really existed). But as Mark Bauerlein says in his The Dumbest Generation students have turned into a "Creative Class" looking to find in the world of work outlets for creative expression. In Canada "good governance" usually means a  policy of multiculturalism designed to be a both theoretical and achievable reality. Even humanities grads, students of wide ethno-cultural diversity who are reared in a fake university and student-worker "harmony", have already been groomed for the rigidly legislated and administered social welfare system of governance that Canada's become in order to serve the needs of its multicultural citizenry. What Hedges says in regard to the American government can be almost inversely applied to our own subsidized arts regime: "It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception." (169)

Even the poets that popular writing classes create by the thousands will thrive only under the academic-corporatist conditions of the university that profits from a lucrative student textbook market and the warming ideals of state-sponsored Art to which they've been encouraged by their teachers to aspire once they leave campus. Which means that rather than fending for themselves, with the marketplace dictating literary taste, poet-graduates will turn naturally to the only agent of state-sponsored literacy directly suited to their writerly needs and aspirations: Canada Council or Canadian Heritage, new surrogate university departments with office hours, application forms and rigid administrative guidelines of their own.

The state becomes an academic playground where graduates expect to find the same classroom spirit of creative 'specialization' and literary production work: paper and/or electronic application being the usual first step to writing projects of any kind. The classes never end nor the call for papers. Here's an academic-government (bureaucratic) isomorphism intended to facilitate the poet-grad's transition into a potentially rewarding writing vocation. But when reality frustrates (as it inevitably will) the academicized expectations of budding poets, and a Malthusian imbalance between writers and publishing resources looms on their personal horizons (with its attendant dysphoria), poets turn to spectacle instead.

A sense of entitlement fostered by the faux excellence of literary work in the creative writing lab, coupled with the ubiquity of Internet technology, stirs contemporary poets on to a hope of instant universal acclaim and acceptance in a virtually endless, unfettered e-market. The switch-over is easy once traditional ("old school") literacy's been redefined as e-literacy. Poetry as "celebrity culture" with all the tricks of "mass entertainment" now at its disposal.

An egregious example of literacy illusion at the level of poetic discussion took the form of a recent Bök-Starnino poetry "cage match" first viewed by many on Vimeo or YouTube. More bombastic and self-serving than informative, with its own WWE stage design, the poetry debate was really poetry theatre, the main event crassly served up as choice of two poetry styles rather than as the complex multi-layered discussion it ought to have been:namely, whether Canada is better served by  avant-gardism or a more traditional poetry. A type of sophomoric presentation (highlighted by Bök's comical gestures & expressions and Starnino's equally comical dead pan delivery)  rather than any advancement of ideas seemed to result from this. The whole had the look of a "frosh week" prank: true spectacle framed by image, poetry peddled as brand-names (amounting to a "junk poetics") and a type of literary sloganeering that resulted in little more than claims by both poet-debaters that his poetry is more popular than the other.

And if a World Wrestling Entertainment format grows stale (and performance novelty always does), there's always the more  ingenious cyborg poetics of Christian Bök alone who's lately partnered with ALICE, acronym for Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity,  a sexy "chatbot", more technically a“natural language processing chatterbot” to whom/which Bök posed a series of questions taken directly from Ron Silliman's post-avant work Sunset Debris (itself a series of questions). Poet as talking cyborg-head reminiscent of the 80s Max Headroom.

 And if he isn't dialoguing with a robot he's usually using Power-Point to read poetry as more silent graphic (letter-glyph) fusions. It's hard sometimes in this emerging age of "Vispo" to separate graphics from language; poetry from techno-poetries. In fact, a growing trend towards digitizing even more traditional flesh-and-blood poets from the past, like Fred Wah and bpNichol, Internet sites comprising mostly of "uploaded scanned images" of poet and their writings, is the extent to which traditional poetics chases after cyber spectacle.

If "fun and fantasy", augmented by Internet media, are preferred to traditional literary expression, the result is a rampant bibliophobia among the young (as Mark Bauerlein argues in The Dumbest Generation): a disdain for reading and the patient and thoughtful inquiry it entails. And if the young aren't reading books, that means poetry as well. But the young are also the largest consumers of Internet social networking, iPod, and video technologies, and the most likely to be drawn to "spectacle" of e-literacy &  Bökian techno-tricks rather than the substance of the Word.

"Corn: From Anatomy to Poetics" by Giorgio Agamben

It's not often an essay can impress by the qualities alone of form, scholarly virtuosity and elegance but Agamben's "Corn: From Anatomy to Poetics" certainly does. I'll compare it to anything Derrida wrote at the height of his powers. I'll even venture to say Agamben, whose name can't be tied to any current literary movements, is a lot more generous with his sources and can segue into more scholarly categories than even the great deconstructionist. It's no coincidence that I discovered Agamben through the writings of another master essayist Robin Blaser (in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser) who discusses Agamben's unique philosophico-literary contributions to language in his essay "The Irreparable"  .

As belonging to a larger text entitled The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics Agamben's essay is actually the record of a literary discussion with friends Italo Calvino and Claudio Rugafiori, all of whom had conceived together of a review, as he says, of "'Italian categories'... a matter of identifying nothing less than the categorial structures of Italian culture through a series of conjoined polar concepts." (The End of the Poem xi). The essay can be seen as a  contribution towards an oeuvre of the scale, say, of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism though the scope and design later narrowed considerably to a shorter discussion of "general problems in poetics." (xii) Agamben's work is part of that discussion.

 The essay is a work of philology, translation and literary criticism that proposes a general view of meter seen as a break with the musicality of Troubadour poetry. That is its general design: Agamben's thesis develops skilfully through the details of a transition from anatomical (quasi-bawdy) reference to metrical innovation and then to all the semantic possibilities now opened to poetry on a newer (more contemporary) meta-understanding of the relationship between sound & sense. Its content almost amounts to a literary paradigm shift.

 The form of the essay, on the other hand, looks strangely at odds with content: divided into Historia, Allegory, Tropology, Anagogy, Sensus Mysticus and Epilogue, it seems to follow a sort of scriptural or medieval Thomistic exegesis. Agamben's exposition can be read in one of two ways: a case of intentional (a poststructuralist sort of) 'irony' at the expense of serious academic reading—a view I'm inclined to adopt—or an ingenious synthesis of classical and contemporary criticism, one that traces out of an ambiguous translation of 'corn'  (anus, clitoris or some other purposely ambiguous sense of bodily orifice?) no less than the origins of a veritable metrics revolution. The razo to Arnaut Daniel's Troubadour composition (in its original bilingual form):

Raimon de Dufort and Lord Turc Malec were two knights from Quercy who composed the sirventes about the lady called Milday n'Aia, the one who said to the knight that she would not love him if he did not corn her in the arse.
     And here are written the sirventes.

(Raimons de Dufort e N Turc Malec si foron du cavallier de Caersi que feiren los sirventes de la domna que ac nom ma domna n'Aia, aquella que dis al cavalier de Cornil qu'ella no l'amaria si el no la cornava el cul.
     Et aqui son escritz los sirventes.)

Thus the philological status of 'corn' in Arnaut's Provencal verses takes us initially to a contested moment in Historia: the historical fact of Arnaut's own substitution of corn for cul in the sirventes that follow the razo. The substitution does more than correct an embarrassing blemish: it creates a textual lacuna (or 'gap', as Agamben says) that becomes the occasion for a crucial "'body of the woman/body of the poem' equation, which constitutes the sirventes's theme" (31). Which in turn leads to Agamben's most developed view of the Arnaut text and Ayna figure as "[t]he site of a fulfillment and an impossibility, of a perfection possible through an imperfection alone". (42) Just the sort of purposeful but playfully ambiguous reworking of traditional materials that's characteristic of so much contemporary poetics.

A quibbling over bawdy terminology creates a textual split after which the history of verse is never the same. But how exactly: how does the essay's typology lead in this way from what Agamben sees as the "somewhat uninspiring interpretative exercises" (23) of the courtly poet's earliest critics to a point in literary understanding where "comprehension is darkened in speech and speech is silenced in comprehension"? (42)

Through scholarly researches that uncover a vital 'corn' to 'cors' transition the 'corn' debate changes female into poetic anatomy (28), the new term 'cors' or 'cor' now meaning a "metrical unit", a structural feature not of a female body but of the verse fabric itself. A nonconformist (more problematic) view of poetry and its constitutive parts arises where anatomy turns into a blemish in prosodic design. A lewd reference to the female body now translates into an equally troubling reluctance on the part of rhymes to do their job within the same strophe. 'Corn' is now understood as "a partially unrelated rhyme" that requires the presence of other stanzas to which rhymes must later refer if compositional unity is to be maintained.

By virtue of this asymmetry of design, and the necessity the reader is now under to regard the poem in its entirety, a new "metastrophical" view of courtly lyric poetry is born in which the appearance of  'corn' then 'cors' marks a continuity and experimentalism divide begun with a substitution of the initially ambiguous 'corn' for a patently obscene 'cul': so that a part of female anatomy in the early Arnaut sirventes now carries over into a new sense of poetry as the place of rhyme displacement. Freed from strophic constraint rhyme loosens like a free radical into the body of the text. Arnaut who "treats all verses as "corns" and...by thus rupturing the closed unity of the strophe, transforms the unrelated rhyme into the principle of a higher relation" (31 italics are Agamben's) is seen as a poet of unexpected novelty, more particularly of verses that always leave something else to look for and explain within the same poem. The troublesomeness of 'site' makes the reading eye work a little harder, looking no longer for melodic verses to courtly ladies but a more interesting Allegory at work in all poetic texts. In Agamben's words,

If we return, therefore, to Arnaut's sirventes, the whole dispute surrounding Ayna's corn is displaced from its obscene literal sense to a question of poetic technique and from a problem of anatomical suitableness to a metrical matter. The "body of the woman=body of the poem" equation, which is not altogether unexpected but is still not a given, will find a counterpart in the equation of corn as bodily orifice and corn as point of rupture of the strophe's metrical structure." (30)

And:

If the corn is a point of fracture in the unity of the strophe, and if the strophe's metrical structure is not to be irremediably shattered...the laceration must take place with a particular precaution: the unrelated rhymes must be joined in a new metastrophic formal unity. (23)

By linking rhymes within a wider textual body the poet (and reader) avoids the prurience of focusing on one aspect only of the "woman-poem", dispensing at the same time with the purely melodic signifiers that give prominence to the physical Lady: in short, a literal reading of corn as female anatomy must now subserve a higher "harmonic" part-to-whole ordering that now appeals as much to the eye as the ear. Here is the emerging idea of poetry as text. The rupture between rhymes and a Troubadour's sound devices stills the singing voice, the poem's allegiance to a dominant tradition of "oral performance" forever gone, and activates a new type of intellectual viewing such as is typified in the complex sestina form. The body of Ayna, no longer the object of coarse sexual play, is elevated to a more intellectually innovative Tropology: it is even perhaps a morally (or spiritually) edifying way to talk about how the female body can presage a distinctively novel view of textual poetry.

Scattered readings of philological speculation and an emerging transformation of the physical into a symbolic body through Allegory are now bound to veer off into more technical discussions. Leaving melos for metrics will  mark the poetic text as a site of errant rhymes and verses that won't end uniformly at the end of every line: enjambments are now seen as a negotiable upper-limit to where poetry can be safely distanced from an encroaching prose, poetry's ghostly Other. Enjambment, the errant verse line, is to poetry at this stage what Arnaut's 'corn' caesura originally was to rhyme.The very "harmony between sound and sense" (35) is put into question.

 The bifurcated textual body of the poem can now be reconfigured as a sound and sense, "metrical segmentation and syntactical segmentation" (34) battleground where the distinctions between them are becoming more vaguely defined. If the music of oral tradition has given way to a  the poem's metrical unity, which in turn threatens to enter prose terrain through lines (enjambments) whose chief sense-carriers (rhymes) don't appear uniformly at the end, it's even hard to separate sound from sense (a topic that's  received in Silliman's view of the New Sentence its only true contemporary post-avant formulation). The "metastrophic" unity signalled by 'corn' now marks a troubling divide between the poem as metrics and poem as site of meaning. This is poetry's Anagogy phase: a kind of even more ultimate & divergent reading of that always troublesome place ('corn' or unrelated rhyme) of the "woman-poem".

Citing Dante extensively (particularly Book III of the Convivio) Agamben draws the most controversial conclusion of all from this growing sense-sound separation: namely, that poetry resides in the ineffability of poetic meanings themselves. Intellect and language, having ruptured almost beyond any formal compatibility, now chase each other around tempestuously like cold and warm fronts, with meanings sometimes gaining the ascendancy over sounds, sometimes sounds over meanings. Again, a perceived imperfection in language (lack of stable rhymes & verse lines), site of potential embarrassment, turns into a new sort of literary perfection. In the hands of the great Dante imperfection is the beginning Inferno stage and the Comedy that ends in beatific vision becomes the Sensus Mysticus form of language itself. Arnaut as the prequel to Dante!

These two synchronous and inverse processes in the act of speaking (and listening)—that of language's movement toward comprehension and of comprehension's movement toward language—communicate with each other in their limitation, such that (as Dante will go on to say) their imperfection actually coincides with their perfection". (39)

And more emphatically still:
    

And is this not precisely what happens in every genuine poetic enunciation in which language's movement toward sense is as if traversed by another discourse, one moving from comprehension to sound, without either of the two ever reaching its destination, the one to rest in prose and the other in pure sound? Instead, in a decisive exchange, it is as if, having met each other, each of the two movements then followed the other's tracks, such that language found itself led back in the end to language, and comprehension to comprehension. This inverted chiasm—this and nothing else—is what we call poetry. This chiasm is, beyond every vagueness, poetry's crossing with thought, the thinking essence of poetry and the poeticizing essence of thought (41 Italics are Agamben's)

In my previous two posts on Timothy Steele's work on the decline of metrics I noted the author's linking its devaluation to the abandonment of meter for something perceived to be closer to language's natural rhythms. I wonder if Steele is aware of the Arnaut connection to the loss of melos in poetry evolution: perhaps even if he'd consider Dante's own Commedia as a valid testimony to the loss of song, & its decline into an opposing play of sound and sense as outlined in Agamben's essay. Whether the lament for 'song' is at all the same as the celebrated final Dantean paradox of the broken vision of the Trinity in Paradiso: XXXIII : where language, as elevated as this, can envisage a triune God only in fragments. In the terzina,

O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,
  sola t'intendi, e da te intelletta
  e intendente te ami e arridi! (124-126)

Dante, nearing the end of his journey, wants to celebrate and invoke at the same time this visione straordinaria of a divine mystery imparted to him in three parts: even at the celestial summits the divine essence  grasped only little by little, restricted to only its diverse qualities. Intellect and poetic imagination battle it out to the very end. To avoid experiencing similar limitations with regards to other higher mysteries like the Incarnation & the  contemplation of God requires a final divine grace (one that seems tantamount to a complete abandonment of poetic language itself):

A l'alta fantasia qui manco possa;
  ma gia volgeva il mio disio e 'l velle,
  si come rota ch'igualmente e mossa,
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.(142-145)

Comprehension and language completely submerged in the divine "love that moves sun & stars."

Timothy Steele's Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter: the case for a new Formalism Part 2

Steele's thesis is valid: vers libre is a more hybrid, complex and structurally vital element of poetry than even its most conservative practitioners have realized, with even Pound and Eliot  having to word their own formulations of it in as exact a language as possible. Eliot is even said to have favoured the elusive ("musically indefinite") meanings of poetry, the effect of  conveying poetic meanings only piecemeal and indirectly, to the dull straightforward senses of metered verse. The result for us of this shift away from meter is not its displacement by anything that equals it in poetic strength: rather metrics and imaginative freedom become vital components of poetry that won't be torn out of each other's arms without the loss of something vital in the creative processes. We seem to have inherited a bifurcated notion of poetry that won't ever be restored to anything like its more classical Aristotelian sense.

 Steeles cites even Coleridge as saying that without meter the genius of poet (and poetry) would remain hidden (Missing Measures 190) There have been those, too, like Emerson, Blake and Whitman who've openly espoused abandoning the rules, making the poet both writer and technician after his own heart. Which is not to abandon meter but to rework it in an entirely individualistic mode. And in the case of Eliot and Pound there's the call to write not with the accentual-syllabic line but as if the poem were rather sheet music and words musical notations likes staves and bars. In Steele's estimation, the die's been cast for a persistent verse/Poetry opposition conditioning our understanding of the nature of verse in general:

   To say that poetry exists in a realm of its own is not necessarily to say that meter should be abandoned. Yet meter's rules are not individual but comprehensive: they ask the same obedience and offer the same rewards to all poets. This quality brings meter into conflict with views which stress the self-sufficiency of the individual poet and poem and with views like Williams' which hold that even private legislation is not to interfere with the poet. (192)

Even if the act of writing poetry is spontaneous, inspired by the world or emotions & ideas, there's a lingering sense that without rules or acknowledgement of writing 'technique' poetry would be too rambling and disconnected to work. It's interesting that by eliminating categorically a division of poetic composition called meter, a whole host of competing 'rhythmical structures' always hurry in to fill the void. Traces of a classical literary 'influence' that won't go away: the invisible void lying hidden beneath the fragments and revealing itself primarily as  prose poetry.

And if the leap from metrics to music could work on aesthetic grounds only, innovators wonder if a similar kind of artistic foray into experimental science weren't feasible. Since poets seemed to despair, as Steele argues in his most interesting chapter "Sciences of Sentiment", of ever matching the classical authors for literary freshness & vitality—poetic models, materials and techniques all but already taken— they looked to improving on the process rather than product of their writing. The desire for a more scientific attitude to writing stems, once again, from the association of meter with an antiquated literary past and non-metrical verse with the progressive bent of modern scientific method (240).

Metrics was envisaged as the terrible link to the past that had to be broken for new art to emerge. Whether in the form of Pound's "Make It New" slogan or Marinetti's notion of the " revolutionary" overthrow of the traditional means of literary production or Whitman's equating true poetry with the spirit of science and democracy in his own day—a kind of 'ageism' crept into the literary consciousness whereby novelty and experimentalism always now came to be more highly esteemed than the old classical models. A bewildering array of "isms" also made their way into literary parlance: the zeal (present still today!) with which bands of poets always strive in literary competition for the newest name, newest manifesto is testimony to this emerging 'scientism' in letters. As Steele wryly puts it,

   This imperative [to adopt science as model of artistic composition] contributes to the "isms" characteristic of the poetry and art of the early decades of this century; the champions of each "ism" pronouncing themselves the embodiment of the newest New and the rightful successor to the next-to-the-newest-New-but-nonetheless-now-old New. These isms reflect not only a concern with making art novel, but also with securing scientific validation for it (246)

     The need to return to tradition is more necessary than ever, the author concludes, especially as contemporary poets seem to have made a Faustian pact with radical novelty, their artistic spirits compromised by this incessant idolization of experimentalism for its own sake, and led to embrace, among other things, qualities of "superstition" and "irrationality" in artistic work (274-276). And to replace isosyllabic measures with a new metrics (however that was envisaged by Pound, Williams, etc.) is something that never really happened either. Leaving poets (and the academic-poets who had a direct stake in vers libre milieu) with just vaguely defined notions of personal intention and subject-matter as the only compositional principles to guide them. Metrics seen as an accessory to the predominantly free verse culture: a related but largely irrelevant subspecies of poetry writing.

I'd like to end with an opinion of my own. If just to add a little clarity to the discussion. As someone who's been pulled in two very distinct traditions and literary styles (British and American), I've always tried to resolve inner-tensions through a typically Canadian syncretism (as Atwood would say): namely, by taking the best from both, and trying to align my own personal sympathies along a sort of sensible middle ground, not too rigidly 'formalistic' nor too wildly experimental, a good style always the result of sound familiarity with the great literary canons of the past and their historical developments, as well as the odd tampering with tradition and the established tools of the trade (like meter, diction).

Canada has experienced its fair share of poetry innovation. The radical Tish poets of  60s Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (Canada), a movement very much inspired by the active presence of Americans Olson, Creeley, Duncan and Blaser, probably represented the most significant era in Canadian experimentalism. Poets Frank Davey, bpNichol, bill bissett, & Daphne Marlatt for a time turned the Canadian literary establishment on its head, rearranging elements of visual, aural and First Nations iconography to create distinctively (very unCanadian) dissonant, 'otherstream' styles. News of bpNichol's winning the Governor-General's Award for best poetry even caused a stir in the House of Commons.

Not that Canada hadn't seen poetic innovations before Tish but just not to that radical degree. In 20s and 30s Montreal, for example, writers like Robert Finch, F.R. Scott and John Glassco, working out of McGill University, were at the forefront of a distinctively tamer 'modernist' movement in which Canadian innovators found elements of a European Aesthetic/Decadent movement more congenial to a distinctively Canadian poetics, for which reason (among others) they never really took to what they considered the inhospitable Imagist poetry of their contemporaries Pound and Williams. Even if the young McGill writers chose to emulate authors who opted for unbridled 'subjectivities', the result was a loosely 'formal' or lyrically self-defining Canadian style.

I suppose I'm a product of both these versions of literary iconoclasticism. By nature and educational upbringing tied conservatively (and perhaps a little sentimentally) to my Dryden, Browning, Tennyson and Swineburne, taking notes mostly from the standard Oxford Anthology of English Verse, I  regarded literary individuality as a little alarming & chose, in my daring moments, to be conversant with a sort of wild-eyed Romanticism instead. In typical early Canadian modernist fashion, I followed the poetic impulses of Page, Layton, Pratt and Souster.But with exposure to more radical European and American poetries came, of course, intellectual maturity and a more settled appreciation of literary différance so that I can recall even now the exhilaration at discovering the heterodoxies of Tzara, Mayakovsky, Verlaine, and the postructuralist theorists ( Deleuze, Kristeva) who seemed to justify radical 'otherstream' poetics. It's been my own writing goal to infuse a Canadian-style modernism that shied away from Pound and Williams with the more personally satisfying 'fragmentariness' of postmodern verse ushered in (and made popular) by the radical Tish experiments. And to believe that the synthesis still makes for a meaningful poetic expression.

The question, therefore, of whether to restore meter to its former prominence in contemporary verse (in some new Formalist style), if only in outline, to me really amounts  to something like what Ron Silliman's perhaps proposing for prose poetry: a New Sentence configuration of the verse line "altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity" ; or perhaps what visual poet Geof Huth's thinks of as a poem's most essential stand-alone constituents— the 'pwoermd'— that's given him, as he says in his most recent blog post, the very flexibility to write "thaumatrope poems, planned zoetrope poems, and...various visual poems meant to take advantage of various optical illusions"; or perhaps what "polyartists" Richard Kostelanetz, Aram Saroyan, Gary Barwin and Ed Baker regard in their practices as primary multimedia sources of art (ranging from computer graphics to pictograms to the barest minimalist typography).

Or what any number of poets will say is significant poetic 'form' or a verse line's key rhythmical nature if asked just what is worth preserving in their work. Steele stresses that legacy-making power of metrics throughout his book, even enjoining young poets to follow the examples of poets like Larkin who may have produced relatively little in their lifetime but whose great popularity and legacy will be keyed directly to their metrics. But I'm inclined to think that Huth's 'pwoermds' or Silliman's New Sentence or Baker's exquisitely spare visual poetry may make them just as memorable. I do believe, in fact, that something will always take the place of traditional 'meter' (and anything else regarded as enduring and worth preserving)and make any departure from it not so much a rupture as a kind of released "intensity" of the original metrical paradigm. I believe 'meter' is a property of language that is destined to spring, as by its own evolutionary processes, into differentiated uses: a spontaneous tendency of artist and their materials to 'deterritorialize' poetic practice.

I guess in this way I've tried, in typically Canadian fashion, to bring together what's seemed to me to be the best tendencies in two poetic traditions.

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