curse of verse

Formal poems that put perfection of form above poetic essence, fail as poems.

siblings

Force and form are close kin.

the poetic vertical

Every real poem, then, contains the element of time-stopped, time which does not obey the meter, time which we shall call vertical to distinguish it from ordinary time which sweeps past horizontally along with the wind and the waters of the stream. Whence this paradox, which we must state quite clearly: whereas prosodic time is horizontal, poetic time is vertical.

—Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetic Moment and the Metaphysical Moment,” The Right to Dream (The Dallas Institute Publications, 1988), translated by J. A. Underwood, 172.

five beats is all

Blank verse can make you believe in any line.

table setting

He’d properly set the table with the form, however no meal was served.

ticking line

Meter is a lateral clock.

slows it down

One of the great practical uses of the literary disciplines, of course, is to resist glibness—to slow language down and make it thoughtful. This accounts, particularly, for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language: verse checks the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure, to extralinguistic consideration; by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing.

—Wendell Berry, Standing by Words (Counterpoint, 1983)

rime on time

In the worst use of form you’ll find you’re reading ahead to see what the next rhyming word will be.

stepping in

Free verse put prose into prosody.

lockstep formalist

He was one of those formalists you could visualize dressed in a black uniform, a real GestaPo.

obscure constructs

Another guidebook chockfull of obscure constructs for one’s amusement.

stress no less

When you say this is ‘blank verse’, are you talking only about the poem’s meter?

conjoined

The rhymes were too close: Like Siamese twins, sometimes one must suffer for the vitality of the other.

verse tweezers

A couplet: verse tweezers used to present an image or a thought held in its squeeze of rhyme.

flip turn

Constraint of the verse line: With each flip-turn, a swimmer gains power pushing off from the pool wall.

sarcophagus

A desiccated body lies in an ornate sarcophagus of form.

phone sex scansion

When poets talk about scansion it reminds me of phone sex…lovers from afar aching to close the distance.

60 second manifesto

I thought this was a well executed performance piece (60 second lecture). I've often observed that much of the 'prosody' of language poetry is expressed in the negative: Poetry that is asyntactic, non-narrative, non-linear or discontinuous, lacking closure, etc. True to form, Bernstein's poem-manifesto is completely phrased in the negative except for the last line, in which he invokes the great Borscht Belt comics' mantra of 'a joke is all in the timing'.

under the lash

The line stooped and bloodied under the metrical lash.

iambs on the march

The jackbooted iambs are marching again in their ranks of five.