Entry 1087 — P&B, Series . . . Call It 5
P&B is short for “pronouncements and blither.”
At some point in a long Internet discussion with Richard Kostelanetz about the Establishment, I remarked that, “Academic and commercial presses ARE the establishment, or essentially if many time implicitly told what to publish by it. Actually, on reflection (gee, I had that word ready to use then lost it for a full two minutes, except for the “re”), I see that it might make sense to divide the Establishment in two, although they overlap: the academic/commercial establishment that rules contemporary literature, and the one that rules the art of the past. You’ve built your reputation, it seems to me, in the latter (which is where academia is at its best, and often splendid), but not so much in the former–not because of lack of support but because the morons in charge of the former are thirty to fifty years behind what’s going on where most of the best art is coming into existence.
In another discussion, this one at New-Poetry, with a number of participants, Sam Gwynn disagreed with me that “if a poet wants maximal musicality, formal poetry is for him,” with the claim that Whitman achieved maximal musicality in his free verse.
You know, Sam, after really really thinking this over, which is uncharacteristic of me, I concluded that I disagree. It seems to me that if I were a composer, and wanted to achieve maximal musical beauty, I would write for a symphony orchestra, not a quartet–or for a piano, not a flute. Someone will throw Beethoven’s quartets at me, or some glorious melody for a flute, but my point is that a formal poet has all possible auditory devices know to poetry (I think) to work with, a free verser doesn’t. A free verser, or composer for quartet or flute, may still achieve things some subjectively find better than anything else (Hey, I think Thomas Wolfe was wonderfully musical–although that was when I was under 25), but what can he do to achieve what, say, Frost does with rhyme in his Snowy Evening poem? I suppose it’s subjective, although I believe it will not too long from now be objectively provable by comparing what happens in the brain listening to Whitman versus listen to Frost, that nothing in poetry can surpass the music of Frost’s rhymes. I further claim they do what chords do in real music, a rhyme causes you to hear two related notes together in a way nothing else does–and in Frost’s poem, you get THREE together.
Did I show that in my knowlecular poetics discussion of the rhyme? I can’t recall. . . .
Okay, maybe my gush above is due my bias in favor of Frost, who seems to me to do just about everything word-only poets do better than Whitman, however admirable in so many ways that Whitman may be.
I note now that I’ve quoted myself, that I forgot that, for me, Whitman is a formal poet, albeit a borderline one, due to his use of Psalmic parallelism.
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