Back to rhythm and meter.

There is a deservedly admired short poem by Gwendolyn Brooks that is worth listening to, “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till” (from The Bean Eaters, 1960, and included in Blacks, 1987).  I’m sure there are many readings available of this poem, but looking at it mostly rhythmically and phonetically, I will add another brief one.

Announcing in the title that the poem is the last stanza of a ballad, Brooks signals that we should imagine a narrative of which this is the final moment.  And she does not follow traditional ballad meter; instead she writes in response to it.  The traditional meter can be seen in many old poems, especially the beautiful Scottish ballads, such as “Sir Patrick Spens” (on line at a number of web sites), which compresses a tragic narrative into a few stanzas, making use of vivid metonyms, such as the cork-heeled shoes that stand for the warriors themselves not wanting to sail, and later, vindicating their apprehension, and signifying their having placed loyalty over safety (pointlessly, in this case), the hats that float on the sea after the ship and the men have gone down.  In this poem a vindictive, cowardly king is chastised forever afterward for the loss of strong young men.

In her one stanza, Brooks has plenty of narrative power, too–implying a narrative she does not need to provide, but to supplement.  Her images are oblique.  She asks us to imagine what we do not see—unlike Emmett Till’s mother, who required that people see what no one would want to see.

“After the Murder, After the Burial,” Brooks writes, as a kind of narrative epigraph.  And she moves us from the imagined ballad of what happened to Emmett Till to a scene in which he is absent, in which his mother is present as the last figure in Till’s own narrative.  The poem begins, “Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing; / the tint of pulled taffy.”  If we listen to the speech stresses, we hear not the balladic four plus three but five plus three (although we could scan the line as four loose metrical feet; but if Brooks had wanted the meter to be close to ballad meter, she could easily have written it that way, given her virtuosity): “Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing; / the tint of pulled taffy.”  The intensity of feeling is concentrated at the end of the utterance: six speech stresses in nine syllables.  The double speech stresses at the end of the first line and at the end of the second are that Ezra-Poundian device I have mentioned in earlier posts in this series: a twentieth-century choice, for roughly metrical or roughly free verse, whichever way one wishes to read it, of a rhythmic figure formerly used in metrical verse.

“She sits in a red room, / drinking black coffee.”  And there it is again, used in the same way.

And again: “She kisses her killed boy. / And she is sorry.”  Now this is “after the burial,” so her son is not in the red room with her.  Brooks runs two moments in time together, perhaps to represent the time-wrenching experience of grief.  By rhythmic stress and by the phonetic figure on the sound of the repeated ki-, Brooks forcefully links the opposites of “kiss” and “kill.”  That is, the love and the horror are brought into the same space by the repeated sounds of those two juxtaposed words, but this is stated and danced, so to speak, simply, and with restraint.  Meanwhile “taffy” and “coffee” rhyme—both are something one ingests, edibles that are not nourishment but rather a self-soothing: candy and caffeine.  (And of course, Emmett’s mother too has been “pulled” into a distorting pain by grief, the absence of retributive justice, and the extinguishing of a life for mere reason of race.)  And then with “taffy” and “coffee” Brooks rhymes “sorry.”  We can sense the phantom utterance of these three rhyme words together; they almost say it, but do not, because they are separated from each other syntactically, and the poem leaves it to us to formulate that utterance by associating the three words with each other.

“Chaos in windy grays / through a red prairie.”  The last rhyme shows us the whole pattern of a repeated sound, a phonetic figure used over and over—two syllables, the first one stressed, the second one a long “e” sound.  So we hear not only “prairie,” which goes with “taffy,” “coffee,” and “sorry,” but also “windy” and, in line one, “pretty.”  (I can’t help hearing, also, inside “prairie” another word that is not given: “prayer.”  Not given.  That is, significant by its absence.)

Meanwhile the rhythm has been speeding up.  (Every line except the first two can be scanned as metrical, but the feel of the poem is of rhythmical free verse.)  Four speech stresses in the first line, then three, three, three, three, two, three, two.   If we read what the poem would be if it were restricted to something like four-line (unrhymed) ballad meter—that is, without reading the even-numbered lines of what appear to be eight but which are in fact half-lines completing the four lines that begin at the left margin—then we have: “Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing… She sits in a red room… She kisses her killed boy… Chaos in windy grays…” (in this case, 4 speech stresses, then 3 and 3 and 3.)  That’s an even more compressed version of the whole story, with a final image as commentary.

Interpreting the poem means not only imagining one’s way into what is only implied, but also listening to how the rhythms and repeated sounds emphasize what is stated.  “Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing”—but those who know the history know that the boy himself was not pretty-faced, after what had been done to him, and his mother insisted that his coffin remain open at his funeral so that people could see what had happened to him.  She did not allow them to think that the brutality of what had happened to a young boy might perhaps be less horrifying than in fact it was.

The loneliness of Till’s mother; the emptiness of an abstract landscape of “windy grays” moving “through a red prairie”—these are the absence of a humane presence anywhere or everywhere.  The “red room” and the “red prairie” are equated by color: blood, a social and political chaos, an absence of right, a chaotic presence of inhumanity.   “Red prairie”: Brooks was a great satirist, a great social observer; here she ends with an emphatically rhythmic image that is not human, not social, not even literally real.  What can one say?

from THE INDEPENDENT (UK)

My thanks to Stephen Scully for the link: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/jason-and-the-argot-land-where-greeks-ancient-language-survives-2174669.html

Why am I going over rhythm and meter?  Do I need to prove that there’s one way to look at it, better than all others?  No, I don’t; and in fact, I can’t—prosody is not a science but an art, and it’s  something on which poets and scholars tend to take strong positions, so I don’t expect to convert anyone who already has a way of thinking about it that can produce poems and readings of poems that deftly use or respond to the rhythms of English.  I’m one of the ones who does have a way of thinking about it, and who likes to think about it.  And so I do this for my own pleasure, as well as with the hope of clarifying something that to another reader or poet has not been clear, and most of all, simply for the lucky privilege—a privilege one can seize for oneself out of the air and the language, without taking it away from anyone, and without having expected anyone to give it away—of participating, as I write these little parts of my discussion, in the life of poetry.

I begin to feel impatient, and wasteful of my own hours, when I do not participate in the life of poetry.  That participation is a practice that sometimes includes working on a poem or a translation, but isn’t at all limited to this.  The practice has been a long process, for me, of thinking about language, about poems, about the artistic resources in language, about what people make of poetry at different times, about how some (good and bad) poems become admired, and for what reasons, and others do not, about what “good” and “bad” mean, in such a statement as the one I just made, about the kinds of roles poets have had in their communities and cultures since as far back as we can guess (about five millennia? or, with guessing that’s entirely vague, about ten?— or twenty?).

I know that such participation in the life of poetry is not very widely seen as a very useful thing, except in its being a part of remembering the myriad elements and aspects of being human that have marked us as a species—inherently, and in comparison to other animals, and in light of what the effect of human beings has been on each other and on our planet.  Only bad poetry, perhaps, minimizes the human, makes it more acceptable to a polite modern society; but also, bad behavior doesn’t necessarily make for good poetry, although it’s something that a lot of readers like to read about; nor does bad bahavior, at least in some poets, keep good poems from being written.

Our human being is a confusing and contradictory object of contemplation.  But to spend time thinking about how what we have been, in all its horror and beauty, has been represented, grasped, turned, troped (and has not been) in poems, is the worthy practice I cherish.  Perhaps it’s only in a country as shot through (I do not choose the metaphor at random) as ours is with the crude and desperate utilitarianism of those who have been economically excluded and even crushed, and—despite our worthy, inscribed ideals—with pretty brutal antisocial, inhumane, greedy, unethical, violent stances, in far too many with political and financial power, would what I’m arguing for have to be justified.

So that’s it.  I can’t pretend I’m interested in all poetry, from the earliest to what was published in the latest issues of any half dozen literary journals.  I’m not.  You have (as do I, as does everyone), a right to claim and hold onto your own personal history as a reader, and work from that.  (I first encountered that idea in an overheard conversation in a library in California, when I was a student; it stayed with me.)  So I hold onto my history as a reader, and I keep opening up new chapters in it as I go.

With the blessing of some time in which to do so, I have been reading Gerard Manley Hopkins from beginning to end, over the last week—poems, some diary entries, some letters, a little commentary by those who have studied his work.  I expect to look at him in one of these posts, although I’m not ready to do so yet.  And to use him in another essay I’m writing, about poetry and etymology (not for this blog).  I haven’t felt much more for his work, over the years, than admiration of a few of his great poems, as poems, and more generally for his intense seriousness in trying to re-conceive how to use the rhythms of English, in the second  part of his career, beginning with “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”  I don’t think I myself will ever write anything that is indebted to his poems; I never have, yet; and I don’t think I can admire the wreck of his psyche that submerged him in depression, but even earlier, in what seems to me an intransigent impulse, after a certain point, to be subjected, to be controlled, restricted, denied (and in this way sustained, held steady).  His self-abnegation as a poet and a person is striking; his self-condemnation sad.  I want to state emphatically that my immersion in his work for several days has been exhilarating for me not because his poetry is a “triumph” over all that, nor of course because his poetry succumbed to all that.  His sheer stamina is inspiring.  He seems to have believed that if only he could write the poems he wanted to write, he would have accomplished something that was worthy of himself and of the God in whom he believed.  Yet what he did accomplish in his strange, utterly individual way was remarkable in the handful of poems that seem to me likely to be remembered for as long as there are readers.   All of that, from beginning to end, was his (fitful) participation in the life of poetry; and because poetry is an art, in the modern world, of the page that preserves poems and more, I am able to go with him a little of his way.  I’m sure I fail to understand as much as I should about him and about his poems and even (or especially) about his poetic technique.  My trying to understand has been over the last week my participation in the life of poetry.

Amidst the continually unfolding catastrophes and suffering in all the world, I try to take heart—as one of my most inspiring friends did, when he was alive—in holding a little of the whole history of us in mind, and choosing from the riches and devastations of that history some poems and poets worth remembering and sustaining in our collective memory.

Back to rhythm and meter next time.

A little more about how we got to free verse.  Ezra Pound’s early version of free verse is at work in his most famous poem (published, like “The Return,” in 1913; Pound was 28):

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet black bough.

Let’s scan this:

………/……. /……… /…………../………../…………/

The ap |pari | tion of | these fac | es in | the crowd;

…/………../………../………….. /

pet | als on | a wet | black bough.

The first line is six iambic feet and has a light, swift tread because it has only three speech stresses.  The second line is a “headless” line of four iambic feet.  “Headless” is a metrical convention—it means that the poet leaves out the expected unaccented first syllable of the first foot.  Which we can guess at, as Pound meant us to: it would have been “like.”  But he didn’t want a simile, a comparison; he wanted a transformation.  So the faces are the petals, and the gloom behind them is the bough, and both petals and human faces are fragile and temporary.  And beautiful against the darkness of change and time.  And all of that he says in perfectly iambic lines, which we tend to read as free verse simply because the swift first line is followed by the very emphatic rhythm of the second line, with its speech stress in the first syllable and then the three in a row at the end, and what we hear is the contrast between the swift and the emphatically slow rhythms.

And by the time Pound wrote his Canto II, he was, in parallel with the work of other “imagists” and T. S. Eliot during the war and post-war years, writing a more truly free verse, with speech stresses packed close together, and by Canto IX he was extending the rhythms of the Cantos all the way to documentary prose.  His was the first documentary poem, I believe.  (His A Draft of XVI Cantos was published in 1925—Pound was forty.  The next great documentary poem in the U. S. was Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead, published in 1938).

From Canto II:

So–shu churned in the sea.

Seal sports in the spray–whited circles of cliff–wash.

Sleek head, daughter of Lir,

eyes of Picasso

Under black fur–hood […]

In these five lines, there are three sequences of three consecutive speech stresses, then a sequence of five, then another of three at the end.  I mean speech stresses, not metrical accents.  Speech stresses are apparent in any text or utterance; metrical accents are only apparent in metrical verse, and as I mentioned in the last post, it’s the interplay between them that makes for the rhythmic energy of metrical verse.  In fact, even these lines can be scanned as metrical!—but the feeling of meter is gone.  Pound is still thinking in meter—as how could he not, after all the ear-training he had done before creating a new way of writing—but he has broken it loose from the pattern of alternating syllables that have a considerable difference in emphasis, which is the basis of iambic meter.  So not only is his line broken up into short chunks, as in “The Return,” but now it also has really been packed with consecutive speech stresses that somehow, because of their emphatic rhythm, heighten the visual clarity of the description, give the visual images more vividness.  It’s a kind of high-def rhythm, you might say.

By 1923, William Carlos Williams, who turned forty that year, had been writing in truly free verse for a while and his themes were maturing; he published the book that broke the freedom of poetic rhythm open for him and for just about anybody else who wanted to be open, Spring and All.  After the opening sections in prose, the first piece in that book that is in lines (well-known as one of his best poems) begins this way:

By the road to the contagious hospital

under the surge of the blue

mottled clouds driven from the

waste of broad, muddy fields

brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen […]

Then he keeps going in that modest, beautiful way–deferring the subject and the verb, continuing to “break” the lines just where the syntax absolute requires the next word (such as “the / waste”) , and letting these truly free rhythms of English go at a more relaxed pace (but without losing any of the visual vividness that Pound, too, wanted).  Williams uses the enjambment and the syntax to differentiate his lines from both prose, on the one hand, and from metrical verse, on the other.  (In contrast, and effective in a different way at creating a new kind of poetic writing, Pound avoided such strong enjambments and used other means to mark his free verse as being poetry—mythological and other allusions to evoke a vast context of poetry and history and language, speech stresses packed close together, elliptical narratives and trains of thought, and a diction that is not at all the everyday language that Williams preferred.)

Most of the poets—that is to say, almost all of us—in all the succeeding generations after Pound and Williams, T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Marianne Moore, have tended to follow Williams rather than Pound.  It’s not that Williams couldn’t produce an emphatic rhythm, though. Here are lines 9-13 of that same poem:

All along the road the reddish

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy

stuff of bushes and small trees

with dead, brown leaves under them

[and] leafless vines—

But Williams doesn’t let that “ghost” of iambic meter show—no, I’m only testing you; he does show it.  Here’s how: “All | along | the road | the red | dish purp| lish, forked, | upstand |ing, twig | gy stuff | of bush | es and | small trees | with dead, | brown leaves“— all of that, if it were disposed properly in a metrical poem, would be heard as iambic meter without a single substitution (except for the “headless” first foot).  But Williams, unlike Pound, takes his lines out of any metrical context, and simply uses the iambic rhythms that English gives him.  Well, perhaps he makes them somewhat more regular, but his lines feel free to us, nevertheless.  And in this same amazing book, he has the wonderful poem that begins this way (it’s part XVIII):

The pure products of America

go crazy—

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of

Jersey

with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf–mutes, thieves

old names

and promiscuity between […]

He too can set up a sequence of five consecutive speech stresses, or let the rhythms run quickly, in a way that we hear as very free and yet very expressive.

I had intended to stick with meter, but I got distracted by the way meter is re-mixed, if that’s the right word, as the first free verse.  There are some good sources on this, especially Charles O. Hartmann’s Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody, which is still probably the best such, although I have not read it for so long that for all I know I got these very examples from it.  (And if so, then thank you, Charles.)

Next time I will get back to meter, and luxuriate in its more traditional modern practitioners, although I am also eventually going to go back to Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Now, after the last post, it’s time for more detail.  I’m sure I can’t contribute anything new to a discussion of rhythm (and meter), but I can at least give a very brief account of how I listen, and hoping it will be useful to others.  This exercise is not about “getting something right”—which would feel like a test.  Judgment in the arts depends on the ear or eye or kinetic sense of the judge—the better ear will hear pleasures or problems that the less trained ear won’t notice.  Well, virtuosity does have its tests, but they are for the sake, ultimately, of expressiveness, pleasure and the powers of the work.  I remember Michael S. Harper saying many years ago that the technical virtuosity of Gwendolyn Brooks’s first book, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), was the proof of the commitment of her civil rights politics.

Let’s look at Ezra Pound’s famous little poem, “The Return” (1913).  Pound was on the way toward creating his own free verse—by which I mean lines of variable length and also variable rhythm.  (Igor Stravinsky composed his “Rites of Spring” in 1912, making use of time signatures that change as frequently as every measure—with opening measures in 4/4, 3/4, and 2/4, and, to add even more complexity, containing notes grouped by three, by five, as well as two or four.  It’s impossible to hear such passages as being in measures, because it’s a kind of musical free verse.  Stravinsky also combines regular time signatures and irregular ones in the same piece—just as Moussorgsky had done in his suite “Pictures at an Exhibition,” although not nearly no strikingly.  The effect is that the rhythms sound more spontaneous, and in the case of Bartok, for example, we may hear the real song and dance measures of Balkan folk song, which are incredibly complex compared to the double or triple beat of folk songs of regions farther west.)

But Pound’s momentous experiment in “The Return” goes only halfway from metrical verse to free verse, for here Pound is using different metrical sequences of feet (rather than regular metrical lines)—sequences that he breaks into lines of irregular length.  This is not meter but rather the use of small metrical “figures”—that is, patterns shorter than a line that we can find in metrical lines all the way back to Shakespeare.

“The Return” poem is widely available on line, so you might try opening another window in order to see the entire poem as you read this brief commentary on Pound’s rhythms.  I’m not able to show the poem in a side-window.

I’ll scan the first four lines:

../………………../…………. /…………/……../…..

See, they | return; | ah, see | the tent |ative |

…/………………………………./……/

Movements,| and the ‘ slow feet,                                 [total = 3 feet]

………./………./…………/……../……………../…..

The troub |le in | the pace |and the | uncertain

…./……./

Wav |ering!

Once we have underlined both the speech stresses and marked the metrical accents, which takes only a moment (and which one quickly learns to do in the mind’s ear), we can see that the whole stanza (like the rest of the poem) is in iambic meter, with perfectly typical “substitutions”—that is, here and there a foot that is trochaic, or, as in line two, what I’m calling “that other thing” (see the previous post), which consists of two syllables with no speech stress at all followed by two that are both naturally stressed.  Together the four syllables make up two feet.

(Some readers—and poets—argue that both feet can be scanned as iambic, if one wishes to be consistent; but such consistency is really for the sake of creating a kind of system of meter that can naturalize as many different configurations of a metrical foot as possible, but to me that is a kind of arithmetic, and what I’m interested in is hearing what the lines do in relation to an unforced, more or less natural speech stress such as we use in conversation.  And I also think that my way of reading is a way of seeing the basic ground of meter as systematic, as in fact it is, while simply allowing for some variations that work, and counting on the poet’s and reader’s ear to hear that some just don’t.)

So line 1 is iambic pentameter, with the lovely touch that the last two syllables have no appreciable speech stress—let’s say (using the scale of 4 that I mentioned in the previous post) a 1 and a 2.  Line 2 has three feet, not one of which is iambic, but all of which are acceptable (by which I mean not only consistent with metrical verse but also enjoyable, rather than inept) substitutions: a trochee and then that “other thing.”  Lines 3 and 4—if we read them together across Pound’s enjambment in the middle of a foot—add up to to seven perfectly consistent feet in iambic meter.

Pound’s idea of free verse at this point seems to be that the poet needs to “break the back of the pentameter,” as he put it, simply by breaking lines in metrically iambic rhythm (with some emphatic substitutions) into irregular lengths, and even breaking a metrical passage in the middle of a foot.  Pound had a wonderful ear.  Scanning the lines (that is, reading them for the meter) shows us how he, like almost all English-language poets until the twentieth century, plays the speech stresses against the reader’s expectation of a regular iambic meter.  Nowadays, too few readers seem to hear this interplay, and so the rhythmic effects of a poem like this are only perceived as interesting somehow, or emphatic.  (Which they can be.)

(Again, an analogy from music: scarcely any of us can hear the emotional qualities of the different keys on the piano.  For example, A-major vs. E-flat, vs.  F-sharp minor, vs. C-major: Bach regarded C-major, precisely because its tuning, even on a well-tempered piano, was close to perfect, as the key of God.  We don’t learn to hear these expressive qualities of key signatures because we don’t hear that many pianos, and because the keyboard instruments that we do hear are no longer “well-tempered” but blandly tuned to match the tuning of electronic keyboards.  Nor, I think, do we much notice the emotional effect of how a composer moves a piece from one key to another and back.)

Hearing a free-verse poem or a metrical poem if we haven’t trained our ears can give us only a vague idea of how and why rhythms are interesting or emphatic.  And a poet who doesn’t hear the rhythmic workings of a metrical line or even a strongly rhythmic (which doesn’t necessarily mean “regular”) free-verse line won’t be able to hear what Pound soon realized: the metrical “figures” (such as a trochee followed by an iamb, and the that “other thing”) can be used in free verse, too.  They’re no longer “metrical figures,” but they’re still “rhythmical figures.”  A poet who doesn’t hear rhythms, even with intuitive responsiveness, isn’t able to do much with them in a new poem.

Pound’s favorites are, first, the initial trochee followed by an iamb: “See, they return,” “See, they return,” “These were the Wing’d-,” “Gods of the wing-,” “With them the sil-,” “Sniffing the trace,” “These were the swift,” “These the keen–scent-” (the speech stress on keen is a 3 and on scent a 4, let’s say), “Slow on the leash,” Pallid the leash-” (there are more instances of this repeated pattern than we would expect to find in a more politely behaved iambic poem).  And second, a packing of speech stresses (iambic meter can do this without disrupting the pleasing iambic alternation of weak and strong metrical accents by using unequal stresses of 3 or even 3.5 before a 4, instead of 1 and 4); Pound puts two only slightly unequal speech stresses in the same foot, or uses “that other thing”: “and the slow feet,” “Haie! Haie!,” “and half turn back,” “keen–scented,” “leash–men.”

Altogether in this poem there are 50-some speech stresses, out of just over 100 syllables.  Which is about what we would expect in English.  But Pound gets more forceful rhythms out of them.  And he also uses the line to create a rhythmic slowing down in the last nine lines by making them shorter and stopping each at the end with punctuation (whereas in the first four lines, which I scanned, above, the sentence flows easily past the enjambments at the ends of lines 1 and 3).  So the rhythms of the poem become more compact and more emphatic as it concludes, as it intensifies its feeling of awe and dread in this vision of the Greek gods, as if even now they might fly to see the world as it has become.  (Hermes had winged shoes, but all the Olympian gods seem to be able to fly wherever they want, instantaneously.)

When Pound then moved on to his Cantos, he began that sequence with an unmistakable nod in the direction of meter, and an unmistakable announcement that he was now writing something new that had the same power of rhythmical emphasis that metrical poetry has, but uses it more freely.  He went the rest of the way to truly free verse, but without losing the rhythmic power that meter had made possible.  In Canto I, he creates a mock-epic episode that he indicates he is translating or rephrasing from a Renaissance Latin translation of the ancient Greek original of the Odyssey.  (I’ll underline the speech stresses, all of them 3s or 4s).

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward

Bore us out onward….

The packing of speech stresses (in five out of six syllables from the end of line three through the beginning of line four); the use of emphatic alliteration in imitation of Anglo-Saxon verse (“set… sail…swart ship”; “bore… aboard…bodies,” etc.); and behind these lines, the lively “ghost of the pentameter”—as T. S. Eliot put it—create a potent narrative opening.  (The hovering of that “ghost” is notable in Eliot’s The Waste Land, especially in part III (lines 231-256), where he the ghost into view very expressively to suggest the squalor of a kind of  mechanical modern life—in his day, the mechanical music of the phonograph and the “mechanical” rhythm of loveless sex.

(More to come.)

POETIC RHYTHM AND METER

It may be that in providing this brief—but useful, I hope—sketch of poetic rhythm and meter, over the next several posts, I am at work in a literary equivalent of art history: “poetry history.”  I can’t help feeling that the workings of language at this level of rhythm have not been added to the toolkits of a lot of poets.  There are admirable new poets whose work is rich with rhythm and sound is wonderful and wonderfully different ways–recently, I have read Urayoán Noel’s Hi-Density Politics (BlazeVox 2010) and Sherwin Bitsui’s Floodsong (Copper Canyon, 2009).  For me, the experience of reading a fragment of Anacreon, a poem by John Donne, one by Lorine Niedecker, one by Urayoán Noel, and one by Sherwin Bitsui on the same morning—this morning—is an exhilarating participation in the life of poetry.  So while what follows may seem to some readers “poetry history,” I wouldn’t still devote myself to thinking about it if I didn’t experience it as being very alive, and if I didn’t think that this treasure-chest is out in the open, not buried by poetry misers, and it’s for us all to find, to use.  (It endlessly replenishes itself).  

~

For the poet, what matters is learning how to hear the rhythmic patterns that the English language creates, and using them, in one way or another, expressively.  (In the work of some poets they are used very emphatically, and in work of others, scarcely at all.)  For the reader this is about learning how to hear what’s being said, beyond and also inside the meaning of the words.  For the poet, this is about learning to make one’s own choices about the rhythms of speech stresses (and, in the past and still among a number of poets, metrical accents).  (These are two different things.)  For the reader, it’s about hearing the music of the individual poet.  After all, the poet who’s listening while working finds that s/he is sounding out— discovering—at least sometimes, the voice that s/he wants to hear and wants heard.  And the reader who’s listening hears how the poetic pace and rhythm of language is the subtly embodied, and also subliminal, dance of the meaning.

The artistic problem is to work with rhythm with as much deliberateness as possible, both intuitively and consciously, to keep growing into one’s own voice.  (The metaphor of “finding” it, as if it were something that already existed, is misleading; what’s true is the metaphor of “finding” it in the process of finding one’s way forward in anything.)  The poet’s use of the rhythms of speech (and of meter) isn’t mechanical, but instead—and fittingly for those poets to whom it matters—it’ a kind of soft singing that is vital (that is, with the feeling of life in it).  The performance is not mechanical.

Of course there’s poetry with no song of any kind in it.  And there’s non-metrical singing (free and syllabic).  I’ll come to some examples, later. 

Writing with attention to any of the qualities and elements of poetry is about being judged by one’s readers (real and imagined, living and dead).  No way to escape that.  No reason to want to escape it.  And there is no one right way to understand rhythm and meter, since all the proof is in the way the poem itself sounds, to those readers.  About meter, I have heard one excellent poet say to another, with utter sincerity and severity, yet not without friendliness, “You’re wrong.”  And there are analytical accounts by scholars of linguistics and language that don’t much serve poets, who—like musicians—mostly learn from scores and from performance.  (But not neglecting “theory.”  There’s “music theory” so of course there’s “poetry theory,” although no one calls it that.)  There is enough agreement on the way meter sounds in English for us not to get lost in the minor quarrels about how to analyze it.  While English-language poetry can do lots of things (and has done a huge variety of things), what concerns me in this series of posts is what it does most inherently, and therefore what poets have mostly done with it, in its long history.

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We speakers of English use speech stress for emphasis and for clarity of meaning; the rhythms of our language are predominantly an alternation between syllables that we stress when speaking and syllables that we do not.  Predominantly, but not wholly so—which is what makes for the liveliness of rhythmic variation that is as much a part of the English language as it is of music.  Beyond this fundamental fact about English, there is the subtler reality that we use different degrees of stress when speaking.  Some linguists posit four comparative degrees.  We can roughly distinguish them by ear—a range from a completely unstressed syllable (like the second syllable in “syllable”) and the most emphatically stressed syllables: “Yikes!.”  I myself don’t write by such numbers, any more than I would paint by numbers, and I doubt that anyone does—but I know I’m hearing them, and using this kind of relative “weight” or duration or volume.  And when I break them down, while reading a poem (as a painter would break down color relations when studying a painting), I can use this scale of 1 to 4 to sort out how meter and stress play against each other in a poem: 1 will be the absence of stress, 2 and 3 will be intermediate degrees of stress culminating in 4, the greatest amount of stress.

A poet has to train the ear and then the ear can hear without being reminded of schemes.  It’s the same with music.  And poets train the ear by playing or singing, in our own way—just as musicians do.

Rhythms of language have to do with the sequences of syllables that we stress “naturally” and those that we don’t.  Meter plays on and with the irregularities among the generally regular alternating stressed and unstressed syllables in our speech, and on the degree of stress, but putting them both into counterplay with a pattern of very clear expectation.

Since the practice of English poetic meter became more or less solidified in the late 16th century, it hasn’t changed very much as a way of taking advantage of the inherent iambic rhythms of our language.  This must be because the rhythmic patterns of English haven’t changed or varied enough to throw very many ears out of tune—despite all the changes in pronunciation and usage over many centuries and in many English-speaking places, from Oxford to East London to the Lake District, Belfast to Glasgow to Toronto, from Chicago to San Antonio to Seattle, from Sidney to Johannesburg to Delhi.  So the alternating speech stresses and lack thereof, from one syllable to the next, that characterize the sound of English still set the dominant rhythm of the language.  In poetry written freely, this is true; in metrical poetry, this is true.  The question is what effects one hears, as a reader, and what effects one wants, as a poet.  How does the meaning, emphasis, and pleasure of a poetic line or passage create the effect that it does?  Partly this is through the rhythms of English.

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The two elements of meter that we listen to, when we “scan” a metrical poem (that is, when we want to see how the rhythm and meter work together) are (1) the “foot,” as we call it—a small group of syllables (almost always 2, but sometimes 3) in which, when those syllables are considered only in comparison to each other, not in comparison to syllables in any other foot, neighboring or distant, we hear one syllable that is stronger than the other(s); and (2) the line, which creates our expectation of breath and syntax.  Often the metrical accent within a foot is also a natural speech speech; at other times, it is invited by the metrical pattern itself, as I’ll show.

Over many years, many schemes have been proposed, some of them very complicated, for classifying different types of metrical feet, derived from terminology used originally to classify feet in ancient Greek meter, which was very different in every way from our own—in how the language sounded (so far as we can guess), what a “foot” was (the term must have been used because poetry was song, and song meant dance), what the different kinds of feet (that is, dance rhythms) were, and how a line was composed out of feet.  Here is where some readers will become bore or will panic, but really, it’s simple.  The most important criterion for any way of looking at poetic meter is whether it helps us clarify what we read and improve what we write, without itself becoming an impediment to our pleasure in reading.  Some scholarly analyses set out to account not only for the general way meter works but also for the variations, including those that don’t seem to make sense according to a scheme.  But that kind of analysis is not about pleasure.  And what’s most important for readers and writers is to hear what poetic lines in English do, to get a feel for the living movement of speech within the pulse of meter.  To get a feeling for an individual poet’s particular rhythmic structure, as well as its relation to the rhythmic structures of other poets.  And to catch the nuances of meaning that meter makes possible.

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I’m using a scheme that I’ve come to by practical decisions, over years of reading, and that I keep simple.  In this poem or that, there may be feet that I can’t account for.  But not so many, except when I am accounting for them by judging them to be clumsy, poorly heard by the poet, forced—or just inept (the usual reason).  (When I read, I judge poems as better or worse; I don’t read them primarily for the information they convey about literature or poets more generally, more historically, more theoretically.)  To figure out what is happening rhythmically in a metrical poem, I pay attention to three things: speech stresses, metrical accents, and the boundaries between feet.  I use only the usual terminology for distinguishing four different kinds of feet from each other: the rhythmical mirror-image iamb and trochee; feet with three syllables; and the double foot that consists of two quick little syllables followed by two strong ones.  I could call them “A,” “mirror-A,” “B,” and “C”—but that would only introduce new terms to be learned, and everyone has already heard the words “iambic”; “trochaic”; and “anapestic” (which is the most common shape of a three-syllable foot).  As for that double thing, I call it “that thing” (there are some established names for it, but there are also disagreements about what it is, so I’ll leave all that to one side.)

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I. What are we hearing?

There are two kinds of rhythmic emphasis: natural speech stresses and metrical accents. As I suggested above, natural speech stress is an essential aspect of spoken English. “He told her,” “He told her,” and “He told her” mean three different things in English; other languages don’t often work that way—they distinguish the three different meanings with other linguistic elements.  Anyone who doesn’t hear the speech stress in English may misunderstand what is being said.  Metrical accent, on the other hand, is an artifice that makes use of a natural element of our language, so meter is apparent and relevant only in a poem written in meter.

Poetic meter is a regularity of rhythmic pattern that allows for a multiplicity of speech rhythms. Meter organizes speech stresses so that they mostly match the meter in their regularity of occurrence, even as they produce a pleasing variety in their degree of emphasis.

Together, the interplay of the variety in degrees of speech-stress emphasis (1 through 4) and the regularity of metrical emphasis produce complex and variable poetic rhythms, while doing so within a relatively simple overall scheme.

~

Some specifics: We often speak several unstressed syllables in a row—naturally we don’t distinguish them as such.  (The underlined syllables in that phrase are the speech stresses—two 4′s [na- and -tin-] and two 3′s, perhaps, which add up to four syllables out of twelve in all, hence eight unstressed syllables.)  So sometimes, because the way we speak often includes many unstressed syllables, the use of poetic meter can result in a foot with no appreciable speech stress—that is, a foot in which the speech stresses might be measured very roughly by the ear as 1,1.  (By the way, of course there are poets who don’t wish their poetic language to have very much to do with speech, who choose to work against speech; I’ll leave that case to one side, for now.)  In a metrical poem, two adjacent unstressed syllables will still create a metrical foot in which the second syllable will have a metrical accent:

/                 /              /             /                   /               /

natur | ally | we don’t | distin| guish them | as such

I can scan that as a six-foot iambic line: the first foot is reversed (a trochee), with the accented syllable first, coinciding with the speech stress on the first syllable of “naturally.”  Then five iambs.  The speech stresses might be:

4    1       1  1      1      3          1   4         1        2         1      4

natur | ally | we don’t | distin| guish them | as such

But nobody has to worry about assessing the four degrees of speech stress; I’m just illustrating with this sentence the range of them.  The important thing is that in all the feet after the first one, we can easily give the second syllable an iambic metrical accent–it does coincide with strong speech stresses in the third, fourth and sixth foot, it sorts out the difference in less-than-emphatic stress in the fifth foot (“them” sounds stronger, lengthier) and it matches up well enough with the second foot, in which the “ly” sounds longer than the “al.”  So a perfectly ordinary sentence can turn out to scan nicely.  It’s simply pleasing that the metrical scheme works out so nicely against the ordinary speech rhythm of that sentence.

In a metrical poem, beyond creating pleasing emphasis and rhythmic interplay, the meter can even determine or clarify the meaning. For example, if this sentence, “I can’t believe what he told her,” were spoken unselfconsciously, there would be speech stresses—perhaps, depending on the meaning—on “can’t,” “-lieve,” “told her.”  In a metrical poem, the ambiguities of vocal emphasis in this sentence would be resolved.  The entirely iambic line “I can’t | believe | what he | told her” shifts the expected speech stresses, showing the reader that the word “he” stands in a position where it is metrically accented, and therefore the line is emphasizing that what’s important here is that this “he” was perhaps not expected to say what he said—maybe someone else was expected to have told her; or it could mean that, contrary to expection, “he” told “her” rather than “her” telling him.”  This is so in the metrical line even though “he” as emphasized in speech might not be given as strong a degree of spoken emphasis, as strong a speech stress, as “her.”  In this metrical line, perhaps “he” is a 3 and “her” is a 4, which in turn is stronger than “told,” which might be a 3.  And because “her” is the second syllable in the last foot of the line in a metrical poem (a very emphatic position for a word to occupy), the line tells us that it gets a lot of emphasis.  Remember, we only compare the two syllables within the foot, so “told her” as it is placed in this metrical line is an iambic foot, and “told” no longer has an emphatic speech stress.  Instead, it has a pleasingly strong stress for a metrically UNaccented syllable; this is a kind of rhythmical syncopation:

2   4        1      4         1      3        2     4

I can’t | believe | what he | told her—

So in a metrical poem, the meter can determine how the reader understands such a line.  Some hastily improvised doggerel (I know it’s awful)  to illustrate:

After He Found Out

Because the coat had been his mom’s, he said

His wife would warm this old, cold fur,

She left it at the cleaners, though.  They called—

I can’t believe what he told her.

If this same line were in a free-verse poem, on the other hand, there’s no pattern that can tip the reader one way or another toward interpretation of what the poem is emphasizing.

The most important practice of reading, then, is that thinking about poetic meter, we don’t say a line aloud in any sort of sing-song exaggeration of the alternating stressed and unstressed syllables of the meter.  We don’t let the meter tell us where speech stresses are; that’s what bad actors do.  Instead, we let the unforced, more natural speech stresses play against the meter, and vice versa.  The key to hearing meter is listening first to how the line might be sounded as more or less natural speech, and then seeing how those speech stresses, which will vary, relate to the metrical pattern (including the usual variations, which must have arisen as artistic responses to the pleasing variability of speech stresses in English; more on this, later).

Someone may be asking—what was the point?  Why did poets bother?  It must have to do with the pleasure of hearing how English can be lightly organized in this way so as to mark the language of the poem as poetic, not everyday; and also with the pleasure of hearing poems as songs.  Songs without instrumental music or sung melodies based on pitch—songs of melodies based on rhythm and meaning.  Very expressive word music.

(Much more to come.)

Most of the time that I spend thinking about poetry, I do so in terms of specific aspects of how it works.  This is usually called the art of poetry, but more often the phrase is taken to mean the craft, the techniques, of poetry.  So, for example, for the last two months I have been trying to write an essay about poetry and the histories of words that words themselves preserve (simply because over time they often change more in meaning than in form; because of this the traces of their earlier meanings are still spelled—perhaps in both senses of that last word.)

How, then, might the definition of the “art” of poetry, in the higher sense, be expressed?  This has been a topic of discussion since ancient times, and for some reason I too feel that before I say a few things about the “art of poetry” (meaning craft, but also meaning “way of thinking”), I am obliged to say something about the “art” of it in the higher sense.

Notorious, oversimplified philosophical disparagement (such as Plato’s) and privileging (such as Shelley’s or Heidegger’s) mark the opposite extremes of a continuum along which many have tried to be definitive.  Wanting to be definitive is exactly what’s wrong with extreme positions, because the history of poetry is an ark carrying many different creatures, all of whom share the quality of being alive.  Poetry is plural in nature.  Yet I too want to define it.

We might say that the art (in the higher sense) and the vocation of the poet must go hand in hand—with poetic thinking and the strangely powerful and endless possibilities of language and poetry, on that one hand, and a sense of the purposes, powers, and uses of poetry, and of the social role of the poet, and of the poet’s experience and uses of creativity, on the other.  Those may well be the most important things, but for a poet to begin with them in practice would be like a composer exploring what music is before even learning how to play an instrument or sing, and only then composing something.   No, it’s the practice that leads the theory, just as rhyme can at least sometimes lead the thought.  And I don’t see the practice of art, and the vocation of artist, as having any essential relation with mysticism or religious belief of any kind, or special access to other sorts of truth, or election to special status, even though all of these are uses that poetry and poets have served.

Whatever poetry’s social function, now or in the past, in the English language or any other, I see the practice of poetry as an experience of spirit (however we define that) in the individual—not essentially for the sake of enlightenment or peace or heaven or authority, but for the sake of being fully alive in one’s inner life, and alive to one’s inner life, and especially alive in and to language.  Others see poetry as the manifestation of something ineffable and even incommunicable—as a crude form of communication that happens to be necessary in order to convey that ineffable something else to others or in order to offer up a worshipful homage (as in the work of Rumi, the poet who is, I have heard, the most popular in America).  The ineffable something is a particular and particularly exalted state of mind (in Rumi’s case mystical, ecstatic, monotheist).  Such respect for, and interest in, the inexpressible is found in the ancient world, too—for instance in the Greek essay “On the Sublime” (author unknown) that was much later to have such an important role in the Romantic movement of England and Germany, and then in later poetry of Europe and America, and eventually nearly everywhere.  Seeking to articulate the inexpressible also goes back to the ideas of Neo-Platonists devoted to apprehending what they believed cannot be apprehended, beginning with the nature of the Christian God.  Some traditions emphasize visionary experience; others emphasize that but also language—the uncanny seeing power of words themselves.  In these latter cases, too, the impulse of the art of poetry is primarily worshipful.  (Poetry can be worshipful in some secular sense, too, so the list of the worshipful includes a range like this: Nerval, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Whitman, Rilke, Eliot, Celan, Bunting, Césaire, Darwish, and multitudes more.)

The very practice of poetry, because its original materials are our everyday speaking and reading and writing, makes possible precious kinds of thinking beyond the everyday; unusual access to the truth of lived experience, at least–our own and that of others; and to what cannot be experience but only imagined; and great pleasure in the use of those poetic materials.  (They are breath and the body that shapes breath; thus even the complex expressive instrument that is language-and-body—that is, poetic rhythm; words themselves and endlessly various and fascinating syntax; the ear and mind that hear language as if it were music as well as thought; and–for us, in our world–the medium of printed language, whether on the page or an electronic screen).

And poetry is a vocation because like all crafts it has the capacity, itself, to reward the maker; and the maker enters the craft because in some sense “called” (even if, in psychoanalytic terms, this is a call from one part of the self to another).  This kind of reward (the word derives ultimately from prehistoric Indo-European wer-4, to perceive, watch out for, thus to guard, thus that which is guarded) is not material.  The practice of the craft (the art) rewards the maker.  Of course poets of the ancient steppes, of old Ireland, of the Zulu kingdom, and perhaps nearly everywhere (pre- and post-industrial), may want, need, and even deserve reward; the ancient bargain between chieftains and poets is the exchange of material reward for the poet, and immaterial and long-lasting fame for the chieftain.  Some modern and contemporary poets, too, have received substantial material rewards and themselves enjoy high regard, but their strictly poetical power to confer undying fame has entirely evaporated—replaced by the potency of clever advertising, which can produce immense dying fame or notoriety.

Although I know no way to refute the reality of this immaterial reward, anyone who may envy me and others for holding the lucky job of being a teacher at a school that prizes arts and humanities may doubt my praise of poetry as an art apart from material reward, for I can be accused by some of merely congratulating myself and trying to divert attention from my own material reward: my job.  I am indeed materially rewarded, and apparently it’s at least in part for my poems, although I can achieve no fame for anyone, even fleetingly, including myself.  My material reward has much less to do with poetry than with the advantages, at least for some, of living in one of the parts of the world that is wealthy, and the luck of being able to make a place near the stream of that wealth in which to dip a cup. 

But poetry itself is not diminished by the asymmetries of wealth and suffering in the world.  And the non-material reward of creating a work—of words or wood, watercolors or wool—partakes of something like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s famous “flow,” and at best, of the experience of virtuosity (of craft and of feeling) and of the capacity for occasionally being able to write up to, or at least near, one’s hope of discovery.  “You know what it’s like,” a pianist once said to me, “when you’re playing and somehow you reach that state where the piece is playing itself, and you don’t even have to think any more about what you yourself are actually doing?”  No, when I’m at the piano, I don’t know that feeling.  But I have had it with a pencil in my hand.  (My two favorite instruments of human music are the massive, incomparable, bourgeois grand piano, and the humble, extraordinary, nearly weightless pencil.  Once I met a poet who saw me with a yellow pencil behind my ear and said with some disappointment that I was looking like a carpenter—it took me a moment to realize that I was proud of this.)  And no matter what one is lucky or unlucky to be doing as a way of making a living, the idea of poetry as an element in a “gift economy,” rather than of a money economy, is venerable and worthy of veneration, and it preserves something beautifully gratuitous about all art—even in our Whole World Whirlwind that spins the elemental and the high-technological, the poor and the rich, horror and love, in the same moving spiral.

Now onward toward the how rather than the what and the why.

… but in my case the significant snow has not been literal.

And by the way, the most ancient root of “fame,” which is one of the most important ideas in the ancient world, and the one that guaranteed the role of poets, is the Proto-Indo-European bha-, “to speak”  Thus, to speak in a particularly strong way—promising to sustain the name of the great warrior or chieftain after his death, and in fact fulfilling this promise, here and there; or—working in the opposite direction—cursing his enemies.  The root is in The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, ed. by Calvert Watkins, Houghton Mifflin, 2000 (and the major source for that dictionary can be found on line, as for example at the Linguistics Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/PokornyMaster-X.html).

My delay in returning to this blog about poetry has simply been the result of being at work on other things, which, if they are what I’m trying to write, precipitate (or not) with their own impulse or rhythm; and if they are professional responsibilities, then they are like a herd of (prehistoric) sheep that need to be sheared, one each day, forever.  (Eventually I hope to get to the subject of weaving another sort of metaphorical wool—language.)

Lately I have gotten back to work on what I hope will be the last few in my long-gestating group of essays on poetic thinking.  One is on choral thinking, and I now realize that have been working on it, or at least thinking about it, ever since the mid-1980s.  The other is still looking for its path, but it has been turning up some things that I find very interesting—or I should say, compelling—to think about.  Here’s a passage from David W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2007).  The names in bold, preceded by an asterisk, have been reconstructed by analysis of their derivatives in other, later, languages.

At the beginning of time there were two brothers, twins, one named Man (*Manu, in Proto-Indo-European) and the other Twin (*Yemo). They traveled through the cosmos accompanied by a great cow. Eventually Man and Twin decided to create the world we now inhabit. To do this, Man had to sacrifice Twin (or, in some versions, the cow). From the parts of this sacrificed body, with the help of the sky gods (Sky Father, Storm God of War, Divine Twins), Man made the wind, the sun, the moon, the sea, earth, fire, and finally all the various kinds of people. Man became the first priest, the creator of the ritual of sacrifice that was the root of world order.

After the world was made, the sky-gods gave cattle to “Third man” (*Trito). But the cattle were treacherously stolen by a three-headed, six-eyed serpent (*Ngwhi, the Proto-Indo-European root for negation). Third man entreated the storm god to help get the cattle back. Together they went to the cave (or mountain) of the monster, killed it (or the storm god killed it alone), and freed the cattle. *Trito became the first warrior. He recovered the wealth of the people, and his gift of cattle to the priests insured that the sky gods received their share in the rising smoke of sacrificial fires. This insured that the cycle of giving between gods and humans continued. (134)

In his note to these paragraphs, Anthony adds:

The three sky gods named here almost certainly can be ascribed to Proto-Indo-European. Dyeus Pater, or the Sky/Heaven Father, is the most certain. The Thunder/War god was named differently in different dialects but in each branch was associated with the thunderbolt, the hammer or club, and war. The Divine Twins likewise were named differently in the different branches—the Nâsatyas in Indic, Kastôr and Polydeukês in Greek, and the Dieva Dêli in Baltic. They were associated with good luck, and often were represented as twin horses, the offspring of a divine mare. (479 n.1)

(Dyeus Pater —the name of a father sky god—is the root of Greek “Zeus” and Roman “Jupiter.”)

In this essay-in-progress (and in another), I’m trying to think my way into the ancientness of aspects of poetic craft that have scarcely changed.  Some of what I’m reading is about language, and about poetry and studies of poetry, so it inevitably leads me back to the world of the earliest known (or rather unknown) poetry in the language family to which English belongs.  That is, the small word list that has turned out to be inconceivably generative, over the last three or four millennia.  Anthony is briefly summarizing what can be known about the core mythology of the speakers of what we call Proto-Indo-European (which was spoken, and then superseded by its daughter languages, so long before there was writing, that even the last speakers of PIE have left us no written utterance, although happily they left linguistic traces that are still apparent in later languages).

I’ll post more about this, as I go.  And I intend to post on poetic rhythm and meter; on more instances of the variety of ways in which poems think; on translating poetry; and other topics.

M. NourbeSe Philip gave a reading on May 12 as a guest of the Poetry and Poetics Workshop (of the Alice Kaplan Humanities Institute at Northwestern) and of the Center for the Writing Arts.  (See http://www.nourbese.com)

Philip read from her 2008 book Zong!, which seeks to discover an adequate way of showing the inadequacy of our ability to write anything as extreme as the history of a slave massacre at sea.  In this work, Philip pursues the disassembly and reassembly of syntactical structures and the use of words as objects. Public radio station WBEZ of Chicago recorded the reading, and it can now be heard at: http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=42193

Out walking on an autumn afternoon not long ago, I came upon five-letter inscription written in chalk on an otherwise unoccupied sidewalk near my home.  Written entirely in upper case letters, it was apparently the work of child who lives in the neighborhood.  The letters were these: STRTE.  A box-like rectangle of chalk lines was drawn around the set of five letters, creating the impression that the text may have been designed to resemble a sign or banner.   Combining my knowledge of the neighborhood, in which children sometimes organize sidewalk races on bicycles or big-wheel riding toys, and my experience deciphering young children’s early experiments with written language, I arrived at the guess that STRTE was written by a six or seven year old child, was meant to represent the word “START,” and that the surrounding rectangle signaled an aim to produce a sign or banner indicating the starting position of a riding course for young riders of bicycles or big-wheel toys.

If we grant the plausibility (if not the firm accuracy) of this conjecture, we can see that this small bit of discarded writing was very likely the work of a child who now, as we approach the end of the first decade of a new century, is just beginning to develop the ability to write — is very nearly at the start, so to speak, of understanding how to use written language effectively, of knowing how to create conventional written forms and novel written texts, and of managing various writing tools and processes.  Assuming that this child will advance beyond the current “STRTE” level of understanding and skill, what can we say about what lies ahead as he or she continues to develop as a writer?  What will be involved as this beginner continues to develop as a writer in the years and decades to come, with the processes of learning, relearning, adjusting, and adapting possibly spanning nearly the entire twenty-first century?

Perhaps the first observation is that the tools for writing — writing’s technology — available to writers and appropriated by beginning writers may vary more than is accounted for in many of the discussions of new media and written communication.  This young writer wrote with chalk on a sidewalk.  For this child, there was, as Roger Chartier (2004) puts it, a certain abstraction of text from materiality, inasmuch as a starting-line banner, if my guess about this text is right, was simulated rather than produced directly.  But there was a palpable materiality to this written composition nonetheless: a mark made with chalk on concrete, a gesture that left a trace.  Learning to write for this young writer may be like learning to write for many other young writers, involving a physical, social, and cognitive act that extends the functions not only of speaking but also of drawing and certain kinds of play (McLane and McNamee 1990).

Even this glimpse of one young child’s experimentation with writing alerts us to the complexity and variability of writing development. Writing development can be shaped in crucial ways by formal writing instruction, but, as recent scholarship has suggested, a premise of understanding writing development is that learning to write often involves more than being taught. (Gundlach 1992, Tolchinsky 2006). Viewed more comprehensively as a dimension of language development, learning to write can be understood as an outcome of the interplay of interacting histories, which, for each individual person, are both broadly cultural and specifically biographical. Individuals begin learning to write, and continue developing as writers — when indeed particular individuals do continue to develop — along various trajectories. These trajectories are shaped by the interplay of individuals’ own inclinations to experiment with writing and their experiences with writing and written language in their families, their communities, their schools, and, especially notable in our time, in the extended virtual geography, sometimes multilingual, of both public broadcast media and personal computer-based, on-line reading and writing activity. (Danet and Herring 2007, Gundlach, 2004). Generalizations about writing development must be tempered by the steady recognition — and hence the firm qualification — that people differ in the ways they learn to write and in the resources they are able and inclined recruit to support the process. These differences are not determined exclusively, and perhaps not chiefly, by the extent to which a writer has access to advanced technology.  Access to chalk, a neighborhood sidewalk, and friends who ride bicycles may form at least a small part of the story for some beginning writers, both now and in the years ahead.

Nonetheless, the increasingly pervasive use of digital technology for written communication in cultures across the world will very likely change the character of writing development in the decades to come in ways that we can scarcely predict today.   Liliana Tolchinsky makes an important contribution in her recent book, The Cradle of Culture and What Children Know About Writing and Numbers Before Being Taught, by emphasizing the value of focusing on the cognitive and linguistics processes involved in the individual “child’s personal work” in “imposing certain principles on the information provided by the environment.” But as Tolchinsky notes, “Children’s ideas [about writing and written language] are not idiosyncratic inventions–although they may appear as such–but rather reflect the selection and elaboration” of what they have encountered in their experience of interacting with readers and writers and their encounters with written language (2003: 93).  In the encounters of the future, children will come upon readers and writers who are increasingly likely to use computers to read and write.  They will also find themselves engaged with computers themselves, and very possibly with machines that offer a mechanized voice reading aloud a text from the screen, whether the text has been created by another writer or by the child himself or herself.  Furthermore, as speech synthesis software programs become more common for reading aloud to beginners, it is also likely that speech recognition programs will also become more common and more adept in transforming a speaker’s utterance into a text on a screen (Sperber 2002, Gundlach 2003).  Some children’s apprenticeships in the course of writing development may well become partly facilitated by — and possibly shaped by — software with features designed to convert text to speech and speech to text.

As speech recognition and speech synthesis software programs become more sophisticated, the machine itself will seem to become increasingly “intelligent” in directing the writer’s choices, in making corrections or other adjustments, and in predicting on behalf of the young writer what the unfolding text could or should include next.  The processes of writing and re-reading one’s own writing-in-progress could thus become increasingly a matter of managing digital tools that offer meaning-inferring and choice-posing software.  Writing with such digital tools may become analogous to mathematical problem solving with the use of advanced calculators and other digital problem-solving tools. Writing development may increasingly involve learning to use “intelligent” composing and editing software effectively.

For at least some children, then, marking sidewalks with chalk may give way in future decades to experimenting with the use of digital writing tools that may resemble hand-held calculators for mathematical operations — writing tools that can create written sentences from a developing writer’s speech and that can speak back, in mechanized voice, the software’s best inference of the words and sentences the child has intended to enter as text.   Even in such intensely mediated and highly mechanized future environments for learning to write, however, a young writer’s development will continue to be influenced not only by access to the digital tools themselves but also by engagement with people who provide help with learning the use of the tools and, as important, for whom the writing and reading activities made possible with such tools have evident meaning and importance.  Such engagement will continue to provide what Emilia Ferreiro calls a child’s highly consequential “first immersion in a ‘culture of literacy.’”  This immersion, Ferreiro suggests in her comments on “Reading and Writing in a Changing World,” provides the experience of  “having listened to someone read aloud, having seen someone write, having had the opportunity to produce intentional marks, having taken part in social acts where reading and writing make sense, and having been able to ask questions and get some kind of answer” (2000: 59).   It is in this kind of sociocultural context, a context that provides opportunities for a child to interact (and, importantly, to identify) with more experienced members of a cultural community and to learn from observing them, that a child undertakes the social and cognitive work of transforming his or her experience in a linguistic environment into individual linguistic ability.

References

Chartier, Roger (2004). Languages, books, and reading from the printed word to the digital text.

Translated by Teresa Lavendar Fagan. Critical Inquiry 31, pp. 133-152.

Danet, Brenda, and Herring, Susan  C. (eds.) (2007).  The Multilingual Internet:            Language, Culture, and Communication Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ferreiro, Emilia (2000). Reading and writing in a changing world. Publishing Research Quarterly 16, pp. 53-61.

Gundlach, Robert (1992).  What it means to be literate. In Beach, R., Green, J., Kamil,  M., and Shanahan, T. (eds), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Literacy Research. Urbana:NCRE/NCTE, pp. 365-372.

Gundlach, Robert (2003). The future of writing ability. In Nystrand, M. and Duffy, J. (eds.),            Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life: New Directions in Research on Writing, Text, and            Discourse. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 247-263.

Gundlach, Robert (2004). Words and lives: Language, literacy, and culture in multilingual Chicago. In Farr, M. (ed.), Ethnolinguistic Chicago. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 381-387.

McLane, Joan B. and McNamee, Gilliam D. (1990). Early Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sperber, Dan (2006). Reading without writing. In Origgi, G. (ed.), text-e: Text in the Age of the Internet. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 144-154.

Tolchinsky, Liliana (2003). The Cradle of Culture. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Tolchinsky, Liliana (2006). The emergence of writing. In MacArthur, C.A, Graham, S., and Fitzgerald, (eds.), Handbook of Writing Research. New York: The Guilford Press, pp. 83-95.