Tag Archives: Charles Olson

The Poem You See Isn’t the Poem You Hear

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Thirty to forty years ago, I taught a number of college courses in Missouri's prisons. One night, in a college composition course, I read a poem aloud to the class. I've forgotten the name of the poet and the title of the poem, but I know it was written in rhyming quatrains. (Right now, I'd guess it was Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz.")

When I finished reading, one inmate commented, that he didn't like poetry that doesn't rhyme. The poem I'd read rhymed; he just didn't hear them. I read the poem again, stressing the rhyming words and showed him the text.

Those who read poems silently miss the heart of the poem, no matter how sophisticated the poem's language or subtle its form. (Some poems are an exception to this rule, mostly concrete poetry.) Poets have long used typography and lay-out as components of a poems form. Ezra Pound's Cantos and many of E.E. Cummings' poems are well-known examples. Here's a sonnet by Cummings. as is Charles Olson's "projective verse," which relied on tab settings on a typewriter to compose poetry on the page as a "field."

The immediate occasion for this posting is the ghazal by Initially NO in the April 2010 issue of The Ghazal Page. Her "The Silence" uses the radif (repeated phrase) of the traditional Persian ghazal but lays the poem out visual in broken lines of different length. David Jalajel does the same thing in his ghazal, "A Frog" (scroll down to see this poem), although he is using the Arabic form of rhyme rather than a radif.

My intention in this post is to call your attention to the importance of the sound of poems. Your appreciation of the ghazals by Initially NO and David Jalajel will be much increased by reading them aloud.

The Poetry of Notation

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I've just published a page on this blog with the title, "The Poetry of Notation." It presents a fairly simple idea about a possibility for poetry. It discusses some of the poetics of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson and offers some suggestions and questions about how these ideas apply to writing ghazals in English.

For the record, I have been strongly influenced by Ezra Pound's poetry and poetics, as well as those of Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams. I read Pound and Williams much more often than Olson now. I did work with Olson's ideas of projective verse or composition by field. 

Writing this page suggested some further possibilities that I hope to pursue soon in posts or pages. While there's nothing especially original about the ideas in "The Poetry of Notation," I think the phrase is original and I find the idea exciting. Perhaps you will also.

The Poetry of Notation

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Reading a chapbook I picked up recently, this phrase occurred to me: “the poetry of notation.” This page is at least an opening discussion of this idea, which seems to me to bring togther elements of the Imagist school, Ezra Pound’s poetics, Charles Olson’s Projective Verse or “composition by field.” and the work and ideas of other poets largely among those influenced by Pound. Here’s a brief discussion of projective verse and a fuller quotation of Olson’s original manifesto.

First, some explanation; then I’ll suggest how these points relate to the ghazal.

In The ABC of Reading, Ezra
Pound discusses “the ideogrammic method” in a couple of pages. The ideogrammic method involves at least two things:

  • using concrete particulars to convey generalizations
  • composing by juxtaposition, a kind of verbal (& visual collage)

A glance at almost any page of Pound’s Cantos will show you his method. There are sudden jumps in specific topic, inclusions of Greek text and Chinese ideographs, quotations in a variety of European languages, even Egyptian hieroglyphs and Native American signs. Some pages look “normal”: left-justified lines, but some pages are collages of various materials.

The point of this page is not to discuss The Cantos. I confess to having read them all, some of them several times, as well as reading some criticism. But the point here is a poetic method of aggregating materials from various sources and composing them to suggest generalizations and abstractions. Pound’s rather Scholastic description is that the materials — images — selected “participate a common quality.” The reader induces that quality from the specific images.

This is a “poetry of notation” because it encourages the poet to include notes of his/her current experience, as Pound notably does in The Pisan Cantos, which include details of his incarceration in Italy at the end of World War II.

Closely related to the ideogrammic method is Pound’s dictum that “The natural object is always the adequate symbol.” He said this in the context of deprecating vague, abstract language and advocated the clarity sought in Imagist poetry.

The ideogrammic method seeks to convey abstractions through conglomerates of concrete particulars; Imagism focuses on clear imagery and direct, natural (not “poetic”) language; projective verse has much in common with Pound’s method, especially in bringing together material from a variety of sources. The use of source material creates a density of reference that can be very effective — and also baffling for the reader unfamiliar with the source.

Now, the chapbook I referred to at the beginning of this page. It is A Kansas Cycle: Poems & a Journal, by Paul Kahn, North Atlantic Books, 1974. When I found it in a used book store, I picked it up immediately. I grew up in Kansas; writing about that state attracts me. I also recognized Kahn’s approach, which seems a little old-fashioned now. He does uses the approach well in any case.

Specifically, this page was inspired by a section of “Notes on a Hike,” a prose record Kahn made of a hike through territory familiar to me. It reads

Image of Adam & Eve / man & woman enclosed in the great Tree. Star branch of cottonwood. Yggdrassil.

This doesn’t exemplify Imagism. It does relate to Pound’s ideogrammic method by juxtaposing several phrases without stating an abstract idea that links them, although an idea seems clearly implied. It is a poetry of notation because it records Kahn’s perceptions and thoughts. He jots down “Yggdrassil,” which image provides a coherence or focus for this brief note, but he doesn’t identify or explain the term. He simply notes it.

Kahn uses typography and page layout in ways reminiscent of Olson’s projective verse and of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson.  I recommend any and all of these poets’ work, especially Pound and Williams.

How does all this relate to the ghazal in English? Here’s a list of points as they occur to me.

  • What if we think of each sher of a ghazal as a notation? Of a ghazal as a set of more-or-less independent notations?
  • What if we think of that set of notations as an ideogram that through its particulars expresses a theme?  (By “theme,” I don’t mean “message.” And it’s the freedom of each reader to discover what the poem means.)
  • Some English ghazals tend to the abstract, “Romantic” diction deprecated by Pound. How necessary are these emotive terms without much concrete reference?
  • The “disunities” of the shers encourages jumps and juxtapositions. The poet can include almost anything, any kind of reference, in a ghazal.
  • In the Imagist manifesto, Pound advocates writing “in the sequence of the melody and not of the metronome.” How can ghazal poets use this insight in writing ghazals in English that maintain the principle of metrical, rhythmic consistency? 
  • Imagism was quickly superceded or expanded. What can we learn from its principles of clear, concise presentation? Imagism was influenced by the Japanese haiku: perhaps some of the developments in English haiku in the last 100 years can suggest directions for ghazal poets.
  • Allusions to such things as Norse mythology (“Yggdrassil”) or stories from the Koran or the Bible or Shakespeare or traditional epics can enrich an individual ghazal and the general culture of the ghazal. The drawback is that such allusions are opaque to readers who don’t recognize them. What constraints should we put on allusions and references in our ghazals? You will find some annotations to ghazals on The Ghazal Page, supplied to me by the poets. I think these are useful. Do you?

I’ve worked on this page for several days. I hope you find it useful and provocative. I’d like to hear your responses. There will likely be some follow up.