Tue Jul 10 19:41:34 2007

Science and Poetry 1

I've been reading some books on science and poetry. What follows isn't a review but my personal responses. Perhaps later I will document some of the assertions I make. And when I accuse Mary Midgley of "sneering," I don't know what else to say when she accuses Susan Blackmore of being a "relapsed parapsychologist." In context, that's simply name-calling.

Mary Midgley's Science and Poetry is a rejoinder of sorts to Richard Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow. I say "of sorts" because it isn't clear to me that Midgley has read Dawkins carefully or really understood what he says. There's very little discussion of poetry or quotations of poetry in her book, where Dawkins discusses poetry and quotes a lot. (He's especially fond of Keats.)

Midgley spends a lot of time beating up "atomism," behaviorism, and individualism. She admits that current physics doesn't hold the old view of atoms and that behaviorism no longer dominates psychological discussion. Still, she whups on them pretty good. She also sneers at "information theory," although, again, she shows little to no understanding of information theory. Dawkins, in a few pages, explains and applies the technical concept of information clearly.

The best part of Science and Poetry is Midgley's discussion of consciousness. She argues that we should study consciousness as the "field" in which all our thinking, feeling, and experiencing take place. She doesn't have much to say about how we should study this "field." In another book, she sneers at Susan Blackmore, but Blackmore has actually studied consciousness and is much less dogmatic than Midgley. Also, Blackmore is an experienced meditator, meditation being one mode of exploring consciousness. (See the collection edited by Blackmore, Converstations in Consciousness; Midgley discusses several of the people whom Blackmore interviews, some of them positively.)

Dawkins argues that poets' imaginations should be inspired by science, rather than attacking science as Blake and Keats did. (Keats appears to be Dawkins' favorite poet.) In discussing various aspects of current scientific theories and ideas, Dawkins constantly refers back to poetry. He writes well, clearly, and expressively. As one who has always been fascinated by science and read nontechnical books about physics and evolution especially, as well as technical books on linguistics, information theory, and semiology, I find Dawkins very convincing, whereas, when Midgley writes about something that I know, she is always wrong or misinformed.

I'm going to let this topic go for right now, but I expect to return to it. I'm also reading (have just started) Aldous Huxley's Literature and Science, which looks promising.

Here's bibliographical information on the books discussed:

• Susan Blackmore. Conversations on Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Richard Dawkins. Unweaving the Rainbow. Houghton-Mifflin, Mariner Books, 2000.
• Aldous Huxley. Literature and Science. Harper and Row, 1963.
• Mary Midgley. Science and Poetry. Routledge Classics, 2002.

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How many can you count?

In an online forum, someone asked about the "correct" plurals for the ghazal terms (ghazal, sher, matla, takhallas, maqta, beher, qafiya, radif.) Someone else answered with plurals for those terms in Arabic and Farsi. My position, though, is that (in English) the "correct" plurals for these words (all nouns) is an added "s." These terms are, or are becoming, nouns in English and naturally take the English plural, as have the many other words that English has absorbed from other languages. If we have any hope of naturalizing the ghazal as an English form, we shouldn't expect English speakers to learn plural forms from other languages. They won't.

At this point, there's not an standard transliteration of these nouns into English: you may see "qafia" or "qafiya," "maqta" or "makhta." Since Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, and other languages have a different set of distinctive speech sounds (phonemes) than does English, very few English speakers will be able to pronounce these words "correctly." The best most of us can hope for is a reasonable approximation. Eventually, the English spellings and pronunciations will stabilize.

The linguistic term for a unit of language that carries meaning is morpheme. The singular/plural forms are morphemes, as are the root forms of words. In English, the common plural morpheme for nouns that can be counted is "s" or "es" added to the end of the noun. This form is the natural plural morpheme for the ghazal terms adopted into English: ghazals, shers, radifs, etc.

In some languages, no morpheme for plural is attached to the noun to show that more than one item is meant. These words are "mass nouns"; they include words such as "deer," "coffee," or "sugar." Instead, a number and, sometimes, a unit of measurement are used: "five deer," "three cups of coffee," and so on.

To my knowledge, none of the ghazal terms are mass nouns. Haiku is an example of a mass noun adopted into English from Japanese. The proper English plural of "haiku" is "haiku." The tendency to add "s" is so strong, though, that some people use *haikus as the plural. (The asterisk means that the expression is ungrammatical.)

Is it cultural imperialism to apply English forms to these ghazal terms? I don't think Westerners would try to avoid cultural imperialism by wearing Arab (or Hindi) dress when writing ghazals; we wear our "normal" dress. Back when the haiku and tanka were new to English, there were folks who adopted Japanese dress as well as Japanese motifs in their poems.

That said, if someone wishes to advocate for the "original" plurals of the ghazal terms, perhaps I'll be proved wrong and English will adapt the plural morphemes from Arabic rather than naturalizing the nouns with the English forms.

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Politics and Poetry 1

Maybe if I didn't date the entries, no one would know (for sure) how much time passes. But what difference dies it make?

For some, poetry must always be political; for others, poetry should never be political.

For myself, I'mm uncomfortable with absolutes like that: such rigid statements tend to obscure and stifle what is really present. If one wants to write a political poem, one should do so. And, if one wants to keep poetry and politics in separate pockets, that's fine too.

My impression is that the general public considers poets to be leftists, radicals, and even provacatuers, Historically, poets have had many different political positions. Two of the most noted 20th century American poets, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were rightists, not leftists. Pound's political views are more controversial than Eliot's, but contemporaries like William Carlos Williams resented Eliot more.

In the United States, antiwar poetry flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. There were individual poems, series of poems, readings, and anthologies. For some, participating in the antiwar movement was a necessary badge of honor for a poet. Among the best-known antiwar poets were Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, and Allen Ginsberg, but there were many others. I participated a little but not in any significant or sustained way.

Is The Ghazal Page open to political poems? Well, yes, if they

are good poems
reasonably approximate the ghazal form
embody the ghazal spirit

What kind of politics would I look for in these ghazals? I don't have to agree with your politics to admire and publish your poem. Simple points made as absolutes might not convince me. Form and content should fit together seamlessly, move to the same beat. I'm not going to identify my own political viewpoint here to avoid (a) poems written only to cater to my views and (b) poets not submitting poems they think I wouldn't agree with.

I plan another entry on poetry and politics soon.

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Da Vinci Again

What have I been doing? Not much with The Ghazal Page, unfortunately, although I hope to change that in the next few days. I have some good ghazals to publish, some new submissions to read, some more on poetics to put here. Let a thousand shers rhyme!

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Literary Brilliance of The Da Vinci Code

Once in awhile, I'm going to put something up here that isn't ghazal-related or even connected with poetry. This review, for instance.

Having just finished reading The Da Vinci Code (hereafter DVC), I want to put my admiration on record. Dan Brown's masterly fictionalization of the secret history of the Holy Grail brilliantly deconstructs such elitist icons as literacy, factual accuracy, narrative verisimilitude, convincing character depiction and action. At every time, Brown defeats the reader's expectations of conformity to old, out-dated standards of imaginative and intellectual responsibility. If Henry James were fortunate to be alive at this time, he would revise "The Art of Fiction" solely on the basis of Brown's goddess-blessed text.

I plan to watch Ron Howard's film of this vital novel sometime during the long weekend ahead. (It's Memorial Day in the US.) In the meantime, I say, "Shame on the literary and theological cranks who simply can't recognize post-post-post-modern brilliance." DVC puts all the pretentious novelists, such as Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy, in the shade. One can only hope that the film replicates Brown's uncanny skill at constructing post-logical chains of extended dialogue. I plan to post my accolade of the film here unless I become awe-sick.

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Accentual / Alliterative Meter

More thoughts on meter—rhythm—the sonic flow of the lines. The native English meter is a four-beat accentual line. Each line has a strong pause dividing the beats into groups of two and two. Also, three or four of the stressed syllables alliterate. (Any vowel beginning a word alliterates with any other word.) This form has been little used since the Middle Ages, when the pattern of beats was combined with syllable counting. Still, a number of recent poets have at least experimented with accentual meter.

Here are links to a couple of sites with information on Anglo-Saxion literature and verse form:

• The Wikipedia on Anglo-Saxon Literature
• A Beginner's Guide to Prosody

I wonder if the alliteration could replace the qafiya. One wants to avoid too heavy-handed effects. It would be possible to use the accentual/alliterative meter in both lines of the first sher and then only in the second line of subsequent shers.

If I come up with something not too embarassing, I'll post it here. Please send me any of your experiments with accentual meter or other possibilities.

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Threefold Process

Dorothy Sayers' book, The Mind of the Maker, uses the Christian doctrine of the trinity as an analogy for explaining creativity. (The great Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, presents a similar, although non-trinitatian analysis.) Sayers says her analysis doesn't depend on believing in the trinity, and I agree with her, since I find her analysis very useful and do not believe in that doctrine. (Here is the poet Kenneth Rexroth's cantakerous essay on Buber—well worth reading.)

I'm going to avoid the theological terms and use fairly straightforward secular terms. As I phrase them, the three terms are

• The idea, or the seed, the beginning stimulus of a poem. This is the poet's sense, often inarticulate, that there is something to be written.
• The process of articulating the idea, the unformed sense of a poem to be written. Different writers have very different approaches to this process. Craft is essential in this process, but craft is not one thing, not one set of procedures. Free association (or the Surrealists' automatic writing) is one extreme of craft; matching syllables to a metric pattern is another.
• The effect of the finished poem on a reader. This is the "power" that the finished poem has to affect the reader.

By "idea" I do not mean a propositional message, such as "We must save nature" or "War is a bad thing." "Idea" in the sense refers to meaning, not message, not explanation. Further, it is meaning that requires work to be developed and completely expressed. ("Meaning" is what is significant, what moves the reader, not the "moral of the story.")

Through the process of articulating, of writing, the creative process, the "idea" is embodied in words, just these words, not some other words, but the precise words, phrasing, rhythms, sound-patterns used by the poet.

The "embodied idea" goes forth and encounters listeners and readers. The process is not always successful, sometimes due to weaknesses in the poet, sometimes to weaknesses in the reader. What moves a reader today may bore the same reader in a year; what bores a reader today may move that same reader profoundly tomorrow.

The poet's creative process may fail in any of these phases. Poor craft is not the only explanation for ineffective poetry.

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"What'd You Mean by That?"

Many people assume that poets and fiction writers proceed in an explicit, calculated way to achieve the finished work, making deliberate choices at each point in the process of composition. This assumption reflects our culture's privileging of calculation and rationalization. I suspect the assumption is reinforced, if not introduced, by the often mechanical, rationalistic teaching of literature in our classrooms. Edgar Allen Poe should take on a good part of the responsibility: his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," details a mechanistic, rationalized approach to writing. (An approach at odds with his intense Romanticism.)

To some extent, this assumption relates to the intentional fallacy, a term introduced into literary criticism by Monroe Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt. Essentially, to commit the intentional fallacy is to believe that the writer's stated intentions express all the meaning of a piece of writing. Despite its association with the New Criticism, the intentional fallacy is a sensible notion. Like other sensible notions, it can be taken to extremes. J. W. Hastings, in an article in The Forager, provides a sensible explanation of the use and abuse of the intentional fallacy.

I don't want this blog posting to turn into an extended piece. If there's interest, I may post more later on the topic. For right now, I will try to summarize my viewpoint.

Poe rightly says in "The Philosophy of Composition" that there is no poem without the poet's intending to write one. So far so good. He goes on to describe the composition of "The Raven" as a series of conscious, rational choices. I don't trust this account.

Starting with the intention to write a poem (or story or whatever), a series of choices does follow; in my view the poet's choices are rarely the elaborate calculus that Poe presents. The work of philosopher Michael Polanyi is helpful here. Polanyi stresses the personal dimension in knowledge, the "tacit" means by which we know something else. My prescription glasses are usually tacit to my visual knowledge. I don't attend to them but to what I'm looking at—unless the lens get dirty or scratched or the prescription is no longer correct for my eyes. I'm listening to music as I type this—my whole system of auditory perception is tact; I attend to the music rather than, say, sensations in my ear.

In my experience, I begin writing with an intention to write. Initially, that intention and my view of the end-product may be very vague or highly detailed. The creative process gets me from the initial intention to the final product. (Of course, there's not always a final product or one worth sharing.)

I'm among those poets and others who feel it's very risky to talk about the creative process and the intentionality that grounds it. I'm afraid of talking it away. Other poets are quite verbose and speak freely. So, there you go: "What did I mean by that?" Why don't you tell me what it means to you? (I'll hope it means something, but if it doesn't, then it doesn't.)

I've foreborn talking about intentionality and phenomenology as a philosophy that makes a great deal of sense to me. However, if you google "phenomenological intentionality," you'll get more hits than you can read in a year. Here's a link to one site, to a PowerPoint slideshow. It's not bad, but I'm not sure how much it conveys by itself. The show has 29 slides; slide 15 hung up on me, but your results may vary. The author uses the terms "looking at" and "looking along," which occur in a very clear essay by C. S. Lewis, "Meditation in a Toolshed." One doesn't have to share Lewis' Christianity (as I don't) to benefit from the essay.

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The last blog here was just over a week ago. This entry will be brief and inconsequential—a weather report, if you will.

We've been having unseasonably warm weather here in the Ozarks—high temperatures in the 80s; strong winds, although fortunately none of the tornados that have afflicted other areas. A sunny, hot, windy Easter. And why not?

Early this afternoon, I glanced into the backyard and saw . . . first let me tell you that we live close to a railroad track and that between us and the track is an asphalted parking lot for the county courthouse. There are flowers and trees and ground cover in our yard, a small L-shaped out building with beds of iris and phlox along the long leg.

I looked out into the yard and saw a large animal moving cautiously beside the iris and phlox. First, I thought it was a big cat. Then, I realized it was both too large and the wrong shape for a cat. "A possum," I thought, but it was broad daylight and possums are nocturnal, and, anyway, it obviously wasn't a possum.

. . . a woodchuck! slipping along beside our flowers, glancing quickly at the house. (It had to know a dog lives there, as well as people.) About three feet long, brown bushy fur, square snout: a real beauty, says I.

We've seen this woodchuck or a relative off and on for several years. It feels good to share the day with a wild animal, something that has adjusted to life in town but has not been domesticated.

I may write a poem about this fellow, but I doubt it will be a ghazal. I recall that Thoreau says he wanted to seize and devour a woodchuck he surprised in the woods. I bet he was just being literary. I just want to watch this fellow pass warily by—maybe leave some vegetables out for him and hope he stays out of traffic.

Woodchuck, slipping
by the phlox, enjoy a feast
of new greens!

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A Simple Syllabic Example

To write a sher with just ten syllables,
Use a clotted Bic to pen syllables.

Gino, your counted verse makes me wonder
If you know any strange Zen syllables.

I handicapped myself by my choice of qafiya—even three rhymes on "-en" stretched my poor imagination.

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Counting Syllables

One basis for meter is the number of syllables in each line; for languages in which stress plays a less prominent role than in English, a syllabic meter makes sense. Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and French are among the (very different) languages that use syllable count.

Most people "know" that a haiku has three lines of 5/7/5 syllables respectively. (Actually, most haiku poets in English do not observe this count. The Korean sijo has a more complex syllabic pattern. The cinquain, an English form invented by the early Imagist poet, Adelaide Crapsey, counts syllables as the basis of its form. Kenneth Rexroth, an excellent poet and also translator of Chinese and Japanese poetry, used syllabic meter in much of his own poetry.

Can a syllabic meter work for ghazals? I'm somewhat dubious but would like to see some experiments with ghazals in which syllable count is the meter. Here's the reason I'm dubious: most ghazals have long lines, and, in those long lines, it seems to me the stressed syllables would tend to stand out. Perhaps a shorter line would be best for syllabic ghazals in English. Or perhaps long syllabic lines would work very well in a ghazal.

One problem in counting syllables is deciding what counts as a syllable. Is "field" one syllable or two? Does each syllable of "bottle" have the same weight? Or does it matter?

Surprise me with syllables!

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Voice in Poetry

As I suggested below, I'm going to do some entries on meter and rhythm. This posting is a follow up to that one. I plan several more entries on this topic; I may even post a handbook. Because of the blog convention of newer entries being on top, you may have to use the links to start with the older entries that are basis for later ones. The entries related to this topic are marked in the list of links.

Poetry is rooted in the voice—from speech to song, as Louis Zukovsky somewhere says. Some poetry, e.g. concrete poetry, cannot be voiced; much poetry for the last 100 years has been too flat in voice to achieve song. But still, the voice is the basis, the medium of poetry.

The voice has rhythm: beyond the individual sounds that make up words, patterns of sound organize words into phrases and sentences. In English (and these remarks are about poetry in English)—in English, three or four levels of stress (loudness) and changes in pitch mark phrases. These stresses and pitches are the elements of rhythm in English poetry.

Consider the "valley girl" pattern which has become wide-spread; this pattern ends a sentence with a pitch that suggests a question? So that the speaker? constantly sounds as though questioning?

The approach I'm taking sees the basic unit of poetry in English as the line (not the foot). Derek Attridge's (the University of York) work on poetics makes clear the line as the fundamental unit. The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables within the line create the distinctive rhythms of English poetry. In traditional metrics, we label these patterns according to the number of syllables in the line, the number of stresses, and whether the stresses fall on odd or even syllables.

Good traditional poetry uses the simplistic patterns of traditional meter to work with (or against) the rhythms of the lines as spoken. So-called free verse uses the same basis in the voice but not in regular, classifiable patterns. Also, in much free verse, the endings of the line must register on the ear for the real rhythm (and meaning of the poem) to be heard.

I plan soon to give some specific examples in an entry.

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Some Thoughts on this Blog

After having a blog on Blogstream for a few days, I've decided to keep my blog here on The Ghazal Page. I can control the appearance in much more detail and provide a link for feedback. If you do send me feedback, I may ask to post it in a comment section. I will kill the Blogstream blog soon. What I could tell of the other blogs there, those folks are in a different place than I want to be. But there's a lot of them, so I probably missed some good ones.

I'm just not interested in the personal diary kind of blog, although I may do a few more personal posts here than I have in the past. Basically, I want to focus on the ghazal, on poetry and poetics, literature more generally, perhaps other arts, and ideas (whatever those are). Thank you for reading this stuff.

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It's About Rhythm

I recently had an email query about meter in English poetry. There are many many books on the topic, some of which are good. Look for Karl Shapiro or Derek Attridge. Too many handbooks of poetic form are accurate on the traditional forms—sonnet, villanelle, terza rima—but not so good on forms relatively new to English—haiku, sijo, tanka, and, especially, ghazals.

Here're just a few basic remarks.

Haiku, tanka, and sijo are Asian forms; the line is based on syllable count, not stress or vowel-length. Syllabic forms are easy enough to adapt to English, but too literal a rendering (the 5-7-5 form for haiku, for instance) often makes the form read strangely in English. Differences in the language, such as articles and prepositional phrases, for instance.

Ghazals flourish in several Central Asian, Indian, and Near Eastern languages. In these languages, ghazals have elaborate metrical patterns that can't be carried over literally into English.

So what's a ghazal-writer in English to do about meter? Almost anything possible, to judge by ghazals published on the Internet and in hard-copy.

Next time, I'll say more about the foundation of meter in English—the natural rhythms of language (and not a cookbook of "forms," such as you can find in most libraries and bookstores).

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Spring Haibun

We had Spring for a couple of days last week. Since then, it's been chilly, cloudy, and rainy. Yet the daffodils and forsythia are blooming. I saw both a dogwood and a redbud blooming across town. Other flowers are sprouting up; the lilac bush and sweetgum tree are putting out buds.

Today, the sun is out.

forsythia glowing
in March sunshine;
today, we remember
one who has died
and our own fragility.

This entry is a haibun of sorts, ending with a tanka instead of a haiku.

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• Where is Gino's Blog Now?
• Science and Poetry 1
• How many can you count?
• Politics and Poetry 1
• Da Vinci Again
• The Brilliance of The Da Vinci Code
• Accentual / Alliterative Meter
• Threefold Process
• "What'd You Mean by That?"
• A Woodchuck on Easter
• A Simple Syllabic Example
• Counting Syllables
• Voice in Poetry
• Some Thoughts on this Blog
• It's About Rhythm
• Spring Haibun

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Here's a snippet of a censored web site. I include this item to oppose censorship and support freedom of expression.

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