¡Bemsha SWING!

14 oct 2010

Here's a really dumb question. Why is free verse unrhymed, typically? It is dumb, but important. In your answer, an essay of 500 words or less, you may consider the following factors:

The Ogden Nash effect. Lines of unequal length, if rhymed, become doggerel.

The enjambment effect. Rhyme marks line endings strongly. Free verse is associated with two traditions: the Whitmanic one of syntactic parallelism, and the blank verse of Milton with its powerful, heavily enjambed verse paragraphs.

The association of meter with rhyme. Poets throwing out meter will also throw out rhyme, because rhyme doesn't occur unless regular meter does also? Rhyme without meter is comic?

What about Creeley? He is the main free verse poet who rhymes.

The prize-winning essayist will receive a free life-time subscription to BS and SMT.

3 comentarios:

Zed dijo...: A few disconnected thoughts: 1. A notable counterexample is Auden's "Musee des Beaux-Arts." (I assume you've noticed the first two lines are "acceptable" IP?) 1'. The most notable classes of poems that (at some level) break your rule are rimas dissolutas poems (mostly written in free verse) and (in a sense) sestinas/canzones. 1''. Paul Muldoon's sonnets over the years -- strictly rhymed but quite unmetrical -- have carved out another class of exceptions. What these exceptions have in common is heavy enjambment (which, btw, is very unWhitmanesque).

2. Most modern rhyming verse is rhymed in a loose sense, which would be undetectable if one weren't looking for the rhymes, which one wouldn't be were the poem unmetrical. (There is an expectations game floating in the vicinity of this point, not unlike my inflatable helium girlfriend.) Rhymed unmetrical verse must therefore draw attention to itself as rhymed, which e.g. Kay Ryan's does.

3. Sort of related to this, calling something free verse is rather like calling it a non-banana. There are really multiple traditions of free verse: the Whitman/Lawrence one of wildly uneven but not-heavily-enjambed lines, the Williams/Creeley one of short lines where the linebreak-pause carries weight, the "generic" one that is really extremely loose metrical verse, etc. Some of these risk the Ogden Nash trap; others do not.; 9:43 p. m.
Vance Maverick dijo...: Hopkins is a counterexample to all your three factors. The phenomenon is real, but we hardly have the start of an explanation. All I'd be willing to hazard is that rhyme and meter are guilty by association with one another, as aspects of the old way.; 11:43 p. m.
Jordan dijo...: All prose should be written in doggerel.; 9:39 a. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

14 oct 2010

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