Poetry's public display

Lawrence, MA--The Frost Foundation has begun a yearlong effort to transform this portion of the Lawrence Library into a gallery that presents the legacy of Robert Frost's early poems. The display flickers the image of XJ Kennedy presenting his memories of Robert Frost.

Enigmatic

The electronic book: enigmatic medium for poetry

Setting a book in type: a river runs through it

Making a book of Seamus Heaney's 2002 Frost reading and lecture has put me in the printer's catbird seat again. It has been years since I set a book in metal type or used the latest page making tools. So I bought a font of type and then tried to find a tool that allowed text to flow through the pages (as Quark and others had perfected), that also allowed one to fix the rivers streams and rivulets that developed in the type, and finally that allowed the minor jiggering that a book always needs-- usually at the last minute. That tool turned out to be right on my computer, Publisher 2003. The other tools that complement my bookmark tool box are pdfFactory, Adobe Reader, Hewlett Packard's manual print utilities. All of these tools handle digital type well.

With luck and loose ends tied up, that book should be available in the first quarter of 2008 in time for the New England Poetry Conference at UMass Lowell on Feb 27. Bookmaking is now such a pleasurable process with fine tools available on almost every laptop.

The electronic book as a medium for poetry

In the last few days of Autumn 2007 several friends who are scholars, teachers, and librarians have asked me my opinion of electronic books. They were mainly thinking of the new device from Amazon, but it turns out that they and I had other kinds of electronic books in mind. At least three of us had ordered the XO laptop, giving one to a child in a developing country and getting one for home. I haven't laid a hand on either the Kindle or the XO but my general opinion is that the laptop and the palm pilot are the best electronic book available for poetry today. Neither surpasses the paper book but both are gaining ground as a medium for poetry.

But because verse written strictly in these feet and by these principles will become same and tame the poets have brought in licences and departures from rule to give variety, and especially when the natural rhythm is rising, as in the common ten-syllable or five-foot verse, rhymed or blank. These irregularities are chiefly Reversed Feet and reversed or Counterpoint Rhythm which two things are two steps or degrees of licence in the same kind. By a reversed foot I mean putting the stress where, to judge by the rest of the measure, the slack should be and the slack where the stress, and this is done freely at the beginning of a line and, in the course of a line, after a pause; only scarcely ever in the second foot or place and never in the last, unless when the poet designs some extraordinary effect; for these places are characteristic and sensitive and cannot well be touched. But the reversal of the first foot and of some middle foot after a strong pause is thing so natural that our poets have generally done it, from Chaucer down, without remark and it commonly passes unnoticed and cannot be said to amount to a formal change of rhythm, but rather is that irregularity which all natural growth and motion shews. If however the reversal is repeated in two feet running, especially so as to mclude the sensitive second foot, it must be due either to great want of ear or else is a calculated effect, the superinducmg or mounting of a new rhythm upon the old; and since the new or mounted rhythm is actually heard and at the same time the mind naturally supplies the natural or standard foregoing rhythm, for we do not forget what the rhythm is that by rights we should be hearing, two rhythms are in some manner running at once and we have something answarble to counterpoint in music, which is two or more strains of tune going on together, and this is Counterpoint Rhythm. Of this kind of verse Milton is the great master and the choruses of Samson Agonistes are wntten throughout

Common English rhythm, called Running Rhythm(2) above, is mea­sured by feet of either two or three syllables and (putting aside the imperfect feet at the beginning and end of lines and also some unusual measures, in which feet seem to be paired together and double or composite feet to arise) never more or less.

Every foot has one principal stress or accent, and this or the syllable it falls on may be called the Stress of the foot and the other part, the one or two unaccented syllables, the Slack. (3) Feet (and the rhythms made out of them) in which the stress comes first are called Falling Feet and Falling Rhythms, feet and rhythm in which the slack comes first are called Rising Feet and Rhythms, and if the stress is between two slacks there will be Rocking Feet and Rhythms.

These distinctions are real and true to nature; but for purposes of scanning it is a great convenience to follow the example of music and take the stress always first, as the accent or the chief accent always comes first in a musical bar.

If this is done there will be in common English verse only two possible feet-the so-called accentual Trochee and Dactyl, and correspondingly only two possible uniform rhythms, the so-called Trochaic and Dactylic. But they may be mixed and then what the Greeks called a Logaoedic Rhythm arises. These are the facts and according to these the scanning of ordinary regularly-written English verse is very simple indeed and to bring in other principles is here unnecessary.

Hopkin's Original Preface (the so-called Author's Preface to the 1918 Edition)

The poems in this book(1) are written some in Running Rhythm, the common rhythm in English use, some in Sprung Rhythm, and some in a mixture of the two. And those in the common rhythm are some counterpointed, some not.

Commentary: Thus, Hopkins neatly devides the domain of English poetry into major rhythmic categories

Running-----------------------Sprung
| |
| |
no------yes----mixture------yes---------no

Amy Clampitt Understood Hopkins As Well As Anybody

In the first essay in her notable collection of essays, Predecessors Et Cetera,
Amy Clampitt states:

I can't be sure I'd ever have become a poet if I had never been introduced to his [Hopkin's] poems-- but in any event I find it impossible to imagine the kind of poet I would have been if I hadn't. It is like imagining a world in which one's own parents had never met.

In the 1990's Clampitt's essay reawakened my interest in Hopkins. Like Amy Clampitt, I discovered Hopkins poetry as an undergraduate at Grinnell College; after reading Hopkins, it became impossible to imagine the world before Hopkins. In 1997, two years after Clampitt's death, I published an article, "In Deepest Iowa," in the Grinnell Magazine describing a visit to the Clampitt family homestead in New Providence, Iowa.

On that visit, I determined that it was possible that Clampitt may have discovered Hopkins in high school. Her classmate Abner White recalls how when everyone else read, she read widely. While others play acted Shakespeare, she memorized her lines.

It is also possible that she discovered Hopkins at Grinnell College and shared her first ideas with art historian Edith Sternfeld or English professor Charles Foster.

Indeed, the first section of poems, "Fire and Water," that opens Clampitt's first book moves quickly from iambics into sprung rhythm.

Your mind keeps turning back to look at them--

chain-gang archangels that in their prismatic

frenzy fall, gall and gash the daylight

out there, all through the winter.

There emerging out of the background's steady rub-a-dub iambics is the fall, gall and gash--

from the Windhover's gold-vermillion signature line.

A map of understandings and mis-

Despite the efforts of Robert Bridges to bring his work to a greater public understanding, Hopkins' prosody has been consistently misunderstood by many literary critics. Critics have, in many cases, been blinded by their own brilliance.

Hopkins wanted to use musical concepts such as counterpoint to clarify English poetic diction and to explore human speech.

This blog attempts first to go back to Hopkins' original description of what he was doing.

This blog then attempts to map the misunderstandings and the understandings-- of others as well as my own-- in an attempt to understand Hopkins' prosody.

I'm particularly looking for posts on the following topics:

1) Hopkins and other poets who understood him well; Amy Clampitt is my first example

2) Hopkins and critics who understood him well; Ivor Winters seems to be one.

3) Examples of critics and poets who, despite their best efforts, seriously misunderstood Hopkins; H. M. McLuhan comes to mind.