William Watkin on Line Measure

William Watkin posted the following comment in the comments box for my “Line in Space” post, but it’s so good I’ve moved it out here to the front. If I wanted to give students a crash course in recent (20th century & beyond) innovations in prosody, I’d have William come in and say something like this.

I’ve been working on lineation for a while now, not taking it for granted as a fundamental of poetry but accepting its importance all the same. The most illuminating work in this field is Agamben’s The End of the Poem, which I have discussed in detail on my blog, so I won’t go on about it again here; even I have my limits of interest!

What seems to be behind the differences of opinion in this discussion is an inability to understand the semiotic materiality of the line as a visual unit with the field of the poem, and of course its liminal status as a non-necessary, convenient way of rendering the temporality of the spoken poem in a more portable and lasting form. Sorry, it’s not easy to say all that in a prettier way but basically the line has its own aesthetic presence but it also serves the voice.

This transition from voice to page happened a long time ago now, and it seems time to pay our dues to the line.

True the line was once the supplement to metre and it may be the case that metre has some cognitive or experiential reason for being, although I have never seen any evidence for that, but the line is also a fundamental element of our visual experience. This means that the line itself has an aesthetic power and that lines in space produce a powerful rhythm akin to that seen in painting, particularly abstract work. I have called this “line measure” in the past and, again, it is discussed in my blog.

One other point is that the line has been the location of postmodern and contemporary avant-garde innovations in poetry from Olson, through New York School work, to Bernstein, Howe, Hejinian. The line is the last material sign of poeticity, the last defamiliarisation of so-called ordinary language, and so understandably its significance has been heightened.

These innovative poets have tried to liberate the poem from the line using prose, attenuated lines down to one word or phoneme, extended the line beyond the brain’s ability to see it as a single unit, split it into two using columns, scattered lines across the page, turned them upside down, written one line on top of the other in palimpsests, renounced the page altogether in favour of performative and talk poems, and are now radically altering the limits and potentialities of lineation using html and java coding.

Correct me if I am wrong but we live in the golden age of lineation and should be as excited about these prosodic innovations as people once were, I presume, about the formalised applications of iambs.

I want to add, as an expansion upon the observation that “the line has its own aesthetic presence but it also serves the voice”: this is something that can be said of meter as well. The first application of meter, it’s generally agreed, was as a mnemonic device, a way to keep the words stored in memory at a time when the notepad hadn’t yet been invented. The same can be said of rhyme. So it might be said that meter, which Mike seems to see as the essential index of the poem, is every bit as supplemental an accessory as the line, or capitalization at the beginning of lines, or titles, or the use of print as opposed to script, etc. All these devices--meter, lines, Flash animation, what have you--are on the one hand ways to convey whatever is being “said” in the poem “itself,” and on the other hand can be promoted to constitutive status. That is, they can be emphasized in such a way as to define the poem, while reference slips into the supplemental role, or goes out the window altogether. And these devices are emphasized in such ways, differently in different historical and community contexts.

The Line in Space

Mike writes: “the line can only exist in space when it’s typeset or formatted with CSS in a standards-compliant browser. A line which depends on such visual technology has a different pathway into consciousness. I’d argue it’s not the primary pathway of poetry.”

Am I missing some special meaning of “in space”? What about handwriting? What about the line as one might picture it textually in one’s mind as one hears the words of the poem spoken? What about the primal synaesthesia that occurred when cave-dwellers first grunted out intentional rhymes, and conceptualized those sounds as in a position of analogy to one another, and thus formed some kind of mental image corresponding to that balance, however rudimentary?

Don’t the most recent words you’ve heard seem somehow not only closer in time, but also in space, than the ones you heard before them?

Guest Poet Dept.: Maria Goodman

Maria Goodman
Sonnet to SK-65 Compound


O soft embalmer of the still migrainous cranial contraction,
  Shunting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-plugg’d extrusion reflexes, embower’d from the light reflex,
  Engorged in formaldehyde divine:
O soothest SK-65 Compound! if it so plays thee, clot,
  In midst of this thine hypalgesia, my willing extrusion reflexes,
Or waste the Amenorrhea ere thy poriomania throbs
  Around my beef tapeworm infection its lutenizing Chaussier’s areola.
Then saturate me or the passive tremored dead-end host will show
Upon my piloerection, breathing many withdrawal methods:
Saturate me with curious connecting fibrocartilage, that still hosts
  Its stratum spongiosum for data analysis, burning like the molluscum contagiosum;
Twin the kidney failure deftly in the ointmented wash-outs,
  And seal the husband-coached castration anxiety of my sore.

The Poetic Line

The poetic line exists in both space and time. And probably in some other dimension(s) as well.

The Turner/Pöppel essay that Mike links to is actually interesting in some of its details about different historical and national manifestations of metered poetry, but the broad conclusions it attempts to draw seem to me to be rooted in a tepid combination of statistical pedantry, bad scientistic analogy, and specious “social” criticism. This is the kind of claim I mean: “free verse, like existentialist philosophy, is nicely adapted to the needs of the bureaucratic and even the totalitarian state, because of its confinement of human concern within narrow specialized limits where it will not be politically threatening.” I have the same problem with this that I have with some of the claims advanced by some Language poets that the form of traditional (i.e. metered, rhymed, etc.) verse underwrites conservative political values, paternalist hierarchies, etc. I’ve said it before: form in and of itself is neutral. It’s context, within specific social formations of taste and received habits of reading, that determines political/cultural significance.

Further, the very idea of “free verse,” as so many people are so tired of having to point out, leads invariably to tiresome straw man arguments. There are two fallacies in particular that tend to go along with attacks on “free verse”: 1) that the majority of poetry being attacked in such cases really does count as free verse (it is often every bit as “rule-based” as traditional metered poetry, but its detractors simply do not recognize its rules as valid), and 2) that the “freeness” of free verse, if there really is such a thing as free verse, is what accounts for its badness when it is bad (that is, I will grant that there is plenty of bad unmetered poetry out there, just as there is plenty of bad metered poetry, but in order for the association of badness with unmeteredness to hold any valid negative evaluative weight, we have to define “meter” very broadly). Bad poetry is bad because of a lack of two kinds of writerly consciousness: 1) consciousness of one’s own methods and the self-imposed standards that govern them, and 2) consciousness of the socially-imposed standards current within the particular community or communities one imagines as one’s audience. These two kinds of consciousness intermingle and overlap, of course.

I will grant the argument that poetry with the greatest potential for stimulating its readers mentally (as well as emotionally, ethically, etc.) is most likely to repay repeated reading and warrant various forms of mass dissemination (whether institutionally or through underground channels or somewhere in between or all of the above). To confine the prospects for mental stimulation within the narrow arena of traditional meter as generally conceived, however, is every bit as bigoted as totalitarian rejection of “formalist error” or fascist rejection of “decadence” or (vulgar) avant-garde rejection of a so-called “mainstream.”