* * *
Published in Chicago Review, Vol. 30, No. 3, 1979.
Linebreaks, Stanza-Spaces, and the Inner Voice
(1965)
IN AN INTERVIEW WITH me in 1964, Walter Sutton asked me to talk at some length about a short poem of mine. I chose “The Tulips” from The Jacob’s Ladder:
Red tulips
living into their death
flushed with a wild blue
tulips
becoming wings
ears of the wind
jackrabbits rolling their eyes
west wind
shaking the loose pane
some petals fall
with that sound one
listens for
First, there was the given fact of having received a bunch of red tulips, which I put in a vase on the window sill. In general I tend to throw out flowers when they begin to wither, because their beauty is partly in their short life, and I don’t like to cling to them. I thought of that sentence of Rilke’s about the unlived life of which one can die (Letters to a Young Poet: Rilke speaks of “unlived, disdained lost life, of which one can die,” August 12, 1904); and, looking at these tulips, I thought of how they were continuing to be fully alive, right on into their last moments. They hadn’t given up before the end. As red tulips die, some chemical change takes place which makes them turn blue, and this blue seems like the flush on the cheeks of someone with fever. I said “wild blue” because, as I looked at it, it seemed to be a shade of blue that suggested to me perhaps far-off parts of sky at sunset that seemed untamed, wild. There seem to be blues that are tame and blues that are daring. Well, these three lines constitute the first stanza … Then came a pause. A silence within myself when I didn’t see or feel more, but was simply resting on this sequence that had already taken place. Then, as I looked, this process continued. You can think of it as going on throughout a day; but when cut flowers are in that state, things happen quite fast; you can almost see them move. The petals begin to turn back. As they turn back, they seem to me to be winglike. The flowers are almost going to take off on their winglike petals. Then “ears of the wind.” They seem also like long ears, like jack rabbits’ ears turned back and flowing in the wind, but also as if they were the wind’s own ears listening to itself. The idea of their being jack rabbits’ ears led me to the next line, which is the last line of this stanza, “jackrabbits rolling their eyes,” because as they turn still further back they suggest, perhaps, ecstasy. Well, this was the second unit. Then another pause. The next stanza, “west wind/shaking the loose pane,” is a sequence which is pure observation without all that complex of associations that entered into the others. The flowers were on the window sill, and the pane of glass was loose, and the wind blew and rattled the pane. This is background.
Is it part the sound that comes in, as you mentioned earlier?
Yes, although it doesn’t really get into the poem quite as sound. Then again a short pause, and then, “some petals fall/with that sound one/listens for.” Now, the petals fall, not only because the flowers are dying and the petals have loosened themselves, in death, but also because perhaps that death was hastened by the blowing of the west wind, by external circumstances. And there is a little sound when a petal falls. Now why does the line end on “one”? Why isn’t the next line “one listens for”? That is because into the sequence of events entered a pause in which was an unspoken question, “with that sound one,” and suddenly I was stopped: “one what?” Oh, “one listens for.” It’s a sound like the breath of a human being who is dying; it stops, and one has been sitting by the bedside, and one didn’t even know it, but one was in fact waiting; for just that sound, and the sound is the equivalent of that silence. And one doesn’t discover that one was waiting for it, was listening for it, until one comes to it. I think that’s all.
I think the line also turns back with the “one.” There is a kind of reflexive movement for me, as you read it, emphasizing the solitary nature of the sound. Now in your comments on this poem you have talked mostly about the meanings, the associations of the experience, and their relation to images.
Also, though, about their relation to rhythm, about where the lines are broken and where the silence is, about the rests.
Where the silences fall. Now, “variable foot” is a difficult term. Williams said that it involves not just the words or the phrases but also the spaces between them. Is that your meaning also? That a pause complementing a verbal unit is a part of the sequence of events?
Yes, and the line-end pause is a very important one; I regard it as equal to half a comma, but the pauses between stanzas come into it too, and they are much harder to evaluate, to measure. I think that what the idea of the variable foot, which is so difficult to understand, really depends on is a sense of a pulse, a pulse behind the words, a pulse that is actually sort of tapped out by a drum in the poem. Yes, there’s an implied beat, as in music; there is such a beat, and you can have in one bar just two notes, and in another bar ten notes, and yet the bar length is the same. I suppose that is what Williams was talking about, that you don’t measure a foot in the old way by its syllables but by its beat.
Though not by what Pound called the rhythm of the metronome?
Well, there is a metronome in back, too.
Is it like the mechanical heat of the metronome or the necessarily variable beat of a pulse? Is it a constant beat? Or is it a beat that accelerates and slows?
Oh, it accelerates and slows, but it has a regularity, 1 would say. I’m thinking of The Clock symphony of Haydn. Well, there’s where the pulse behind the bars is actually heard—pum-pum, pum-pum, and so on. But then, winding around that pum-pum, it’s going dee, dee-dee-dum, and so forth. Well, I think perhaps in a poem you’ve got that melody, and not the metronomic pum-pum; but the pum-pum, pum-pum is implied.
When you think of the variable foot, then, you think of beats rather than of the spacing of phrases or of breath-spaced units of expression?
I’ve never fully gone along with Charles Olson’s idea of the use of the breath. It seems to me that it doesn’t work out in practice.
Of course, he thinks of this as one of the achievements of the modernist revolution—that Pound and Williams inaugurated the use of breath-spaced lines.
But I don’t think they really are breath-spaced. There are a lot of poems where you actually have to draw a big breath to read the phrase as it’s written. But so what? Why shouldn’t one, if one is capable of drawing a deep breath? It’s too easy to take this breath idea to mean literally that a poet’s poems ought by some moral law to sound very much like what he sounds like when he’s talking. But I think this is unfair and untrue, because in fact they may reflect his inner voice, and he may just not be a person able to express his inner voice in actual speech.
You think, then, that the rhythm of the inner voice controls the rhythm of the poem?
Absolutely, the rhythm of the inner voice. And I think that the breath idea is taken by a lot of young poets to mean the rhythm of the outer voice. They take that in conjunction with Williams’s insistence upon the American idiom, and they produce poems which are purely documentary.
What do you mean by the inner voice?
What it means to me is that a poet, a verbal kind of person, is constantly talking to himself, inside of himself, constantly approximating and evaluating and trying to grasp his experience in words. And the “sound,” inside his head, of that voice is not necessarily identical with his literal speaking voice, nor is his inner vocabulary identical with that which he uses in conversation. At their best sound and words are song, not speech. The written poem is then a record of that inner song.
* * *
Published in Minnesota Review, No. 5, 1965, as “A Conversation with Denise Levertov.” This article is an extract from that interview conducted by Walter Sutton.
Technique and Tune-up
(1979)
A LOT OF PEOPLE write in what have come to be called “o
pen forms” without much sense of why they do so or of what those forms demand. Or if they do think, it seems mainly to recognize that they are confused. They are sailing without the pilots and charts that traditional forms provide. If one is interested in exploration one knows the risks are part of the adventure; nevertheless, as explorers travel they do make charts, and though each subsequent journey over the same stretch of ocean will be a separate adventure (weather and crew and passing birds and whales or monsters all being variables) nevertheless rocks and shallows, good channels and useful islands will have been noted and this information can be used by other voyagers. But though people have been exploring open forms for a long time now, from the free verse pioneered by Whitman and picked up later by Sandburg or the very different free verse of the Imagists through to the various modes of the last two decades (so that nowadays it is rare to find a college freshman writing in traditional forms) there has been a curious lack of chart-reading. People not only have their personal and proper adventures with the infinite variables—the adventures which make it all worthwhile and exciting—but also they keep bumping unnecessarily into the same old rocks, which isn’t interesting at all. (And incidentally, when they do attempt traditional forms, college students often display an inability to scan, revealing how untrained their ears are even in the simplest repetitive rhythmic structures.) Since, judging from my experience as a teacher and also as a reader, this general confusion seems to me to be so prevalent, I’m going to try to note some common problems of technique as well as ways to get the written score of nontraditionally formed poems down on paper efficiently. Because there’s no consensus about some of the tools of scoring—just as up till the eighteenth century there was virtually no consensus about musical scoring techniques—one can detect uncertainty and a hit-or-miss approach to these matters even in some of the major poets of our time. When I speak of consensus I’m not suggesting that people should write alike— only that it would be helpful if more poets would consider what typographical and other tools we do have at our disposal and what their use is. To point out that a carpenter’s plane is not designed to be used as a knife sharpener or a can opener does not restrict how someone planes their piece of wood; and to indicate that objects specifically designed to whet knives or open cans do exist is not to dictate what shall be cut with the knife or whether the can to be opened should be of beer or beans.
Obviously the most important question and the one about which there’s the most uncertainty is, what is the line? What makes a line be a line? How do you know where to end it if you don’t have a predetermined metric structure to tell you? If it’s just a matter of going by feel, by ear, are there any principles at all to help you evaluate your own choices? The way to find out, I believe, is to look at what it is a line does. Take a poem and type it up as a prose paragraph. Type it up again in lines, but not in its own lines—break it up differently. Read it aloud (observing the linebreak as roughly one-half a comma, of course—it is there to use, and if you simply run on, ignoring it, you may as well acknowledge that you want to write prose, and do so). As you perform this exercise or experiment you will inevitably begin to experience the things that linebreaks do—and this will be much more useful than being told about them. However, I’ll list some of the things they do which you can listen for:
Unless a line happens to consist of a whole sentence, the linebreak subtly interrupts a sentence.
Unless a line happens to consist of a complete phrase or clause, it subtly interrupts a phrase or clause. (Though lines may also contain whole sentences, phrases, or clauses.)
What is the function of such interruptions? Their first function is to notate the tiny nonsyntactic pauses that constantly take place during the thinking/feeling process—pauses which can occur before any part of speech and which, not being a part of the logic of syntax, are not indicated by ordinary punctuation. The mind as it feels its way through a thought or an impression often stops with one foot in the air, its antennae waving, and its nose waffling. Linebreaks (though of course they may also happen to coincide with syntactic punctuation marks—commas or semi-colons or whatever) notate these infinitesimal hesitations. Watch cats, dogs, insects as they walk around: they behave a lot like the human mind. This is the reason why Valéry defines prose in terms of the purposeful (goal-oriented) walk, and poetry as the gratuitous dance. If linebreaks function as a form of nonsyntactic punctuation, for what purpose do they do so? In order to reveal the thinking/ feeling process. What does that imply? I think it implies that the twentieth century impulse to move away from prescribed forms has not always been due to rebellion and a wish for more freedom, but rather to an awakened interest in the experience of journeying and not only in the destination. This statement doesn’t mean to denigrate the great works of the past, which do, as a rule, focus on the achieved goal, not on the process of reaching it. All I mean is that just as a sentence is a complete thought, so a traditional form—the sonnet, the villanelle, etc., even blank verse—is a complete system; and though a great poet can bring about marvelous surprises within it, yet the expectations set up by our previous knowledge of the system are met, and we get a great deal of our gratification in reading such poems precisely from having our expectations met. And that’s somewhat like receiving the fruit of the Hesperides without having travelled there—some other traveller has brought it back to us. But there’s something in the twentieth century consciousness or sensibility that wants to share the travails of journeying; or we want at least to hear the tale of the journey. The poet-explorer heading for Mount Everest flew to Bombay or Delhi, what was it like? How did he or she get from there to Tibet? What were the Sherpas like? What about the foothills? Did you still want to get to Everest by the time you first saw the south face of the western peak? And so on. We are as interested in process and digression as in an ultimate goal.
At this point it strikes me that I seem to be making a statement about content, which was not my intention. I do not mean that I think we want every poem to be digressive. There can be poems, good poems, that meander (as long as each digression ultimately contributes to the needs of the composition), but I’m by no means holding any special brief for them, and it is not content that is in question, but structure. Perhaps I should switch metaphors: let’s compare poems to paintings: the analogy would be that, if we choose open forms in which the movement of lines can record the movement of the mind in the act of feeling/thinking, thinking/feeling, we have, as it were, an interest in seeing the brushstrokes; we like to experience the curious double vision of the scene represented and the brushstrokes and palette knife smears and layers of impasto by which it is produced. In the process of giving us this experience by incorporating into the rhythmic structure of the poem those little halts or pauses which are not accounted for by the logic of syntax, a second essential effect is produced, and that is the change of pitch pattern inevitably brought about by observation of linebreaks. I’ve written elsewhere on this*—the way in which melody is created not only by the interplay of vowels within lines but by the overall pattern of intonation scored by the breaking, or division, of the words into lines, and about how this melodic element is not merely an ornamental enhancement but, deriving as it does from the mimesis of mind process, is fundamentally expressive.
Let us look now at another “tool”: indentation. Why do some poems seem to be all over the page? Indentations have several functions: one of them has to do with the fact that eye-ear-mouth coordination makes looking from the end of a line all the way back to the starting margin a different experience from that of looking from the end of a line to the beginning of an indented line—the latter is experienced as infinitesimally swifter. This registration of a degree of swiftness conveys, subliminally, a sense that the indented line is related to the preceding one with especial closeness. For example, I used indentation in these lines,
up and up
into the tower of the tree
because if I had put all the words on one line I’
d have lost the upstretching sound of the first half line—it would have dissipated. And if I’d gone back to the margin. I’d have lost the ongoing into-ness that stretches mimetically up into the tower of the tree. The other main function of indentations is to clearly denote lists or categories for the sake of clarity—but this too works not only intellectually (by way of the eye to the brain), but also sensuously (by way of the eye to the ear and the voice) and thus expressively. Through changes of tone and pitch elicited subliminally, the score provides a more subtle emotional graph than it could without them.
If you will take a look at this poem of mine, “A Son” (from Life in the Forest) you’ll see a score that uses carefully consistent degrees of indentation: sub-categories of content within the whole syntactic composition are assigned specific degrees of indentation.
A Son
A flamey monster—plumage and blossoms
fountaining forth
from her round head,
her feet
squeezing mud between their toes,
a tail of sorts
wagging hopefully
and a heart of cinders and dreamstuff,
flecked with forever molten gold,
drumrolling in her breast—
bore a son.
His father? A man
not at case with himself,
half-monster too,
half earnest earth,
New and Selected Essays Page 9