Lucy Alford’s *Structures* of Poetic Attention

20 07 2022

Though titled Forms of Poetic Attention, Lucy Alford’s book really should be called *Structures* of Poetic Attention–Alford is far more interested in structural turning than she is in form as it is typically conceived of. This is incredibly interesting: it’s further confirmation that the structure/form distinction exists, and that it’s generally not recognized as such even when the turn is ubiquitous in a theorist’s thinking, as it is in Alford’s. Here, I’ll demonstrate Alford’s thoroughgoing interest in the turn, and I’ll discuss some of the ways that failing to more fully theorize the structural turn matters.

Forms of Poetic Attention is primarily interested in investigating the phenomenon of attention in poetry, how poems convey and embody different types of attention. Here’s a brief description of the book’s main endeavors from its publisher’s webpage:

A poem is often read as a set of formal, technical, and conventional devices that generate meaning or affect. However, Lucy Alford suggests that poetic language might be better understood as an instrument for tuning and refining the attention. Identifying a crucial link between poetic form and the forming of attention, Alford offers a new terminology for how poetic attention works and how attention becomes a subject and object of poetry.

Part of the book’s “new terminology” is the terminology related to attention. Alford, for example, attends to two different kinds of attention. On the one hand, there’s “the dynamics of transitive attention, or modes of attention that take an object,” which involves “five dynamic coordinates,” or “the ‘moving parts’” of this kind of attention: intentionality, interest, selectivity, spatiotemporal remove, and apprehension” (5). This kind of attention is covered in the book’s first part, called “Attending to Objects,” with chapters focused on “Contemplation: Attention’s Reach”; “Desire: Attention’s Hunger”; “Recollection: Attending to the Departed Object”; and “Imagination: Attention’s Poiesis.” On the other hand, there’s “intransitive attention, exploring modes of attention that are objectless,” the coordinates of which include “intentionality, scope, the presence of absence of an indirect object, temporal inflection, and the effect on the subject-space of poetic attention (its expansion, contraction, or kenosis)” (6). This kind of attention is covered in the book’s second part, called “Objectless Awareness,” with chapters on “Vigilance: States of Suspension”; “Resignation: Relinquishing the Object”; “Idleness: Doldrums and Gardens of Time”; and “Boredom: End-Stopped Attention.”

However, new considerations and their resulting new terminology abound. One area where this kind of happens is with form. In the “Introduction”’s section on “Form,” Alford notes that she uses “form” in its somewhat conventional ways, but also in a new way; she states, “It is true that poetic language is densely formed. But what is formed by and in poetic language is an event of attention generated in the acts of both reading and writing” (3-4). Alford clarifies: “I suggest that a poem might be better understood not simply as a gathering of composed formal features, but as an instrument for tuning and composing attention” (4).

However, the poem, when understood by Alford as such an instrument, is generally much less a formal entity and much more structural one. This is hinted at in this discussion of form, which includes an endnote reference to Robert Hass’s A Little Book on Form, in which Alford notes that Hass offers a number of definitions of form before settling on “‘The way a poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its making,’” the definition Alford understands to be the one “that comes closest to what [she is] suggesting in [her] book” (279). However, as I’ve written about here, Hass really is deeply interested in the turn and form as structure, specifically. And, it turns out, Alford shares this interest.

This deep interest is revealed right away in the opening pages of Forms of Poetic Attention, in which Alford recounts her engagement with James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” acknowledging that what really draws her attention is the poem’s turn; she writes,

The poem turns on the word “therefore,” and the necessarily long mental space that precedes it, which it creates in turn. Semantically, the poem enacts a series of removes, lifting off from the immediate context of the high school stadium to the mental recollections or reflections on other spaces: bars at workday’s end, steel mill work lines, then the step back to the collectivity of “all the proud fathers” and “their women.” “Dying for love” draws to a full stop. Rhythmically, nothing can follow the absolute downbeat of “love.” At “Therefore,” the poem gathers itself into a hairpin turn of pure force, a kind of blast of wind smiting from above and beyond. (2)

Wow! Although I’m not sure I exactly follow Alford’s tracking of the attention in Wright’s poem, including the way it seems to move backwards through the poem, what is obvious here is Alford’s attention to and interest in the poem’s turn. 

And there’s more. After a paragraph in which she describes contemporary culture’s general inattention to poetry, Alford writes,

At a gut level, I know that the kind of operation Wright’s “therefore” performs in my mind is experientially different from the kinds of attention valued at this particular cultural moment. This difference, and all the differences contained within it, are the subject of this book. Thinking about “therefore” and its reshaping of the space-time (textual and readerly) that surrounds it entails and inspires a consideration of how other poems activate and manipulate shifts in the field of spatiotemporal perception we call attention….This book is an exploration of the multitude of forms “poetic forms” assumes… (3)

As one reads Forms of Poetic Attention, it becomes clear that that “multitude of forms” includes–and perhaps even features–structures: significant turns abound, and in fact, as we’ll see, turns, and even the related concept of “liftoff,” will be repeatedly pointed to by Alford as significant features of poems.

Indeed, turns and liftoff will be attended to not only as crucial parts of poems but as elements of attention itself; attention itself seems to be largely composed of turns:

[I]n poetry as in prayer and meditation, the act of contemplation turns out to be far from simple, and no small attentional feat….Sometimes attention’s reach is an intrusion, an act that changes what it tries to contemplate. Other times, the subject of contemplation is changes, acted upon, and altered by the object even in the act of consuming it. And often the object resists consumption altogether, evading the observer’s drive to grasp, to metaphorize, to metabolize, to apprehend. The reach and granularity of our attention determine our ability to grasp or perceive the object, and yet the mind interferes at every turn, analyzing, moving into abstraction and away from direct perception, muddying attention’s lens with distractions, ambitions, and ideas. Often the object of the poem’s contemplation turns out to be other than its initial semantic object of focus, either through metaphorical liftoff or by turning attention back onto the poem itself. Perhaps because of the intrinsic limitedness of contemplation (its tendency to diversion as well as  its dependence on our limited, variable, and environmentally swayed perceptual capacities), contemplative poems must grapple with thwarted apprehension as much as plentitude–the reach of attention does not always grasp. And, when it does, a further challenge lies in keeping this grasping from doing violence (through usage or fixation) to its object, thus shifting the relation out of (spatial or aesthetic) contemplation and toward instrumentalization. (74-5)

While brought up in the context of “Attending to Objects,” in the chapter on “Contemplation,” this idea is largely repeated in the discussion of “Objectless Awareness,” in the chapter on “Resignation,” where Alford states,

The sociohistorical conditions of reading and writing in the postmodern era are characterized by a provisionality, a contingency, and a lowering of expectations that can be reread as a phenomenon of attentional resignation, a choiceless shift from one attentional mode, or from one perception of salience, to another. Frederic Jameson reads the shift between modern and postmodern modalities as not merely a shift in stylistic choices or literary fashions, but a necessary environmental response to social conditions overwhelmed by spectacle, repetition, and arbitrarily, externally determined valuations and devaluations. This response is reflected in the role of the poet… (195)

It seems as though, for Alford, attention in its many forms is essentially made up of turns and shifts. This fact comes into increasingly clear focus when one considers some of the poems Alford examines, but even more importantly, what she attends to in her own engagements with the poems.

Many of the poems Alford discusses, especially in the first part of her book, are famous for their turning. Alford tracks the shifts in attention in poems such as

Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish”–which concludes with “epiphanic closure” (69);

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18–“As the poem moves forward, this dynamic of involvement and layered address is heightened by repeated layering of phrases separated by semicolons, so that each new rhetorical turn is contained within the one before….In the couplet…we arrive at a kind of kernel of the poem’s attention: the ‘thee’ of the poem gives way to another beloved, the ‘this’ that is the poem itself, and the poem seems to hold itself forward as an object of attention, the object that has been forming over the course of the poem from the living beloved to the textual beloved, from the textual beloved to the life-giving text” (85);

Psalm 137–which moves from “grief” to “imperative” to “indictment” to “curse” (105-6);

William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”–in which “[t]he imaginative attention at play…places us between recollection, direct contemplation, and a projected future act of recollection” (138);

Sappho’s Fragment 31–which ends with a strong suggestion of a big turn, as commented on by Anne Carson: “Carson’s reading is hemmed in by the breaking off of the poem itself, where the papyrus’s incompleteness necessitates a reading of the poem’s own potential development: ‘Unfortunately we don’t reach the end, the poem breaks off. But we do see Sappho begin to turn toward it, toward this unreachable end. We see her senses empty themselves, we see her Being thrown outside its own center where it stands observing her as if she were grass or dead’….Reading the potential turn of the poem’s lost conclusion, Carson asks, ‘Why does she consent?’ only to reframe the question according to the condition of the Sapphic subject: ‘What is it that love dares the self to do?…Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty’” (162); and

Catullus 51–which is “a rewriting of Sappho (Fragment 31)” that contains a massive final turn: “when Catullus breaks off his inhabitation of Sappho’s lovelorn daydreaming, the poem becomes a warning against idleness’s mental quicksands” (216).

But even with poems that may not be as well-known by readers, Alford’s readings focus greatly on tracking turns. Alford’s reading of Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” registers how “[t]he task of attention…moves from discovery to meditation to a revelation of a deeper kind, a revelation that brings with it a burden of perdurance and a responsibility to open doors, shed light, cast the ray of attention into forgotten histories” (33). Alford reads Wallace Stevens’s “Study of Two Pears” as “something of a manifesto in itself, a summary of what is wrong with the aesthetic appropriation of things for symbolic purposes,” and, as such, it is largely “an enumeration of wrong turns”; however, “[w]ith the fifth stanza, something miraculous happens: an active verb, some movement that belongs to the pears themselves: ‘The yellow glistens’….The pears have passed from passive, inert ‘forms,’ a series of disembodied negotiations, into active and changing presence that ‘flowers’ in multiple dimensions” (61; 65). 

Especially with difficult, longer poems, tracking turns seems to be a key strategy for Alford to use to grapple with the work and the shifting attention embodied within it. For example, Alford reads Paul Celan’s “Engfürung” as having multiple shifts, but one key one: “At its nadir, in stifled silence and the height of obscurity, the poem turns. A kind of genesis unfolds, tentatively and slowly: ‘Speak, speak. / Was, was.’ Wrought at the final hour, ‘an der letzten Membran,’ a hard-won speech comes into being” (111). Attending to “Friedrich Hölderlin’s long poem ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage…’ (‘As on a Holiday…’),” Alford notices that “At the level of ‘plot,’ very little happens in the course of the long poem”; however, she adds, “Yet, at the formal and figurative levels, the poem composes a dynamic terrain of suspense, expectation, and waiting, punctuated and brought to climax by dramatic turns, composed primarily through a highly crafted syntax of extended hypotaxis punctuated by sudden reversals and emphatic declarations” (170-1). And, indeed, the reading that follows observes features such as “the sudden shift into active and emphatic now” at stanza three (172), and “[t]he declarative suddenness of ‘Jezt aber Tags!’” that “is also the shift into presence, the sudden turn of direction, that throws the preceding vigil into contrast, making it sensible” (173). Ultimately, according to Alford, “Through the repetition of this cycle of attenuated vigilant contemplation followed by abrupt turns in the present of deixis and declaration, Hölderlin crafts a flow of intransitive attention whose semantic content pales in importance beside the continual modulation of temporal and contemplative intensities” (174). 

Hölderlin’s turning becomes even more extreme in his poem “Brod und Wein,” about which Alford states,

We find a sustained example of this cycle of modulatory turns [like that of “Wie wenn am Feiertage…”] in the long poem “Brod und Wein,” in which the shift between the vigilant present and the emphatic present takes place not through an explicit repositioning of temporal cues, and not through the contrast between syntactical futurity (hypotaxis, colon, and conditional) and immediacy (declaration and exclamation), but rather through a series of hairpin turns that take as their hinge the uniquely Hölderlinian aber (“but”) found in “Jezt aber Tags!” (174)

Alford then tracks many of the shifts marked by “aber/but,” noticing that 

These turns in contemplation, subtler than the emphatic daybreak of now, hold the reader in tension, each turn disallowing philosophical or narrative onward march, modulating the present with the dialecticism of autocritical hesitancy. Temporally and attentionally, what is produced in these modulations is a zaudernden Weile, a wavering moment–a present continually represencing in question and rerouting. (177)

Alford figures that “In nine stanzas we find no less than sixteen abers, each signaling a hairpin turn into a different present,” along with a host of smaller turns: “scatterings of emphasis and intensity in Hölderlin’s interrogatory clusters, pilings of question after question…” (179). In short, Hölderlin “accentuates the effect of poetic vigilance by repeatedly interrupting it with a poetics of epiphanic immediacy” (181).

Alford then attends to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, which offers an example of poetic vigilance “without…revelatory relief–without the hairpin turns into immediate presence offered by Hölderlin’s uses of aber and jezt” (181). Still, Mallarmé’s poem turns: according to Alford, “We can see numerous patterns of alternating oppositions throughout the poem: ABAB–thesis and antithesis in recurrence, a relation of alternation without synthesis or conciliation” (182). And after providing a reading of the poem that largely tracks its dialectical–or perhaps negatively dialectical–structure, Alford states that, unlike Hölderlin’s poems, “The poem remains in the mode of vigilant potential, without the vigilance leading to a culminating or interruptive event. The deliberateness with which the poem’s form resists synthetic resolution exhibits a greater restraint than would a more traditionally resolving closure” (189). Ultimately, and succinctly, “The work of poetic attention in Mallarmé becomes an ongoing labor of guarding both the something (being) and the nothing (potentiality) against the anything (arbitrary)” (190).

Alford leapt away from Hölderlin with her discussion of Mallarmé, but she returns with her discussion of the poetry of Charles Wright: “In Hölderlin, the attentional pivot was the word aber, marking a shift, a turn, into a different present and giving relief and contour to the suspended state of vigilance. In Wright, the equivalent pivot is still, indicating the point at which resignation becomes meditation and marking the difference between Wright’s resigned metaphysics and despair” (209). Alford clarifies that Wright’s still signals “both a semantic turn of perseverance in the sense of ‘nevertheless’ and a call to stillness” (209). Either way, or both ways at once, it’s a turn: “Often the ‘still’ comes as a reversal or a rethinking of everything that has come before, creating a shift in direction, rerouting thought and calling it back from whichever closure it has been trending toward” (209-10).

I could–perhaps you, my patient, persistent reader, already get this–go on and on. I could dive into Alford’s attention to how “suddenly, the poem turns” in Rilke’s “Die Rosenschale” (139). Or I could delve into how Alford’s take on Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations understands it to be “by turns apocalyptic and messianic,” occupying “a temporality shaped by this convergence of leaning toward a nostalgic past, repulsion from the present moment, and grasping for a possible future that might offer an escape from things as they are” (202). Or I could dwell on how Alford sees Joan Retallack as making “of idleness an interventionist procedural methodology, mixing a variety of formal constraints with intuitive play to perform and produce ‘swerves’ in poetic experience” (231). I could offer examples of self-reflexive turning in a number of the poems cited, including Thom Gunn’s “Wind in the Streets”–the penultimate line of which begins, “But I turn…” (250)–and Wallace Stevens’s “Angels Surrounded by Paysans”–which ends with the lines “an apparition appareled in // Apparels of such lightest look that a turn / Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?” (278), and which happens to be the final words of the main part of the book: the next page begins the “Notes.”

For someone who is fascinated by turns in poetry, Forms of Poetic Attention is a treasure trove. It’s wonderful to read a contemporary commentary on poetry that is so enamored of the turn–enamored because it understands how useful seeing turns can be for deeply and fully engaging poems. In a way, reading along with Alford feels a bit like reading with Dante as he reviews some of his poem’s great structural shifts in the prose of his La Vita Nuova. It’s terrific, as well, along the way, to be introduced to new material that might be related to turning, such as Joan Retallack’s poetics of the swerve. (My copy of The Poethical Wager is wending its way to me right now!) And I’ve been a fan of Charles Wright’s poetry for a long time–his notion of sottonarrativa, or sub-narrative, was the inspiration behind the chapter on “Substructure” in Structure and Surprise. However, I don’t think his stillness registered for me–this insight will send me back to Wright’s work. In short, Alford’s book has given me much, as I think it will for anyone interested in turns.

And yet, for all its insight into and all the new material and work focused on turning that it points to, Forms of Poetic Attention is confounding in that it’s not clear that it actually knows how important the turn is to its endeavor. Turns are not mentioned at all, so far as I can tell, in any of the book’s official publicity material–such as the publisher’s webpage for the book. In fact, that page states that Alford “theorizes the process of attention-making–its objects, its coordinates, its variables–while introducing a broad set of interpretive tools into the field of literary studies.” However, its main interpretive tool is the time-honored one that Dante emphasized: track the turn. “Turn,” however, does not even appear as an item in the book’s index. And nor does “shift.” And nor does the important word “liftoff”–more on this in a moment.

This lack of acknowledgement of the centrality of the turn to Alford’s project does not only affect my sense of the project’s own self-awareness, but it also makes me think about what is missing from this book. It’s surprising that Alford’s chapter on “Contemplation” does not once refer to Louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation, and nor does it ever even glancing refer to some of poetry’s extensive traditions of contemplation, including the emblem tradition. M. H. Abrams is mentioned once, briefly and in passing, but his “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric” receives no mention, even though it is a great investigation into the structural turning of the descriptive-meditative poem, of which Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” is a prime example. Even if Alford’s reading of “Tintern Abbey” differs from Abrams’s it likely at least should have been in conversation with the previous reading. The end result of these omissions is that, at times, it seems like Alford is reinventing the wheel, or at least its turning, when she in fact is not, and need not have.

The problem is so bad that Alford seems to miss one of her own inventions: liftoff. This word gets used repeatedly in Forms of Poetic Attention–it has appeared a few times in some of the previously cited quotations from the book. I will point out as many of the uses as I can detect–again, an entry for “liftoff” in the index would be helpful for this, but I’ll do the best I can, and then I’ll try to analyze the uses to see what Alford means by this term. Here are the uses:

  • “…in many poems of contemplative focus, regardless of the object, the movement of the poem shows as much about the movement of the mind around and away from its focus–including in the liftoff to metaphor, in which the object serves as a starting place and a touchstone even as the attention moves to connect, to analogize, to make meaning” (57).
  • “Often the object of the poem’s contemplation turns out to be other than its initial semantic object of focus, either through metaphorical liftoff or by turning attention back on to the poem itself” (75).
  • In Audre Lorde’s “Sowing”, Alford notes that “the movement of desire opens an absence in a present full of the matter of life–daily repetitive work and the lull of an afternoon offer a space in which the mind lifts off from the present occupation into fantasy,” adding that “In this liftoff, desire’s lack wells an absence in the everyday, which is filled by a conjuring act of imagination” (88). In what might be a clarifying comment, Alford states that “The poem turns on the word ‘lack,’ which falls midline, almost buried in a flow of thought” (89).
  • “Sowing” “shares an attentional form with an earlier lesbian love poem,” Amy Lowell’s “The Blue Scarf” (90), and Lowell’s poem also has liftoff: “In Lowell’s poem, the dream is sparked by an object–an abandoned scarf left on a chair, whose touch and lingering scent ignite an attentional liftoff from present sense into erotic fantasy” (90). The poem contains at least one other turn, “[t]he rupture upon ‘waking’ from fantasy” (91)–but it does not seem to be an example of liftoff.
  • When reflecting on the poetry of imagination, Alford notes, “The crafting of attention in the poem, and the periods of intentional, focused concentration required to enter and engage, can be seen as the long trudge through pathless darkness, the hours of wait, the cold and unpromising terrain. No promises offered, only potentiality, only glimpsed moments, moments of resonance and rhythm that suggest a ‘something there’ behind the opaque bramble of lines….This lack of guarantee in the emergence or liftoff of imaginative attention is part of what animates and rarefies experiences of vision when they come” (147). Alford adds, in what is likely a connected idea, that “the ‘grace’ of a poem’s imaginative happenings is never guaranteed” (147).
  • On the next page, Alford states, “[P]oetic imagination enables more than simple mental representation…: it makes possible a coming to life that develops beyond the sphere of the words on the page. The few words present in a single line serve as potential triggers for something larger than what they represent–a leap or liftoff, an event that takes on life, layers, dimensionality, and movement. It is not surprising that the lexicon of imagination is tied to ‘flights’” (148).
  • Concluding her main discussion of Hölderlin by focusing on some specific lines, Alford states, “The suddenness of the potential poetic event, possible only in the stillness of vigil and sacred, contemplative, wakeful night, is one of grasping, active seizing, and making-present: a sudden shift from highly endogenous intransitive attention to radically exogenous transitive apprehension: revelation. In stark contrast to both the meditative stillness and the contemplative inquiry of the preceding stanzas, this passage breaks in with an almost violent, ecstatic urgency of near liftoff–” (180).
  • About Charles Bukowski’s “the old big time”, Alford observes, “At no point does the poem lift off into metaphor or symbolism or go out of its way to add complexity, layered significances, hidden references, or any of the other formal elements one might expect from a literary work. In other words, the poem seems to enact that motto it describes [‘Don’t try’] by refusing to try, having given up or rejected the notion of ‘working’ at poetry” (244).

So, what is liftoff? It seems that it is a significant, often sudden turn within a poem, one that transubstantiates the poem into an event that takes on life, layers, dimensionality, and movement; often the liftoff’s leap or flight transforms the poem’s material into the status of metaphor or symbol in a maneuver that has the power of revelation–and as it never is guaranteed, when it happens it feels like grace. Liftoff seems to have little or nothing to do with coming down or out of the privileged state of revelatory grace, little or nothing to do with ironic self-reflexivity.

This is a cool idea. I wish, though, that Alford would have theorized it more herself–in this way, Alford perhaps could have added something to the names given to turns, including Ciardi’s fulcrum, Rosenthal’s torque, Lazer’s swerve, Hirshfield’s window-moment, and many others. I also wish that Alford would have been more aware of her interest in turns, and perhaps tried to link up liftoff to some of the structures to which it very clearly is connected, including the midcourse turn, the emblem structure, the metaphor-to-meaning structure, the epiphanic structure. That is, there are traditions that should have been considered by Alford, not simply particular poems.

Alford notes that for her methodology she draws “on literary, philosophical, and psychological research on attention and poetic experience to develop [her] own concepts and terminology,” and as a result, her “reflections on the poems themselves are thus deeply subjective, rooted in firsthand acts of attention” (10). She adds: “This approach locates me in a limited position, bound by my own blind spots and conditioned lenses, which I have kept in mind throughout my theorization of poetic attention” (10). 

Still, it remains a mystery why the turn, and the related liftoff, which are so central to Alford’s project, so generally un-, or at least under-, recognized, under-theorized, so little attended to. This phenomenon obviously requires further investigation.


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Categories : Emblem Structure, Epiphanic structure, Metaphor-to-Meaning Structure, midcourse turn, poetic turn, structure-form distinction

Alden’s Structure-Form Distinction

11 07 2017

I’ve recently engaged in a project to more systematically investigate whether or not the poetic turn–and, along with it, the structure-form distinction–makes appearances in introductions to poetry and handbooks for poem-making, especially books supposedly focused on poetic forms. I’ve been making what I think are some fascinating discoveries. Chief among them is that the structure-form distinction indeed does exist in a number of the kinds of books I’m exploring. Whether or not there are patterns to these occurrences remains to be seen. For now, it is important to note them, to gather the dots before (possibly) connecting them.

My most recent search has turned up a book that very clearly employs the structure-form distinction: Raymond Macdonald Alden‘s An Introduction to Poetry: For Students of English Literature (Henry Holt and Company, 1909). The book’s table of contents largely reveals that the distinction will be in play. It indicates that the book largely is a book about poetic forms. Of its six chapters, four focus on what are traditionally conceived of as formal issues: “Chapter II: The Classes or Kinds [of poetry” (ix); “Chapter IV: The Basis of Poetry (External),” which focuses on rhythm (xii); “Chapter V: English Metres” (xiii); and “Chapter VI: Rime and Stanza Forms” (xiv). However, it also is clear that something else, another factor will be at play: Chapter III is called “The Basis of Poetry (Internal)” (xi).

This initial indication is borne out in the book. Consider the book’s discussion of lyric (55-73). As a part of this discussion, “Structure of the lyric” (57) is differentiated from “Form of the lyric” (58). Form, as expected, is concerned with lyric’s “musical” aspects (58). However, structure is something different: “Its [lyric’s] structure may be said to depend in part upon its relation to the outer and the inner worlds” (58). While some song-like poems reflect the outer world and other, more “reflective” lyrics convey primarily the inner, “More familiar is the lyric which takes its beginning at a point in the outer world, but passes to the invisible world of emotional reflection; of this type a great example is Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, which takes its point of departure at the visible object, and passes to profoundly emotional reflection on the immortality of the spirit of beauty” (58). It seems here that Alden is acknowledging the presence and the importance of the turn.

This certainly seems to be the case when he discusses the sonnet in particular:

The sonnet…while a favorite form with many of our greatest poets, is rarely used for other than distinctly conscious and formal expression; at its best, too, it expresses a definite intellectual conception fused with a single emotion. Its two-part structure (in the case of the Italian form) makes it peculiarly fitted for that lyrical movement described on a previous page [58, as noted above], where the impulse takes its rise in the outer world and passes to a point in the inner. (70)

The discussion of the sonnet in Chapter VI (“Rime and Stanza Forms”) also includes a subsection on the sonnet’s “[b]ipartite character” (326): “In the stricter type of the sonnet there is a marked rhetorical pause at the end of the octave, the division representing a twofold expression of a single thought which forms the unifying basis of the form” (326). For Alden,

…those sonnets may well be regarded as the most successful whose form bodies forth the real character of their content. From this standpoint, the Italian type is especially well fitted for the expression of a thought presented first in narrative form, then in more abstract comment (as Arnold’s East London); or, in the form of a simile between two objects or situations (as Longfellow’s first sonnet on the Divina Commedia); or, from the standpoint of two different moods (as Rossetti’s Lovesight); or exemplified in two coordinate concrete expressions (as in Keats’s Grasshopper and Cricket). (327)

Alden then compares and contrasts the Italian and the English forms and structures: “The resulting effect is different in two respects: first, the rime arrangement is more obvious, and more popular in tone, being more readily followed by the ear; second, the structure is more directly progressive, the rime scheme being developed climactically and closing with epigrammatic, summarizing couplet” (328).

Oddly, when he summarizes the “[s]ources of sonnet effects,” Alden essentially drops the sonnet’s structure, stating, “The success and pleasurableness of the sonnet form seem to be dependent upon two elements: the complexity of the rhyme scheme (this applying only to the Italian type), and the fixed length of the whole poem” (330). Alden does, however, note when discussing the sonnet’s relatively brief length that “[i]t is precisely the contrast which it [the sonnet’s relatively small size] presents with the limitless liberty of romantic art, as exhibited in abundant variety of metrical, stanzaic, and rhetorical structure, which gives the restraint of the sonnet its chief charm” (330, my emphasis). Though this seems far too little: the inner structure, it had seemed, contributed greatly to the sonnet’s charm.

If somewhat regrettable, this situation is not unique: many of those who acknowledge the importance of poetic structure and the turn often struggle to articulate their significance. This is the case with Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, as well as Robert Hass’s A Little Book on Form. Also, while Alden is very consistent, he is not perfectly consistent: the meanings of “structure” and “form” sometimes seem to merge. And, finally, and oddly, Alden does not ever refer to the turn or the volta. And yet, for all of this, Alden’s An Introduction to Poetry clearly and interestingly incorporates major aspects of the structure-form distinction.

In his book’s preface, Alden notes his book’s lack of focus on the structural interior and perhaps too-great focus on formal exterior, stating, “[I]t may be thought unfortunate that the chapters on metrical form should bulk more largely than those dealing with the inner elements of poetry; to which there is only the reply that matters of metrical form appear to be, not the most important, but those that present most difficulty to the student and require the most careful examination of details still under debate” (v). It is my belief that it is now time to bulk up our writing on structure and the turn.


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Categories : poetic turn, poetry, Uncategorized, volta

‘don’t know what to call it’: Robert Hass’s Elision of the Poetic Turn

20 06 2017

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I shall have to disregard the musical structure of poetry: metre, stanza-form, rhyme, alliteration, quantity, and so on. I neglect these without too much regret: criticism has paid them an altogether disproportionate amount of attention….I am going to talk, primarily, about other sorts of structure in lyrical poetry.

  —Randall Jarrell, “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry” (Georgia Review 50.4 (1996): 697-713)

Thought begins in disagreement, the terms of which demand to be articulated.

—Robert Hass (225)

Robert Hass’s A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry in fact is a book about the importance of the poetic turn. Though odd, often careless and confounding, it is clearly a book (like some others, including Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry) that acknowledges the primacy of structure (understood as the pattern of a poem’s turning) over form.

In the book’s opening sentences Hass indicates his approach. His book will not be like typical books on form, which take “form to mean traditional rules previous to composition—rules for the formation of the sonnet, for example, or the villanelle” (1). While “useful,” such information “didn’t seem [to Hass] to have much to do with the way the formal imagination actually operates in poetry. It does not, for starters, address the formal principles, or impulses, that underlie the great majority of poetry in English and American literatures not written in these conventional forms” (1).

Hass offers some initial definitions of form:

  • One meaning of form that has currency has the meaning “traditional form,” which usually means the use of rhyme and meter.
  • Another meaning is that it refers to one of a number of traditional kinds of poems that apply particular rules of composition. As in “the sonnet is a form.”
  • Another meaning is “external shape.”
  • Another is “the arrangement and relationship of basic elements in a work of art, through which it produces a coherent whole.” (3)

While such “usages” are “common” and “useful,” according to Hass, “none of them capture the nature of the formal imagination—the intuitions that shape a work of art—or the pleasure form gives to writer and readers” (3). For Hass, “[c]loser might be:

  • The way the poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its making. (3)

This virtually mystical fifth option, though, remains merely suggestive—it in fact will go essentially unexplored by Hass. Hass actually largely conceives of form in the terms he presents in his fourth bullet point. He’s interested in basic elements, “the essential expressive gestures…inside forms” (2). And these gestures are best described as structures. Again and again, Hass will actively set aside issues of rhyme, meter, and external shape in order take apart poems to reveal the arrangements of and the relationships among their basic parts, their structural components, separated (and joined) by turns.

This certainly is the case when Hass explores the sonnet, a main dwelling-place for the turn in poetic forms. (For more on the sonnet and the turn, click here, and here, and here.) Hass understands the importance of the turn, or the volta, for the sonnet. In fact, the turn just may be the sonnet’s main attraction. He states:

Amazing the range of the work in the form. There really isn’t, as far as I know, a good study of whatever it is, formal or psychological, that has made the form—in all the European languages—so persistent and compelling. It might, as Peter Sacks has suggested, be the single gaze and the proportions of the face. But that doesn’t account for the importance of the turn. 8/6: say it long, say it a little shorter. In the Italian sonnet with the more musical twining rhymes in the sestet: say it, then sing it. Or say it and sing the opposite, or the qualification. And the Shakespearean sonnet, which usually has the strong turn, doesn’t have the formal change in the rhyme scheme, so if it has an 8/6 structure, it also has a 4/4/4/2 structure: say it, say it, contradict or qualify it, nail it….It may be something in the turn that echoes the process that we experience as constituting our subjectivity… (185)

Hass qualifies this statement a bit, noting that there are “descriptive” sonnets that “have no turn at all” (186). However, while Hass is correct, this in no way compromises the central place of the volta in terms of the significance of the sonnet (in the sonnet, the lack of a volta is significant), for Hass, this is a minor note: in Hass’s extensive discussion of the sonnet (pp. 121-186), which involves numerous references to the turn, he devotes a single sentence to the fact that there exist sonnets without turns.

The turn also is what gives power to two-line forms. Hass states, “[T]he two-line poem is based on a human pattern of exchange: question-and-answer, call-and-response. This was one of the basic forms of West African folk culture and both the work song and the spiritual evolved from it” (28). The two-line poems Hass provides follow this structure, turning from question to answer, from call to response by which, as with Bantu combinations, in which “[t]he first singer produces an image; the second supplies another,” a non-narrative, riddle-like “internal comparison” is created (29). (For further examples of the question-and-answer structure, click here. For further thinking on two-line poems, click here.) Hass points out that “[t]his is basically the principle upon which many haiku [though typically three-lined] are based…[a]nd it is…the basis of the couplets in the Persian ghazal” (28). In fact, when discussing the ghazal and its couplets, Hass quickly dismisses the importance of meter, stating, “The ghazal was intricately metrical in ways that we don’t need to go into” (a remarkable claim in a book about form!), and he turns to discuss internal structure: “In practice, though the couplets are discrete, they are linked by theme, and the subtlest of them proceed almost like a set of Bantu combinations, linked line by line, couplet by couplet, through internal comparison” (42).

Structure also is the defining characteristic of the Chinese quatrain called the chueh-chu. According to Hass, “The Chinese quatrain was one of the great literary forms of the Tang dynasty. It was called the chueh-chu, or ‘curtailed verse.’ It was a form of ‘regulated verse,’ or chin-t’i-shih, in which the pattern of tones followed certain rules” (103). Hass continues, citing Arthur Cooper: “‘…the fourfold structure [of this particular quatrain] has something at once like a little sonata-form and like the composition of a painting. The sonata form of these poems is reflected in the Chinese names of each of the lines: the first is called “Raising,” that is, the introduction of the theme; the second is called “Forwarding,” that is, development; the third, “Twisting,” or introduction of a new theme,[sic]; and the fourth “Concluding”’” (103).

Here is such a poem by Du Fu:

My rain-soaked herbs: some still sparse, some lush.
They freshen the porch and pavilion with their color.
These waste mountains are full of them. But what’s what?
I don’t know the names and the root shapes are terrifying. (104)

Throughout its supposed discussions of form A Little Book on Form in fact attends much more closely to structure. This is additionally apparent when, approximately mid-way through A Little Book on Form, Hass turns from discussing form to discuss genre. Fascinatingly this is the point at which Hass’s interest in the turn really begins to reveal itself: genre is marked mainly by patterns of turns. Hass begins “A Note on Genre” by showing how much he wants to be done with form, as it is traditionally conceived:

1. So that’s it for poetic forms. Four hundred and fifty years of the sonnet, occasional sestinas and villanelles, the rarer occasional pantoum. One could add the ballad—short narrative poems, traditionally in four-line stanzas. And a couple more recent English language adaptation [sic]—the ghazal (see Chapter 2) from Persian and Arabic, the blues from the American vernacular.

2. Much richer in the literary tradition is the idea of kinds of poems, poems with particular subject matter and/or particular angles of approach that don’t, however, specify their length or a particular metrical patter or rhyme scheme. (197)

After one is done reeling from the fact that it’s a book on form that has the sentence “So that’s it for poetic forms” in it, one can then start to trace Hass’s particular interest: internal structure. Hass observes that “the impulse of prayer seems to be very near the origin of the lyric,” and prayer, he notes, has “[a] transparent structure. Praise, then ask” (202). Toward the end of this brief transitional section, Hass states, “Thinking about lyric, about the formal imagination working its way from the beginning of a poem to the end, one can turn to the work of genre, to the shapes of thought and arcs of feeling in the traditional kinds” (205). And this clearly is something other than form as traditionally conceived; Hass states, “So the rhythms of formal shaping in a poem are always working at at least a couple of levels—that of prosody, numbers falling through numbers to create the expressive effect of a piece, and that of—don’t know what to call it—thematic development, the way the poem makes its trajectory, creates its sense of movement (or doesn’t) from beginning to end, some of which is apt to get prompts from generic expectations, conscious or not” (205-206).

Hass may not know what to call it, but we do: structure, understood as the pattern of a poem’s turns. Nowhere is this clearer than in Hass’s discussion of the ode, the first genre to which he turns. Hass emphasizes the ode’s traditional three-part structure: Pindar’s “strophe, antistrophe, and epode,” or, in Jonson’s version, “turn, counterturn, and stand” (210). And, in what we should recognize as a move typical of Hass, he plays down metrical form in the process. While “[t]he strophe and antistrophe had the same stanza pattern, and the epode a different one,” that doesn’t matter much because “[i]n translation the three-part metrical pattern isn’t evident”—“but,” Hass adds, “the basic formal pattern is” (210). For Hass, the ode’s “formal pattern” is its three-part structure: “The clue to the formal structure—what gets echoed in the history of the ode—is the way they begin in a place, and then take their audience on a journey—the entertaining stories in the middle part of the after-dinner speech [the typical occasion of original Pindaric odes]—and then come to their graceful conclusion” (211). In the section called “Reading the Ode” (223-291), Hass consistently breaks down the odes into their constitutive parts, parts separated by turns. Sometimes, there are three parts (231, 240, 250-252, 256), once five (242), and twice “several” (244, 278).

Hass seems to be particularly taken with the pattern of the romantic ode. Derived in part from the three-part structure of the seventeenth-century meditative poem (which itself, as described in Louis Martz’s The Meditative Poem, has a three-part structure: “Begin with a scene from the story of the man-god and his suffering. Take the story in, focusing on its details and their meaning, and then return yourself to the scene fully in possession of it” (212)), the romantic ode “begins with [a] scene….Then the poem takes you on what one critic, M. H. Abrams, describes as ‘an inward journey’ where some work of transformation is done, and then returns you to the place where you began, with that place altered by the process” (211). (For more on this structure, which M. H. Abrams calls the “descriptive-meditative” structure, click here.) But, regardless of the particular kind of ode, odes consist of moving parts. Hass concludes his discussion of the ode this way:

The takeaway: Out of litany and prayer came the praise poem and endless lyric variations on the praise poem. In their formal development these poems have a beginning, middle, and end; an inescapable (unless you are Gertrude Stein) three-part structure. The beginning part is often initiated by desire or dissent. The middle section is almost infinitely variable. It can proceed by narrative, by argument, by association, by elaboration of a metaphor, by a mix of these. In postmodern practice development often proceeds by braiding and disparity, by disruption and non sequitur. An ode can have few or many parts. It can attempt to name, or possess, or stand at the right distance from, in the right relation to, even veer away, from the spoken or unspoken object of desire or imagination of value that initiates it, and its third and final section is apt to get to, or point toward, or try to instantiate, or ask a favor from that object or power. (Which is apt to be, at least implicitly, the power of poetry, or the action of the imagination of which poetry is an instance.) (290-291)

For Hass, the turn is also at the heart of the genre of elegy. In the sections of his book that addresses elegy, Hass draws heavily on Peter Sacks’s The English Elegy. (Sacks happens to be one of the great thinkers about the poetic turn. To find a link to Sacks’s lecture on a type of turn he calls the “dolphin’s turn,” a lecture introduced by Robert Hass, and a reflection on that lecture, click here.) For Sacks, the turn is at the heart of the elegy: as Hass cites, “‘Daphne’s “turning” into a tree matches Apollo’s “turning” from the object of his love to a sign of her, the laurel bough. It is the substitutive turn or act of troping that any mourner—perhaps that language—must perform’” (296). As he attends to Milton’s “Lycidas,” Shelley’s “Adonais,” and Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” Hass notes that “[p]artly [he] will be tracking Peter Sacks’s reading of the poems in his The English Elegy,” but in doing so, “[w]e are tracking old, inherited formal structures for surviving and transforming the kinds of devastating loss that can sicken the roots of life” (303). The next nearly 20 pages track the sections and turns of these poems.

After the sections on elegy, there’s some more to A Little Book on Form, including brief sections (about ten pages / section) on satire (325-334); georgic (335-343); variable stanzas and organic form (345-352); difficult forms (353-363); collage, abstraction, Oulipo, and procedural poetics (365-379); mixed forms (381-384); the prose poem (385-391); metrical stress (393-398); how to scan a poem (399-411); and how free verse works (413-429). However, as the brevity of these sections (and others: the section on blank verse is six pages long (115-120); the sestina and villanelle are given a total of nine pages (187-195); and the pantoum, slipped into the sestina and villanelle section, receives one page’s worth of attention) reveal: this is just clean up, just touching on some final topics, mere formalities. The real work of the book was already done, and that work was the work of troping our attention from metrical form to structural turning.

*

While for me, and perhaps for many of the readers of this blog, it is incredibly interesting to witness how much the turn intrigues Hass, I want to be clear: I do not recommend this book.

At all levels, it is considerably careless. Even if we allow, as Hass notes, that this book “began as a series of notes and reading lists for a seminar [he] was invited to teach at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in the winter of 1995,” and so that the “[t]he notes are intended to be suggestive, not comprehensive” (1-2), it is still very problematic. It is poorly edited. Grammatical errors abound, and often partial and/or incorrect citations (David Mikics co-authored The Art of the Sonnet with Stephen Burt; Phillis Levin edited The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, not Phyllis) float about. Twice, M. H. Abrams great essay “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric” is called “Style and Structure…” (214, 253).

Hass states, “I’m very much aware that [my notes] come from what I happen to have read or be reading and that other readers will bring other lists and perhaps better example drawn from other traditions to the issues of craft discussed here” (2). But too many times A Little Book on Form reveals what feels like an almost active disengagement with its subjects. In a section called “Reading the Sonnet” (133-186) Hass offers a number of sonnets to be perused, but he does not make clear why he’s offered these and not others (including anything from Astrophil and Stella, a glaring omission near the core of a tradition with which Hass is familiar). A Little Book on Form also contains a number of claims that, seeing them in print, print being prepared to become a book, should have given anyone, let alone someone as smart as Robert Hass, some pause. For example, Hass writes, “People kept experimenting with the [sonnet] form though it is hard to name a decisive instance after Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ in 1923 and Frost’s ‘Design’ in 1936” (130). This is preposterous: see The Reality Street Book of Sonnets. Additionally, of the villanelle, Hass states, “It is a form that has produced at least four quite powerful poems”; they are, as Hass recalls them, E. A. Robinson’s “House on the Hill,” Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” (194). Hass is right about these poems, but it is alarming that he won’t (or can’t) name another out of this tight, well-know group. (Surprisingly, Hass’s range of reference to contemporary poets and scholars seems to be severely limited. The avant-garde barely seems to exist in A Little Book on Form, and there are strong links only to work by folk from particular environs familiar to Hass: the Bay area and greater Harvard, with a tiny outpost in Iowa City).

Replete with reading lists, Hass too-often relies on a reader’s willingness to do additional reading to collect insight rather than offer it himself. For example, Hass states, “The best way to get a sense of the four-line stanza in English is to pick up an anthology and read through it” (89). Such instruction is given or implied numerous times throughout the book. This level of disengagement is particularly disappointing when it comes to Hass’s unwillingness to enter into scholarly debate with other thinkers. When discussing the ghazal, Hass notes that “[b]y 2000 the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali had objected to these freehanded appropriations of the classic form and published, by way of protest, an anthology of poems, Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, which follow the rhyme scheme and something like the meter of the classic Muslim form” (45). However, though he offers a smattering of examples of “real ghazals” (two couplets from three poems), Hass seems totally unconcerned about the issue of formal correctness—a shocking stance in a book (purportedly—though, as we now know, not really) about form. And nor does Hass engage Stephen Burt’s skepticism about the sestina. As Hass notes, in a 2012 essay called “Sestina! Or, The Fate of the Idea of Form,” Burt “reads the phenomenon [of “a recent explosion of sestinas”] as a product of the teaching of creative writing and as a symptom of ‘diminished hope for the art,’ a way ‘to emphasize technique, and to disavow at once tradition, organicism, and social and spiritual efficacy’” (193). Whoa. So, what does Hass think about this? We have no idea: we’re instructed to read Burt’s essay, and many of the sestinas he lists (Hass doesn’t make his own), and judge for ourselves (193). This disengagement reaches its apotheosis in the book when, in his brief discussion of satire Hass can’t even be bothered to consider its structural elements. Instead he states, “One would have to do more study of Horace and Juvenal and the Hebrew prophets than I’ve done to answer the question of whether there is a pattern of development, an inner logic to the shape of satire and prophecy like the ones one can make out in the ode and the elegy. It would seem that satire’s natural form would be the list, the bill of particulars” (328). And that’s that.

But, of course, the real, deep disengagement results in nothing that is in the book but, rather, is a result of vital material having been left out. Hass seems to think that nothing of interest has been written about the poetic structure and its turn. But there has been a great deal of high-quality, insightful conversation about the turn. Jorie Graham has some very interesting takes on the turn. In fact, I was introduced to the turn by Graham in the fall of 1994, when I was just starting my studies as an MFA student in poetry at the University of Iowa–that is, the semester before Hass taught his first course on forms there. (A brief reflection on Graham’s thinking about the turn, and about what I learned about the turn, at Iowa can be found here.) And even if we focus solely on the sonnet’s volta, there are Paul Fussell, Christina Pugh, and—oh, yes—Dante. What is perhaps deeply disappointing for me about Hass’s book is that it makes it seem as though there is no conversation about the volta, or, more broadly, the turn. Therefore, Hass gets stuck. He doesn’t seem to have a language, or a way to think more deeply into poetry via the turn. His book suffers greatly because of it.

The penultimate paragraph of A Little Book on Form recounts this story:

Stanley Kunitz saying there were three ways a poem moves: in a straight line from A to B, in a circle beginning with A and passing through various place [sic] and coming back to A, or by braiding two, three, even five elements in such a way that by the end their relation to each other becomes clear. And I said, “What about pointillism or a Calder mobile, where elements just hang there in relation to each other or not, the connection unstated?” And Stanley, “Yes, that would be a fourth way.” “Or a list,” I said, “that would just be A A A A.” “Yes, yes,” said Stanley, getting a little weary. (428)

If only A Little Book on Form had been restructured so that it started here, so that it could have ended someplace much more revealing and surprising.


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Categories : poetic turn, Uncategorized, volta