Modern Poetry ∫ The MOD Blog

Introduction: Musical Poetry, Poetic Music

Setting poems to music is as ancient as the chorus of Greek tragedies. Embedded in the very root of words tied to poetry, such as lyric (lyre) and sonnet (little song), is an expectation for poetry to sing–and this was to set it apart from prose. At some point, however, things changed. The lyrical aspect of poetry took on the form of lyrics in a song. Though often poetic, lyrics are distinct these days from what we think of as poetry. Composed alongside music, often driven and constrained by the rhythm and form of the music, lyrics have kept outdated aspects of poetry like rhyme and strict meter, use diction that most people understand, and share generic subjects and themes (like love). At the same time, poetry seemed itself to become less lyrical. It turned inward, dedicated to the individual reader with the advent of reliable book-making processes, relieved of its place in drama or performance, and directed for quiet reading by those who had time (generally the upper class). Driven more by language and the didactic, poetry took on a cadence of natural speech. Poetry during Romanticism, embodied by Wordsworth, reads now like speaking breathlessly about poetic experiences, rather than being song-like, lyrical itself. With Modernism came newer developments which threatened to divorce poetry from song: the death of rhyme, the celebration of free-meter, the borrowing of technical, scientific, or journalistic language into poetry. One only has to read Gertrude Stein to know what I am talking about. If poetry’s evolution during Modernism can be said to be a series of emancipations from restricting notions of what poetry could be, then it can also be said that poetry had carved out a niche for itself in which music seemed strangely absent. It seems both Hip-Hop and “Spoken Word”, in turn, moved in to fill our need for musically driven poetry. Imagine Emily Dickenson at a Poetry Slam at the Nuyorcan Poetry Cafe in the East Village of Manhattan.

And yet, here is the grey area. Poems do not have to rhyme to be musical. Langston Hughes wrote intentionally rhythmic poems. And finally, like the difference between sound and noise, hearing the music in poetry is a matter of creative listening and creative reciting. Ultimately, music too can shift around poetry, itself emancipated from traditional notions of what music can and should be. To imagine the untapped potential of music and poetry, turn the tables: rather than poetry set to music, imagine for a moment, music set to poetry: that is, music driven or constrained by the flow and form of a recited poem. Imagine drumming without a steady pulse: Paul Motian was championing this style up to his recent death in 2011. Imagine music set to the cadence and pitch of natural speech: Steve Reich was doing it in the 90s with Different Trains, in which he wrote a string quartet to interviews of holocaust survivors. The symmetrical, machine-like para-diddle rhythm (LRLL RLRR) imitates the chug of a train while the melodies almost perfectly articulate the cadence and pitch of the speaker’s voice.

Drumming about Poetry

In the prologue to The Invisible Man, written by Ralph Ellison in the 1950s, the invisible man himself describes the music of Louis Armstrong after smoking marijuana. I had read it 6 years ago, yet it stuck with me. As I embarked to do something relating my love of jazz and poetry, this passage struck gold in my brain as I fetched the book off my shelf. Striking the blues-roots of American music, I found it relevant to an undertaking with little precedence: setting poems to jazz drumming. More specifically, I was setting American modernist poems to a distinctly American art-form given breath largely by black experience.

“There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue”–all at the same time…Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time; you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music…So under the spell of the reefer I discovered a new analytical way of listening to music. The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well. I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths. And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it…” (Ellison 8).

Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis have said it before: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” A quote whose origins remain murky–it rings true. Using one medium to explain another is expensive–its costs often outweigh the results, and somehow, some paranormal weight lifts away from a dying body. However, for all of this, it’s funny that the sentiment is so often found, biting the hand hand that feeds it, in a written piece about music. Miles, for example, uses the quote in his autobiography knowing that inevitably he would write about music by the very nature of his project. Suffice it to say, I too share this sentiment in two ways: writing about my project, and my project itself: well, drumming about poetry. After all, poetry rarely has the sort of rhythmic zing of spoken word or rapping, and unlike lyrics, is hardly written alongside a steady pulse or musical form (AABA, verse-chorus, etc.). But there is always the reminder that everything is connected, that difference and similarity if a matter of where you stand. Because musicologists have long thought that music was from its earliest inception using natural objects to mimic natural sounds. And, well, music-ing about nature is like poem-ing about life–an imperfect likeness, yet so very human. So that’s the crux: all art forms point outward, mimic, hold, gesture–its integral to what we’ve always been and done as human being. What’s more, drumming is probably the most ancient way of gesturing back at the world. Perhaps at its most basic level, when humans began to drum marked our awareness of time, and our willingness to spend time extravagantly: think about a bunch of people literally passing time making noise–it’s not cooking. And if the language of human rhythm imbibes natural phenomenon, then surely human rhythm has absorbed the rhythm of language, the natural flow of the spoken word–sentence, accent, breath, and period. Call and response.

 The Project

Click the link above to listen to poems I set to rhythm.

My DH project consists of research into how anthologies are arranged and poetry is classified. Anthologies consist of many works that are usually arranged according to certain characteristics. I explore how a modern poetry anthology is created and how the poems are classified. I set up the the project as a mock anthology, using Flipsnack, with a preface and introduction to show how they are set up and arranged.

My final project takes a look at the critical reputation of Jeffers across Modernism and beyond its time-frame by analyzing the critical review of the poet’s work, mainly revolving around four of his books of poetry: Flagons and Apples, Californians, “Tamar and Other Poems,” and Roan Stallion. In addition, I also briefly look at the underrated anti-war book Jeffers published in the 1940s, Be Angry at the Sun and Double Axe, as well as a meta-poetic essay published in The New York Times during Jeffers’s run as a Broadway playwright. Ending with a look at the scholarship of Jeffers’s reemergence, beginning in the 1960s at the fall of Modernism, I compare Jeffers to the Modernist giants Pound and Eliot, questioning how contemporary popularity affects permanence. Ultimately, Jeffers’s poetry becomes most timeless and meaningful, withstanding the supersession of Modernism by Postmodernism and serving as a classic influence to many contemporary poets across the West Coast and America.

Jeffers in the Canon

In an effort to provide background for my final project discussion concerning the depiction and experience of crime in Modern Poetry, this blog post will decipher the Classical period of Criminology and the way poets of the time were exploring its social significance.

In Criminology: The Essentials, Anthony Walsh states:

“Criminology…a young discipline, although humans have probably been    theorizing about crime and its causes ever since they first made rules and observed others breaking them…how people thought about crime and criminals…was strongly influenced by the social and intellectual currents of their time” (10).

The definition of criminology is simply an interdisciplinary science that collects and deciphers data on the many aspects of criminals, delinquents, and antisocial behavior, but in practice, anything but simple.  Although the term criminology was not officially coined until 1885 by Italian law professor Raffaele Garafolo, as periods of humanity progressed, so did its conceptions of the world around it.  We are all familiar with the Renaissance advances in art, literature, music and philosophy, which carried human thinking away from an absolute authority towards an avenue that lead to the scientific method.  Enlightenment remolded human thinking associated with mathematics, science, and individuality that led to criminal justice system reforms throughout Europe.  Walsh summarizes the transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment best: “the Renaissance provided a key to the human mind and the Enlightenment opened the door” (10).

Cesare Beccaria’s work, On Crime and Punishment (1764), paved the way for the Classical School of Criminology responsible for emphasizing human rationality and free will when studying criminals.  Beccaria pleaded to reform the criminal justice system, humanize and rationalize laws, as well as their corresponding punishments.  To him, citizens engaged in a social contract with the state: in order to gain protection of the state, citizens gave up certain rights.  As a way of deterring crime, the protections secured by the government, the laws should be certain, swift and severe, depending on the severity of the offense.  As demonstration of the support the classical school received, the ideals were implemented into constitutions still in existence today…we already know this stuff backwards and forwards.

Another important figure in the classical school of criminology, Jeremy Bentham, adds social control based on the utilitarian concept principle of utility, whereas the acts of individuals should be judged moral or immoral by its effect on the happiness of the community.  Thus, the study and practice of the criminal justice system should be focused on weighing maximum pleasure and minimal pain for an individual against a population, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number.  Bentham believed hedonism is life’s central purpose being pleasure and hedonistic calculus is the approach of weighing anticipated pros and cons of a course of action and determining which would result, again concentrating on the greatest pleasure and lowest pain.  Central to Bentham’s theory was the assertion that humans are rational and possessed free will.  One of his contemporaries, William Wordsworth agreed with Bentham’s claims and sought to, as Quentin Bailey with San Diego State University praises, “imagine a way of relating to the vagrant and criminal poor,” while society and lawmakers at the time were creating agencies and offices to “tackle criminality and establish a disciplined and obedient workforce” (Excerpt from Bailey’s Wordsworth’s Vagrants).

In “Thoughtless Cruelty,” Charles Lamb explores the repercussions and other possible explanations as to why a man named “Robert” would murder something as harmless as a fly.  The speaker attempts to appeal to the criminal’s sense of reason and logic by suggesting Robert was “devoid/ Of thought and sense, to have destroy’d/ A thing in which no way you annoy’d” (lines 5-7).   While appealing to the criminal’s rationality, the speaker enlists other possibilities for the fly’s early demise, but argues for every “creature’s pain by small or great” (27).

Philosophers and writers of every discipline frequently wrote about criminal behavior, but not many approached the angle of criminal rationality, or as sociologists referred to as criminality.  Writers such as Wordsworth and Lamb were helping to continue a broader discussion that sociologists and philosophers, like Bentham, had already created.  However, Beccaria and Bentham were not the first to introduce the idea of human rationality.  In 1690, John Locke defined “the self” as:

…that conscious thinking thing, (whatever substance, made up of whether             spiritual, or material, simple, or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or        conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is   concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends (Locke, An Essay).

The more we understand man and womankind, the better we understand crime and the role crime plays in literature, particularly Modern Poetry.

Modern History of Criminology

• Positivism
  • more scientific view of human behavior replaces classical assumptions (application of scientific method from more positive knowledge)
  • determinism: events have causes that preceded them
  • Cesare Lombroso
    • Criminal Man (1876) – many criminals are evolutionary throwbacks to an earlier form of life
      • atavism – organisms resembling ancestral pre-human forms of life
        • identified by physical characteristics (protruding jaws, drooping eyes, large ears, twisted and flat noses, etc.)
        • people who acted beastly and lacked reasoned conscience were thought to be biologically inferior beings belonging to an early time in evolution
    • most extreme views were not supported very well, so he modified to include two other types
    • insane criminals – not born criminals; became criminal as a result of an “alteration of the brain, which completely upsets their moral nature” (46)
    • criminaloids – no physical peculiarities of born or insane criminals; “habitual criminals” bc they became so by contact with other criminals and “distressing circumstances”; “judicial criminals who fall afoul of the law by accident”; “criminal passion, hot headed and impulsive persons who commit violent acts when provoked” (46)
• Italian School of Criminology by Raffaele Garofalo and Enrico Ferri
  • Garofalo coined term “criminology” and formed a “natural” definition of crime, wanting to anchor it to human nature
    • crime is an act is universally condemned, and would be condemned such if it offended altruistic sentiments (integrity, honesty, compassion, and sympathy)
    • natural crimes are evil in themselves (mala in se); crimes wrong only because they violate law (mala prohibita)
    • punishment should fit the criminal, not crime
    • peculiarities – characteristics that place offenders at risk for further criminal behavior (4 categories)
      • extreme = execution
      • impulsive (alcoholics and the insane) = imprisioned
      • professional = “elimination” either by life imprisonment or transportation to penal colony
      • endemic (crimes committed peculiar to a given region and mala prohibita crimes) = changes in law
  • Enrico Ferri (1879)
    • moral insensibility combined with low intelligence were the biggest criminal characteristics
    • rationale for punishment was social defense – purpose is not to deter or to rehabilitate but to defend society from criminal predation
    • if criminals could not base behavior on rationality, how could they be deterred?
    • criminals should be locked up for as long as possible so they no longer pose a threat to society
    • Neoclassicalism: Return of Choice and Deterrence
      • swing back from ideals of positivist school towards classical notion (offenders are free actors responsible for their own actions)
      • “soft” determinists – believe that criminal behavior is ultimately a choice made in context of personal and situational constraints and opportunities; substitute extremes of the classical free will concept (actions are free of any causal chains) for that of human agency (concept that maintains humans have capacity to make choices and the moral responsibility to make moral ones regardless of internal or external constraints on one’s ability to do so)
      • rationality the quality of thinking and behaving in accordance with logic and reason so one’s reality is an ordered and intelligible system
        • rational choice theorists view crime in terms of Bentham’s principle of max pleasure and min pain
        • we are not all equally at risk to commit crimes – takes into account temperament, intelligence, class, family structure and neighborhood impacts
        • ignores how these aspects play into consciousness of offending
        • Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson (1979)
        • routine activities theory
          • helps to explain high crime rates in different societies and neighborhoods w/out invoking individual differences
          • routine activities are recurrent and prevalent activities which provide for basic population and individual needs (day-to-day things that characterize particular community)
          • artists/writers portray events, ideals, and activities of their surroundings and blend them into a physical or literary representations of activities
          • crime is a result of motivated offenders, meeting suitable targets that lack capable guardians
            • victimization is most likely to occur in poor, disorganized communities where there is never a shortage of motivated offenders, with a lack of capable guardians for either persons or property that discourages motivated offenders from committing the acts
            • many poems give feeling of questionable/unsafe environments

For my final project I decided to research apocalyptic themes in modern poetry and why poets use this as a trope. For the research section I talked about what I believed was used as an inspiration for this theme and found sources to back me up. After writing the research I chose four different poets and did a close read on each of them and gave a short biography of each. The four poets I chose were William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

A lot of times when people hear the word apocalypse they think of the end of the world, but the idea of this could also be about the received vision. For example, William Carlos Williams’s poem, “Spring and All.” I wrote that this poem has an apocalyptic view because he is talking about the dead weeds and trees but later in the poem he talks about how spring is emerging and the land will wake up. It reminded me of the circle of life which I think he used as a metaphor of the poem because he talks about creation after he describes the societal destruction.

Another factor of inspiration on the apocalypse theme is, what I believe, religion. The apocalyptic writing is all over the religious scriptures from the Bible. It is in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament about the impending apocalypse or also Noah’s Arc from Genesis. William Butler Yeats  wrote profoundly of religion. The Second Coming by Yeats’s was written just a year after the first world war and this was about the second war coming. But it was also about the second coming of Christ.

Yeats’s begins the poem with a feeling of loss of control. Since this was written just a year after the war ended, he uses this poem to express the feelings of the aftermath. Everything was just a disaster. Even though the war was over, technically, no one really won. Because there was a lost of so many innocent women, children, men, and soldiers. The first lines indicate everything spinning out of control. The falcon representing man and the falconer representing God is symbolizing a man turning away from God and of the chaos that was there at the end of the war.

For T.S. Eliot I chose to talk about The Wasteland. The Waste Land is understood to be a metaphor of cultural pessimism and sterility. It depicts a culture that is dying and longs for vitality or rebirth. The subject of this poem is the decline of western culture and the beauty that this culture once possessed.

Lastly, I wrote about Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush. Dr. Andrzej Diniejko says Hardy’s life can be divided into three phases. The first phase (1840-1870) embraces childhood, adolescence, apprenticeship, first marriage, early poems and his first unpublished novel. The second phase (1871-1897) is marked by intensive writing, which resulted in the publication of 14 novels and a number of short stories. In the third phase (1898-1928), the period of the writer’s rising fame, he abandoned writing novels and returned to poetry. The Darkling Thrush has the theme of renewal, life in darkness, and finding optimism when things are going wrong. He eludes that the world is a living creature. It is slowly being killed by the darkening days and encroaching frost. The clouds above him are the canopy adorning a crypt, while the wind sings a funeral dirge in the world’s honor.