Rhythms of Speech

     Some poets focus on scansion to the exclusion of rhythm elsewhere.  Let's switch horses for a moment and consider the regularities of common speech.  Humor me.  I promise I'll come to a point eventually.



     The main difference between listening to verse and prose is that meter involves processing stichs of fixed length.  We soon learn how and when the line is going to end.  Thus, we scan verse backwards.  To wit, amid many similar lines we can discern that Leonard Cohen is not finished here:

I am the one who loves changing from nothing...

      Thus, we wait for the finale: 

...to one.

      If surrounded by the rest of the lyric we hear the meter as [acephalous] anapestic (de-de-DUM) pentameter:

I | am the one | who loves chang|ing from noth|ing to one.

      We don't have this luxury in prose.  Instead, we must assimilate the rhythms as they occur, hearing them as a string of dactyls, the last one incomplete.

I am the | one who loves | changing from | nothing to | one...et cetera.

     Rising rhythms (i.e. iambs, anapests, bacchics) begin with unaccented syllables and end with stressed ones.  Falling ones (i.e. trochees, dactyls, antibacchics) are the opposite.  Roughly, the risers are used to express information and independence;  the fallers, emotionalism and authority.    

     Because Anglo-Saxons used so many articles and monosyllabic words, starting with the verb "to be" in all its forms, English is unquestionably an iambic (de-DUM, "rely") language.

The cat is here.

     Iambs, then, are our default pattern, evident in must reportage.  They produce a business-as-usual march of time.  We may wonder:  "What are the effects of the other cadences?"

     Trochee (DUM-de, "counter") suggests the imperative (i.e. commands and urgency), sometimes creating eeriness or suspense in the process.

Go to hell you jackass!

Help them!

     It follows that if we use trochees (DUM-de, "eager") for less forceful speech we risk losing modulation, like a slam poet screaming into the microphone for three minutes straight.  As they say, "too much emphasis is no emphasis at all."

     The spondee (DUM-DUM, "foxhound") and molossus (e.g. DUM-DUM-DUM, "wine dark sea") are just trochees on steroids but will tend to be more passionate than urgent, more contentious than authoritative.

Screw you!

No, I won't!

...and in the off chance that pigs fly...

     Strong, sympathetic leader characters will issue orders using trochees, not spondees.  The opposite is true of weaker tyrants.

     As the term "unstressed" suggests, pyhrrics (de-de, "as a") and tribachs (de-de-de, "and on the") are soothing, transitional sections.  As the excitement builds towards a climax these give way to  accented syllables.  In terms of tempo, stressed syllables are slower than unaccented ones.  To illustrate these points, compare this filler:

I am on the couch.

     ...to the conclusion drawn in this key sentence:

I think, therefore I am.

     Trinaries that include a stressed and two unstressed syllables tend to suggest movement, which might be literal (e.g. action), strategic (i.e. rising to or falling from a climactic point) or evolutionary (e.g. growth, entropy, metamorphosis).  This general trend is far more evident than the differences between trinaries, especially if we don't know when they began.

     The "waltzing" dactyl (DUM-de-de, "constitute") suggests the structure of a ball room or the fatalism of a Greek play.  Among the binaries, it is most closely associated with the trochee.  Conversely, the "driving" anapest (de-de-DUM, "a la carte") mirrors the iamb and often conveys lighter motifs.  If detectable, the "hopping" amphibrach (de-DUM-de, "repentant") suggests [mis]adventure.

     Trinaries with two accented syllables tend to be more distinct.  The "rocking" cretic (DUM-de-DUM, "Lancelot") hints at frustrating zero sum endeavors:

Sisyphus

Back and forth, | up and down

     As Clint Eastwood so aptly demonstrated, this futility can lead to resignation, enervation or callous indifference:

Hey, a man's | gotta do | what a man's | gotta do.

Do you feel | lucky, punk?

Go ahead.  | Make my day.

     The "badgering" bacchius (de-DUM-DUM, "We real cool") connotes insistence.  At the far extreme is the "detailing" antibacchius (DUM-DUM-de, "storm windows"), often explaining things in a stentorious MODIFIER-NOUN-verb format:

Black death was...etc.

     Even more than other falling rhythms (e.g. trochee and dactyl), antibacchic patterns can sound heavy handed. 

Hip bone con|nect'd to the | thigh bone.  The | thigh bone con|nect'd to the | knee bone.  The...etc.

     ...which could also be scanned as bacchics:

The hip bone | connect'd to | the thigh bone. | The thigh bone | connect'd to | the knee bone.  

     As we would see if the above were to occur in a conversation or speech, it is often difficult for our ear to detect in real time where and when the rhythm string began.  My advice is not to worry about this;  in well-composed efforts this will be either apparent or inconsequential.

     Speechwriters understand intuitively, if not consciously, when to employ which cadence.  This skill is glaringly evident in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the rhetoric feats of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and others.  Poets?  For metrists, it is a simple matter to choose the one cadence that captures the stanza's mood.  Almost by definition, today's text-based prose poets couldn't be bothered learning about rhythms--if only because they don't anticipate anyone reciting their work aloud.  That leaves the 2% of poets capable of writing actual free verse.  For them, this can be one of the most fascinating, vital and beneficial aspects of prosody.

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Addendum:

Margaret Ann Griffths

     As you could tell if you were to hear someone perform "Studying Savonarola", Margaret A. Griffiths (1947-2009) was the undisputed authority on twinning cadence with pace, mood and theme.  Did you know that for years Maz earned half of her income by winning poetry contests?  If the judges were conscientious enough to read the entries aloud the event became a struggle for second place. 

     Not that you should need it, but this is yet more independent, double-blind proof that the woman many knew as "Grasshopper" was, far and away, the greatest poet of our time.

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State of the Union - 2015

     As you know, there are three essentials in poetry:

1.  Audience;

     We are witnessing the sad demise of the last generation to be alive while poetry was.  It is grim accounting but we could, I suppose, take some tiny, cold comfort in knowing that the decline in poetry's audience is bottoming out.  Is there reason to hope it might begin to rise soon?

Margaret Ann Griffiths

2.  Writing;

     The caliber of composition has obviously declined, slowly but steadily, since "Prufrock".  Poetry fundamentals disappearing from our education system in the middle of the 20th century accelerated this process.  Nevertheless, thanks in large part to the Internet, it can be argued that poetry struck its nadir in the 1980s and is beginning to turn around.  Yes, I might be guilty of some generational narcissism but I'd have no reservations about pitting today's best versers¹ against anyone after Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) and Robert Frost (1874-1963).    

3.  Presentation.

     No matter how we feel about the quality of text and the quantity of listeners (tanl), we can only be optimistic about the platforms for poetry:  stage, video, multimedia, e-book, et cetera.  In terms of performance, I believe that we are seeing less "Poet Voice" in readings.  It seems academics are being shamed into learning the rudiments of delivery.  [Shrug]

     You know that parable about the frog on the hotplate that keeps adjusting to the rising temperature until it boils to death?  You know how you're unaware that your house smells until you return from vacation?

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #10

     Recently, I took an eighteen month hiatus from live poetry.  When I returned to slam I assumed, based on how little had changed in the previous two decades, that I would be subjected to the usual diary entries and diatribes delivered with an auctioneer's pace and jet engine's volume.  The focus was still bellybuttons and politics but the tone had morphed from strident to coaxing. 

     This was too good to be true so I discounted it as an aberration.  Days later, though, I attended a youth slam where, much to my surprise, I encountered the same sea change² in approach.  Slammers were talking like intimates, not whingers or demagogues, to audience members, not at them.

     I reported this to some of my online buddies and was convinced that this phenomenon may not be as localized as I thought.  Have you experienced a similar shift from screaming to speaking or are your open mics and slams the same as always?

     Is emo dead?

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Footnotes:

¹ - ...including that rarest of animals, the actual free verser.  I'm not so sanguine about our current crop of prose poets, though.

² - I also noticed a profound demographic switch that we'll discuss in my next post.  Stay tuned!

---

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Criticism Versus Critique

     From "What You Should Already Know About Poetry":  "Why do academics underperform when writing constructive criticism...?  Because literary criticism and book reviews are written by and for readers while critiques are written by and for writers."

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NFL Scout Mel Kiper, Junior

     Mel Kiper, Jr. is an independent NFL scout.  With his keen eye for talent and encyclopedic knowledge of statistics, he often compares players to past greats in terms of potential and style.  He has sufficient command of English to impart his perspectives by writing authoritative, convincing reports.  He may know very little about technique and "x's and o's" (i.e. the strategy of the game).  Rather, he concerns himself with personal histories and influences:  college environments and coaches.  In spring, when the NFL holds its annual draft, such scouts are in their heydey, advising teams and bettors (starting with fantasy football enthusiasts) on whom to select.  His role diminishes sharply once the season starts.

      In short, Mr. Kiper deals with evaluating prospects.  He cares about the past and present:  how good is the player based on his performance so far?

     Bill Walsh (1931-2007) was a Hall of Fame NFL coach.  As such, he had an entirely different skill set and mission.  Unlike a scout, his job was not to recognize talent as much as it was to develop it, along with a game plan.  He was a master of tactics/techniques and strategy.  He was amazingly creative;  his "West Coast Offence" remains the most popular and successful approach in the game.  To inspire his troops he needed strong verbal, not writing, abilities. 

     In short, Mr. Walsh dealt with improving prospects.  He was focused on the future.  As they say:  "You're only as good as your next game."

     These two men worked exclusively with NFL players but were direct opposites in every discernible aspect.  There is one more contrast:  it is difficult to assess Mel Kiper's success.  Few will bother trying.  Some of his recommendations will work out, others won't.  Bill Walsh, on the other hand, would have a win-loss record and, if he had a great season, he'd win a Superbowl, news which would be in all of the newspapers.

     In every respect¹, a literary critic such as Marjorie Perloff  is like Mel Kiper, the scout.  A great critiquer such as Margaret A. Griffiths is like Bill Walsh, the coach.

     It is the difference between a judge and a midwife.

     It is the difference between prose and poetry.

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Footnotes:

¹ - Both critic and critiquer use text as a medium but the latter is far more likely to engage in a detailed conversation about sonics while the former may, at most, pay lip service to "musicality".  The critiquer is helping someone write poetry worth reciting aloud;  the critic is writing prose.  It should surprise no one to learn that, in general, critiquers tend to be far better poets than critics are.

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12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VI

    As we cross the halfway mark some might speculate about what is the most obvious, common and egregious thing that poets get exactly wrong.  For now, we can cross Earl Gray's Law of Poetry #1 off our list.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #1

    In the adult world, bars continue to host more poetry performances than all other types of venues combined.  For the most part, we're talking about open mics and slams here. 

    Libraries are the dominant venue for poetry readings but those tend to honor poets more than poems.

    Consider for a moment the things people do and do not discuss in bars.  Of course, we can pick almost any topic but certain approaches will result in us talking to ourselves.  For example, lectures¹, sermons¹, condescension and obscurities will soon empty the chairs at our table.  Gibberish may have its place after everyone is thoroughly soused but only in tiny doses.  Thus we may have "Jabberwocky" and "Epigraph: The Pismire Oration"² but not much else.

     Politics¹ and religion¹ are borderline.  Because preaching to the choir is pointless and boring, most such conversations will concentrate on differences.  Debates are more interesting than most diatribes but there is the chance that someone is a mean drunk.  While polemics and faith may be reflected in all communication--especially before the Modern era--they were usually more visible in art forms other than poetry:  sculpting, painting, theatre, and song (with the possible exception of opera).

     Tavern conversations are not always upbeat.  The death of a close friend or relative might inspire an impromptu eulogy (in poetry, an elegy).  As with a toast, the language won't always be informal.  Similarly, poets might write occasional poems, praise poems and, yes, even toasts.


A Toast posted by Earl Gray on Vimeo.
     People can address serious issues or profound thoughts in bars [or poems³].  As Stephen Hawkings demonstrates in "A Brief History of Time", the most complex and significant concepts can be illustrated through analogy and narrative without alienating readers.  Unfortunately, poets today prefer to use figurative language to complicate rather than simplify life's mysteries.  The other key difference is that, having been left alone at a table, the drinker is far more aware of being ignored than someone publishing poems that few will read.  The imbiber understands something few poets do:  entertainment is the vehicle, if not the path or destination. 

     Obviously, sex and romance will be vital themes in bar life, as they are in poetry.  Without question, though, humor is the key.  I'm not talking about the glib, all-too-clever dessicated "light verse" and clever allusions that bring wry smiles to stony faces.  I'm talking about knee-slapping, gut-busting, piss-your-pants standup comedy.

The Evolution of Buffalo Wings


Worst Date

     If poetry is revived in this century comedy will lead the way--as it always has.

     Before I shuffle off to [eat some] Buffalo [wings], let me tie up a few loose ends.  The language in Shakespeare's plays was not what one would find in bars, even during his day.  It was frequently a lower class individual trying to guess how a lord or lady would speak, often with hilarious results.  Of course, we bear in mind that these groups didn't frequent the same drinking establishments in the first place.

     Naturally, we avoid anachronistic language unless we have a good and obvious reason (e.g. we are writing a period piece, parody or for humorous affect/effect) for using it.  What about Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnet 43", though?  Outside religious colonies, hadn't people given up on "thees" and "thous" centuries earlier?  Yes, but, among many other considerations, EBB's persona was speaking in the voice of an Elizabethan because, as prudish as they were, Ms. Browning's Victorian contemporaries were even more likely to raise an eyebrow at mention of "quiet needs", loving "freely" and "with passion".  Think "plausible deniability" here.

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Footnotes:

¹ = Rants and debates?  Sure.  Lectures and sermons?  Not so much.

² = As far as I know, this is the only recording of Margaret A. Griffith's voice.

³ = Here we mean successful poems, which, in the absence of an audience today, must refer to verse of the past or, we hope, the future. 

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Links:

1. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part I



2. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part II



3. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part III



4. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IV



5. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part V



6. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VI



7. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VII



8. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part VIII



9. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part IX



10. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part X



11. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XI



12. 12 Things Poets Get Backwards - Part XII

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The Ten Most Influential People in Poetry Reviewed

Earl's sister:  Pearl the Squirrel

    Before you read this, please take a moment to jot down the names of your 10 favorite contemporary poets.  Just humor me. 

    Earl is neck deep in sports magazines, preparing for his 2013 NFL Fantasy Football drafts.  This leaves me, his sister, Pearl, with the onerous task of analyzing the two most significant recent verse-related lists:  Earl's "Ten Most Influential People in Poetry Today" and Seth Abramson's "The Top 200 Advocates for American Poetry (2013)", posted here and to the Huffington Post, respectively, on the same day.  Quite a coincidence:  Seth authored one article and was mentioned in the other!

    There may never be two lists on the same topic (i.e. poetry, in this case) that have less in common, reflecting in sharp focus the contrast between the established Print and the emerging Pixel worlds.  The key is the explicit stipulation in "The 10" presupposing that poetry would succeed in finding a public audience before 2030.  Seth's article shows no interest in poetry's repopularization.  Rather, "The Top 200" concentrates on practical, professional considerations, the realpolitik of indifference.  As always, Mr. Abramson speaks eloquently for the academic/PoBiz (the "AcaPoBiz"?) group aesthetic.

Seth Abramson

    Reactions to "The Top 10" were positive, criticism limited to a typo correction, AcaPoBizzers unfamiliar with the online world and a few suggested additions from those who missed the part about unread producers.  One Internetter remarked:  "The future isn't now but it is here."  With actual and potential careers at stake, reactions to Seth's "Top 200" were more mixed, often more visceral.  One commenter, referring to the lack of audience, said:  "It's like a beauty contest in the land of the blind."

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #37

    The most obvious disparity between compilations is their size:  10 versus 200.  Idealistic onliners tend to work on regaining viewers, including non-poets, with audience-oriented verse.  This puts them in a minority which may be adequately represented by ten or twenty figures.  The more careerist Page community is represented by 200+ people, adding more each day, lest an omission diminish anyone's prospects.   As for aesthetic diversity, more than 95% of the poets listed are, by the objective standards of my "Prosody Evaluation And Report Logger", prosers.  200+, though?  Well, there is an old saying among us squirrels:  "When someone gives you six reasons the real one is the seventh."  If there are 200 sources of influence in such a tiny, homogenous group there really isn't much discernible influencing going on, is there?  Why not find the few people responsible for this conformity and credit them?

     The Top 200 list could only be written by and for people untouched by the modern cyberzeitgeist.  This was evident in the first phrase of the introduction:

    "With more than 75,000 poets in the United States alone..."

     Ahem.  Let me put this in perspective, using one of my brother's favorite examples.  Francis Ford Coppola--you know, the one who gave us "Patton" and "The Godfather"--launched Zoetrope on June 21, 2000.  It began as a critical forum for screenwriters but soon branched out to embrace playwrights, novelists and poetry writers.  Over time, poets--most of them American--have dominated the membership, traffic and contributions.  Of the online poetry subforums that have survived for all or most of the last decade Zoetrope is, by far, the most obscure.  Most onliners either don't know what it is or refer to it dismissively as "Zoetripe".¹

     Zoetrope alone has more than 75,000 American poets as members. 

     How many American poets are there in total?  It's hard to say but, extrapolating from online, slam and other contest participation, one million American poets would seem an extremely conservative estimate.  Earl's best guess is that 2,000,000 Americans consider themselves poets, serious or not.  Does that sound like a lot to you?  Well, it's about .5% of the total U.S. demographic.  That may be the all-time high those using raw numbers boast about but, as a percentage, it might also be a historic low in any human population.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #43

     The second oddity to Internauts accustomed to dealing with anglophones from all over the world is the focus on American poetry.  Why not left-handed poets?  Or coastal versus mountain or flatland poets?  Do audiences today really care whether a writer is American, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, South African, East or West Indian, Kiwi, Australian, or Outer Mongolian?  If so, why?  Yes, I know this doesn't raise eyebrows among Print Worlders but within the cybercommunity of the past, present and future this is bound to appear strange--perhaps even antiquated or unhealthy!

     If none of the ten favorite contemporary poets you wrote down earlier are from foreign shores your chances of being a Page rather than a Pixel poet skyrocket.

     For the most part, the Top 200 was a list of underrated poets, many of them unfamiliar even to others in the Print World.  This is a reflection of that milieu's segmentation;  one doesn't produce iconic efforts by selling 200 copies of a book or by publishing in poetry magazines with, at the very most, 30,000 subscribers.  By contrast, Earl restricted himself to people well known to everyone within the established Internet community.

     All of this said, "The 200" is also remarkably expansive.  In addition to poets and publishers, it includes, as one cynical Kris Kristoffson fan commented, "songwriters, politicians, activists, organizers, scholars, essayists, critics, one troll, two semiliterates, 'an electric eye, two big dogs and a minefield'".



     No one is surprised by the aesthetic bias.  By my count, only one Nemerov winner or judge was listed in the 200.  Even multiple winners who have spent decades in open fora providing free expert critique to developing poets were overlooked.  By contrast, the Top 10ers, including the late Steve Sabol, all understood basic verse technique and its value.

     Speaking of Mr. Sabol, there is a parallel between the NFL and the poetry worlds.  Playing the AcaPoBiz role is the players' union:  The National Football League Players Association ("NFLPA").  Unlike a guild, it concentrates on its members' welfare without regard to performance.  Criticism of other members is actively discouraged.  Both the league and Players Association have a conduct code and rules encouraging uniformity--literally!--and respect when appearing in the public eye (i.e. playing onfield or being interviewed). 

     The more purist onliners are like the NFL Network, a television channel that grew out of Steve Sabol's NFL Films (which is similar to Stage poets, dealing with the more dramatic and amusing).  The NFL Network unabashedly promotes football as its raison d'être, often featuring technical discussions (something never found in literary periodicals anymore), form[ation]s, crowd-pleasing² highlights, humor, news, drama, and, of all things, poetry!

     Mr. Abramson has provided us a useful directory of those whose influence has brought U.S. poetry to where it is today.  Whether this is to their credit or not is another question entirely.  It is time again for me to quote Kristofferson:

    "Who's to bless and who's to blame?"

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Footnotes:

¹ - To be fair, Zoetrope poets have created no less than two of the top 10 poems of this century:  "There are Sunflowers in Italy" by Didi Menendez and "Specimen #31, Adult Female" by Sharon Hurlbut.

² - As opposed to performances of interest only to other participants.

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The Ten Most Influential People in Poetry Today

     The current fad is lists of the most influential people in poetry.  My particular spin presumes a successful future for our art form.  The question becomes:

    "Who will be most responsible if poetry regains an audience before 2030?"

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #69

     Most such lists will be dominated by authors, publishers or editors of poetry books.  This begs the question about people reading poetry.  They don't.  That is the problem.

     The role of teachers will figure prominently on other lists but, for our purpose, this would have to be confined to famous instructors who teach techniques, technologies, performance and forms that will appeal to non-poets.  As far as I know, that list is empty.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #52

    Far more important are the administrators and critiquers who mold that verse, the organizers and performers who bring it to the public's attention in open mics and slams, the videographers who post it on venues like YouTube, the bloggers and reviewers who filter out the shite and, finally, the editors of successful [web and maga] 'zines--especially non-literary ones (where and once they exist)--that bring poetry to the public.

     At the risk of stating the obvious, in this Internet Age the most influential people¹ will be those with a long and strong online presence.  That some of these individuals may be unknown to you says more about the transitional state of the endeavor than its participants. 

Peter John Ross

     Almost everything you have learned online about poetry fundamentals or the workshop ethos in the last twenty years can be attributed directly or indirectly to PJR.  He is the grandfather of successful 21st century poetry.

John Boddie

    "Whether or not critique is constructive depends on how the author uses it, not on the manner in which it’s phrased."

     If you don't know who John Boddie is then you have never encountered serious poetry critique.

Margaret Ann Griffiths

     That Maz was the Critic's Choice as best poet of our time and that the first two editions of her posthumous collection were oversubscribed will not be what puts her on this list.  As a mentor, commenter and, most importantly, as a role model she simply had no equal.

Marc Smith

     Any list of influential contributors to poetry's future that does not include the inventor of the slam cannot be taken seriously.

Nic Sebastian

     Nic's attention to presentation puts her decades ahead of anyone else in imagining the successful poetry [performances] of the future.

Christine Klocek-Lim

     Chrissie twice rescued one of the world's largest poetry forums.  In its day, her "Autumn Sky Poetry" was among the top three webzines;  despite being on hiatus for more than a year people still deep link to its particulars.  Recently, she has started a poem-a-day version, "Autumn Sky Poetry Daily".  Ms. Klocek-Lim's gentle style doesn't create waves but, if influence can be measured by the loyalty an organizer inspires, Christine's name must be recognized.  If the poetry world had a dozen more people as effective and level-headed as Chrissie we would not be having this discussion.

Seth Abramson

     Famous blogger Seth Abramson's frequent and exhaustive analyses of PoBiz and academic practices make him the Noam Chomsky of the poetry world.

Michael Burch

     Say what you will about his mixing poetry with politics or religion but Mr. Burch's "The HyperTexts" remains the single greatest source of contemporary poetry.  If nothing else, this is a tremendous convenience for those wanting to cite a great contemporary poem.

Tim Green

     If the Print world survives it will be because of the innovative approaches pioneered or perfected by Rattle magazine's editor, Tim Green.

Don Share

     Whether we are talking about dinosaurs, armies or organizations, the larger an entity is the slower it moves.  While "academic" efforts will continue to play a decreasing role in discussions of contemporary verse, Poetry magazine's resources ensure that it will continue to be the elephant in the room.


Honorable Mentions:

Gary Gamble

    "Try to have your writing make sense²."

     More than anyone else, Usenetter and Poetry Free-For-All moderator "GG" can be credited with putting an end to cryptocrap, to say nothing of unearned respect.

Kei Miller, Mary E. Hope, Stephen Bunch, Bob Schechter and Richard Epstein

     These prolific online critiquers, along with many others, have contributed more to the revival of poetic competence than anyone else.

Steve Sabol

Stephen Douglas Sabol (1942-2012)

     I knew I would forget someone!  This oversight was so egregious that it required immediate correction with this post-edit.  As of this writing, the single most successful contributor to poetry's repopularization (a subject that existing producers avoid) is the late, great NFL Films director, Steve Sabol, ably assisted by his predecessor and father, Ed.  He did whole segments on poets and recitations from poems (e.g. "Hurt but not slain, lay down and bleed awhile, then we’ll rise and fight again.").

     In 1974 Steve wrote the closest thing to an iconic poem in the last half century, "The Autumn Wind".  Sports announcer John "The Voice of God" Facenda recited it, reminding us of the value of fine performance and production.

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     My apologies to the many whom I have omitted.

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Footnotes:

¹ - We needn't broaden the discussion to include squirrels and the like.

² - Mr. Gamble's original phrasing was "Try to make your writing make sense."  He arrived at the final wording with the help of a fellow Usenetter.

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A Brief History of Time Online

     From "Exploding the Groupthink Myth":

     Factoid from Facebook: A group comprised of fewer than 1 in 10,000 living poets has quietly produced, in addition to the bestselling personal poetry collection (not including educational sales), one third of the speakers at the 2012 West Chester convention and all of the last ten¹ Nemerov winners. Who are these poets and what is the source of their mojo? Do they have a secret handshake?

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Dennis Hammes (1945-2008)

     If your exposure to e-poetry is limited to a few webzines and the blogosphere you probably think of "online poetry" as...well, poetry that is online:  ditties on Facebook, collections on vanity pages or the blogosphere, or quality works on e-zines (e.g. TheHyperTexts, The Pedestal, etc.) and e-versions of magazines (e.g. Rattle, Poetry, etc.).

     Those who have been part of the online poetry community for more than a few years use the expression to describe someone whose aesthetics were, in whole or in part, developed and/or shared in online workshops.

     If this group were to have a motto it might be:  "Be teachable.  We can work with the clueless but not the clueproof."  More succinct is Scavella's Mantra:  "You aren't as good as you think you are."

     The core difference between the print and pixel mindset is the immutable versus the improvable.  This is reflected in the media themselves.  When a number of critics and advisors pointed out errors in a popular textbook the author did a recall and reprint--an awkward process in a hardcover listed at $95.00!  When we bloggers or e-zine editors make mistakes we thank the reader, make the correction without much cost or bother, and move on.  By definition, onliners invite critique;  criticism of printed work is rare and not always welcome.

Seamus Heaney

     It would be hard to imagine Seamus Heaney as an attendee, as opposed to a facilitator, of a live workshop.  Can you envision Derek Walcott posting his drafts to an online critical forum?  No.  Print poets don't want a reader to see the sausage being made.  They want to continue the Mosaic illusion of words coming straight from some divine source onto stone tablets.  Immutable.

     Other poets of their calibre, some of whom may be familiar to you, do present their works-in-progress for constructive critique.  Theirs is an equally simple motivation:  they believe in improvement of poems and poets.

     The preamble to this article hints at the significance of this tiny community.  We might wonder:  how did it come into being and what else has it contributed to the whole?

Origins of Online Information Exchange:

Michael McNeilley (1947-2001)

    The Finger program, written in 1971 by Les Earnest, facilitated access to university databases.  This later morphed into much more sophisticated search engines like Google or Bing.  It was the first major civilian Internet application. 

    Email protocols, standardized in 1973, added a carbon copy feature soon afterwards.  This paved the way for the discussion list:  roughly, people sending out Round Trip Memos.  After Information Technologists and other scientists, English Departments were the third to employ this new technology and the first to expand Internet use to non-academics:  journalists, novelists and poets.

Usenet: 

J. R. Sherman

    Implemented in 1980, Usenet is an online bulletin board service (BBS), divided into "newsgroups".  One of the first of these was rec.arts.poems, joined much later by its echo chamber, alt.arts.poetry.comments.  For 13 years before the World Wide Web a thriving poetry community discussed and analyzed poems online.  Terms describing people and behavior, including "crosspost", "flaming", "kill file", "plonk", "lurk", "postcount", "CABAL" (technically, the group that started Usenet but, more commonly and metaphorically, a term used to aggravate egomaniacal paranoids), "spam", "sockpuppet", and "troll", were popularized on Usenet.  For better or worse, what we now call "chat-speak" began there, highlighting "acronyms" such as  "LMAO", "BTW", "AFAIK", "FWIW", "IIRC" and "IMHO".  Before Usenet, "LOL" meant "Little Old Lady".  Because rec.arts.poems habitues were among the most literate and vociferous Usenetters many, if not most, of these expressions can be attributed directly to them.

     Here is a provocative factoid for you:  had people cared to use the available technology, the rec.arts.poems newsgroup would have been the first venue where all poets in a postliterate society could have been gathered in one location.  If humankind had produced an iconic poem in the half century before Facebook it would probably have happened on Usenet.  It was the only game in town.

     Not counting Dr. Seuss nursery rhymes, would you care to guess the title² of the best known poem among poets in the last three decades? 

Peter John Ross

    If you have learned anything about poetry technique, but especially about scansion, on the Internet there is a good chance that you can credit Peter John Ross, directly or indirectly.  If you are not familiar with this guy you are either not a poet or not a Usenetter.  Author of the satirical "rulez 4 aspiring ~poets~", PJR is a mainframer, linguist, wit, critic and one of the world's leading authorities on matters prosodic.  Unfortunately, along with Gary Gamble, "J.R. Sherman" (aka "The Value Added Savior"), and the late Dennis Hammes, Mr. Ross spent most of his time on unmoderated Usenet forums fighting trolls or TORLLS [sic] (i.e. illiterate trolls).  These reprobates were so odious and numerous that a search engine was developed to track them:  "Kookle". 

     No, really.

World Wide Web:

     The World Wide Web started in 1993 but it wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990s that browsers and public interest developed.  Among the first critical sites was Bela Selendy's "Poetry Free-For-All" or "PFFA", which grew directly out of the need for Usenetters to find a moderated forum, sans trolls.  People who complain about how sharp some of the PFFA critics and moderators can be need do no more than Google "rec.arts.poems" to understand why.  Today, when you see the guidelines of an online workshop you are reading the "don't-crit-the-crit" ethos developed by Usenetters.

Rik Roots

    Along the way we saw the egoless experiment:  two sites where poems and critiques were posted anonymously.  The first of these was "The Lathe", created by English poet and programmer Rik Roots.  On Egoless, poems and critics earned performance ratings.  Among other innovations, the egoless format originated the "thumbs down" and/or "thumbs up" (then called "me too" or "chime") buttons used by social networks and discussion software today.

    What were the lessons we could draw from from the egoless experiment?  Nothing onliners didn't already know, really:

1.  Selfless, informed critiquers like Hannah Craig and Aidan Tynan are gold;


2. very few poets are interested in a careful, objective evaluation of their work, even if rendered politely and received anonymously; and,


3. the social aspect of a workshop is important.

    Today, the egoless format survives in business, scientific and political discourse models.    Among poets, its legacy is in its motto:  "If you don't think your writing is competing against the works of others you're probably right."

Christine Klocek-Lim

    Soon after PFFA came Eratosphere, run by Alex Pepple, and Alsop Review Gazebo, established by the late Jaimes Alsop.  A few years laters we saw the first of two incarnations of the now defunct Poets.org forum, headed by Autumn Sky Poetry head editor Christine Klocek-Lim.  When we speak of the pre-existing World Wide Web community, these are some of the key figures.

     Which of these venues would I recommend to those eager to improve their technique?  Such individuals should join and lurk on all of them, really, but if new to the study of the craft--regardless of how many decades they've been writing or teaching poetry--I'd encourage them to learn the basics before joining in.  Those who know that Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Moriturus" is neither iambic nor free verse should consider Eratosphere.

In Conclusion:

Margaret Ann Griffiths

    The history of online poetry may be obscure to most but it accounts for much of our modern language (mostly tech- and text-speak), a claim that page and stage poets cannot match.  It is a story of struggle against trolls and between aesthetics, often punctuated by brilliant one-liners and rants.  Stay tuned for more on this subject in upcoming posts.

    Let me leave you with one final touchstone.  It doesn't matter if you edit or have been published in a hundred webzines, have run a popular blog for years and have the world's largest poetry newslist.  If you don't know who Margaret Ann Griffiths is you are not an onliner.  Period.  It follows that if you want to understand this community you will find no better starting point.

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Footnotes:

¹ - Make that 11.  Since we posted this, Gail White won her second consecutive Nemerov.  Congrats, Gail!

² - The ultimate filler-and-killer poem, "Hookers", written by Marco Morales in 1995, is familiar to all rec.arts.poems denizens--that is, to everyone who engaged in any open online poetry discussion at that time.

Missing you again
I embrace shallow graves.
Pale faces, doughlike breasts
help me forget.

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    Your feedback is appreciated!

    Please take a moment to comment or ask questions below or, failing that, mark the post as "funny", "interesting", "silly" or "dull".  Also, feel free to expand this conversation by linking to it on Twitter or Facebook.  Please let us know if you've included us on your blogroll so that we can reciprocate.

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    We look forward to hearing from you.

Signed,

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Multimedia - Part II

"If you don't think your poetry is competing against the works of others you're probably right."

- Egoless maxim.

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A buddy--the word "mentor" would be equally apt--of mine told me about his plan to promote a poetry anthology through "tourney marketing". Modest to a fault, he claims that he stole the idea from the admirable "Poetry Out Loud" project created by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation and applied it to a 21st Century collection. Whatever.

Start by publishing a collection of poems that have "significant performance and youth appeal", to quote my friend. The example he gave was, of course, Margaret A. Griffiths' Grasshopper: The Poetry of M A Griffiths. I agree that Maz's masterpiece has many appropriate examples, starting with "Studying Savonarola", but I'd be thinking in terms of a more selective, eclectic anthology. No matter. Your definition of "significant performance and youth appeal" will undoubtedly do as well as mine. Just remember to get your authors' approval of your plans before including their work.

Hold a contest with a sizeable prize, challenging people to create videos based on the poems in your book and post them to YouTube, using the title of your book followed by that of the poem (e.g. "Grasshopper: The Poetry of M A Griffiths - "Studying Savonarola""). This will allow your judges to find the entries easily while promoting your book with thousands of YouTube posts bearing its name.

That's the whole idea. The rest is fine print:

• other than the poem itself, only original material (e.g. pictures, film, music, et cetera) is permitted;



• contestants are free to use the text only for the purposes of this event, with all other rights retained by the copyright holders;



• winning contestants agree to allow the sponsor to use the videos for promotional purposes;
  
  
• offer void where prohibited by law, et cetera.

Your prize fund could be awarded any way you choose, from winner-take-all to dividing it by status (e.g. students versus non-students) and/or format (e.g. separate categories for performance versus montages and slide shows). The contest can be promoted without cost through national poetry organizations, web sites and university publications.

Repeat annually.

Multimedia - Part I

"There isn't a lack of money in poetry. There's a lack of marketing imagination."

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To recap:

We know what killed poetry: music on the radio, starting in the 1920s.

We know what prevented its resurgence and why its decline was peculiar to anglophone countries: lousy performance.

Take a look at Lola Flores performing a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca:



You don't need to speak a word of Spanish to see how vital these words are not just to the long dead poet's legacy or to this particular performer. Watch the audience. Note all the other performances of Lorca's verses available on YouTube. Lorca's words are important, so much so that whole generations have grown up memorizing, quoting, performing, and recording them.

Decades ago, high school English departments used to introduce students to Shakespeare by reading it. More progressive schools today show it being performed, either live or, more often, on video, before studying it on the page. Similarly, students in Spanish-speaking countries are introduced to Lorca's work almost invariably through performances like the one above, usually involving a professional actor/singer. The 2007 release of "Beowulf" sparked interest in the poem on video and in print. Whether we speak of dramatic, lyric or narrative poetry, then, it is always better introduced to audiences live or on the screen rather than on the page.

As dismal as textual poetry sales are, those of poetry audio recordings are lower still.

Painfully obvious conclusions:

1. Poetry is a multimedia art form.



2. To compete, we'll need to apply the basics of multimedia.



3. The best person to present the poem is usually not the one who wrote it.



4. We need to write in a manner that exploits multimedia.

In Preservation, Presentation and Promotion - Part II we discussed multimedia performance, which typically involves presenters in front of a video recorder or a live audience. If we are not great performers--and few poets are--we'll need to work with someone who has theatrical talent. Know any actors?



Montages and slide shows are easy to put together: write your poem, take some pictures or video clips, slap them together with a graphics package like Adobe Flash or Roxio Creator, add some music, perhaps, and post it to Vimeo or YouTube. No musical talent? Do a web search for "creative commons music" and download whatever seems most appropriate. Don't own a graphics package? Go to the Poets.org or Eratosphere discussion forum and ask for help. In the meantime, do your planning: which files in which order?

A similar idea is to write a poem that mentions anything sold on the open market. We're not talking about slogans or jingles. A serious poem. The more artistic, the better. You've probably already written dozens of such efforts. Scan your archives. Alternatively, use a excerpt from a canonical poem. Think of Levi's "Whitman" ad but with a direct tie to a product. Make a video that uses the logos and promotional material of a manufacturer of that item. Post it privately to YouTube and ask the supplier for their opinion. Swap in the visuals of another producer of that item and repeat the process until one of the companies shows interest.



"Okay, but how does one make money giving their work away?" a newcomer to the Internet might ask. By fame equaling fortune. If one or two of your videos "goes viral" you could be the next Lisa Donovan (aka LisaNova).

The most ambitious and possibly lucrative option is the ekphrastic trailer. Pick a movie--ideally, a recent or, if you can obtain a copy, an upcoming film by an established production company. Write a poem that follows its plot. Contact the producer and ask for permission to create and upload a video using parts of their film. With luck, they'll send you a DVD of the movie. Download and install a shareware video cutting program such as FreeStar. Create your video by combining your words--spoken or written--with clips from their film. Post it to YouTube, using the "Private" option until the producers can view and approve it. Then change "Private" to "Public" so that everyone can see your video. Watch the hit count soar.

If you do a good job there's every chance the producers will think of you for their next feature. If not, try another company.

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Part II: A friend of mine came up with a brilliant plan to market a poetry anthology. Yes, we're talking about an actual book here. Paper, binding, the whole nine yards. Stay tuned!

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Preservation, Presentation and Promotion - Part III

Impressions: William Shakespeare understood that, in order to survive, verse needed to be meaningful, entertaining and adroit. That the three current supercommunities each specialize in a different one of these aspects is a reflection of their media--most notably their media's lifespans. To wit:

1. the Page poet hopes to address the ages and, naturally enough, chooses the format that lasts longest;



2. the Stage poet speaks directly and literally to those present with less regard for those beyond earshot, including future generations; and, finally,



3. the Pixel poet concentrates on technique as it affords the same portability that the Internet itself does.
   

When we speak of someone as being from the Print World we don't mean a one-time vanity author who thinks "Christian Wiman" involves pious ladies from the Ozarks. By the same token, a 3-minute recitation in an open mic doesn't make us a Presentation Poet. We refer to an individual who has been around since dirt was dust and knows the ground rules and major players.

An e-poet's attitudes reflect the pre-blogosphere online experience and ethos. These were forged in web-based critical forums (late 1990s to the present) which, in turn, were fashioned after Usenet newsgroups (starting in the early 1980s). Such discussion groups are a far cry from the peer workshops we see in the Face-to-Face ("F2F") world. In online forums, most of which are tiered according to experience level, poems are analyzed in depth by critics of all ages, backgrounds and nationalities. Imagine how this would go over in the other metacommunities! Picture an open mic where, instead of the usual polite applause, audience members would stand up and go through your performance, word by word, gesture by gesture, pointing out strengths and weaknesses.

Why is the blogosphere excluded? Because while it is, in theory, where the three supercommunities can intersect, in practice it has become largely the domain of Print Worlders, used primarily to discuss the PoBiz.

The world wide web's poetry community is still in its first generation. Future participants will undoubtedly be much better equiped to exploit its capabilities, including those yet to be developed.

Overview: Consider the difference in environments to appreciate how Shakespeare's "meaningful, entertaining and adroit" aesthetic has been splintered into a trichotomy. Book publishers serve a few hundred readers. The collections are blurbed but few are reviewed by strangers, rarely for technical rather than interpretive merit. Live performances meet with tepid, obligatory clapping. The detailed critique that onliners receive in workshops encourages audience orientation and technical expertise. E-poets also produce the widest variety of form (starting with more metrical poetry) and genre. To wit, the two best received e-poems are both elegies, one of them unabashedly romantic, the other in a form seen only twice in the Print World.

Pixel poets are a cautious, humble lot. Having every word you write analyzed by the greatest critics alive does that for you. Bearing in mind that anyone can start their own vanity website, online poetry exhibits, by far, the greatest range in quality. I don't care how awful last night's newly published reader or open mic performer was; I can show you dozens of onliners infinitely worse. On the other hand, this same community produces some of the greatest contemporary verse you'll find. The trick is knowing where to look.

While critical sites form the backbone of the online community, webzines complete the skeleton. These rarely have any financial backing, if only because governments and universities are usually focused on local talent and audiences. Not surprisingly, these e-zines are labors of love and rarely survive ten years; a page can last ten centuries while a performance rarely last ten minutes. Just weeks ago two eminent webzines, Christine Klocek-Lim's "Autumn Sky Poetry" and Paul Stevens' "Shit Creek Review" went on indefinite hiatus. Yes, I realize that print magazines go under every day but at least some of them survive for generations. The instability of the online platforms, coupled with the modesty of the denizens, makes filtering difficult.

Paradoxically, the editor of "TheHyperTexts.com", one of the best and longest-standing webzines, is decidedly not an onliner.

What identifies the Pixel poet? A shared view which includes among its aspects:

• familiarity with key organizational figures such as the late Gazebo founder Jaimes Alsop, Poets.org administrator Christine Klocek-Lim, Eratosphere Head Moderator Alex Pepple, Poetry Free-for-all moderator Gary Gamble, and editors Mike Burch and Paul Stevens.



• recognition of the great crossover poets (e.g. A.E. Stallings and 3-time Nemerov winner Michael Juster) and, for sure, of the Internetter selected as the one critics would most like to read in an anthology: the late Margaret A. Griffiths;



• gratitude toward selfless, authoritative critics like John Boddie, James Wilk and Richard Epstein, to name only a few;



• a concentration on how good we'll be in the future rather than on how good we are now;



• an understanding that the person who took the time to call our last poem "unspeakable shit" was doing us a favor;



• a skin thicker than the earth's crust;



• a greater interest in poems than poets;



• a waning interest in the Print World;



• a nascent interest in the Presentation World;



• a more technically centered and, dare I say, technically informed view;



• an understanding well beyond lip service that poetry "isn't about what you say but how you say it";



• a preference for candor over diplomacy;



• a disdain for blurbing;



• a palpable contempt for Convenient Poetics; and,



• a healthy lack of interest in the blogosphere.

Perspective: Given that they are, by definition, computer literate, we might expect online poets to be at the forefront of multimedia presentation and technology. In truth, they are a distant third. Every minute of every day another slam poet posts a webcam performance on YouTube. Host venues archive their latest open mic. Meanwhile, magazines sport spiffy e-versions of their issues and recordings of poetry readings and lectures. Only recently have blogzines like Nic Sebastian's defunct Whale Sound offered voice recordings.

The Internet is the most cost-effective way to promote anything. The onliners' focus on poems, the readercentric nature of their work, and free access to it combine to raise e-poetry's profile. Compare a webzine's hundreds of hits per week to a slam conducted in front of a few dozen people or a "successful" book that goes out of print after selling a few hundred copies. Show any editor a list of the top online poets and they'll report, often to their own amazement, that many of their favorite contributors are included. As mentioned in Part I, the best selling book of 2011 (excluding educational sales) was authored by a Pixel poet. In short, e-poets are beating Print poets on their own turf. How? Easy. Over and above the sales to alumni, associates, friends and relatives that all poets enjoy, Internetters can sell dozens or even hundreds more to fellow onliners.

Conclusion: Personally, I'd urge ever poetry fan to reach beyond the limits of their community and closer to the Shakespearean model. Not familiar with the Print World? Check out some of the blogs and online newsmagazines, beginning with the Poetry Foundation's "Harriet". Click on their Blogroll links. If you're on Facebook, befriend "Poetry" Senior Editor Don Share; those who have attest that he's always good for an interesting link or two.

New to the Performance World? Drop in at your local open mic to develop your performance skills. Don't be put off if the calibre of presentations is poor...all the less reason for you to feel nervous!

Interested in online poetry? Lurk on Eratosphere (coincidentally, an online workshop created by a print publisher, Able Muse), The Alsop Review - Gazebo, the rough-and-tumble Poetry Free-For-All or the friendly tiers of Poets.org for a year or so to appreciate the critique found in their expert forums. Note how different their conversation forums are from those on the blogosphere.

The future of poetry is its past: audiovisual presentation. Think YouTube here. Practice your delivery in front of a webcam and, as they say, "post it when you nail it". In addition to performances, options include videos and slideshows. Along with some recording equipment, consider purchasing a video editor. Adobe "Flash" is the industry standard but Roxio "Creator" is cheaper and, in my experience, more user friendly (especially in a Windows environment).

Scant seconds may be all that is required to distinguish inhabitants of the three supercommunities from each other. In theory at least, immersion in the pixel, page and stage subcultures can triple our appreciation of this multifaceted art form.

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