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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Preservation, Presentation and Promotion - Part II

"Verba volant, scripta manent."

- "Spoken words fly away, written words remain."

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The written word, then, usually comes with some assurance that we can return to it later. This, in and of itself, discourages memorization.

The spoken word may be no less a mandala than existence itself but, in a field where participants could synchronize their watches and argue about the time of day, there is an almost unanimous consensus that:

• poetry is primarily and originally an oral/audiovisual mode of communication;



• few modern poets are even passable performers; and,



• cultures that still revere poetry also value performance.

Why, then, do so few poets, professors, MFA and English graduates learn the rudiments of performance?

Presentation

Impressions: Based on the paucity of crossovers (i.e. well known active members of more than one group), the society of performing poets has to be the most isolated of the three metacommunities. The average age seems to be lower, the gender mix similar to the Print World. The Presentation World certainly takes pride in its "democratic" nature but I'm not convinced that the word "anarchic" wouldn't be more apt. Surprisingly, its aesthetic may be the most narrow, rarely straying far from the stereotypical impassioned rant. As with Print Poetry, whole genres (e.g. elegy, allegory, epic), including the three most popular with audiences (i.e. comedy, romance and third party narrative), are largely ignored.

Overview: Performance poetry is a reserved expression describing "anything goes" stage poetry. It tends to eschew competition but allows props, costumes, music, actions and whatever else the poet deems appropriate. By contrast, slam poetry is a competitive format that permits nothing but words and gestures. The most common live venue is the open mic[rophone], many of which follow a reading from a recently published book.

Perspective: The medium that will likely take center stage in poetry's revival is YouTube (and sites like it). Consider this contrast in mindsets: those from the Print World despair at how difficult it would be to resurrect interest in poetry. Performers marvel at how easy it would be: two or three poetry videos going viral might be all it takes!

For a state-of-the-art view go to YouTube and search for "Poetry". The unfiltered results are unlikely to impress you. Indeed, it confirms the Crap Constant, 98.3%, that we discussed here. There is a wrinkle, though. Just as bad verse is more noticeable than bad free verse, the visual effect makes terrible performance more evident than terrible writing. This leads to the misimpression that all presentation poetry, like all doggerel, is awful. This problem is exacerbated by performed verse, a double-whammy often riddled with clanging rhymed couplets and bone-jarring meter. In that vein, here is some gratuitous advice for new presenters:

• Poet, look the bastards in the eyes...
  
  You need to look at your audience, if only to know when you may be losing them. Pick two or three prominent listeners, spaced evenly about the audience, and speak exclusively to them. Make it intimate. Let some hear while others overhear.
  



• while not allowing yours to rise.
  
  When looking away to avoid staring and/or to feign thought peer down and to the side, so that you don't appear to be reading from notes, or turn your entire face upward. Do not roll your eyes upward and to the right; that is a sign that you are trying to recall something you've read or seen. (Upward and to the left means you're performing a calculation rather than a poem.)



• Imagine patrons in their drawers.
  
  Unfortunately, for me, this brings up a disturbing mental image:
  
  
  I hope this bit of advice works better for you than me. In one variation, we're also supposed to imagine that everyone in the audience owes us money. I'm not sure what that is about. In any case, remember that everyone is there to be entertained; they're pulling for you.
  
  There is no need to be nervous. Consider practicing on your webcam. Oh, and remember to breathe!
  


• Don't read from scripts, from books or scores.
  
  Teleprompters? Maybe. Reading prose? Sure, but that is the difference between prose and poetry. If your verse isn't memorable to you, it won't be to anyone else (even if your message is). You wouldn't tolerate this level of unprofessionalism from performers in a movie or a play, would you?
  



• How much of verse resides in pace,
  
  Close your eyes and listen to the rate of a performer's words. Notice how uniformity, lack of pauses or undue haste adds an alienating level of artifice.
  


• in body and expressive face?
  
  Study how much a great Shakespearean actor's gestures add to context, clarity and emphasis.
  


• Speak at, not to, and none will heed...
  
  I can't stress this enough: there is no special voice for poetry. Talk to your audience exactly as you would to three buddies in a diner booth.
  


• as auctioneers blur words with speed.
  
  Rookie open-mikers and slammers make the mistake of trying to cram too many words into the allotted time. Pick shorter pieces. Better to leave them wanting more than less.
  
  


• Performers pause for thought, not breath...
  
  The essence of performing is in the apparently impromptu nature of the speech. Act as if your words never existed before you spoke them. Own them. This cliché is fundamental to all theatre, of which presentation poetry--if not all poetry--is a subset.
  


• as monotones bore all to death.
  
  All too often, slammers scream non-stop, without variation in pitch, pace, tone or volume. This is no more interesting than a reader droning.
  

Samples: There is no shortage of examples of how not to perform poetry. Here are the two best known recent cringefests, one from each of the Poetry Worlds we've discussed:

1. Elizabeth Alexander's dismal outing at Obama's inauguration gave us Rule #24: "Poetry's only selling point is that it is cheaper than tear gas."
   
   
   



2. Not to be outdone, Shane Koyczan's beer commercial ripoff, "We Are More", at the 2010 Olympics demonstrated once and for all the danger inherent in mixing nationalism, "art" and laziness.
   
   
   

It wasn't easy to find examples of well-performed poems. If you can link to a convincing one, please do so in the Comments box below. There are a few at "Poetry Out Loud: Learning Recitation", including:

1. Allison Strong
   
   Sonnet CXXX: My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun
   by William Shakespeare



2. Shawntay A. Henry
   
   Frederick Douglass
   by Robert E. Hayden

Many of these efforts illustrate how difficult some modern poems are to perform. IMHO, great poems have to be written with performance in mind yet still stand up to review as text. Due to the isolation of the three Poetry Worlds, few contemporary poets have exhibited both talents.

Conclusions: We can blame music for the precipitous drop in poetry's fortunes between 1920 and now. How do we explain the gap between poetry's popularity in anglophone versus other modern cultures, though? The lack of theatre in our prosodies and prosody in our theatre seems the only explanation.

We can and should preserve on video the best performances of our time. Nevertheless, there will always be a you-had-to-be-there presence to them. As such, this critical aspect of the art form has to be reinvented and reiterated by each generation. That this transitory magic cannot be preserved like text is its charm--a strength, not a weakness.

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Preservation, Presentation and Promotion - Part I

In addition to the usual spate of anthologies throughout the year, the end of 2011 was marked by foundations, publishers, critics and commentators making lists of top ten books. Missing from all of these is an English language poetry collection that:

1. outsold any of these books;



2. received more praise from arms-length critics than all of these books combined;



3. was written by a poet voted by 133 of the world's toughest critics as the one they'd most want to read;



4. was written by a poet of whom few, if any, critics or readers had seen a photo, let alone met; and,



5. contained the closest thing to a serious (i.e. not a nursury rhyme, bawdy limerick or efforts like those mentioned here) iconic poem this century has produced.

So why was this compendium overlooked by all of these listmakers? Was it a deliberate snub? Politics? Discrimination? A conspiracy? A scandal?


Nope.

It is merely a reflection of the fact that there are three discrete poetry worlds with varying degrees of awareness of the others. Each of these has its own raison d'être, promotional models, media, ethos, aesthetics, prominent figures and institutions. The tome in question was written by a leading denizen from another milieu.

The most obvious upshot of this narrow focus is that, if dramatic poet William Shakespeare were alive today, his work would appear in none of these lists or anthologies. If page poets were even vaguely aware of their counterparts we might see anthologies entitled "Best [insert nationality here] Poetry in Print".

Preservation

In general, paper outlasts electromagnetic storage which, in turn, survives longer than speech. Each of the three metacommunities derive their identity and Prime Directive from these lifespans. Thus, the Print World's principle role is the preservation of poetry, much as Dark Age Irish scribes protected so much classical literature against the ravages of time, ignorance and outright persecution. Every aspect of this subculture reflects this shared, noble goal. Today, Print Worlders range from vanity authors who want their thoughts and experiences archived to mentors who hope to obtain or retain a job teaching the thing they love to new generations of mentors. Due to the latter and depending on how sympathetic the speaker is, "professional" and "careerist" are terms commonly used to describe this environment.

So why does no one (at all, according to Giles Coren) except, perhaps, one's associates (according to Robert Archambeault), want to read the poetry produced here?

A cynic might answer with another question: "Would anyone want to watch football games played by NFL coaches?"

This isn't far from:

• "Those who can't do, teach" (Charles Shultz, "Peanuts")
  



• "Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach."
  H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)



• "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."
  
  George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
  



• "Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym."
  
  Woody Allen (1977)



• "Those who know do. Those who understand teach."
  
  - Aristotle

The last view may be the healthiest and most apt. As long as we're using sports-related analogies a better question might be: "Would anyone want to watch football games played by NFL referees, commentators and statisticians?"


Members of the other two supercommunities will likely never understand the concept or purpose of "art without audience". Nevertheless, the "publish-or-perish" need to create and sustain a CV based on prestigious publication of criticism and poetry serves a literary academic population competing for fewer and fewer positions. Here we observe a behavior that must baffle outsiders: having been published in an esteemed magazine, page poets tend to be less likely to resubmit.

"Once I can include that venue on a resumé why not move on to newer pastures?"

Print publishers face two challenges relating to the poetry they produce:

1. It is inaccessible.



2. It is inaccessible.

Debates rage elsewhere about poetry needing to make sense. Remove the audience from the equation, though, and this issue becomes moot.

Physical inaccessibility of today's print poetry would be the greater dilemma if the purpose were to promote the poetry rather than the poet. The chances of two people--even two poetry lovers--having read the same contemporary poem are remote--yes, even if the poem were to appear in "The Atlantic Monthly", "The New Yorker" or "Poetry" magazine. It is largely a matter of cost and inconvenience limiting the creation of icons. We can quote or paraphrase a movie (e.g. "May the force be with you!"), confident of recognition, but not a contemporary novel, let alone a recent poetry book. Even here in the poetry blogosphere we can and will discuss aesthetics, trends and poets but rarely individual poems (unless we bring everyone up to speed by including it, perhaps via a link). Not surprisingly, magazine publishers are branching out with webzine versions.



Notwithstanding the efforts of Helen Vendler and William Loman, criticism in the print world is rarely critical. Jobs are at stake here. Typically, it is blurbing and/or interpretive--"glorified footnoting" in one cynic's view. "From all appearance," said one observer, "its central purpose must be to serve as a lesson guide for teachers, uncovering all the clever [usually literary] allusions and references that can fill up classroom time."

Add up all the factors--the absence of audience and criticism, the professionalism/careerism, the focus on poets rather than poems, etc.--and the Print World's relativistic, laissez faire attitude toward "new prosodies" begins to make sense. Why get involved in definitions and aesthetics when the other person's future may rely on their acceptance? The banana you're trying to take away means much more to the gorilla.

Page Poetry is serious business! How different an enterprise would it be if its purpose were to sell books and magazines?

Next: Presentation Poetry

Numbers - Part II

In "The Jewel-Hinged Jaw", a 1978 essay collection, Samuel R. Delaney said: "...today, there are fifty times six major poets (about three hundred)..." As Mark Halliday did in Robert Archambeau's blog, Delaney is just throwing out numbers, in this case to make a case about the paucity of objective criticism inflating the stats.

In truth, the last half century has produced a grand total of one major poet, defined traditionally and logically as the author of an iconic body of work. We can predict that Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, might be remembered for as long as the Brothers Grimm, Mother Goose and Aesop.



Not only have no other major poets appeared since Robert Frost (March 26, 1874 to January 29, 1963), there have been no minor ones either. (Lest you be thinking of Allen Ginsberg, he came onto the scene in the mid-1950s while Frost was still very much alive. Ditto Leonard Cohen.) Indeed, aside from Geisel's nursery rhymes and that limerick about the man from Nantucket, there have been no iconic lines, let alone poems or poets, during this period. Works that have come closest to it in this century won't remind anyone of Shakespeare:

• "Al Bundy Christmas", from the "Married with Children" Season 4 episode, "It's A Bundyful Life", aired on Fox Network in 1989 to a viewship of millions, many more watching it in syndication.



• "Lost Generation", a reverser by "metroamv" (aka Jonathan Reed), went viral on Youtube, boasting 15,659,066 hits at the time of this writing.

Of course, you know all this. The "market" has spoken. Still, it adds a humorous perspective of Helen Vendler's numbers: "No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading..."

175!

LOL!

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Poetry Numbers - Part I

Want a quick demonstration of how bad we poets are at numbers and how oblivious we are to the effects of losing our audience?

On his Samizdat Blog, in "10,000 Poets: The Problem of the Multitude in American Poetry", Robert Archambeau paraphrases Mark Halliday as saying:

---

Defining a poet as someone who has published a book, or aspires to do so, continued Halliday, we might conservatively estimate the number of American poets at 10,000 (“or,” he added, “30,000 — when I’m in a bad mood”).

---

Even if we take the higher number, 30,000, and divide it by the U.S. population figure he mentions, 300,000,000, we get .01% of the population, 1 in 10,000 individuals, being poets. Messrs. Archambeau and Halliday are trying to make the point that there are too many poets. In truth, expressed as a percentage of the population, we have fewer American poets now than at any time in history.

Of course, what is missing is the audience.

The Same Words

This is prose:

---

This is poetry:

---

     How can this be?  They're the very same words!

God is alive, magic is afoot
God is alive, magic is afoot
God is afoot, magic is alive
Alive is afoot, magic never died

God never sickened
Many poor men lied
Many sick men lied
Magic never weakened

Magic never hid
Magic always ruled
God is afoot
God never died

God was ruler
Though his funeral lengthened
Though his mourners thickened
Magic never fled

Though his shrouds were hoisted
The naked God did live
Though his words were twisted
The naked magic thrived

Though his death was published
Round and round the world
The heart did not believe

Many hurt men wondered
Many struck men bled
Magic never faltered
Magic always led

Many stones were rolled
But God would not lie down
Many wild men lied
Many fat men listened

Though they offered stones
Magic still was fed
Though they locked their coffers
God was always served

Magic is afoot, God rules
Alive is afoot, alive is in command
Many weak men hungered
Many strong men thrived

Though they boasted solitude
God was at their side
Nor the dreamer in his cell
Nor the captain on the hill

Magic is alive
Though his death was pardoned
Round and round the world
The heart did not believe

Though laws were carved in marble
They could not shelter men
Though altars built in parliaments
They could not order men

Police arrested magic
And magic went with them
For magic loves the hungry

But magic would not tarry
It moves from arm to arm
It would not stay with them
Magic is afoot

It cannot come to harm
It rests in an empty palm
It spawns in an empty mind
But magic is no instrument
Magic is the end

Many men drove magic
But Magic stayed behind
Many strong men lied
They only passed through magic

And out the other side
Many weak men lied
They came to God in secret
And though they left him nourished

They would not say who healed
Though mountains danced before them
They said that God was dead
Though his shrouds were hoisted
The naked God did live

This I mean to whisper to my mind
This I mean to laugh with in my mind
This I mean my mind to serve 'til
Service is but magic

Moving through the world
And mind itself is magic
Coursing through the flesh
And flesh itself is magic

Dancing on a clock
And time itself
The magic length of God

Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd.

     Note that this isn't a matter of a pre-existing poem being set to music and/or chanted/sung, as with Pink Floyd star David Gilmour's rendition of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

     Nor is it embedded poetry.  It is an excerpt from Leonard Cohen's 1966 novel, "Beautiful Losers", every word of which was intended, accepted and honored as prose.  Only when folksinger Buffy Ste. Marie read and, subsequently, sang this snippet did it become verse (a subset of poetry).

      How is that possible?  What definition of poetry or prose can handle this?  If adding background music made words verse then many a movie finale would qualify.  Chanting a telephone book doesn't make it poetry¹.

Leonard Cohen

     We could get into the technical aspects, pointing out that this is accentual heterometer, like "The Red Wheelbarrow" (except that it is mixed dimeter/trimeter rather than alternating dimeter/monometer).  However, the truth is much simpler than that:  people repeat it verbatim.  Whether they are speaking, chanting, or singing onstage or in the shower² is irrelevant.  They are making a voluntary effort to get the words exactly right.

     That is poetry.

     In fact, that is how all poetry came into being before the development of writing and prosody.  One cave dweller told a story, another wanted to preserve it, in whole or in part, for posterity.  This memorization effort turned a [prose³] tale into a poem.

     Voilà!

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Footnotes:

¹ - Until others follow your lead, chanting the same names, at least.

² - Or both, given the state of performance art, I suppose.

³ - Prose being the stuff we don't memorize and recite.

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Cheap Prosody Parlor Tricks - Part II

In Cheap Prosody Parlor Tricks - Part I we saw how a knowledge of scansion can help us predict what sections of a poem or song will be retained in memory. Let's continue the fun with a test my friend conducted during an open mic.

The rules couldn't be simpler. Participants will be presented with four poems--parts of poems in my buddy's 3-minute version--and then be asked whether each one is metrical or not. No, really. That's all there is to it. In fact, to make it even easier, the metrical poem(s) will rhyme and at least one of the works will be familiar to us.

Why not play along? If music will distract you, turn off your volume for all except #2, which is recited. For #1, #3 and #4, feel free to read the poems aloud to yourself as the words appear. In any event, please view each video only once before marking the poem as Metrical or Free Verse.

---

1. "Studying Savonarola" by Margaret A. Griffiths

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRlHq0JGFdI

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2. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by Thomas Stearns Eliot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BykfGCPn5IU

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3. "How Aimee remembers Jaguar" by Erin Hopson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiWTD6PVItE

---

4. "Beans" by D. P. Kristalo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJBiVwRRRVc

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When you're ready to see the answers, please scroll down past these photos:






"Beans" (iambic pentameter) and "Prufrock" (iambic heterometer) were verse. "Savonarola" and "Aimee" were free verse.

So, how did you fare?

When my buddy did this he had 35 people in the audience but, because it came after a poetry reading, three of them were fast asleep. Let's do the math:

32 / (2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16) = 2

If the audience were stone deaf and guessing blindly, then, two of them should have gotten all four right. By my friend's count there were at least eight MFAs, graduate students or PhDs in the crowd so our minimum expectation should be...what? 8 contestants getting all of them right? 9 out of 32?

No matter. Only one person in the crowd (a PhD, yes, but in History) got all four correct. Ever the diplomat, our hero told those assembled that the purpose wasn't to test people's ear for poetry but to show how the best free verse is virtually indistinguishable from metrical.

For what it's worth, here are the four snippets my friend used in his 3-minute version:

1. from "Studying Savonarola" by Margaret A. Griffiths
   
   Say you die, scorched into ashes, say
   
   you pass from here to there, with your marigold
   eyes, the garden darker for lack of one golden flower,
   would bees mourn, would crickets keen, drawing long
   
   blue chords on their thighs like cellists?
   Say you disperse like petals on the wind,
   the bright stem of you still a living stroke
   
   in memory, still green, still spring, still the tint
   and the tang of you in my throat, unconsumed.
   
   
2. from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot
   
   And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
   The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
   And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
   When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
   Then how should I begin
   To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
   And how should I presume?
   
   
3. from "How Aimee remembers Jaguar" by Erin Hopson
   
   Sheets
   sink into the spaces between knees, brush bottoms
   of feet. The softest parts pursue something equal
   to spoon, fingers trace patterns over smooth
   and slick terrain. How pliable, the chasm between lovers
   where welcome linen soothes the burn.
   
   
4. from "Beans" by D. P. Kristalo
   
   September came like winter's
   ailing child but
   left us
   viewing Valparaiso's pride. Your face was
   always saddest when you smiled. You smiled as every
   doctored moment lied. You lie with
   orphans' parents, long
   reviled.
   

Try this with your fellow poets or students. It's a hoot.

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