Geekin' out on poetry (and Romanticism)—my study thread

Season of the Witch has resurrected and is my main focus again. Poetry is on pause for a while. But I'll keep coming back to it. For now poetry goes on a back burner and simmers gently. It was a between-stories project, and will be again.

When I started this blog I spent several pages working all around the idea of what I called poetic narrative, in both film and writing. I broke it down into two basic divisions—the narrative and the poetic. And my main aim is to find pleasing ways to combine the two.

Free verse is one. It's poetry freed of the need for rhyme or regular metrics. I'm reading through Leaves of Grass. Whitman is considered the father of free verse. I suppose it was the next big breakdown of poetry from its highly structured classical forms after blank verse, way back in the Renaissance, which freed it from the need to rhyme.

Prose poetry is another. Here's a nice one I found called She Spent a Year Hallucinating Birds on PoetryFoundation.org. Some of my freewrites look ilke this, and back in the 90's I did a few I would call anger-directed automatic writing, in one of which which I wrote "Don't sentence yourself to structure." Meaning free yourself of sentence structure. Ironically, I wrote it in sentence form. I mean that particular statement was a sentence, much of what I wrote wasn't. I found it extremely liberating and stimulating to write this way, though of course many people would become incensed on seeing it. And. to be honest I'm pretty critical of it when I see it, though I sometimes like to express myself freely this way. It's sort of like vomiting on the page—it can be very therapeutic and feel great, but it probably won't result in something many people will want to read. I looked through a lot of prose poems on PoetryFoundation before I found one that appealed to me.

I think ultimately what I'm looking at developing is something that's closer to 'normal' prose than either of these, but takes on some apsects of poetry, such as alliteration, assonance, and a sort of unstructured intuitive metric with no regular form to it, very much like Whitman used. I've done this in parts of stories, and I'd like to do some more of it, though it wouldn't fit in either of my current projects unless I go back and completely rewrite them. Unless, maybe in certain more surreal parts of Season of the Witch...

As I ebb’d with the ocean of life—Walt Whitman

​

As I ebb’d with the ocean of life,
As I wended the shores I know,
As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok,
Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant,
Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways,
I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,
Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems,
Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,
The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe.

1 09—As I ebb’d / with the o / cean of life,
2 08—As I wend / ed the shores / I know,
3 17—As I walk’d / where the rip / ples con tin / u a lly / wash you / Pau man ok,
4 10—Where they rus / tle up / hoarse and / sib il ant,
5 15—Where the fierce / old mo ther / end less ly / cries for her / cast a ways,
6 14—I / mu sing late / in the aut / umn day, / ga zing off / south ward,
7 18—Held by this / e lec tric / self out / of the pride / of which / I ut ter / po ems,
8 14—Was seiz’d / by the spi / rit that trails / in the lines / un der foot,
9 20—The rim, / the sed / i ment / that stands / for all / the wa / ter and all / the land / of the globe.​

I feel like I got most of these right, but on some I just can't tell where they're supposed to break, so this is tentative. The blue numbers down the left-hand side are line numbers, the red bolded numbers next to them are syllable counts for the lines. I'm not color-coding or labeling the feet because I'm not sure I've got them right. I just want to analyze Whitman's free verse as well as I'm capable at this stage. It's part of a run toward trying something similar myself.

I feel a really strong gap in l2 between shores and I—a silent beat I suppose you'd call it. It's so strong I'm tempted to throw in a 'that' to fill it, but that makes if feel more sing-songy. All of this, as well as probably all the things I'm confused about and the ones I haven't even noticed, are what combine to make it feel so sophisticated and so impressive. So far I think he's my favorite poet, for his rhythms and complexity-of-rhythm; that extremely irregular meter and line length. Of all the poets I've looked at to date, he uses the longest lines by far.

line 6—I think the I (1st syllable) is an extra head on the line. Could be wrong though, as in several other places. I know not how many.

The last couple of lines (with all the 'the's) remind me of The Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag (of the United States of America). Lots of 'the's and 'of's in there, plus it's patriotic—he would definitely approve. Not sure if the pledge as we know it was around in his day though.

I understand he took a lot of inspiration from the free-form poetry of the Bible, and from Dante. I know I saw one or two more influences I'm not remembering now. Vergil maybe, who was also an inspiration on Dante (and a character in his Divine Comedy)? He also took inspiration from Emerson, and I'm sure many more. In fact I've seen mention of someone named Tupper that some claim he practically ripped off. Not sure, I haven't seen any of Tupper's wares yet to compare.

The whole verse is one long sentence. Check the lines, they all end with commas except the last one. Which means they're all strongly end-stopped. His seem to be most of the time from what I've seen so far.

He also mixes a certain high poetic tone (from our modern persepctive anyway) with coarse low words like ordinary folk would use. I think it was that plus his refusal to rhyme, that made him a pariah in his own day, unrecognized as a genius until after death.

It's one long left-branching sentence. Those last two lines (with all the the's) are most of the actual sentence, everything leading up to them is a series of clauses—many consecutive lines beginning with the same repeated phrase or word. There's a word for that, and I can't remember it, but it doesnt matter. Oh wait, I think it's consonance? But no matter, it's the technique that's important, not its name.

Link between Transcendental Film and psychedelic/progressive rock?

Probably not at all a direct link, or a causative one, but there might be some indirect causation involved. Or they arose at the same time, in the same cultural paradigm, and possibly from similar stimuli. Maybe the progenitors and purveyors of each were puffing the same stuff.

The reason I posit a similarity is because they both deal with stretching out time. Scenes in transcendental films got longer and trippy, and exactly the same thing happened to progressive rock songs, and they're both aimed at creating a facsimile of transcendence in the mind of the viewer or listener.

Transcendental cinema began in the 50's and kept picking up steam. Progressive rock grew from the psychedelic rock of the 60's, fueled by psychedelic drugs—which are known to bring transcendence (sometimes, if they don't bring a bad trip or psychosis).

I was looking through some of my early posts about poetic film and landed on the one about Paul Shrader's book on Transcendental Style in Film. In particular I read the introduction.

"I posited that the psyche, squeezed by untenable disparity, would break free to another plane."​

This is what Jung called The Transcendent Function. It happens in the mind when a person is faced with some unsolvable problem, essentially caught between a rock and a hard place. The conscious mind is unable to solve the conundrum, logic and reason are too linear. But after some struggle, and perhaps sleeping on it, the unconscious will sometimes offer up a solution that's perfect and uncanny. One nobody would ever have arrived at through logic and reason.

These two definitions are the same thing really, stated in somewhat different terms. Perhaps Schrader was familiar with Jung, or had run across his theory of the transcendent function somewhere? Jung was very popular in the 60's.

They're both theories of the mind—in particular of how the unconscious will burst through and solve a problem the conscious mind, with its very limited apparatus and techniques, is unable to solve. It does it in the form of a dream, vision, intuition, or inspiration of some kind.

And isn't this essentially what transcendentalism is about? Rising above—transcending the logical and reasonable to another realm, that which has been referred to as the divine or the spiritual, and also as the unconscious?

Another way to look at this statement by Schrader:

"I posited that the psyche, squeezed by untenable disparity, would break free to another plane—"​

It does break through into another plane—one where time works very differently. It dilates, stretches out, expands, to become infinite or meaningless. Where there's no anxiety or worry, where there are no schedules to keep or appointments. Where you can idle in childlike wonder, staring for what seems a lifetime at cloud formations as they slowly transform in the sky, or at leaves of grass waving gently in the wind. I refer you to my post called An Investigation into Poetic Film - The World of Objects/Nature/Animals

The transcendental state is the unconscious, meditative state. It's reached by shutting off the structured, restrictive apparatus of the conscious mind and allowing yourself to expand into the formless timeless unconscious state of meditation.

This is what happens to me when I'm outside (generally) and find myself falling into this unutterably beautiful world of transcendence. Looking at a cracked and weed-grown parking lot and seeing paradise. Smelling hot asphalt and exhaust and hearing traffic noises, and it all becomes a pleasant melody of meaningless droning motion. It's nirvana. Enlightenment. You still chop wood and carry water, but now you know how to reach nirvana whenever you want to. It's just a jump to the left (or rather a shift of mental focus).

And this is what I'm getting at when I do the powerfully visual (and other-senses-involved at times too) scenes in my stories. I'm aiming at transcendence—that everyday transcendence we've all experienced many times as children, but forgotten about since then and become too worried about schedules and calendars and clocks and appointments and responsibilities to find again as adults (most of the time). It's always there waiting for us, we just have to let ourselves fall into it. Like a rabbit hole. You don't need drugs to get there, just meditation done in nature.

I mean the kind of transcendence seen in films like this:

​

I went ahead and posted this here, on a Poetry thread, because transcendent thought is poetic thought.

It's done through the soul, rather than the logical mind—though a psychologist would call it the unconscious.

The kind of transcendence seen in films like this:

​

Switch off the ususally-endeless stream of words in your mind, let yourself drift in childlike bliss. Let the imagery, the motion, and the sounds wash over you. Lose yourself in them.

Or like this:

​

There's no narrative, no meaning, everything becomes pleasant and abstract. Like a beautiful dream. Forms, colors, textures moving gently, lapping, advancing and receding in endless cycles. Sun sparkling on moving water, coming through dappled leaves that are in constant motion, to make patterns of moving light on the ground. This is pure transcendent poetry.

You can do something like this in writing. Walt Whitman does it in Leaves of Grass, James Joyce does it in Ulysses. Perhaps you only need an alliterative name? I'm sure many poets and litfic writers accomplish similar things.

Generally though I wouldn't be looking for anything so drifting and meaningless, except at certain points for very specific reasons. This is just an extreme I wanted to show. There's a sliding scale, all the way from pure telling narrative to pure abstract imagery and sound. Whitman and Joyce move around this spectrum as they see fit. I think it's time for me to start experimenting in freewrites, see what I can do. Expand my repertoire of techniques. Probably after I tackle trying to write like Whitman a few times. I've been moving through poetry from the more structured, with rhyme and meter and foot, through blank verse to free verse.

Beckons

A mass of stray bales beckons across a million rogue
blasphemers, sailing on a derry sloop to Newberry on a drunken junket with a
trunkful of elephant parts. Broken hearts.
The dark and stringent pastures of blasted gratitude mock any sense of
decency you might have claimed to feel

But is it real?
would you steal away and stroll through twilight meadows?
On a lark

Who knows what morbid monster grows
in sunken silken tombs
where dimmed eyes deign to peer?

Fuck it

Let’s have a beer

I think it would be better without the rhymes, or maybe just a few carefully done slant rhymes. But they tend to make it sound sing-songy and silly. Of course so does breaking down at the end and making a couple of joke lines.

Again I wasn't thinking about meaning, just rhythm and occasionally I'd string a few ideas together through association. It's pretty much automatic writing.

Also weakened by things like "on a", "with a", "but the". It sounds like an amateur putting together silly phrases and looking for linking devices. The more intense lines always sound better. The classier stuff—the Whitmanesqe, Joycean or Miltonian.

A mass of stray bales beckons across a million rogue
blasphemers, sailing on a derry sloop to Newberry on a drunken junket with a
trunkful of elephant parts. Broken hearts.
The dark and stringent pastures of blasted gratitude mock any sense of
decency you might have claimed to feel

But is it real?
would you steal slouch away and stroll lurk through in twilight meadows alleys?
On a lark

Who knows what morbid monster grows fancies rise
in sunken silken tombs
where dimmed eyes deign to peer?

Fuck it

Let’s have a beer

* * * *​

Red=sounds pretty good (poetic, classy, serious etc)
Bold red= replacement words
Blue=silly, obnoxious

I actually don't mind that rhyme near the end, rise with eyes 2 lines later. Eyes doesn't fall on the line end, and doesn't imemdiately follow, as I've tended to do. Sounds ok to me. But don't let it become a habit.

I realized I'm working with a little more than just the sound and rhythm of the words when I do these nonsense poems. It isn't just individual words, there are phrases, and while they don't really contribute to any meaning (there is none) they do bring some level of atmosphere or mood to the piece. It's almost bizarre how much is going on already, without linking words together to create meaning. I think this is a very important aspect of poetry (and of prose as well) that bears some examination.

It almost did degenerate into meaning with these lines:

The dark and stringent pastures of blasted gratitude mock any sense of
decency you might have claimed to feel
​

With just a couple of words changed it could come to carry some actual meaning, but it's still nonsense struggling to make sense. But I don't want to just stop working (playing) with words and phrases this way yet. I think it's vitally important to hear (feel) the sounds this way, abstractly, rather than ignore these aspects and go straight to thinking only about the meaning, That's logic and reason taking over (conscious mind), and poetry needs to come largely from the unconscious, through intuition etc. It needs to be largely about feel. And maybe meaning can be added loosely, partially. Otherwise you get the standard—as soon as you let logic and reason into the game they bully everything else into submission. Then you're just writing rhyming prose rather than poetry. It must come from the right brain as much as the left (using those terms loosely, not strictly), and most liklely it's the tensions or balances between them that makes it really interesting. It's the old yin and yang balance once again. If you let masculine logical yang dominate you lose much of what makes it poetic. Yang is bright sunlight that dispells mystery, yin is moonlight in which it thrives.

It's very much like what I'm doing in my stories by trying to strike a balance between plotting/character arc on the one hand and discovery writing on the other. The discovery is what allows some mystery in, and lets the unconscious go to work on things and pull together disparate threads the conscious would never notice. The structuring devices like plot and character arc are pure reason and logic taking over from above, they're almost formulae. You must be loose and flexible with them, let them be suggestions rather than absolutes. And let the poetry bubble up from underneath and work its magic.