Strong Verse, Part 3: Trobar ric, part the second: Fun Verse, Van Verse, and Full Verse

Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5

So first we'll need new terms.

Semantics is always important, you know.

Trobar leu is easy. "Light verse" is already an accepted term that is only a vehicle for derision when an idiot is speaking. However, since idiots often speak, let's go with "fun verse," for reasons we'll see later.

Trobar clu presents a greater renaming problem. In many respects it's a form of shibboleth--a poetry for poets' sake, a secret handshake--and at the same time it can and does pull the art of poetry forward. "Vanguard verse" is delightful and alliterative--and retains a nod to "avant-garde" without owing a loaded debt. Since "fun verse" is a spondee, however, I think we should stick with that metrical pattern and skip, Cockney-like, to "van verse."

So we are left with Trobar ric. "Rich verse" is the obvious answer, but I think "ripe verse" is more accurate--if less serious. Likewise I am tempted by "perfect verse" though that is 1) too big of a hand-tip and 2) annoyingly arrogant. "Plenary verse" is the right feel but the wrong word, metrically and lexically. So we're left with the "Saxony" shortenings of plenary: "whole" and "full." As "whole" has a popular and unwanted homophone, we'll go with "full verse."

So we have three classes of poetry, coming roughly from the troubadoric terms:

Fun verse

Van verse

Full verse.

They line up metrically and alliteratively. Good and poetic terms for good and poetic things.

Fun verse is easy to read and immediately understandable but does not gain meaning upon multiple readings. It is not superficial or shallow--for those words are far too loaded to be useful but, if such a word can serve here, fey, or indeed, fun.

We must have fun verse because it teaches readers that poetry is not a puzzle while endearing and indoctrinating them into poetry's many forms and folds. It must be praised and encouraged as it, like all poetry, is difficult to write well.

Van verse is poetry that is exceedingly difficult for the layman to read and understand. Only poets and rare connoisseurs of poetry enjoy--or benefit from--reading it. The closed nature of van verse in no way diminishes it. All art needs a vanguard to discover what can and what cannot work within the limits of the mode.

We must, however, ensure that we--as poets and teachers and promoters of poetry--do not treat van verse as if it were the "only proper form" of writing poetry. Too many poets view form and experimentation as more important connection--and because of the grave tendency within "the right people" to view anything that has popular appeal with derision, there is a trend toward valuing "the new" and "the difficult" and "the unpopular" above all others. Such hubris cannot be encouraged--though we should not commit the reverse sin of throwing out van verse altogether. Just as surely as we will lose new readers without fun verse we will lose all freshness without van verse.

Full verse should combine the best of fun and van verse. It should be easy to read and immediately understandable but it should reward and grow from multiple readings. The form should not be in the forefront but appear as a supporting structure to the verse. It is from full verse that the language should grow--as it once did through the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Longfellow.

Full verse, being neglected in the current longueur, must be encouraged and gotten out to the layman reader. Perhaps the efforts of EA, Longfellow, and Dante will remind people that such works are enjoyed by more than just the attendees of MFA programs and workshops. Perhaps not. To say that the current world of mainstream publishing is unfriendly to poetry is to make an obvious understatement. Serialization might help. A friendly magazine certainly would--perhaps Poetry or another high-tone rag can serialize a long narrative poem. Maybe one of the many periodicals famous for publishing short stories. But again, maybe not. I'm not enthusiastic about the world of print publishing. Serialization online similar to online comics may be the best bet.

Obviously I'm most interested in full verse--as I likely would have been interested in van verse at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries--as a lover and defender of the art of poetry I feel compelled to ensure it is a complete art--with introductory, experimental, and mature work.

As this series continues, which will probably get some name like "complete poetry," we'll look at how to integrate full poetry into the already established teaching curricula of van poetry (and how to get fun poetry in there, too) and what changes can be made (or proposed) that will allow room for full poetry in publishing (where fun poetry and van poetry are already well-established, if not well-read).

Strong Verse, Part 2: Trobar ric, part the first

Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Troubadors, the medieval rock stars who gave us the Canzone, the Sonnet, and the Sestina, divided poetry into three classes:

Trobar leu, or light verse: broad-based and appealing poetry meant to reach as wide an audience as possible.

Trobar clus, or closed verse: difficult and complex verse for poets and fine connoisseurs of poetry.

Trobar ric, or rich verse: a middle path between the two--involving wordplay and complexity but without losing its broad appeal.

My contention is that we, as poets, have given up on trobar ric and that this is precisely why poetry has failed as a popular medium for art.

Ron Silliman correctly points out that experiments in poetry fall into the trobar clus category. His conclusions about trobar ric and leu are off--and his thoughts on trobar clus could use some refining. At any rate, I am not here to bow to him, but I thought since I ran across his post researching this one I should mention it.

So here it is:

Most poetry that sells is trobar leu: Billy Collins, Shel Silverstein, Bok's Eunoia, Ginsberg--it's easy to read and immediately understandable. It may reward multiple readings and deep delving but, more often than not, all that's there is there.

Most poetry that is praised by poets is, not surprisingly, trobar clus. Unlike Silliman, however, I include not just avant-garde works in the Pound/Olson/Johnson vein or some of the complex trickery of a Mohammed (most avant-garde poetry is trobar leu anyway--see flarf). I also include most of the neo-formalists--as for many of them--whether audience or poet--the majesty of the structure overcomes the subject--and an obsession with small forms has resulted in "little" poetry. It's often praised and well-received by other poets but it's not on a grand enough scale to draw in laymen--while a painter may be interested in brush strokes an observer wants to see the whole picture.

So we have candy and we have caviar. What we don't have is a main course.

Strong Verse, Part 1: Looking forward (and backward)

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Lyric poetry remains useless.

I know that's not the most popular sentiment I've expressed.

Indeed, many of the folks who I've reviewed here on the blog disagree with me, more or less vehemently.

I submit, though, that their greatest poems are the ones that tell stories. Go back, read some Yezzi & Essbaum--tell me which poems strike you and you'll see the story.

I am persuaded to generalize the above statement:

The lyric mode is useless.

I say this because the point of the lyric mode is incapable of providing the breadth of experience necessary to continue to validate our artistic medium.

In other words, everyone is painting portraits and no one is painting the Sistine Chapel.

Okay, that's not entirely true--as my reviews point out. It is to some extent though. David Mason uses the techniques of Sistine Chapel painting to give us a really big portrait & Campbell McGrath paints on a large scale but uses an unrefined hand. I know there are others--though my readers have been lax of late in offering new narratives up to me--and certainly none of them are taking the literate world by storm.

Why?

That's the hell of it, isn't it?

It's the question I've been asking for the better part of a decade and the only answer I can come up with is that there is little-to-no interaction between the layman audience and the poet.

This is not true of performance poets. The problem is that performance and content are so inextricable that they poet may never be able to suss out what was good from what was bad--only to change one or the other and judge the reception.

Now, generally the reaction between the layman audience and the novelist is limited to sales--but sales of poetry books are so few and far between that this is difficult to judge (at best). And when a book of poetry sells to laymen it often does because it is either a curiosity or by someone "famous" (like Jewel & Tupac's books--or, in the case of Cobain's journals--both).

So until books of poetry start to sell we won't know what the audience wants and we won't know what the audience wants until books of poetry start to sell.

Well at least now we know what's happened since elitism overtook poetry (and patrons stopped being people and started being corporations).

So how do we look at what an audience wants?

I think I've pretty exhaustively gone over the notion that the reading audience wants stories. If you still doubt that, I'm not sure I can convince you know. Look me up at AWP in April and we'll talk about it. So we have looked at the present and we know its answer.

So how do we look forward to producing such work? For that we have to look about eight centuries backward--and look to a different post.

Aquarian Blog

Happy 2nd Birthday, Blog!

For those of you who feel like celebrating, there's a donate button to your immediate right -->

:)

Things to come

Good day, Lovers of Poetry! I've just a brief newsy post for y'all--it's the run up to the blog's second anniversary, after all.

We'll be welcoming baby 3 near the middle of February. I've no idea what this means for blogging frequency as I can't really be said to blog with any frequency.

I'm always looking for great books to review. Contact me if you've got a great book of poetry recently out or out soon.

My doomsday clock of the death of poetry has been moved back a little lately. It's not that folks are all happy-cum-friendly about creating outstanding narratives and embracing a natural meter--though that's not holy-crap weird like it was nearly two years ago--just that the feelings seem to be swinging away from post-avant silliness. One can hope. I'm guessing that I'll get a better feel at AWP in April (who is going besides me? Post in the comments!).

That's about it for now. In short:

Baby

Reviews

AWP

Heady times!

Strong Verse is now a Wikipedia source?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Alexander_Essbaum

Tee hee :)

I noticed my name isn't notable yet.

Oh well.

I hope my newfound internet street cred results in many sales & much recognition for the excellent poets whose work I review.

A Review: Jill Alexander Essbaum: The Devastation, Necropolis, and Harlot

The Devastation ($9)

Necropolis ($13.25)

Harlot ($15)

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

When the words of Jill Alexander Essbaum are anthologized and collected, her long poem "The Devastation" (2009, Cooper Dillon Books) will serve as the introduction to her work. I should say her early work, as Jillian is in her 30s, but unless there is a radical shift in direction, theme, and style (and there ought not to be; her writing is practically perfect), "The Devastation" (this is a prayer) will remain the place to pry into her poetry.

"The Devastation" is a sometimes-rhyming, sometimes-metrical, form-shifting poem divided into page-stanzas so that each encapsulates a pulse of thought, a technique taken from the patterns of extemporaneous Protestant prayer. Just to whom the prayer is addressed is a debatable and important point, but by the time we reach the second page, we should be familiar with Essbaum's language and play of language--it serves as her linguistic primer:

Years younger; it is a different cross I'm nailed to.

All my charms, all my conniving.

My doings and my dont's.

Impossible paths. Impassable boths.

(I will. I won't. I will. I won't.)

Jill is riding high here on Frost and Eliot and Plath (and a few others I'll let you discover; no sense in revealing all her secrets) though she goes farther than any of them (or any poet I know of save Shakespeare) in word play--her wrenched Plathian rhyme of don't/both is so speedy and arresting that it nearly eclipses the delicious vowel-switching and letter-flipping of "Impossible paths. Impassable boths." Jill is a bit infamous for her puns at the Best American Poetry blog and wisely keeps the spirit of punning alive in her work but spares us the flavor of the howlers.

If we are given a linguistic primer by page two, we only have to wait until page three for the topical primer: "Years ago, I was old in my adulteries," says the supplicant;

I was beaten like a woman.

I was eaten like a woman.

I was smitten with paramours and paracletes.

Ever nearer to thee, but never near enough.

Yes, folks, that's right, Jill Alexander Essbaum is bringing Donne back. While the bluntness of the 21st Century prevents her from the subtleties of "The Flea," Jill's poetry is the made of the rare air of The Song of Solomon, a conflation of sex and divinity; superficially this can be seen as more of the same--we live in a sex-obsessed culture rivaling that of Athens or the court of Elagabalus. In truth, however, Jill's poems turn the sex-obsession onto its head--sublimating the primal desire into the divine.

Unsurprisingly, in "The Devastation" the sublimation doesn't quite work out--the poem's not called "The Creation," after all. Once the speaker tells us that "there's no logic to the Word" we know that something is up. The prayer then ends abruptly leaving us both with a sense of turned tables and the need to re-read. Unlike the inescapably comparative "Prufrock," the end reframes the poem; on the final two stanza-pages, Essbaum demands that we reread the entire prayer--which then becomes less of a prayer than a Jacobian struggle with the speaker's past, her poem, and her paraclete whose divine end, like Dante's, replaces language with the primordial cry.

Once we understand Essbaum's thrust, we can pierce her previous volumes, Necropolis (2008, neoNuma Arts) and Harlot (2007, No Tell Books). These books are best understood as two halves of the same quest: the reconciliation of spirit and flesh. Necropolis is organized around an Easter weekend, half-Dante and half-Christ. Its cover is grey, with a stylized graveyard image. Though dedicated "chiefly to Nick Cave," the acknowledgements point to the importance of the death of Jill's parents and it is through death that Necropolis moves.

On "The First Day," "Terra Infirma" leads us through a dead landscape and, like the end of "The Devastation," informs us that "there is nothing left of Christ." As the day extends to night, we walk through "Cemetary Road" "burned and bitter" in loss and "fearing the darkness of the grave" even though as "Good Christians" we ought not to.

During "The Second Day," we "descend into Hell," following "nothing left" into "maggots." In this fleshy Hell we encounter "Danse Macabre," a poem that is pure Essbaum, from "weep off that white dress" to "I'll pare by halves your berry," a sexy poem that is creepy, crawly, and catabolic but still ends on Christ. Unable to escape the embodied Hell, "The Second Day" shifts with "What (C)remains" into the question of redemption and intention and, while I would prefer a differently punctuated title, the double question of the end

How exactly has your will been done?

And where, precisely, has she gone?

punctuates the central question of this book perfectly: what is the will of God and how am I, the lost, able to fulfill it?

We are given the beginning to this answer in "An Alabaster Jar and Its Oil," the following poem, where "the faint waft of Christ" leads the speaker to "a promise" (of salvation) "[she dares] at once to doubt and to believe," giving her the strength (with drink) to stumble into the third day.

For "The Third Day," the body becomes "A Variety of Hells," where a little death is mixed in with life and sex. To grasp the full force of Jill Alexander Essbaum's ability to mix sex and life and death and faith, "La Petite Mort"--where "sex is the solvent of all isolation"--cannot be missed. As the day, and the book, comes to a close, we are told in "RSVP" that the speaker has had her fill of death; she is "off to elsewhere" and "even Heaven. . .can't have [her] yet."

We can, however, and in Essbaum's Harlot we can have her deeply. If Necropolis is stuck on death and subtle, Harlot is stuffed with sex and subversive--made clear by the cover, a watercolor of naked woman embracing a phallus twice her size. Yet of the three works, Harlot burns the brightest and the most holy; it reads as if John Donne and Sylvia Plath had a child and gave her only the Song of Solomon and the four Gospels to read.

The lips of "Young Magdalene's Prayer" curl around "flimflam fists," "flesh [and] fire," "swelling seas," and "Holy Writ." The young Magdalene "can hardly imagine/what she might do with her fingers" once the "safe-keeped" "box of hers" is finally unleashed. And though the sex of the passage is obvious enough, when one remembers that Mary Magdalene is often conflated with the Mary of the Anointing of Jesus the meaning of a safe-kept box expands. This play of holyness and whoreishness is the point on which Harlot revolves.

"The Clockmaker's Mistress Knows Complications" and "The Villagers Warned Me About You" each take punning and wordplay about as far as they can go in a poem without breaking it. The draw of these poems is their differing approaches. Where "Clockmaker" is remorseful, "Villagers" is playful" but on re-reading it is "Villagers" and not "Clockmaker" that results in despair. "La Linguiste" continues this wordplay with an insistence on the word "whore"--a word as central to the book as "harlot"--a word, the poem argues, central to us because "who're is just a stroke away from "whore." "Stroke," of course, being a double-edged word.

The final third of the book, starting with "Folie a Deux, Menage a Trois" (which has been written about elsewhere), refocuses us back towards the divine. A "Strange Woman" tells us to "use her. She will let you." Though we may be confused by the title the cover of the book we cannot forget the dedication to "Rahab. . .". In the end, the harlot is used by God, not man--and it is to God that she opens fully.

This full opening is made clear in the penultimate poem "Nightboat," a retelling of The Gospel of Mark, 4:35-41, where the both the storm and the body of the speaker are made to behave Christ. As the poem progresses, the waves become bodies of Christ and the speaker and the bodies become waves until in the end, the speaker prays "pilot me" and is rewarded for her faith. She of the poem gets driven gets nailed by Christ and like Christ and, in the body of the poem, is redeemed.

No poet today dares play with such spiritual fire like Jill Alexander Essbaum dares. Her poems skirt the edge of blasphemy and pray for re-readings and a spiritual embrace. Dancing on the edge of her words one finds despair and salvation, often in the same word. She echoes Donne and Plath and riffs on Eliot but has the precise benefit of being alive and full of our time. I can find few poets to recommend so highly. A reader would be hard-pressed to find finer contemporary verse.