"Poetry Reading" by Catala, and photo from a poetry reading in Munich, GermanyA Formalist Poet at the Open Mic Part V: ‘Nose Blind,’ by Daniel Kemper The Society July 15, 2024 Essays, Poetry, Poetry Forms, Readings 22 Comments . A Formalist Poet at the Open Mic Part V: Nose Blind by Daniel Kemper After a stressful day, because of issues with which you, dear reader need not concern yourself, I decided to swing by the Capital Gardens and rove over to the section of roses to de-stress a little. The day was strained and hectic, but ended early and all at once. Full adrenaline dumps are that way. What I craved, for reasons that I cannot put my finger on, was the scent of roses. Perhaps an echo of a long-lost girlfriend, call her Joan Sobrina. She’s a gardener and so I know a little about the roses. At least more than I used to know. As I pace down the rows in the dry and blistering heat, the desiccating breeze wreaking havoc with my eyes, I’m nearly overwhelmed with all the roses. There are so many and so many different types. There are over one-hundred fifty varieties. Many have names that cheer me up sometimes directly, sometimes through ironic humor: The Santa Claus Rose, Michelangelo Rose, César Chávez Rose, Bing Crosby Rose, Diana, Princess of Wales Rose, Barbara Streisand Rose, Rosie O’Donnell Rose, John F. Kennedy Rose, and the Betty Boop Rose. As I wander near the border of the garden, a sidewalk downtown, I pick up the unmistakable scent of body odor. What the heck? In this breeze? Ah. A bundle of homeless’ clothes in a pile on the curb. It alerts me: These roses have been visually gorgeous, but I haven’t smelled anything. No aromas. Nothing. Ah, yes, I’d forgotten Joan Sobrina told me of the wars of the roses, as it were. Hydroponic gardens and “Franken-roses,” all selectively bred or genetically engineered for visual appeal, and the smell neglected. They’ve overwhelmed the market. New horticulturalists have made them so gaudy and glary that traditionalists almost do not recognize them as roses. They are beautiful, in a way, in their garishness, but somehow, something’s missing. It’s the difference between the beauty of the women who stand around on, eh, seventh avenue let us say, and this Nora Jones tribute band that is advertised on a poster just now blowing past my feet. Traditionalists struggle to maintain a place for the organic healthy roses, the ones that retain distinctiveness, aroma, pleasure for all senses. Figures. Here in my moment of relaxation, more drama. I forgot. The official name of the place is the “World Peace Rose Garden in Capitol Park.” A poet’s life. Off to the poetry reading I go, mollified I guess, but not satisfied. Something lingers with me as I drive across town. The dense traffic—tangled around homeless, bicyclers, new green lanes, eternal construction, more homeless, delivery trucks, light rail—all swim by me. I’m thinking. I’m busy. I’m thinking about how odd it is that I did not notice the lack of aroma until something really stunk everything up and rattled me. I want to say that I went nose-blind, but how do you go nose-blind to the lack of smell? I’m sitting standing in the back of a packed house and helped bring out extra chairs I’m sure, but I’m a total blank about the intervening drive. That’s happening more lately. I drive and have no memory of getting wherever it is I arrive. Probably for the best. Heh. Thing that bugs me is I have no idea how much of the poetry I zoned out for. It’s a night dedicated to forms—definitely a rarity. A local poet of some note, call her Notorious SPC, held a workshop for forms and tonight is dedicated to readings of the end products. One must adjust a little, give a little mercy because poems written in class, for class, well you know. Creativity doesn’t always work like that. The forms are abecedarian, ghazal, acrostic, villanelle (ambitious!), pantoum (maybe even more ambitious!), cento. Three of those forms are simply not my taste, so I recuse myself from commentary. They are abecedarian, acrostic, and cento. An abecedarian just starts each line with a letter of the alphabet, 26 lines. An acrostic spells out something with the first letter of each line. A cento is composed entirely of quotations of some poet (use the term loosely), songwriter, or whatever. All visual. Presented auditorily. Nuff said. I love villanelles and am pleasantly feeling out pantoums. Ghazals are o.k. They’re easy to compose, hard to compose well. It’s exciting that form is getting a little play. Not to take over, just to have a seat at the table. A really ambitious variation on a villanelle is being read when I come to. It’s a double villanelle. It’s thought and plot and settings are well played. It’s about misbegotten and frustrated love, or making connections at the bar anyway. The time setting is long enough ago that there were still a few juke boxes around. It’s about the crew who hang out at the at the jukebox acting tough and the crew at the bar who hang out acting femme-y. And no one brave enough to walk up and talk to one another. I’m amused at the timelessness and universality of just striking up a semi-amorous conversation. I’m trying to follow the twists and turns of the structural scheme and it’s much more difficult and distracting than I expected. That’s neither why I zoomed out, nor why I came to, though. I think I just hit a tipping point with trying to follow the structure of the poem. It should be easy with a villanelle with those hammering repetends. Even if they are varied somewhat. But I was really having trouble, enough trouble that it brought it to mind that I had trouble for all of the other form poems, too. It wasn’t because they were mixed in with other visual-only poems and camouflaged, nor because they were being squeezed out by the visual poems. It’s clear that these are workshop poems in that you can feel the guiding hand of an experienced writer in the imagery which is generally quite beautiful in a way. One might even call the imagery gaudy or even garish at times. There were no aftereffects from the overwhelm of non-traditional verse trying to maintain a place. I wrinkled my nose. There was absolutely no meter in this villanelle, just parts of phrases or rhyme words at semi-regular times (which really renders them not rhyming, but that detail’s for later). The imagery and emotion of this villanelle and all the poems were of many different types and varieties, and gorgeous in places, but I heard no meter, no pulse, nothing aural. Nothing. I wrinkled my nose again. How can you write a formal poem with no meter? A metrical poem with no meter? But the truth is, I can tell they have an innocent and total lack of awareness. They do not know there is something missing. They do not know there is something to miss. They do not hear it. I want to say that they’ve gone ear-blind, but how do you go ear-blind to the lack of meter? Feeling a little deflated and wanting a little company, I look from the microphone over to the refreshments table and back. We must have come to a break. . . Daniel Kemper is a former tournament-winning wrestler, a black belt in traditional Shotokan karate and a former infantryman. He has a BA in English, an MCSE (Systems Engineering), and an MBA. He quit a 25-year IT career in 2023 and went all-in on poetry. Since then, he’s had works accepted for publication at The Blue Unicorn, The Lyric, thehypertexts.com, The Creativity Webzine, Amethyst Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Formalverse, The Literary Hatchet, the Society for Classical Poets, and Ekphrastic Review. He was an invited presenter at the 2023 national PAMLA conference and will preside over the Poetics Panel at PAMLA 2024. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Blue Unicorn and has been the featured poet at the historic Luna’s Cafe and the Sacramento Poetry Center. NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets. The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Trending now: 22 Responses Roy Eugene Peterson July 15, 2024 The “visually gorgeous” roses must have been paper roses. Reply Daniel Kemper July 17, 2024 Howdy, howdy, Roy~ I wish. They were real. There are hundreds of species and thousands of cultivars with many intriguing or amusing names. The preference for sight over smell is a very strong one, seemingly abetted by the apparent extraordinary susceptibility to allergies of recent generations. As lacking in scent as the so-called villanelle was in meter. Note: It’s actually pretty challenging to hear the rhymes without the meter. Rhyme is really dependent on it. Reply Margaret Coats July 16, 2024 Daniel, I understand about roses. In my own teaching of poetry, I had a full lesson only on the image of the rose–always illustrated by rose poems. It must be the richest of all images, and there was very much I did not cover. It is therefore rather intriguing to consider your visit to a rose garden without scent. All those varieties bred to appeal only to the sense of sight, with more to offer in their historic or poetic or symbolic names (which is mental rather than sensual appeal). Indeed something was lacking to the nature of those roses. And then villanelles without meter. As villanelles are written in lines that require rhyme, and rhyme depends on the final accented syllable of the line, there might be meter–unless the lines were free prose. This could happen among free verse writers unaware of meter and probably uncertain about rhyme. I am not entirely surprised, because villanelles are so popular as they are, precisely because they lack much of a tradition. The villanelle first became a form in the 19th century, modeled on only one particular poem from about 1600. Writers become enchanted by context-supplied meaning in a piece with multiple repetends. They focus on writing repetends that can give rise to numerous nuances of meaning. Writing workshops therefore like villanelles, as for a long time they liked sestinas. Sestinas were even more attractive for having no rhyme, though these did have a tradition going back into the Middle Ages, with many metrical examples. Again, though, the focus in workshops is choice of words so as to produce varied effects of meaning, not of sound. I think that’s probably how one can write in a form, and not use meter. Excess attention to variations of meaning, which are necessary and desirable, but little or no attention to the background music. Reply Daniel Kemper July 17, 2024 Hi Margaret. When I read your opening, the richness of roses comes roaring back. It’s easy to get boiled by degree like the proverbial frog and lose sense of how much is in roses. That rather deepens my observations, pretty depressingly. My bet, not having attended the workshop at which these poems were taught, is that the length of the lines was gauged roughly by eye, perhaps even more roughly by ear. There’s a scene in “Harold and Maude,” where they cut to a handful of tombstones and begin panning back. And panning back. And panning back. The graveyard is beyond enormous. That panning back feeling is what I get every day realizing how widespread metrical illiteracy is. Reply Julian D. Woodruff July 16, 2024 If we used any other terminology for it, a rose would look just as beautiful as it is. You have to shake your head when you realize that that statement is around the corner from, or down the block from, or across the tracks from a line of actual poetry (that invokes the sense of smell). Reply Daniel Kemper July 18, 2024 I hate to be the bad guy and I feel like one now. It’s unpleasant to me to state the following, but it’s necessary to face unpleasant truths. Shakespeare is, in fact, wrong. The names of things do change human’s perceptions of those things, though the names do not change their realities. Shakespeare did not address the reality, but a human perception of it. The scientific literature in studies of perception is voluminous, as is the literature regarding sales and marketing. For one trivial example, a experiment famous in those circles asked participants to take a blind taste test of two colas in paper cups and rate which one was better. (It was Pepsi in both.) One cup had the letter “M” prominently displayed: the other, “Q.” The “M” cup was rated significantly better tasting by a significant portion of the testing population. [Theory is: “Q” is weird, and “M” is like “mmm.”] The experiment has been repeated many times. Just one example. There are many, many like it. How long would we still smell the sweetness roses if we only called them “thorn bait?” True, the chemical profile would remain unchanged, but how long would we smell it? When have you ever heard someone appreciate the lavender shades of kudzu flowers? Or even notice their grape-like scent? (More and better scent than many modern hybrid roses, too.) Shakespeare’s thought is beautiful, but it just isn’t true. Reply Julian D. Woodruff July 19, 2024 Valid point, Daniel, and interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if S himself made it somewhere–but more likely in prose than in verse. Maria August 7, 2024 I remember my English teacher, albeit a long time ago , saying that perhaps Shakespeare was being very tongue-in-cheek with the statement, ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ for after all in the context of Capulet and Montague the names matter very much indeed. Was Romeo saying something untrue, or at least trying to downplay the importance of names because of his love for Juliet? And in that case, Shakespeare’s own views on the matter are debatable. Cynthia Erlandson July 16, 2024 I like the way you’ve explained “nose-blind” with roses, and “ear-blind” with what’s heard at a poetry reading. It’s a great comparison which, it seems to me, might possibly be even more effective written as a poem than an essay, with the garden of scent-less roses used as a metaphor for the meter-less poems. In any case, your essay reminded me that one reason I don’t attend many poetry readings is that for me, however good the poetry may be, I find I need to see it as well as hear it. I always wish people would hand out copies of the poems they’re going to read; without seeing them, I miss a lot of what is there. I’ll hear a line I really like, then try to “type” it into my brain, and miss what follows. Reply Joseph S. Salemi July 16, 2024 Cynthia, I strongly agree with that. Poems are artifacts, so it is essential that they take the form of written text as well as auditory experiences. Part of the problem with modern poetry is the ass-backwards assumption that its main job is to be spoken aloud and heard. While that assumption may have been true in preliterate times, it isn’t true in a developed culture with a long literary tradition behind it, with countless canonical works that need to be read and studied on the page. As a culture grows older and more complex, as vocabularies expand, as memories deepen, the poetry of that culture will become heavy with allusion, nuance, and intricacy. It becomes essential to see the poem in print to grasp it and appreciate it fully. I also avoid poetry readings. It seems that they have just become ways to network, make friends, express emotion, and perhaps gain some kind of local status. Reply Cynthia Erlandson July 16, 2024 Thank you, Joseph. I’ve wondered if others feel the same way about that. Joshua C. Frank July 19, 2024 I, too, avoid poetry readings for the same reason… plus, I’ve tried them before, and even in the red states, all the “poets” are screaming leftists and have an aversion to rhyme and meter. I also agree with you that poetry needs to be written and not just spoken. Daniel Kemper July 19, 2024 As a culture, we are bombarded with visual communications which impacts the (lack of) development of our hearing, it’s true. This is one of the reasons people have gone ear-blind. They read visually, not auditorially (silently out loud as it were). We all have our preferred modes of input. Nothing against that. Visual does help. A lot. I remember, eons ago, attending an open mic at a place called, “The Paper Plant.” It sure smelled like one. But the unique thing there was that people read only short poems and they read them twice. A little preview, the first read, the briefest touch of comment, then the second read. It worked really well. But limits of time on opem mic’s is pretty savage these days. I come back to a core observation, though. If we developed networks of listeners, trainers and funders like classical music has done, these crutches would be less necessary. In that theme, I think we assume too much (and inadvertendly diminish ourselves and formal poetry) to think that capturing all the finer points of a poem performed in real time will come just like falling off a log. It comes with real practice, training, and repetitions. There really is music in the verse; it really is meaningful. It really does take practice to hear the music of multiple instruments simultaneously, as say, in a quartet. Poetry is at least four instruments–the music encased in the words (1), the words themselves (2), and the meaning(s) of both (3 &4). Musicians have the advantage of large, pre-established training networks that we as of yet, do not. Not for these particular skills. Often we can miss the satisfaction of enjoying each new thing that we catch upon each new listen. I can’t dig that dark pessimism. I want to start with what I do catch and work towards the light. I want to hear a good read, like I enjoy listening to Beethoven, savoring new discoveries each time, growing more familiar, more intimate. AFA imputed motives to attendees and participants, they vary wildly. Who knows? Who cares? Either the poetry’s good or it’s not. Some engage fairly heavily in “extra-poetic” activities, e.g. networking, express emotion, one might cite a guest of a couple weeks ago, Brandon Leak certainly counseled those are requirements for success as a poet. (He does Spoken Word, not a formal poet, but won America’s Got Talent with it a few years back.) Say what you will about his chosen art — non disputandum — it’s clear what’s needed for success, though these things are also accomplished without live performance. Or else what is all this junk about on everyone’s CV’s… Reply Margaret Coats July 16, 2024 I agree with you, Cynthia, and with Joseph, about poems as written art, meant to be read on the page. The villanelle, one form Daniel discusses here, provides a good example. The repeated lines are intended to carry thought forward by adding something new to the entire poem every time there is a repetition. It is not possible to fully hear the development as the poem is read through a single time; the repeated lines come off as mere refrains unless there is regular looking back to what they contribute. Reading groups are not necessarily for poets. I very occasionally attend one where members are there simply to show interest in poetry. All read, but most do not write what they read. The occasion is an opportunity to select a poem of special interest, new or old, and present it to others. Reply Cynthia Erlandson July 17, 2024 Thank you, Margaret. Reply Daniel Kemper July 22, 2024 Hey Margaret, regarding “It is not possible to fully hear the development as the poem is read through a single time;” I agree and think this is key. But as I touched on the Cynthia, I’d like to add context and perhaps change the implied action which results from the observation. Do we hear *enough* the first time seems to me to be the most important question; not necessarily do we hear *all.* Consider, say, one of Beethoven’s late quartets. The person with no training will hear one thing: a person with training, another. By training, I mean a period of dedicated instruction, practice, goal setting, and verification of correct apprehension. An untrained person, desiring to go no further might enjoy it at a level that makes it indistinguishable from Windam Hill stuff. The trained person, depending on natural ability and extent of training will capture more. But neither will capture all in a first hearing, right? The context shift is this: One of the pleasures of listening is the growth of learning, discovery, appreciation. If that is focused on, not what is missed in the first hearing, everything goes better. Training might be with the system of hearing, or with respect to a specific piece, or both. Do your practice sessions singing follow something like that–including verifying how useful it is to have a physical artifact to initially “get it” -? But afterwards, having reached a sufficient level, don’t myriad pleasures then follow? There are actually two things here with the poem, though. The performance of it and the reception of it. Both are skills that almost all of us presume we carry inherently. If the poem is read/recited with an overdramatic, William Shatner-like drama or if it is given the standard prose-sounding read (misnomered as natural), there’s no way we’ll catch the incredible nuance that meter and rhyme alone can bear. And it takes a lot of practice with breath control, inflection, pacing, etc. to find the magic point in between where the poem’s not read like a newspaper, nor a chant, nor a rant. It also takes practice to actually hear (and process the meaning of) that skilled reading. I’ll might anger you and probably will anger others, but it seems to me that academia has consistently betrayed the traditional poetry of which it is assumed to be the guardian. At every turn that a difficulty has arisen, the answer has never been to train more, practice more. How would you consider a person who read a Palestrina piece once, sung it into the mic immediately after, and considered that was all there was to it? How would you consider the people who heard that performance and figured similarly? Overwhelmingly, the answer has been to redefine the problem so that we can look good without doing anything. The answer has been to redefine poetry as an artifact/visual thing, violating thousands of years of tradition in the manner that free verse did/does. It’s been to say there’s no way to “get it” one time through and stop, when that’s the moment to drive forward with more vigor. It’s been to redefine perfect meter as meter that’s, well, in various ways, not perfect. I’ve heard a fair amount of hip-hop that’s almost perfectly accentual and a fair amount of iambic meter that’s 3/5 per line. If our differences are only by degree, and the degrees overlap that much… then we’re in real trouble …and is it any wonder that when the first true historical test for formal poetry came along, by which I mean free verse, that formal poetry collapsed, at least in terms of market share? Achievement or expertise can be thought of as a mountain. Not everyone wants to scale it above the tree line or all the way to the summit. Everyone must find the level(s) at which they’re comfortable journeying. But not to make it to the top on the first try, is way too much to expect. And we shouldn’t get discouraged by that. Reply Joseph S. Salemi July 22, 2024 So let me get this straight — you want formalist poets to recite their work at open-mic readings, and if the audience doesn’t appreciate it at first, we are to go back week after week and re-read the same pieces until the audience finally gets a sense of how good the stuff is. At the same time, we need to develop “networks of listeners, trainers, and funders” to facilitate this change. As for “market share,” the SCP is one of the most popular formal poetry sites in the Anglophone world. Or by “market share” do you mean something else? Daniel Kemper August 4, 2024 Joe, I didn’t see this until just now. Apologies for owing you a reply. It’s way not as bad as that. It’s how a very young child often needs a new food presented 8-10 times before they’ll accept and learn to like it. Still, what’s the converse? If they never have formal poetry presented to them, they’ll never accept it or learn it. I think the Ethiopian Eunuch’s words to Phillip. Various people will get it in various degrees. And that will change over time. It depends on choice of poem as well. Obviously, no one gets everything all at once. Faith! The poetry has a power like gravity, especially if the selection is savvy. Patience (and many times taking a deep breath) is required, of course. Networks develop organically over time. Opportunities present themselves, but yes, these audiences don’t form themselves. This is the work that free verse people have been willing to do but formal verse people have not. But looked at another way–they’ve built a network for us. All we have to do is be friendly and we can use it. Here’s the proper logic of market share. SCP has a large portion of the formal poetry market. True. But the formal poetry market remains disproportionately small compared to other-than-formal poetry. And won’t change if formal poets don’t do something different than we’ve done for the last 60 years or so. Again, here’s the cool thing: We need not develop our own parallel networks; the networks are already built. We just have to socialize. Again, everyone has their role. Not for everyone. My role, in this life season, I suppose, is cheerleader, so I cheer on everyone. Sort of. Hold a muddy and a clean glass of water up to someone. Eventually, they’ll choose the clean one. Reply Joseph S. Salemi August 4, 2024 Daniel, believe me — I have no objection to your desire to spread the word about the excellence of formal poetry, either by socializing or proselytizing or presenting the stuff to a wider audience. No objection at all. I don’t want formal poetry to be a gnostic mystery cult, available only to the initiated, even though this is often the case with artistic excellence. But when you talk about “market share,” you show a basic misunderstanding of what has happened. Yes, the SCP has a large portion of the formal poetry market — thousands come to read us every day, and Evan Mantyk is overwhelmed with submissions. Even our sworn enemies show up to read what is posted here. Your complaint is that this “market share” is nowhere near that of free-verse and other non-traditional websites or networks. But you haven’t asked yourself why such a disparity exists. It’s not because we in formal poetry prefer to concentrate on writing our best work at the expense of running open mics or starting relationships with free-verse types. It’s not because formal poetry is largely an acquired taste, and one that demands a great deal of reading and practice. These things are true, but they are not the real reason why there is more free verse around. It’s because free verse exists FOR A TOTALLY DIFFERENT PURPOSE than our purpose. Today free verse is practiced to make its practitioners feel good. It emphasizes emotion over rational thought, spontaneity over self-control, personal experience over discursive argument, simplicity over complexity, colloquial diction over verbal elegance, immediacy over remembrance, the contemporary situation over historical depictions. It is deliberately plain, rather than studiously hieratic. In short, it’s easy and satisfying. Naturally the great mass of any “market share” goes to free verse. That’s hardly an argument in its favor! The bigger “market share” always goes to Prosecco and not to Dom Perignon. The best comment on this subject was made by someone here who said that the typical free-verse poetry reading just had dozens of people who were desperately waiting for their chance at the open mic so that they could bare their soul, get applause, and feel ratified in their self-importance. And as Joshua Frank pointed out, the readings are all dominated by left-wing types with some kind of sick agenda, and who have a reflexive dislike for rhyme, meter, tropes and figures, or anything else that suggests an “elitist” or “Eurocentric” quality. These free-verse “networks” and open mics that you mention were deliberately set up in opposition to excellent formal poetry. They were designed to allow anyone and everyone to come up to the lectern and emote. Naturally vast numbers of the minimally talented showed up, and because of the compulsively democratic mindset of its organizers, no real distinction could be made between the works that were presented. “Market share” depends on demand. If you have a cheap product that the Wad likes and wants, that product will be more popular than a more expensive and finely made product that is appreciated by a select few. But in any case, if you are writing excellent poetry, you shouldn’t be thinking about “market share” at all. Reply Daniel Kemper August 7, 2024 I hope the following helps to illustrate my line of thinking better. One should not think of markets while writing poetry, but anyone who’s published has thought about it. And should, lest they go the way of Tucker, Netscape, Novell, WordPerfect, etc. Still, I admit, you have a good point from the “If you build it, they will come,” perspective. Quality is not type: Free verse v. Formal is type. Good v. bad is quality. But let’s stipulate that free verse is not as good as formal, while NOT stipulating that the best free verse is worse than the worst formal verse. There’s only an overlap. “Market share” and “Market size” should be kept as separate terms, which I, in an undisciplined way, did not do earlier. Market share of formal vs. free has no inherent limit. Nothing bars the ratios of the nineteenth century from returning. Market share of bad will always be larger than good, but how bad is bad and how good is good? These can change. Product improvement is inherent in capitalism, if no other interventions occur. Wines, coffee, cars of today are better than before. Not all Dom Perignon is great, especially back then: Contemporary Two Buck Chuck is often better. Likewise, Starbucks vs. ’70’s swill. And current Corolla vs a new Lexus 10 yrs. past. Bad vs. good, whenever defined comparatively means that the best of the best is necessarily small. The best free/formal verse are rare. What’s more relevant is that market size can be grown. Inherent relative value will mean that free verse will always have a degree of advantage, but it’s not absolute or determinative. Solutions are market size and share well known. Promote. Organize. Go to where the readers/listeners are. Same for anything. Networks are there; we just have to use them. Doesn’t matter what their intended uses were. DARPA net became Internet. Hard work still required for position and attention. That’s life. But each has a calling. Note one item: those who don’t promote could still search for people who do. Still, there’s a stubborn fact: Do what’s been done and get what we’ve got. Sure, there’s lots that no one wants to do~ “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” Reply Joseph S. Salemi August 7, 2024 I’m sorry, Daniel, but I simply cannot follow the logical thread of your prose. Reply Chris August 7, 2024 the irony Long ago someone didn’t like makeup on a woman. it obscured her natural beauty he said A garden of roses without aroma Each singularly perfect, long lasting, beautiful Incapable of offspring a single plant commercially propagated lacking the very thing necessary for the future odorless roses meterless poetry a mirror of our society oh for an English rose fleeting beauty not perfect yet continues without the help of man Find me if you can Reply Leave a Reply Cancel ReplyYour email address will not be published.CommentName* Email* Website Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. 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Daniel Kemper July 17, 2024 Howdy, howdy, Roy~ I wish. They were real. There are hundreds of species and thousands of cultivars with many intriguing or amusing names. The preference for sight over smell is a very strong one, seemingly abetted by the apparent extraordinary susceptibility to allergies of recent generations. As lacking in scent as the so-called villanelle was in meter. Note: It’s actually pretty challenging to hear the rhymes without the meter. Rhyme is really dependent on it. Reply
Margaret Coats July 16, 2024 Daniel, I understand about roses. In my own teaching of poetry, I had a full lesson only on the image of the rose–always illustrated by rose poems. It must be the richest of all images, and there was very much I did not cover. It is therefore rather intriguing to consider your visit to a rose garden without scent. All those varieties bred to appeal only to the sense of sight, with more to offer in their historic or poetic or symbolic names (which is mental rather than sensual appeal). Indeed something was lacking to the nature of those roses. And then villanelles without meter. As villanelles are written in lines that require rhyme, and rhyme depends on the final accented syllable of the line, there might be meter–unless the lines were free prose. This could happen among free verse writers unaware of meter and probably uncertain about rhyme. I am not entirely surprised, because villanelles are so popular as they are, precisely because they lack much of a tradition. The villanelle first became a form in the 19th century, modeled on only one particular poem from about 1600. Writers become enchanted by context-supplied meaning in a piece with multiple repetends. They focus on writing repetends that can give rise to numerous nuances of meaning. Writing workshops therefore like villanelles, as for a long time they liked sestinas. Sestinas were even more attractive for having no rhyme, though these did have a tradition going back into the Middle Ages, with many metrical examples. Again, though, the focus in workshops is choice of words so as to produce varied effects of meaning, not of sound. I think that’s probably how one can write in a form, and not use meter. Excess attention to variations of meaning, which are necessary and desirable, but little or no attention to the background music. Reply
Daniel Kemper July 17, 2024 Hi Margaret. When I read your opening, the richness of roses comes roaring back. It’s easy to get boiled by degree like the proverbial frog and lose sense of how much is in roses. That rather deepens my observations, pretty depressingly. My bet, not having attended the workshop at which these poems were taught, is that the length of the lines was gauged roughly by eye, perhaps even more roughly by ear. There’s a scene in “Harold and Maude,” where they cut to a handful of tombstones and begin panning back. And panning back. And panning back. The graveyard is beyond enormous. That panning back feeling is what I get every day realizing how widespread metrical illiteracy is. Reply
Julian D. Woodruff July 16, 2024 If we used any other terminology for it, a rose would look just as beautiful as it is. You have to shake your head when you realize that that statement is around the corner from, or down the block from, or across the tracks from a line of actual poetry (that invokes the sense of smell). Reply
Daniel Kemper July 18, 2024 I hate to be the bad guy and I feel like one now. It’s unpleasant to me to state the following, but it’s necessary to face unpleasant truths. Shakespeare is, in fact, wrong. The names of things do change human’s perceptions of those things, though the names do not change their realities. Shakespeare did not address the reality, but a human perception of it. The scientific literature in studies of perception is voluminous, as is the literature regarding sales and marketing. For one trivial example, a experiment famous in those circles asked participants to take a blind taste test of two colas in paper cups and rate which one was better. (It was Pepsi in both.) One cup had the letter “M” prominently displayed: the other, “Q.” The “M” cup was rated significantly better tasting by a significant portion of the testing population. [Theory is: “Q” is weird, and “M” is like “mmm.”] The experiment has been repeated many times. Just one example. There are many, many like it. How long would we still smell the sweetness roses if we only called them “thorn bait?” True, the chemical profile would remain unchanged, but how long would we smell it? When have you ever heard someone appreciate the lavender shades of kudzu flowers? Or even notice their grape-like scent? (More and better scent than many modern hybrid roses, too.) Shakespeare’s thought is beautiful, but it just isn’t true. Reply
Julian D. Woodruff July 19, 2024 Valid point, Daniel, and interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if S himself made it somewhere–but more likely in prose than in verse.
Maria August 7, 2024 I remember my English teacher, albeit a long time ago , saying that perhaps Shakespeare was being very tongue-in-cheek with the statement, ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ for after all in the context of Capulet and Montague the names matter very much indeed. Was Romeo saying something untrue, or at least trying to downplay the importance of names because of his love for Juliet? And in that case, Shakespeare’s own views on the matter are debatable.
Cynthia Erlandson July 16, 2024 I like the way you’ve explained “nose-blind” with roses, and “ear-blind” with what’s heard at a poetry reading. It’s a great comparison which, it seems to me, might possibly be even more effective written as a poem than an essay, with the garden of scent-less roses used as a metaphor for the meter-less poems. In any case, your essay reminded me that one reason I don’t attend many poetry readings is that for me, however good the poetry may be, I find I need to see it as well as hear it. I always wish people would hand out copies of the poems they’re going to read; without seeing them, I miss a lot of what is there. I’ll hear a line I really like, then try to “type” it into my brain, and miss what follows. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi July 16, 2024 Cynthia, I strongly agree with that. Poems are artifacts, so it is essential that they take the form of written text as well as auditory experiences. Part of the problem with modern poetry is the ass-backwards assumption that its main job is to be spoken aloud and heard. While that assumption may have been true in preliterate times, it isn’t true in a developed culture with a long literary tradition behind it, with countless canonical works that need to be read and studied on the page. As a culture grows older and more complex, as vocabularies expand, as memories deepen, the poetry of that culture will become heavy with allusion, nuance, and intricacy. It becomes essential to see the poem in print to grasp it and appreciate it fully. I also avoid poetry readings. It seems that they have just become ways to network, make friends, express emotion, and perhaps gain some kind of local status. Reply
Cynthia Erlandson July 16, 2024 Thank you, Joseph. I’ve wondered if others feel the same way about that.
Joshua C. Frank July 19, 2024 I, too, avoid poetry readings for the same reason… plus, I’ve tried them before, and even in the red states, all the “poets” are screaming leftists and have an aversion to rhyme and meter. I also agree with you that poetry needs to be written and not just spoken.
Daniel Kemper July 19, 2024 As a culture, we are bombarded with visual communications which impacts the (lack of) development of our hearing, it’s true. This is one of the reasons people have gone ear-blind. They read visually, not auditorially (silently out loud as it were). We all have our preferred modes of input. Nothing against that. Visual does help. A lot. I remember, eons ago, attending an open mic at a place called, “The Paper Plant.” It sure smelled like one. But the unique thing there was that people read only short poems and they read them twice. A little preview, the first read, the briefest touch of comment, then the second read. It worked really well. But limits of time on opem mic’s is pretty savage these days. I come back to a core observation, though. If we developed networks of listeners, trainers and funders like classical music has done, these crutches would be less necessary. In that theme, I think we assume too much (and inadvertendly diminish ourselves and formal poetry) to think that capturing all the finer points of a poem performed in real time will come just like falling off a log. It comes with real practice, training, and repetitions. There really is music in the verse; it really is meaningful. It really does take practice to hear the music of multiple instruments simultaneously, as say, in a quartet. Poetry is at least four instruments–the music encased in the words (1), the words themselves (2), and the meaning(s) of both (3 &4). Musicians have the advantage of large, pre-established training networks that we as of yet, do not. Not for these particular skills. Often we can miss the satisfaction of enjoying each new thing that we catch upon each new listen. I can’t dig that dark pessimism. I want to start with what I do catch and work towards the light. I want to hear a good read, like I enjoy listening to Beethoven, savoring new discoveries each time, growing more familiar, more intimate. AFA imputed motives to attendees and participants, they vary wildly. Who knows? Who cares? Either the poetry’s good or it’s not. Some engage fairly heavily in “extra-poetic” activities, e.g. networking, express emotion, one might cite a guest of a couple weeks ago, Brandon Leak certainly counseled those are requirements for success as a poet. (He does Spoken Word, not a formal poet, but won America’s Got Talent with it a few years back.) Say what you will about his chosen art — non disputandum — it’s clear what’s needed for success, though these things are also accomplished without live performance. Or else what is all this junk about on everyone’s CV’s… Reply
Margaret Coats July 16, 2024 I agree with you, Cynthia, and with Joseph, about poems as written art, meant to be read on the page. The villanelle, one form Daniel discusses here, provides a good example. The repeated lines are intended to carry thought forward by adding something new to the entire poem every time there is a repetition. It is not possible to fully hear the development as the poem is read through a single time; the repeated lines come off as mere refrains unless there is regular looking back to what they contribute. Reading groups are not necessarily for poets. I very occasionally attend one where members are there simply to show interest in poetry. All read, but most do not write what they read. The occasion is an opportunity to select a poem of special interest, new or old, and present it to others. Reply
Daniel Kemper July 22, 2024 Hey Margaret, regarding “It is not possible to fully hear the development as the poem is read through a single time;” I agree and think this is key. But as I touched on the Cynthia, I’d like to add context and perhaps change the implied action which results from the observation. Do we hear *enough* the first time seems to me to be the most important question; not necessarily do we hear *all.* Consider, say, one of Beethoven’s late quartets. The person with no training will hear one thing: a person with training, another. By training, I mean a period of dedicated instruction, practice, goal setting, and verification of correct apprehension. An untrained person, desiring to go no further might enjoy it at a level that makes it indistinguishable from Windam Hill stuff. The trained person, depending on natural ability and extent of training will capture more. But neither will capture all in a first hearing, right? The context shift is this: One of the pleasures of listening is the growth of learning, discovery, appreciation. If that is focused on, not what is missed in the first hearing, everything goes better. Training might be with the system of hearing, or with respect to a specific piece, or both. Do your practice sessions singing follow something like that–including verifying how useful it is to have a physical artifact to initially “get it” -? But afterwards, having reached a sufficient level, don’t myriad pleasures then follow? There are actually two things here with the poem, though. The performance of it and the reception of it. Both are skills that almost all of us presume we carry inherently. If the poem is read/recited with an overdramatic, William Shatner-like drama or if it is given the standard prose-sounding read (misnomered as natural), there’s no way we’ll catch the incredible nuance that meter and rhyme alone can bear. And it takes a lot of practice with breath control, inflection, pacing, etc. to find the magic point in between where the poem’s not read like a newspaper, nor a chant, nor a rant. It also takes practice to actually hear (and process the meaning of) that skilled reading. I’ll might anger you and probably will anger others, but it seems to me that academia has consistently betrayed the traditional poetry of which it is assumed to be the guardian. At every turn that a difficulty has arisen, the answer has never been to train more, practice more. How would you consider a person who read a Palestrina piece once, sung it into the mic immediately after, and considered that was all there was to it? How would you consider the people who heard that performance and figured similarly? Overwhelmingly, the answer has been to redefine the problem so that we can look good without doing anything. The answer has been to redefine poetry as an artifact/visual thing, violating thousands of years of tradition in the manner that free verse did/does. It’s been to say there’s no way to “get it” one time through and stop, when that’s the moment to drive forward with more vigor. It’s been to redefine perfect meter as meter that’s, well, in various ways, not perfect. I’ve heard a fair amount of hip-hop that’s almost perfectly accentual and a fair amount of iambic meter that’s 3/5 per line. If our differences are only by degree, and the degrees overlap that much… then we’re in real trouble …and is it any wonder that when the first true historical test for formal poetry came along, by which I mean free verse, that formal poetry collapsed, at least in terms of market share? Achievement or expertise can be thought of as a mountain. Not everyone wants to scale it above the tree line or all the way to the summit. Everyone must find the level(s) at which they’re comfortable journeying. But not to make it to the top on the first try, is way too much to expect. And we shouldn’t get discouraged by that. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi July 22, 2024 So let me get this straight — you want formalist poets to recite their work at open-mic readings, and if the audience doesn’t appreciate it at first, we are to go back week after week and re-read the same pieces until the audience finally gets a sense of how good the stuff is. At the same time, we need to develop “networks of listeners, trainers, and funders” to facilitate this change. As for “market share,” the SCP is one of the most popular formal poetry sites in the Anglophone world. Or by “market share” do you mean something else?
Daniel Kemper August 4, 2024 Joe, I didn’t see this until just now. Apologies for owing you a reply. It’s way not as bad as that. It’s how a very young child often needs a new food presented 8-10 times before they’ll accept and learn to like it. Still, what’s the converse? If they never have formal poetry presented to them, they’ll never accept it or learn it. I think the Ethiopian Eunuch’s words to Phillip. Various people will get it in various degrees. And that will change over time. It depends on choice of poem as well. Obviously, no one gets everything all at once. Faith! The poetry has a power like gravity, especially if the selection is savvy. Patience (and many times taking a deep breath) is required, of course. Networks develop organically over time. Opportunities present themselves, but yes, these audiences don’t form themselves. This is the work that free verse people have been willing to do but formal verse people have not. But looked at another way–they’ve built a network for us. All we have to do is be friendly and we can use it. Here’s the proper logic of market share. SCP has a large portion of the formal poetry market. True. But the formal poetry market remains disproportionately small compared to other-than-formal poetry. And won’t change if formal poets don’t do something different than we’ve done for the last 60 years or so. Again, here’s the cool thing: We need not develop our own parallel networks; the networks are already built. We just have to socialize. Again, everyone has their role. Not for everyone. My role, in this life season, I suppose, is cheerleader, so I cheer on everyone. Sort of. Hold a muddy and a clean glass of water up to someone. Eventually, they’ll choose the clean one. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi August 4, 2024 Daniel, believe me — I have no objection to your desire to spread the word about the excellence of formal poetry, either by socializing or proselytizing or presenting the stuff to a wider audience. No objection at all. I don’t want formal poetry to be a gnostic mystery cult, available only to the initiated, even though this is often the case with artistic excellence. But when you talk about “market share,” you show a basic misunderstanding of what has happened. Yes, the SCP has a large portion of the formal poetry market — thousands come to read us every day, and Evan Mantyk is overwhelmed with submissions. Even our sworn enemies show up to read what is posted here. Your complaint is that this “market share” is nowhere near that of free-verse and other non-traditional websites or networks. But you haven’t asked yourself why such a disparity exists. It’s not because we in formal poetry prefer to concentrate on writing our best work at the expense of running open mics or starting relationships with free-verse types. It’s not because formal poetry is largely an acquired taste, and one that demands a great deal of reading and practice. These things are true, but they are not the real reason why there is more free verse around. It’s because free verse exists FOR A TOTALLY DIFFERENT PURPOSE than our purpose. Today free verse is practiced to make its practitioners feel good. It emphasizes emotion over rational thought, spontaneity over self-control, personal experience over discursive argument, simplicity over complexity, colloquial diction over verbal elegance, immediacy over remembrance, the contemporary situation over historical depictions. It is deliberately plain, rather than studiously hieratic. In short, it’s easy and satisfying. Naturally the great mass of any “market share” goes to free verse. That’s hardly an argument in its favor! The bigger “market share” always goes to Prosecco and not to Dom Perignon. The best comment on this subject was made by someone here who said that the typical free-verse poetry reading just had dozens of people who were desperately waiting for their chance at the open mic so that they could bare their soul, get applause, and feel ratified in their self-importance. And as Joshua Frank pointed out, the readings are all dominated by left-wing types with some kind of sick agenda, and who have a reflexive dislike for rhyme, meter, tropes and figures, or anything else that suggests an “elitist” or “Eurocentric” quality. These free-verse “networks” and open mics that you mention were deliberately set up in opposition to excellent formal poetry. They were designed to allow anyone and everyone to come up to the lectern and emote. Naturally vast numbers of the minimally talented showed up, and because of the compulsively democratic mindset of its organizers, no real distinction could be made between the works that were presented. “Market share” depends on demand. If you have a cheap product that the Wad likes and wants, that product will be more popular than a more expensive and finely made product that is appreciated by a select few. But in any case, if you are writing excellent poetry, you shouldn’t be thinking about “market share” at all. Reply
Daniel Kemper August 7, 2024 I hope the following helps to illustrate my line of thinking better. One should not think of markets while writing poetry, but anyone who’s published has thought about it. And should, lest they go the way of Tucker, Netscape, Novell, WordPerfect, etc. Still, I admit, you have a good point from the “If you build it, they will come,” perspective. Quality is not type: Free verse v. Formal is type. Good v. bad is quality. But let’s stipulate that free verse is not as good as formal, while NOT stipulating that the best free verse is worse than the worst formal verse. There’s only an overlap. “Market share” and “Market size” should be kept as separate terms, which I, in an undisciplined way, did not do earlier. Market share of formal vs. free has no inherent limit. Nothing bars the ratios of the nineteenth century from returning. Market share of bad will always be larger than good, but how bad is bad and how good is good? These can change. Product improvement is inherent in capitalism, if no other interventions occur. Wines, coffee, cars of today are better than before. Not all Dom Perignon is great, especially back then: Contemporary Two Buck Chuck is often better. Likewise, Starbucks vs. ’70’s swill. And current Corolla vs a new Lexus 10 yrs. past. Bad vs. good, whenever defined comparatively means that the best of the best is necessarily small. The best free/formal verse are rare. What’s more relevant is that market size can be grown. Inherent relative value will mean that free verse will always have a degree of advantage, but it’s not absolute or determinative. Solutions are market size and share well known. Promote. Organize. Go to where the readers/listeners are. Same for anything. Networks are there; we just have to use them. Doesn’t matter what their intended uses were. DARPA net became Internet. Hard work still required for position and attention. That’s life. But each has a calling. Note one item: those who don’t promote could still search for people who do. Still, there’s a stubborn fact: Do what’s been done and get what we’ve got. Sure, there’s lots that no one wants to do~ “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” Reply
Joseph S. Salemi August 7, 2024 I’m sorry, Daniel, but I simply cannot follow the logical thread of your prose. Reply
Chris August 7, 2024 the irony Long ago someone didn’t like makeup on a woman. it obscured her natural beauty he said A garden of roses without aroma Each singularly perfect, long lasting, beautiful Incapable of offspring a single plant commercially propagated lacking the very thing necessary for the future odorless roses meterless poetry a mirror of our society oh for an English rose fleeting beauty not perfect yet continues without the help of man Find me if you can Reply