I’m having a little trouble understand James Longenbach’s scanning of Pound’s metro poem.
The apparition of these faces in the
crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
He scans it as this:
The apparITion of these FACes in the
CROWD;
The only way this makes any sense me is by voicing the ‘the’ attached to ‘apparition’ as ‘thuh’.
Isn’t the rule that ‘the’ before a word whose first letter is a vowel should be voiced as ‘thee’??
If I read it as I was taught I should say the word I get this scan:
The apPArition OF these faCES in the
CROWD
Reading it stressed four times seems to me to be more natural and much easier to catch the meaning of the words.
Now, I understand that the stress for the word ‘apparition’ in the dictionary is on its third syllable, but English is a stress timed language so what you’ve said will effect how your pronounce after, and I get Longenbach’s point about particles not being stressed unless something directs you to do so, but didn’t Ezra Pound argue that you should “make it new?”
So did he make it new by stressing a particle or did he do it by mispronouncing “the”?
When you read this line with four stresses the following image of a “wet, black bough” pops out.
This article popped into my Facebook feed and for some reason and I clicked on it and was completely amazed by it. I have never seen such a long and endless bit of mental masturbation in print before. I must admit, I do admire Mark Richardson’s stamina.
I should have realized that this review was going to be a piece of self glorifying fantasy by the opening paragraph where the reviewer tells us what kind of poetry he is conversant with. How does this show this review will be a fantasy you ask? Well, anyone who has been around mainstream free verse haiku knows that it is, and has been historically, anti-poetry to the core. That it isn’t “western poetry” is exactly why the people who write it get interested in it. The idea that this book of haiku by Robert Maclean is something on the par with the famous poets that get mentioned is nothing but one serious wet dream.
It’s obvious by the way he writes that Richardson is pleasantly involved in mental onanism. Such pondering as “I don’t doubt that poetry gets in”….“But I can’t be certain”….”Perhaps I’m sensing, or fabricating, a temporal problem”…..I’ll take a flier and guess that we are to hear these lines in two ways:”…..”What can this mean?”….”Is there a slight imprecision here?”…etc. are from a writer who is self flagellating himself to bring himself to a climax about things.
I don’t ever believe I’ve seen a literary review that had so many self asked questions in it. You would think a writer who finds himself with so many questions about what they are reading would eventually stop and realize that what they are reading is vague to the point of having no meaning. But, of course, if you enjoy beating off your brain and you have the time, why would you ever stop?
Richardson states that “I enjoy poems that argue or imply arguments,” by which he means, I’d guess, that he likes poems that make him think, but in this essay he is confusing writing that is expressive, thus moving him to contemplation, with writing that is so vague that he has to think about what it says because it actually expresses next to nothing. Yes, thinking over things is great fun, but there is a difference between thinking that emotionally moves you onto deeper truths and thinking that titillates you.
Titillation is exactly what mainstream free verse haiku is all about. The writer whores his words into stunted language, making it a kind of word porn that the reader takes to plug in their own experiences or personality into. Be honest about it, isn’t that whole point of actual pornography??
Every top off comes with a big ending, and here, well it takes quite awhile to get there. It starts when he compares Maclean’s “harmonic crickets” with John Dryden writing about the heavenly harmony that created the universe where he goes off on playing harmonics on a guitar, which are three complete different things that only make sense in Richardson’s brain.
I’m sorry, but you can’t say Maclean isn’t “a pessimist or a cynic” when he actually doesn’t give you any tone of language to judge it. That’s how we express things. Finally, (but impressively in length I’ll add) after making some reference to a famous pop album, quoting William James about religion in a extremely long paragraph and waxing how “healthy-mindfulness” this book is it’s time to pass the tissues.
Sorry, but I’m not convinced that always writing thoughts through stunted language is a sign of a healthy mind that communes evil to its place in the world. And you can’t argue that Maclean is just copying the sparse language of the Japanese because the Japanese understand their sparse language in a much deeper way than we understand sparse language in ours.
To be fair with Mark Richardson, he did write that he’s “new to the game” (of haiku) and that he’ll “ask questions and cover ground not strictly necessary to a book review,” but he certainly fell into the revery of getting himself whipped into a frenzy over a love (poetry) who clearly isn’t here.
Why else would he end the essay with the statement “Whatever gets you through the night is all right.”?? It seems you’d have to spend many a sweaty lonely night to get any poetry out of this book and that unconsciously he is admitting it.
The Haiku Experiment 