Re:Pulse – on pulse and Richard Andrews’ A Prosody of Free Verse: Explorations in Rhythm (New York, Oxford: Routledge, 2017). More about the author here: Richard Andrews
Re-pulse. I’ve not thought a lot formally about rhythm since writing ‘Pulse’. (This is a ‘treatise on metre’, or rather, on rhythm, and I write about it here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/04/robert-sheppard-pulse-all-rhythm.htmland an excerpt appears in Tentacular here: https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-5a/robert-sheppard) (I am hoping that someone will publish the whole of ‘Pulse’ at some point.)
Richard Andrews’ A Prosody of Free Verse brought
me back to the subject, but didn’t convince me that I was wrong. It didn’t
convince me that he was wrong, either, though I wasn’t convinced by his attempts
to draw in several other ‘rhythmic’ disciplines, though he does consider ‘groove’
by the end (but not in the way Tiger Roholt managed it; my ‘Pulse’ is a
writing-through of Roholt’s book Groove, an odd method, I know). The more specific he becomes,
the less useful it seems. He elaborates elaborate schema for parsing rhythmic
contours, and then suggests there’s little point in extensively using them. (He
often gestures to areas of ‘further study’, indeed, there's a later book.) He seems to be describing a kind of
well-behaved free verse very different from my own (or Lee Harwood’s, or Roy Fisher’s,
or Maurice Scully’s, etc.).
To fill
it an allograph
Of utter
utterance
Caught
through the aperture
Of
belonging longing
To think
a moon
Pressing
close to kiss the earth
Rhythm, as in free verse, is additive, he tells
us, which is fundamental to his thesis.
… event-sized
shapes, both men in front,
loose
ties around hot necks, the next clouds’
black
rims fringed with greying and blueing,
she slows
to light her cigarette, laconic,
steps to
a kerb, leather bag over her
shoulder,
it slaps her thigh, reminds her,
somewhere
inside this body I’m happy, yes, she
walks
across the ceiling with her red hair …
‘The opening line or lines of a
free verse poem can set the template via which subsequent lines position
themselves, both aurally and/or visually … one line provides the ground for the
next, one strophe for the next, and so on…’ (a ‘so on’ that can include the
super-cadences (my term, made up on the spot) of whole books, Pound, Whitman…) –
‘with the reverse operation that subsequent lines reflect back on the opening
lines or strophes’. (68) Another good thing about this attempt is its
refusal of traditional metrics to account for any of the rhythmic effects of
what really happens in a free verse poem.
walks
across the ceiling with her red hair,
negotiating
reefs of felt under window clouds,
climbs
the ringed bark
into a
sky of river,
cools her
wrinkled feet
Andrews writes of ‘pulse’ slightly differently from me: ‘Pulses are crucial in that they provide periodic markers; they establish anticipation and predictability’. (68) I’ve used Abrahams’ phenomenological readings of ‘anticipatory’ consciousness a little like this. (See page 3 of the online excerpt: https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-5a/robert-sheppard) Pulse ‘has a foundational and often unheard or invisible function in free verse’. (69) Pulses ‘are not the same as beats’. (68) (I need to consider this distinction more. Andrews uses the plural often.)
There’s
no end to it line-
Break its
little one
The dead
their own deity it’s
Best to
offer tactile thanks
Twitching under
Fingerprinting pulse
‘Turns’, what I call (above) ‘line-/Break(s)’, ‘are more
literal than in formal, metrical, verse. (104). They are ‘part of the form’
(104), ‘the turn is more significant because the articulation required is multifunctional.
It joins two rhythmic phrases together (they are ‘articulated’) and also signals
a shift that is, at the same time, rhythmic and syntactic’. (104)
– To
think with particular and
Articular
interruptions
Never to
unthink skinned-in
Ecstasies
in the poem that
Sees the
world as well
As itself
I find his use of ‘turns’
suggestive, but we mustn’t think of this too closely as actual ‘turns’
(whether we relate it to dance, as Andrews does, or not).
To think
through
The tune
of the thing
Andrews’ use of Lanham’s ‘economics of attention’ – ‘it
takes more attention to respond to free verse because the rhythmic framework is
not “given”’ – is also suggestive (the telling adjective of my response). ‘If’ –
note! – ‘the additive model is accepted … the reader or listener has to hold
each line in isolation to those that follow and precede it’ etc (184). Thus the
attention has to be greater, ‘getting to the heart of the creative
compositional process’. (185)
To shiver
with joy drive
Pattern
against violence
The theory is ‘multimodal’, and the future is ‘to
recognize how gesture, movement, choreography, music, sound and other modes are
embodied in the ostensibly two-dimensional nature of the poem on the printed
page … to show not only how the various modes (and their rhythmic impulses) inform the words on the
page but how the words on the page evoke those very same modal dimensions.’
(186) Andrews looks as if he’s about to launch into speculations about
hypertext but he brings it back to the page (or simple screen). (These final
pages will bear some re-reading.)
Spectral
email template
Pre-addressed
to the dead one
One final plea: ‘A new prosody or multimodal notational system for rhythm can open up possibilities for poets, enabling them to see connections and affordances of which they were previously unaware.’ (192) It seems to me we should imagine such a system, assume the possibilities, and create connections and affordances that then may be seen – but possibly not measured. (I never use the term ‘free verse’ unless I can help it; ‘non-metrical’ verse at a pinch; ‘poem’ ordinarily of verse and (much) prose.)
Prosody as part of a poetics of anticipation (as we anticipate the next pulsation of sound and meaning). (Which is a summary of my Pulse, as well as of much of Andrews' work.)
A couple of times (I’ve lost the page references) Andrews writes of free verse ‘taking form’, which sounds like a gesture towards Derek Attridge’s sense of the literary (although Attridge only appears here as a prosodist). (I’m thinking of what I’ve written here https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/05/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-and.htmlAnd what I have long ago amassed here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-forms.html). Form as a gestural thing, as an active mode of forming in both the acts-events of writing and of reading. And pulse or rhythm is part of that.
NB The excerpts from my poems which interposed themselves as I typed up my response to Andrews from my poetics journal come from ‘Six Poems Against Death’ in Berlin Bursts (and ‘Five Poems Against Death’ in History or Sleep: Selected Poems) See here for both books (and others) : https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934