Meeting February 9, 2008

WWWC
Meeting February 9, 2008
Although only sparsely attended the meeting was pretty good. We continue to look for another location and Emerson will attend the the libraries' BOD meeting to see if with the help of board member David Carlson we can gain entry into a suitable library room for our meetings. Our options at Cheney Hall seem limited and it is fading as an option.
We will make firm plans for the annual dining event at the March meeting. The dining event will be our April 12 meeting.

I've included some fairly long documents about Dryden and Pope since our conversation about couplets included references to them and also because they were prolific and profound political writers and civic in much the same sense as Robert Pinsky is today as is discussed in the article about him below.

Vaya con Dios,
Emerson

Minutes of Last Meeting

CPS Items
Check the website for further information and guidelines
http://ct-poetry-society.org


Guidelines and Contests
The Connecticut Poetry Society sponsors these poetry contests:
CONNECTICUT RIVER REVIEW POETRY CONTEST
Open to all poets. NEW GUIDELINES AND PRIZE AMOUNTS
Submit poems: Dec. 1-March 1 (postmark)
Prizes of $400, $200, and $100.
Send up to 3 unpublished poems, any form, 80 line limit each. Include two copies of each poem: one with complete contact info and one with NO contact info. Both copies should be marked CRR Contest. Include SASE for results only (no poems will be returned). Winning poems must be submitted by disc or electronically following notification. Send fee of $15 for up to three poems; make check out to Connecticut Poetry Society. Prize winning poems will be published in Connecticut River Review.
Send submissions to CT River Review Poetry Contest, CPS, PO Box 270554, West Hartford, CT 06127.
This year's CRR contest judge: Kim Bridgford is a professor of English at Fairfield University and editor of Dogwood and Mezzo Cammin. Her books include Undone, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Instead of Maps, nominated for the Poets’ Prize; and In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records, winner of the Donald Justice Prize. She is currently working on a three-book poetry/photography project with visual artist Jo Yarrington
LYNN DECARO POETRY CONTEST
Open to Connecticut high school students only
March 15th 2008 Deadline
Prizes of $75, $50, and $25.
This contest was established to honor Lynn DeCaro, a promising young CPS member who died of leukemia in 1986. Send up to 3 unpublished poems, any form, 40 line limit each. Include two copies of each poem: one with complete contact info and one with NO contact info. Both copies should be marked DeCaro Contest. Include SASE, a stamped, self-addressed, stamped envelope, for results only (no poems will be returned). Winning poems must be submitted by disc or electronically following notification. There is no entry fee for this contest. Prize winning poems will be published in Long River Review II.
Send submissions to Lynn DeCaro Poetry Contest, CPS, PO Box 270554, West Hartford, CT 06127.
DEHN POETRY COMPETITION
Open to college undergraduates.
Submit poems: Dec. 1-March 15 (postmark)
Prizes of $150, $100, and $50.
This contest is to honor the memory of Adolf and Virginia Dehn, visual artists who supported creativity and excellence in all art forms. Send up to 3 unpublished poems, any form, 40 line limit each. Include two copies of each poem: one with complete contact info, including college or university affiliation, and one with NO contact info. Both copies should be marked Dehn Competition. Include SASE, a stamped, self-addressed, stamped envelope, for results only (no poems will be returned). Winning poems must be submitted by disc or electronically following notification. Include the entry of fee of $10; checks should be made out to Connecticut Poetry Society. Prize winning poems will be published in Long River Review II.
Send submissions to Dehn Poetry Competition, CPS, PO Box 270554, West Hartford, CT 06127.


Treasurer's Report

WWWC Issues
Relocation
Cheney Hall director will offer us space but we need Charlie to open and close for us.
I will be attending the board meeting for the libraries to see if they will waive insurance and other requirements. David Carlson, a member of the board and former member of WWWC, will speak on our behalf and has said if we do not get satisfaction he may be willing to take it directly to the mayor.

I suggest we await the outcome of this.

Poetry dining
Will be in April. Should we consider inviting Ed as our guest, honor him in some way?



News
Robert Pinsky
This article features Robert Pinsky as a civic poet. As we will see from our consideration of John Dryden and Alexander Pope below, poetry is often used for social commentary. The most recent example I can recall of this is Baron Wormser's Carthage which is a savage commentary on the Bush administration and which Baron self-published for fear standard publishers would not take it for fear of its topicalism. Not so for Dryden and Pope (and Swift and others) in days when not only was poetry useful for social commentary and satire but it was also much more popular to the general public than it is today. So, that in mind, our news today is about Robert Pinsky whose reviewer on Feb 3 in the NY Times considers a very public poet.

Pinsky reading anecdote here.
The Night Game
Robert Pinsky

Some of us believe
We would have conceived romantic
Love out of our own passions
With no precedents,
Without songs and poetry--
Or have invented poetry and music
As a comb of cells for the honey.

Shaped by ignorance,
A succession of new worlds,
Congruities improvised by
Immigrants or children.

I once thought most people were Italian,
Jewish or Colored.
To be white and called
Something like Ed Ford
Seemed aristocratic,
A rare distinction.

Possibly I believed only gentiles
And blonds could be left-handed.

Already famous
After one year in the majors,
Whitey Ford was drafted by the Army
To play ball in the flannels
Of the Signal Corps, stationed
In Long Branch, New Jersey.

A night game, the silver potion
Of the lights, his pink skin
Shining like a burn.

Never a player
I liked or hated: a Yankee,
A mere success.

But white the chalked-off lines
In the grass, white and green
The immaculate uniform,
And white the unpigmented
Halo of his hair
When he shifted his cap:

So ordinary and distinct,
So close up, that I felt
As if I could have made him up,
Imagined him as I imagined

The ball, a scintilla
High in the black backdrop
Of the sky. Tight red stitches.
Rawlings. The bleached

Horsehide white: the color
Of nothing. Color of the past
And of the future, of the movie screen
At rest and of blank paper.

"I could have." The mind. The black
Backdrop, the white
Fly picked out by the towering
Lights. A few years later

On a blanket in the grass
By the same river
A girl and I came into
Being together
To the faint muttering
Of unthinkable
Troubadours and radios.

The emerald
Theater, the night.
Another time,
I devised a left-hander
Even more gifted
Than Whitey Ford: A Dodger.
People were amazed by him.
Once, when he was young,
He refused to pitch on Yom Kippur.


________________________________________
February 3, 2008
The Civic Poet
By JOEL BROUWER
Skip to next paragraph
GULF MUSIC
By Robert Pinsky.
83 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.

Robert Pinsky has been writing outstanding poems for more than 30 years - "Gulf Music" is his seventh collection - but you're more likely to know him for his poetry advocacy than for his own examples of the art. Given Pinsky's public profile, this is more than understandable; he has served as a highly visible poet laureate of the United States for an unprecedented three terms, founded the acclaimed Favorite Poem Project (and edited or co-edited several resulting anthologies, including "Americans' Favorite Poems" and "An Invitation to Poetry"), fashioned an eloquent translation of Dante's "Inferno," written a regular "Poet's Choice" column for The Washington Post, moderated a "Meta-Free-Phor-All" on "The Colbert Report" and read one of his poems during a cameo appearance on "The Simpsons." (No token haiku, either! A real live longish poem!) No other living American poet - no other living American, probably - has done so much to put poetry before the public eye.
Pinsky's recent essays - particularly those in his succinct and sparkling "Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry" - make clear his passion for promoting poetry's relevance, so perhaps he wouldn't be too troubled by the notion that his mass media presence has drawn more attention than his poems ever will. If that's the case, then I'll here volunteer to be troubled on his behalf, since it seems to me that in "Gulf Music" Pinsky offers us his most valuable contribution yet: not just an argument for but a demonstration of contemporary poetry's necessity and vitality in our democracy.
"Deciding to remember, and what to remember," Pinsky has written, "is how we decide who we are." Poetry's role in that process is simultaneously to preserve our common American memory and honor our diversity, to make music in the gulf between unum and pluribus. This is an intractable instance of the one-many problem if ever there was one, but Pinsky seeks from the first to address it in his new collection's opening "Poem of Disconnected Parts."
At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto Each one Teach one.
In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as "Profesor."
Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I
Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.
Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination
That calls the boiled sheep heads in the market "Smileys."
With its clear language and sturdy blank verse, the poem offers images of state violence past and present, intimate moments of self-analysis, allusions to Homer's "Odyssey," ambiguous references to the poet's own family history that no reader unfamiliar with his earlier books would understand, philosophical conjectures, even the thoughts of a traditional Zulu healer: "The Sangomo says in our Zulu culture we do not / Worship our ancestors: we consult them."
Given this range of seemingly unrelated subjects, it's as if Pinsky wants his poem, too, to be consulted for possibilities rather than worshiped for convictions. Each of the poem's 26 couplets is self-contained and set alongside its companions without any syntactical connective tissue, so it's impossible to read the work as a rhetorical argument demanding either assent or dissent. Instead, the poem throws us back on ourselves, requiring us to imagine how we might connect the Afghan writer Abdul Rahim Dost's imprisonment at Guantánamo, Pinsky's grandmother Becky, presidential malapropisms and Odysseus pouring out blood for thirsty shades in Hades. It is a singular poem that contains multitudes.
The second of the three sections in "Gulf Music" makes a radical shift in frame of reference, from sweeping historical and global topics to an inventory of everyday objects. Still, the poems maintain a metaphorical connection with Pinsky's overarching goal of melding the public and private without diluting either of them. "Thing," the section's first poem, gives an etymology of the word that shows its evolution from the "Old English thyngian, to parley, to assemble, to confer, to reach terms" to "the nearly opposite sense of a concrete object, a physical or bodily thing." The poems that follow seek to reverse that transformation by taking a series of apparently static objects - a book, a glass, a jar of pens and so forth - and imaginatively reanimating them as discussions in motion. In "Banknote," consideration of an inert scrap of paper leads to a vision of a vast and frantic system of commerce "turning the gear of custom"; in "Pliers," a simple tool designed to exert control evokes "this despair I feel / When I feel / I've lost my grip, can't manage a thing." Pinsky wants us to think of the things of this world - and, crucially, the words we assign them - as strange and changeable. We may have thought there was no simpler thing than a glass of water, but if we are directed to think of it as "Earth changed by fire, / Shaped by breath or pressure," or as "Time's / Viscid pawprint," suddenly it and everything else around us seems alive and unpredictable, and we feel a fresh imperative to negotiate anew our relationships with all we've thought of as certain.
Pinsky's efforts in word and deed to reassert poetry's civic role have throughout been accompanied by another project of reclamation: his insistence, in his prose book "The Sounds of Poetry" and elsewhere, that poetry is made not only of ideas generated by the mind, but of sounds made in the body. The two projects may seem distinct, but they are not, since minds differ, but bodies are alike. However much the presidential hopefuls at their lecterns may wish to distinguish their ideas from those of their rivals, they all breathe with the same in-and-out rhythm and voice their conflicting arguments through essentially identical esophageal machinery. Furthermore, poetry's sonic elements have traditionally served a mnemonic function, helping the culture to preserve its poetic heritage in common memory. (It is of course patently reactionary to ignore the possibilities of free verse, but it's undeniable that it's a heck of a lot easier to memorize Dickinson than Whitman.) To contend that poetry originates not only in ideas, books and traditions - all fine things, but indisputably all systems of differentiation rather than inclusion - but also in our indistinguishable mouths and lungs, is a fundamentally egalitarian act.
Throughout "Gulf Music," Pinsky strikes a balance between free verse's individualism and the communalism implied by regular sound patterns. "Work Song," an hommage to Yeats's famous poem "The Fascination of What's Difficult," begins:
Fascination that dries the sap out of Yeats's veins
And rends spontaneous joy out of his heart - with art,
Art not "dolts" or "management of men" the difficulty
Craved and admired more than pleasure, more
Than accomplishment certainly more than Eden.
Heroic fascination of an overwhelming difficulty:
Joan of Arc tortured to death by clergymen
And failure incidental as for Jackie Robinson engaging
At one and the same time two worthy difficulties.
A sharper prosodist than I will doubtless point out something I've missed, but it seems to me that there are no predictable sonic or metrical patterns at work in these lines. And yet there are any number of musical echoes that lend the passage a feel of regularity, from the obvious - ending each stanza with a version of the same word (just as Yeats ended every third line of his poem with a rhyme) - to the nearly invisible. Almost every line, for example, contains an internal full rhyme or other sonic echo, often near its end: Yeats's / veins, heart / art, pleasure / more, than / Eden, heroic / overwhelming, death / clergymen, and so forth. Echoes like these may be noticed by some minds and not by others, but they will resonate identically in any ear that hears the poem read aloud.
The story goes that once upon a time in America there existed a species known as the popular poet but that, alas, the last of this sweet and useful breed died out right around the time men stopped wearing suits to baseball games, and ever since then poetry has been about as approachable as an alligator with mommy issues and an unfinished dissertation on Wittgenstein. The account may sound persuasive, but it's hogwash. The fact is that a number of skilled American contemporaries regularly write books of general appeal that sell thousands of copies.
I'm not sure why people are so attached to the idea of poetry's unpopularity, but I do know that among the delusion's pernicious effects is its tendency to mask a genuine problem: the truly endangered status of the American civic poet, who strives not only to speak to us with vigor and sympathy in our common language, but also to reveal how crucial that language is to our struggles and hopes as citizens. Pinsky is our finest living specimen of this sadly rare breed, and the poems of "Gulf Music" are among the best examples we have of poetry's ability to illuminate not only who we are as humans, but who we are - and can be - as a nation.
Joel Brouwer is the author of two books of poems, "Exactly What Happened" and "Centuries." He teaches at the University of Alabama.




Education is about couplets

Rhyming couplets were basic for poetry for a long time. Even this day we find them. In this group Ed Bartek used them often. Shakespeare used them in his sonnets. The late 17th and early 18th writers of note, esp Milton and Dryden and Pope used them with great success and skill. We often think of them as solely for comic poetry but they can be put to serious use as well. It takes a while to get acclimated to their use and after getting comfortable with them it is often briefly difficult to adjust to other forms, esp free verse. However, the exercise of writing couplets is a useful way to remind us to keep the music in our poems, whatever the style. Sonic attirbutes are necessary to every poem.




The Heroic Couplet: Its Rhyme and Reason
by J. Paul Hunter


(Above: Alexander Pope, by Jonathan Richardson, British Museum.) This essay derives from a lecture presented at the National Humanities Center by J. Paul Hunter, 1995-96 Fellow and Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities and English at the University of Chicago. Editor of The Norton Introduction to Poetry and The Norton Introduction to Literature, Hunter, during an earlier residence at the Center, worked on a volume that received the 1991 Louis Gottschalk prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies--Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. For three years he led the Center's summer institute for high school teachers of English.
When you go to a poetry reading today, look around and discover that all the listeners are other poets, you get the idea: Poetry, for most people at the end of the twentieth century, is not the nerve-center of their universe, not their idea of where to go to sort out important political, ethical, or economic issues. You therefore might conclude that studying poetry represents historical irrelevance, intellectual indulgence, and social flight--or, at best, a sweet and restful retreat to a haven from a heartless world. I suggest otherwise. Poetry--irrepressibly, irrationally, and sometimes irresponsibly pleasurable--can be public, powerful, resonant, central to the culture it lives in, representative of its institutions and practices, and reflective of larger structures of thought and expression.
A form as seemingly alien as the heroic couplet--even its pretentious name echoes a long-lost or never-existent world--can in fact tell us something about how the world of public affairs (defined as the process of putting ideas into action) works. What happens in poems has a lot to do with what is going on in a particular society at a particular time, what forms of thought and expression poets have to work with. The way they think and argue both reflects and modifies the larger public culture, especially in times when poets see themselves as public figures and claim a voice in national issues. It may be hard to imagine now, but there have been times when poetry and poets were near the center of political experience. Plato thought poets too dangerous to be trusted, because he imagined them actually being listened to as serious commentators, rather than as, at best, language decorators who are trotted out to grace ceremonial occasions. The poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often close to seats of power, were always writing about public matters.
For 150 years, the heroic couplet was the dominant verse form in the English language (and closely related to verse forms dominating other European languages); it prevailed for nearly a quarter of the entire English poetic tradition. Before Ben Jonson and his contemporaries, there had been couplets galore--dating back to Chaucer--and after Alexander Pope and Charles Churchill some poets continued to choose the heroic couplet as their medium. But in the century and a half between Jonson and Churchill (from the 1630s to the 1780s) the couplet covered the British and American literary landscapes like the dew and dominated poetry like a tyrant. If forms can be hegemonic--and all but prevent meaningful departures--the couplet was such a form; never has any single poetic form before or since dominated the English language (or any other language I know about) so insistently and so thoroughly. There were, of course, during this long period, many poems written in other meters, stanza forms, and rhyme schemes; every major poet experimented with other possibilities (quatrains, Spenserian stanzas, odes, rime royal), and a few poets, such as Milton, resisted almost entirely the tyranny of the form. But most serious poets assumed that if they were writing an ambitious poem, they had no other choice, and even when Milton imitators or occasional odious odists resorted to wild warblings, they seldom roamed far from the couplet's principles of conciseness and balance.
As recently as ten years ago, it was widely assumed that women poets were considerably less likely to employ heroic couplets than men, largely because of differences in temperament and interests. But now that more women's poems of the period have become available, we can see that such was not the case. It turns out that the few poems by women that have been valued and anthologized over the years were singled out precisely because of their difference and what that presumably told us about women's sensibilities, but really about ourselves. These poems represent what we moderns have valued and isolated as distinctively feminine, not what women typically wrote and not what they themselves then valued most.
Why did couplets work so indisputably well for so many for so long? And why, subsequently, have they worked so unbelievably badly? With a few exceptions in the nineteenth century and with even fewer in the twentieth, the couplet has disappeared, along with most other traditional forms of rhymed verse. Do formal properties explain why the couplet dominated an epoch as never before or since? Can the fading of couplet verse be explained as an instance of the "exhaustion" of the form? Were poetic imaginers no longer up to the task, as traditional literary history has implied? Or, over time, did the ears of listeners change, or did structures of thought and expression change so that "hearing" was no longer the same? What can one deduce from the rough correspondence between (on the one hand) the formal properties of the couplet and (on the other) the public events and formal institutions of the period from about the time of the English troubles at home to the eruption of revolution abroad? I do not fully know the answers to these questions yet, but I am pretty sure that they are not entirely to be found within the history of poetry--that one needs to examine larger cultural patterns of thought and discourse, rhetoric and argument. My focus here, though, is on a preliminary issue: what formal features of couplets might we be prone to misread (or read too simply) because of changing assumptions? Here I will briefly review only two of many formal features that deserve re-examination.
Rhyme, which was an indispensable feature of poetry in the age of the heroic couplet, has fallen badly out of favor in the modern era. Few poets now employ rhyme at all, and, consequently, we are not used to regarding rhyme as an effective way of providing aural pleasure or as a structural device to convey meaning. We do have rhyme in our lives, but we reserve for it a quite specific and usually comic place: Rhyme is jingle, a memory device for slick commercials, complicity of sound become simplicity of thought, or some false claim of feeling enforced by cheap trick. Rhymes, in popular songs and other vestiges of the oral poetry tradition, are at our culture's intellectual margins.
For most modern ears rhyme falls pretty much into two categories, neither of them to be trusted, though both are distantly derived from historic applications of rhyme. The first category involves nostalgia and sentimentality: It is what happens in valentines and other greeting cards you don't want to receive. The rhymes are predictable and the sentiments easy: moon/June; kiss/bliss; hug/snug; pleasure/treasure; calm/balm; thine/mine/wine/fine. Such rhymes, conventional to the point of being clichés even before the second sound clunks into place, have long been with us, and Pope parodied them long ago--"the sure returns of still expected rhymes," he called them--in explaining why they were both ineffective and stupid:

Where-e'er you find "the cooling western breeze,"
In the next line, it "whispers through the trees;"
If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep,"
The reader's threatened (not in vain) with "sleep."
Such rhymes comfort with familiarity, and never do the rhyme words venture to connect things that romance or easy listening wish to stay disconnected: breeze/sleaze; love/shove; June/goon; hug/thug; romance/pants; eternity/paternity; court/snort; happy/nappy/yappy/sappy/crappy. The fact that sentimental rhymes persist in some strata of popular culture suggests that the similar sounds of words must once have been assumed to have some meaningful cohesive power, but thoughtful moderns seldom buy into such assumptions except in holiday states of mind: too easy, and too sleazy.
Rather, we are more apt to feed on rhyme that is comic or satiric--rhyme that parodies assumptions of hidden similarity and highlights ludicrous pairings. One of the more benign forms is in the popular Yuletide verse that Roger Angell annually presents readers of The New Yorker. His is always a high-spirited and chirpy performance, and it depends for its effects almost exclusively on playing with people's names; much of the fun is in making long strings of syllables rhyme (the challenges are names like Buttafuoco) especially if the rhyme can link celebrities together ludicrously or associate them with incongruous ideas or ideologies: It does in verse what The National Enquirer does in prose. Angell's latest effort, for example, manages to link Jose Mesa with Mother Theresa, Susan Lucci with Leo Nucci, Sharon Stone with John Malone, Andie MacDowell with Alma Powell, and Beverly Cleary with Timothy Leary. It's a good opportunistic idea, and Angell at his best reminds you a bit of Hudibras or Jonathan Swift, but in a lighter key.
Most contemporary musical satirists use similar comic rhyming: the Capitol Steps, Mark Russell, the Imis-in-the-morning parodists, and Tom Lehrer. Some of them do more with pyrotechnics of rhyme than others--Lehrer, for example, consistently makes his wit depend on ludicrous rhymes ("ave maria/gee it's good to see ya"), as do some popular lyricists ("magnifique/what I seek"). The Imis parodists (though they are often very silly) are surprisingly rhyme-sophisticated), while Mark Russell, though conceptually clever, gets little wit-mileage out of sound. All such strategies remind us that we are stuck with the sounds of our names and the associations they evoked to grade school wits and bullies--remember? Clinton thus largely escapes telling associations, and Gore does not; while poor Phil Gramm--rhymes with sham, scam, ham, damn, slam, whambam, and flimflam--probably needed to change his name, among other things, to survive the satiric process. Although these casual and teasing yokings may lead us to suspect that language and sound patterns can sometimes tell us things our conscious minds resist, most poets today (with the interesting exception of strongly oral poets, especially African Americans) no longer use rhyme seriously.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, poets viewed rhyme--and particularly the couplet rhyme--as a standard mode of communicating--and thinking. Couplet rhyme has a syntax of its own (as W. K. Wimsatt long ago pointed out) and makes a meaning claim in linking together words with the same sound. Something less than argument, this association creates a sense of relationship. The principle--so simple-minded-seeming when June is rhymed with moon or chills with thrills--operates in very sophisticated poetry. Thus, when John Dryden repeatedly makes kings rhyme with things (not wings or sings or brings or clings)--and rule with fool--he conveys particular opinions and values. Even though his actual syntax makes no specific claim, the rhyme makes the claim for him, seeming to deny the writer's agency and place the responsibility on language or the nature of things. Any rhyming of words performs some version of the same task, as do assonance, consonance, and alliteration, but couplet rhyming puts a special force on the association because of the rhyme's emphatic place in the line and the concentrated, insistent repetition of sound. The stress falls on rhyme and appears to give it finality and authority. Rhyme thus has a syntax distinct from that in conventional grammars, and parts of speech regularly cross over in rhyme to make the zaniest or most profound observations. The association of words at the ends of lines sets up comparisons that poets use rhetorically to assert and create attitudes.
What we need especially to note about couplet rhyme are two things: first, that rhyme tends to lead to judgments arrived at irrationally or at least a-rationally (sound alikes do not exactly prove similarities, even to committed homologists)--and thus ought to lead us to question the cliché about the couplet as an easy mouthpiece for age-of-reason propositions; and second, that the self-conscious process of noticing the jangle in the comparison tends somewhat to undercut the jingle aspects of couplets, something that unpracticed readers today have not been trained to hear or differentiate. The finality that may seem to result from the second shoe dropping in a couplet--when the expected sound comes home--is not nearly so dramatic as modern readers, who are victims of habit or innocent of history, hear it as being. For those in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this sound repetition--or rather the completed variation on the sound, the thump of the second shoe--would have created an expectation of future sound jingles and jangles--jingle to the ear, jangle to the mind--so that each couplet leads beyond itself to future connections, promising future harmonies and disruptions.
The perceived thump of the second shoe tempts modern readers to suppose that couplets are discrete, that they present closure of a thought. Before the middle of the seventeenth century, however, many couplets were not end-stopped but instead were en-jambed; that is, the end of a couplet did not necessarily coincide with the end of a clause or a thought unit. Poets such as Edmund Waller, Dryden, and Pope then made an issue of "closing" the couplet so that it would be tighter and more concise. The so-called closed couplet is certainly more demanding on the poet and tends, among critics and poets alike, to get more respect for its discipline and artistry. But just how closed is the closed couplet, and what are the relationships of individual couplets to each other?
The second-shoe theory seriously misleads us about the way couplets work in signaling completion. Second-shoe theory assumes we know how many shoes there are to drop, so that when the second one thumps down we know that the process is complete, the tension relieved, the expectation satisfied. That, however, is both true and not true for couplets. In one sense there are two shoes--that is, a second line to be chimed with the first. And the second shoe does signal completion of the cycle, at least in part. But if the rhyming sound signals that nothing more aurally can be predicted with certainty, it does not signal that no further sound developments lie ahead or that the thought is complete; in fact, it promises whole new sound patterns and new intellectual challenges of complication or modification. Often the repeated sound connects to other uses of sound within the same couplet or alludes ahead or backward to link up the sounds of one couplet with another and to make associations, again non-rational ones so that terms take on new associations and expanded meanings.
There are not neat pairs here--two shoes to a customer--just as sometimes the predictable number of feet in a line fools us by variation and rearrangement. In comedy routines and slapstick radio shows, the effect when (after we hear a second shoe drop) we hear a third and fourth--and then a fifth--may, depending on contexts, imply something quite more than we anticipated: someone going to bed; some two going to bed; no, even more, not just some ordinary coupling. And in poems, too, the satisfied anticipation is not necessarily the end of things, sounds being at least as promiscuous as people, and in couplet poems by nature so. But whether or not the rhyme sound directly connects one couplet to another, the closed couplet is not a closing down, not closure in the punning sense modern criticism has misleadingly implied--only an indication that a step has been achieved. Just as one sentence leads normally to another in prose--and together and with others adds up to an organized paragraph--so in poems the couplets add and accumulate. Couplets are not paragraphs, not completed units, not completed ideas.
We must therefore question the easy and misleading conclusion that a closed couplet means closure in a larger sense--pause, yes; indication of a step completed, yes; but nothing like a finished unit of thought. A couplet is something like a semicolon in a sentence that has several clauses and phrases. It is a mistake to think of couplets as stanzas; ordinarily, it takes about seven of them to become a verse paragraph, the closest approximation couplet poetry makes to a stanza, as the printings of couplets in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books makes clear. (The fact that couplet verse paragraphs are frequently the length of sonnets is a little eerie, but as far as I can see it means nothing except that units of thought may tend to be of a more-or-less common length.)
One simple indicator of how couplet poets think is to notice how infrequently they are memorable epigrammatists (though many modern critics imagine them to be), how seldom in fact they even try to write pithy poems of two lines--or even four or six. Poets such as Jonson, or Dryden, or William Congreve, or Sarah Egerton, or Pope think in larger terms; they are arguers, essayists (as titles of their poems very frequently suggest) rather than apothegmatists or versified Henny Youngmans, and they use the two-line unit simply as a brick for building something bigger. You can think of a lot of famous single lines from couplet poets ("A little learning is a dangerous thing," or "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread") for couplet poets are concise and witty, but few of their observations are memorable as couplets, simply because they do not think that way. Their two-line sense of balance and antithesis is part of a larger combination of contrasts. Binariness is only the beginning of the rhetorical structure: The rest of the story lies in discontent and re-formations.
Turning again to a passage from Pope helps us to see what happens when a series of couplets are read together as a paragraph. The passage begins with what has become a famous line which is then seriously modified in its meanings by subsequent allusions, accruals, and refinements. Note that even the aphoristic opening move, much in need of qualification, does not constitute an epigrammatic couplet: The second line (where the qualifications begin) is always omitted by those who want to reduce Pope's poetic ideas to the truths of a bumper sticker.
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind,
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;
But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky,
Th' eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last:
The growing labours of the lengthened way,
Th' increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!


Notice the way Pope manipulates the meter to speed up or slow down the reading pace and indicate swift movement and the quick passage of time on the one hand, or heavy, laborious dragging along on the other; the way the resources of classical learning and ancient time are summoned up, with the Alps which modern aristocrats and gentlemen visit on the grand tour fading into the old mountains of Greece, and contemporary springs drawing from the ancient fountains of the muses; the way the metaphors of intoxification and sobering operate first literally to confirm common sense, then magically to reverse it; the way the metaphors of heating and cooling--of fire and water in its various states from fountains to clouds to snow--suggest both physical conditions and human states of mind and body; the way drinking is manipulated to stand for reading, depth for persistence, distance for altitude, youth for freshness and length for age, as whole orders of being and activity are crossed and recrossed; the way perspective moves--and sights change--as we go from couplet to couplet, as if the crafter here were demonstrating just what closure does and does not mean; the way the experiences of everyday life are transformed into mythic travels and labors; and (ultimately) the way the simple summary pith of aphoristic expression is complicated and diversified into a statement almost of the experiential human condition, as it moves through bald generalizations, to nuanced argument, to meditation.
Comprehending why the heroic couplet held so tenacious a grip for so long a time is no easy venture: It involves renewed formal analysis properly historicized, and then larger cultural analysis of other kinds of texts and institutions. It requires exploring how poetic form related to the public culture of that 150 years when the halvings of the British nation took different forms and revised and recast the combatants in different combinations, when the culture became the two and many. It requires thinking of antithesis in pre-Hegelian, not necessarily synthesizing, ways in which contradictions continue to exist and to reassert and redefine themselves rather than being resolved. It requires rethinking dominant prose forms such as the dialogue and whole cultural institutions and practices--such as the rise of the two-party system--along with the crucial properties of the couplet itself. And it requires thinking about how different kinds of expression represent in different ways central patterns of experience and thought-formation. If I am right in formulating the questions about couplet hegemony in the way I have, reading a poetic form (or even a single poem) can provide insights into political, ethical, and economic (as well as aesthetic) issues--and especially into a historical era's way of framing and trying to resolve them.

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Riff on vomit

Julia, what did you do with your vomit?