The Barbarian Invasion of Poetry (Hurrah!)

The barbarians are here! They've breached the walls of the fortress! The city lies in ruins! Poetry is at their mercy!

Well, it's all a bit more complicated and not so grim. Find out more in the first monthly installment of the new "Essays and Comment" feature at Plume. I will be editing, and sometimes writing, the feature.  I wrote the first one, "The Barbarian Invasion of Poetry (Hurrah!)" and it begins like this:

This just in: the Empire of Poetry has fallen to the barbarians. The fall was not sudden—it took place over the course of the last seventy years or so, and even before then alarmed sentries spoke of shaggy hordes moving in the dark forests beyond the far-flung border outposts, clutching their axes and the icons of their strange, compelling gods. Let me begin by making clear that I, bred within the confines of the old and dying Empire, welcome the barbarians as friends, and as a force to invigorate our aging and insular imperium. 

When I speak of barbarians, I speak of them as the Italian novelist and essayist Alessandro Baricco does in his study The Barbarians: An Essay on the Mutation of Culture, a book largely unknown in America, despite having been serialized in one of the most prominent Italian newspapers, giving rise there to a nationwide discussion of the changing nature of cultural production and consumption. For Barrico, the barbarians are a group on the rise, and not just in Italy, or even Europe, but worldwide. Ever more visible, they cause great distress among the more hidebound Catos committed to the old and dying virtues of the Empire—not, it is important to note, a distress that Barrico shares. Barrico sees the barbarians everywhere, marked not so much by their different culture as by the different way they think about culture, be it musical culture, literature, cuisine—even wine and soccer (Barrico is, after all, Italian). The old ways of the Empire are deeply traditional, rooted in an appreciation of the specific history of whatever cultural form is under consideration. But the barbarians see things differently. They are eclectic, these nomads from beyond the borders, and less attached to the traditions of the imperial past.

It goes on to talk about Frank O'Hara, Claudia Rankine, Michael Robbins, C. Russell Price, and others, with some notes on how to drink wine and listen to music.  You can find it here.

Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Contemporary Rhyme in Poetry

The latest issue of the Spoon River Poetry Review is out, and contains my essay "Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Rhyme in Contemporary Poetry."  Some very talented people have been writing in rhyme lately, both in and well outside the old 'New Formalist' movement.  And they've been rhyming in vastly different ways (I look at Michael Robbins, Amanda Smletz, R.S. Gwynn, and Ben Mazer).  Moreover, some very bright people have been thinking about the meaning and history of rhyme.  The essay begins by examining what two of these people—Stephen Burt and Anthony Madrid—have to say.  Here's how the essay opens:


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Rhyme, argues Milton, defending the blank verse of Paradise Lost, is "no necessary adjunct or true ornament of a poem… but the invention of a barbarous age," and the poet's freedom from rhyme is "an ancient liberty recovered… from the troublesome modern bondage of rhyming." Times have changed: try thinking of a contemporary poet who has felt the need to defend the lack of rhyme in his or her poetry and odds are pretty strong you'll come up blank. Indeed, it's the rhymers who are more likely to feel the need for a defense. The best defense, of course, is a good poem in rhyme—and if we look, we begin to find these in many different quadrants of the poetry world.

But there are rhymes and there are rhymes, and it's worthwhile considering what some of the recent scholarship has to say about the differences between them, especially if we hope to understand the various ends to which contemporary poets have put rhyme. Perhaps it's not coincidental that the most provocative critical thoughts about rhyme in recent years have come from poets, notably Stephen Burt and Anthony Madrid.

Burt looks at rhyme primarily in terms of its function, making a general distinction between what he calls “background” and “foreground” rhymes. For most of the history of rhymed poetry in English, Burt writes in his essay “Cornucopia, or Contemporary American Rhyme,” rhymes were not meant to pull focus away from other elements of the poem. Rhyme was one element in the “metrical contract,” an agreement between poets and readers that poems would be more tightly organized and musical than prose. Individual rhymes, though, “would not usually draw more attention than other aspects of the verse.” Indeed: they were part of a norm—a background—against which deviations became more visible. They were the settings in which verbal gems were placed, not the gems themselves. When they were too ingenious—or, alternately, too worn and cloying—they pulled focus and failed to serve their vital if unglamorous function. Burt cites Robert Graves’ analogy between good rhymes and good servants as an example of this theory of rhyme’s function: good rhymes, says Graves, “are the good servants whose presence at the dinner-table gives the guest a sense of opulent security; never awkward or over-clever… You can trust them not to interrupt the conversation.” Rhyming “moon” with “June,” in this view, is much like spilling a bowl of soup in a diner’s lap; while rhyming “intellectual” with “hen-pecked you all” is more a matter of spending far too long explaining the choice of appetizer, or making an unctuous compliment about the diner’s choice of necktie.

When rhyme forces itself onto our attention, it pushes itself into the foreground. The move may be propelled by all sorts of different fuel: rhymes may jump forward “because they are polysyllabic, because they employ proper nouns… because the words they use are the oddest in their respective lines” or for any number of other reasons. What matters is that it demands attention: rather than being part of an accepted contract, it comes across as a violation of some kind, making the verse seem “consciously artificial—ornamental, or antiquary, or ironic (even sarcastic), or willed, or faux-naïve.” Most of you wouldn’t want this kind of rhyme serving you dinner on a big night out, though you’d probably enjoy it as a cabaret performer.

A contract, of course, has two parties, and Burt’s theory of rhyme isn’t so much about the qualities of rhymes in isolation, but about the way they interact with readerships. The percentage of published American poems that rhyme is smaller than it was even a few decades ago —fewer and fewer readers take rhyme as a norm—with the result that it is harder and harder for rhyme to fulfill a background function. Foreground rhyme, therefore, “has become, for most American poets now, the only kind that we can use: its possibilities have expanded immensely, while background rhyme has become, though not unheard of, scarce, and extremely hard to use well.”

While Burt focuses on the function of rhyme in a shifting context, Anthony Madrid gives us a bold, broad history of English rhyme. In “Warrant for Rhyme” he tells a story of rhyme’s transformation from the Renaissance to the present day, centering on a “rhyme shift” that quietly remade English poetry over the course of the seventeenth century. Before this shift, we find a much greater emphasis on rhymes that bear a sematic resemblance as well as a sonic one: “cherry” and “berry,” for example, or “mother” and “brother.” After the shift, though, such rhymes occur with greatly reduced frequency. By 1660 or so, Madrid argues,

 …serious poets unconsciously resisted using rhyme pairs wherein the two words bore to each other any strong and essential semantic link. This resistance sometimes reached a pitch of utter exclusion in cases where the words in the rhyme pair were perceived on some level as participating in a semantic algebra of equivalence or opposition… whole categories of rhyme were decommissioned. In particular, rhyme pairs wherein the words are near-synonyms or near-antonyms were to be avoided. Thus, {moan | groan} would have been counterintuitive to an Augustan poet, because the two terms are near-synonyms. {Sad | glad} would have seemed undesirable because the words are opposites.

Since the move away from semantic/sonic combinations in rhyme happens in poetic practice without ever becoming the subject of a manifesto-like polemical essay in the period, the rationale remains evasive, although Madrid advances a hypothesis that we might take as a description of the birth of what Burt calls background rhyme. “[T]he implied purpose of rhyme” after the shift, says Madrid, “was to affect the audience in the same way that music does: not by encoding information, but by manipulating the sensual apparatus of the body." The hypothesis, then, is that poets sought “ to exclude rhymes they expected would call attention to themselves, thus disturbing the operation of the music.”

For Madrid, this system began to break down in the nineteenth century, beginning with the comic masterpieces of Lord Byron. In Byron we see the first poet to work, not intermittently or marginally, but in his great works quite consistently, with rhymes that willfully violate the norms of decorum. He does so not by turning back the clock to the Renaissance emphasis on semantically significant rhymes, but by turning to a kind of rhyme that insistently “demonstrates inventiveness and originality.”

This turn to eccentricity prepared the ground for the diminished role of rhyme in modern poetry. The flashy virtuosity of Byronic rhyme inevitably led the reader to ask, “Are not all these crazy rhymes a joke on poetry itself?” The ultimate effect of Byron and those he influenced was to help undermine the old contract about rhyme between poet and reader, giving us a “demotion of rhyme from an effect that characterized a given poem as a whole to a local and unpredictable effect whose pretensions to power were sharply limited.” We find ourselves in the world of Burt’s foreground rhymers, with rhyme coming across as artificial, ornamental, willed, ironic, or faux-naïve. Madrid laments this situation, claiming that while rhyme culture never disappeared among songwriters, in literary poetry rhyme will, in the absence of some champion, “languish in a perpetual catarrh, and students of English poetry will have to strain hard to lend half of our greatest poets the sympathetic ear they deserve.” “When, oh when,” Madrid seems to call out in the wilderness, “will the covenant be revived?”

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Well, it goes on, with readings of recent work by of R.S. Gwynn, Michael Robbins, Amanda Smeltz, and Ben Mazer, who employ different types of rhymes to different ends for different audiences.  At the moment, the essay is only available in the print version of the Spoon River Poetry Review (39.2, winter 2014) but the online version should be available soon.

Aiming High, Aiming Low, and Landing in Jail: Poetry and Risk

“We are all Tunisia in the face of the repressive,” wrote the Qatari poet Muhammad ibn al-Dheed al-Ajami, in a poem praising the uprisings of the Arab spring.  He wrote in praise of those who put their lives at risk for freedom, and must have known he was taking a great risk himself: his poem landed him in a Qatari jail, where he remains.  He’s a poet who knows about the kind of risk it is hard to imagine an American poet running—protected as our poets are by freedom of speech and widespread public indifference.  It’s not that American poets can’t run risks; rather, it’s a matter of much lower stakes.  The most common thing our poets put at risk is the sympathy of their readers and editors, and they may do so by aiming too high or too low.

That's the opening paragraph of my contribution to a symposium on poetry & risk in the latest issue of Pleiades, now appearing in bookstores and in the mailboxes of subscribers.  The essay goes on to discuss Peter O'Leary's poetry as aiming high, and Michael Robbins' poetry as aiming low—in both cases it's a matter of diction, and of alienating potential audiences.  

The poetry and risk feature includes a lot of fine things, including Rae Armantrout writing on Ben Lerner; Carl Dennis writing on David Wojahn; Joan Houlihan writing on Brenda Shaughnessy, John Gallaher writing on Michael Benedikt, and much more.  It's not available online, but on this strange alternative medium called "paper."

***UPDATE FEB. 4, 2014: My contribution to the symposium is now available online.

"Imagine That Happening Again in Poetry": The Future and History of Rhyme

Anthony Madrid (right) with Michael Robbins and Stephanie Anderson

It is, of course, a debatable proposition that Anthony Madrid's paper on rhyme at the recent Midwest Modern Language Association conference is the most exciting thing to come out of Milwaukee since the introduction of the Harley-Davidson Fat Boy in 1990, but I'm inclined to believe it is just that.  Indeed, in combination with another paper on rhyme by Robert Strong of Bates College, Madrid's paper led me to revise my sense of literary history.

Madrid came to Milwaukee to speak on a panel I'd organized on the poetry of Michael Robbins.  He joined Don Share of Poetry magazine, who spoke about the controversy that surrounds much of Robbins' work, and Lea Graham of Marist College, who spoke of capitalism and commercialism as influences on both the form and content of Robbins' poetry.  Madrid took a long view, and arrived at Robbins only after giving a précis of his University of Chicago doctoral dissertation on the history of English rhyme from the sixteenth century on.  What he revealed was, to the best of my knowledge, and entirely original and convincing theory on the evolution of rhyme, and a hint at the direction in which it may be going in English language poetry.

The story begins with the surprising frequency, in the Elizabethan period, with which rhyme words occur with particular kinds of semantic elements: rhymes that are not merely aural, but linked in certain kinds of elementary dyads, especially opposites like he/she or me/thee or ever/never, say, or hither/thither.  Synonyms are also common rhyme pairs in the period, as are pairings with a genus-species link (cherry/berry) or that come in one way or another from the same category (mother/brother, say, as a kinship pairing).  The idea was to combine semantic similarity with sonic similarity.

The striking thing is that these whole categories of rhyme begin to disappear, or become greatly diminished, in the Stuart period (Madrid's diligence over the course of several years in counting rhyme words is to be commended and honored, and perhaps also pitied just a little, in the way we might pity Milton's study-bound scholar in "Il Penseroso").  The disappearances happen without being theorized: there are no manifestoes or treatises condemning such rhymes, but the change is real and clear and empirically there.  Semantically significant rhyme becomes greatly reduced, and a new form or rhyming becomes the norm.  This new form is sonic or aural first, says Madrid, and seeks to be a kind of climate of background sound, a white noise or a lulling drug.  It does not wish to draw attention to itself by making a clever semantic parallel to the rhyme's sonic element.  Rather,  it wishes to go by as something felt but unmarked.  Mother/brother or hither/thither fade to be replaced by the kind of rhyme we in our time deprecate as mediocre or banal—moon/June and the like.  This is not to say that such rhymes, with their refusal to forefront any kind of semantic cleverness, are bad—although I heard papers at the same conference where Madrid spoke that asserted just that, as if there were transhistorical truths about rhyme, unbound by any historically contingent aesthetics.

The kind of rhyme that came to prominence in the Stuart era and lasted throughout the Augustan period fell from fashion with the Romantics and has not returned to fashion since (though it persists, of course, in many popular forms—wedding verse, greeting card verse, and other forms despised by the literati).  The Romantic transformation of rhyme drew inspiration, in England, from Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, that great rag-bag of popular song and balladry.  The transformation is most visible in the works of Lord Byron.  Byron, after all, was a great lover of the Augustans, and much of his poetry partakes of an Augustan form of rhyme.  But when he leaves off the seriousness of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage for the comedy of Don Juan, Byron lets loose with a new virtuosity in rhyme.  Instead of letting rhyme be unobtrusive, he juices it up, and makes us notice it for its originality, striking newness, and cleverness: "But oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual/Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all" is the most famous case of dozens, even hundreds, of virtuoso rhymes from Don Juan alone.  Rhyme, in the new dispensation, is to be about flash and dazzle and cleverness, and you are meant to notice it, as you had not generally been meant to notice it in the Augustan paradigm.  The new rhyme differs, too, from the old Elizabethan form, since it does not necessarily seek some kind of semantic parallel to the sound echo.  It is about startling freshness, however that might be found.

The trouble with this new kind of rhyme, Madrid says, is that it can, if established as a tradition, become tedious—especially when handled by pens less deft than that of Byron.  So rhyme falls from literary fashion almost altogether with modernism, or becomes something we  downplay and disguise with off-rhyme, enjambment, and other de-emphasizers.

Rhyme never really goes away, of course, and it has remained with us in popular poetry, in song, and in poetic movements that set themselves self-consciously against the dominant culture of unrhymed verse.  It has also been notably present in rap, and some poets have taken up the form of rhyme found there—a form in reminiscent of the Romantic or late Byronic model.  Here, rhyme is meant to be noticed for newness and originality, and sometimes, too, for a semantic component that goes along with the sonic one.  Rap rhyme is (as Robert Strong, who spoke at a panel just before Madrid's, says) often most intensely original and attention-grabbing at moments of extreme praise or of denunciation.  Moon/june just won't cut it in this paradigm.  And since one can bend the spoken/rapped word to fit the rhyme one can create oral rhymes where none would have been expected, as Eminem famously did when he created full sonic rhymes between "four inch" "storage" and the supposedly unrhymable "orange."

In his paper (which cites Madrid) Robert Strong describes the virtuosity of rhyme in rap battles, where rappers denounce one another with displays of originality in rhyme.  "Imagine that happening again in poetry," he says—but I don't have to, since I've seen it in the poetry of Michael Robbins.  The title poem of Robbins' book Alien vs. Predator, for example, consists of a depiction of just such a rhyme battle between the protagonists of the movies Alien and Predator, and—as in so many of Robbins' poems— deploys rhymes in the Byronic mode (the Robbins rhyme that most sticks in my head, and is perhaps destined to be his "intellectual/hen-pecked you all" is "Rorschach blots/Arnold Horshack thoughts").

After a fine analysis of Robbins' rhymes, and what they owe to those of Frederick Seidel, Madrid speculated on the future of rhyme, on whether it will take up the hyper-clever and virtuosic rhymes that he, Robbins, and some others of his generation employ, or whether this revival, too, will drown in a sea of its own cleverness.  But I'd run out of room in my notebook, so we'll have to simply wait, read, listen, and see.