Time and Space: Enjambment

I've commented before on this blog regarding time and space, how the primary dimension of performance poetry is time and the primary dimension of written poetry is space. In looking at long poems and poetic sequences with a strong visual element, I'm coming to revise that statement.

The long poem traditionally exists primarily in time. It consists of a narrative, which is a temporal device, moving along through events in a (generally) chronological order. If events are taken out of the time sequence, these sections are marked off as being a speech or song or flashback or otherwise made easily comprehensible within that boundary that is time. It also traditionally falls back on meter, which is a more blatant temporal device. Meter creates effects over time, whether actually out loud or in the reader's head.

The visual poem exists primarily in space. It exists on various parts of the page at once and must be negotiated not with regard to proper meter or narrative, but a piecing together that can happen at any pace whatsoever. The obvious incarnations of the visual poem, then, are creations of folks like Apollinaire, The Futurists, Cummings, and the concretists of the latter half of the 20th Century.

There are less obvious poems that ought to be called visual, though, and which blend these two states. diluvium strives for both spacial and temporal recognition. But consider any long poem that features enjambment. To enjamb is to assume a reader, not a listener. It is to force that reader back in space, not just in time. And yet the overall narrative, this being a long poem, pushes forward. This is truly hybrid work, asking us to use two very different areas of the brain. What is the first narrative poem ever to use enjambment? I don't know. I'd like to know. Google is pretty useless on this end, so someone smart out there should feel free to chime in.

Working under this concept, can I open the door to calling any of the consciously-different long poems visual ones as well? Is Whitman in the door, at least in the 1855 Leaves of Grass, because he intentionally printed the poems with their full, long lines? He published the subsequent editions with the lines shortened on the page, so that despite the preserved meter of his voice, the effect on the reader (not listener) is distinct. Do I call The Waste Land a visual poem, with its free verse ranging not through meter but through line breaks? Is it a visual poem only in contrast with the typical long poems that precedes it (do we notice its form only because that form is so different than its contemporaries and forebears)? And if the break with prior assumptions is necessary to the visual, are free verse long poems today no longer truly visual, since we've accustomed ourselves to viewing them? Do I call Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette a visual poem despite her explicit effort to create a new meter because said meter is cordoned off by the visual device "of constant" "quotation marks around" "phrases?"

More questions later, perhaps.

Remains

For those of you who are still reading/subscribing:

1. My computer died in early November. I've been borrowing a laptop, but haven't bothered to post here on it. I now have a new laptop of my very own, an HP dv4t, and I'll return to posting. Expect updates on

2. Poetry. diluvium is getting a thorough vetting by my chair right now. I'm not going to comment on that process, as I consider it something to be kept between my advisor and myself. But poetry and the editing process is definitely on my mind of late.

2b. Poetry. It's about time I start weighing in seriously on the prose/scholarly portion of my diss. I've had thoughts tumbling around for a while now, but have concentrated my efforts on the creative section. No more (or at least not to the exclusion of the scholarly stuff). Might as well put some of those thoughts up here while I'm working through them.

3. Also expect my thoughts, whether you wanted them or not, on Windows 7. I don't have it installed yet, but a free copy is coming because of the timing of my laptop purchase. I'd gotten quite used to Linux Mint, so switching back to Vista has been odd. Good news - I don't have to hack into my own iPod Touch anymore (i.e. I can run iTunes again, though I miss Amarok 1.4). Bad news - It's slower than Linux Mint. Good news - the Search option isn't as powerful as Gnome-Do (i.e. it doesn't learn which programs, folders, and files I access most often), but it's actually finding all my files correctly this time. Bad news - need to get used to fewer customization options again.

Music of the moment: Woodchopper's Ball by Woody Herman. "Blue Flame" and "Goosey Gander" are awesome. "Blue Flame" especially.

Enough Rope

I am, as I always am at this stage, a little worried about my classes. It's not undue worry, and it's not unexpected worry, but it's there. It's anticipation, excitement, concern all rolled up into one ball that will be released beginning Friday.

Their first papers are due that day, and some of them only had a paragraph (or less) written by Wednesday. This is not necessarily a problem. In fact, I'm a bit of an oddity among composition teachers I know in that I don't require an outline, then an annotated bibliography, then a draft, then everything along with a final draft in a portfolio, with each step being graded. I offer most of these steps along the way in some form, but I know that students write in very different ways. Drafting an outline is not guaranteed to be helpful, and I hate busywork in college classes. Annotated bibliographies were the bane of my existence as an undergrad, and yet they're useful for some people to organize. Instead of requiring these elements for a grade, I build in a day on which my students share with the class what information they've found so far and where they seem to be going with it. It's an informal sharing, but one that allows students

A) to find out if anyone is working on a similar project and thereby collaborate on resources
B) to practice some oral communication
C) to have a soft due date that pushes them more gently towards completion

I also build in a day on which students do group revisions, partnering up to read another person's paper aloud to that person, trading papers to look very specifically at punctuation, at evidence, at theses, at spelling, etc. Their grades will not suffer automatically if they don't have much done for that day, but it definitely benefits anyone who brings as much as possible.

For the first paper, students (freshmen especially) don't always realize the benefits. They know that their papers are not due until Friday, that there is plenty of time, that perhaps instead they'll concentrate on a biology exam. They're still thinking in high school terms, that the stick is more powerful than the carrot, to react to negative pressure instead of proactively pursuing positive feedback.

Every time I do this, I end up being pleasantly surprised by a few papers that turn out wonderfully despite having been written the night before. It's silly, but if they can make that work, I don't begrudge them. Every time I do this, I'm a little bit saddened by papers that have decent ideas but really needed another few drafts to become good. I've warned them, but it won't be real until they see their grades in about a week. As usual, some will take it in stride. Some will change their work ethic about college as a whole, which is my favorite reaction. Some will wonder why grading got so "unfair" between high school and college, which is my least favorite reaction. Most will reflect on how they went about the paper, and that's part of the lesson, too.

A moment of crisis

Vis a vis diluvium

My heart is a modernist one. I like thinking all this knowledge will do me good some day, that Noah and his wife are on a trajectory that leads them to enlightenment, that all the languages of the world can swirl around each other into one clear symbol, that there is a (G)god who responds to the prayers of two people alone on an ark. My mind is a postmodernist one. I end up thinking that, as I put it in another poem, “knowledge is merely that / which is forgotten,” that Noah and his wife will end up landing in the New World and starting the events of El Oceano y La Serpiente all over again (or perhaps it will be one of the ships they create from their wants that lands on that shore and destroys the Aztecs or whoever it is in that dimension), that all the languages of the world swirl around each other and just create more language, that (G)god doesn't get his/her/its/their own font and is therefore everything and nothing in this poem from the very beginning.

Can I have both? Can I?

Are you looking for a song?

If you're a songwriter looking for a quirky love song, I've had this chorus bouncing around in my head for a few months. I've got verses to go with it, but am holding all but the first back as bargaining chips.

Verse 1, part 1

I was always straight-laced

You always liked to follow a plan

I was brought up in a flow-chart faith

You were brought up at your father's right hand

Chorus

We said we'd just get a little stoned...

Next thing you're wakin' up next to me

And I'm wakin' up in Mexico

Two Steps Forward...

Sometimes as a professor you have a good idea. Sometimes it's a really good idea. And sometime the version of that idea that you've used successfully in one place simply doesn't hold up in another. That doesn't mean getting rid of the baby and the bathwater, just admitting to a class that you have to re-tailor an assignment.

In this particular case:

At Texas A&M, I always began a composition class with a research assignment. Visit the university archives and find an event or tradition, give it a context, and offer a brief argument as to why a current student should know what you now know. It played particularly well at A&M, given the culture of tradition there, but I stand by my thoughts that it should work at any institution of higher learning. This is the first time (most likely) in a student's career that s/he has chosen where to learn. By that very fact, some part of the student's identity is wrapped up in the university's identity, either aligned or opposed. Finding out about your college or university is finding out about yourself. It also means working with primary materials, not just going online and bopping around until you get something that looks kindasorta helpful. There's a respect for the material, for libraries, that comes from working with old things. When you look at a photograph that's 70 years old, it's very different than looking at a copy of that photograph in a textbook. Finally, it teaches students how to work with librarians, one of the most helpful things I teach them in the entire class. Librarians are a sorrowfully underused resource, and often a maligned one. I want my students to respect them, to learn from them, and to use the help they so gladly offer in most cases.

This semester, my first at UNE, I wanted my students to do the same kind of research. I met with the archivist at the Westbrook College History Collection, Bobby Gray, and worked out some meeting times. We talked about potential research topics. Everything fell into place quite nicely. Then came the first couple of days of class, and the discovery that most freshmen here don't have cars. The WCHC is about a 35-minute drive from the Biddeford campus where I teach. I tried to arrange carpooling. It started, then stalled. I tried to access a student driver or drivers and a university van or vans. On such short notice, it was going to be very aggravating. In short, this field trip, and the subsequent individual/small group research trips, not going to happen.

I found an alternative in town. There is a free bus that runs very close to the McArthur Library in downtown Biddeford, which also contains archival materials. The librarians there have offered their assistance to all 40 of my students (in fact, they seem overjoyed that we'll be taking advantage of the collection). The assignment will be modified, but should still benefit my students in most of the ways I want it to.

Now I just go into class on Wednesday and tell them all of this. I don't mind setbacks - it gives me a chance to talk about them. I'm very open about my pedagogy in class, often explaining precisely why I do something, and if something doesn't work, explaining to the class why I think it failed. No matter what, there are valuable lessons to be extracted here. Given that the overall theme of the first quarter of class is "context," my misunderstanding of the context of UNE (transportation-wise) should be a lesson in and of itself.

In case you Google your professors

Dear ENGL110 Students,

As I mentioned in class and an email, I'm going to push you fast and hard. Composition is not just throwing words on a page and hoping they stick; it's an entire mindset. That's what we're going to learn this semester - how to find the best possible mindset for yourself during your college career and how best to express that mindset through (primarily) words.

That being said...

I threw a lot at you on Wednesday. It was certainly more than most of you expected, and likely more than most of your other professors did. We didn't even get to meet each other properly, just dove into exercises and expectations. We'll fix that to a certain extent on Friday. If you haven't played Apples to Apples before, you're in for a treat. It's a good icebreaker game, a way to get to know people in a wholly unusual manner. It's also a good time to start practicing your argumentation skills, with little on the line but others' initial impressions of you (which is, of course, a lot). The lesson won't be a throwaway one, but it will pay dividends slowly over the course of the semester.

Be ready. Have fun.