The Art and Artifice of Poetry | Hamza Yusuf & Scott Crider

[Music] uuuugh recently wrote an article for us for Renovatio and you make an arguments about poetry so maybe you could just give us a little summation of that certainly I'm very interested in the topic of the of the issue what what makes a human being a human being and I wanted to identify language which I quite naturally rushed to as that which makes us human and I we are the we are the animal with language but then I was remembering encountering this mark remarkable text at the beginning of putnams art of posy and and in it he he clearly sees language as central to humanity that that really constitutes our humanity as such but he does not focus on the the rhetorical aspect as much as on the poetic which I found really interesting and so I wanted to explore a reading of his text and to just draw from what he says an argument about why it may be that it's poetry that actually makes us human a particular form of language which I think he does associate with rhetoric but he tensed and continues to throughout it to emphasize poetry itself and I decided after following his reasoning that he thinks this is the case because poetry is particularly concentrated form of ordering language metrically stands a eclis figuratively and I've begun to see that he thinks that that ordering has a way of reordering the human soul of the one who participates in poetry and then reorders the the soul of others as well and so it becomes a social order and I was really quite stunned to see that Putnam thinks that poetry more or less makes us human by remaking us through the poetic art itself one of the interesting things about human beings is that I don't think there's a culture or civilization that doesn't have poetry it's a it's really an argument for a universality of nature that there is a human nature because and and the interesting thing is almost every peoples and cultures certainly the ones that all the ones that we know have the poetry is very similar it's about in three seconds for each line and it begins hundreds of years before I mean we have recorded poetry from China in like I think 500 BC and a homer obviously and in the in the Greek tradition is even earlier and another aspect that fascinates me personally is that arguably every single civilization because we have Aboriginal peoples and then we have city people people that create civilizations of very complex aggregates of people living together and that all of those civilizations are prefaced with great poetry mm-hm so for instance if you look at the Greeks I don't think I think it's arguable that you don't you cannot have Plato or Socrates without Homer and and the number of times that they quote Homer as a sourcebook and in in the in the Islamic tradition the very first book is the Quran but the Quran is preceded in almost immediately the the the hundred years before the Quran is the pinnacle of Arabic poetry and right before the the Quran emerges was considered they had reached acne of poetic prowess the famous ODEs the seven ODEs that hung in the Kaaba these were the great they call them heceta and and then if you look at European civilization I mean arguably are in Norton's anthology because with the Song of Roland you know our literature begins with the Song of Roland and then the the English Shakespeare is and Marlowe and all these great poets Ben Jonson they precede the the King James Bible I mean it's just amazing that the King James Bible which is arguably what created English civilised in my trouser before that and be a wolf even before that but arguably the King James Bible does so much for America without the King James out we don't have Abraham Lincoln we don't have so many of the rhetorical greatness that the civilization produced yeah the point about Homer is extremely interesting because it immediately raises the question what do we mean by poetry and on the one hand we do mean measured speech and so we are yeah we are talking about dactylic hexameter verse so on the one hand we recognize that Plato's own understanding of music is itself arising from Homeric poetry that is is musical accompanied or not it's a liar exactly because meter meter itself is a kind of lyre within the language but then of course Homer is also a memetic artist so not just that it's verse but that it's mimetic or representational of human of human action and what I find tremendously compelling about the antagonistic relationship between homer and especially Plato and you're absolutely right Socrates will quote the Socrates the character will quote Homeric verse regularly but what I find so intriguing is that it's quite clear that Plato arguably the first writer of philosophical texts is clearly imitating homer and not just topically but by fashioning works that have been influenced by Homeric fashions sure one of things I like to point out to students is that's why he wanted the poets exiled so they wouldn't see yeah that's right that he was stealing from them but also that he's fashioning a new form of poetry it seems naive to me not to recognize that when he critiques Homer as a poet in the Republic he knows that his audience realizes that the Republic itself isn't poem it's narrated by Socrates that's the dramatized narrator he says I went down to PI Reyes the other day and you realized that if you were to explore Greek literature and ask where have we heard someone tell their own tale before about going down it becomes quite clear that he realizes that his audience will know that he's imitating he's imitating homers representation of Odysseus telling his own tale at the Phi E key in court and so I think that Plato actually wants to write a new form of poetry but the condition of possibility for that is is is clearly is clearly Homer and it's that that quality of making making music of fabricating through this mimetic art of representation world's fictional worlds in which we can participate and observe and be moved by characters who who are not people but resemble people it draws us into a kind of intelligibility of human action and our our compassion so often in response to the to their suffering that that I think may actually be central to humanity which might indicate why it's universal well why indeed storytelling in some form or another is is there in every culture we encounter and I think a lot of people have pointed this out throughout the ages that we speak rhythmically that human languages by its very nature of rhythmic a lot of people are completely unaware that Shakespeare is actually in verse it's true because it's so natural to be or not to be that is the good version it just it flows trippingly off the tie it does indeed and and you can scan parts of Lincoln and Melville absolutely I mean you can scan parts of what we're saying no don'ts it's just especially iambic because this is the the the meter of the English language tends to fall into the iambic but the the use of meter in conveying meaning and before because I want to extend about poetry extend it beyond verse because certainly it you know the Greek concept it comes from a word which is basically about artifice to create something to make something and and and certainly imaginative literature is all if it's good if it's great it reaches a level of poetry but the epic poem which obviously homers are greatest in in Western civilization the epic poem it's there's so few people have been able to do it and it's been tried many times the last time we had we actually had a caracal character in early American history Joel Barlow do you do I don't he's famous for a poem called Hasty Pudding which is very often anthology he was part of the Connecticut wits he was a friend of George Washington but he had aspirations to be an epoch he wanted to be America's epic poet and and he attempted but it's it's it was a failed attempt and it's it's just very interesting then what's called the noble voice you know that that was one of them Stringfellow Barr I think wrote a book called the noble voice oh no Van Doren actually about the epic poem why is the epic poem so difficult to to do no that's a wonderful that's a wonderful question at least in literary studies we tend to assume that the epic poem took up took up residence if you will in the novel and so that the novel began to do the work of the love of the epic poem but what's interesting about that is that the novel is really quite essentially composed of prose it's its body if you will is a prose ybody right whereas the the epic poem is in is in verse and so a lot of people will suggest that that may be for example Wordsworth's prelude was the last great epic but we actually I think live in an age of a great epic poem derek walcott so marrows which is a magnificent treatment of life in in the caribbean and and takes up a number of questions and does so by means of a central character named - he'll clearly named for achilles and is always running a Homeric parallel along his own quite distinct contemporary Caribbean culture Dante too is quite influential in that in that poem but I I think it's very difficult to do of course in part because readers are not accustomed to reading verse as often as they used to be and expect their stories to be in in prose and so when people read literature they tend to presume that means reading novels imaginative imaginative literature is I won't say it's reduced to novels but that's that really is the form of literature people most gravitate toward in part because we haven't taught enough people recently how to write verbs that arise needed to write no that's exactly right one of these is an art that has to be taught things about well not necessarily I mean there there are people that do naturally the Arabs are amazing at that III know some pretty sophisticated Arabic poets that that really don't know the prosody of and it's it's like Greek it's not syllabic so it's it it's not accentual it's it's related to the actual duration of the word so it's long short as opposed to light heavy or heavy light or heavy that doesn't surprise me though actually because as you were saying it indicates poetry itself indicates some natural talent for it right which means that the measure in language is natural to language yeah exactly and some people will have an extraordinarily whole musician powerful natural gift with or without training but but but art art will improve it right so even those without as much talent can have that talent prove through art you often hear about musicians that we would recognize as clearly quite talented who don't know music my first thought is always what if they did how would it change how would it how would it change what would be the accomplishment if all for the Beatles actually knew how to read music well I am used to the song Cat Stevens I heard him once say that he found it so difficult to learn other people's music so he just decided to write his own and I thought that was really interesting because one of the things about classical musicians is that all they loot they start from day one learning not really how to make music but how to imitate music and and this is something that the pre-modern world was obsessed with with mimesis with its artifice with with actually one of the things was very common they the idea of creative writing would have been insane to to anybody before the 20th century that the idea that you could teach people how to write what you could teach them to do was how to imitate and and so they would you know have a sentence like when in the course of human events and then they'd have to the student would have to write a sentence with completely different words but following the form of that sentence and and so artifice was not a negative thing whereas today it's become a very negative thing and I think one of the tragedies of a lot of modern especially the young people i I actually think it's it's really unfair to them to encourage them to write poetry because 99.9 percent of it is is tripe and and they're not because their self-esteem has to be boosted we're not allowed to actually say that's doggerel and it's complete rubbish and we have to say gee that's wonderful great you know a way to go and instead of doing the traditional way which would have they would have memorized great poetry and and internalize it I mean we talk about learning something by heart it's such a beautiful idiom the idea of internalizing something and one of the things that the Arabs say that if you want to be a great poet memorize the corpus of a great poet and then forget it that's right and I think Dylan to me who you know there's a lot of debate about Dylan but III really do think he he's he will be in the Canon that's my do and and and and there there are people like Rick ceteris prefer Riggs and others I just read a book about him why Dylan matters from a Harvard professor making that argument and I think the Dylan when he came to New York I think he knew 200 Woody Guthrie songs and he was busy I've got three imitative using ramblin Jack Elliott style and then the other major influence on him was Hank Williams who is also a really I mean I think quite an extraordinary lyricist Rick's that makes a make secured mix make this case actually in public that uh that he thinks he's influenced as well by a number of a number of poets including including Eliot this this DynaMed I mean he read Verlaine Rambo he was hero definitely had a big this dynamic of imitation up to a habit and then a habit which is no longer consciously imitating and then becomes innovative and I think is actually the classical model for for education for education itself it's interesting that we're talking about teaching people how to write but of course we also want to make readers and so I think because of a fear frequently of the massive technical vocabulary that's often involved improvident prosody people will be worried if you will about about introducing young people to to poetry but I think it's a mistake because for for one thing you cannot suppress it right so so in fact the desire for rhyme which is a different kind of chord than then the most most poetry globally is is in blank verse so rhyme is is Chinese poetry is definitely the Arabs are obsessed with Ryan yeah there's a great scene in Dead Poets Society where the character that's played by Robin Williams Robin Williams rips out that you know that kind of Cartesian analytic approach the X and the y that's right and whether a poem is great and even though the message of that film I didn't like but but that one scene I really appreciate it because I remember very clearly the first time a poem hit me in the gut like I was in eighth grade hmm and and and it was a literature class I we I was actually at a progressive school where they had four quads and so based on your aptitude you went like they had a quad for it was actually pretty horrific now and I think about it this social engineering but they had a quad for math and science they had a quad for arts and music and things and then they had a quad for just like vocation well these are like eight so the students were divided by yeah and so I was in the language arts down quad but I remember clearly reading Ozymandias and it was just it just really affected me you know in such a deep way and that was the first time a poem had ever done that that's for me and well I was just gonna say and I don't think had it been explained to me in that x/y that's ripe thing it wouldn't it it was a gut reaction I think the question is in whether but when pedagogically I actually I actually do think that we should bring the art to the to the students on the other hand I know we have to we have to do it in a way that actually killed doesn't kill the spirit that that that recognition that you had in your heart like rhetoric you know one of the things about rhetoric that when you learn all the tricks it can it can it can almost take the magic okaylet but it but if if you if you it can also have the opposite effect where you really appreciate the artifice where you really appreciate what a master is doing and when they're when they're true masters there's a reason why somebody like Frost will go from it I am to anapest in in I mean he knows what he's doing because to him the the the form was actually sometimes he said that a great poet for him the form is surpasses the importance of the content and and I think there's a lot of truth to that I think I think Shakespeare I mean you can see Shakespeare is having fun with language you know he's you can see his tongue in cheek you know a horse a horse my kingdom for a horse I mean you can hear the horse trot you know and it's such a wonderful so to understand what he's doing yeah you know with like a kind of spondee type of and you it's interesting they said you can hear it which means that that memorization is not enough actually what we want to do I think as well is that once a student has memorized a poem we want them to deliver it but when we want them to recite it and it's there I think where the vocabulary comes in right as a useful way to explain the the recitation that they're that they're doing I think we don't do enough with delivery unfortunately is very important it's almost nixed from the Canon no that's right we live we live in a loud culture the volume may not have ever been this high in human culture but the discrimination of sound from sound act yeah the last two cannons are really they've been mixed and and they're it's I mean all of it really very few people learn the invention which is so central I mean the the the you know the first and the dominant you know definition but then comparison and and and in the in the in the in the topics of invention comparison is is that's the bread but ER of great poetry the conceit finding two things that are so dissimilar and yet bringing them together in a way that's the aha moment shall I compare thee to a summers day like me in fact in the poetics Aristotle says and this I think actually confirms something you were saying before he says that the power of of metaphor can't be taught and I'm not convinced of that by the way but it's a very interesting idea that in indeed the ability to see counterintuitive likenesses which then become quite intuitive is is a real gift but there's no doubt there's no doubt about it a figuration figuration is crucial and metaphor metaphor central but I still think a lot about this need to ask students to to stand and to deliver to use another teacher movie that that I enjoy and that is to ask them to speak because what I office of assertion no that's right more and more what I find is that the that students will that was a plug for your book thank you I appreciate that the students more and more actually have trouble articulating them themselves and again it's not because they don't have often quite very intelligent and interesting things to say but they're frequently intimidated by public public discourse they're exceptions no doubt it seems to me that the that any number of young people who are particularly naturally gifted at it yeah but I think to to ask them to memorize so that they don't have to access their phone but to ask them to memorize and to ask them to recite and to recite artistically I think is is itself a great gift because at that point they're being given their own voice but it's a voice that's being educated by by poetry itself I I make students memorize to their chagrin in every class that I do they have to memorize and I incorporate poetry and all I had when I taught astronomy I had a book on all the the poetry to deal with the Stars and when I taught ethics they read The Merchant of Venice so I always I always have poetry and bring it in and corporated I think it's really important I think one of the things about did you use sonnet 116 for the for the astronomy course I I can't remember I actually had a book that was just poems about the Stars but one of the things about poets I think is they just have brilliant ears because people are saying poetic things all the time there are children are saying poetic things I was I was at the grocery store the other day and there was this elderly I think she was probably Filipino American lady and she was a little plump and and she was in front of me and her and her husband or significant other showed up she was about to buy things and he showed up with a Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia you know and she looked at it and just her eyes lit up and she said oh my favorite and she said but I've gained so many pounds eating that but happy pounds you know and I I think that's what Dickens was able to do he just listened to people's conversations because one of the things that that's so clear from great poets is their characters are so different I mean when a bad writers always you feel the same 'no sits right in the characters whereas great writers are clearly I I once saw somebody he was reading Dostoyevsky's the brother to care was up at the airport so I just said how's that book going for you and he just he put it down he looked up he said this is not fiction [Laughter] and that's what great poetry is not fiction in that way it's like mythology you know it's the mythos my father's definition of mythology was too true to be believable and and and I think I Dylan you know there's there's a there's an old skit from a from a program where where they have Dylan at would he got through his bedside you ever see that know what were you know they're actors and he says how's things going woody and he's like the answer is blowin in the wind and I said I'm so sad to see you and this he said don't think twice it's all right he's like writing it down and you know it's it's obviously making fun of Ginsberg once asked him do you think you'll ever be tried as a thief and and but I think that's what Dylan had that year you know I was so much older than I'm younger than that now I can hear somebody saying that in a conversation definitely and and and he's got his notebook out so it's I think that's the in some ways the gift of the poet is that they're showing us something about the world that we we we might not have thought about it's like van Gogh because painting is a type of poetry as well you know when Van Gogh paints old shoes and you it forces you to look at those shoes and you'll never look at a pair of old shoes the same way it's right and I a friend of mine we were in West Africa he's a brilliant photographer Peter Sanders and he he took a picture of this old ladder that that was literally two sticks with other sticks tied together on a rope and it was up against an Adobe house and this was it was a primordial ladder right really just it must have been the first ladder must've looked like that and I actually had seen that matter several times but I never really looked at it and his photograph forced me to think about that that and I think you know when Emily Dickinson says something like there's a certain slant of light winter afternoons that oppresses like the heft of Cathedral to that slant of light winter afternoons will never be the same he's right we all know it yeah know it in a new way in a new way and that's the concern you know the conceit thereof of death and you know the declining day of a winter afternoon but I think that's the paradox of poetry that though it frees itself from the real it ends up revealing the real and so what I have more and more come to believe is that Aristotle is right that poetry is actually more philosophical than history yeah because it's not universal it does it's not as bound to the actual particulars and in that imaginative transformation is a displaced representation that we then can encounter without the difficulty of encountering ourselves directly and that's the catharsis I mean that was the whole event whatever was happening at the amphitheater in Greece the experience I mean these were really religious experiences and and did the the revelation that occurs not just in the play but in the spectator the one that's experiencing the play that internal revelation the plays the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king that that there's something that's revealed in the play that that corresponds to something being potentially being revealed in in in the south there's a great boar head story a knight in Cordova have you ever read that story not recently I don't he you know he's got a very wheeze even LaRoche ed is reading the poetics and he's having a really hard time understanding you know what what Aristotle was talking about and because the Arab tradition did not have theater hmm and so he has to go to a dinner and he's not really happy about it but he goes he goes to the dinner and and and they're having conversation about whether or not jahaly poetry was still relevant this pre-islamic poetry at the 7th is 6th century and 7th century Arabia was relevant to endow Lucien's who were living in a completely different culture and he quotes and you know Boris is always mixing reality with him with his own imagination but he quotes a famous poet Zuhair from the the the seven ODEs and about that that he saw death like a blind camel that fate you know it was like a blind camel it just it just stumbles and did camels really have anything to do with us here in Cordoba or not and so they're there debating this then the conversation turns to the this character who's just come back from from Persia and so they asked whoa what did you what did you see in Persia so he starts talking about how he saw play mm-hmm because the the Persians do have a tradition of passion plays and and so they're asking what what's a play and he begins to explain it's these people get together on a stage and they and they act out a story and they're all like that's ridiculous like who would believe something like that and he said well that's just it you start believing it the suspension of disbelief and then and then a light goes off in in 'verily is he he he realizes what Aristotle was trying to convey and is it's a beautiful story oh I'm definitely gonna have to read it but that that displacement which then allows us to recognize ourselves in characters and their actions who who resemble us but are not us I think is extraordinarily liberating right more and more realized how difficult it is for any of us to understand ourselves without without some way of doing it in which we don't have to look directly at ourselves and so the therapy of drama the therapy of both tragedy and comedy actually it seems to me is that we are liberated from ourselves even as we're seeing versions of ourselves in in the mimetic in the mimetic world I think Shakespeare is particularly good at that indeed especially with respect to getting his own play going and then establishing a play within a play from which characters will learn or not learn about them about themselves it's an obsessive technique of his well and I think we owe him to talk about it as well and he's forcing us to to see the play within our own play I think he's you know he it's a platonic idea that that this is that there's something else going on alongside this no that's right this experience there's a whole spiritual dimension I mean Midsummer's Night's Dream is a good example of that where he he's got all these dimensions alongside this dimension and the kind of sleepiness I mean that play huh and that's another play that huge I mean arguably when I was thinking about converting to Islam I actually went and saw that play and and in some ways that was the play that convinced me to Islam I yeah because because I you know I'd been in a head-on collision and and I really felt like I had you know it was a kind of wake up you know I was only 17 and and I really according to Highway Patrol I should not have survived the crash but I did and and it was very strange experience like that I had after that you know for several days I you know I was like like am I here is this meal spectral yeah a very very strange experience and when it went when I I really started studying religion seriously at that point and I did that for about a year and I went through I mean my mother had always told me that she raised us that religion was largely an arbitrary thing that most people just have the religion they were brainwashed into and they get entrenched in it and this is the truth because I was born in in Sri Lanka and therefore I'm a Buddhist or I'm a Hindu or it's a mere convention yeah it's it's there's there's um it's a lot less solid ground than a lot of people would like to think so I decided just to look at the different religions and what they had to say what was it about the play it summer nights it was actually the and when pop comes out and kind of says you know if we shadows have offended think but this and all is mended yeah that you just slumbered here there's just a dream and it was I kind of felt like that car crash was like it's time to wake up and I three and I realize I could go back to sleep and easily and and it was do I set out to wake up and make a conscious go of it with my life to use my life as a a spiritual path of awakening to actually awaken to our true self whatever that is and and that's that's that's what I I felt like I felt I didn't have an option that I that I that I couldn't just go back to sleep I so by the way what's fascinating and it was it was it was the it was a it was in Santa Barbara and it was it was actually the Royal Shakespearean they would say our silver duck sure it was a production from England and they were really great yeah the interesting thing about that about that play is that bottom is though is the one character who can actually pass from one order to another and he actually he actually goes from the human to the spirit world you know then back again and has some form of a relationship with a quasi a quasi deity yeah and I'm fascinated by that because he is the player well he's the one who wants to play play all the parts well it says I can play and indeed and so he's he's the most theatrical yeah and yet it might not be an accidental relationship between his theatricality and his and his spiritual distinctness mm-hmm that he actually can pass back and forth and when he does pass back when he's D metamorphosize right from ass to man again he actually comes back revising st. Paul he comes back with with indeed a vision and although he's not allowed to share that that vision by Theseus once they do the play within a play in act 5 he's also the one who can velocity seas around at certain moments he actually speaks back to her and I more and more begun to think that he's the unacknowledged king if you will of of that of that play and although at first it startled me to hear you say that that Midsummer Night's Dream played an important role and not in your conversion I actually think that that play is seriously exploring exactly what it is that makes it possible for us to experience this order as not the only order I totally agree and and to to pass if you will back back and forth well also you know my dad I I don't know anybody that would even come close to his knowledge of Shakespeare he was convinced that bottom was Shakespeare that he that was his that you know I shall call it bottoms dream for it hath no bottom that that that Shakespeare was able to dream impossible dreams and continue to dream throughout his life and and that he the the imagination no he certainly he certainly identifies with in the play the play adores him I've never seen a production even bad productions during which the mechanicals didn't bring down the house and bottom and bottom in particular yeah but to take him seriously as a seer or maybe even some kind of prophet makes us realize that the stakes of poetry may be much higher than we realized that these mere fictions are actually a form of spiritual training well to catch to catch the impermanence the theatrical quality actually of actual life well the the the Arabs believe that the poet was yeah was possessed by a genie you know that there's actually a great they have a group of Arab posts they're called the outlaw poets outlaw boys and and they really are they're they're they're amazing care one was called Texeira which means he had evil under his arm you know the genies he's carrying around but the the the outlaw poets were they were like the the Dalits you know they they were man Budin they were people that were expelled or had rejected the tribal alliances and they became a tribe for people without tribes mmm and and some of their poets are really really powerful but they they definitely saw a relationship between you know the spiritual realm and poetry that a true poet was was somebody who was inspired that there was something and and undeniably the importance of poetry is accentuated by the fact that there is a entire chapter in the padang called the poets and and and it's recognized that all of the chapter headings of the of the Quran are momentous things it's only momentous things get a chapter like the Jews are there's a chapter called Benny - Satya because there are momentous people mmm there's a chapter called the the the the spider right at the ant and even Arabs asked like why as adapters named after these little creatures and it's like because these are very very profound little creatures that have great import and and it's calling attention to those things and and the the the verse about the poets in the Quran because they accused the Prophet Muhammad of being a poet and one of the things that Emir out the father Jerzy 81 of the great scholars and a poet himself and and he fought the French in Algeria and was actually honored in this country there's a city in Iowa named after him out of cater Iowa because he saved Christians that were being persecuted in Syria but he he wrote a small book called timbale - which in it he argues that the reason prophets are accused of being poets is because of the similarity between prophecy and poetry the poet the Arabs have a beautiful expression for what a great poet does they call it a sad and lieutenant which means the easy impossible because it looks like I can do that but then when you try to do it you fall short and and there's something about great poets and I think well unfortunately for us lyric poetry our poetry has been reduced to lyric poetry and and most because of free verse and the loss of prosody and and or you know something like Mary Oliver is clearly capable of writing in verse if she wanted to and she certainly knows the art but chooses to to write in in this free verse and I find pre verse extremely interesting it's undeniably interesting but I think it's a third category I think prose poetry and and to call it versed for me as problem at the Arabs had a third category which is very similar to free verse which they caught they had novum and nothi and said yeah so they had prose poetry and then they had a third category which is more like rap today it's it's kind of has internal rhymes a lot of assonance a lot of alliteration but it's not metered and it's not it's not rhymed in any formalized I have a colleague who does some very interesting work on Whitman a poem i i i love and she she argues and I think it's quite astute that we can think of poetry as as as metre or we can think of poetry as line so her argument is that free-verse avails itself of an any number of formal properties of poetry note that what's significant is the line is the line itself and Whitman I think is really quite remarkable for achieving his measure in in line as opposed to meter yeah and and that it has it has a rhythm and in that sense it's like it's like prose that has a rhythm but because of the lineage the third category that you're well I I mean I would argue that see Whitman who really starts the ball rolling Whitman for his is free verse it's clearly versified but it's free whereas a lot of what is called free verse today that you can't if you look at you know captain oh captain that's clearly got strong meter in it it's just not fixed to any you can't say oh this is pentameter or tetrameter or dim it or what what you can't fix it it's but it's clearly metered he's got rhyme going he's got it's and that's why I think what happens later when when you have people like Ezra Pound because pound pound is like Picasso Picasso could do the realist if he wanted you know he was a trained painter but he chose to do the abstract and and it made sense because photography had really replaced realist art but but he could do that and and and pound could could write in in meter what a lot of people today are doing they don't know how to write in in meter in traditional forms and so they're just doing it's like modern dancing where you just get out and do whatever you want whereas all traditional dancing you have to learn how to dance the waltz is a very specific set or the cha-cha or even you know ballroom dancing all those forms have and this is what I think this would this is the demarcation of the the modern and the pre-modern world is that it it's there's a type of do what thou wilt it's the abbey of Thelema you know the the the rejection of law and order and I'm going to be free and and nobody's going to put constraints on me and I think the problem with that and this is why it's very interesting that the great disciplines of our civilization are called the liberal arts they're the arts that free you because if you if I get on a piano and just start pounding away that's not music I mean maybe George auntie all thought it was but it's not music you know but if I if I discipline myself to master this thing then I'm free okay to do whatever I want and that's where I would personally I really feel that to to to encourage people to do these things without learning the rules then you're free to break the rules it's like if I know grammar and I choose like Dickens to have a sentence with one word in it you know I don't the English teacher can say that's not a sentence because there's no subject and there's no predicate but Dickens knows what a sentence is right and if he chooses to make a sentence out of one word he has every right to do that he can break the rules because he knows the rules and I think that's where I really I think free-verse has has destroyed poetry personally yeah I don't agree startled me when you came back to the to to that to that to that point because I don't think that it's fully free I think again I think the the line is still a discipline and what its freed from is I think if they know what they're doing X yeah no that's that's right but most don't but I think that's always always the case in the sense that only those who have mastered an art can transcend it and in that sense I am traditionalist educationally without a doubt but when you look and I'm identifying Whitman in particular because he ends up being proof of something you said earlier when you were talking about the influence of the English Bible especially the King James Version on on English and American literary culture which is really hard to overestimate I mean he was a great reader of the Bible including the Psalms and it's quite clear that he picks up a lot of his phrasing and Clausing from the English Psalms in in the King James Version of the Bible and so in many ways I think Whitman is actually a traditionalist that he not only studied the forms but he studied he studied the great the great books if you if you will but but that's always the case it seems to me that the untrained tend to make for less compelling revolutionaries than the trained they're the ones who are actually free enough not only to choose when to obey rules or not but to invent new rules my father wrote a book on prosody and really one of his life yeah one of his lines in there was that he felt Robert Frost Gordon ace when he said that free-verse was like playing tennis without a net I'm just saying there was still lies I know I really that's my point about Whitman I do and if you take a poem like Kensington Gardens by Ezra Pound I mean that's as good as poetry gets as far as I'm concerned it's it's a it's a poem of free verse it's an incredibly powerful poem but again pound knew what he was doing yeah and and my argument is that people are it's a default setting when when you don't know how to do something and you go to the default setting of just doing whatever you can and and that's where I think you lose artifice is very important art and art is from ours you know power we the word for army is a cognate of art art is power and and and and power comes about from discipline it's it's it's it's a crewed by by discipline exact a civilization that's undisciplined will never become a powerful civilization and and and a writer who's undisciplined will never become a powerful writer and that's why I think great poetry is always there there's definitely the discipline is there you can feel it and somebody like if you if you take somebody like Cormac McCarthy is a good example of that who just from one point if you can drive you crazy with his punctuation but he knows exactly what he's doing he has a purpose behind that I'd like to ask him if I ever met him what about particular moments yeah like what what he's trying to convey in that usage but I really feel like we our civilization has lost so much by the abandonment of rules and one of the interesting things and Nietzsche brings out this this idea of the Apollonian and Dionysian these two impulses I we've become such a Dionysian culture that we've lost the importance of the Apollonian that that there's a balance between the two and wonderfully portrayed in Sense and Sensibility with these two Elinor and Marianne mm-hmm Austin does an incredible job at showing us these two ways of being in the world and and and how they're both in essence flawed that you know the end where there's a recognition of the other's worth and the beauty of the other that need one of them they need one another and and and I think we have an interesting tradition in Islam in in Sufism Tasso wolf which is that the Sufis should be outwardly sober but inwardly drunk or a static and and I think that is is that incredible balance of the Apollonian decorum the idea that decorum is important I mean one of the things that troubles me about modern culture is the complete loss of decorum the importance of and Richard Weaver I'm sure you're familiar with that the ideas have consequences I think he was really getting at the heart of the crises that were suffering from in the loss of a sense of hierarchy that all of life has hierarchy and and to reduce and level and I think that's one of the things about free-verse to me it levels it makes everybody a poet because everybody can do it and and then you lose something in in in the in in the discipline that that elevates one over the other not in terms of a kind of inherent superiority but in an acquired superiority the Confucian idea of the superior man was a man who had cultivated his character and his being and and and that's I think we've really lost that in our culture and and and and i think i think that that loss of meaningful life alive in a discipline that actually accomplishments are are something that are relished because they were so hard-earned when everything becomes easy when all information I mean I can just look up the meaning of any poem on the internet I can find out what meter it's in and what verse it's in and I admitting Lee have done that before well exactly but that something is lauded when every well I share your father's admiration for for Shakespeare and the way that I would approach what you're talking about which i think is right and the loss of a sense of decorum is a shame unfortunately we think of decorum as mere manners we don't think of it as an ordering an ordering principle of some of some kind but it's interesting that one of the reasons that decorum got a legitimately bad name is that it too often was used in to to support social hierarchies but what's missed I think in in decorum especially with respect to How to Train poets how to teach poets on the write poetry how to teach people how to read it is that the submission to a superior artist is how unless her artist becomes a greater artist and in fact in in Shakespeare's own example it's very easy to see that early in his career he was heavily influenced by Christopher Marlowe and he took Marlo as an object of imitation it's quite clear Marlowe in great part because he died he died young tends to have a verse less mature than the most mature of Shakespearean verse but I had had he lived we don't know where he would have ended up that's right and Shakespeare's own imitation of Marlowe made it possible for him but to begin to do things that Marlowe did quite less quite less frequently so for example Shakespearean meter tends to be much more regular in the early part of his career and then he starts to experiment with more and more interesting metrical substitutions for example the line changes so that frequently he has n stop lines at the beginning and relies much more heavily on rhyme itself we think of him always writing bankers when in fact there's a great deal of rhyme in the earlier frequently in the earlier in the earlier work Romeo and Juliet for example often has very interesting end rhymes early early in the play and so then you get this experiment with enjambment that actually comes to define the Shakespearean line which is really quite distinct and so what I think we've lost in in in the very loss of decorum that Europe that you're talking about is not the loss of submitting to illegitimate social Authority because let it let it go but the submission to legitimate artistic Authority in which your training requires you to recognize someone's artistic talent is so superior to your own that you need to pay attention to learn how to how to do that and again intuitively we all we all know this Aristotle says in the poetics that the human being is the most mimetic of animals right and he says something very interesting that I've actually meditated on my neurons we begin to actually mirror the person were sitting with entrainment the hearts begin to beat in in in sync with the people we're standing next no exactly living together their their their periods synchronize that's right so that when young when young people are actually trying to learn something of course they imitate their heroes they play their guitar like their favorite hero does they hold the bat that way you could always see a young person when they're when they're imitation Dylan was imitating James Dean Charlie Chaplin that's exactly right right but that is it so he became who he was yeah it wasn't just that he became that but he became it by in a sense mastering his master I once saw a documentary on one of my favorite there was this Hank Williams and Hank Williams could imitate these two singers and he said he realized that he had to find his own voice he said so I got right in between them entry they showed the two singers and they blended their voice and it was Hank Williams it's just amazing remarkable so again mimesis like he was a twin B goes in great detail about the mimetic importance of mimesis in a civilization that's that that I think is the paradox of originality and of finding ones there's not words you know yeah no that's right until one masters another artist one is imitating and then feels compelled to to innovate and at that point I think newness is born the truth of the matter is before Shakespeare a Shakespearean line of extraordinary metrical volatility and varied pacing jams right oh it's new yeah it's new the language it thing the languages he invented words he constantly inventing it was it was a new it was a new language and then we think about somebody like like Milton who's paying a great deal of attention than to - to Shakespeare much less so tomarlo and he himself realizes that that metrically volatile in jammed line is something that he himself can do in paradise in paradise lost in his epic poem but he there finds that the Shakespearean syntax is not complicated enough for the for the elections and the actions that he wants to represent and his own Latinate his own Latinate training at university drives him to then create a miltonic style that's distinctly distinctly his own but I agree the the liberal arts tradition is a tradition that's ultimately liberated but próxima a discipline that's right approximately it requires discipline and and and submission right and the submission the submission to a discipline I think is something that's a great gift to young people whether it's the discipline that music that's my planet lettuce and poetry because that kind of mastery empowers them much more much more fully than shall I put it less discipline for sure forms of expression you know Frost said the life is is a series of disciplines and the first one is the acquisition of language of words and even the nuances of words and the meanings of words and poets great poets they know their words so well and and and they and they and they reveal that and you know Shakespeare sister Mary and Joseph I think compellingly shows the indebtedness of Shakespeare to artifice to to mastering the the books of rhetoric of his time and and Marshall McLuhan in in his book on the Trivium the listen Elizabethan age which created the greatest English literature that we have was an age of rhetoric that's what they were doing and and that's why I really feel you know just to close this out I think what you did with the office of assertion because I'd been looking for a book for freshmen because there's a couple of things about our college students today they don't know English grammar because they didn't go to grammar school which to me is a crime against a young person and and two they they really struggle with writing partly because they don't know grammar but more importantly because they don't know topics of invention they don't know how ideas are generated and the the discipline of rhetoric and what you did with that very short but incredibly rich little book was to really give a student in a very short and concise way the essence of writing a good essay and I think the essay in the end about Telemachus and and from from the Odyssey is proof in the pudding so I appreciate that agree - yeah yeah no I mean that's how we ended up connecting and and you've now written for the journal and hopefully it'll you know it'll continue the dialogue so I want to really thank you just for coming out or hear it at the upper campus at Zaytuna College and and I also for inviting me out to the University of Dallas I really enjoyed it your hospitality was wonderful and meeting all those people and hopefully we'll do that again here something similar to that so we hope so and I wanted to thank you and the community had Zaytuna or for having me today it was a delight yeah great all right [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Renovatio: The Journal of Zaytuna College

Views: 34,580

Keywords: Poetry

Id: 2Vwze1G9y-A

Length: 66min 10sec (3970 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 12 2018