Metrical inventions: Zukofsky and Merwin

Cook is Professor Emeritus at Brown University. His writings include 20 books of criticism, eight books of poetry, and translations from the Greek and Russian.

A broad and various metrical invention is audible in the new poetry all around us, if we listen for it, expanding well beyond the preliminary calibrations of "free" and "formal" verse, though generally we should keep in mind strictures that were already old when Jacques Maritain cited them a generation ago from Jean Cocteau still a generation earlier. "These mysterious rules [the `free and contingent' rules of free verse], as Cocteau puts it, are with regard to the old rules of versification what ten games of chess played at once are with regard to a game of dominoes."1 The rhythmic lead of Whitman, picked up not only throughout the world by such as Claudel and Mayakovsky but extended in American practice by Pound and Williams, and then by Olson and Creeley, and then by newer poets, has powerfully developed and mutated for a century and a half (Cook, "Projections"; "After Olson").

In considering the richness of the metrical dimensions of poetic production during the past two decades or so, it would be protractedly diversionary to access the superb micro-analyses of recent writers on metrics like Derek Attridge and Paul Kiparsky, though (what I am not offering), a comprehensive survey, should ignore their strictures at its peril. We remain in a situation where on the one hand complex given patterns in the past are available as models inimitable in our practice but available as criterial markers-the polyphonies of Pindar, of Welsh and Old Norse metrics, of the troubadours. Yet we do have available the alliteration of Anglo-Saxon poetry as an alternate English possibility. The Saxon alliteration across half-lines is both imitable and variously imitated, as the thought-rhyme of Hebrew poetry with its accompanying sound patterns really is not (except for translation). Both of these conventions offer the analogy of metrical modules that allow for a considerable range of syllabic variation within a metric unit, as opposed to those built on the accentual-syllabic meters of French and Italian dominant in the Renaissance and most fully exemplified by the poetry of the 1590's, most notably that of Spenser. This poetry sets up a metrical tradition that does not admit of intralineal variation through extrametrical syllables.

Even a less than comprehensive overview of recent powerful inventions should listen to the transmutations of the line achieved by many poets-- Michael Anania's modulations of a Williams base, the fluid very long lines of Gerald Burns and Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, the careful stepped-triads of Mary Oliver, Jorie Graham's polyphonization of ruminative speech through intermittent italics, the more structured self-interrupting ruminations of Denise Riley, Leslie Scalapino's suspensive sweep of sentences through a pages-long variation of repetitions, the shorter-breathed anaphoras of Anne Waldman, to mention just a few. Robert Creeley continues to apply the pressures of curtailing syntax on the short line; John Ashbery has recourse not only to the phantom-polyphony of the two-track As We Know but to such various verbally playful but metrically conventional forms as sonnet, sestina, and pantoum. Instead of surveying all these here, I should like to look at the implications of the use of word-boundary, which amounts to a kind of caesura, in the work of Louis Zukofsky, and at W. S. Merwin's continued inventions as he manipulates caesura, enjambment, line-echo, and terminal rhyme.

2.

For nearly fifteen years at the crest of his career Louis Zukofsky used prevailingly a line which conformed to the rule that it would consist of exactly five words, an explicit boundary that has considerable metrical consequences. He uses this device for the "A"s after 1963 (except for "A"-24, an anthology of his phrases set to music in a five-track polyphony by Celia Zukofsky), and also for all of 80 Flowers, and for the final "Gamut." In such a style the regularity of the five words to a line means that the mind is counting them, along with the voice, and so there is a thought-caesura, as well as a small sound-caesura, between one word and another. They are arrested, in sound as in sense, and they are also liberated for an attention to the order of the words, to ordonnance.

In the uniform five-word-to-a-line rule the words are as though suspended above the natural flow of a spoken sentence, superordinating a metrical fix over and above, and to some degree against, the modernist rule that words be given in a spoken natural order. The five-word rule provides a form for miming the artificed order that was especially accessible in the inflected language of the Latin poets Zukofsky composed on. Especially Horace (whom he does not "translate") and Mallarme achieve a suspensive metrical surface largely through word ordonnance. Horace and Mallarme "purify the language of the tribe" by forcing words to remain unresolved through much of a run: (To the cloud, overwhelming, hushed base of basalt and of lava as far as the echoes slaves to a trump without virtue)