Going With the Flow

or not...

(I’m proud to say that this essay started as a letter to a friend about what I admired in a certain poem. This friend’s privacy is carefully guarded, so that’s all I’ll say.)

What I admired about this and other works of this poet is the flow. There’s probably a better word, but I’ll stick to flow. The contrast is the Big Name PDX Poet (IYKYK) whom I heard read the other night. The poems were full of sharp insight and music and glorious sounds, but each line occupied its own space. The ironic thing is that on the page this poet’s work has a lot of flow, but it didn’t come through that evening when read aloud.

I believe it was gentleman farmer Robert Frost who observed the relationship between “verse” and “reverse.” At the end of a line of poetry, just like at the end of a row of butter beans, one turns. (Paul Muldoon’s The End of the Poem is full of this enlightening word play.) At open mics and even when listening to Big Names one can hear the traces and reins and feel the hot breath of the horses as the poet/ploughman makes that turn. And many poems, read aloud, end without having an ending, if that makes sense. The big, loud carriage return lever has rolled to the end of the page, and the poet steps back to retrieve more paper (more on this in a bit), and the audience wakes up and claps. And this is for really nice poems!

Do MFA programs teach poets how to read aloud to an audience?

What I feel is missing is what I will call flow. While the poet/ploughman has to get the team to turn, the poet/pilot in the ag plane cannot stop, by the laws of aerodynamics. The poet/pilot pulls the nose up and to the right to start an elegant wingover. (Disclaimer: while I have flown thousands of hours I have never done any ag work, although I have done a few wingovers. I think I can put myself into the cockpit while watching that maneuver, but it might just be my imagination, and, as Johnny Burke wrote in 1940, “imagination is crazy...it has you asking a daisy...what to do, what to do.”)

Others turn elegantly, too: the competitive swimmer with the kick turn, the Tai Chi master with the Double Whip, and others. It’s something I strive for.

My friend says that internal rhyme is a big help with flow, as is the natural sing-song iambic rhythm of spoken English. When Kenneth Branagh played Hamlet there were no verses: he played the iambs as if they were normal, everyday speech. You had to strain to see what was on the page.

My friend adds that end rhymes can break the flow. Ending a line with a plosive — d, k, p, t, or glottal stop — stops the flow. Some linguists even call these letters “stops.” Songwriters have known this forever. Cole Porter began the Beguine and got no kick from champagne, Oscar Hammerstein waited for “that moment divine,” Johnny Burke (again) praised pennies from heaven. A singer can hold these letters — e, s, n, and the like — until running out of breath. But try doing it with “heart.”

That makes the stop into a tool. In Cole Porter’s list song At Long Last Love (1938), the first few list items end on plosives — earthquake, shock, soup, mock — but the next few lines end joy, feel, McCoy — because true love can last for bars and bars if not years and years. The pattern continues with end rhymes — lark, park — then switches to letters that can be held — fancy, of, love.

These simple ideas carry a lot of weight (if this were a song I suppose I’d have to say carry a lot of mass), but there is another problem: orators and singers and wind players have to breathe. Breath can be a dam or just a large rock in the middle of the river. The dam is a stop; the river flows around the rock. I don’t know how to do that reliably, but I do know some reliable dam-building techniques: adverbs, progressive verbs, gerunds, unnecessary conjunctions. I am constantly trying to avoid these and other errors.

Some wind players can do it. Paul Desmond would breathe at the end of the phrase, rather than at the end of line. Charlie Parker and Cannonball Adderley could do the same thing.

So where does this leave the poet? Poetry might flow on the page and clunk aloud, or vice-versa. Jack Kerouac was a master of flow in both senses. One can hear it in his audio recordings like Poetry For The Beat Generation (with Steve Allen)

The lines are different lengths — some three words, some forty. According to the liner notes this was done in one take. First thought, best thought.

Kerouac famously wrote on rolls of teletype paper. He did not stop to change the page, or turn the page like I have to do in my notebooks. He just let it flow.

But he didn’t need the whole roll. Consider his poem, Buddha. It looks formal: 5 lines, 6, 5, 6, until the pattern is broken. (That’s the mathematician in me talking, but I won’t apologize.) There’s not much punctuation: a few commas and a handful of em-dashes, which may well be marks to breath. This is definitely meant to be read aloud, to an audience, with a smoky jazz band playing in the background.

Kerouac’s language is dense. It encourages me to try to stretch language, too. What does “stretch” mean? In Buddha he uses the word “ululating” but a few lines later uses “countin[’]. According to the Oxford English Dictionary “ululate” is used approximately 3 times in every 100,000,000 words of modern English prose. You don’t have to do the Math to see that it’s an obscure word. On the other hand “countin[’]” probably got used 1,000 times within the city limits of Wendell, North Carolina in the time it took to write this paragraph.

But on with the flow...

Kerouac kept the flow going even as he switched languages. His Pomes All Sizes has some Chinese (in Gotha) and some colloquial Canadian French. Kerouac stretched personally, too, as seen in On The Road and in his embrace of Zen Buddhism.

Gotha begins

Sitting in the chair

In the morning ground

Is no sitting in no

Chair in no morning ground,

which is a pretty good approximation of “The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.” (Then again, I once wrote All The Things You Aren’t as an exercise in First Order Logic: a negation of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1939 All The Things You Are. Go figure.)

If Kerouac can code-switch so can I?

There are more examples of flow going around the rocks rather than being dammed up. Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen (1875), more properly “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle,“ is an example. I recommend the Caterina Antonacci - Royal Opera House version, but beware: it’s NSFW. Seriously.

In L’Amour the waterfall hits the rocks three times but continues until it completes its descent. It’s an 8-measure melody (in jazz we’d say 8 bars, but this is opera, man), just like most of the melodies in the Great American Songbook, which is about as much as one pair of lungs can carry without breathing (and let me tell you, if you watch the video you will be very aware of Antonacci’s breathing). And it rhymes! This could be You Do Something To Me (Cole Porter, 1929) in which “You do that voodoo that you do so well.”

The end words of the rhymes in L’Amour are rebelle, apprivoiser, l’appelle (Antonacci uses an apple as a prop instead of the usual flower!), refuser, prière, tait, préfère, and plaît. There are no plosives. Monsieur, you object to the ‘t’ endings? Listen, s’il vous plaît! That final ‘t’ is not pronounced. Tait? The same: “be silent” ends on a silent ‘t.’

[What is this? A cryptic crossword?]

Looking at the libretto on paper, without the music, the flow is not clear. But it’s there. William Carlos Williams’ overused “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow...” has the flow when read aloud, and flow is referred to in the text — glazing involves flow — but doesn’t look flow-y on paper. In fact it looks concrete, each stanza a wheel barrow.

The flow that can be written is not the eternal flow.

The flow that can be spoken might just be so.

I’m beginning to think that poetry requires all of the senses. You have to look at it. You have to hear it. I do word play on food, so you have to taste it. If you write it out longhand, your poems or another’s, you feel it.

And I have a poem Astronomy Stinks. Some poems just smell.

You can confirm that with my dog, who loves to roll in the stinky poems I discard onto the floor.