The Written Poem: Semiotic Conventions from Old to Modern English

The Written Poem

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The Written Poem Semiotic conventions from Old to Modern English

Rosemary Huisman

CASSELL London and New York

Cassell Wellington House 125 Strand London WC2R OBB England 370 Lexington Avenue New York NY 10017-6550 USA First published 1998. Reprinted in paperback 1999 © Rosemary Huisman 1998 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN

0 304 33999 7 (hardback) 0 304 70734 1 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huisman, Rosemary, 1941The written poem: semiotic conventions from Old to Modern English/Rosemary Huisman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-304-33999-7 (hardcover) ISBN 0-304-70734-1 (paperback) 1. English poetry—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. English poetry—Old English, ca. 450-1100—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. English language—Old English, ca. 450-1100—Versification. 4. Commonwealth poetry (English)—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 5 American poetry—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 6. English language—Written English. 7. Semiotics and literature. 8. Literary form. 9 Poetics. I. Title. PR502.H75 1998 821.009—dc21 97-48708 CIP Typeset by York House Typographic Ltd Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

vii 1

Part One Contemporary Poetry Chapter 1 Poetic Discourse and Genre Chapter 2 The Seen Poem and Its Semiosis Chapter 3 The Semiotic of Art and Music

7 33 41

Chapter 4 The Semiotic of the Body Chapter 5 The Semiotic of Language

58 70

Part Two

From Old English to Contemporary Poetry

Chapter 6 The Origin of the English Line, 1100-1300 Chapter 7 The Transition to a Literate Subject, 1500-1800 Chapter 8 The Reading Subject and the Writing Subject, 1800-1990 Epilogue The Postmodern Subject and the New Media Poem

99 127 143 160

Bibliography

167

Index

179

V

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Acknowledgements

A major part of the research for this book was done in 1994 on study leave from the University of Sydney in France and England, and my grateful thanks go to the staff of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the British Library, London, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for their kind assistance at that time. I must also thank the Department of English at the University of Sydney for their assistance, though necessarily small from hard-pressed research monies, which enabled me to travel to England briefly in 1995. And finally researchers must eat, and my daughter Penny Huisman and her friend Rod Drayton have sustained me in good food, good wine and good cheer through the last months of relentless writing. I am grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: University of California Press, for the English translation of the Preface to Un Coup de Des from Stephane Mallarme, Collected Poems of Stephane Mallarme, trans./ed. by Henry Weinfield, copyright © 1994 The Regents of the University of California. Joanne Burns, for 'reading' from 'Pillows' from Compass (1984). Also published in Joanne Burns, blowing bubbles in the 7th lane (Sydney: FAB Press, 1988). Oxford University Press, for Derek Mahon, 'Girls on the Bridge', from Selected Poems (1991). Simon & Schuster and Faber and Faber for Marianne Moore, 'The Fish', from The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore, copyright © 1935 by Marianne Moore, copyright renewed © 1963 by Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot. ETT Imprint, for Gwen Harwood, 'The Present Tense'. This version of the poem was first published in Island (1989). The complete and final poem appears in Gwen Harwood, The Present Tense (Watsons Bay, New South Wales: ETT Imprint, 1995). Geoff Page, for 'Decalogue in Double Voice', from Westerly (1992). Heather Cam, for 'How I Come to Own a Black Leather Jacket with Studs, Zippers, Snaps and Pockets Galore', from The Moon's Hook (Poetry Australia 125/South Head Press, 1990). Katherine Gallagher, for 'Nettie Palmer to Frank Wilmot ("Furnley Maurice")', from Southerly (1989). David Herkt, for 'Standing in the Shadows', from Meanjin (1989). Carol Novack, for 'The Staircase', from Susan Hampton and Kate vii

Acknowledgements

Llewellyn (eds), The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986). Anne Kellas, 'Z, under house arrest in Johannesburg, 1988', from Island (1989). Subhash Jaireth, for 'About words (a journey into the world of Alzheimer's disease)', from LiNQ (Literature in North Queensland) (1992). Stephen Mallick, for 'First Kill' from Overland (1993). This poem was published under the pseudonym of Stephen Anthony. I dedicate this book to the memory of my parents, Doris Isabella (nee Thompson) and Keith Lowe, great readers both of them.

VIII

Introduction

The idea, the question to which this book attempts an answer, came, as many ideas do, from an emotion. I had submitted a poem to a newspaper; it was published, but oh! the indignation when I first saw it in print. The poem had four stanzas, of four lines each. For reasons of space, or inadvertently, the literary editor omitted the line space between the third and fourth stanzas, so that eight lines of verse followed continuously. I was furious! This was not my poem! though the words were exactly the same on the page. Some textual feature, satisfying to me as the logo/egocentric poet, had been lost. But what? My original personal interest in reading contemporary poetry had led me to a research interest in Old English poetry, poetry written before about AD 1100, in Anglo-Saxon England. This was because, separated by a thousand years of 'Romantic imperialism' in which English poetry was usually written in syllabic metres, contemporary poetry (for the most part) and Old English poetry both based their versification on the rhythm of conversational English, a rhythm based on the regularity of stress not syllable. A native speaker of English does not need any theory of metrics to identify such rhythms - the stress beat is felt in the pulse in the chest (accompanied or not by vocalization) as well as cognitively perceived in the word interpreted as most important in its textual context (whatever any measuring device of loudness, etc., actually registers). So the similarity between poetry in Old and twentieth-century English, separated by such a period of social and historical change, was of great interest to me. As well as a greater understanding of the two periods themselves, such study can give one more insight into the subtle 'music' of traditional syllable-counting poetry in English, where the metrical regularity of, say, an idealized iambic pentameter is necessarily spoken in the stress-based rhythm of English. But an interest in Old English poetry also gave me an awareness of a great difference between then and now - the Old English manuscript text of a poem looks nothing like the twentieth-century poem printed on the page. The Old English text is written continuously across the page, filling the valuable vellum from left to right margin, without lineation or stanza spacing. So I knew that my emotional reaction, described above, to my poem's printed layout was a socially situated one, not a 'natural' or inevitable one. It 'made sense' only in a social context in which poems appeared on the page in lines and stanzas, where language/textual conventions for 1

Introduction

poetic discourse could be seen as well as spoken. Thinking about the 'seen poem' led quickly to a concern with lineation, for from the fourteenth century (the time of Chaucer) at least the most immediate sign of poetry has been its graphic display in lines. Thus the first question of this study became: what is the origin and development of the line in English poetry? And what kinds of semiosis, or meaning-making, have been associated with the line, or with spatial arrangement on the page generally? Part One of this book is primarily concerned with the second issue, and Part Two, Chapter 6 with the first. But studying the spatial display of the text alone is not enough to explain my indignation over a lost line space. It is not just the generic features of the textual object, the possibilities for the 'seen poem' in the twentieth century, which need to be explained. For patently I felt some sense of 'ownership' of the visual display of the poem, that indeed the appearance, as much as the words and grammar, was a realization of my writing (both writing down and composing) of the poem. Again, such an attitude is historically and socially produced; it assumes at least that the poet equates composing and writing and that the text is fixed and reproducible. To explain such attitudes you need to study the subject of poetic discourse as it is socially produced in the context of, at least, contemporary conditions of literacy and language technology. So a second set of general questions emerged: what changes can we describe in subjectivity or habitus, that is in dispositions to interpret or to produce meaning, and how are these changes in relation to poetic discourse also related to the larger social context, especially to changes in that context? Part Two, Chapters 7 and 8 make some suggestions on these issues. Because my work on the line emerged from questions about twentieth-century poetry, I was particularly concerned to examine the development of twentieth-century subjectivity (I do not of course wish to imply some totalizing 'subject position' at any one historical time, for the individual habitus is socially as well as historically positioned), so Chapters 7 and 8 lay particular emphasis on changes from the sixteenth century to the present day. A brief summary of the contents may be helpful, as this work brings together material and methods more commonly isolated in different academic discourses. To the reader who thinks, 'this is not my field', as they begin this chapter or that, I would suggest that, rather than abandon the text, they turn initially to a chapter whose contents are more compatible with their own immediate interests. True, the first two chapters introduce terminology which will be used in the remainder of the book, but I have tried as much as possible to write an interdisciplinary text; the corollary is that I hope those expert in a particular field will forgive whatever solecisms I commit when paraphrasing the language of their discipline. In a work of rather panoramic ambition it has been inevitable that some parts primarily record my own research while others are more deeply 2

Introduction

indebted to the writing of other scholars. Chapter 5, 'The Semiotic of Language', and Chapter 6, 'The Origin of the English Line', offer the most original contributions. The meta-text of endnotes, recorded at the end of each chapter, both records the great contribution of other scholars to this text and serves, I hope, as a guide to further exploration of those issues particularly interesting to the individual reader. I would like also to record the pervasive influence on my thinking of the work of M. A. K. Halliday in systemic functional linguistics, whose way of talking about language first showed me a way of talking about texts as social practices. Chapter 1, 'Poetic Discourse and Genre', discusses the meanings given to genre and discourse in literary, linguistic and cultural studies. The modelling of social context by sociologist Basil Bernstein (in his study of pedagogy) is described as particularly helpful. Lineation as the dominant visible sign of poetic discourse is exemplified, and the generic contravention of the prosepoem discussed, with particular reference to the writing of the Russian semiotician, Jurij (also Juri) Lotman. Chapter 2, 'The Seen Poem and its Semiosis', gives a short account of the semiotic complexity possible in the visual realization of poetry, introducing the topics which will be discussed in Chapters 3 to 5. Chapter 3, 'The Semiotic of Art and Music', Chapter 4, 'The Semiotic of the Body', and Chapter 5, 'The Semiotic of Language', discuss the different possibilities of meaning-making which have been attributed (consciously or not) to the seen poem, making close reference to the writing of individual poets both in their poems and in their writings on poetry. Most examples are taken from the twentieth century. Chapter 6, 'The Origin of the English Line, 1100-1300', discusses the phenomenon of doubly transferred literacy, from Latin to Anglo-Norman to English texts, and includes a detailed discussion of British Library manuscript Cotton Caligula A.ix (which contains texts of Lasamon's Brut and The Owl and the Nightingale). Chapter 7, 'The Transition to a Literate Subject, 1500-1800', describes the relations of poets to their handwritten and printed texts after the advent of printing, and traces the late transition to a literate subject associated with poetic discourse. Chapter 8, 'The Reading Subject and the Writing Subject, 1800-1990', reviews, very briefly, the history of reading, discusses disjunction in the reading and writing subject and suggests a role this disjunction has played in the generation of new writing practices for poetic discourse. The Epilogue, 'The Postmodern Subject and the New Media Poem', describes the advent of the immaterial seen poem through late twentiethcentury technologies. The answers which I finally give myself to that initial question - what textual features had been lost? - turned out to depend on the conjunction of social writing/reading practices which emerge from two widely separated 3

Introduction

periods of English poetry - the development of the poem in the twelfth century as a visual object, and the development of a highly literate subjectivity for interpreting that visual object in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

4

Part One Contemporary Poetry

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1 Poetic Discourse and Genre

A traditional term for grouping literary texts, by various criteria, is that of genre. Thus Alastair Fowler calls his 1982 book-length study Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes.' The word genre has been used in various ways, but initially I want to use it to make two broad generalizations. Studying the meanings of a genre in its historical situation, any genre, involves the study of two related practices. First, one must study the practices of production and interpretation (how it is made and how it is read) through which a text is recognized as an instance of that genre. Secondly, one must study those practices of production and interpretation which are invoked (by the speaker/writer or listener/reader) once the genre has been acknowledged. No, there is no absolute meaning associated with a text, but yes, there are certainly predictable meanings. This book is specifically concerned with texts which have been called 'poems' and grouped together in the traditional literary genre 'poetry', so the two generalizations above may be paraphrased more pertinently. A text will be recognized, or not, as a poem according to practices which are historically and socially contingent. Once recognized, the text may be read/spoken according to practices for reading/speaking 'a poem' which, again, are historically and socially contingent. A banal example may be helpful. To my students I hold up a small packet and ask, 'What's this?'. They look at the object, note its material features and answer, 'A packet of seeds'. We look at the words on the back of the packet. Having recognized 'seed packet instructions', we can make predictions about the language of the text. 'Leeks grow best in a warm place with plenty of plant food added.' The grammar and words are unsurprising, but so also is the way we read the text. We are unlikely to linger over possible symbolic readings, and if we think about the graphic display of image and text at all, we will probably conclude they are designed both to advertise and inform an attractive picture of leeks, a clear and sequential layout of planting instructions. But, like the avant-garde poets of the twenties, I could take the leek instructions, rearrange them, and publish them as a 'found poem' in my book, Collected Poems. Leeks grow best in a warm place with plenty of plant food added. 7

The Written Poem

If the publisher is reputable, or if you believe book titles, that is, if you recognize a text because of some institutional authority (here those with power in the social institution of literature), then you may accept that the text is a poem and read it accordingly, noting perhaps its transfer from the everyday register of 'seed packet instructions'. Or, more immediately from the text itself, you may recognize it as a poem merely from its layout in lines, and read accordingly. This 'reading accordingly' refers to your own practices of reading, which depend on both what is historically possible now and what has been socially experienced by you. As a well-read reader, having recognized 'a poem' of twentieth-century 'free verse', you may invest its words with wider resonance (is it just leeks that need warmth and food?) and read its graphic display as meaningful (note that word 'added' enacting its meaning in the visual object of the poem - being added on its own line). And of course you may then make your own judgement - bathos? - a literary type of judgement which is scarcely relevant to horticulture. So the interpretative practices are not 'in the text', but are invoked by your prior recognition of the text's social function. It should be clear from these initial remarks that I locate this study of the semiosis (the processes of meaning) of poetry within the study of the sociology of literature. This is not equivalent to what has been called Literary Pragmatics, which 'aspires to be, at one and the same time both literary and linguistic' and which is 'grounded in a sound explanatory theory of verbal communication'.2 Rather such a study needs to be grounded in a more general account of social practice, its reproduction and change, within which language itself is theorized as a social practice. A linguistic approach compatible with such a need can be found in the functional study of language as social semiotic, as modelled by the linguist M. A. K. Halliday.3 In this approach, a culture (to use the word loosely and holistically) is constituted of semiotic acts, meaningful acts, realized in all the material possibilities of the culture (including social relations and bodily behaviour). Of these possibilities for realization, language is undoubtably the most complex. Halliday's description of 'language as social semiotic' means that, in his model of language, semantic acts, meaningful acts in language, are semiotic acts, socially meaningful behaviour. Meaning is not 'in the text', but in the social function recognized by the person for whom the language is meaningful - as in my example of the seed packet language, differing in meaning (potentially, in twentieth-century Western society) according to whether it was read within the semiotic (socially meaningful) institutions of 'horticulture' or 'literature'. At the same time, theorized consistently, a model of 'language as social semiotic' will not allow you to view language as somehow a 'lower-order' material representation of culture; rather 'language practices are social practices' and constitute, with the practices realized in other media, that which we understand by culture or 'social context'.4 The genres (as I have 8

Poetic Discourse and Genre

used the word initially) recognized in a culture, in a given place and time and social milieu, the manner of that recognition (which semiotically may be intra- or extra-linguistic, that is through relations within the text, or through relations between the text and its environment, including other texts), and the social/linguistic practices then brought into play - all of this is part of the social context of the production or interpretation of any text. Halliday himself, and Ruqaiya Hasan, who has recently published 'The Conception of Context in Text', have, unlike some other systemicists, deliberately left context relatively untheorized,5 concentrating on the task of linguistic description. Plainly, to study poetry within the sociology of literature, some more detailed theory of sociological explanation was required, specifically a theorizing complementary to Halliday's which would enable the relation of linguistic practice and social practice to be the focus of attention. Jay Lemke, in Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics (1995), gives a helpful summary of the work of those one might most profitably turn to for such theory: to Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian scholar writing from the 1920s to the 1960s, to Basil Bernstein, British sociologist, publishing from the 1950s, to Michel Foucault, the French social historian, publishing from the 1960s to the 1980s, and to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, publishing from the 1960s.6 Certainly, my reading in the writings of all these scholars has had considerable influence, in a general way, on the nature of the issues raised in this book. It is, however, the work of Basil Bernstein which has particular pertinence to my need to describe poetry and the social practices associated with it. With the benefit of hindsight I write the above comment, for it was in fact some considerable time after the principles enunciated in the first paragraph of this chapter had become clear to me that I discovered that Bernstein had made very similar statements in the larger context of his work of formulating a sociological theory of pedagogy.7 His 'recognition rules' associated with 'classification' are comparable to my first principle ('one must study the generic practices of production and interpretation through which a text is recognized as an instance of that genre' - how did I recognize the same words as seed packet instructions? or as a poem?). His 'realization' rules associated with 'framing' are comparable, though with significant differences, to my second principle ('one must study those practices of production and interpretation which will be invoked once the genre has been acknowledged' - the meanings of the seed packet instructions will tell me clearly what to do in the garden. I wonder what this poem is supposed to be about?). I will return to a closer discussion of Bernstein's work. It is necessary at this point to make some detailed remarks on the word 'genre' itself. Where I have used 'genre' so far in this chapter, others might have written 'discourse' (and indeed I will qualify my own use of both words as this discussion proceeds).8 From the vantage point of this approach, located in the sociology of literature, it makes no sense to ask questions like 9

The Written Poem

'what is genre?' (or what is poetry?, what is literature?) if what you want is an absolute answer. On the other hand, it makes great sense if you want to know 'how does the word function contextually', that is historically and socially. Etymologically, 'genre' is related to the word 'gender', both coming into English from French (and derived as Old French gendre from the Latin genusy 'kind' or 'type'), 'gender' in the fourteenth century (the time of Chaucer) but 'genre' not till the nineteenth. Social/literary history is of course written into those derivations and time frames. Consider the word 'genre' in its contemporary use in English. As a lexical item (word), it typically functions to realize a Field (subject matter) of social action: 'talking about semiosis/meaning-making', especially 'talking about meaning-making in language'.9 Grammatically, it functions as a noun realizing, semantically, a participant. Its nominal role in English promotes its understanding as a 'thing', for Halliday a technical term derived from everyday understanding of semantic structure.10 This is a rather longwinded way to conclude that genre is a superordinate (general) term for talking about language as constituted by things, language things realized in the materiality of language (spoken or written) for English speakers. The American semiotician Charles Peirce, in his triadic understanding of the sign, described the mutual interdependence of the sign, the interpretant (in language, the paraphrase) and the 'known object', such that a known object is that which is represented as such, not some absolute reality, independent of its representation. The linguistic 'things', a 'genre', a 'poem', 'literature' itself, are just such known objects. Again Peirce describes this interdependence as recognized on some grounds - and the grounds for this linguistic recognition, using Halliday's model, is the social context, however theorized; 'things' in language are 'socially known objects'.11 I am labouring the understanding of 'genre', for it is a word whose semantic 'ownership' can cause dispute (whose sense of genre is the 'right' one?). As the recognition of the role of discursive formations (ways of talking) in the generation of cultural objects has itself become a known object of scholarly study, words associated with textual practices, such as 'genre', have themselves been 'reinscribed' through their use in different academic discourses.12 We could list the traditional nouns of literary genres, whether more or less inclusive, such as poetry, prose, drama, sonnet, short story, epic, with their multifarious criteria of recognition (rather like the categories of traditional grammar). We could list the usually socially qualified uses in cultural studies: detective stories, science fiction, popular music lyrics and so on - an upwardly mobile group in academe, though some categories, such as 'romance', have been recognized long enough to be situated as objects of both 'literary' and 'popular' attention.13 Finally there is the appropriation of this more traditional use of'genre' by academic discourses of linguistics and ethnography, as in genres like 'service encounters' or 'ritual insults'. Such approaches attempt to be more rigorous 10

Poetic Discourse and Genre

but can sail dangerously close to the shoals of 'unreconstructed structuralism' - a Platonic approach in which the 'underlying abstraction', typically represented in diagrams or other reductive schemata, is viewed as 'the real meaning' of the genre.14 Or the primary focus can remain on reductionist generalizations because they describe structures for an effaced 'speech community', one idealized as contemporaneous and homogeneous. What such work seems to naturalize is the interpretative behaviour of the investigator in identifying that schematic structure. In the approach favoured here, on the other hand, and as intimated in the opening paragraph of this chapter, such work - the description of texts - is an important part, but only one part, of the second area of study described, that is the study of those practices of production and interpretation which will be invoked once the genre has been acknowledged. Indeed the literary theorist Alastair Fowler, mentioned earlier, identifies literary genres with discursive practices rather than with any schematic structure of text: 'In literary communication, genres are functional: they actively form the experience of each work of literature. If we see The Jew of Malta as a savage farce, our response will not be the same as if we saw it as a tragedy .. .V5 These sentiments are similar to those expressed in the different words of linguistics by Mary Macken-Horarik, in her research on examiners' evaluation of early secondary students' responses in a public examination in English. Utilizing systemic functional grammar and Bernstein's theory, Macken-Horarik demonstrates the importance of student orientation to one pedagogic 'domain' (she identifies four) or another when reading a short literary text. Such orientation determines the student's understanding of 'salience' or 'relevance' to the task, and so the student's capacity to produce an examination text highly valued - or not - by the examiners. (The focus of Macken-Horarik's work is on the 'invisibility' of the more highly valued orientations, to many teachers as well as students.)16 The word 'genre' then cannot be used in any modern scholarship without further clarification. As earlier mentioned, I found the work of Basil Bernstein brought a particular clarity to these matters and a brief and very limited account of his work follows. In the course of this discussion I will modify my own initial use of the word 'genre'. In Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, published in 1996, Bernstein asks 'how does power and control translate into principles of communication, and how do these principles of communication differentially regulate forms of consciousness with respect to their reproduction and the possibilities of change?'.17 He begins by differentiating power from control. Power relations ... create boundaries, legitimize boundaries, reproduce boundaries, between different categories of groups, gender, class, race, different categories of discourse, different categories of agents. ... power always operates on the relations between categories. . . . in this way, power establishes legitimate relations of order. (p. 19) 11

The Written Poem

He contrasts power with control: 'Control carries the boundary relations of power and socializes individuals into these relationships; . . . control establishes legitimate communications. ... Power constructs relations between and control [constructs] relations within given forms of interaction' (p. 19). In his work, Bernstein is interested in those category relations which pertain to pedagogic discourse, and in those control relations which pertain to pedagogic practice. Translating these terms to my concerns, I am interested in those category relations which pertain to poetic discourse, and to those control relations which pertain to the practices of reading and writing poetry. Bernstein goes on to define two concepts, one for the translation of power relations, and one for the translation of control relations. For the former he uses the concept of classification, for the latter the concept of framing. In summary, 'classification refers to what, framing is concerned with how meanings are to be put together' (p. 27). For Bernstein, classification enables us to differentiate and hence identify categories, such as those of discourse, while framing enables us to produce texts of a given genre (a texttype) within a category. Classification is associated with the development of recognition rules (p. 31) - 'rules' which enable you to recognize, say, literary discourse as opposed to non-literary discourse (a poem, a seed packet text). Framing is associated with realization rules (p. 32) - rules which enable you to write or interpret an appropriate text (what kind of interpretative disposition do you bring to a poem? or to seed packet instructions?). The terms 'classification' and 'framing' can be related to the two statements in the first paragraph of this chapter. For recognition rules, 'one must study the generic practices of production and interpretation through which a text is recognized as an instance of that genre'. For realization rules, 'one must study those practices of production and interpretation which will be invoked once the genre has been acknowledged'. The word 'genre' I used there in the most traditional literary way, in which the three principal genres of literature are said to be poetry, drama and prose, a differentiation believed to derive from Aristotle's three modes of communication.18 However, to be more compatible with Bernstein's usage, I will now use the phrase 'poetic discourse' rather than 'genre of poetry' to refer to texts recognized as poetry, through their membership of the category 'poetic discourse', a category whose boundaries are clearly classified, that is differentiated, from other discourses. Just how this recognition takes place is a crucial issue for any category, and one I shall return to for poetic discourse. The terms classification and framing are worthy of further elaboration. Bernstein uses the concept of classification to examine relations between categories, whether these categories are between agencies, between agents, between discourses, between practices ... the crucial space which creates the specialization of the category [such as a discourse] is not 12

Poetic Discourse and Genre

internal to that discourse but is the space between that discourse and another [for example, the discourses of physics and geography at school, or as I shall discuss, the discourses of poetry and prose], (p. 20) This is a Saussurean-like principle of paradigmatic contrast - value assigned to a sign not by any essential attribute but by its participation in a system of contrasting terms. However this is no fixed structuralist paradigm. Bernstein asks 'what preserves the insulation?' [of one category from another] and answers 'power'. 'The arbitrary nature of these power relations is ... hidden by the principle of the classification, [which] comes to have the force of the natural order.' The degree of insulation between categories can vary, with strong classification associated with strong insulation and weaker classification with weaker insulation, as 'with less specialized discourses'. Implicit in this account is the possibility of change: as Bernstein says, 'if [the] insulation changes its strength, then the classification changes' (p. 21). I will return to these questions of 'authority' and 'naturalness', of strong and weak classification and of change of classification when discussing prose, poetry and the prose-poem. I have not here laboured Bernstein's own principal concern, in which he equates the principle of the relation between categories, such as discourses, to the principles of the social division of labour, but it is certainly not difficult to construct, from this correlation, theories concerning the political role of avant-garde art, including avant-garde poetry, whether it is viewed as a political threat to the established social order by conservative readers, or as a politically disruptive gesture by its producers. Bernstein further suggests a role for insulation within the individual as well as between individuals; it becomes a system of psychic defences against the possibility of the weakening of the insulation, which would then reveal the suppressed contradictions, cleavages and dilemmas. . . . However these psychic defences are rarely wholly effective and the possibility of the other, the unthinkable, the yet to be voiced, is also rarely silenced, (p. 21) So in this Eden of paradigmatic meaningfulness, the post-structuralist serpent of deconstruction always lurks. (Bernstein had been criticized for his 'structuralist' alignment, which seems scarcely fair in the light of such comments as I have quoted here.)19 Bernstein uses the concept 'framing' 'to analyse the different forms of legitimate communication realized in any pedagogic practice' (p. 26). For my study, the focus of interest is the 'legitimate communication realized in the practice of poetic discourse'. At different times and places, what is understood as 'writing a poem?' what is 'reading poetry'? The word 'genre' and 'generic practices' can appropriately be used for these 'legitimate communications', for they involve both the processes of writing and reading 13

The Written Poem

texts and the textual product, the poem, that marks the end or beginning of these processes. Bernstein speaks of two systems of rules regulated by framing, those of social order (which he calls 'regulative discourse') and those of discursive order ('instructional discourse'). The former, social order, refers to the forms that 'hierarchical relations take in the pedagogic relation' and indicates 'the control over the social base which makes this transmission possible' (p. 27). What are the relevant social relations in relation to poetic discourse? I would suggest, at least, those of writer and reader. Studies of the author (and of patronage) are the traditional literary staple, but histories of reading and of literacy (readily available for French, less so for English) are equally relevant. Also relevant is the relation of writer or reader to the means of production, what has been called the technology of language, such as printing, or even writing itself. The second of his two systems of rules regulated by framing, the rules of discursive order, Bernstein calls 'instructional discourse', as befits the field of his research, pedagogy. 'The rules of discursive order refer to selection, sequence, pacing and criteria of the knowledge' (p. 28). Bernstein's model is oriented, as I read it, to the production of text, a situation in which the student recognizes the appropriate pedagogic context (by classification rules) and produces the appropriate student text (by framing rules). The reader of poetry outside the classroom context is however usually oriented primarily to interpretation. For the writer, the rules of discursive order are realized in the text; realization rules are relevant to the production of text. What of the reader? What are comparable rules for the interpretation of text? Chapter 8 suggests some introductory answers from the history of reading. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to explore classification and framing in relation to poetic discourse with specific textual examples, making particular reference to the work of the Russian semiotician, Juri Lotman. Halliday's model of language as social semiotic uses the term 'substance' for the material/physical realization of language. What he calls the 'formal level', that of the 'lexicogrammar' of words and grammatical structures, is realized in spoken or written language. If spoken, phonic substance is the medium of realization; 'phonology' is the study of the use of phonic substance by a particular language. Similarly, if the language is written, the lexicogrammatical structures are realized in graphic substance; 'graphology' is the study of its use. The written, or more generally, the 'seen' poem is the focus of this book, so it is graphology, rather a Cinderella of linguistic studies, which is my primary concern.20 The categories of different discourses are classified, in part, by different uses of the resources of phonology and graphology. Historically, poetic discourse is one of preliterate society, and its oral origins are persistent in its generic realizations of phonic substance. Conversation is the first 'discursive 14

Poetic Discourse and Genre

formation' and poetry is the second, for in a preliterate culture poetry is the organization of the language of everyday conversation so that it is more memorable. The repetitions of rhythmic patterning and phonemic soundplay which come to be associated with poetry serve, originally, that centrally important function of transmitting accumulated wisdom.21 It was presumably a response to these typical repetitions of poetry, though without overt acknowledgement of their historical contingency, which led Roman Jakobson to formulate his famous dictum in 1958: that 'the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination', that is, that in the sequence of language (the axis of combination), we encounter repetitions (selection from a paradigm of linguistically similar items), such as rhyme or rhythmic regularity. (Jakobson includes examples of grammatical parallelism, but most of his examples of patterning are of phonic substance, features of the heard poem.)22 These heard devices of an oral culture persist into the written and later printed culture, though they acquire additional possibilities of interpretation in their literate contexts, a change in framing.23 The introduction of writing, bringing new possibilities for framing in relation to phonology and, for the first time, graphology, promoted changes in classification, with new categories of discourse. I want first to concentrate on classification and the possibilities of new categories of written discourse, which means asking the first of my two basic questions (in the introductory paragraph) in relation now to graphology. How has graphic display been related to the recognition of poetic discourse? Or, in Bernstein's terms, how has graphic display been related to the differentiation of poetic discourse as a category from other discourses? Or in semiotic terms, how, if it has, has graphic display constituted the 'signs of poetry'? Spatial arrangement in lines has been a convention associated with written texts of poetic discourse in English at least since the time of Chaucer, about 1400. For much of this time, the arrangement has been primarily a spatial metaphor for the temporal phonological realization of the poem, that is the written or printed lines and stanzas corresponded to perceived regularities of pronunciation, however conventionally these regularities were identified as choices of recognized metre or rhyme scheme. Thus the visual line-end probably coincides with some prosodic pattern, such as a regular metrical span like iambic pentameter, and perhaps coincides with the phonemic repetition of rhyme. All lines may be left-aligned on the same margin, as in most printed poetry. Or lines sharing some phonological feature may be indicated by varying the left margin with indentation, as in the five-line repetitive patterns of Browning's 'Porphyria's Lover':24 Porphyria's love: she guessed not how Her darling one wish would be heard.

a b 15

The Written Poem

And thus we sit together now, And all night long we have not stirred, And yet God has not said a word!

a b b

Lines 1 and 3 rhyme (a), lines 2,4 and 5 rhyme (b). Lines 1 and 3 are aligned on the left margin, lines 2, 4 and 5 are indented, and vertically aligned. The graphic sign of indentation visually links together the heard links of rhyme. The text has gained a more coherent material 'texture' with this equating of phonic and graphic substance. The layout of Keats's poetry is particularly informative of the sound links. As printed in The Norton Anthology^ 'To Autumn' has three indentations.25 Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.

a b a b c d e d c e

I have marked only the exact rhymes, but patently there are more subtle sound-plays in the line-end words - the consonance of 'fruitfulness', 'bless' and 'cease', the assonance of'bees' and 'cease', and, with 'cottage-trees', the close sound relation of all these words which end in [s] or [z], for these phonemes are identical in place and manner of articulation but differ only in voicing ([s] is unvoiced, [z] voiced). This is one poem for which we have the poet's autograph. In Keats's writing, as accurately transcribed by P. J. Croft, the layout is: Season of Mists and mellow fruitfulness Close bosom friend of the naturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless The Vines with fruit that round the thatch eves run To bend with apples the mos[t]'d Cottage trees And fill all furuits with sweeness to the core To swell the gourd, and plump the hazle shells With a white kernel; to set budding more And still more later flowers for the bees Until they think warn days with never cease For summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells-26

Here we see that the three levels of indentation of the printed version have 16

Poetic Discourse and Genre

been contracted from an original five in the handwritten autograph (this manuscript, according to Croft, is the 'only known draft' of the poem). The printed layout brings together in indentation all lines which rhyme (nearrhyme for 'bees'/'cease'). The handwritten layout, on the other hand, does not bring together what does not rhyme. Thus from line 3, we see 'bless'/ 'run'/'trees'/'coreV'shells' as the final word in lines successively indented. This apparent concern prevents the rhymed lines ending in 'core' and 'more' having the same indentation; the Norton edition does indent these two lines similarly. We cannot know Keats's exact motivation for the display of his lines; we can however infer first his poetic (not necessarily conscious) awareness of the materiality of his text in its seen as well as its heard realization, and secondly, his interrelation of the seen poem to its sound patterning. The interrelating of sound pattern and visual line is so well established that modern poetry, even when without traditional metrical regularity or rhyme scheme, may encourage us to read in a certain way according to the line breaks. Certainly some twentieth-century poets, like Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg, have theorized about the breath and the line in this way (to be discussed in Chapter 4, 'The Semiotic of the Body'). This realization rule of poetic discourse, the correlation of visual line and heard rhythm and rhyme, has been so commonly understood as framing the genres of poetic discourse that critical comment on poetry has sometimes blurred the basic distinction between seen and heard poem. Thus the Russian Boris Tomashevsky wrote early in the twentieth century, 'the breaking up of poetic language into lines, into sound units of similar and possibly equal force, is clearly the distinctive feature of poetic language'.27 Here the graphic (seen) realization of 'lines' and the phonological (heard) realization of 'sound units of similar and possibly equal force' are immediately equated. This traditional equation has enabled the graphic display of a poem, the visual or cognitive object 'a poem', to be read as transparent, as a spoken process, embodied in the aurally perceived phenomenon of speech, whether spoken out loud or 'in the head'. (In Chapter 3,1 will comment on Willard Bonn's reading of graphic display in this way.) Yet this habitual writing/ printing of poetry in lines led to the first and most pervasive 'meaning' of graphic substance. This is quite simply the meaning of'this is a poem', this text belongs to the category of poetic discourse. Recognizing the presence (or absence) of lineation has provided the basic classification/differentiation of poetic discourse from that which is not poetic. A text so identified, even at first glance before reading, will then be read, interpreted, as a poem, according to the reading practices for poetry (poetic discourse) then current and internalized by the individual reader. For example, in contemporary interpretative habits, a text once recognized as a poem is more likely to be read symbolically at the level of the lexicogrammar (that is, at the level of 17

The Written Poem

word and grammatical structure). The question of the historic origin of this graphic recognition of poetry, that is of the phenomenon of lineation, will be taken up in Part Two, Chapter 6, where the basic question of my enquiry is, simply, what is the origin of the line (non-right-justified) as the primary sign of poetry? In his influential structuralist work, The Structure of the Artistic Text, Juri Lotman clearly pointed out the socially contingent nature of the functional roles of these signs of poetry. His comments concerning the relationship of poetry and prose appear in the opening pages of Chapter 6, 'Elements and Levels of the Paradigmatics of the Artistic Text'.28 Lotman points out the illusion of equating ordinary speech with literary prose. He reminds us that, historically, poetry precedes prose.29 He criticizes descriptive literary criticism which merely observes literary devices, and asserts that a structural account of literature will always consider the device, such as rhyme or metaphor, in relation to the context of established literary conventions. The significance of the device will lie in such a relation, not in the device itself. Thus the absence of a conventional feature in the text, what Lotman calls minus-devices, can paradoxically have a strong presence, be textually more noticeable. Most of Lotman's examples are phonological or semantic but it is to his remarks about graphology, the visual display of a text, that I wish particularly to draw attention. He observes 'that in the consciousness of author and reader there is a clear-cut division between the structures of poetry and prose'. A text which does not make much use of traditional devices must provide a border between poetry and prose which is 'clearly discernible' (a means of classification) so that the 'poetic consciousness' of the reader is invoked (so that the reader identifies the category 'poetic discourse'). 'That is why', Lotman writes, 'free verse requires a special graphic construction to be apprehended as a form of poetic speech.' And further, Hrabak is incontestably right when... he stresses the significance of graphic signs in distinguishing verse from prose; graphic indicators here are not a technical means of fixing the text but a signal of a structural nature, in compliance with which our consciousness 'pushes' the text at hand into an extra-textual structure.

So the graphic line activates in the reader, familiar with the convention, the practices that the reader associates with reading poetry. Classifying the text as 'poetic discourse' activates generic expectations through which the reader interprets the text (Bernstein's rules of discursive order, I infer). It is interesting here, I think, that, as so often happens in Lotman's writing, his understanding exceeds the particular vocabulary of theory which he uses. Read from a strictly structuralist position, Lotman appears to be setting up a classic Saussurean dichotomy of la langue and la parole, that is the genre of traditionally recognized conventions, whether of poetry or 18

Poetic Discourse and Genre

prose, as the abstracted langue versus the particular poem, the particular instance of textual practice, la parole. Such a structuralist reading looks for devices, traditionally recognized generic practices, in the text. Listen. Does the text rhyme? Is it strongly rhythmic? Yes, well it must be a poem, not a piece of prose. Lotman quotes a claim from Hrabak that certain Russian poems not graphically signalled as poems, that is, not printed in lines, were none the less clear in their traditional phonological signals, with a standard verse with 'strong rhythmic elements'. So we can give up conventional graphic signals if some traditional principles of versification, some phonological regularity, can be discerned. Lotman is suggesting that the reverse is also true: that if the graphology, through the traditional generic display of lineation, signals 'this is a poem', then the text will be unambiguously poetic in 'structure' (that is, in our reading of it) even if, as with free verse, it does not fulfil recognizable conventions of phonological patterning. So to identify a text as that of a poem or a prose piece, we will consider at least the sound or the look of the text, we will consider the text as a linguistic object in order to identify what type of literary object it is, that is its extratextual structure, as Lotman puts it, or its category of discourse, in Bernstein's terms. Yet a reconsideration of Lotman's account makes it clear, I suggest, that a simple structuralist reading of that account misrepresents the complexity of his thought. Lotman has in fact taken up what we might now, post Derrida, describe as a post-structuralist positioning, that is, he has recognized the interrelation of subject and object, the observer and the observed. The historical and cultural positioning of the writer/reader will determine what is observed as significant in the text. Lotman writes, for example, 'the difference between verse and prose lies not only in the material expression of a structural edifice of some text, but also in the function of the text defined by the whole type of culture'. Lotman's comment about graphic indicators now fits into a larger context. If, as Lotman claims, graphic indicators are 'a signal in compliance with which our consciousness "pushes" the text at hand into an extra-textual structure', then graphology is functional for us twentieth-century readers in distinguishing verse from prose, that is, culturally positioned as we are, we observe graphic signs in the text and interpret them generically. But it need not be thus. Our cultural positioning is historically contingent, it changes over time. And our cultural positioning is socially contingent - different social trajectories have formed our individual habitus, which includes our interpretative dispositions.30 Thus Lotman has effectively deconstructed the objective opposition of prose and poetry, where objective differences are looked for in the text, while at the same time preserving the reality of that opposition in our subjective experience. For me, this reader of this text, such and such is meaningful now. Such a functional approach also allows one to discuss discourse dynamically, as, if you like, a 'dynamic open system' of exchange between text and textual environment.31 19

The Written Poem

Lotman's discussion makes particular use of poetry in Russian, from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, and his timescale is narrow, observing a pattern of change in the poetry/prose relation over every twenty years or so. In contrast, I will briefly explore these matters, using examples of English poetry in gross cultural contrast: on the one hand, Old English poetry and early medieval poetry, recorded in manuscripts, and on the other an example of contemporary printed Australian poetry. The manuscript page of an Old English homily or sermon (from about AD 1000) looks very much the same as a page of an Old English poem. The vellum is written on until the right ruled margin; there is no lineation to distinguish the poetic discourse from any other functional use of language. True, recent scholarship has pointed out the developing conventional use of the punctus (point) to separate metrical units, but to our modern eyes this is a very faint graphic sign of 'poetry' compared to the later sign of 'short irregular lines'.32 Modern scholars, in some ways, have had an even more difficult time with Early English texts in manuscript, as, the actual manuscripts being rarely accessible to most, they are accustomed to work from facsimiles or microfilm. The punctuation contrasts of punctus are often difficult to discern. Moreover, these reproductions do not usually show colour, which in early Middle English texts is sometimes used to mark the beginning of a metrical unit in texts without lineation.33 The expense of colour reproduction is of course pertinent, but at the same time, the lack of editorial comment on the use of colour, or on graphic display generally, is partly the result of an editorial habitus, a disposition editorially not to notice, regard as potentially significant, what is not functional in one's own understanding of poetic discourse.34 As a result, scholars without access to the manuscript no longer have even the objective device as a potentially subjective sign. Thus, in my opinion, Old English and early Middle English alliterative poetry has sometimes been described as being less differentiated in written mode from other discourses than was necessarily the case for its contemporary users. Faced with written text not in lines, with the pointing barely discernible, and with the colour not reproduced, it has been easy for a modern reader to think 'In Early English, alliterative poetry was realized as a spoken genre but not as a written genre'. It is too easy then to see that generalization as functional in terms of a homogenized social context: that is, that Anglo-Saxon society was primarily oral rather than literate. This generalization may be true about Anglo-Saxon culture as a whole, but it is scarcely simply true about the environment in which the early manuscripts were produced, that is the monastic scriptorium. The situation is more complex. In the scriptoria we have a transferred, rather than a transitional, literacy from (primarily religious) Latin to Old English texts, and then from Latin to Anglo-Norman to early Middle English texts, and at the same time a parallel development of non-classical Latin poetic texts (some of these matters will be taken up in 20

Poetic Discourse and Genre

Part Two, Chapter 6). At the same time, the relations between practices of speaking and writing, listening and reading, were very different from those of our contemporary society, and it is in the context of those practices that the material facts of texts will be functional. Consider now a poem printed in the 1980s by an Australian poet, Joanne Burns. The poem, 'reading', is from a larger collection entitled 'Pillows'. from Pillows35 reading there were so many books, she had to separate them to avoid being overwhelmed by the excessive implications of their words, she kept hundreds in a series of boxes inside a wire cage in a warehouse, and hundreds more on the shelves of her various rooms, when she changed houses she would pack some of the books into the boxes and exchange them for others that had been hibernating, these resurrected books were precious to her for a while, they had assumed the patinas of dusty chthonic wisdoms, and thus she would let them sit on the shelves admiring them from a distance, gathering time and air. she did not want to be intimate with their insides. the atmospherics suggested by the titles were enough, sometimes she would increase the psychic proximities between herself and the books and place a pile of them on the floor next to her bed. and quite possibly she absorbed their intentions while she slept, if she intended travelling beyond a few hours she would occasionally remove a book from the shelves and place it in her bag. she carried 'the poetics of space' round india for three months and it returned to her shelves undamaged at the completion of the journey, every day of those three months she touched it and read some of the titles of its chapters to make sure it was there, and real, chapters called house and universe, nests, shells, intimate immensity, miniatures and, the significance of the hut. she had kept it in a pocket of her bag together with a coloured whistle and an acorn, she now kept this book in the darkness of her reference shelf, and she knew that one day she would have to admit to herself that this was the only book she had need of, that this was the book she would enter the pages of, that this was the book she was going to read The text looks like two printed prose paragraphs. Why am I calling this a poem? We recall Lotman's comment, 'that in the consciousness of author and reader there is a clear-cut division between the structures of poetry and prose', so that to invoke this poetic consciousness for texts whose language is not overtly poetic in traditional devices, the border between verse and prose 'must be clearly discernible'. In distinguishing verse from prose, graphic indicators 'are not a technical means of fixing the text but a signal of a structural nature, in compliance with which our consciousness "pushes" the text at hand into an extra-textual structure'. This 'extra-textual structure' is Lotman's structuralist language for talking about a post-structuralist 21

The Written Poem

perspective, that is, that the graphic signs are signs of a culturally constructed discourse, and that this discourse is constructed through the reading and writing practices regarded as 'natural' to it. The layout of Burns's poem, with its right-justification like modern printed prose and its paragraph indentation, is patently a reaction against the usual graphic or visual conventions of poetry. At the same time, in nice demonstration of Lotman's point that a radical gesture will become incorporated into the tradition, such a poem already belongs to a recognizable subgenre of modern poetry, the so-called prose-poem. Thus, in a no doubt deliberate oxymoron, Margueritte Murphy calls her book-length study of the prose-poem in modern English, A Tradition of Subversion.™ But if it is part of the convention of these prose-poems not to give 'graphic indicators' of their poetic status, what encourages our consciousness to 'push' the text into one to be read as a poem? The answer takes us into an area of discussion now most associated with the work of Michel Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu, that is the area of the authority of the institution, here the institution or field of literature. To whom is authority given, who has 'symbolic capital', that is power, in this field? In its contemporary construction, in the initial dissemination of a work, most particularly the 'author', 'the editor', 'the publisher'. The author, Joanne Burns, has submitted her work as 'a poem'. The editors of the anthology in which the poem is published, The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn, have chosen the text as a poem and so publicly named it by the title of their anthology. And the well respected publisher, Penguin Books, has endorsed the authority of the editors. The reader who then refuses to read the text as a poem is her or himself making a radical gesture of rejecting such strongly established institutional authority. Ironically, the admission of contra-generic texts within the 'recognized' discourse - the suspension, that is, of generic framing rules as in the admission of the 'prosepoem' - illumines most clearly the source of institutional authority. It throws into relief the homogenized genre of conventional art, uniformly recognized, its features apparently 'in the text', effacing the source of interpreting agency, the social location of power in the production of meaning. This social fact explains the politically disruptive role of avant-garde art (though in this century it has quite a different social history from the prose-poem). It resists, while it is avant-garde, attempts to incorporate it into the institutional body, it is repressed in totalitarian regimes, for the very reason that it points to the source of power, demanding not evaluation of the text, the generic achievement, but a re-evaluation of the category, and, finally, the identification of the source of power over classification, not 'is this a good painting?' 'poem?' but 'is it art?' 'poetry?' and finally 'who says so?'. Although the prose-poem is usually described as dating from Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit, published in 1842, and is most famously associated with Charles Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris, Petitspoemes en prose, 22

Poetic Discourse and Genre

a collection of 50 prose-poems published in 1869, two years after his death,37 it is not until the mid-1970s that it became prominent in the United States. From that time, according to Paul Hoover in his 'Introduction' to A Norton Anthology of Post-Modern American Poetry, 'the prose poets went in two directions: some ... wrote narratives, fables and metafictions; others associated with the budding language poetry scene ... used the form to redefine the "unit" of attention from the line to the sentence, sentence fragment, and paragraph. [Some] used the prose poem to experiment with related prose forms such as autobiography, the essay, and fiction.'38 The attempt to 'redefine the unit of attention' from line to sentence is an attempt to shift attention from the graphic realization of the poetic substance to the grammatical structure, independent of the material realization as spoken or written. It is thus a movement in the other direction from the avant-garde preoccupations at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which a concern with the materiality of the text was dominant. The shift from line to paragraph does however show a weakening of contemporary classificatory boundaries between poetry and prose. We now see clearly the social construction of the opposition between prose and poetry. Though an Old English poem in manuscript is, roughly, right-justified like the modern prose-poem, the cultural function is quite different; there is no established 'natural' tradition to subvert or react against. Thus to describe Old English poetry as 'written like prose' is misleading - for there is no layout associated specifically with prose either. Rather, to repeat, lineation does not serve to differentiate English poetry from other discourses at this time. Again, a closer look at the Joanne Burns poem would show that this particular text is as subversive of prose as it is of poetry. The graphic conventions of prose are also contravened, to produce a graphic display in some respects similar to that of an early manuscript. Burns uses lower case throughout and uses the full stop, rather like the old use of the punctus, to indicate pauses rather than sentences, though in paragraph two she does admit some modern punctuation with commas and quotation marks. Graphically, this text is not-poem and not-prose. Negative devices indeed, but present to the reader as negative devices only because of the traditional genres framed within the discourses of both poetry and prose. That such a non-genre text should find its contemporary home in the discourse of 'poetry' is appropriate, if we consider the 'poetic function' of Roman Jakobson in the broadest sense: that is, that poetry is language which draws attention to itself. Of course his structuralist observation we now can view from a post-structuralist perspective: that attention will be drawn in a particular cultural context of how it is 'natural', including how it is graphically natural, for a text to signify its discursive credentials. And indeed, now told that Joanne Burns's text is a poem, we read the text as a poem, we discover to our pleasure some of the very patternings of equivalence that Roman Jakobson told us to expect (and which Lotman goes 23

The Written Poem

on to discuss under 'repetition' in Chapter 6 of The Structure of the Artistic Text); .or perhaps what we might have called rhetorical parallelism if instead we were reading the text as prose, as we might one of the eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon homilies of the priest /Elfric, noted for their rhythmical - and indeed sometimes alliterating - passages.39 If prose and poetry have been two discourses valiantly classified apart by conventional criteria, then there are clearly two directions of subversion. The one, as already discussed, is that of the prose-poem. The other is not 'poetic prose', but rather that poetry which, in the twentieth century, came to be called 'free verse'. Thus David Perkins, in A History of Modern Poetry, writes, 'Free verse is of innumerable kinds; some is very close to metrical verse, but so far as the rhythm goes, most unrhymed free verse would be prose if it were printed as prose' (my italics). 'This being the case, defenders of free verse could argue that there was or should be no essential difference between poetry and prose, or they could argue that lineation makes free verse poetry, even if it could otherwise be prose - because lineation compels reading habits quite different from those brought to prosed Perkins suggests that the debate has been effectively over since the 1920s, that 'most readers, poets and critics have agreed to call free verse a form of poetry'.40 This is an agreement that a text can be identified visually as an instance of poetic discourse even if it does not realize a particular poetic genre in the traditional conventions of phonology, such as metrical regularity and rhyme scheme. It is also clearly an agreement that poetry is a discourse, not a text-type or particular genre, characterized primarily not by particular linguistic features in the text, but by the productive and interpretative procedures invoked in writing and reading it. One textual phenomenon which could be produced through such an agreement was that of the found poem, language uses taken from other contexts and refrained as 'a poem' through lineation (as in my banal example of the 'seed packet instructions'). But what are we to make of the following example, described by Jerome McGann, 'When Yeats tried to summarize modern poetry in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), he made a famous gesture to modernism's aesthetic and pre-Raphaelite inheritance. He printed as the first text in his collection a notable passage from Pater's The Renaissance ... [and] reformatted Pater's lush prose as a free verse poem.'41 (Walter Pater was an Oxford don whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance was published in 1873. The studies ended with a stirring conclusion, celebrating the intensity of experience and the role of art in contributing to such intensity in a style that was in itself intense and elevated.)42 McGann suspects that Yeats was inspired to 'revisualize' Pater's writing by a similar enterprise by Louis Zukofsky, whose collection, An 'Objectivists' Anthology of 1932, printed several texts which had been similarly rewritten. McGann concludes that both Yeats's and Zukofsky's works showed 'the renewed interest that modern poets were taking in the materi24

Poetic Discourse and Genre

alities of poetic textualization'.43 But such a concern did not suddenly appear in the twentieth century. Richard Bradford has some very interesting observations to make on the reception of Milton's poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1679 'a little known country parson, Samuel Woodford' suggested that Paradise Lost 'might suffer little if printed as prose'. Although valuing the poem highly, Woodford says of its style that 'through the Disguise the Prose appears' and to illustrate the prosaic nature of the poem he reprints some of Milton's prose as verse. Bradford comments that 'although the new format is an irregular departure from the strict iambic pentameter, it does echo the uniquely Miltonic effect of the verse line cutting into and intensifying the already elaborate syntax, which many critics have found to be part of the poetic design of Paradise Lost'. Bradford's conclusions echo what I have already remarked about the Old English homilies of /Elfric, and the more general conclusions already made, that poetry can be characterized as a discourse rather than a genre, as particular conventions of practice rather than particular conventions of text. I quote him at length: Woodford's experiment is significant because it sets a precedent for eighteenthcentury critics. First it suggests that the rhythms and intonational sequences which we regard as poetic are actually present in a variety of distinct expressive contexts, including, it would seem, theological prose. And by implication, it would seem that our response to such sequences is determined essentially by our visual recognition of context. We read Paradise Lost as poetry because it looks like poetry, and Woodford attempts to demonstrate that we would also read the unpoetically titled Apology in Answer to the Modest Confutation of a Libel intituled, Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence of Smectymnuus as a poem if it were made to look like a poem. It would seem that our response to context and genre might be part of a Pavlovian instinct triggered by typography.44 Or as I'd prefer to say in Bourdieu's terms, part of the habitus, the individual's disposition to interpret, a disposition which is produced through the personal trajectory of a socially and historically situated subject, who recognizes (or not) poetic discourse in its lineation and who then invokes (or is unable to invoke) practices of interpretation deemed appropriate for poetry. The inability (to recognize or adequately interpret) may relate to the individual's life trajectory (such as educational level and textual experience) or it may relate directly to the social possibilities of the time, as in the classificatory difficulty of Milton's poem as poetic discourse. As Bradford points out, Paradise Lost was the 'first major English poem to deploy varied and extended rhythmic sequences unregimented by rhyme or regular syntactic closure - its true rhythmic and prosodic identity thus became a matter of opinion'.45 A final comment on these two examples of 'prose as poems'. It is clear that in Yeats's and Woodford's rewritings, a different attitude to literacy, to 25

The Written Poem

the printed text, is involved. Woodford lineates Milton's prose to show that (some of) his poetry might as well be prose. Yeats lineates Pater's prose to show that his prose could well have been poetry (both in its influence on Impressionism in literature, and in its own evocative imagery). So Woodford assumes that text classified as poetry ought to have particular generic features of sound patterning, whereas Yeats (I infer) assumes that a text may be classified as poetry through its visual display. In Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, Marjorie Perloff takes the role of lineation one step further, to the text which is lineated but which is not poetry. She writes, the standard print format associated with the word 'poem' (justified left margin, ragged right margin, a block of type to be read from left to right and top to bottom and surrounded by white space, a format still ubiquitous in the 'poems' printed in The New Yorker or Poetry magazine or American Poetry Review) is by no means the inevitable or the only one. Indeed as the 'look' of the standard poem begins to be replicated on the billboard or the greeting card, an interesting exchange begins to occur.

Perloff gives an example of a billboard sign for a garage, lineated poetically.46 Its elegant display (in capitals, in lines carefully balanced in width by judicious hyphenation) reminds me of the classical and post-Renaissance inscriptions collected by John Sparrow (in Visible Words: A Study of Inscriptions in and as Books and Works of Art, and in Line upon Line: An Epigraphical Anthology) ,47 From the point of view of their time of production, the garage sign and the inscriptions, like the Old English manuscript text and the modern prose-poem, are discursively classified by quite different recognition rules. However, what the garage sign and the pre-twentieth-century inscriptions have in common is that either might be seen by a late twentiethcentury poet and imported, directly or indirectly, into a poem, all grist to a postmodernist mill, a pastiche of language registers. Authorized by some institutional authority, the lines of advertising billboard or memorial tablet may well now be recognized as the lineation of poetry, to be read as poetic discourse, with whatever interpretative practices that implies for the individual habitus. The seventeenth-century readers of Milton could be uneasy because the traditional generic features of sound patterning were absent. The late twentieth-century reader of contemporary poetry in English may also be uneasy because she/he is unlikely to encounter comforting textual features of realized genre. As Margaret Atwood wrote at the end of her prose-poem, 'Iconography', 'We fall back into these rhythms as if into safe hands'.48

26

Poetic Discourse and Genre

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Roger Sell (ed.), Literary Pragmatics (London: Routledge, 1991). Quotations are from Roger Sell, 'An introduction', p. xiv and Adrian Pilkington, 'Poetic effects: a relevant theory perspective', p. 44. Sell gives a brief summary of his approach in 'Literary genre and history: questions from a literary pragmaticist for socio-semioticians', Approaches to the Analysis of Literary Discourse, ed. Eija Ventola (Abo: Abo Academy Press, 1991), pp. 1-38. M. A. K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning (London: Edward Arnold, 1978). 'Language practices are social practices' - a point reiterated, for example, by Norman Fairclough in Language and Power (London: Longman, 1989). See especially Chapter 2, 'Discourse as social practice'. Ruqaiya Hasan, 'The conception of context in text', in Peter H. Fries and Michael Gregory (eds), Discourse in Society: Systemic Functional Perspectives (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1995), pp. 183-283. Jay Lemke, Chapter 2, 'Discourse and social theory', Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995). Hasan, Halliday and Bernstein have been in close correspondence since the 1960s and Bernstein comments 'the Halliday/Hasan contribution to my development is incalculable'. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity (London: Taylor & Francis, 1996), pp. 148-9. Again, Norman Fairclough briefly describes the mutual contributions which so-called 'critical discourse analysis' and the insights derived from Foucault's work could make to each other. The former, a more micro approach to discourse, pays close attention to text analysis, including linguistic analysis. The latter, a more macro approach to discourse, focuses on the social institutions brought into being and perpetuated through particular historical 'discursive formations'. See Chapter 2, 'Michel Foucault and the analysis of discourse', Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). Unfortunately, Bernstein's earlier work was not fully understood in the United States. He was misread in some places as assigning a lower value to some uses of language, whereas it was to the value judgements of the schools that he was drawing attention. 'Bernstein tried to point out something that is now largely taken for granted: that the schools expect people to use language in certain ways, and that these are by and large the ways of the upper-middle class, putting the members of other social classes at an automatic relative disadvantage' (Lemke, Textual Politics, p. 27). The word' discourse' also needs to be understood in its scholarly context of use. In Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), Anthony Easthope uses 'discourse' in the Foucauldian macro sense, as described in note 6, above, linking the 'rise and dominance' of iambic pentameter with class dominance. 27

The Written Poem

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

28

The words Field, Tenor and Mode are used in systemic functional linguistics as technical terms to describe the three principal components of the 'situation' or 'social context' which is 'realized' in language by a speaker/writer, or which is 'construed' from language by a listener/reader, as in literary interpretation; I will indicate systemic use by capitalization. The words are also variously used by other writers; such use is not capitalized. More detailed discussion of these terms is given in Chapter 5, with the relevant reference in note 28 of that chapter. M. A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edn. (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), pp. 106-9 and pp. 352-3 ('processes and participants') and p. 180 ('Thing'). The vocabulary of systemic functional grammar is used lightly throughout this book with a minimum of explanation as its use is wherever possible glossed in non-technical language for the general reader. For an introductory account, see David Butt, Rhonda Fahey, Sue Spinks and Colin Yallop, Using Functional Grammar: An Explorer's Guide (Sydney: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Macquarie University, 1995); see especially pp. 60-1. An introduction to Peirce's thought is rather a contradiction in terms! Perhaps Thomas A. Sebeok, 'The doctrine of signs', Frontiers in Semiotics, ed. John Deely, Brooke Williams and Felicia E. Kruse (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), pp. 35-42. Gunther Kress and Terry Threadgold give a brief overview of these disparate uses in 'Towards a social theory of genre', Southern Review, Vol. 21 (Nov. 1988), pp. 215-43. The vocabulary of textual description has also been extended to a more general material concern which includes descriptions of the body, as in Michel Foucault's notion of bodily 'inscription'. Bernstein himself considerably extends the social application of 'literary' words when he writes, 'The text that is constructed may be no more than how one sits or how one moves. In this system a text is anything which attracts evaluation. The definition of a text is anything which attracts evaluation, and this can be no more than a slight movement' (Bernstein, Pedagogy, pp. 32-3.) Tony Schirato and Susan Yell give an excellent introduction to 'narrative', 'genre' and 'discourse' as used in cultural studies in Chapter 5, 'Framing contexts', Communication and Cultural Literacy, an Introduction (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996). Cultural studies can suffer from being overeclectic. Thus Schirato and Yell's list of genres includes those identified by traditional literary criteria ('poem') with those identified by linguists ('parent-child talk') (pp. 95-6). A post-structuralist perspective emphasizes the role of the subject, the interpreter, in arriving at this particular 'objective description', that is interpretation, of the 'object'. See, for example, Norman Fairclough's comment on linguistic description as interpretation, Language and Power (London: Longman, 1989), p. 27. The writings of the philosopher Jacques Derrida are of course relevant; references now abound but see, for example, Peggy Kamuf, A Derrida Reader, Between the Blinds (New York: Harvester, 1991), especially pp. 31-58.

Poetic Discourse and Genre

15. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, p. 38. 16. Mary Macken-Horarik, 'Construing the Invisible: Specialized Literacy Practices in Junior Secondary English', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1997. See also Macken-Horarik's article 'Literacy and learning across the curriculum: towards a model of register for secondary teachers', Ruqaiya Hasan and Geoff Williams (eds), Literacy in Society (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 232-78. 17. Bernstein, Pedagogy, p. 18. 18. 'Many of the systems [of genres] depend on a formal distinction, said to be fundamental and universal, among three ways of representation... called lyric, dramatic and narrative. These representational modes go back to Plato's division of literary discourse into authorial, figural and mixed, according to whether the feigned speaker is poet, character, or both. As developed by Aristotle, this division according to speaker underlies much ancient, Renaissance and neoclassical theory' (Fowler, Kinds of Literature, p. 235). We see here the origin of generic differentiation in discourse practices, rather than texttype. 19. See for example Jose L. Rodriguez Illera, 'Code theory and pedagogic subject', in Knowledge and Pedagogy: The Sociology of Basil Bernstein, ed. Alan R. Sadovnik (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1995). 20. Angus Mclntosh felt obliged to gloss graphology, and place the word in citation marks, in his first footnote to' "Graphology" and meaning', written in 1961 but published in 1966, in Patterns of Language, ed. A. Mclntosh and M. A. K. Halliday (London: Longman, 1966), p. 98. Michael Cummings and Robert Simmons, using the systemic model of language in a student text, The Language of Literature, a Stylistic Introduction to the Study of Literature, include a chapter on 'Graphology', with discussion of three poems (Oxford: Pergamon, 1983), pp. 63-85. 21. Walter J. Ong, Chapter 3, 'Some psychodynamics of orality', Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982). See also Rosemary Huisman, 'Displaced belief: the role of religious textual conventions in the practices of production and interpretation of meaning in English literary texts', in Michael Griffith and James Tulip (eds), Religion, Literature and the Arts Project, Australian International Conference 1996 Proceedings (Sydney: RLA Project, 1996). 22. Roman Jakobson, 'Concluding statement: linguistics and poetics', Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350-77. 23. For an introductory account of some possible functions of poetic metre, also utilizing a systemic functional model, see John Haynes, 'Metre and discourse', Language, Discourse and Literature, an Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics, ed. Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 24. The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (London: Oxford University Press, 1960 reprint), p. 359.

29

The Written Poem

25. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edn. (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 849. 26. The spelling and punctuation are as handwritten. Reproduced, with transcription, in P. J. Croft, Autograph Poetry in the English Language, Facsimiles of Original Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Cassell, 1973), pp. 108-9. 27. As quoted by Antony Easthope (Poetry as Discourse, p. 51) from Boris Tomashevsky, 'Sur le vers', Theorie de la Litterature, Texts des Formalities Russes reunies, ed. and trans, by Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965), p. 155. 28. Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans, from Russian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1977), pp. 94-104. 29. In English, the development of prose is usually associated with the reign of Alfred the Great in the second half of the ninth century. Alfred initiated a programme of translation into the vernacular; see his Preface to the Old English translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis. See Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (eds) 'From the translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care', Alfred the Great (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1983), pp. 124-6. 30. I am using the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu. See John B. Thompson, 'Editor's Introduction', Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 10-25. 31. This is a favourite explanatory image of the physicist/discourse scholar Jay Lemke, as in Textual Politics, pp. 159-66. 32. This use of the punctus is most consistently developed in Bodleian MS Junius 11, as discussed by Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), pp. 151 and 179-86. The Germanic versification of Old English poems, and some Middle English poetry such as the thirteenth-century Lagamon's Brut, and the later poems of the Pearl manuscript and of Piers Plowman, was based on regularity of stress, not on syllable counting, as is the natural spoken rhythm of English. With a similar 'natural' transference of the characteristics of spoken English, metrical units (usually of two stressed syllables with a varying number of unstressed syllables) were appropriately linked by alliteration, not rhyme, for the principal lexical stress in English is typically on the first syllable of the word. In similar fashion, though from a very different linguistic environment because of the relationship to Latin, the Romantic traditions of syllable counting and rhyme emerged from the dominant rhythm and word stress patterns of the spoken Romantic vernaculars. See Halliday, Functional Grammar, pp. 292-4, on the stress-based rhythm of spoken English. (I should acknowledge that the linguist Peter Roach, in 'On the distinction between "stress-timed" and "syllable-timed" languages', has questioned the conventional assumption of this distinction as empirically observable. See Linguistic Controversies: Essays in Linguistic Theory and Practice in Honour of F. R. Palmer, ed. David Crystal (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), pp. 73-9.)

30

Poetic Discourse and Genre

33. As in the text of I^amon's Brut in British Library MS Cotton Caligula A. ix, to be discussed in Chapter 6. 34. For example, Elliott van Kirk Dobbie makes no mention of the cul-de-lampe (inverted triangle) display of the short poems Thureth and The Metrical Preface to the Pastoral Care, in Volume VI of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (New York: Columbia UP, 1942). 35. Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn (eds), The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (Ringwood, Victoria, Aust.: Penguin, 1986), 185. The whole 'Pillows' Series was first published in Compass, Vol. 5 (1984); it was republished in Joanne burns, blowing bubbles in the 7th lane (Sydney: FAB Press, 1988). 36. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). See also John Simon, The Prose Poem as a Genre in Nineteenth-Century European Literature (New York: Garland, 1987); Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987). 37. My French/English edition of Paris Spleen is in a combined volume with The Flowers of Evil, a collection of 160 conventionally lineated poems. The notes give a one-page history of the prose-poem before Baudelaire and on Baudelaire's own usage comment, 'Compare "L'Invitation au voyage" in both versions, the prose and the poetry, to perceive how the form shapes the work, the one free of restraint, the other hobbled by the rules of prosody.' The Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen, translated by William H. Crosby (New York: BOA Editions, 1991), p. 483. 38. Paul Hoover, 'Introduction', A Norton Anthology of Post-Modem American Poetry (New York: Norton, 1994), p. xxxiv. 39. Scholars have pondered the loose classification rules for prosaic and poetic discourse in the late Old English/early Middle English period, as in 'Was ^Elfric a poet?', Sherman M. Kuhn, Philological Quarterly, vol. 52 (1973), pp. 643-62. 40. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, Vol. 1, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1976), p. 314. 41. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 81. 42. A brief summary and excerpt is given in Perkins, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode, pp. 55-7. 43. McGann, Black Riders, p. 83. 44. Richard Bradford, 'The visual poem in the eighteenth century', Visible Language, vol. 23 (1989), pp. 9-27. This quotation is from p. 11. Another relevant article by Bradford, with some overlap of material, is 'Criticism and the visual format of poetry', Word & Image, Vol. 5 (1989), pp. 198-205. 45. Bradford, 'Eighteenth century', p. 15. 46. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 100. 31

The Written Poem

47. John Sparrow, Visible Words: A Study of Inscriptions in and as Books and Works of An (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969) and Line upon Line: An Epigraphical Anthology (Cambridge: Brooke Crutchley, 1967). 48. Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems II, Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1986), p. 99.

32

2 The Seen Poem and Its Semiosis

The phrase 'visual poetry' suggests, in the usual grammatical role of modification, that 'visual poetry' is a subclass of 'poetry', that is, that one could speak of 'the discourse of visual poetry'. Thus Willard Bohn in his booklength study, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928, calls visual poetry a 'genre', one with a 'long and varied history, from the technopaegnia of the ancient Greeks to the latest experiments with concrete poetry'.1 (In the various quotations from others throughout this book, the word 'genre' is usually used in the traditional literary sense which blurs together the two meanings which I have differentiated in Chapter 1: 'categories of discourse' and 'genres of text'.) But with what is such poetry contrasted so that its category classification can be made? In one sense, since the use of writing to record poetry, and certainly since the use of printing to publish poetry, all poetry is visual (a point made by The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, in its entry under 'Visual Poetry').2 Similarly, John Hollander comments - after quoting Dryden's scathing comment on figured poems, a far from isolated scorn - that 'the burden of all these denunciations is upon the superficiality, the literary version of taking the letter for the spirit. And yet the fact remains that from the early sixteenth century on all poems are in some sense shaped.'31 take it Hollander is thinking of the advent of printing - in Part Two, Chapter 6,1 will suggest that, for English, one might more accurately suggest the twelfth century rather than the sixteenth, as that from which 'all poems are in some sense shaped'. Yet a traditional reading practice which read the basic visual signs of poetic discourse - the line, indentations of the line, the stanza - as transparent, as the means to the end of transmitting a text to the reader's auditory sense, assumed there was only one poem, the spoken one. This is a poem whose semiosis is construed from sound alone. However, to the extent that poets, or readers of poems, become aware of the seen poem, the poem as visual object, the phenomenon of'visual poetry' comes into being for them, to be variously exploited. (I sometimes refer to 'seen poetry', for 'visual poetry' has already acquired particular uses which differ from scholar to scholar, but which do not include all the phenomena I wish to discuss.) If the poem can still be read, as heard language, then the text is now recognized as being construable (able to be interpreted) through two semiotic systems that in which the signs are accessible to the ear, and that to the eye. What I have said so far raises those two basic and interrelated questions: first the extratextual question of historical and social production: when and 33

The Written Poem

why did the 'seen poem' achieve recognition? and secondly, the intratextual question of semiosis - what meaning-making practices (various or persistent) can be identified in relation to seen poetry? Part Two of this book is primarily concerned with the first question in the extended period from Old English poetry (before 1100) to the present. Histories of poetry which call themselves 'modern' (in the general sense, though they may also focus on 'Modernism' as a type of poetic discourse) typically begin with writing of the late nineteenth century, as does the impressive two-volume study by David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry.* Because I want to begin here, in Part One, primarily by discussing the second question (just what use has been made of visual semiosis?) it is helpful to begin at our historical end point of 'modern poetry'. Bernstein describes an environment in which different categories are strongly differentiated from each other as having strong classification (poetic discourse may be clearly differentiated from prose). An environment in which realization rules are explicit and prescriptive he describes as having strong framing (poetry may be written and interpreted according to clear generic expectations, as in early eighteenth-century English poetry). One could say that, since the nineteenth century, poetic discourse in English has increasingly been weakly classified and weakly framed. This is an issue seriously discussed by literary critics and by poets, the latter sometimes enacting the issue by conducting such discussion in what might otherwise be recognised as poetic discourse. Jerome McGann, discussing the work of the American poet Ron Silliman, comments: 'The Chinese Note-book' is one of a large group of recent works ... where the borderline between imaginative and expository writing is called into question, or is lost, or is actively being shifted. Silliman's text comprises a numbered set of reflections on various problems of writing and philosophy. An explicit parody of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, 'The Chinese Notebook' raises the question of poetry's relation to truth both formally and substantively. The formal aspect of the problem is particularly crucial because (according to the received line of argument) poetry's failure as truth comes from its preoccupation with appearances. Is 'The Chinese Notebook' philosophy or is it poetry? And if we say it is (or is not) one or the other, why and how do we arrive at our judgment?5

Roman Jakobson's famous structuralist understanding of'poetic language', referred to in my previous chapter, certainly assumed it was textual orientation to appearances (to the message itself) which was the sign of the poetic function. McGann continues: One reads the work of Alan Davies (for instance, a piece like 'Language Mind Writing') or a critical text like Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson only to experience a crisis of language. As in 'The Chinese Notebook' and so many other recent texts,

34

The Seen Poem

the dissolution appears as a problem of genre ... My Emily Dickinson looks like 'literary criticism', and is catalogued as such by booksellers and libraries. It reads, however, like poetry ... frequently slipping altogether into ballad meter as the physical text maintains the linear formalities of prose, (pp 136-7)

McGann's last example nicely brings out the way in which framing and classification rules can operate in disjunction. According to Bernstein, this possibility is the 'potential of change'. Bernstein writes, 'Although framing carries the message to be reproduced, there is always pressure to weaken that framing . . . at some point, the weakening of the framing is going to violate the classification. So change can come at the level of framing.' Thus the sound pattern, the 'ballad meter', into which My Emily Dickinson 'frequently slips' - a conventional genre of text according to the realization rules which frame poetic discourse - 'violates' the classification which divides poetry from literary criticism, the category into which the text has otherwise been placed ('by its looks'). I will return later to the question of why, according to Bernstein, 'there is always pressure to weaken the framing'. An environment in which classification is weak is one where categories are more permeable, can 'leak' into each other more readily. So discourses 'leak' into each other (as in McGann's example of poetry/literary criticism).6 An environment in which framing is weak is one in which the realization of text is less controlled. So different semiotic realizations 'leak' into each other (the visual/aural poem). With weak framing, poetic discourse gains the potential to be realized in different semiotic systems (including, though it is not here my concern, those of the drama in so-called 'performance poetry'). I have already differentiated visual from aural semiosis in language and both can conventionally be understood as realizations of discourse as 'language as social practice'. But critics do not always 'see' language even when they 'see' poetry. The senses of sight and hearing associated with visual and aural semiosis are also of course associated with the perception of 'texts' of other 'discourses' - notably that of art for sight and music for hearing. Though there is general agreement among critics and literary historians that the period from the late nineteenth century to the twentieth has been strongly interested in visual poetry, variously understood, it is the influence of art and music on its development which has attracted most attention. Less remarked on are developments of seen poetry concerned with the possible meaning-making of graphology, that is a concern with 'visible language'. Perhaps these last developments are less noticed by commentators because they do not involve a semiotic shift to another 'discourse', such as that of art. They represent an enlargement of the possibilities of semiosis in language, a more subtle shift of framing than a complete transfer of classification to a non-verbal semiotic environment. Chapter 5 discusses some of these 'more subtle' developments in detail. In overview, what kinds of semiosis have been invoked in the various 35

The Written Poem

practices of 'visual' or 'seen' poetry? I have inferred the following catalogue from my readings of poetry, from the comments of poets on their work, from the opinions of literary critics. They are (at least) the the the the

semiotic semiotic semiotic semiotic

of art (painting, sculpture, drawing, 'found art', etc.) of music (including jazz) of the body of language.

The last, meaning-making through seen language, can be subdivided (at least) into (using the vocabulary of systemic functional grammar): graphology as a realization of Mode ('the organization of the message') to facilitate semantic concentration syntactic ambiguities counterpoint between syntax and semantics graphology as realization of meanings of Field, Tenor and Mode (meaning-making directly through the seen language).

The semiotic of the body includes two realizations which may seem to contrast the most natural and the most contrived. First there is theorizing about the breath - sometimes taken as life itself, and the way in which the 'seen poem' can represent the very breathing of the poet. Secondly, there is theorizing about sight as a human sense and graphic display as visual presence, embodying all that is peculiar and accessible to the sense of sight rather than to the other modes of perception (visual presence does not 'belong' to art but underlies all semiosis perceived through sight, including that of art and written language). All these types of semiosis, and the 'interreading' we give to their juxtaposition (the interpretation of their simultaneous presence) are not ahistorical and asocial. It is helpful to return briefly to the work of sociologists such as Bernstein and Bourdieu to explore this point, for the very reason that they do not introduce some of the issues of social context which I will suggest are needed. The reason why, according to Bernstein, 'there is always pressure to weaken the framing' - that is, for poetic discourse, there is always an impetus to generic change - is because '(pedagogic) discourse and (pedagogic) practice construct always an arena, a struggle over the nature of symbolic control'.7 This is a comparable insight to that of Pierre Bourdieu, in his account of 'cultural production', in which he would describe 'the institution of literature', and, by implication, its sub-area 'the institution of poetic discourse', as a 'field' or 'market', within which there were different sites of authority - well-known poets, 'unknown' poets, editors, prestigious pub36

The Seen Poem

Ushers, vanity presses, academic critics, popular journalists, public literary boards, private prize-givers and benefactors and so on and so on - who have various and varying amounts of 'symbolic capital' because of their placement in the field, and who are engaged in a struggle to enlarge that symbolic capital by defining the nature of symbolic control.8 For both Bernstein and Bourdieu, a change in 'what' signals a change in 'who'. Thus Bernstein suggests, 'if framing changes from strong to weak or the classification changes from strong to weak, there are two basic questions we should always ask: which group is responsible for initiating the change? Is the change initiated by a dominant group or a dominated group .. .?'9 Or as Bourdieu puts it: the field of cultural production is the site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer ... the fundamental stake in literary struggles is the monopoly of literary legitimacy ... the monopoly of the power to say with authority who are authorized to call themselves writers.10 Bourdieu, in my opinion, does oversimplify the case here. The institution of literature is not isolated from other social institutions, and over time its interrelationship with those others may vary considerably. For example, some of the avant-garde artists and poets of the early twentieth century saw the symbolic power of literature as capable of exerting force upon political and economic structures. This is a concern with more than 'the struggle to define the writer'. This period was one of the four 'great periods' for visual poetry, probably a significant conjunction as the following would imply. Poets and literary critics have agreed that, since the late nineteenth century, there has been a resurgence of visual poetry of one kind or another. Geoffrey Cook suggests that 'visual poetry has appeared four times in Occidental art history as an extensive movement - during the Alexandrine period, the Carolingian renaissance, the Baroque and our own day'.11 (I would assign two periods to the twentieth century, with its fast forward approach to cultural transformation - the first period being the first three decades of the century, the second, that following World War II, for there are significant discontinuities of practice.) Cook sees great significance in this appearance: 'each of the past three incarnations appeared at the death of one cultural epoch & the beginning of another... Visual poetry... is a visual statement that nothing more meaningful can be said till we can restructure the basic vision that is an historical culture.'12 In the terminology of Michel Foucault's earlier writing, one could say a resurgence of visual poetry is associated with, even a sign of, epistemic change. (For Foucault, the episteme of a culture was characterized by certain discursive formations, ways of construing reality.)13 This is a larger topic which cannot be pursued 37

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here, but one which reminds us of the essentially social location of literary studies, however we may narrow our focus for the purposes of research. Change in twentieth-century English poetry most commonly has been associated with changes in French art and French poetry. In addition, Jerome McGann gives a British antecedent, associating the twentiethcentury developments particularly with what he calls 'the late nineteenth-century Renaissance of printing'. The latter gave artists 'a new horizon of bibliographical and institutional possibilities'.14 McGann's introduction of 'the late nineteenth-century Renaissance of printing' introduces one of two features that need to be mentioned as constituting some of the important possibilities of the 'field of struggle', to use Bourdieu's words. Bourdieu and Bernstein do not mention (or at least foreground) these features - Bernstein because he is concerned with the strongly classified institution of the school, and Bourdieu, I suspect, because he is thinking particularly of the literary 'scene' in Paris, and both because they are assuming an atemporal, or contemporaneous presence of contemporary (or near-contemporary) life. These two features, theorized separately but always interrelated, are concerned with the subject of reading (the reader) and the object of reading respectively. To study the subject of reading one needs to take account, historically and socially, of practices of literacy and reading, including the different relations between reading and writing, at different times. To study the object of reading one needs to take into account the possibilities of object production within available technology. 'Available technology' is a very open-ended term. Changes in transport, in public utilities (such as the availability of electricity), in craft or manufacturing practices and so on - all can be relevant but the most centrally relevant area is that associated directly with language itself. According to Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy^ an oral culture is profoundly changed by the introduction of writing, the first 'language technology'.15 Elizabeth Eisenstein first drew detailed attention to the restructuring of the social world associated with the introduction of printing, another technology for language production.16 And the twentieth century has seen an acceleration of technologies for seen language production, especially those under individual or private control, from the typewriter to the local personal computer with its associated text-oriented applications (word-processing and formatting programs, and graphics programs transferable into the previous two). I say 'seen language production' because the twentieth century has also witnessed the development of heard language technology, both for private and public use - the telephone, radio, the tape recorder - together with the technologies of mixed semiotic realization, film and video. And finally, from the 1980s, we have the development of interactive multimedia technology for both production and reception of language, seen and increasingly heard, and graphics and sound generally (computer art and computer music) 38

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through the Internet. Thus the realization of the signs of one semiotic or another - of art, of music, of language - traditionally material, but now also immaterial or virtual with electronic realization, will be an 'instantiation', an instance, of the technological possibilities of the culture. Geoffrey Cook's observation, previously quoted, on the four periods of visual poetry, in conjunction with a consideration of the periods of technological change and histories of reading, immediately raises an interesting question. To what extent, if at all, have these periods of prominence of visual poetry (signifying crises of culture, Cook implies), some correlation with changes in technology and/or changes in literacy? This is part of the larger question of'the sociology of literature': 'what is the relation between poetic discourse and social change?', a question obviously much larger than the scope of this study, but one on which it may throw some light. Part Two attempts some overview of these issues of literacy and language technology, beginning in the period of 'transferred literacy' in late Old English manuscript culture and concluding with a discussion of some of the implications for poetic discourse of the most recent technological developments, those of interactive media. I return now to the catalogue of kinds of semiosis associated with visual poetry, and to a discussion of the different framings of poetic discourse, that is, the production of different text-types or genres of poetry through the different media of semiosis. First, the semiotic of art. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

Willard Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), p. 1.1 discuss technopaegnia in Chapter 3. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, The New Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), pp. 1364-6. John Hollander, Vision and Resonance, Two Senses of Poetic Form, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985), p. 268. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP), Vol. I (From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode), 1976, and Vol. II (Modernism and After), 1987. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 135. In contrast, the nineteenth-century development of the prose-poem has been described as a political reaction against the strongly classified categories and strongly framed genres of traditional French poetic practice. 'The wealth of devices and artifice characteristic of rhymed metrical verse, in particular the classical alexandrine, had become by the mid-nineteenth century its peculiar poverty', writes Jonathan Monroe in A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987), p. 117. The reaction is political, Monroe comments, because it suggests an equation between accepting a 39

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7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

40

'hierarchy of genres' and a 'hierarchy of social classes', yet another example of the way in which disruptive literary practices foreground the reversible statement 'language practices —>are