Sestina On the Advice of Anthony Hecht

Poet:

As any form becomes canonical,

it virtually invites

experiment, variation, violation, alteration.
(A.H.)

Logic is an arrow––to the point, singular, literal . . . no detours. 

Metaphor is a map, full of blind alleys, irrelevancies, absurdities, ambiguities, multiple meanings, choices . . . interesting things. It lets you begin your story where you please––middle, end, wherever, it doesn't matter.

Taking you to the edge and convincing you not to jump, logic keeps you safely within the world you are given.

Subverting reality, distracting you to a world that may never exist, metaphor takes you to the edge, tells you to fly, and pushes you off.

Logic is a necessary connection.

Metaphor is an imaginary bridge.

Premise and consequence: metaphor and logic are inseparable––together they create art and science.

Internal Critic:

OK, then.  You know quite well that a proper sestina consists of 6 verses of 6 lines each, followed by a closing 3-line envoi. "On the Advice of Anthony Hecht" either is a single 6-line verse followed by a 1-line envoi, or it is six 1-line verses followed by a 1-line envoi. Or is it just prose –– notes for a future poem perhaps? Another W.I.P.-mask you so like to hide behind to avoid completing anything. In any case, it fails as a sestina.

Furthermore, each verse of a proper sestina must contain six distinct words that are repeated from one verse to the next; also, these repeated words must appear as the terminal word of each line. "On the Advice" has only 2 repeated words, and these never appear at the end of a line/verse.

Here's a suggestion: Let's generously accept "On the Advice" as a bizarre 2-verse "binary sestina." If we label "logic"=0 and "metaphor"=1, then the 6-line stanza begins this obviously unfinished poem with the word repetition order 010101.  This might be the beginning of a more reasonable structure getting back to something more closely resembling the sestina form we have come to expect.  So we keep what you have as verse A and work out the word repetitions as the structural basis for five more verses B through F.  Then you will only have to compose out from this scheme:

A   010101

B   100110

C   011010

D   001101

E   100011

F   111000

Poet:

That's very helpful of you, but that's a lot more 0's and 1's than I had planned.  I'm not sure I have that much to say about logic and metaphor.


Internal Critic:

Well . . .

Poet:

And seriously––... didn't you catch the recap of all six key words in the envoi?

Internal Critic:

Well, no. I really didn't hear the six key words you think you "repeated" in the envoi.  But still I'd certainly have to pan any attempt to keep my attention through 36 lines with 18 logics and 18 metaphors, plus another three of each for a proper envoi.  But I have another suggestion for you.  Why not try actual, proper rhyming?  Leave the first stanza as it is, then in stanza B use, oh, I don't know, 0="pedagogic" and 1="petits-fours."  Then maybe verse C could use, let's see ... how about 0="trick" and 1="door."  And since we now have six distinct words in the pattern, why not go back and change verse A so it uses all six of these words––label them 1 through 6––one in each of verse A's six lines? Then we, I mean you, could riff on this pattern:

A   123456

B   615243

C   364125

D   532614

E   451362

F   246531

"New" and "different" are so overrated. You're brilliant. You can do this! Trust me.

Poet:

Uh-huh.

Internal Critic:

And it would be a nice touch––a tribute, if you will––if you could try iambic pentameter rather than the frankly quite ugly prose you seem to like. The public, after all, has come to expect the beauty of stacked iambs.  After all, they are the feet we've come to love.

Poet:

Uh-huh.

So you'll finally be happy if I write a poem using the exact formula concocted by a troubadour to win a poetry slam in some tavern in Provence 800 years ago?

Internal Critic:

Well . . .  But it will be your own voice, of course.  There's still plenty of good poetry to be written in ....

Poet:

. . .

Thanks for all this. Really. But I sort of like it just the way it is. Whatever it is.

Internal Critic:

OK. Your call. But one last thing–––.

It's not all that important, but . . .

       what were you trying to say about logic and metaphor?

So this is going . . . . . where? –––>

The Emaciated Sonnet

Forging right ahead from the previous post...


Hecht continues:

"In 'Pied Beauty' Hopkins wrote what he called a 'curtal,' or abbreviated sonnet.  Elizabeth Bishop first, and later Mona Van Duyn, wrote sonnets with strikingly short lines, Bishop beginning hers with the (complete) line 'Caught––the bubble,' Van Duyn calling hers 'minimalist' sonnets.  But these were neither the first nor the last to attempt such artistic parsimony and spare ingenuity.  As far as I am aware, the first truly emaciated sonnet (with each line confined to a single syllable) was composed by Arthur Rimbaud.

     Coucher Ivre

      Pouacre

 Boit:

   Nacre

 Voit:

Acre

Loi,

   Fiacre

   Choit!

     Femme

     Tombe,

     Lombe

      Saigne:

       Geigne.

      Clame!

"Roughly rendered, this means: (The) Slob / Drinks: / (The) Pearl (of a girl) / Sees (what's coming): // (The) Bitter / Law (of gravity takes effect), / (The) Carriage / Collapses! // (The) Woman / Tumbles, / Loins // Bleed: / Whimpers. / Pandemonium!"

It is not enough to identify this quotation with the title of the book where it appears, Melodies Unheard, along with the usual page reference (p.53-4), because Hecht's chapter & section titles reveal immediately what he is about here. The chapter is "The Sonnet: Ruminations on Form, Sex, and History"; the section is entitled simply "The Form."

It's here that I begin a journey attempting to understand––or at least illuminate––the role of subversion in questions of musical form, and from there to questions of the relevance (or lack of relevance) of music analysis.  The contemporary musicologist will likely find this journey mostly irrelevant with regard to au courant agendas: it will––for the most part––elide the sex and ignore imaginary linear histories.

Right now, what I ask of the reader is to consider the puzzling fact that "Coucher Ivre," in the judgment of Rimbaud at least, and surely many others (Hecht provides several examples), is a sonnet.

Most of us––I at least––grew up with an "acceptable" idea of just what a sonnet is, and so also of what it cannot be.  A good summary of what an acceptable sonnet is, along with minor acceptable variations, can be found in many places––even on the web, for example, >here<.  But of course, there must always be 14 lines, traditionally divided 8 plus 6––octave followed by sestet. The lines in "Coucher Ivre" have a rather dull rhyme scheme (abab abab cdd cc d), but I suppose this is barely acceptable within the tradition.

But the heresy is immediately obvious before even reading (or hearing) the sonnet.  14 lines, yes––but just one syllable per line?  What happened to iambic pentameter?  And once you push this far in allowing "experiment, variation, violation, alteration," at what point does the initial, generating form cease to exist and become something else?––perhaps ceasing to be an intelligible "poetic form" at all, devolving into prose or nonsense.

Amplifying the questions posed in the previous post, if you had never heard of "Coucher Ivre" before, and you were to hear it read aloud, would you guess that it was a sonnet?  If you knew Petrarch and Shakespeare sonnets, would that help identify the Rimbaud poem as a sonnet?  Does it matter or not if you know/hear/read it as a sonnet? If not, why not? Why does Anthony Hecht spend so many words demonstrating (justifying, almost) that this is a sonnet? Why does he, a poet, care?  Finally, now that you know it's a sonnet, does that spoil the magic of the poetry for you?  If the poem didn't "speak" to you before you were told it was a sonnet, does knowing that it's a sonnet create the magic for you.  Or would you just rather not know?

Next up: The Form –––>

Melodies Unheard

"As any form becomes canonical, it virtually invites experiment, variation, violation, alteration."

Anthony Hecht

Melodies Unheard 

You will find two brief examples of Hecht's principle below in the footer – two piano pieces, on the edge of something and Atacama.  The first question here is, without the score, with only the sound available, can you tell what canonical form these two pieces vary, violate, and alter?  The second question is, does being able to tell matter?  And the third question is, if it matters, to whom does it matter? – composer? performer? listener?

Continued in The Emaciated Sonnet –––>