Trevor Joyce recently put an image of this poem on Facebook, and I loved it so much I asked his permission to post it at LH, which he generously gave, so here ’tis:
Neglect in Camera
It is another obscure chamber. The town is trapped in light and shade, and limited to the back wall of the shop. The glasses man and his parrot inhabit an intermediate dimension.
The parrot knows the names of things. Roskyn, he says. Then, shag, cendal, gazzatum, dobby, fleece. An ignorance of grammar does not allow his speech to accumulate meaning. His master draughts the projected image on his scrim. Things he knows, but not their names.
They make an odd pair, this glasses man and his pet. When the bird dies, his master will have him stuffed, he loves him so. Already selected is the corner in which he will perch, steadfast. The figures moving through the inverted silver town are averaged into a poised stasis. They represent the citizens as the bird represents the tropics.
Later, the glasses man will attend with oils to the precise textures of cloth, of hair, of milk pouring, a needle penetrating lace, sunlight on pearl, on skin. His nails are dark from years of grinding colours. His eyes are dark from years. His skin? Gossamer!
The obscure chamber is, of course, a camera obscura. As for the parrot’s more obscure words, cendal is “a thin and light silk material, chiefly used to make ceremonial clothing, church vestments, and banners”; gazzatum is “A fine species of silk or linen fabric, apparently what we now call gauze, and conjectured to have received its name from Gaza in Palestine, where it was manufactured”; and dobby is “a woven fabric produced on the dobby loom, characterised by small geometric patterns and extra texture in the cloth” (the ancient OED entry says “Perhaps from a proper name”). And gossamer, as we discussed here, is, delightfully, from the phrase “goose summer.”
Something Vermeer had in common with Flaubert. Yes, and “what do you call it gossamer” is wonderfully referenced. One Joyce to another.
I just realized I missed a trick by saying “I loved it so much” rather than “I loved it so.”
That would have made for a nice syntactic double-take, resolvable only by recourse to a comma. “I loved it so, I asked his permission” and “I loved it, so I asked his permission”.
It is an interesting and evocative piece of poetic prose, but it is not a poem. Poems require some regularity of metre, rhyme, rhythm; some constraining framework.
Oh, please. That point of view was well past its sell-by date a century ago. You might as well hang a sign around your neck that says “I know nothing about poetry, but I know what I like.”
Honestly, I feel with Graham here. It’s difficult for me not to read it as a prose text; there is nothing in it that makes me want to consider the line breaks. Beautiful language, but it doesn’t work as a poem for me.
I somehow overlooked the claim that it’s a poem – and I’d never have guessed. What makes it a poem? Are the line breaks really deliberate?
They are called prose poems and yes, they are poems.
I first saw the form in the work of Killarney Clary. It was surprising, but made total sense to me. If you are in a poet’s frame of mind, then what you write is poetry.
Y yes! However you classify this poet’s text, it is a diamond-cut masterwork of the first order. I waver: am I moved to cascades of eloquence over its virtues, or simply struck mute in awe? A middle path: I’ll be brief. Even the few “prosaic” points serve to pin a wind-puffed canvas down at a plateau of great height, so more of the soaring whole remains visible to us below. A sentence that would not be out of place in brown-suit litcrit of the 1950s: “They represent the citizens as the bird represents the tropics.” Ars autem est celare artem.
On verse and not-verse, we must remember how Yeats treated Pater’s “prose”, celebrating this transcendent gem as the first lines of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935:
Hat:
I just realized I missed a trick by saying “I loved it so much” rather than “I loved it so.”
Never mind. I made up for your oversight by concealing two equally workable parsings here: “Something Vermeer had in common with Flaubert.”
As for the parrot’s more obscure words,
‘Roskyn’ is unknown to wiktionary, or Google [**], or me. (I also tried ‘roskin’ — which is Finnish plural for trash. Typo for ‘Roslyn’ — a town name?)
[**] unless it’s a family name — but that’s not “name[s] of things”. A family portrait?
Otherwise reciting obscure names for fabric as a prelude for the photographer’s ‘scrim’ seems to me entirely gratuitous. (I’ll avoid the word I would use outside polite company.) I get no poetic ‘mouth feel’ from reciting them — which is what I would expect from parroting.
I don’t expect prose poems to rhyme; I do expect them to scan/have a rhythm/an arrangement of sounds/an echo. Otherwise they’re just prose. A ‘prose image’? So yeah, hand me the “I know nothing about poetry, but I know what I like.” sign.
I looked at a few of those @Y linked to. So calling those ‘poems’ is supposed to hide/justify that they’re bad writing (mostly)? de gustibus …, I suppose.
Short lines are a poetic device. A lovely and versatile and powerful one, but nobody is bound to use it if it doesn’t generate the desired effect.
Auden’s own favourite part of the superb The Sea and the Mirror was “Caliban addresses the Audience.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_and_the_Mirror
Thanks @DE, even this (frankly, terrible) reading demonstrates what I mean by “arrangement of sounds/echo”.
(wind-whipped cornice that overhangs the unabiding void resonates.) There’s a heightened vocabulary, but no gratuitous throwing-around of obscure words.
No matter how contrived/halting a recitation I try of the prose-thing above, I can’t get it to resonate. (I’m using terms from music because for me music is the primary art form.)
I’m happy to call it ‘imaging’, ‘imagining’, even ‘art’. I don’t see it adds anything to call it a ‘poem’ (to ‘stick to the knitting’ here of words).
unknown to wiktionary, or Google
Your google-fu is weak, grasshopper. You must learn to add another search term, such as “fabric”, and tell google firmly that you want “roskyn”, not “roslyn” (adding “-roslyn” will also help). The first page of results will then contain several relevant links.
The OED, Anglo-Norman Dictionary, and Middle English Dictionary all have roskyn as a variant spelling of ruskin, ‘fur of the Eurasian red squirrel’. Last known use in ?1510, per OED; the poem is set in the Middle Ages.
Thank you @kts
camera obscurum per obscurius, then.
Ah, if all concerns were so easily allayed. Some poetry then, for the squeamish about categorial permeability:
i’ve always thought that “what a piece of work is man” is an underappreciated part of Hair; it’s probably the most poetic lyric in the show, with “i would just like to say” determinedly prose.
prose poetry, i hasten to say. “what a piece of work is man” has the strongest constraining framework, or system of rhythm, sound, and timbre – all the more so because it isn’t in a traditional form.
and clearly both are poetry, because they’re sung.
“What a piece of work is man …”
That @Noetica can quote Noel-Tod mis-quoting such a well-known piece (and thereby destroy the cadence) suggests there’s rather a lot of tin ears round here. Shakespeare wrote that to be spoken out loud to an audience. It sounds very well; it carries a rhythm/ an arrangement of sounds.
The Joyce spoken out loud is ghastly (I’ve tried). There’s no arrangement of sounds (Noetica’s arrangement on the page is arbitrary: it doesn’t reflect any spoken cadence — where do you breath?). We were spared the obscure fabrics: their lack of euphony is not the squawking of a parrot — which would be some kind of word-play/sound-play — I can lay no prosody over them (not even a parrot’s prosody) — would permuting the sequence upset anything? Upset as badly as missing out an unstressed single syllable in the Shakespeare? (Which echoes the later “an angel”, “a god”.)
The not-poetry complaint isn’t for the lack of chopping up sentences on the page; it’s the lack of music.
It’s prose to be read, not spoken. J. K. Galbraith can produce more harmonious prose for speaking out loud; Andrew Marr at the New Statesman/political analysis has better cadences. (Perchance he’s quoting Auden at ~4:00.)
Perhaps the difficulty is there’s no word other than ‘poem’ for this form?/It’s the least bad term?
Now I can sympathise: I’ve just returned from a concert performance of Petrushka. Although there’s a clear line from Bach to Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, … and on to Shostakovich, I really am not happy to call this ‘classical’ music; far less ‘serious’ music when Stravinsky’s blowing raspberrys at all that formal stuff.
What does “an image of this poem” mean? Do you mean a graphic with the text of the poem?
As for what’s a poem, I’ve myself written plenty of poems without meter, rhyme, or rhythm, but this is a different sort of work than those. Which doesn’t mean it can’t be called a poem. (I’m not inclined to call it a poem, but no one put me in charge.)
I suspect if read out loud it would feel a lot more like a poem to me than it does me reading it written.
Which brings to mind the thought that poetry is a spoken (or sometimes sung) art, with written poems reflecting it.
I will not enter into the question of what is or is not poetry, but when speaking of verse (the true antonym of prose), I agree with Graham that it is defined by a rhythm, a patterned regularity, something definitely absent from the Pater (which has an irregular prose rhythm) but present here in the Joyce.
This rhythm belongs to the English-language category called simple stress-verse, which is related to foot-verse but does not count the unstressed syllables, a formal element it has in common with the Germanic alliterative line and the native measures (Long, Common, Short, and Poulter’s Measure)[*]. The vast majority of the lines are five-stress, thus relating it to the familiar iambic pentameter. In particular, all of the lines of the first stanza, which sets the pattern, are five-stress:
Ít is anóther obscúre chámber. The tówn is
trápped in líght and sháde, and límited tó the
báck wáll of the shóp. The glásses mán and his
párrot inhábit an íntermédiate diménsion.
In the other stanzas, the last line is short, which is a standard but not universal variation in English stanzaic verse. The line “his spéech to accúmulate méaning. His máster” I can only read as a four-stress variation. But the remarkable line “the córner in whích he will pérch, stéadfást. The” puts two metrical stresses in a two-syllable word, thus reflecting the steadfastness of the dead parrot (“the sound must seem an echo to the sense”, as Pope says) and reminds me of the end of Hamlet’s address to the Ghost, a five-stress line in an otherwise iambic pentameter context: “Stáy! Spéak! Spéak, I chárge thee, spéak!”
The most familiar of poets using simple stress verse, or as he called it sprung rhythm, is Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The wórld is chárgèd[**] wíth the grándeur of Gód.
It wíll fláme óut, like shíning from shóok óil;
It gáthers to a gréatness, líke the óoze of óil
Crúshed. Why do mén then nów not réck his ród?
The additional formal element of alliteration moves this verse further from prose (it is a gradient distinction, after all); the absence of such an element in the Joyce poem makes it effectively quieter. But the Joyce is just as much verse as the Hopkins or the Shakespeare.
[*] Here is a basic introduction to the native measures, though it deals only with those it calls iambic. Limericks are in duple-triple meter with triple meter dominating, but are just as much native-measure as any hymn. The true mark of the native measures is the stressed pause, roughly corresponding to a rest in music (or a drumbeat or its verbal imitation ba-dump), which makes the lines and sublines four-stress even though the last stress may be in fact silence:
There wás a young féllow who thóught [páuse]
Very líttle but thóught it a lót. [páuse]
Then at lóng last he knéw / What he wánted to dó,
But befóre he could stárt, he forgót. [páuse]
This is Poulter’s Measure, as you can see from the linked article (and you’ll note that it requires the THOUGHT=LOT merger). The end-rhyme and internal rhyme as well as the consistent triple rhythm is yet another case of an additional formal element.
[**] Hopkins writes chargèd to allow the metrical stress to fall on with and prevent a four-stress reading in the very first line, which would confound the reader. This effect of treating an unstressed syllable as metrically stressed is called promotion, and is another common formal element of English verse. An example is the first line of Paradise Lost, “Of mán’s first dísobédience ánd the fáll”, where the iambic pentameter context forces ánd to be metrically stressed. The first stress in íntermédiate above is also promotion.
I’ve rarely really enjoyed poetry. Perhaps relatedly, it nearly always sounds better in my head than spoken aloud, by myself or another. Maybe I need to listen more widely. Would anyone care to recommend a recording of an especially fine reading or recital?
This discussion about “prose poem” (where everyone has his own essentialist notion of poetry) remind me of this passage from Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit:
I think the notion of “prose poems” was made popular by Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose. Citing Gaspard de la nuit as his model, his declared aim was “le miracle d*une prose poétique, musicale sans rhythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience”, while admitting that he fell short of this aim.
mollymooly: there’s an older style of reading poetry, which is near universal, which makes every poem sound like a dirge. I don’t like it. One can only take so much of feeling older, sadder, and wiser. And then, poetry slams came around, and all of a sudden read poetry got exciting and fun to listen to.
That’s not prose. It’s in the same somewhat loose iambic meter as “To be or not to be”. It merely doesn’t rhyme, and my ten-second attempt to find line breaks produces lines with 6 to 7 feet instead of 5.
The other way around, surely? The Pater is reasonably close to the looser parts of Shakespeare, like That is the question; in the Joyce I can’t find anything.
…no. You just arbitrarily wrote a line break after every five stresses – after adding stress to to and inter- for no discernible reason. ~:-|
That works as poetry, yes. The missing unstressed syllables are dramatic pauses that let you feel Hamlet wrestling with the situation, scared and confused; and they emphasize steadfast, giving you time to think about what its full meaning is.
But reading steadfast that way requires that you’re already assuming there’s a line with five stresses in there somewhere. And the rest of the text just doesn’t suggest this assumption, very much unlike in Shakespeare or (Manley?) Hopkins or Milton.
That’s also all over German, from the Nibelungenlied* to nursery rhymes**. I wonder if they’re a natural outcome of stress-based meters…
* With one foot as ^ = ´`:
Ez wûohs ín Bùrgôndén èin | vîl édèl mágèdîn,
dáz ìn állèn lândén nìht | schœ́nèrs mőhtè sîn [pâuse];
Krîemhíld gèhêizén. Sì | wárt èin schœ́nè wîp [pâuse] –
dar úmbè múosèn dégenè víl vèr-|-lîesén dèn lîp [pâuse].
** Hóppè, hóppè, Rêitêr!
Wénn èr fa̋llt, dànn schrêit êr!
Fa̋llt èr ín dèn Grâbên,
fréssèn íhn dìe Râbên;
fa̋llt èr ín dèn Sûmpf [pâuse],
mácht dèr Réitèr plûmps [pâuse]!
I suspect if read out loud it would feel a lot more like a poem to me than it does me reading it written.
Neglect in Camera, read on YouTube.
The poet continues, shortly after, with short pieces each of 36 words. Is this a verse-structuring constraint, as the 17-syllable constraint (then further constrained) of a haiku is held to be? Why not, or why?
Our conventional categories are … just that. Categories are prerequisites for cognition, but ill-managed they preclude optimal cognition.
As for “tin ears”, that is to miss many points and opportunities for insight in one fell scattershot. It would be well, once in a way, to tuck those donkey ears down and give the leaden brain a chance to overcome its chatterbox intracameric obscurity.
In orality there are no “lines”. There is no “verse” even, if we are to construe etymologically – which despite reflexes often in play round here is not automatically to construe fallaciously. When linguistic poeisis shifted media and its products most commonly appear on the page, it all changes in complicated ways. We are in a post-Homeric liminality, without clarity or resolution. The lens needs refocusing.
There is undisputable music without regular rhythm (plainchant, Classical Indian alap), and without tonal melody (solo drums/percussion). So why not poetry without verse?
Not that Trevor Joyce’s poem is without rhythm. It has rhythmic phrasing throughout, which sets its mood. It is distinct from what you’d see in usual narrative prose.
I get it now. It’s a masterpiece of stress-timing. It really doesn’t count unstressed syllables for its meter – something I’ve only seen half-hearted examples of.* Together with the pauses, it works out as poetry.
I still don’t think it has lines, though. In particular there’s no stress on inter-. (There are two on back wall, though.)
* The four extrametrical syllables muget ir nû in the middle of the fourth line of the (probably later added) introductory stanza of the Nibelungenlied come to mind; in context they come across as a failed attempt to squeeze more into a line than there’s space for there.
@Noetica read on YouTube.
Thank you. I’m pleased some have now heard the stress. I haven’t. It sounds like the fella is reading from the specifications at the back of a catalogue of bathroom fittings.
@Y there’s an older style of reading poetry, …, which makes every poem sound like a dirge. I don’t like it.
Yeah. I went to a few such readings. Assumed the dirge was because there’s no rhythm/music in it. Gave up on it fairly quickly. I found more animation in:
* The shipping forecast (as read on BBC World service).
* List of Huntingdonshire Cabmen, a regular feature on Spike Milligan’s TV tribute to ‘Beachcomber’.
I just don’t get your claim about absence of rhythm in Plainchant or alap: it’s the rhythm of breathing; in the case of alap, the foreshadowing of the raga to follow. Very comparable to the free-form Fantasias or Toccatas in Baroque music, foreshadowing the fugue; take the breathing in Bach’s D minor Toccata, for example (which doesn’t have to be played at all metrically — note all the free-form rests (fermata) here ).
A very special thank you to JC’s efforts to explain; that must have taken a lot of research. I can hear ‘sprung verse’ happily in the Hopkins. The Joyce not.
Ok. If this is what ‘poetry’ has become, I don’t like it. Having got myself crossed off everybody’s Christmas card list, I’ll return to the cheap seats. Bring on more Stravinsky. (I’m hoping the orchestra will get on to Rite of Spring next season: awash with non-rhythmic rhythm.)
You just arbitrarily wrote a line break after every five stresses – after adding stress to to and inter- for no discernible reason. ~:-|
Wait, what?
It isn’t I who wrote the line-breaks, its the way they appear in the OP. I took the word “image” to mean that the way they appear there is what the poet intended. If that was just accidental, then I withdraw everything I said about the poem (though not about English poetics).
Hat?
“The way they appear in the OP” depends on your font and window size. There are just paragraphs, no line breaks.
I didn’t think to check for that. Oh well.
Joyce (or someone) seems to pay a lot of attention to format/linebreaks, for example here, or this typescript.
The first at that first link is mostly one word per line.
Positively
asking
to be
read
as a
dirge.
~~~~~~~~Or a
shopping
list.
Triple-clicking on a paragraph here confirms it’s a single paragraph in the computer sense – the line breaks depend on the size of the window. In my case, the first paragraph has three lines; the first ends in “limited to the”, and “dimension” alone is the last line.
Plato’s writing is often considered poetic. (E.g., as quoted by Noetica, above.)
Yet Plato’s attitude towards poetry was mistrustful; “there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Republic, 607b5–6)
Not news, but brought to mind.
It’s notable that gauze hasn’t been touched since the NED’s 1898 original casting doubt on du Cange. Gauze and falafel are good examples of textile and food products from an area specializing in intractable conflicts large and small. But there are others, interesting in their own ways, like women’s embroidered thobes or sabich.
TLFI prefers an Arabic/Persian origin for gauze, citing Corominas:
AHD discards the origin from Gaza entirely, no doubt also following Corominas:
Etienne alert: Wikipedia s.v. gauze cites the TLFI etymology, but mistranslates it into English as
That should be “more likely/rather… than”, shouldn’t it?
I can’t find (on a brief look, but still) a text or a recitation of “God’s Grandeur” that gives “charged” two syllables. Also, it’s “shook foil.” Whether this is a sword, or a piece of (say) gold to airy thinness beat, is another interesting question.
To cast TLFi as “the French government” is just such quintessential Wikipedian libertarianism, isn’t it?
Yup. I’ll fix it.
Edit: done. It turns out the TLFi has an English Wikipedia page.
I like nonalcoholic wine
And yuletide without pine,
Without matter universe,
And poetry without verse.
Thanks very much, David M, but it still says “which itself was obtained from the name of the city of Gaza”; could you correct that too?
Wiktionary also links from Arabic qazz to Persian kaž, which it says is actually two homonyms, one meaning “crooked” and the other a type of silk. Did AHD conflate the two homonyms?
Corriente’s dictionary of Arabic loans into Spanish and the RAE dictionary online also have gasa as a borrowing from Arabic, either via Italian or directly into Spanish.
Oh! Yes – I simply overlooked that plutôt […] qu[e] belongs together and was wondering why issu had the form it does… Tiring weather lately.
A mere teaspoonful from the Pierian might leave one gasping on the strand. Just as quoting Ulysses is hazardous (many layered recensions), so is “correcting” quotes from Shakespeare.
Quaerendo invenietis. But a further hint for the deeply perplexed: don’t tilt after the audiality of dulcimers on occasions when the visuality of gossamer is patently to the fore. Or better, find both – and other modalities of art. Then harmonise synaesthetically.
Thanks for that, Noetica — you have single-handedly rescued this thread.
Thanks, DM. We could use marie-lucie in this thread; the history of fabrics would be in her wheelhouse.
Yes, I’m sorry she seems to have retired from the Hattery.
And some anonymous asshole has been busy undoing David’s corrections, insulting him, and inserting outdated references. Great.
What else do you expect from a ” free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” ? It’s an invitation to the worst sort.
Assholes on Wikipedia tend to go about their impudent business anonymously. They’re understandably shy.
Nowadays I correct only typos there when I happen to see them.
The anthology that Noetica quoted is outstanding, by the way. I happen to be reading it right now, and would recommend it to anyone who wants to spend a little more time thinking about what makes a poem a poem. The exact title (unless there’s some US/UK difference) is The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson. Although it’s actually structured the other way around, moving backwards in time.
Yes, it’s a fine survey. I bought a copy as soon as Trevor Joyce’s offering appeared here. My single reservation is that the non-English authors are represented only in translation.
The introduction is strongly recommended as preliminary reading for anyone wanting to hold forth on the topic in hand.
We note that the editor specified full-justified paragraphs throughout. Some of the byways and eminently retractable remarks above could have been avoided, if that formatting were available at the Hattery. That’s how Trevor’s printed original is presented.
And thanks, Biscia: I did put the title in wrongly. Editing time was running out, I think.
Ah, but as far as I can tell from previews the Kindle version doesn’t justify any of the paragraphs. Tsk! This is one context in which it really matters.
The earliest (and thus the last) author in the anthology is Aloysius Bertrand, credited with being the inventor of the form, and an influence on Baudelaire. I hadn’t heard of him before. Formally, he is interesting, but the contents of his work are a bit too gloopy (“Romantic”) to my taste.
By chance, I was just reading Thurneysen’s Grammar of Old Irish (as all Hatters do from time to time for relaxation) and noticed that in §513 he says “in prose, the finite verb always stands at the head of its clause”, and then goes on to say “a freer word order is found in Irish poetry and also in non-metrical ‘rhetorical’ prose” (where you get tmesis and also verb-final order using “conjunct” verb forms.)
So the Irish invented prose poems long before Aloysius Bertrand was ever thought of.