Dear SunWinkers!

In the history of art in general and poetry in particular, one of the creative giants and originals among originals is Dame Edith Sitwell. Born in 1887 into an upper-crust family and distant parents, Sitwell was encouraged by her grandmother and governess to write and express herself. From the very infancy of her poetic career, she broke the mold of stuffy, rigorous Victorian English poetry, determined to find a new language and a new approach.

Not only a pioneer, Sitwell was a celebrity on the order of Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Dali. So I was gobsmacked to find a vintage 1949 copy of her volume The Canticle of the Rose: Poems 1919-1949 for sale at Powell’s for $3.50. It begins with an invaluable preface: Some Notes on My Own Poetry. I feel like a kid who found an antique wind-up tin soldier in his Cracker Jacks box:

At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery, and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.

Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning.

Sitwell was a performance artist decades before we had that name for it. Early on, she wrote a poem cycle called Façade in which she explored percussive, energetic, free rhythms and the propulsiveness generated by reiterating assonances and internal rhymes. Her friend, English composer Sir William Walton, wrote orchestral music in the same spirit, and together they put on staged readings which became sensations, with Walton conducting the orchestra and Sitwell sitting behind a screen on which was painted a huge open mouth, reading Façade through a megaphone.

She gave a name to the technique she explored in Façade, calling it abstract poetry. In a nutshell, abstract poetry pays far more attention to rhythm, sound, and texture than to surface meaning. It is the idea of expressing feelings via the sounds of the words themselves. In musical terms, you could call her pieces tone poems, like those of Liszt, whom she herself cites as an inspiration.

It was said that the images in these poems were strange. This was partly the result of condensement—partly because, where the language of one sense was insufficient to cover the meaning, the sensation, I used the language of another,* and by this means attempted to pierce down to the essence of the thing seen, by discovering in it attributes which at first sight appear alien but which are acutely related—by producing its quintessential color (sharper, brighter than that seen by an eye grown stale) and by stripping it of all unessential details.

The ‘Waltz’ in Façade is an example at once of the technical exercises and of this heightened imagery.

Here, the rhythm is produced by the use of rhymes at the beginning of certain lines, and, occasionally, in the middle, as well as at the end, and by the use of carefully arranged assonances and half-assonances. The rhyme-assonance scheme…gives a kind of ground rhythm.**

*[The device of synaesthesia, e.g. “cold mandoline,” “wan grassy sea.”]

**[“Ground rhythm” is a term in Baroque music referring to a continuously repeated rhythmic pattern carried in the bass line.]

 

From Waltz:

Daisy and Lily,

Lazy and silly,

Walk by the shore of the wan grassy sea—

Talking once more ‘neath a swan-bosomed tree.

Rose castles,

Tourelles,

Those bustles

Where swells

Each foam-bell of ermine,

They roam and determine

What fashions have been and what fashions will be—

What tartan leaves born,

What crinolines worn.

By Queen Thetis,

Pelisses

Of tarlatine blue,

Like the thin plaided leaves that the castle crags grew;

Or velours d’Afrande:

On the water-gods’ land

Her hair seemed gold trees on the honey-cell sand

When the thickest gold spangles, on deep water seen,

Were like twanging guitar and like cold mandoline…

This may seem trivial, but so are butterflies, as Sitwell argues. The rollicking momentum of the dactyls is skillfully and assiduously maintained. The assonances “hair…honey cell,” “castle crags” “fashions…fashions,” the beginning-rhymes “Walk…Talking,” and the double rhymes:

Daisy and Lily,
Lazy and silly,…

Each foam-bell of ermine,
They roam and determine…

all contribute to a primitive percussiveness and irresistible pulsation which puts one in mind of Stravinsky.

The Prompt

Read.

There’s no substitute for reading. Sitwell says, “For many years I have read with the fury of a cannibal hunting heads, with the reverence of a pilgrim approaching Mecca upon his knees.”* Read Sitwell. Read Jack Kerouac, especially his “blues” poems in such volumes as Mexico City Blues and Book of Blues. Read Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Read Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.

*Sitwell, Preface, A Poet’s Notebook (1950)

Then…

There are any number of ways to learn about writing abstract poems. One is to pick a word and say it aloud over and over until it loses its meaning. That’ll get your mind focused on sound. Then just write, as quickly as you can, whatever words come to you because of their sounds.

Another method involves taking a poem by you or someone else and changing most of the words. Count the number of nouns in the poem, the number of adjectives, and the number of verbs. Then make a list of an equal number of new nouns, adjective, and verbs—all of which you choose just because you like their sounds, not their meanings. Then use your lists to replace the corresponding words in the poem.

 [Ron Padgett, ed.: The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms; NY: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1987.]

 

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Love,

Doug

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. Please share, reblog, link to, but do not copy or alter.