OK.
Have you [INAUDIBLE].
Let me see if I can just get it down to some correlation
here at the end.
According to Jourdain phrasing imparts a kind of narrative
to music.
It is the mechanism by which a composition can play out
a grand drama.
And phrasing is the rhythmic system
that builds large scale musical objects
and thereby induces large scale musical perceptions.
Its arrangement is an enactment of form.
Syntactical rhythm, too, like musical phrasing,
lacks the repetitive evenly paced accentuations
of measured rhythm and is built up
by a succession of irregular sonic shapes that
combine in various ways like the parts of a painting.
Sometimes hanging in exquisite balance,
sometimes joining forces to gyrate, or plunge, or swirl.
That seems to me the right description not only of
snake, which gyrates and swirls more than the other two
examples.
But in fact of all three poems.
Lawrence simply relies less on regularity, on measured beats,
on a detectable grid.
Using syntax instead to manage both the small scale
and the large scale rhythm.
That he does so is largely I think,
a matter of temperament, as is one's willingness
to throw a palm open to radical asymmetry
and leave it there as Larkin does,
versus one's need to complete the circle
and come back where the poem started as Justice does.
In light of these large differences,
the current spat between neoformalists
and the writers of open verse seems to me
entirely beside the point.
Of course, Apollo and Dionysus are well-matched opponents.
And the stakes as with most religions
have been very high as we recall from Apollo's flaying
of Marsyas and the Bacchantes beheading of Orpheus.
Different centuries, different aesthetics
have worshipped one more fervently than the other.
Putting a premium on pattern over variation,
or energy over order, or currently fragmentation
and dis-junction over unity and coherence.
And these preferences are usually
coincidence to beliefs--
coincident to beliefs about the inherent nature of the world.
But despite those preferences and beliefs,
poets it seems to me, still need to petition both deities,
both Apollo, and Dionysus.
That is true that during the 20th century, coincident
with greater tolerance for dissonance in all the arts,
poets sought more room in their poems
for asymmetry and variation, which is more easily provided
by open verse, but this now seems less a revolution
than an evolution of aesthetic intention.
Meanwhile, most of us write poems rather than prose
because we have very high formal appetites.
The use of the line in a poem affords us very visible
and sometimes audible opportunities
for making pattern.
And we adore pattern, preferring it.
It's momentary stay against confusion
to the order threatening energy of asymmetry.
However, after a century of open verse match stream,
it seems to me simply not enough for us
to focus on the use of the line alone,
or to fall unthinking into one of the dominant conventions
of our time.
On the one hand, a sincere accessible poem
made of predictable simple declarative sentences
all about the same length, all in normal order,
predictably chunked by end stopped
and end paused lineation predictably
arrayed over three or four visually equivalent
short lines.
Or on the other hand, a difficult smart poem
of passive predication or no predication at all.
Sentence fragments, jazzed by violent, idiosyncratic,
or opportunistic enjambment that have nothing
to do with overall structure.
Both kinds of poem, it seems to me,
disregard to their great loss, the inherent nature
of the language we write in.
The source of its muscle, and sinew, and music.
Its clarity, and its resonance, and its power.
OK, that's the end [INAUDIBLE].
[APPLAUSE]