Another question?
Yeah.
Could you elaborate a little of that
the sentence as a grammatical unit,
and the line, and the relationship between these two?
Yeah.
The sentence, it seems to me, that the neurolinguists
say that the way we manage syntax in English
is with these chunks, so that we divide up things
that naturally go together.
If I walk down the street under the trees, that's the way
your brain is going to process it,
even if I say it to you fast.
I walked down the street under the trees.
Your brain is going down under, OK, two little prepositions,
down, and then it has its object, and under,
and it has its object, and they're parallel.
Your brain is-- you're sorting all that out.
So that those are chunks.
Those are rhythmic chunks, and they exist in the language,
and that's how we make meaning.
Because if I take them away, or if I disturb them,
then it'll be very confusing what I'm saying.
I walk down the street under the.
See, I mean that's harder, right?
Because it's not the rhythm by which we process the image.
OK, so that's a rhythmic system that
exists within the sentence.
We write in sentences.
So that's ongoing.
The line is always artificial.
The line does not exist in nature.
The line does not exist in the language.
The line does not exist anywhere, except poets make it.
We make it because we want another rhythmic system
to either work with or against that phrasing.
And what is very interesting to me
is that this is the same relationship
that as Jourdain says, exists in all great music.
In all great music you have meter,
which is a grid, which is 4/4 time, for 3/4 times,
whatever the time signature is, that says all of these
are units of similar duration.
If that's all you have, that's boring.
You also have this other thing, which
is the arc of the line, which is chunks put together and built
into a larger chunk, and then that chunk into a larger chunk,
and so you have-- that's musical phrasing, and that's rhythmic.
OK, and so it's overall--
he uses terms that I like, which is small scale and large scale.
I like that.
Small scale, is just when you pat your foot.
That's the march that the fourth graders are doing.
That's a small scale management of rhythm.
But da da da da dum, da da da da dum, de de de de,
that's a large-scale rhythm.
So it seems to me that all poems that are written in lines
have some need to pay attention to the relationship
between those two rhythmic systems.
And they can be anything.
What I've tried to give you are examples that
show you how you can shift.
Larkin pretty much keeps it always consonant.
I mean, you could put a comma even
after the lines that are not--
you couldn't after long long the death.
But most of them are consonant with the units of the syntax,
right?
Justice doesn't.
He starts off that way, then when he gets in the middle,
"the schoolteacher is waving in time to the music."
What is this?
In time to the music well we would say.
In time to the music, you would never say, never in your life,
I don't care, you're lying on your hospital bed,
you're not going to ever say in [PAUSES] time to the music.
They'll call in the people to examine you
because something is wrong.
You've kind of developed a dyslexia if you do that, right?
So he does that deliberately.
Why does he do that deliberately?
That's a place where he wants the line
to be resisted, in struggle, with this longer
unit of the syntax.
That's why Jourdain says, in music, the two systems are not
always at peace with one another.
This is a choice the poet makes.
They can be absolutely opposed to one another
all the way through.
That's what Creeley does.
They can be consonant almost all the way through.
That D.H. Lawrence poem has only one enjambment in it,
and that's so he can set off "a life."
That third line from the end, that's
the only place, and everywhere else it's exactly--
seems to be playing along in concert with the syntax,
because he wants you to see these chunks that
are made in this syntax.
5, 14, 20, 14, 5, and that's off of this list.
Each one of those is a verb, verb, verb, verb, verb, verb,
absolutely paratactic.
These things are parallel to one another.
They all have the same weight.
So why is that not boring?
It's not boring because it goes duh, duh, duh, and then
it comes back, and then he comes back, like that.
It makes a shape.
This is pleasing to us.
That's what form is, it's a pleasing arrangement,
and it keeps variation in it.
So it seems to me whether you write an open form,
or if you decide to write in meter, then all you're doing
is you're saying I want to [INAUDIBLE] that everybody
can get a hold of.
I'm going to grid it up there like Justice has it.
Five syllables in every line, or I
want iambic pentameter, whatever it is,
you can put the grid up there.
That's fine to do that.
But to put the grid up there and not
pay any attention to its relationship
to syntax is really kind of dumb,
isn't it, because it's not paying attention
to this other huge rhythmic system that's going on.
So very often I think we kind of get so caught up in the line,
we're going, oh wow, I just did another,
you know, blank verse, great.
Clop, clop, clop, I'll go along, and then, there
are all the sentences that are absolutely boring,
that are made the same way, that are usually simple declarative
sentences that last about three line, all of them,
the same, the same, the same, the same.
So mainly what I'm trying to say is, pay attention
to your sentences, even if you had
to take them out of lineation in order to see them.
And read them out loud, and see if you do anything close
to what Mr. Lawrence does.
See if there are chunks in there, if they are varied,
or if they're varied in length.
If they're not varied in length, hey, remember that thing
from eighth grade where you had to rewrite three sentences
and put them together using and, or using
a subordinating conjunction?
Try it so that again, you have some sort of variation
and energy that comes out of the large-scale, rhythmic pattern
of the poem.
So that's the main thing.
If you do that, see what the sentences are,
because you are writing in sentences, then you go back
and say, OK, what relationship between the line
and the sentence?
And it can change.
It changes in Justice.
Right in the middle, that's where has all that enjambment,
and then he goes back to those, you know, his stop lines.