[OPENING NOTES OF BEETHOVEN'S 5TH SYMPHONY PLAYING]
That's all Justice's poems have to be.
That's the pattern.
There's the asymmetry.
OK.
That's enough.
[MUSIC STOPS]
That's exactly the same principle.
It's exactly the same principle.
He starts out with that little melodic chunk.
That's a little chunk, da-da-da.
And then, he's going to give it to you again.
Da-da-da.
Right?
He's going to repeat it.
And so, that's what establishes the pattern for it.
And then, he's going to complicate that
by letting it sweep past those restrictions.
So then, it's going to just start--
it's like mitosis, it's like cell division, right?
Once that thing starts dividing, and then it divides again,
and it divides again, just like that.
Da-da-da-da.
So, off it goes.
That's a huge asymmetry, right?
Here's the pattern, and then, oh, off it goes.
That's what Justice does in this very poem.
Farewell is the bell beginning to ring.
That's the da-da-da.
Now, he's going to do it again.
The children singing do not yet hear.
So it's establishing in your ear what the rules are,
what the parameters are, what the pattern is.
The sun is shining in their song.
Oh, this is just a tiny little variation.
This isn't very much, you probably wouldn't notice that.
Except, we have these two words that are left over--
the sun is in fact shining upon the schoolyard,
on children swinging like tongues of a bell swung out
on the long arc of a silence.
That will not seem to have been a silence till it
is broken, as it is breaking.
You hear that?
The syntax is saying to you, forget all that stuff
about the syllables, forget all that stuff about that meter,
forget all that stuff about two lines at a time.
I'm taking you way over here in right branching syntax.
Here we go, right branching, right
branching, and never going to go there, never going to go there.
So that the energy then that's coming out
of the rhythmic system of the sense
is pulling you way away from what that pattern was.
We know the pattern is not gone, pattern is still there, right?
You see it on the page, and you can go through,
and you can look at the meter.
And you're going to find that, pretty
much with one exception in the poem,
it's going to be all dimeter.
It's going to be two feet per line.
He never varies it, five syllables per line.
What changes is the relationship between the line
and the sentence, right?
And the sentence becomes more important.
Does that make sense to you?
Right branching, the sun is in fact shining.
Shining where, where is it shining?
It is shining upon the schoolyard on children.
Which children is it shining on, Mr. Justice?
The children swinging like tongues.
What kind of tongues, Mr. Justice?
The tongues of a bell.
Which bell, Mr. Justice?
The bell swung out.
Swung out where?
Where is it?
Swung out on the long arc.
Which arc of a silence?
Right branching syntax, do you hear it?
It's like hang on to the tail of the horse,
because the horse has already smelled the barn,
and it is going there.
It is absolutely going there.
Like Beethoven's exposition of his opening theme, I would say,
it's exactly the same principle.
And it's the same principle or the management
of two kinds of rhythm, OK?
Beethoven doesn't set aside his time signature.
That's still in there.
But the two kinds of rhythm are not entirely at peace
with one another.
Not at all at peace with one another, I would say.
And it's that exhilaration and that disorder that thrills us,
it seems to me.
It not only keeps the peace from being boring,
it makes the peace heroic.
Because it's threatening at every minute
to just tear the thing right away from its time signature,
right away from its key signature, everything else.
It's going somewhere.
It's going to grab us by the throat and pull us over there.
And I would say that the Justice poem is
doing exactly the same thing.
And look where it ends.
Justice is a classicist, he's not
going to just jump out there into outer space
and stay in outer space.
On children swinging like tongues of a bell, swung out
on the long on the arc of a silence,
that will not seem to have been a silence till it
is broken, as it is breaking.
We come back to where we started, right?
We will come back to that pattern, there it is again.
Till it is broken, two strokes, you hear it?
As it is breaking, and all that nice little sort
of echoing rhyme among the sounds,
the broken, the breaking, like it is, till it is,
as it is, so when it come down to some sort of resting place.
Justice is also a composer of music.
And he knows full well the art created
when a piece, as Jourdain says, "wanders
into unfamiliar territory then returns to momentary repose."
Upon hearing this resolution, a brain groups.
A brain, the listener, groups the preceding notes,
then readies itself to perceive the next progression.
Lesser resolutions create lesser phrases
that can be built into hierarchies of larger ones.
We want to do just a little more Mr. Beethoven?
Oh, I didn't pause it, I stopped it.
It don't matter.
OK.
Oh.
No, it don't matter.
It doesn't matter?
No, you keep going from wherever you stopped, right?
No.
Because it's a CD, it's going to start at the beginning again.
That's OK, that's right.
We can hear it again.
OK.
Great.