Joan Murray's Rhythmic Elegance

I was browsing recent NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) recipients, and came across Joan Murray, who received the award in 2011. I have had the distinct pleasure of hearing her read her work twice at my institution, Herkimer County Community College. In both cases I remember Joan reading her work with flair, tenderness, and grace. It was obvious the words on the page were not simply words for her, though I would assume that to be the case for any serious writer, but what really struck me about her work are its rythmic qualities. Murray's work occupies an interesting middle ground between formal verse and free verse, between lyric and narrative, a place where varieties of rhythmic drive build intensity.

Take for instance "Her Head," the opening poem in Looking for the Parade:

Near Ekuvukeni
in Natal, South Africa,
a woman carries water on her head.
After a year of drought,
when one child in three is at risk of death,
she returns from a distant well,
carrying water on her head.

The pumpkins are gone,
the tomatoes withered,
yet the woman carries water on her head.
The cattle kraals are empty,
the goats gaunt—
no milk now for children,
but she is carrying water on her head.

The engineers have reversed the river:
those with power can keep their power,
but one woman is carrying water on her head.
In the homelands, where the dusty crowds
watch the empty roads for water trucks,
one woman trusts herself with treasure,
and carries the water on her head.

The sun does not dissuade her,
not the dried earth that blows against her,
as she carries the water on her head.
In a huge and dirty pail,
with an idle handle,
resting on a narrow can,
this woman is carrying water on her head.

This woman, who girds her neck
with safety pins, this one
who carries water on her head,
trusts her own head to bring to her people
what they need now
between life and death:
She is carrying them water on her head.

Variety is the key to this poem. Well aware of the content and drama of the poem, Murray fits an appropriate rhythm to each moment, stanza, and line to create a very human utterance. There are stacatto lines that catch our ears (like the first two), only to be smoothed out with the refrain-like "a woman carries water on her head." While others are adamant, admiring, awestruck, and coy among other things.This strategy is a way to render surprise palpably, and enacts what good poems do: bring us on a journey of discovery.

The first three lines of the second stanza, while similarly constructed to the first three lines of the first, offer us a different tone, one that is more wistful at first, but adamant later: "The pumpkins are gone, / the tomatoes withered, / yet the woman carries water on her head." In the first two lines, the stressed syllables (in bold) are outnumbered by the unstressed as Murray alternates between iambs and anapests to create that wistful, rocking lull, while the third line reutrns us to the confident refrain, and sense of regularity. Other lines stack stresses together to bring the voice to an emotional apex and give a sense of heightened drama: "The sun does not dissaude her." While other lines invert rhythmic patters to serve as bridges for a longer more regular line: "what they need now / between life and death: / She is carrying them water on her head."

Select use of alliteration also contributes to the flow, regularity, and humaness of the poem. Consider the shock value of "The cattle kraals are empty. / the goats gaunt" both of which marry sound and image, or the sneer of "The engineers have reversed the river." Such moments of sonic regularity provide stabilty for a peom that plays with unstable metrics. Punctuating irregular free verse lines with regular sounds like these allows the tension to between order and chaos to be exploited for dramatic effect. Sounds here are not just part of the elegance of the poem, but are also representative of the content of the poem. Seasonal crops, the cyclic nature of the land, the conflict between society and technology, and even the woman are all expressions of the tension created by sound. Murray is wise to find such moments of tension and use them to her advantage, and by doing so this makes the woman not merely a woman anymore, but art.  

In a lesser poem, the varieties of rhythm here would sound jangly, cacaphonous, or unordered, but Murray masterfully balanaces stress, syllable, sound, and line to create the modulating rhythm and tone of the poem. With such attention to craft, Murray reminds us that content is crucial, but the motion the poem is what allows that content to transcend the page, as if to say, "The joy of reading a poem is always in the journey."

Sounds good to me. 

Fido says, "Flarf Flarf Flarf!"

For some reason, literary movements are inordinately complicated to pin down. Back when "modernism" was in its infancy, circa 1920, there was a distinct sense of a something new, something fresh. Williams Carlos Williams was writing intense, precise wildly-enjambed lyrics about everyday people and things. Wallace Stevens had not published Harmonium yet, but was writing the poems that would go in that collection. Gertrude Stein was chillin' in Paris sipping espresso with Picasso, and doing her thing. H.D. and Marianne Moore were conducting their own experiments with language.Then Eliot, along with "il miglior fabbro" Pound, comes along and devastates the poetic world with "The Waste Land," in 1922. Well, now the literary world took more notice of what was happening, and felt compelled to label this movement. The word of choice - Modernism. Given the incredibly diverse range of of poets listed here, how can any group label be anything but imprecise and lame? Though, to our benefit, much wonderful work has been done by some brilliant critics, and we now have a clearer understanding of the whole poetic landscape, its experiments, its prerogatives, and its scope.

Though I wonder if the same will happen with what is being deemed "Post-Modern" poetry. This movement does share some of same difficulties for categorizing as its predecessor (variety, methodology, technique, etc.), but I wonder if it has the same value. A new anthology entitled Post-Modern American Poetry has recently emerged from the folks at Norton, and is edited by Paul Hoover. This book has caught the attention of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Peter Monaghan has written a pretty decent article about the book and its contents.

Hoover admits that much of post-modern poetry is silly and derivative, but there are some poems that pose several interesting questions for traditionally held notions like "author." For instance Kenneth Goldsmith's "Seven American Deaths and Disasters" contains nothing he has written himself, or Craig Dworkin who has become more of a "conceptual" poet. As a literary movement, this is understandable. After WWI Dada emerged to question notions about art, politics, and life. Then the Surrealists emerged from them, and they began they inquiries through many, ahem, interesting means. Then Absurdist literature emerged and posed more challenges. All these movements, like this post-modern stuff, share the quality of defining themselves through opposition. Dada was anti-art. Surreal is anti-rationality. Absurdism is anti-meaning (in some ways). Post-modern poetry is anti-tradition.

Now I'm not against these movements or their anti- nature. Their interrogation and critique are crucial to the fecundity of art, ideas, and our views on life. The best of the post-modern poetry is really quite stunning, and does pose some serious questions about citation, quotation, pastiche and collage (here are two short poems from Goldsmith's The Day for a taste). Or consider the first few lines from "Head Citations," again by Goldsmith:

          1. This is the dawning of the age of malaria.
          2. Another one fights the dust.
          3. Eyeing little girls with padded pants.
          4. Teenage spacemen we're all spacemen.
          5. A gay pair of guys put up a parking lot.
          5.1. It tastes very nice, food of the parking lot.
          6. One thing I can tell you is you got to eat cheese.
          7. She was a gay stripper.
          8. Fly like a negro to the sea.
          9. Hey you, get off of my cow. 

This is absolutely side-splitting. Clever wit and a fine ear are on display here as we pick up vestiges of misheard, misappropriated, or parodied popular songs. We are awed by the ingenuity and attention, and are impressed by the sheer volume of these witticisms (Goldsmith chugs along for 800 lines). The sense of arrangement here is also keen, as Goldsmith mixes hilarity with a sense of infection or outbreak. Though, we must wonder why so much sampling is used, what's its effect is, and why must we endure it for 800 lines.

Part of the answer is that Goldsmith is reworking the relationship between poet and audience. The pleasure of reading this is discovering what he has sampled and has reworked. We take part in the game, and feel a certain way when we solve the puzzle. We experience the speaker's associative imagination, which is akin to the "automatic writing" of the surrealists. The speaker's mind shifts from The Who, to The Counting Crows, to The Beatles, to the Steve Miller Band, then to The Rolling Stones, and this is all very entertaining, but any sense of connection between them is avoided. Fierce juxtaposition, not fluidity, is the rule.

There is a rather illuminating discussion about flarf, poetry, and Sharon Mesmer's poem "I Accidentally Ate Some Chicken and Now I'm in Love with Harry Whittington" on the Poetry Foundation website, and it is very much worth the twenty-nine minutes.They sketch many of the dominant trends and ideas surrounding flarf, and somehow flarf manages to be "anti-poetic" and "super-poetic" at the same time. Well how can this be?

It is undeniable that flarf would not exist with the internet, is certainly an expression of our hyper-connected society, and is very intellectual in many ways, though it seems their methodology is what is truly new, creative, or has never been done before, not necessarily their devil-may-care attitudes, subversive politics, or nothing is taboo content. They have created various methods to manufacture poetry, such as typing a word or phrase into Google and then copying all the associated searches. or reshuffling words from a website. They claim to have a unique movement of thought that is jarring, tangential, and often goes off in odd directions that challenges our biases on beauty, quality, and other standards.

If there is anything I'm against it is the lack of grace, beauty, sensitivity, and tonality. Much of flarf is like this, as much "modern" poetry was gibberish, but also like the moderns, the very best of flarf is surprising, intelligent, and funny.