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The longer line.

By ANTHONY HOWELL.

THEY USED TO call them “Bastard Sizes” according to Bryan Williamson of Arc & Throstle Press — who printed one of my books. This was 160 mm in width by 200 mm in height. An unusual size, wider than the norm, but it suited me. I was writing lines with seven stresses (fourteeners) and what I thought of as “cadenced” poems where the unit was a sentence, which, if it ran over the margin, was indented when continuing below. “Bastard sizes” are bastards because they need to be cut down from standard sizes. American “letter” size is broader than A4, and American poets seem to favour bastard sizes more often than poets do here in the UK.

lgfolioBut the longer line deserves a wider page, and as much attention as I have already given to the prose poem. Many years ago, when I was fourteen, I met Christopher Logue and asked him how to become a poet. He suggested that I read everything Pound recommended in The ABC of Reading. It was in this way that I was introduced to the longer line, for Pound is keen on George Chapman and Arthur Golding. Both The Iliad, in Chapman’s version, published in 1611, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses — as rendered into English by Golding in 1567 — are written in what are known as fourteeners. This is a line with fourteen syllables and seven iambic feet (iambic heptameter). It rolls along, as a rhythm, and seems particularly suited to epic narrative verse. I fell in love with this metrical warhorse, and subsequently I have experimented with it myself.

Here is Hector, taking up his son, in the Sixth book of The Iliad:

This said, he reach’d to take his son; who, of his arms afraid,
And then the horse-hair plume, with which he was so overlaid,
Nodded so horribly, he cling’d back to his nurse, and cried.
Laughter affected his great sire, who doff’d, and laid aside
His fearful helm, that on the earth cast round about it light;
Then took and kiss’d his loving son, and (balancing his weight
In dancing him) those loving vows to living Jove he us’d,
And all the other bench of Gods: “O you that have infus’d
Soul to this infant, now set down this blessing on his star:
Let his renown be clear as mine; equal his strength in war;
And make his reign so strong in Troy, that years to come may yield
His facts this fame, when, rich in spoils, he leaves the conquer’d field
Sown with his slaughters…. ‘

(Chapman)

And here is the start of the second book of Metamorphoses:

The Princely Pallace of the Sunne stood gorgeous to beholde
On stately Pillars builded high of yellow burnisht golde,
Beset with sparckling Carbuncles that like to fire did shine.
The roofe was framéd curiously of Ivorie pure and fine.
The two doore leaves of silver cleare a radiant light did cast:
But yet the cunning workemanship of things therein farre past
The stuffe wherof the doores were made. For there a perfect plat
Had Vulcane drawne of all the worlde: Both of the sourges that
Embrace the earth with winding waves, and of the stedfast ground,
And of the heaven it selfe also that both encloseth round.

(Golding)

Although writing later, Chapman’s fourteeners seem more rough-hewn than Golding’s. There’s a willingness to step outside the confines of the metre, giving a freer “spilling out” of the narrative, compared to Golding’s polished feet. This gives the sense of a natural speaking voice with the rhythm sometimes surging up through the sense, sometimes allowed to fall into the background. Poets seek to locate themselves in their own special relationship with rhythm (and rhyme); some neatly precise, keeping scansion in the foreground, others preferring a more casual relationship (in a recent interview, Alan Jenkins described his verse as “disheveled”).

AS DEVELOPED SINCE the mid-19th century, longer line usage seems to signify an anti-colonial stance. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a book which embraces the “indented sentence” — as described earlier — and the precedent for his cadences was surely the Bible in King James’s version – Whitman’s sentences being very similar to biblical “verses”. Nor should we fail to acknowledge The Song of Songs as we know it — which, with its sense of pulse and adept use of repetition, is one of the masterpieces of our poetry.

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him,
____but I found him not.
I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the
____broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him,
____but I found him not.

The watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said, Saw ye
____ him whom my soul loveth?
It was but a little that I passed from them, but I found him whom my
____soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my

____mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds
____of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.

Whitman turned the idea of cadence sentences into revolutionary verse. It is to Swinburne’s credit that he wrote “To Walt Whitman in America” — albeit in conventional quatrain and trimeter — acknowledging Leaves of Grass, and praising it for being such an innovative manifestation of American writing (how different to our establishment’s mealy-mouthed dismissal of the Beats). Swinburne experimented with the longer line and repeated phrases in Super Flumina Babylonis:

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
____Remembering thee,
That for ages of agony hast endured, and slept,
____And wouldst not see.
By the waters of Babylon we stood up and sang,
____Considering thee,
That a blast of deliverance in the darkness rang,
____To set thee free.

And with trumpets and thunderings and with morning song
____Came up the light;
And thy spirit uplifted thee to forget thy wrong
____As day doth night.

As is apparent, though, Swinburne couldn’t actually break free of metre — so we get loose pentameter and a two stress appendage instead. Whitman, on the other hand, revelled in cadence and rhapsodic exclamation, relating his line to the need to draw breath:

You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.

(from “Song of the Open Road”)

Immediately we sense a modernism here that cannot help but make Swinburne feel dated, trapped in a convention.

cendrarsEUROPEAN POETRY WAS also breaking out of predictable metrical shackles. Born in 1887, Blaise Cendrars was associated with the cubists and is seen as one of the founders of the modern movement in literature — along with Apollinaire and, in English, Gertrude Stein. In the work of Cendrars, punctuation is abandoned, metre is put aside, and there’s no kow-towing to any of the correctness that deadens so much contemporary verse. Lines may be a word long or comprised of some lengthy pronouncement (since there are no full stops, I hesitate to call these sentences).

Night
There are elephants in the plantations
The strident noise of branches ripped off is succeeded
____by the duller noise of big banana trees turned over with a
____slow push
We are coming right up on them
Climbing a small mound I see the front of the nearest animal
The moon is directly overhead the light favourable it’s a
____handsome elephant
The trunk in the air the end turned towards me
He’s caught my scent there’s not a half-second to lose
The shot fired
Immediately a new bullet goes into the Winchester’s breech
Then I smoke my pipe
The huge animal seems to sleep in the blue glade.

(From “Elephant Hunt”, Blaise Cendrars Selected Poems, translated by Peter Hoida; Penguin 1979)

The influence of the poème en prose can be felt, as if the block of its sentences were being chopped up simply for the intake of air, which is fair enough. And there is also an urge to bring poetry nearer to prose, especially the prose of exotic travel and lurid fiction. Jules Verne was very popular among the surrealists and a desire to emulate some of his effects was prevalent at the time of modernism’s debut. Meanwhile, in England, Edith Sitwell pioneered the longer line while still adhering to the rhapsodic high-tonédness of the Victorians:

Yet one will return to the lost men,
Whose heart is the Sun of Reason, dispelling the shadow
That was born with no eyes to shed tears, – bringing peace to the lust
And pruriency of the Ape, from the human heart’s sublimity
And tenderness teaching the dust that it is holy,
And to those who are hungry, are naked and cold as the worm,
____who are bare as the spirit
In that last night when the rich and the poor are alone,
Bringing love like the daily bread, like the light at morning.

(From “A Mother to her Dead Child”, Edith Sitwell, Collected Poems; Macmillan 1957)

One of the key figures in the twentieth century’s not-at-all-sparsely populated pantheon of sentences stacked on sentences is D. H. Lawrence, whose poems often explored a freedom from metrical rules and stanzas, and this was again a chance to respire, much needed in the stultifying atmosphere of Georgian poetry with its dull reliance on the rules:

Now I say to her: “No tool, no instrument, no God!
Don’t touch me and appreciate me.
It is an infamy.
You should think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence
as it lifts its straight white throat.
Your hand would not be so flig and easy.
Nor the adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder,
curled up in the sunshine like a princess;
when she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder
you did not stretch forward to caress her
though she looked rarely beautiful
and a miracle as she glided delicately away, with such dignity.
And the young bull in the field, with his wrinkled, sad face,
you are afraid if he rises to his feet,
though he is all wistful and pathetic, like a monolith, arrested
____static.

(From “She Said as well to Me” The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence; Martin Secker, 1932)

BUT THIS IS STILL a poetry of cadence and of sentences, as is the case with Alan Ginsberg. Can we focus our search on the longer line, specifically; that is, on poetry that is still taking the line as a measure? After a fair amount of experimentation, C. K Williams found a form with a longer line in With Ignorance, which came out in 1977. Here five, seven, eight, nine stress lines are freely ordered, their scansion casual almost to the point of neglect, leaning towards prose again; but, for whole swathes of verse, we lose the shorter metres; lose the single word on a line, as in Cendrars, or the short, one line statement, as in Lawrence.

A few nights ago I was half-watching the news on television and half-
____reading to my daughter.
The book was about a boy who makes a zoo out of junk he finds in a
____lot–
I forget exactly; a horse-bottle, a bedspring that’s a snake, things
____like that–
and on the news they were showing a film about the most recent
____bombings.
There was a woman crying, tearing at her hair and breasts, shrieking
____incomprehensibly.
because her husband and all her children had been killed the night
____before
and just when she’d flung herself against the legs of one of the soldiers
____watching her
Jessie looked up and said, “What’s the matter with her, Why’s she
____crying?”

(From “The Last Deaths” in C. K. Williams, Collected Poems; Bloodaxe, 2006)

For me, the form is interesting, but the execution is a trifle soft. Phrases such as “things like that” help create a easy conversational tone, but it’s too facile, as if simply “a filler” to keep the line long. I also sense a certain moral impetus. That coupled with the feel of a prose story being related would soon wear out my interest, were it not that Williams also has poems — such as “The Dog” — which explore a far more abject, grotesque and sometimes explicitly sexual material, which serves to keep me engaged.

On the whole, I find the “prosaic” quality of Edward Field’s work far more magnetic — and Field will often write in stacked sentences, which may be long or short, as sense dictates, as is demonstrated by “The Life of Joan Crawford” (After the Fall; University of Pittsburgh Press 2007).1

simicsmTHE WORK OF Charles Simic takes the prose poem and finesses its block, leaving its right hand margin unjustified. In so doing he allows the reader to toy with the suggestion that the prose is in lines, of poetry. Simic delights in playing with the page in several ways. He uses the sentence paragraph, as Whitman does, and he also uses this notion of prose which is freed from uniform regularity of margin. So here, a maybe comes about. Maybe the sentence is the unit, as in the “conventional” prose poem, maybe it isn’t, maybe there are still lines to his poetry. The book I have of his work is fairly narrow, so when it comes down to it, the lines aren’t so long.

____The dog went to dancing school. The dog’s
owner sniffed vials of Viennese air. One day the
two heard the new Master of the Universe pass
their door with heavy step. After that, the man
exchanged clothes with his dog. It was a dog on
two legs, wearing a tuxedo, that they led to the
edge of the common grave. As for the man, blind
and deaf as he came to be, he still wags his tail at
the approach of a stranger.

(From The World doesn’t End: Prose Poems, by Charles Simic; Harcourt Brace, 1989)

The “conceit” of prose allows Simic to end lines in less usual places…

Since his work mediates between the line and the (longer) sentence, I think it merits consideration in the context of this essay. The “conceit” of prose allows Simic to end lines in less usual places; after the definite article, or after a preposition maybe, which enables the line to begin on some less transparent word, a noun or a verb or an adjective. He also understands something of the “atomic” sentence, promoted by the language poets — the sentence that refers to itself, juxtaposed against the next sentence — with no attempt at continuity expected from one period to the next. Of course, language poets, and, before them, the poets of the New York School have taken this further than Simic does — Clark Coolidge for instance. But it lends Simic’s prose poems a density while the ghost of a narrative renders these juxtapositions readable and entertaining. Mind you, I am not saying that Coolidge isn’t. One of his finest books is Own Face, and in it a poem such as “Connie’s Scared” becomes more and more readable, and it makes more and more sense the more you come to it. Other poems are darker, more immersed in the undergrowth of language, but his use of the longer line is masterful:

From all the roads around we enter the landscape of the past.
We will find its door. Among weeds, some grown to arms-breadth,
in a mound. Turning in past the collapsed foundation of fossil
slabs, once house of the tall man who hoisted them, a dirt
track filled with potholes from the winter brimmed with water.
How deep, each one, will it break the car? The Roller Rink,
once noisy with marbles rolled on polished wood and all night
long we camped in the near field, now filled with young trees.

(From “The Cave remain”, Own Face, Angel Hair Books, 1978)

TWO POETS PRESENTLY making their presence felt have also been exploring the longer line. Anthony Madrid’s I am your Slave Now Do What I Say (Canarium Books, Iowa 2012) works with the sentence as a line in exclamatory couplets:

Fuck Buddha, I’m Buddha, nobody’s Buddha, quit talking about
____Buddha.
You can’t intimidate me with your Thangka-toy halo.

You can’t intimidate me with your kneeling animals, your “journey,”
____ your treasure words.
For I am just returned from beyond the endurable limits of human
____ wisdom.

I walked on the bottom of a swimming pool. Saw giraffe-skin patterns
____ of light.
Saw for myself what the light spelled out, and here is what I know:

The book resolutely holds on to this form, fetishizes it almost, much as C. K. Williams seems to, and Madrid delights in a blithe surrealism which often creates memorable pieces, but sometimes the jumps feel predictable, and we come to expect his brand of the unexpected. When a form becomes heavily relied on, the series or sequence it generates may overwhelm the requirements of the specific perception. If Madrid’s next book were to adhere to the same formula it would be a shame. There is such promise here that I would like see what happens when he tackles other methods of forming a poem.

Pitts has made the longer line his own — taking it far beyond anything anyone else has ever done and freeing it from any equation with the sentence.

I come now to Partial Objects by George Pitts, published by Jerkpoet in 2016. This is one of the most original books of poetry that I have come across. Extracts from the title poem have appeared in the Partisan Review and in the Paris Review, but Pitts remains relatively unknown. This should not be the case. Pitts has made the longer line his own — taking it far beyond anything anyone else has ever done and freeing it from any equation with the sentence. This ambitious, longer work might be an elegy for his mother — who appears to have been a photographer’s model. The book is dedicated to her memory, and the title is a Freudian term — to the infant the mother may be the breast at first, rather than her whole being — a part object. Equally, the penis may seem an object separated from the person — a part object again. But the poem can’t be pinned down to one subject — perhaps it’s a part poem — part the author, part the mother:

…She made a wish,
And there before her was her revised body, capable of ambiguity, and
Sharp discourse on the company of wolves. Nothing got past her,
____except the
Ellipsis of the day, the hollowing out of shed skin, and the subsequent
____coat
Of many colours of emotion.

Someone put a match to that coat, during the time period when we were
____ men.
And we weren’t crazy about being on fire for a cause, even though
It felt better without a coat on in the summer heat. It was the principle
____ of
The thing, to disintegrate in summer, to burn, to take leave
Due to the sweltering metamorphosis, one honestly needed more time
For a sex change, in order to inspect all the technology that would
Go into altering one’s view outside the eyes. But there was no allowance
For that, the clock was running, and the ambivalence that was widely
Documented, called on some thugs to smack you around a little bit,
Not to hurt you, but to bring you back to the bravery of making a stand.

(Partial Objects 1)

Pitts has a very good ear, and loves to mingle elaborate abstractions with simple terse phrases. There is a confident beauty that resonates throughout his poem, and he seems to relish the twists and turns of syntax. As the poem progresses, its lines and its sentences get longer and longer and one finds oneself immersed, drowning in its confident, surprising language, and happy to drown that way.

….Appearing armless by
Hiding her arms strenuously behind her back, was a pose she enjoyed
____ doing, and
She would do it whether the picture called for it or not. It was like being
____sculpture,
And being abject, both agreeable to her interior script, fussy with the
____ way her body
Presented itself, better strange or estranged, than to go through the
____ motions of cuteness
Or pander to the lowest rung in the bleachers. Fights always happen
____ there, fights with
The heckler who knows your name, and who knows a hundred ways to
____pronounce it badly,
Like a parrot with a vendetta….

(Partial Objects VI)

gpittsSometimes, when reading the poem, I get the sensation that it is written by a hermaphrodite. Pitts is a respected photographer working for Vibe Magazine and for LIFE Magazine, and he seems to have grown up within the world of fashion. I suggest that the poem is womanly at times, as he seems to get inside a vocabulary of the opposite sex, whatever sex that might be that is opposite to anyone’s sex, if anything ever is. If I sound sexist this is not my intent: I am simply trying to convey the sensual ambivalence I feel in the poem’s passionate core. While the part object may be perceived as separated from the rest of the body, I also sense a fusion, this time of the breast and the suckling mouth. A lady told me recently that she is always being told how like her father she is. Here, in this poem, we experience the son as the mother. So the breast may be separate from both infant and mother, or all three may be fused into one.

The poem seems to slip categories, and its androgynous writing could be thought of as abstract, could be read as a story. Rather than residing utterly in language or, conversely, letting the narrative lead the reader on, there’s a sense of being inside a passage without anxiety about where it may be going, but then the passage does seem to be going somewhere; so it’s like playing ducks and drakes, skipping between language and event.

My copy of this book is 175 mm wide by 215 mm in height. So the ends of its long lines never need to be carried over onto a new line. I note that it has been reprinted and now the book is 205 mm wide by 205 mm in height — a square. Innovation such as this presents a problem for conventional publishers, who are now at threat from self-publication. I sense that longer lines are “in the air”. Both Carcanet and Faber have reduced the size of their fonts. This is not the answer. To accommodate the longer line, we need wider books.


Anthony HowellAnthony Howell, a former dancer with the Royal Ballet, was founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and performed solo at the Hayward Gallery and at the Sydney Biennale. His articles on visual art, dance, performance, and poetry have appeared in many publications including Art Monthly, The London Magazine, Harpers & Queen, The Times Literary Supplement. He is a contributing editor of  The Fortnightly Review. In 2001 he received a LADA bursary to study the tango in Buenos Aires and now teaches the dance at his studio/gallery The Room in Tottenham Hale. He is the author of a seminal textbook, The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice. Details about his collaborative project, Grey Suit Online, are here.

NOTE:

  1.  I have written about Field — and included a long poem of his — in an earlier piece for The Fortnightly, “Dreadful as the Abortions of an Angel”.
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