Why does sound patterning make us tap our feet involuntarily, help us remember things, and call forth words we may or may not be asking for? These questions speak to what David Caplan calls “rhyme’s capacity for unforeseen revelation”—the same, we suggest, holds for meter and rhythm. Answers to those questions, however, are less important than what the questions imply: that sound patterns act as agents of revelation, markers of linguistic evolution, and reminders of our environmental enmeshment. As such, we should examine them through critical frameworks that are ontological, epistemological, and ecological, vis-à-vis natural ecologies and disciplinary ecosystems.
In “Verse/Universe: William Blake and Octavio Paz,” Rick Ness notes how we seldom scrutinize the implications of the involuntary somatic effects rhythm and meter have on us when examining the many moving parts involved in writing and reading poetry. For Mexican poet-critic, Octavio Paz, “Poet and reader are two existential moments” among many in the process of language shaping itself into poetry. The universe, he argues, “is not only cosmic syntax, it is also prosody.” Through analyses of Blake’s metrical experiments, Ness draws on Paz to articulate an eco-prosody that de-centers poet and reader, positioning them in what Jane Bennett calls a distributive agency that includes environment, rhythm, biology, cultural memory, past patterns, and future expectations.
Professor D.B. Ruderman’s “Substance/Revelation: Form in Coleridge & Levertov” juxtaposes two important restatements of poetic theory. The first is Coleridge’s refutation of Wordsworth’s claim that there is no “essential” difference between the language of prose and poetry, prompting Coleridge to disambiguate two meanings of “essential”: one, the “idea” of the thing and, second, its ground or substance. While poetry and prose are closely related, it is not at all the case, Coleridge claims, that they arise from the same “idea” or inner impulse, suggesting that certain ideas are immanently metrical; as such, they express their own prosodic patterning. 150 years later, Denise Levertov suggests to Robert Creeley that his famous dictum (“form is never more than an extension of content”) be revised to “form is never more than a revelation of content.” For Levertov, as for Coleridge, the “form of the poem is the form of the content.” At stake in each of these retheorizations is the ultimate inseparability of form and content, individual and collective, world and idea. Through Spinozist readings of Levertov and Coleridge, Ruderman argues for a lyric ontology of interconnection, plural temporality, and trans-individuality.
In “Prosody in a Time of Limitation and Abundance,” Professor David Caplan argues that contemporary prosody offers an image in miniature of the broader state of literary studies, as well as a strategy to understand it. Poets have faced nearly endless artistic options. The sheer bulk of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (over 1000 entries) suggests the dizzying number of available forms our contemporary moment offers. No poet can try all these forms, let alone master them. In this respect, contemporary prosody resembles the broader field of literary studies, marked by countless options, in which no major theories dominate. In an era of such abundant poetic choices, to claim a poetic identity is to reject countless others. “If there is to be / no principle of inclusion, then, at least, there ought,” AR Ammons observes, “to be a principle of exclusion.” As Caplan argues, literary studies might follow this model, foregrounding the particular “principle of exclusion” the practitioners develop; that is, the particular limits of their scholarly projects and agendas. Paradoxically, by doing so, we might discover—as with prosodies—that apparently antagonistic fields of scholarship complement each other in new and surprising ways.
Professor Caroline Levine will respond to these three 15-minute papers before we invite questions from the audience.