I am reading from Lewis Turco’s The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (1986).

Why am I here? That is because I am reading from the epic Essay on Rime, by Karl Shapiro (“epic” it seems to me — as an overview of seemingly the entire modern English tradition of poetry) — in passing, he mentions a roundelay, and its definition mentions Turco’s work.

But why Karl Shapiro? I think that is because (and I’m not entirely sure now) because I am, or was, recently, reading both The Sense of Sight by John Berger and On Poets and Others by Octavio Paz. Both are collections of essays written by thoughtful men. Octavio Paz, in particular — being a poet — writes about poets — could it be that in his essay on William Carlos Williams, maybe he mentioned Karl Shapiro in the same breath as the following quote?

All of these poems [Williams’ Paterson, Pound’s Cantos], obsessed as much by a desire to speak the American reality as to make it, are the contemporary descendants of Whitman, and all of them, one way or another, set out to fulfill the prophecy of Leaves of Grass. And in a sense they do fulfill it, but negatively. Whitman’s theme is the embodiment of the future in America. Marriage of the concrete and the universal, present and future: American democracy is the universalizing of national-bound European man and his rerooting in a particular land and society. The particularity consists in the fact that that society and that place are not a tradition but a present fired toward the future. Pound, Williams, and even Hart Crane are the other side of this promise: their poems demonstrate to us the ruins of that projects. Ruins no less grand and impressive than the others. Cathedrals are the ruins of Christian eternity, stupas are the ruins of Buddhist vacuity, the Greek temples of the polis and of geometry, but the big American cities and their suburbs are the living ruins of the future. In those huge industrial waste-bins the philosophy and morality of progress have come to a standstill. With the modern world ends the titanism of the future, compared with which the titanisms of the past—Incas, Romans, Chinese, Egyptians—seem childish sand castles.

I think that it could be the case, because Shapiro, in his Essay on Rime, takes up a very similar theme on lines 1916-31:

    Nor is it any accident that Emerson
    Anointed Whitman and not Poe. The nation
    A hundred years ago was real estate
    For the synthetic myth and poetry
    On the grand national-international scale.
    I do not think that I exaggerate
    In saying that our period has produced
    More poems conceived as epics, large and small,
    Than has the entire history of rime!
    The bulk of these fall from the sanguine pens
    Of Emersonian and Whitmanian bards;
    These in their works, as if to justify
    And prove our transcendental unity,
    Recite the whole geography and construct
    A gigantic stage perennially set
    For some Siegfried who never comes.

But flipping through the pages of Paz’s essays—maddeningly—I can find no mention of Shapiro. And on further reflection he doesn’t seem all that related to Berger’s themes.

As a last resort, I turn to my Google history. I see that the first time I googled about Karl Shapiro was not long after I googled for Schillinger — aha! — so it must have been John Cage who I was reading — and indeed! — in the “From the Forward” section of a previous post, I quote John Cage (“Karl Shapiro may have been thinking along these lines when he wrote his Essay on Rime in poetry”) talking about something altogether different than the above theme of American vacuity.

But yet the John Cage book came from a different stream than the others (both of those from Amherst Books, in fact). I might argue that I ordered it online in large part because I had earlier purchased the remarkable Stockhausen, Conversations with the composer from Unnameable Books, also in downtown Amherst, as I wrote about in a previous post. Stockhausen’s mind-bending, futuristic thought reminded me that I knew little about Cage, another progressive composer of the same era.

And so but somehow these streams joined together, clearly. Shapiro appears to have guided not only Cage but Paz as well — and if not directly, then let it be that both thought along the same lines, as did Newton and Leibnitz.

In the spirit of streams joining, I note also that my Mom mentioned some time ago, maybe a year ago, lamenting that I knew so little about poetry, that perhaps poetry may yet become a space that I would explore.

And so — I am reading from Turco’s The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (1986)!

From the Preface

The volume begins with a “Handbook of Poetics” arranged in “levels”—the typographical, the sonic, the sensory, and the ideational levels. These chapters survey the two modes of writing—prose and verse—and various prosodic and metrical systems, clarify terms such as rhythm, cadence, and meter, and provide clear explanations of the processes and methods of versification. Figurative language is defined and discussed, as are considerations such as diction, style, syntax, and overtone.

What catches my attention is the overloading — and possible earlier, and more fundamental usage — of several terms from two domains very close to me: music (rhythm, cadence, meter, overtone) and computing (style, syntax).

I am also intrigued to separate figurative from literal language, “at the root”.

From the Introduction

I am impressed by this concise model of literary genres:

  • types of literature
    • fiction
      • “the art of written narrative”
      • purpose: tell a story (therefore: use language to carry a narrative)
      • 4 elements
        • character
        • plot
        • atmosphere
        • theme
      • use any narrative language techniques
    • drama
      • “the art of theatrical narrative”
      • purpose: tell a story using the same 4 elements as fiction (above)
      • use only narrative language techniques of dialogue, monologue, or soliloquy
      • can supplement written narrative techniques with theatrical techniques such as representation
        • e.g., scenes, costumes, physical actions
    • essay
      • “the art of written rhetoric”
      • purpose: written discussion or exposition of a particular subject or an argument in favor or against a point of view
        • (I wonder, is it possible to write an essay outside this definition?)
      • techniques: rhetorical rather than narrative
      • 4 elements
        • subject being examined
        • thesis
        • argument (or logical proofs and data required to back thesis)
        • conclusion (usually identical with thesis)
    • poetry
      • “the art of language”
      • focus on mode, on language itself
      • “The poet focuses upon the literary resources of language in the same way a musician concentrates upon sound, the painter upon form, or the dancer upon movement”
      • 4 elements of language on 4 different levels
        • typographical
        • sonic
        • sensory
        • ideational

Turco mentions a 5th “level” — fusion — which is part of all genres. It answers the question “How do the elements of this story, poem, essay, or play come together to achieve a final effect?”