the blind critic

Of course I’ve been thinking about this lately. I’ve thought about it since the age of six, when I realised how important reading was. I know from poetry readings, and indeed conversations, that I don’t take things in nearly as well through my ears. Seeing is believing! I’ve often liked spoken poetry, only to find when I saw it on the page that the poet hadn’t reflected his own written form.

It's a delicate balance between a line ending and a caesura. When I read, this is the hardest element to enunciate, and when I go to readings it is the way in which poets most often ruin their poems: bad poems can, dangerously, be made to sound better than they are, and beautiful ones can be made to sound choppy. And the fashion for reading straight over a line break as if it didn’t exist means that the shape of the poem is (in the absence of visual cues) destroyed.

There are poems that appear to be free verse, and roughly are, which actually contain metrical and even rhyming lines embedded within their structure. I think a lot of poets do this unintentionally. They just don’t have the ear, and when they read aloud they read in metre without even knowing it.

On the other hand, for example, Dorothy Molloy is a poet who does it on purpose as a sort of contrapuntal technique; it’s part of her style signature. Look:

My heart lives in my
chest. I know it’s there.
But now the rogue will often
disappear, and leave me
stranded in my scarecrow
mind. It’s so unkind.

These lines, read naturally, aloud, would sound like three perfect iambic pentameters on an aabb rhyme scheme, with a short final line:

My heart lives in my chest. I know it’s there.
But now the rogue will often disappear,
and leave me stranded in my scarecrow mind.
(Da DA da DA da DA,) It’s so unkind.

How on earth would you pick that up with out seeing it on the page? (And how would the blind critic even get hold of this kind of work in the first place? But that’s another question.)

I just finished putting next-to-final edits on a close reading, for the Contemporary Poetry Review, of a Joseph Brodsky poem. More-than-usually conscious of how I work, I realised something explicitly which I think I've always noticed under the surface: that I read a poem (aside from hearing the sounds, which so many poets seemingly fail to do) simply by looking at it - its patterns and shapes settle themselves onto my eye, informing the linear reading.

This isn’t how Homer’s audiences did it. But they probably also weren’t writing essays about his use of assonance and dissonance, end rhyme, internal rhyme, slant rhyme, caesurae. Or were they? (Of course, Ms B will probably now have to adopt the great poet as a mascot, if not as an actual role model; but he lived in the Great Age of Memorisation.) In our world, how do you formulate a critical opinion if you can’t see all the beautiful double l’s standing up in lovely rows?

I’d need to train someone to read to me, according to some system I would develop, and I’d have to memorise the line endings. Otherwise, in practical terms, one’s judgement would be in fact shot.

Now, I am clearly writing this with my eyes — in fact, I'm sitting in the lovely Charles Lamb pub, waiting for my friend the Darling Ranter — and even the worst thing I have been given to fear in the immediate future is not the total annihilation of the Baroque Vision; as I say, I entertained these musings from the moment I realised about reading. It is a formal deliberation.

But the routine disregard of linguistic patterns someone went to the trouble of making is something I do think about even at the best of times, so why not flag it up now?