Thomas Edison's people convinced Alfred Tennyson to chant the "Charge of the Light Brigade" into a microphone. You can hear it in a BBC collection, and you can hear it in a CD that comes with a book called The Voice of the Poet. Tennyson sounds like this:
pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!
pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!
Hobble leg, hobble leg,
hobble leg owhmmm!
Into the bottle of fluff, rubbed the stuff under!
pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!
pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!
But under the static of the wax cylinder, did you hear what Lord Alfred was up to? He was using the regular four-beat line, but he was using triplets within each beat. One-two-three, one-two-three:
That's how he reads it, with the triplets. Triplets are called dactyls or anapests in the official lingo, depending on whether they start with an upbeat or not. But those words are bits of twisted dead scholarship, and you should forget them immediately. Put them right out of your head. Wave them away. The poetry here is made up of triplets.
Triplets are good for all kinds of emotions. People think they're funny-and they are. They work in light verse and in limericks. "There was a young man from North Feany-rest. Who sprinkled some gin on his weenie-rest." Dr. Seuss uses them: "A yawn is quite catching, you see, like a cough." Ya-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, tum. Light.
Or you can use them for a love scene:
That's by Mary Louise Ritter, a forgotten poet, out of an old anthology called Everybody's Book of Short Poems, which once sold thousands of copies.
Or you can use triplets to dispense advice:
That's a poem by Alice Carey that was very big a century ago. If you read it aloud, you might feel yourself declaiming it too bouncily. But if you sing it, you'll find that you slow down and you begin to hear the wisdom in what she's saying:
James Fenton-who is the best living love poet-uses this same triplet rhythm, with the same end-rest on a four-beat line and the same warningness: "It's something you say at your peril (rest) / It's something you shouldn't contain (rest)."
And you can mix triplets together with duplets. Swinburne was the great rhythmic mixmaster, and before him Christina Rossetti. And Vachel Lindsay was good at it, too. Vachel Lindsay was a chanter and drumbeater. In the twenties, for a short time, he was probably the most famous poet in the U.S.A. Listen to what he does.
Now what has he got going there? He's got triplets in the first part of the line-"factory windows are"-and doublets in the second part-"always broken."
Bumpada, bumpada, bumpum, bumpum
Bumpada, bumpada, bumpum, bumpum
Factory windows are always broken
Diddle a diddle America
We want to live in America.
It's everywhere.
And sometimes the rhythm isn't a double or a triple, it's a quadruple rhythm. In other words, sixteenth notes, not eighth notes. And sometimes, often in fact, it's a quadruple rhythm made up of an eighth note plus two sixteenth notes that lead you into the next eighth note. That sounds complicated, but when you hear it you'll recognize it as obvious and familiar-something you've been listening to for your whole life. "Death comes with a crawl, or he comes with a pounce," as Edmund Vance Cooke said.
I'm dancing around the barn with my new broom. Dum deem, deedledeem, deedledeem, deedledeem!
WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE nobody mentioned Vachel Lindsay. Not even a whisper of his name. I heard a lot about Pound and Eliot. We had to read "Prufrock," which is a lovely poem, and "The Waste Land," which is a hodgepodge of glummery and borrowed paste. And I heard about the Spoon River Anthology, and the Black Mountain poets, and Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, of course, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and end of story.
But Vachel Lindsay, in his day, was big. He went around doing a kind of vaudeville act using poetry. A one-man minstrel show. He was famous for it.
And one day on one of his tours he came to St. Louis, and there he met Sara Teasdale.
Sara Teasdale was a much better poet than Vachel Lindsay was, and he recognized that, and he fell in love with her and chanted his poems to her and beat his drum for her, and later he dedicated a book to her. And eventually he proposed to her.
She didn't marry him, because basically she saw that he was a lunatic. Very unstable and he had seizures from time to time. But they corresponded for years. And as his fame dimmed and people forgot about him, he got crazier, and he began to threaten his wife-he'd married a young teacher- and he began to have paranoid thoughts that her father was after him. His wife became terrified of him. They had very little money. And when he would go onstage at some provincial women's club, they always wanted him to do his old stuff. "Do the stuff where you bang the drum and sing about Bryant and the Big Black Bucks. Not the new stuff. We don't want the new stuff." And one night back at home he had a fit of rage, and then he calmed down and went down to the basement. His wife called down, "Are you all right, darling?" And he said, "Yes, honey, I'm quite well, thank you-I'll be up shortly."
And then in a little while she heard a sound, blump. And she sat up: something is not right. She rushed downstairs and there was Vachel staggering up from the basement, going erp orp erp. Obviously in extremis. And she said, "Darling, what's happening?"
And he said, "I drank a bottle of Lysol."
Seriously. He died of it, in agony. And it was good that he died because he could feel that he was getting violent. His time was over. He had contributed what he had to contribute. He could sense that. His kind of poetry, which was so performable and so immediately graspable, had fallen out of favor. People like Ezra Pound-who was even crazier than Vachel Lindsay was, and who also, by the way, beat a drum sometimes when he gave readings-were laughing at him. They thought he was a joke. Modernism was winning its battle with rhyme, and he didn't want to be around when Pound and Williams did their victory dance. So he left the scene.
WELL, WHEN SARA TEASDALE found out that Vachel Lindsay had died, she was unhappy, as you can imagine, because in some ways she'd always loved him. She was one of those love-at-a-distance kind of people. She'd loved several men at a distance. And women, too. His death hit her hard, and she was not a healthy woman-she was very very touchy and moody, and sensitive, and hypochondriacal, and a really fine practitioner of the four-beat line.
O shaken flowers, o shimmering trees,
O sunlit white and blue,
Wound me, that I, through endless sleep,
May bear the scar of you.
But she also wrote dirty limericks and then destroyed them. People who read them said they were some of the most incredible dirty limericks they'd ever encountered. Why, why, why did she destroy them? Why? I can hardly bear to think of this loss. Sometimes she suffered from what she called "imeros"-a word from Sappho that meant a kind of almost sexual craving for romance. A lust for love.
One day she hit her head on the ceiling of a taxi while it was driving over a pothole in New York, and afterward she said her brain hurt and she dropped into a funk and eventually she took morphine in the bath and died. And not long after that her friend Orrick Johns-who was also from St. Louis and also a poet, who wrote about the whiteness of plum blossoms at night-he killed himself, too. And later Edna St. Vincent Millay fell down the stairs. So the rhymers all began dying out. All except for Robert Frost. Two vast and trunkless legs of Robert Frost stood in the desert.
I'M NOT A NATURAL RHYMER. This is the great disappointment of my life. I've got a decent metrical ear-let me just say that right out-and some of my early dirty love poems rhymed because I still believed then that I could force them to, and some of those poems were anthologized in a few places. So I got a reputation as a bad-boy formalist. But these days when I try to write rhyming poetry it's terrible. I mean it's just really embarrassing-it sucks. So I write plums. Chopped garbage. I've gotten away with it for years. And I sometimes feel that maybe if I'd been born in a different time-say, 1883-and hadn't been taught haiku and free verse but real poetry, my own rhyming self would have flowered more fully.
But you know, probably not. Probably my brain just isn't arranged properly. Because think: right now we're in a time in which rhyming is going on constantly. All the rhyming in pop music. There's a lust for it. Kids have hundreds of lines of four-stress verses memorized, they just don't call it four-stress verse. They call it "the words to the songs." They call it Coldplay or Green Day or Rickie Lee Jones or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. "Now in the morning I sleep alone, / Sweep the streets I used to own," says Coldplay. "California rest in peace / Simultaneous release," say the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Four-beat lines. Sometimes the rhymes are trite and sometimes not, and it doesn't matter because the music is the main thing. And I'm sure there will be a geniune adept who strides into our midst in five or ten years. The way Frost did. Sat up in the middle of that spring pool, with the weeds and the bugs all over him. He found the water that nobody knew was there. And that will happen again. All the dry rivulets will flow, and everyone will understand that new things were possible all along. And we'll forget almost all of the unrhymers that have been so big a part of the last fifty years. We'll forget about the wacky Charles Olson, for instance, who was once so big. My poems will definitely be forgotten. They are forgettable. They're simply not memorable. Except maybe for one or two. Maybe people will remember part of "How I Keep from Laughing." People seem to remember that one, sometimes. Garrison Keillor read it on the radio once.
NEVER MIND THAT. I soaked my skin graft in saltwater, which wasn't a good idea, but now it's healing nicely. And here's what amazes me. Howard Moss was writing poems at the same time that Allen Ginsberg was. They're so different. Sometimes it's very hard to recapture simultaneity-because even to the people living at the time it didn't feel simultaneous. At the time it felt as if Ginsberg was over here, going "first thought best thought, first thought best thought," and Howard Moss was over here, quietly watching the sun go down through his ice cubes after a day at the office writing a letter accepting a poem sent in by Elizabeth Bishop.
Ginsberg had a poem in The New Yorker, too. In the sixties, Moss accepted one of Ginsberg's poems. It's a good one, too. Very long. It spreads out over parts of two pages. It begins ambitiously: "When I Die." Ginsberg's father, Louis Ginsberg, also had poems in The New Yorker. His poems rhymed and scanned in the old-fashioned way. But his son Allen was smitten by Walt Whitman's preacherly ampersands and he never recovered.
And one day Ginsberg was giving a talk at the Naropa Institute, where he taught, and somebody asked him what the real rhythm of his poetry was. He was in the middle of saying how bad it was for children to be taught traditional meters-the kind his father used-how the bad iambic rhythm warped their little pure Buddha minds. And somebody at the Naropa Institute said, Well then, tell us, Allen. What is the real rhythm of poetry? And Ginsberg replied that the rhythm of poetry was the rhythm of the body. He said that it was, quote, "jacking off under bridges."
And everyone went, Oh ho, chortle, provocative, ho. Because Ginsberg's referring to jacking off under bridges and that's humorous. And it is, frankly. In fact I really like that Ginsberg would say that. It's the kind of refreshing thing that only he and some of the Beats were able to say.
So yes. Except that it isn't true. Because-try it. Just try to imagine standing under a bridge somewhere, holding a copy of Howl. Paperback copy.
You're under a bridge and you're holding your copy of Howl, and you read: "I saw the best minds of my generation zonked out on angry Koolaid in the junky slums of West 83rd street, dah dah dah dah dah dah dah dah-" Help! You can't get anywhere with that. Nobody can.
THE REAL RHYTHM of poetry is a strolling rhythm. Or a dancing rhythm. A gavotte, a minuet, a waltz. Remember those inner quadruplets I mentioned? When each beat is divided into four little pulses? Sixteenth notes, they're called, in music. Not duplets, not triplets, but quadruplets. Tetrasyllables. Some meter people call this the paeonic foot, after Aristotle. There's a useless term for you. But listen to the way they can sound:
Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do
That's Edna St. Vincent Millay. Still four beats, but each beat has four inner fuzz-bursts of phonemic energy.
Sara Teasdale did quadruplets, too:
Hear it? People always say that this quadruplet rhythm is for light verse. It doesn't have to be, but it can be. Listen to this four-beater.
That's light verse by Mr. Newman Levy. One of the lesser Algonquinites. Wrote a number of poems about alcohol, as befits a poet of the Prohibition, using that same quadruplet rhythm. Notice there's no rest on the third line, just as in a traditional ballad. W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, also uses it-"He's a modern major-general." And A. A. Milne:
When the War is over and the sword at last we sheathe,
I'm going to keep a jelly-fish and listen to it breathe.
And Thomas Bailey Aldrich: "And the heavy-branched banana never yields its creamy fruit." Vachel Lindsay used it: "Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley"-hear the sixteenth notes in "respectable McKinley"? T. S. Eliot used it, under Vachel Lindsay's influence. "Macavity Macavity there's no one like Macavity." Rappers use it a lot-
That's by Ludacris. And Kipling used it a lot, and Poe used it, too. Poe's "Raven," which is probably the best quadruplet rhythm ever written-listen to it slowly:
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Isn't that smooth?
Four very slow striding beats, with four steady silken swells filling each one. It's so simple and so hypnotic.
And the metrists don't know what to do with it. Here's what one introduction to poetry says. A good introduction by John Frederick Nims. He says that Poe's "Raven" is written in-ready?-"trochaic octameter with lines two and four catalectic." Catalectic meaning cut short. And how far does that get you? It actually disables any understanding of the poem to say that what he's doing is trochaic octameter. Because it's still really a basic four-beat stanza. Poe chose to set it in a different way because the lines came out long, but it's just a ballad. He said so himself. Poe is just taking a certain kind of beautiful stroll. Whether or not he stops under a bridge is not for us to say.
I WENT TO A BEAD STORE in town, and I bought some wire and a clasp and a clamping tool. I've decided to make some of the raw beads I bought for Roz into a real string of beads and give them to her. Not as an aggressive gift, but just as a friendly gift, to thank her for helping me when my finger was bleeding. I've learned to type without using my finger, by the way. Sometimes I type "dinger" for "finger" and "invlude" for "include."
So I went to the bead store in town-Beadle Bailey, it's called. It was very quiet inside. There were thousands of beads in tiny plastic cells, and I was amazed by the choices, the profusion of possibilities. It was like being a poet in that you had indivisible units that you could string together in certain rhythms. You can't alter the nature of a given bead, or a given word, but you can change which bead you choose, and the order in which you string them on their line. And I wanted to string together the beads I chose as a gift, which meant I had a certain person in mind when I looked at the colors. I was looking at the colors with Roz's color sense in my eyeballs. And I had an ideal in mind of rhythm and of randomness. Other beaders were bending, staring into the containers, or looking at the strings of beads hanging from metal hooks on the wall.
I saw some dusty pale small ceramic beads, and I felt the immediate clench of knowing that these were the ones that Roz would like best mixed with the ones I already had from Second Avenue. I asked the beadseller at the register about clasps, and it turns out that you can buy a certain kind of magnetic clasp that frees you from the problem of fitting tiny spring-loaded hooks together. The beadseller put on her reading glasses-she had them on a black-and-yellow beaded string-and she said, "I love these," pointing to one of my selections. She put the singles in a little plastic bag, and the strings, too. The whole purchase went into a pale green paper bag, and I walked out blinking onto the street carrying the raw materials for my present to Roz and feeling a joy of knowing that I was going to make something for her-something like a poem, but better than any poem I could write.
I think I'll do a quadruplet rhythm, a love-has-gone-and-left-me rhythm: one gray-green bead and then three other beads of near-random colors, and then a gray-green bead again.