Sound & Sense: An Open Thread
The first of a regular opportunity to learn what others are reading — and writing
Well, it ain’t a personal favorite, but Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) did give us “Ars Poetica,” a 1926 free-verse work that is perhaps the best-known American poem about poetry: “A poem should not mean / But be,” he famously concludes.
I have a theory (although theory is probably too grand a word; suspicion might be better) that general pronouncements about art are true exactly to the extent that their opposites are true. Thus, for example, “There is no ‘must’ in art because art is free,” said the painter Kandinsky, and fair enough — but it’s equally fair to note that art is created within its medium and more constrained than many other human activities. All art is revolutionary is as true, and false, as All art is reactionary. And maybe, as MacLeish says, a poem should not mean but be — that a poem is akin to something “palpable and mute.” Just as true, however, is that language must mean to be in the first place.
So, what are you thinking about? Reading? Writing? This is an open-mic thread, available to both free and paid subscribers, where we learn what’s in your mind these days.
There's a comment thread about which books of poetry we reread periodically, but what about novels? What are your regular rereads?
Mine (and my lists are always full of eccentric choices):
Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding
J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country
Edwin O'Connor, The Edge of Sadness
Barbara Pym, Excellent Women and An Unsuitable Attachment
Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices
Any number of Alice Thomas Ellis novels, but probably #1 is The Other Side of the Fire
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (though I just spent the last year rereading a LOT of Dickens, on a major binge --- about the only one I don't think I reread is Great Expectations, so I should probably do that)
First of all, a great hurrah to you and Sally Thomas for reclaiming poetry for the intelligent common reader.
Second, a small disagreement about Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica." The poem was used during my youth as an aesthetics lesson for the feeble minded. "See, students, a modern poem doesn't have to mean anything. I just exists!" It took me years to realize what a suave and clever poems it actually was. One could say "Ars Poetica" keeps repeating the same message--pure Jacques Maritain--that poetry communicates differently from workaday prose. But 98 years later, this message still hasn't sunk into literary critics.
MacLeish's poem is not free verse. It unfolds as unmetered lines rhymed in couplets. (I find the rhyming ingenious.) That is what French would call "vers libre," a term which is usually mistranslated into English as "free verse." In French and Italian poetry, what is "free" is only the line length. The rhymes are mandatory.
The young T. S. Eliot became fascinated with the vers libre tradition. That is probably where MacLeish got the idea of using the form.