In search of lost lines

Whitman to me was an instrument... he started us on the course of our researches 

into the nature of the line by breaking finally with English prosody. After him there has been 

for us no line.   --W. C. Williams

    J. Kruse (2012), who cited the Williams passage above, has observed that one main reason for the lack of technical terminology for enjambment, despite the noted fact of its presence in the classical languages, is the distinction held in linguistic typology between analytic and synthetic languages. Enjambment would then be a feature more noticeable in analytic languages like English where sense depends heavily on word order. But is enjambment really noticeable without the aid of the visual dimension of the written or printed page? Can I hear an enjambed line in the microsecond it occupies as a prosodic boundary between words or phrases? In the delivery instance of a text without canonic phonic markers such as stichs, rhymes, caesuras, or alliterations, won’t it be more likely that the utterance would be prosodically parsed following either the speaker's pacing or the listener's sense of syntactic order? Enjambment would then seem to be of a different order. It is  not bound by canonic phrase groupings or junctures and even by standard orthography (e.g., E. E. Cummings). No necessity binds it to the physiological rhythms characteristic of actual human breathing either. We can probably say for enjambent, as much for free verse, that its dynamic overflows that of the metrical, the grammatical, and the phonological. 

    This argues, then, for the visual nature of enjambment, a device that, for analytic languages, is highly dependent on its recognition as a graphic feature scanned during silent reading. Following Bradford’s statement about enjambment in his Graphic Poetics, we can then look at this scriptural device as an axis that serves as the contrapuntal play between the Eye and the Ear, implying the crucial involvement of the visual (written or printed) dimension in its mechanics. An enjambment would be like an “eye pause” because it is more readily perceived by the eye than by the ear. To take account of this mechanism, we will need what Kruse observed as lacking in the study of this device: technical terms for its discussion, terms which we can mine from today’s studies in typography, graphematics, and grammatology. From a canonical point of view, the modulation in the configuration of the line in verbal and visual terms is interpreted as a movement bending toward or away from the axiomatic orders of grammatical syntax, metrical line, and phonological structure. This canonic triangulation needs to imagine the ground of perception and the  "celestial" frames as highly-determined systems (immobile points) so that we can draw any discursive trajectory as an isomorphic mapping among various semiotic subsystems. 

    Free verse would be that motion where complete information or totality is absent, and where the trajectory is not guided by fixed stars but by the projected mapping motion of those posited frames of reference in relation to an imagined stable ground of discourse. That map would be based on previous cultural memory that is constantly being redrawn or revised on-the-fly (cf. D. Davidson’s “radical interpretation”), and poetic discourse would be the laboratory where all these moving references are being tested and probed. The oscillatory Gestalt of poetic discourse comes from the metalinguistic play it stages in the invocation of those projected structures in memory, either satisfying our deepest desire for a confirmation of a hidden but complete Order (a theological canvas), or upsetting this desire by delaying or dislocating the imaginary coherence of the “line” as a utopian mapping among linguistic, typographic, and semantic planes (or structural, vehicular, and referential bundles).

    This delay is all the more made operational by the semiotic and technological reflexivity it imposes upon the reader by forcing a comparison between her expectations of linguistic order (or “deeper” meaning) and the unusual reconfiguration of the poetic text, thereby reopening the field to a perceptual crisis that brokers the return of the aesthetic via the ascendancy of asymmetry, incongruity, and anisomorphism. The diagrammatic map, invested on the utopia of equivalences, would barely hold the parts together in the absence of the whole. The whole is exactly what is delayed or suspended, whose horizon is posited or imagined as somehow already attained or circumscribed. We can repeat here what Derrida has said about Saussure’s langue: no one has yet encountered the whole in its totality. In the infinitely slow arrival of the whole, free verse would primarily operate as a metaprosodic trajectory tracing the echoes of ideal systems as distant allegories.

Prosodic notes on free verse

    From one of the best works on historical metrics, we can read:

Whereas a caesura represents a line-internal pause caused by a syntactical juncture in the text, enjambment represents the lack of a syntactical juncture at line ends. Speaking in the most preliminary of terms, enjambment occurs whenever a line break does not coincide with a syntactical juncture in the text, and enjambment therefore constitutes one extreme of a scale whose opposite extreme is constituted by an end-stopped line. (Jesper Kruse, 2012)

    Under a post-essentialist view of prosody, the bi-play between syntax and the metrological line can only be posed in absolute terms if the knowledge of syntax as a grammatical system is already complete. Such a status is possible only if the subsystems that it needs to work are themselves already transparent or fully-known systems. In other words, a transparent syntax presumes all other subsystemic variables to be fully established and available for co-reference or corroboration. The thresholds that are crossed constantly--via the dialectical rapport between a notion of standard syntax and the metrical frame which tests both itself and the linguistic and mediatic forms at its disposal--could be recast as cognitive mapping operations through which aesthetic objects (like "line" and "foot") could be overmarked for material reference and informational salience. The bracketing of orthodox metrologies that scan for markedness in terms of prominences and boundaries in favor of the displacement of the abstract poetico-linguistic line, and the shift in the level of analytical generality toward a metaprosodic dimension where equivalence rules are perpetually negotiated in a solution space, would disentangle us from the undeclared essentialisms of the binary oppositions between natural and formal aspects of language and media (i.e., the cognitive pairing of one ideal object with another, e.g., line+syntax). 

    From this reformulation, and extending from R. Bradford’s work on graphic poetics, the virtue of free verse is staked less on the construction of a new metrological mode that it may have afforded, than on its capacity to open the way toward the foregrounding of the metaprosodic biases of the metrological imagination (the axis between the eye and the ear). Approached this way, poetic composition under a metrological scheme is an operation of transposition where the sum total of the unknowns of language and communication (cf. the notion of lalangue in Lacan) is purified to a rational frame of binary rules and exception. In short, it is a prosodic laboratory where the limits of what can be known about the medium can be tested, an ideal environment in which the constraints imposed on the use of signs act like referential frames against which semiotic objects could be abstracted and measured (Cf. Jean-Claude Milner's For the Love of Language).

    Wouldn’t the concept of verse design, say for an accentual-syllabic meter, presume the self-evidence of the structural presence of stresses? We need to invoke the current empirical notion of stress and prosodic features as purely pragmatic variational elements; that is, as metadiscursive features of emergent script acts. The binarism of verse design vs. verse instance in Jakobson needs to be re-examined, especially since they mirror the langue/parole dichotomy in Saussure. Useful as it may seem in separating the application of the verse design from its status as a formal framework, it nonetheless presumes that its formal elements are universally accessible givens without themselves needing to be resituated in the cycle of pragmatic interpretation (and history). Usually, the formal elements are presumed to be self-evident properties of the language, analytically extracted from its indefinite mass, then fed back into it in the guise of an art form that raises that language to its aesthetic potential, as the acme of its incarnation. 

    Needless to say, as a privileged mode of commodified discourse whose value depended on such aesthetic promotion, poetic discourse is a means of gaining cultural capital in a society where such process is sanctioned and validated. It is also the reason why it can easily be co-opted by the discursive technologies of the State and bodies of power. As avant-garde counter-traditions have shown us in the history of poetics, there is nothing apolitical about poetic discourse, even if it downplays such possible affiliations in its form or content. Despite its capacity to open the way toward metaprosodic interrogation, free verse, because of its conceptual grafting to expressive individualism, retains a nostalgia for transcendental agency grounded on Romantic humanist thought. In its association with the Romantic voice and common "natural" speech, free verse's radical potential is contained, recuperated once again by its alliance with a prevailing poetic model. 

    At the same time, however, the critique of Romantic ideas and the originary notion of the Author produced a post-hermeneutic condition (F. Kittler) which pried language away from such a metrological anchoring. (The Futurist parole in libertà points the way in a manner more radical than free verse, opening the door toward the technological horizon of metamedia in the prosodic laboratories of the avant-garde.) By the time Formalism entered the picture, the shift from formal metrologies toward the ideal of organic unity marks the moment of a new development: the institution of Criticism and the establishment of Literature as an autonomous object. Without formal metrologies at the center of modernist poetic discourse--having been reduced to the status of the ghost of meter, free verse represented not the arrival of a new metrology but the index of the crisis of form, a crisis addressed later on by the emergence of formalist New Criticism. New Criticism, in effect, saved poetic discourse and provided it a new-found metaprosodic base.

Where is the reader, how is it located?

    -Where is the reader/observer, how is it inscribed/embedded/located? Usually hidden, as ground, not figure, but sometimes foregrounded, that is, thematized. We can liken its status to the theatrical fourth wall. In the visual arts, we can recall perspective, play of depth, light, volume, angles, color, trompe-l'oeil, or all ways by which the readerly gaze is embedded as an operation of looking. Until there is no more form or depth, and the vision stops short before the materiality of its medium.

 

              Matthew Sepielli, Little Light, 2019 (artsy.net). Haze effects, hue or color contrast, 

             and frame elevation combine to triangulate an implied range, depth, and viewpoint.

   - This illusionism is replaced by the idiom of bodies, textures, pure surfaces, and materials as the aesthetic language of attention. The illusion of a window looking out folds back and extends toward the other direction to redefine the readerly space until, as if, finally, they inhabit the same topography where the act of looking itself is generated. Sometimes, in action painting for example, the readerly space expands (Expressionism) to become the whole record of its nonlinear motions. Artefacts of looking may or may not accommodate the space for the reader/observer; they may, partly or fully, demand or deny the observer's space. 

    -Not often is this aspect thematized, or this tendency follows historical modulations. Or, the ontology of the object is the extension of the readerly stage, spliced off and then displaced outward to satisfy the age's rhetoric of discursive authority (positivism). In literature as early as the epics, the narrator function being given to the figure who takes over the narrative is a reader in disguise, where performance intersects and becomes part of the ontological space of fiction (metalepsis). Media within media, the readerly stage is the site of the modulation of the poles of emergent aesthetic objects and the motions that map them for perceptual salience.

Prosody & causality

"A prosody based on intonational contours has become increasingly problematic."
                                                           -Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice, 1991

    

    Meter is an idealist platform just like the phoneme, grapheme, or morpheme as a minimum unit that supposedly carries a distinctive value. These ideal notions justify their existence by the assumption that they are derived from a natural input or base, of which they are the stylizations. The organization of signs on media can be seen as either a form of rhythm or layout whose patterning is seen to conform or be isometric or isomorphic with a primary field or object. Hence, it is a cognitive mapping of a specific semantic referent, value, or object, that is, of a cognitive target. It imagines itself to be a consequent, for which the target is the precedent, or as the effect of a prior cause. In short, a schema of causality governs the metrical, prosodic, and stylistic imaginary of many poetics. Often, the givenness or self-explanatory nature of the ground is rarely examined or questioned, using the default ideological force of ''tradition'' or some version of nativism or essentialism to suppress all further interrogations.

    A strategic reorientation (like in the works of the poetics project of the French Oulipo group or of U.S.-based L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers that M. Perloff discusses in many of her publications) allows us not only to see the ideological and historical provenances of metrological schemes, but also affords us more ways of exposing the neglected or ignored organizational, structural, pragmatic, or poetic features of semiotic systems; that is, their ''potential'' aspectual profiles marginalized by discursive regimes. Instead of a precedent cause as the reason for the form, a potentialist prosody is locally generative, not a transcendentalist mapping of a prior referent. 

    (This brings to mind the long literary practice since the Aeneid where the text or elements of the text, diegetic or paradiegetic, are mirrored or replicated within the text. The play on narrative levels in metafiction, for example, is a familiar extension of this practice. The referential operation, in effect, is housed within the text, a text that loops back to reflect its own reflection. It would be interesting to regard this procedure as the alibi of discourse or language, as the practical means by which discourse becomes possible as a semiotic network of differences. At the most basic, it is the elaboration of the mirror-stage of language, the self-generation of metaphoricity as such where the textual and the non-textual, the narrative and the discursive, or the literal and the figural, as perceptible or readable categories, are splintered off for aesthetic salience. The readable becomes available via the opening that textual operations enact as a technological and material feature of their information design environment.) 

    In this case, we can actually reimagine metrical schemes themselves as locally generative (with the looping character of rhythmic patterns as analogues of metafictive play), as constraints and not as prosodic rules founded on an aspect of language or unmediated reality that is deemed structurally or formally essential and intrinsic, carrying the force of a natural, ahistorical law or ground. The invocation of contextless "imagination," "genius," or "soul" and their connection to a super generic "voice" or "vision" is in this case a version of such naturalization. << Verse form is... determined by the simulation of... the voice of an "I" that alternately cajoles, teases, and hectors his nameless interlocutor, using linear patterns that loop back and forth to enact the ''gradual pulsing to and fro" of consciousness coming to awareness >> (in Perloff, italics mine).

On the twilight of prosodic idols

     To take up again the Concretist piece entitled ''Silence'' by Eugen Gomringer:* 

    Only by looking can it obtain its existence, i.e., via silent reading. It forbids vocal performance and desires an existence beyond speech. As it veers away from dependence on verbal performance for its being, its whole existence can only be sensed through the visual channel. We would. by habit. impose a subphonetic echo. on the repeating sequence. Yet, that repetition reminds us as if by command, as it flits from the verbal to the nominal to the adjectival, or from the discursive to the graphemic, that its proper world is the forbidden reentry of speech. From its exploitation of pictorial layout and type, or its avoidance of syntax and the metronomic line, it reconquers every phonovocalic temptation, and calms all verbalization into the final triumph of a formal and material auto-inscription. As a manifesto of visual prosody, official or unofficial, it reestablishes the frontier that divides the prosodic world between the glottographic and nonglottographic, and breaks open our worldview of the horizon for a poetic practice beyond speech-centered metronomy.

Eugen Gomringer, 1953, "Wind":
diagrammatic, nonlinear, kinetic, multimodal;
iconicity at the limits of iconicity

    Up until now, current practice did not yet break the hold of the metrico-lyrical Voice nor of the assumed but mysterious grand order of Syntax, despite the avalanche of visual, bibliographic, materialist, digital, and ergonomic dimensions of modern 20th to 21st century prosody. More currently, Gomringer's pivotal piece reminded me of "postliterate" texts such as the late Peter Ganick's and his contemporaries, whose underrated works evoke for me Abstract art's post-figural moment in terms of historical turns in artistic paradigms where the fundamentals and primes of a koinē aisthēsis are once more interrogated and shaken. These artists' output straddles the prosodic worlds inherited from dadaism, concretism, proceduralism, ''language'' poetics, vispo, conceptualism, and asemic writing. Elsewhere, however, writing still labors under the twilight of prosodic idols. It continues in the void where human language is confronted with the absence of absolute grounds, proceeding either unreflexively and ahistorically, or propping itself up erringly, like an amnesiac dreaming faintly of utopian grammars, ideal languages, and isomorphic cartographies. Stubborn archaic idols brandishing the promised land of some indescribable objective solace never cease to haunt its centers and margins.

*The blank space activates the dialectic between the visible scripts and the unfilled surface of the page. It allows us to imagine the reversal of the visible scripts into their invisible counterpart. What is readable becomes, in turn, transparent, that is, unreadable, absent yet present, present yet absent. Surrounding the blank space in the center as if to assure its captivity as an insubstantial void to the gaze, the legible glyphs ironically become contaminated by it, themselves imperceptibly becoming what they seem to have tried containing. By an abrupt expansion and Gestalt inversion, we realize at once that the empty space is not a mere center subordinate to the self-evident presence of visible fonts: it forms part of the whole page whose whiteness now surrounds the legible space of writing.

On the significant other of prosody

From Richard Bradford's Roman Jakobson: Life, Language, Art we read:

<< In the Dialogues with Krystyna Pomorska Jakobson is disarmingly honest about the specialised and somewhat partial nature of his poetic investigations. In the chapter on ‘Parallelism’ he concedes that in his work on Czech and Russian couplet poetry he had succeeded more in establishing the nature of the pertinent critical questions than in offering final and conclusive answers.

The perception of similarities and contiguities within the couplet united by parallelism leads automatically to the need to find an answer to the unconscious questions: what links the two lines? Is it an association by similarity or by contrast? Or is it an association through contiguity, and, if so, is its contiguity in time or in space? All of which leads to the essential question for the comprehension of the verse: what is the hierarchical relation between the parallel units? Which of them is subordinated to the other? How is the relation in question actualized—by the internal content of the verse, or by the fact that one of the lines simply dominates the other, or finally by the position that the couplet occupies in the whole? >>

    The questions posed by Jakobson here alerts our attention to the function of an abstract set of principles that delivers coherence in the process of reading. What abstract principles hold the text together or permit a reading pathway to become possible? This will be the set of pragmatic operations that any abstract regime of signs enacts on the assembly of otherwise non-signifying glyphs or marks to extract a value of significance from them. In short, we become the recruited witnesses for the emergence of aesthetic objects...

    We see Jakobson in the lurch, but what his poetic function ultimately implies if pursued fully is that it is a metaprosodic stance where the elements of the script act are postulated via differences, then reinforced by redundancy, i.e., by the formalities of pattern-making where abstract constituents like  ''syllable'' or ''stress'' or ''accent'' are given temporary ontological weight. It is in this sense that the semiotic “substance” which the script act carries is its own creation or “induction,” arising or emerging only in the “wire mesh” it weaves back and forth as a network of relations or “equivalences” in its attempt to count the memory of the passage of time. Wouldn’t this be the meaning of the passage from his infamous essay, cited below? 

Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is matched with long, and short with short; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no boundary; syntactic pause equals syntactic pause, no pause equals no pause. Syllables are converted into units of measure, and so are morae or stresses.

    The meta-discursive contrastive pairs which are minimally required to enable discourse and the script act are themselves prosodic postulates. Prosody posits its own elements, distributes them on the abstract line. (The difficulty in empirically establishing the ontologies of prosodic elements in the likeness of grammatical units is perhaps what keeps them prosodic.) The better way of resolving this is by the constant foregrounding of the differential binaries in a conventional artifice or form where the performance of the form includes both its possible states and its variation. In the more metalinguistic emphases of the poetic function, the norm and the variation are variables applicable to both the polar opposites deployed to allow the line to move. No element of either the linguistic or the poetic prosody has an absolute ontology. Nevertheless, each shadowy element invokes its opposite or must posit it in the design of the line for the line to become a perceptible object. Strong and weak stresses are examples of prosodic elements which play a central role in the manufacture of a rhythmic order which is supposedly anchored on the voice or language itself.

    The script act is the mimesis of what? The ground of mimesis, once gone, becomes a shadow which the performance must posit as an other of itself, and yet not dissimilar. It must locate its principle of resemblance to overcome the gap it opens up to even exist as a mimetic movement of what is other than itself. In modern notions of textual exegesis, the linguistic performance is a mimesis of the linguistic system, its modernist center or ground. No longer the mimesis of the world, the mind, speech, the romantic voice, history, culture, ideology, or any other topic or theme, natural or supernatural, textuality and its various forms are now viewed to be representative of the structural truth of language, and, if not of the autonomous object of art, the aesthetic form itself in its organic or self-coherent idealized unity. 

    (The ideal object of poetic "form" is technically defined by a ''metrology.'' In this case, any prosodic regime that has a metrical ideal, whether positive or negative, enacts the desire for an ideal measure (thus, « meter » in the most generic "free" and "non-free" sense). The arrival of free verse can be seen as an interrogation of such ideal forms as basis of a prosodic organizing principle. Hence, in itself, free verse is not a new form, but the search for form, or, more precisely, the crisis of form, or the recognition of the absence of an absolute prosodic ground. The recruitment of the visual expands the investigation of this open horizon where the poetic must now begin realizing the arbitrariness of its grounds, that is, begin recognizing its own historicity. It is here that the historical and the critical mutually define themselves in the search for the ground of prosody.)

    In the materialist semiotics which would emerge with the early 20th century avant-garde, from Futurism to Concretism to Book Art to Asemic writing, this mimetic imperative (where an extra-discursive Signified must always be invoked for the rationale of the poetico-linguistic line) would be de-emphasized—via a shift in the binarist perspective—to underline the material dynamics of the production of signifiers. This is only a first step, since replacing the retreat of the ideal signified by the apotheosis of the signifier merely reverses the ontological pole. By the time of the Lettrists up to Asemic writing, the remaining idealism in the form of the signifier would also give way to the larger dynamic of discursive regimes and design environments where semiotic values obtain their coefficients of the real.

Notes on the expansion of the prosodic

    The idea that cast print as a "medium" usually implied that it is the ''leftover'' of the bifurcation of Signifier/Signified binary in a process we can call "overmarking." The necessity of manufacturing a discourse having a master Signified as prime objective has relegated the visual-material dimension to the neutral notion of ''medium.'' The medium has become inert, that is, asemic, or has the most minimum prosodic value on its own. The real value it must signify is its other, another prosodic realm, namely ''speech'' or ''voice'' or ''feeling,'' or ''psychic events'' if not ''world events.'' That is why any attempt to draw attention to its visual-material medium is seen as transgressive of its primary duty. If there is talk of self-referentiality, it remains within the noetic realm of ideal objects like poetic ''form'' and linguistic ''structure.'' It is true that the attention to an ideal form allowed a focus on the manner by which language use foregrounds itself, as a structured set of signifiers deployed to highlight language's ''poetic'' function. It is just a matter of expanding this scope of the medium to recognize the semiotic role of visual, spatial, ''material,'' and bibliographic, even ergonomic, dimensions presupposed as background ''silent'' processes. We must again examine the historical genealogy of such fine distinctions and terminological formulations that structure accepted reading habits. If today there is a huge body of asemic art traversing the globe, it is only to testify to the redeployment of the medium as mere vehicle, but this time with a recuperated aesthetic focus, as if to draw attention to its distinct contrast to the ideal Signified that only a proper grammatological conversion would reactivate or reanimate.

    If anything at all, the strategic value of "poetic" practice is the manner it foregrounds the presuppositions concerning language, experience, cultural memory, and history. These presuppositions can either be assumed as self-evident or problematized by more reflexive writers or composers. When the borders between the medium and the message becomes shifty, a historical moment arrives: the medium appears as a carrier of a "meta-message," like the metadata pinned on computer data files. The limited economy or ecology around which forms of poetic practice have been pivoting--where the Signifier/Signified binary is assumed to exclusively structure the imagined semic aspect of symbolic entities: the linguistic message--now explodes beyond their confinement. Consequently, the specific prosodic grounds assumed to be primary upon which is built such a limited ecology is exposed to be a specific cultural or historical bias: a paradigm. It is then made clear that the same semiotic binary also functions as heretofore muted metacodes informing the material or technological ''carriers'' of the delineated "message." The manner by which prosodic assumptions expand or contract in relation to the signifying bundles admitted to be the target of semic focus defines which aspects of the reading field gets invested with informational salience. That is, it defines for a specific regime of reading the aesthetic entities of meaningfulness.