If I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate
Posted on December 14, 2006
Filed Under Philosophy, Poetry, Writing | 1 Comment
That is the poem’s greatest wish. Or at least that’s what claimed over at Jonathan Mayhew’s blog. Jonathan rightly dismisses the idea that rhythm & sound in poetry are mimetic except in occasional & mostly superficial cases. This is something my old teacher Donald Justice, who as a young man trained as a composer, made a point of. The sound of a poem has its own integrity. Take what might be a limit case: a country blues about a train, or riding a train, or watching a train. That the guitar or harmonica can make like a train is an effect, something added to the substance of the song, a trick, however felicitous (or corny). And there are plenty of blues that use the “train rhythm” that haven’t a thing to do with trains. So rhythm is its own thing, but what is its purpose? It persists, so it must be good for something.
Maybe rhythm is the carrier wave for subject matter. I suggested in Jonathan’s comments that rhythm is there to move the gestalt from poet to reader. I think I’d just say, on reflection, that rhythm is the (imperfect) attempt to reproduce the poet’s body. Of course, remembering Blake, I take it as given that “there is no body distinct from the soul” & that the body is just the part of the soul we can grasp with the five senses. The poet chases an ineffable rhythm to carry the feeling & meaning of the words & uses rhythm in the poem in an in an effort move that rhythm across the gap like a dancer. Like dancing to soul music. The subject seems to demand multiple metaphors. And as much as I would like to, I can’t get around Blake’s Neoplatonism, nor can I get around the dualism of “sound & sense,” except in so far as these are unified temporarily by the performance of the poem.
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One Response to “If I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate”
Poetry more than any other form seems to have such a long history of being mis-taught in so many stupid ways. The very grasping of the mind at a concrete and unifying means of understanding, and which good poetry consistently evades, has been etched into stone by generations of misguided teachers, most of them never writers, who have convinced most contemporary readers that their experience is invalid and certainly less weighty than the stacks of worthless tablets they have produced. Thanks for pointing out the obvious cracks in this particular little slate.