NOTES FOR A LECTURE AT THE
BROOKLYN INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

In adapting a language to the uses of poetry the first thought must be for the language. The speech must be of the day and age if the poetry resulting is to be more than a referendum from the past. To refer to the day the poem must be as complete-ly as possible made or the materials living in that day, word and form, as well as not less informed in all its parts than the day itself.

A new language, such as the american speech, which has never been broken to poetic form, keeping itself intact, strives toward new poetic forms.

Poetry is getting up the heat with - or by use of - words. The somewhat vulgar turn of phrase, expanded, - can be expanded. And when the intensity is reached the language tends to become rhythmic - as with all rapid motion. But the language, each language, takes its own pace - the same as any other - and different from all others. It is the understanding of this pace and rhythm that makes for the poetic form natural and suitable to any language - It is not easy.

But "to get up the heat" needs explanation. It means that by use of words, at a pace and accuracy of high power - that the intellectual, moral, spiritual sensual (emotional) man is touched in all his parts at once. If, by the power of perception and invention a poet can so build his form as to do that - and he must do it if he is to be noteworthy - then he is a poet. It is not easy.

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How are you going to raise the heat in a man if he looks
at a poem and sees a stale and sentimental image in imitated form
addressed to an outworn intellectual ideal - a geocentric world
of feudal lack of knowledge - philosophically anchored in the
shallowest and most transparent of ebb waters? Nothing will be
raised by that, if he have a will and a mind, but his gorge.

Naturally, there are those who love ritual. And there
are others who know its uses. Poetry to many is just the ritual
of observances which serve the ends of interested -

But a poetry that will be full, would require more than
ritual. It requires observation and invention. It doesn't fol-
low anything but its own sensual world. Sensual in the Miltonian
sense that all art is of the senses.

Accuracy, as in science, accuracy to the sensual language
of the day giving it the ear - and then looking to *discover* how it
will or will not lend itself to structure. A long hard study of
practical significance - and much pleasure.

Since the turn of the century that has been the main line
of endeavor in the United States - the underlying current which
has carried - unwittingly - all other movements: To adapt the
new language to the uses of poetry - not many have consciously
known what it was about. Old ballad patterns have been brought
out and refurbished. Here and there a sonnet will turn up that
is passable or even very good. Verse has been used by women to
get themselves a wealthy husband or a man to get himself girls -

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or what you will. But these things have nothing to do with the
sweep of the event.

That lies in the invention, or rather the discovery
first, then the invention of new form - suitable to the state
of knowledge of the day - knowledge being used here in an all
inclusive sense - in the sense in which Ezra Pound uses it in
his colossal work, the Cantos.

The same might be embodied in the subtlety of a few
lines if they were sheer invention in poetics - You don't do
it with a sledge hammer or even, it may be, in a generation.
It is slow and difficult. It may not happen at all. But it
is the place where to work.

Whitman had a sense of it in his day - as did the writ-
ter of the *eloquentia vulgaris* in his

With the new language emphasizing new rhythmical pat-
terns - the whole range of poetic materials came in for recon-
sideration.

To most poetry is a line of so many measured syllables -
measured in a stated way - that rhymes _and_ which expresses a
poetic idea. They do not realize the stultifying effects of
ritualistic repetition. Lord knows, to break away is no virtue -
any pig can break out of a pen. But it is important to realize
that certain subjects were tabu to poetry. That is it was not
permissible to treat them in the way which poetry treats its ma-
terials.

4.

Rhyme has never been essential to poetry and much of
the best poetry does not affect it. But rhyme _meant_ poetry to
most people a few years ago. It was called _rhyme_. Lines ended
as the clause ended. Inversions of phrase crept in to preserve
the accepted pattern.

An age of enlightenment is retarded by such rhythmical
whackings on the cranium. The dictum became, Poetry can use any
material - so that it raise the heat with them, that they touch
the maximum thought of the day with such force that the movement
of them takes on a rythm of its own - so much its own that it re-
veals the thing alive - as you might know a deer from a wolf by
its run. Or, if you were sufficiently informed, a Japanese deer
from a Mexican one for the same reasons.

The accepted mode of poets, writing in an established
way, says that what I write is no more than prose cut up. I
thank them for an approach to the truth. In fact much that I
have done is speech observed and set, in small pieces, apart to
reveal something in it which I have tried to define - to discov-
er how thereby I might approach a just form.

Sometimes it is, in fact, a sentence as - in the short
lyric - I bought a new bathing suit -

Then I have been called an imagist, an objectivist -
now and then in going ahead, it has been useful to be imagist
or objectivist - or what not. Underneath, it is the adaptation
of a new language to the purposes of poetry, a long hard work -

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of considerable significance. In the invention of fragile or
broad new forms - sensible as new beauties -

These are some of the earlier attempts. Occasionally
influenced (thank God) by those around me.

In adapting a language to the uses of poetry the first thought must be for the language. The speech must be of the day and age if the poetry resulting is to be more than a referendum from the past. To refer to the day the poem must be as complete-ly as possible made of the materials living in that day, word and form, as well as not less informed in all its parts than the day itself.

2.

3.

Whitman had a sense of it in his day - as did the writer of the *eloquentia vulgaris* in his

With the new language emphasizing new rhythmical patterns - the whole range of poetic materials came in for reconsideration.

To most poetry is a line of so many measured syllables -
measured in a stated way - that rhymes _and_ which expresses a
poetic idea. They do not realize the stultifying effects of
ritualistic repetition. Lord knows, to break away is no virtue -
any pig can break out of a pen. But it is important to realize
that certain subjects were tabu to poetry. That is it was not
permissable to treat them in the way which poetry treats its materials.

4.

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