william watkin's blog (since 2003)

Malevich, Black Square "O black black black black black" Patterning Machines: Towards an Avant-Garde Prosody In traditional prosody, of which Koch is aware, there are three basic methods of sensible patterning: rhythm, rhyme, and spacing. Each of these is absolutely determined by repetition of the same and repetition as difference, the first two parts of machine grammar. Rhythm repeats the same stresses in a regular pattern called metre, rhyme repeats the same sound at the stage of the final syllable of a line, and lineation (imposed space at the end and so between lines) makes sure this happens after the same number of syllables, as well as organising complex variations of this. Yet, metre is a function of the mind which recognises regularity of stress through the regularity of non-stress in a binary fashion. [i] While all speech has stress, metre organises stress into an abstract pattern of similarity and difference. Rhyme meanwhile produces two exact sensible repetitions...

"O black black black black black" Cohesion Machines While it is easy to see the significance of poetry machines at the level of linguistics or at the level of literary theory, to relate the two things together so as to fully understand the impact of Koch’s work one needs an interim discipline such as stylistics. Stylistics has a number of terms for the modes of repetition in literary texts but they fail in some respects as they are, on the whole, concerned only with cohesion while Koch’s use of repetition is always deviant. Still, they are essential tools for understanding repetition in Koch’s work and I have already mentioned anaphora, which is an example of the RD part of my grammar. In addition, we must consider Geoffrey Leech’s foundational terms free verbal repetition and verbal parallelism, along with more general stylistic terms such as parallelism, cohesion and deviance. Leech chooses a quotation from the bible to present his idea of free verbal repetition, a passage ...

Grammar Machines It must be made clear at this point that the idea of a deep structure which may be said to be the grammar machine of Koch’s poetry is, like the idea of the machine itself, really just a figurative concept. The trope of the machine is something I am using, following on from a number of other poststructural thinkers, in particular Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, to better describe the mechanistic nature of much of Koch’s work. Similarly, the use of the idea of a poetic deep structure is really only to allow us to better document the peculiarly mechanistic manner in which Koch composes his highly repetitious poems. To do this I will consider three very different poems from Koch’s early career, When the Sun Tries to Go On¸ “Sleeping with women,” and “Collected Poems,” all generated in the same machine-like way in relation to the ideas of deep structure in generative grammar, cohesion in stylistics, and patterning in traditional prosody. The aim is first to break poetry...

Poetry Ideas—Poetry Language—Poetry Machines The theory of “poetry machines” comes from Koch’s own theory of “poetry ideas” which he developed to teach children to write poetry. Koch explains: I taught reading poetry and writing poetry as one subject. I brought them together by means of “poetry ideas,” which were suggestions I would give to children for writing poems of their own in some way like the poems they were studying...for the Wish Poem, starting every line with “I wish.” [i] Already one can see in this passage the mechanistic poetic technique that dominates Koch’s own work, and although poetry ideas are not fully worked out, I think, in Koch’s mind, with little more in his prose work to really develop the concept, however one definite feature of the concept is repetition as a mode of cohesion: As for trying difficult forms, this was all pulverized into one form or variations of one form: repetition. I would say, “Start every line with ‘I wish,’” “Put your favorite color in ...

Bra Machine “The Brassiere Factory” would seem to many to be a minor, perhaps even politically suspect, poem by a minor poet. It does deal with the theme of sexual freedom, in its way, but it would be hard to convince many people of this with a straight face, yet to dismiss it as just a bit of fun would be a mistake. So why has the critical establishment missed the point so badly, why have they been so busy getting the joke that they missed the message? Partly it is because analysing even the surface implications of Koch’s work requires, on the part of the critic, a wide variety of analytical tools which the poetry itself might not seem to merit, and “The Brassiere Factory” is no exception. One can say that at the time of the poem’s publication, 1962, there was avant-garde kudos to be got from writing a poem about the industrial process of making women’s underwear, and in some ways Koch’s association of the bra with sexual oppression is strangely prophetic, but this might seem all ...

Introduction: Kenneth Koch and the Avant-Garde This article was originallypublished in the journal EnterText but I suspect it will get a wider reading here. If you want the PDF version go to: Poetry Machines: Repetition in the Early Poetry of Kenneth Koch One of the verbal inspirations I have had was from a big wooden box containing life jackets on a transatlantic steamship. There was a lifeboat drill and I ended up standing next to a big box on which was printed the big word BRASSIERES. This was the French word for life jackets—naturally, of course, I thought after a moment, bra (arm), something you put your arms through. But, for that moment, I was amazed. Why in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean was I standing, during a lifeboat drill, next to a huge wooden box of brassieres? Something about it seemed part of my poetry, but in fact didn’t become so until two years later when (apparently out of nowhere) I thought of a line that combined the two meanings of the word: Arm in arm we fled...

Conclusion In the process of adding up the diverse phrases of these two very different poetic units, The Tennis Court Oath and Writing is an Aid to Memory, one gets then a sense of how a certain structural similarity, the predominance of parataxis as mode of combination, can produce different text-ideology. Ashbery’s chosen title emphasises a self-conscious exploitation of erasure, leaving all out, and the myth of national politics. Written during a self-imposed exile the poem conveys in its two extremes, “America,” and the much analysed “Europe,” not only two very different modes of combination, parataxis and collage, producing two very different text units, but also two myths of nationhood predicated on the revolutionary fervour of the late eighteenth century that David’s painting depicts. And the to and fro of the game of tennis matches the to and fro of the poetic consciousness between a myth of America as free and Europe as horrific, which is cut across by the paradox of the se...

Hejinian's Slippage This musical “back and forth” movement is a myth of intersubjectivity which is directly opposed to the more disjunct sense that Hejinian describes in the preface to Writing is an Aid to Memory: I am always conscious of the disquieting runs of life slipping by, that the message remains undelivered, opposed to me. Memory cannot, through the future return, and proffer raw conclusions...Abridgement is foolish, like lopping off among miracles; yet times is not enough. Necessity is the limit with forgetfulness, but it remains undefined. Memory is the girth, or again. [i] The main difference between Ashbery and Hejinian is that Hejinian does not presuppose the interaction between subjectivity and writing to be an easy passage, a musical to and fro productive of the poem unit with the aim of “going on.” For what happens when one cannot go on any more? Paratactic syntax is not endless, it is proscribed by number and thus by size, and whilst we all now know abridgeme...