For Vachek, then, writing is a doubled system: a visual representation of speech (as language) and a self-sufficient visual system (a distinct and alternative system of language) that has evolved from speech and speaking, operates through and for the eye, and has over time developed norms and practices that reflect its particular advantages and limitations as a visual rather than aural medium.[1]<\/a>\u00a0For the most part we shift so easily between speaking and writing that we seldom consider the different norms, occasions, or capacities and limitations that shape our practices of these two distinct modalities of language.\u00a0 We are, in a sense, bi-language-al.\u00a0 We talk one way; we write another, and we are so comfortable with the occasions for each and so adept at their respective dynamics that we have little apparent reason even to notice their differences, much less reflect upon them.<\/p>\n Yet, our practice of language does not always divide so neatly into the two separate realms of the immediately interactive exchange of speaking\/listening and the deferred interactivity of writing\/reading.\u00a0 Our practice also includes various hybrids.\u00a0 We have all encountered conference “talks” that are lucid and reasonably paced if read by the eye as \u201cwriting\u201d but when heard as if speech (what might be termed voiced writing) are so turgid that even a triple latt\u00e9 can\u2019t keep us awake.\u00a0 Similarly, anyone who has “transcribed” a taped panel discussion knows that what seemed a brilliant point brilliantly made in the actual unfolding of the interacting voices can be a baffling series of elliptical fragments when transferred verbatim to the page.\u00a0 People who\u00a0write<\/em>\u00a0good \u201ctalks\u201d adjust their prose to accommodate the needs of the ear, and people who are skilled transcribers do not so much write down what was spoken as translate it into a prose that \u201csounds\u201d to the eye as if it could have been spoken.\u00a0 Such hybrids as conference talks and transcribed discussions illustrate that writing for the ear is not the same thing as writing for the eye and show that voiced writing is not the same thing as interacting in speaking with a listener who functions as a responding \u201cyou\u201d rather than an audience.<\/p>\n These hybrids also illustrate that the doubled system of writing (its capacity to function, on the one hand, as a visual representation of spoken sound and to function, on the other, as a visual system derived from but not limited to the action of speech) often plays out in our actual practices of language not so much as a binary either\/or but rather as various intermixtures that combine writing as represented sound (and potentially image of speech) and writing as units of visual meaning in different ratios.\u00a0 The unvoiced efficiency of technical prose suggests one end of this dialectic.\u00a0 Written speeches that emphasize incantatory rhythms, repetitions, and the like as performance elements fall somewhere toward the other end of it, while conference talks and transcribed discussions fall somewhere in between.\u00a0 The various practices that we aggregate as literature, also, I\u2019d suggest, fall somewhere in between.<\/p>\n If voicing writing (that is reading aloud) is not the same as speaking and if writing speech is not the same as writing writing, the way composing in language can involve various negotiations of writing as represented sound and writing as visual code seems especially, and unavoidably, a factor for poetry with its roots in oral practice and its history of emphasizing auditory elements (rhythm, meter, rhyme, alliteration, etc.).\u00a0 While the novel has been from the start a written form, produced for print and read silently, poetry preceded the advent of writing, and while its successive formal incarnations in writing and print have changed the role of sound in poetry, we continue to believe that poetry is written at least in part to be voiced and either heard or imagined as heard.\u00a0 The belief that poetry should continue to appeal to and function through the ear to some extent, even as it is composed for the page and circulated on the page as writing, has never fully died out.\u00a0 This may be one reason why the history of poetic experiment is so much a history of poets attempting to come to terms with what it means to transcribe sound visually onto the page and work out ways to utilize the page as a visual field, to make the line function as a visual unit of measurement, and to exploit typography as a stylistic element.[2]<\/a>\u00a0It may also be a reason why the history of experiment in the novel tends to move in the opposite direction and to involve more a series of plays on and with the spoken\u2014Sterne, Joyce, Faulkner\u2014that push us to hear the page in ways that supplement or disrupt the written mode and its visual norms.<\/p>\n At the least, it seems clear that the relationship of writing to page tends to differ in prose and poetry.\u00a0 In prose, the page has relatively little to do with measuring the writing.\u00a0 Whatever the ratio of representation of sound and speech to visual code a particular writer\u2019s prose might enact, we tend to read the language, the writing, as if it unfolds continuously without being measured or bounded by the margins or page breaks.\u00a0 The modulations within sentences and between groups of sentences come from syntax, punctuation, shifts in register that we may hear within the voice, paragraphing, and chapter divisions.\u00a0 In most prose, then, we \u201cread\u201d the page as a relatively neutral surface, and prose that breaks up the space of the page to create visual, spatial relationships among the written units seems experimental (or it reflects a specific, codified use of space and spacing such as hanging indents and bullets in certain kinds of technical writing).<\/p>\n In poetry, though, the page is not simply a passive surface for writing.\u00a0 It actively participates in the measure of the verse and helps define that measure, which in turn helps create the specific ratio of writing as represented speaking to writing as visual code in a given work.\u00a0 In poetry, the page is much more than a shoebox that stores the poem on the shelf until we slip it out and try it on for size.\u00a0 Rather, the surface of the page and the writing on it are a single mechanism that enact the various conventions poets and readers have negotiated over time for what the space of the page actually is, what poetic \u201cwriting\u201d is in relationship to this space, and the system for how this space and the verbal units in it interact.\u00a0 In modern poetry (as I think the following examples will suggest) the page can function in at least two contrasting ways: it can function as a space where writing as a visual system can be inscribed and measured against the field of the page (and where we attend to the interaction of the inscribed elements), and it can function as a space where writing as represented sound enacts a voice that we hear as if it an actual (though constructed) \u201cI\u201d speaking to us.\u00a0 In both of these modes it is necessarily the \u201ceye,\u201d which interacts with the page, and in both the reader is to some degree a \u201chearer\u201d of the language the eye converts from off the page.\u00a0 But only in the second of these modes, where the page is imagined as a space for enacting speech and storing it, is the reader not only a \u201chearer\u201d but also cast as a \u201clistener,\u201d a \u201cyou,\u201d an other to whom the imagined \u201cI\u201d of the voice speaking from the page is speaking.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Section XXII of William Carlos Williams\u2019\u00a0Spring and All<\/em>\u00a0(1923), the often anthologized \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow,\u201d is a poem that exploits writing as visual system of language, and it illustrates how the page can function as part of the system of the writing:<\/p>\n so much depends a red wheel glazed with rain beside the white The poem enacts a single visual moment and yields a single image.\u00a0 The importance of the way the page and phrases interact is clear if we read it as if prose: \u201cSo much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.\u201d\u00a0 This reduces the poem to a flat assertion that is of little (actually no) interest\u2014at least without a story or argument to specify why anything could \u201cdepend\u201d on a wet wheelbarrow in the chicken yard.\u00a0 But broken into lines, this sentence renders a seemingly energized moment of visual perception.\u00a0 In prose the words are a kind of summary; but arranged against the field of the page, the words becomes a set of visual recognitions and actions where we engage texture, color, and spatial relationships.\u00a0 Measured and chunked as smaller than usual perceptual and linguistic units, the scene\u2019s elements gain specificity and energy (the way lines five and six split the word \u201crainwater\u201d into two so that we attend to \u201crain\u201d as action and thing and to \u201cwater\u201d on objects as outcome illustrates this).\u00a0 The cumulative effect is to intensify an ordinary glance into a moment of energized seeing in which the discrete details become a set of visual qualities and relationships that in turn become an imaginative whole.\u00a0 In this sense, \u201cmuch\u201d does \u201cdepend\u201d on this poetic still life and the active, engaged mode of looking that it enacts (and that it can elicit from the reader).<\/p>\n In \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d the page functions as a visual space that presents (and modulates) writing as a visual system.\u00a0 This not only contributes to its effect but is necessary for the poem to work at all.\u00a0 \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d does not represent speech and need not be voiced (or heard) to be experienced.\u00a0 It can be read silently, so long as it is not read as prose but is read with attention to the conceptual emphases the line breaks and space creates.\u00a0 The functioning of the crucial word \u201cdepends\u201d demonstrates this.\u00a0 If we were to read the poem aloud, we would presumably emphasize \u201cdepends\u201d because of its position at the end of the line.\u00a0 This emphasis is not, though, driven by the way the sentence of the poem would be read if it were treated as a unit of speech, nor is it driven by any aural patterning of rhyme, meter, or rhythm.\u00a0 The emphasis is conceptual, and it depends on the visual action of reading (the way our eyes stop when they reach the end of the line, before shifting down and left to begin processing the next unit) and on our recognition of how this break and those that follow cut against the syntactical grain to re-organize the units of the sentence as units of visual apprehension.\u00a0 Similarly, the way the whole poem hangs down from, and conceptually derives from, \u201cdepends\u201d (literally hangs from or on) is a play that energizes the word but turns almost entirely on how \u201cdepends\u201d functions as a visual unit of writing in a specific visual position.\u00a0 The occasion of \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow,\u201d then, is visual; its action is visual and conceptual; the writing emphasizes the words as visual units rather than units of speech; and the way Williams\u2019 uses the page to disrupt and recast the written visual system energizes the language.\u00a0 We can, of course, choose to hear the poem, to read it aloud with appropriate pauses and inflections, but there is nothing that requires that we do so, and even the inflections derive from the writing that is the poem, not from speech or speaking.<\/p>\n A somewhat earlier Williams\u2019 piece, \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple,\u201d (first published February 1916 in\u00a0Others: An Anthology<\/em>, then collected in\u00a0Al Que Quiere!<\/em>\u00a0in 1917) underscores the visual, writerly basis of Williams\u2019 approach in his early Imagist work:<\/p>\n Rather notice, mon cher, Rather observe Rather grasp See how it fails! Observe It is true: But observe The way this poem is cast as an address to an imagined disciple suggests that the language, here, functions as speech and that we hear, rather than see, these phrases.\u00a0 Yet even though the poem appears to be an act of speaking, the writing (and its logic) is\u2014as with \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d\u2014essentially visual rather than aural.<\/p>\n For one thing, the disciple is less an auditor than a device that provides an occasion for the speaker to enact a particular heightened awareness to the visual scene, an awareness that one achieves by setting aside prior conceptions of what might make the scene beautiful in order to experience the visual elements and their relationship freshly.\u00a0 This scrupulous regard for the scene, this rejection of painterly and poetic conventions of the picturesque, allows the speaker to perceive the scene actively and participate in it.\u00a0 As with \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow,\u201d so much \u201cdepends\u201d on this imaginative apprehension of world and the way a heightened attention to actual, perceptual details makes it possible.\u00a0 But also \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple\u201d illustrates and defines the nature of the looking that supports the writing of poems such as \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow.\u201d\u00a0 It shows the speaker avoiding (and instructing the imagined disciple to avoid) both conventional perceptions of the picturesque and conventional expressions of it.\u00a0 One must break out of the habit of being satisfied with seeing \u201cthat its color\/is shell pink\u201d if one is to grasp\u2014and to compose\u2014the scene\u2019s actual set of relationships and its dynamism.\u00a0 And by doing this one can reach a moment where the perception of \u201cthe jasmine lightness\/of the moon\u201d is poetic rather than trite because it is engaged specifically and as if directly without conventional mediations.\u00a0 This enables the image to function as the apprehension and expression of what is actually there and also as an imaginative intensification of it that can enable the viewer to experience the energy of the scene.<\/p>\n The way the page can disrupt language as spoken gesture and redeploy it as written visual system is less obvious in \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple\u201d than \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow,\u201d but the speaker of \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple\u201d functions less as a \u201cspeaker\u201d than a perceiver\/writer.\u00a0 Even though the speaker explicitly addresses the disciple (\u201cRather notice, mon cher\u201d), this is a poem that exploits the visual dimension of writing, and it must be seen on the page more than heard to be understood.\u00a0 The break between the second and third lines illustrates this.\u00a0 The way the second line can stand alone as the completion of what the disciple is to notice (\u201cnotice, mon cher,\/that the moon is\u201d) emphasizes \u201cis\u201d and allows the line to function as an assertion of the moon\u2019s physical being, emphasizing this presence as a matter of primary importance.\u00a0 The third line then recasts \u201cis\u201d more simply as the linkage of \u201cmoon\u201d to its being \u201ctilted\u201d:<\/p>\n Rather notice, mon cher, The way \u201cis,\u201d in this stanza can be both an assertion and a simple linkage requires language as a visual system, and it requires that the poet and reader have a shared sense of the conventions for how the units constructed from the visual code\u2014the \u201clines\u201d\u2014interact with the space of the page\u2014how, that is, the interaction of the lines as composed units of writing is mediated by the page as space, as surface.\u00a0 This point is, I\u2019d suggest, more apparent when we recognize that there is no direct equivalent in speech.\u00a0 We can read these phrases emphasizing the final \u201cis\u201d of the second line (\u201cRather notice, mon cher, that the moon IS tilted above\u201d), but this does not underscore that the \u201cmoon is\u201d in the way that responding to the written code on the page does; instead, it emphasizes the need to attend to the quality of being \u201ctilted.\u201d\u00a0 The modulation of \u201cis\u201d as we voice this written construction is not a product of the language as speech recorded in writing; it is a product of writing and the way units of writing can relate to each other spatially on the page.\u00a0 It is related to the composed system of images and phrases, not to a spoken utterance of the speaker as \u201cI\u201d to the reader as \u201cyou.\u201d<\/p>\n That \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple\u201d is composed as writing (in which language operates first as visual code, with the aural dimension of the words not only secondary but to a significant degree disposable) rather than as speech that has been encoded and thereby preserved in writing is clear if we consider the way the poem builds from verbs that emphasize perception and how the pattern this creates functions conceptually and aesthetically.\u00a0 In the poem\u2019s first verse paragraph, the disciple is to \u201cnotice,\u201d in the second to \u201cobserve,\u201d then to \u201cgrasp.\u201d\u00a0 The three verbs show the speaker\/writer demanding that the disciple\u2019s looking become progressively more engaged and active, and this pattern helps create the imperative energy to the directions \u201cSee\u201d and \u201cSee\u201d in the first two lines of the fourth paragraph, and this progression of \u201cnotice\u201d to \u201cobserve\u201d to \u201cgrasp\u201d to \u201cSee\/See\u201d shapes how the imperative \u201cobserve\u201d (repeated three times in paragraphs five through seven) functions.\u00a0 In the second paragraph, \u201cobserve\u201d is more simply the instruction to pay careful, accurate attention; in the fifth and seventh paragraphs it becomes not only a matter of observing but of grasping, seeing, and projecting the images that are the scene\u2019s true and actual beauty (and its imaginative realization and expression).<\/p>\n The way the sequence of these verbs and their interplay shape their precise meaning in the poem is a feature of the writing.\u00a0 The eye can track such patterns, because the page allows the eye to move back and forth between the written elements arranged on it.\u00a0 The eye, that is, can follow the unfolding of the writing as linear process (and thus, in this poem, the way these commands evolve through the poem as a series), while also constructing the imperative verbs as a set in which each element takes something of its meaning (its particular nuance or resonance) from the way it repeats, extends, and diverges from the set\u2019s other elements.\u00a0 The eye can hold (or review) the words as visual units and thereby process the writing both as linear series and as spatial set, read these two in terms of each other, and generate the system of the poem.<\/p>\n That these qualities involve writing (i.e. the visual elements on the page) as itself language rather than writing as speech represented visually is, I think, clear if we imagine what it would be like to hear the poem rather than read it directly from the page.\u00a0 In hearing the poem, the speech action of addressing the disciple would be immediately clear, as would (if it were read well) the way the perception of the scene becomes increasingly engaged and energized as the poem moves from \u201cmoon is\u201d to \u201cjasmine lightness\/of the moon.\u201d\u00a0 The poem might well be a compelling emotional experience, but the ear could not track the way the poem as written composition (as opposed to spoken performance) builds from the more specific unfolding of the series of verbs nor construct these verbs into a functional set.\u00a0 The ear can track inflection, tone, and pace better than the eye can see them, but the ear cannot stop the text and reflect as it listens, cannot move recursively up and down the page, cannot extract and pattern the units of a set of elements from a text with the same power or precision as the eye.\u00a0 \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple,\u201d that is, builds more from the simultaneity of the images and phrases as a systematized visual set than from the unfolding of sound in time that characterizes speaking.<\/p>\n This is not to suggest that listening is inferior to visual processing.\u00a0 It is, rather, to note that speaking\/hearing and writing\/reading are different modes of practicing language and that poems that are imagined as operating more within the aural domain (as if performed speech recorded in writing) and those that are imagined to operate more within the visual domain (as compositions made from the visual system of writing) engage and deliver language differently.\u00a0 These differences suggest that \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple\u201d was written to be read visually more than it was written to be heard.\u00a0 And this becomes, I\u2019d suggest, even clearer if we note that the gesture \u201cRather notice, mon cher\u201d functions in the poem less as speech (either as monologue for the benefit of disciple and reader or as imagined dialogue with the disciple) and instead functions more as an \u201cequation\u201d as Pound uses that term in his essay \u201cVorticism\u201d to explain the distillation and transformation of an actual experience in the metro station into the aesthetic perception that becomes \u201cIn a Station of the Metro.\u201d[5]<\/a>\u00a0In \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple\u201d the imperative verbs support a series of equations (notice a not b; observe x not y, and so on).\u00a0 And the poem itself becomes a larger equation that is the sum and result of this series (attending to a not b transforms the landscape from sentimental convention into energized visual field).<\/p>\n For Pound \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple\u201d might have seemed a lesser poem than \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow.\u201d\u00a0 It is more discursive, less distilled; and one could argue that it circles around its \u201cequation\u201d rather than expressing the equation directly (as \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d and \u201cIn a Station of the Metro\u201d perhaps do).\u00a0 But one value of \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple\u201d is that it models the perceptual process that would yield the particular moments of seeing in a poem like \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow.\u201d\u00a0 And it illustrates why \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d needs to be read visually (both in the sense of attending to the scene being evoked and in the sense of mapping the poem\u2019s linguistic units both from the surface of the page and against the space or field of the page).\u00a0 And it shows that poems that emphasize writing as visual code may well incorporate moments of represented speech and spoken touches, yet still require primarily the attention of the eye, not the ear, to engage not only the material of the poem but also its mode of language.\u00a0 In these three poems the external world is a text to be read\u2014that is, seen and possessed through the imaginative energy of the eye.\u00a0 And this process of reading as seeing becomes the written text (the distillation and realization of the imaginatively apprehended \u201cequation) that the reader, reciprocally, sees and possesses in reading the visual code of words and images.\u00a0 The poem, that is, is a textual object to be viewed and appreciated, and its value comes in large part from the power of the textual object to elicit a recognition of the \u201cequation\u201d that distilled the original experience and transformed that biographical and discursive reality into the poem.\u00a0 In this sense the poem as writing does not refer; rather it \u201cis\u201d as the \u201cmoon is.\u201d<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Robinson Jeffers\u2019 \u201cCredo\u201d (probably written late 1926) is a completely different kind of poem than \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d and \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cCredo\u201d is not a moment of seeing distilled in writing as composed visual language that the reader is to experience as if directly even while savoring poem\u2019s mediation (as if that mediation could, that is, both celebrate itself and erase itself if the poem is written with sufficient art, and as if such art would, then, in itself authenticate both the seeing and the constructed object of the poem).\u00a0 Instead, \u201cCredo\u201d is a reflection on what the speaker has seen and how he has come to think about that seeing.\u00a0 It is a series of comments, and it is openly, unapologetically, discursive.\u00a0 In this poem we do not relate directly to what the poet has seen but relate to it through the mediation of a speaker who both represents and interprets perceptions and reflections that stand outside and prior to the poem itself.\u00a0 \u201cCredo\u201d is, also, and in part for these reasons, a poem that needs to be approached as an act of speaking.\u00a0 Reading it is more a matter of hearing the voice from the page than seeing the writing on the page and how the page controls our recomposing of the poem through reading it:<\/p>\n My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum<\/span> Unlike Williams in \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d or even \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple,\u201d Jeffers in \u201cCredo\u201d does not attempt to inscribe images and ideas as if directly onto the page.\u00a0 Instead, the \u201cI\u201d who speaks the poem talks about them; he refers to the reality of things (\u201cThe water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality\u201d), and this \u201cI\u201d mediates the reader\u2019s relationship to the real in way that is finally less immediate and direct than the way the writing \u201ceye\u201d mediates the reader\u2019s relationship to the faces as petals in \u201cIn a Station of the Metro\u201d or the scene of \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow.\u201d<\/p>\n The way \u201cCredo\u201d presents a speaker talking about reality rather than the poem presenting itself as offering reality (or as being reality) would be a weakness if \u201cCredo\u201d were an attempt at an imagist lyric.\u00a0 But to read the poem as failed Pound (or failed Williams or even failed Stevens) is to miss both the nature and function of its discursiveness.\u00a0 As a credo, \u201cCredo\u201d is both a definition of belief and a public statement of belief.\u00a0 This occasion and the way \u201cCredo\u201d functions as composed speech (speech recorded in writing and shaped for re-enactment as if heard speaking) make Jeffers\u2019 poem social in a way that an imagist lyric is not.\u00a0 Pieces such as \u201cIn a Station of the Metro\u201d are socially constructed objects, and they accrue or enact social functions as they circulate, but social relationships are mostly not figured directly in the poems themselves (even in \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple\u201d the disciple is less an other whom the speaker considers and addresses than a turn of speech\u2014actually, a turn of writing, that initiates the speaker\u2019s attention to the elements of the visual scene, and the speaker is finally not a \u201cspeaker\u201d in any actual sense but actually a writer figured as speaker).<\/p>\n In \u201cCredo,\u201d though, the poem\u2019s action, what happens within it, is directly social.\u00a0 The \u201cfriend from Asia\u201d (unlike the solitary disciple) is offered as an actual other, who \u201cbelieves\u201d differently than the speaker.\u00a0 And the way the poem opens indicates that the speaker and friend have already explored their different approaches to the world and the nature of its beauty.\u00a0 While this exchange is implied and prior to the poem, it invokes the dichotomies of East and West (as they functioned between specific individuals and at a particular cultural moment) and of idealism and materialism as frames to the speaker\u2019s words, and this nexus of having spoken and of speaking, in turn, projects the reader as an actual other, a listener who is asked to acknowledge the difference between the speaker and his friend as the context for this statement of belief and to consider the nature, validity, and the reward (and cost) of believing as the speaker does.<\/p>\n The speaker of \u201cCredo,\u201d thus, stands at the intersection of two implied dialogues, one that happened at some point in the past and the one that occurs as he addresses the reader who he imagines as listening and reacting.\u00a0 This factor is, finally, both the source and justification of the poem\u2019s discursiveness.\u00a0 \u201cCredo\u201d is not so much an aesthetic object as an aesthetic action.\u00a0 The beauty that the speaker praises in the poem is not the beauty of the crafted beautiful object (the poem itself raised to the status of the beauty it supposedly records) but is instead \u201cThe beauty of things\u201d that is prior to the poem, that extends beyond the poem, and which cannot be reified into an aesthetic object.\u00a0 The goal in \u201cCredo\u201d is less to transform the real into a poem than to use the poem to drive a recognition of the real and an engagement with it.\u00a0 If the imagist lyric can be a moment so intensely distilled, transformed, and fixed as language that it is redeemed from time, the lyric meditation of \u201cCredo\u201d must unfold as if in time and lead out to a recognition of time and process that eclipses the poem.\u00a0 The poem invokes reality in order to point to it and drive an apprehension of the real that is beyond the poem rather than being in the poem.\u00a0 It must, that is, unfold as a heightened moment of speaking, a witness, that happens to be recorded in writing.<\/p>\n Just as \u201cIn a Station of the Metro\u201d and \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d show Pound and Williams using the page to intensify writing as visual code, \u201cCredo\u201d shows Jeffers using the page to intensify writing as a representation of speech.\u00a0 The line break that intensifies the word \u201conly\u201d in line seven is a case in point:<\/p>\n . . . the ocean in the bone vault is only<\/span> The emphasis that the break gives to \u201conly\u201d can (unlike the emphasis on \u201cdepends\u201d in \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d) be fully conveyed by the voice and perceived by the ear.\u00a0 Similarly, the way the seventh line offers \u201cthe ocean in the bone vault,\u201d then follows \u201conly\u201d with two phrases that play against it uses the aural echo and near repetition to make both the image and what might be termed the conceptual action apparent to the ear and emphasize it.\u00a0 The writing, that is, functions as a script, and the spacing suggests how the line should be said and heard.\u00a0 How it is imagined as heard speech controls the function and meaning.\u00a0 The repetition of words and sounds similarly works for and by the ear.\u00a0 It heightens or intensifies the language beyond ordinary speaking, yet the resonance and interplay of sounds reinforces the sense of the language as voiced and as a mode of speech.\u00a0 In the following lines some of the repeated or echoed sounds are noted in bold face, and several key repeated or varied words are italicized:<\/p>\n My\u00a0fr<\/strong>iend\u00a0fr<\/strong>om Asia has\u00a0pow<\/strong>ers and magic, he\u00a0plu<\/strong>cks a\u00a0bl<\/em><\/strong>ue leaf<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0fr<\/strong>om the young bl<\/em><\/strong>ue-gu<\/strong>m<\/em><\/span> One might also note the effect of the \u201cer\u201d sounds in the last of these lines and the way the hard consonants that close the word \u201csalt\u201d and the first syllable of \u201cactual\u201d sound out against the more open sounds that close most of the words (\u201cmagic\u201d is the other word in these lines where the final consonant brings the sound to a hard stop) and add a dramatic and auditory emphasis to the phrase \u201cthe salt, the actual\u201d that matches its conceptual emphasis in the poem.<\/p>\n The enriched sound and rhythm of the speaking voice in \u201cCredo\u201d has several functions.\u00a0 It marks the piece as \u201cpoetic,\u201d as artful, as more than ordinary speaking.\u00a0 Yet it also intensifies our sense that we are hearing a voice, an other who is situated in time and addressing us.\u00a0 This gives the page a certain (albeit illusory) transitivity.\u00a0 In the imagist lyric as Pound theorized it, the poet constructs (writes) the poem on the page, and the written page becomes the poem.\u00a0 The page might be said to function reflexively: the poet interacts with the poem on the page, and the reader in turn re-enacts this interaction with the page.\u00a0 In \u201cIn a Station of the Metro\u201d and \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d we can infer a poet as maker (writer) who stands on the other side of the page, but we are not asked to imagine interacting directly with this figure.\u00a0 Indeed, the textual dynamic, what might be termed the textual rhetoric (along with the various critical essays and manifestos Pound offered) make it clear that we are not to imagine ourselves interacting, as if in dialogue, through the poem to the poet.\u00a0 To do so would be to erase a key element in what was, for Pound, Modernism\u2019s modernity and its break with nineteenth century poetics.\u00a0 As readers we are, of course, to engage the poem, but our interaction is to be with the written object inscribed on and stored on the surface of the page\u2014the constructed (i.e. meticulously composed) aesthetic object.\u00a0 As Modernist readers of the Modernist poem\/object (later so aptly evoked through Cleanth Brooks\u2019s image of the poem as \u201cwell wrought urn\u201d) we engage the poem through its written gestures, the visual elements these project, and their functional interaction (that \u201cequation\u201d that Pound imagines as transforming the raw material of actual perception and emotional response into the aesthetic moment).[7]<\/a>\u00a0In \u201cCredo,\u201d though, the way the writing is cast as speech asks us to hear a voice that speaks not only from the page but as if through it.\u00a0 The one approach casts the page as a space for organizing writing; the other treats it as a space for enacting voice.\u00a0 The one approach brings the reader to a seemingly direct apprehension of, and participation in, the poem\u2019s aesthetic energy (its equation); the other approach depends on the reader\u2019s ability to empathize with the figure who speaks as if across and through (though actually from) the page and poem.<\/p>\n In the case of \u201cCredo\u201d it is the reader\u2019s ability to empathize with, and reflect on, the speaker\u2019s affirmation of the \u201cheart breaking beauty\u201d of the natural world\u2014even as the speaker implicitly acknowledges that this acceptance of nature as other also confronts one with a sense of one\u2019s own mortality\u2014that gives the poem much of its energy and pushes the reader toward experiencing this same mix of affirmation and loss.\u00a0 The poem looks beyond the social realm of speaking and listening but does so by harnessing the empathy of the social act of speaking and listening.\u00a0 One could, of course, see \u201cCredo\u201d as simply a chattier (and thus lesser) version of \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple,\u201d where an \u201cI\u201d also presents the material of the poem, and the poem offers a heightened awareness of beauty, but in Williams\u2019 poem the speaker is not dramatically specific nor dramatically active to the same degree or in the same way as the speaker in \u201cCredo.\u201d\u00a0 In \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple\u201d the speaker is a device used to focus our attention on the written equation that the interplay of the visual elements embodies and that the reader can apprehend (\u201cgrasp\u201d) through the right kind of looking at the poem and its writing.\u00a0 If we reach the perceptual and imaginative breakthrough that the poem sets up, the speaker simply drops from the picture (much as a catalytic agent drops out of a chemical reaction).\u00a0 In \u201cCredo,\u201d though, the figure of the speaker experiences the dilemma of the poem as if directly, speaks from this dramatic participation to the \u201cyou\u201d of the reader, and remains engaged throughout the poem.\u00a0 The speaker is, in fact, doubly engaged\u2014with the terms of the experiential dilemma and with the reader as the addressed other, and the speaker remains an active mediation between the reader and the terms of the poem\u2014and actually, the speaker is most present at the end, when the speaker and reader both recognize and share their mutual yet distinct isolations in a redemptive nature in a moment of intensified awareness that derives from the poem but moves beyond it.\u00a0 Both \u201cTo a Solitary Disciple\u201d and \u201cCredo\u201d necessarily involve mediation, but it might be said that in the former the writing itself is the mediation and through it we engage and experience the equation of the poem, while in \u201cCredo,\u201d the figure of the speaker is the mediation and through the speaker we experience something beyond the poem.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n As the example of \u201cCredo\u201d illustrates, the difference between poems that use alphabetic characters as visual language (as writing that need not be mediated by and perceived through the sound of the words to be understood) and poems that use this same set of visual alphabetic characters more as a system to represent composed acts of speech (that happen to be stored and transmitted through the visual units) isn\u2019t that the latter place more emphasis on the sound of words (this is sometimes, but not always, the case).\u00a0 Rather, the difference has more to do with the function of the page itself.\u00a0 In poems like \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d the page is a visual field for structuring written units.\u00a0 In poems like \u201cCredo\u201d the page is an aural field for staging spoken units.\u00a0 And at least for poetry of the first half of the twentieth century, using the page as a space for writing as a visual system and using writing as a way to transmit composed speech have different rhetorical tendencies and implications.\u00a0 In poems where the page is more a visual field, the speaker is often effaced or is a figure or set of figures inscribed within the field of the poem (as are the various voices and registers of voices in\u00a0The Waste Land<\/em>) rather than being a subjective other or agent who (implicitly) stands beyond the frame of the poem addressing the reader as if a \u201cyou\u201d who might hear and respond.\u00a0 We may, if we choose, project a disposition that we label Eliot and imagine this figure behind his text and animating it.\u00a0 Similarly, we may, if we choose, infer a position from the various figures of the epic heroes in\u00a0The Cantos<\/em>\u00a0that we equate with Pound\u2019s constructing consciousness. \u00a0But we do not, for the most part, treat poems like\u00a0The Waste Land<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0The Cantos<\/em>\u00a0as if the figure of the poet addresses us directly[8]<\/a>\u00a0(the crisis, both poetic and personal, that drives Pound to a more direct, confessional act of speaking in\u00a0The Pisan Cantos<\/em>\u00a0is, I\u2019d suggest, an exception that proves the tendency).\u00a0 And this is even clearer in pieces such as \u201cIn a Station of the Metro\u201d and \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow, which seem to have no speaker but seem instead (to borrow the poet Louis Simpson\u2019s suggestive pun) to have an \u201ceye\u201d instead of an \u201cI.\u201d[9]<\/a>\u00a0In these poems the speaker (perhaps more properly the speaker function) is, finally, contained within the system of the poem, while in poems like \u201cCredo,\u201d conversely, the poem seems contained within the speaker who speaks as if through the marks on the page.\u00a0 We cannot actually reply to the \u201cI\u201d in \u201cCredo,\u201d but we hear the poem as if we could, and the way the poem invites the reader to share empathetically in the speaker\u2019s final, dramatized recognition functions something like a moment of response where the \u201cI\u201d and \u201cyou\u201d are linked by their parallel participations in the process of projecting beyond the frame of the poem.<\/p>\n Today our canon of modern American poetry tends to feature poets who, like Pound and the early Williams, focused on the potentials of writing as a visual system rather than poets, like Jeffers, who worked more in terms of writing as represented sound and speech and cast the reader in the position of listener and hearer.\u00a0 Perhaps poetry that treats writing as a visual code is inherently and inevitably more worthy than poetry that treats writing as an auditory system, but perhaps (and I think more plausibly) our critical training and current critical preferences have helped us be more alert to poems that must be seen than poems that must be heard.\u00a0 If so, perhaps we need to learn how, why, and when to hear the page as well as how, why, and when to see it if we are to understand more adequately the array of poetic projects that made the first half of the twentieth century such a rich period of innovation and achievement.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a>\u00a0Josef Vachek\u2019s seminal 1959 essay, \u201cTwo Chapters on Written English,\u201d is collected in\u00a0Selected Writings in English and General Linguistics<\/em>\u00a0(Prague : Academia, 1976), 408-41.\u00a0 Vachek later updated and extended his discussion of these matters in\u00a0Written Language: General Problems and Problems of English\u00a0<\/em>(The Hague, Mouton, 1973).<\/p>\n [3]<\/a>\u00a0The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939<\/em>, Ed. A Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions Books, 1986), 224.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a>\u00a0The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939<\/em>, 104-05.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a>\u00a0Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir<\/em>\u00a0(New York: New Directions Books, 1960), 81-94.5.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a>\u00a0The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Volume I, 1920-1928<\/em>, Ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 239.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a>\u00a0See \u201cThe There That\u2019s There and Not There in the Writing of Writing: Textuality and Modern American Poetry\u201d posted elsewhere on this website for a discussion of \u201cIn a Station of the Metro,\u201d for further discussion of these points.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a>\u00a0If we do imagine such a voice in these poems, we are, of course, reading directly against the grain of Eliot\u2019s position in his highly influential essay \u201cTradition and the Individual Talent.\u201d<\/p>\n [9]<\/a>\u00a0Louis Simpson,\u00a0Adventures of the Letter I<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1971).\u00a0 This distinction relates, clearly, to the vexed contemporary question of \u201cpresence,\u201d a matter not addressed in this piece but which I hope to address elsewhere.<\/p>\n If we think of the page at all, we probably see it as something necessary to writing but of little interest in itself.\u00a0 It stores language and conveys it to the reader, nothing more.\u00a0 We recognize that writing, publishing, and reading are socially and culturally mediated, but the page is seemingly neutral enough and constant … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2326,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-38","page","type-page","status-publish"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2326"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89,"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/38\/revisions\/89"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tahunt.com\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nupon<\/p>\n
\nbarrow<\/p>\n
\nwater<\/p>\n
\nchickens[3]<\/a><\/p>\n
\nthat the moon is
\ntilted above
\nthe point of the steeple
\nthan that its color
\nis shell-pink<\/p>\n
\nthat it is early morning
\nthan that the sky
\nis smooth
\nas a turquoise.<\/p>\n
\nhow the dark
\nconverging lines
\nof the steeple
\nmeet at the pinnacle\u2014
\nperceive how
\nits little ornament
\ntries to stop them\u2014<\/p>\n
\nSee how the converging lines
\nof the hexagonal spire
\nescape upward\u2014
\nreceding, dividing!
\n\u2014sepals
\nthat guard and contain
\nthe flower!<\/p>\n
\nhow motionless
\nthe eaten moon
\nlies in the protecting lines.<\/p>\n
\nin the light colors
\nof morning
\nbrown-stone and slate
\nshine orange and dark blue.<\/p>\n
\nthe oppressive weight
\nof the squat edifice!
\nObserve
\nthe jasmine lightness
\nof the moon.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n
\nthat the moon is
\ntilted above<\/p>\n
\nAnd gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
\nThe God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
\nAppalling presence, the power of the waters.
\nHe believes that nothing is real except as we make it.\u00a0 I humbler have found in my blood<\/span>
\nBred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
\nMultitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
\nThe bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;
\nThe water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality.\u00a0 The mind<\/span>
\nPasses, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
\nThe beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty<\/span>
\nWill remain when there is no heart to break for it.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n
\nThe bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;<\/p>\n
\nAnd\u00a0ga<\/strong>zing<\/strong>\u00a0upon it,\u00a0ga<\/strong>thering<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0qui<\/strong>eting
\n<\/strong>The\u00a0Go<\/strong>d in his mind, creates an\u00a0ocean<\/em>\u00a0more real than the\u00a0ocean<\/em>, the salt, the actual
\nAppal<\/strong>ling\u00a0pre<\/strong>sence, the\u00a0pow<\/strong>er of the waters.<\/p>\n
\n
\n[2]<\/a>\u00a0Jerome McGann\u2019s discussion of Anglo-American modernist poetry in\u00a0Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism\u00a0<\/em>(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) provides an extended example of this.<\/p>\n![\"Creative](\"http:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-nd\/3.0\/88x31.png\")
<\/a>
\nShowing vs. Telling: Toward a Rhetoric of the Page by\u00a0Tim Hunt<\/a>\u00a0is licensed under a\u00a0Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"