Poetry
‘Contemporary research suggests that the human brain contains few if any unique neuronal types, and few if any genes lack a significant ancestral precedent. At the same time, humans show much continuity with their non-speaking cousins in dozens of ways that might contribute to language, including mechanisms for representing time and space, for analysing sequences, for auditory analysis, for inhibiting inappropriate action, and for memory.’[1] ‘There might be no single property or processing capability that marks the many ways in which the complexity and detail of human language differs from non-human communication systems.’[2]
Some birds such as starlings can learn a basic grammar form, and differentiate between a regular bird ‘sentence’ and one interrupted by a clause or a phrase.[3] Hauser claims this doesn't disprove the uniqueness of the human faculty for language: the starlings are grasping a basic grammar, but not the necessary semantics to have the language ability that he and Chomsky wrote about.[4] In a study of the borderline between human utterance and birdsong, Fritz Staal has conducted a structural comparison of certain types of birdsong with Dravidian chant, and has found the ‘meaningless’ but structured sound sequences of the chant to have more in common with birdsong than with other human languages.[5]
‘“Duality of patterning” – the existence of two levels of rule-governed combinatorial structure, one combining meaningless sounds into morphemes, the other combining meaningful morphemes into words and phrases – is a universal design feature of human language. A combinatorial sound system is a solution to the problem of encoding a large number of concepts (tens of thousands) into a far smaller number of discriminable speech sounds (dozens). A fixed inventory of sounds, when combined into strings, can multiply out to encode a large number of words, without requiring listeners to make finer and finer analogue discriminations among physically similar sounds.’[6] It is this combinatorial quality which allows for the rich textures of assonance, alliteration and rhyming which can be found in poetry.
The physical possibilities of the human vocal tract determine the gamut of possible vocal articulations.[7] The FOXP2 DNA sequence, which facilitates the formation of words by the mouth, enabling modern human speech, was possessed by our Neanderthal ancestors at least half a million years ago. ‘Most of what distinguishes human language from vocal communication in other species, however, comes not from physical means but cognitive ability.’[8] And a poem, after all, is not made only of words[9] but also ideas. Poetry is made of sounds and content.
Since Saussure postulated an arbitrary relationship between the sounds of language and its content, others have pointed out important limitations of his assumptions, for example his consideration of language only at a point in time rather than as the evolving complex system it clearly is. The poet J.H. Prynne allows that ‘we may if we wish leave arbitrariness in more or less full control of the central citadel of linguistic theory, but out in the larger semantic fields and forests its writ does not successfully prohibit a wider and more hybrid repertory of contrarious procedures.’[10] In poetry or other language-conscious performance ‘the whole prior history of the language-community can be tuned to allow and invite the vibrations of sense and suggestions and historical retrospect. It is not the lexicon which carries these data, so much as the encyclopedia and the historical thesaurus and some ideally synoptic dictionary of quotations: to the functions of language as code and framework have been added those of depot-inventory and memory-theatre.’[11] It is these additional functions which Prynne goes on to call secondary relations, connections or transgressions, and he opines that ‘it is the function of a literary context of usage to codify previous innovation into generically part-determined procedures, and to accommodate new innovation by promoting expectancy of such classes of connection.’[12]
Order marks poetry out from common uses of language. Roman Jakobson asked, ‘What is the indispensible feature inherent in any piece of poetry? [It is that] the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection [of words] into the axis of combination [of words].’[13] That is, the poet not only considers selection of words in isolation, but pays far more than usual attention to words in relation to each other. The poem is a phalanx of words, acting rhythmically in co-operation and coalition, and planned and orchestrated to achieve maximum semantic effect.[14] However, poets cannot force language to conform to their will entirely, but can impose a framework of order on the disorder, and should judge when to keep tight control, and when to seek to generate disorder to do its own disruptive work. Prynne, again:
‘What literate readers can do with literary language is defined not by the permission of rules only, but by their significant secondary transgression, because that too can be intelligibly active as a practice of inscribing new sets of sense-bearing differences upon the schedule of old ones. How far these secondary transgressions can then be allowed to be themselves sense-bearing is a function of the interpretative consensus, or of the author/reader contract.’[15]
At the same time as enacting a radical letting-go of language through rampant polysemy, and by refusing any semblance of a direct appeal to the reader who is throughout denied any easy illusion or gestalt of meaning, Prynne’s poetry[16] attempts a firmer grip by closer attention to the deep etymology of the lexicon (through Middle and Old English, all the way to Proto Indo European) and the ability of the phonemic units of language to bear meaning,[17] and in doing so he consciously grapples with a domain of poetic creation and interpretation usually activated only at a subconscious level.
Jakobson acknowledges that the ‘poetic function’ is broader than poetry itself. The rules of rhetoric (including repetition, alliteration, assonance, and rhyme) established by the ancient Greeks can be found to have been used extensively by poets from Homer to J.H. Prynne. Some rhetoric is poetry (Caesar’s ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici’), and some so-called poetry is rhetoric. In his wider definition of the poetic function, Jakobson also cites everyday mnemonic phrases (’Thirty days hath September’), advertising jingles, versified medieval laws, Sanskrit scientific treatises in verse ‘which in Indic tradition are strictly distinguished from true poetry’, and to Jakobson’s list we can add many finely crafted public statements (Churchill’s D-Day radio broadcast), some popular catchphrases (‘Nice to see you, to see you, nice’), parts of many religious texts (for example the Arabic Qur’an) and sacred and profane ritual (from Callimachus’ hymns to contemporary Episcopalian songs), and sub-poetic song lyrics in general.[18]
Jakobson also opines that ‘no human culture ignores versemaking, whereas there are many cultural patterns without “applied” verse; and even in such cultures which possess both pure and applied verses, the latter appear to be a secondary, unquestionably derived phenomenon. The adaptation of poetic means for some heterogeneous purpose does not conceal their primary essence.’[19]
For as long as it has been produced, poetry has also been at the service of rulers wishing to record an official version of events.[20] And if rhythmic dance helped the Spartans to prepare the body, poetry in addition prepared the mind of the warrior with its heroic and moral tales.
‘The fourth-century Athenian orator Lykourgos tells us that “the Spartans made a law, whenever they went out on campaign, to summon all the soldiers to the king’s tent to hear the poems of Tyrtaios, believing that thus they would be most willing to die for their country” (Against Leocrates 107). […] Like the Spartan custom of sussitia (public communal dining), this performance context extended the sphere of commensality in the entire citizen population. In this context, we can imagine the profound effect of verses such as:
This is a virtue, this is the best prize among mortals
and the most beautiful for a young man to win;
And this is a common noble deed for the city and the entire demos,
whatever man, planting himself firmly, stands fast in the front ranks
unceasingly, and forgets entirely shameful flight,
setting at risk his spirit and his enduring heart,
and, standing next to his neighbour, encourages him;
This one shows himself to be a good man in war. (Tyrtaios, W2 fr. 12, ll. 13-20)’[21]
[1] Marcus, G.F., Startling Starlings, Nature, vol 440, 27 April 2008, p1118
[2] Gentner, T.Q. et al, Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds, Nature, vol 440, 27 April 2008, p1206
[3] Marcus, G.F., ibid
[4] Gentner, T.Q., et al, ibid
[5] Staal, F., Rules Without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences (Toronto Studies in Religion, Vol 4), Peter Lang Pub Inc, 1990
[6] Pinker, S., The faculty of language: what’s special about it?, Cognition 95 (2005), p211
[7] The International Phonetic Association symbol chart is a systematic transcription of many of the possibilities actually found in languages, including some ‘articulations judged impossible’ – see e.g. the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. Asher, R.E., Pergamon, 1994, p3050 – though it does not represent the entire gamut of possibilities. Other authors have studied how they are combined in actual languages – e.g. Ladefoged, P., Maddieson, I., The Sounds of the World's Languages, WileyBlackwell, 1995, and Maddieson, I., Patterns of sounds, CUP, 1984. Ladefoged points out: ‘We are, of course, aware that there are phonetic phenomena in every language that have yet to be described. Speech varies in response to many different circumstances, and we do not have a complete knowledge of the phonetic structure of any language. In addition, languages are always evolving. Thus there can never be a final description of the sounds of any one language. The next generation of speakers will always speak a little differently from their predecessors, and may even create sounds that have never been used in a human language before. We think it is probable, however, that any new sounds will be similar to those that now have a linguistic function and will be formed by re-arrangements of properties and sounds that have been previously observed in linguistic usage. […] We have sometimes posited the existence of sounds that have not yet been reported in the linguistic literature. These are sounds which we feel reflect accidental gaps in the currently available data, or are absent only by chance from any currently spoken language. Other possibilities are not mentioned at all since we believe they will never have a role in linguistic structure. There are, of course, many sounds that can be made with the vocal organs that are not known to be used in any language. People can whistle, click their teeth, wag their tongues from side to side, and perform a variety of manoeuvres to produce sounds that have never been reported to have a linguistic function.’
[8] Pollard, K.S., What makes us human? Scientific American, May 2009, p35
[9] Projective Verse (1950), collected in Olson, C., Collected Prose, UCP, 1997
[10] Prynne, J.H., Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words, Birkbeck College, 1993
[11] Prynne, ibid. See also Jakobsen below.
[12] Prynne, ibid.
[13] Jakobson, Roman, Linguistics and poetics (1958), in Lodge, D., Modern Criticism and Theory, Longman, 1988
[14] The Battle of the Trees in Robert Graves’ White Goddess (Faber, 1948) can be taken as a metaphor for poetry, if trees are in turn a metaphor for (Ogham) letters, as Graves would have us believe. In fact, though a small number of Ogham letters directly designate trees, most of the tree-letter associations are a later medieval construction.
[15] Prynne, ibid. The publication this is extracted from forms part of Prynne’s own author/reader contract, and in fact in his poetry the secondary transgressions bear an unusually high proportion of the sense, as the primary system of signification is deliberately effaced.
[16] For example Blue Slides at Rest (2004), in Prynne, J.H., Poems, Bloodaxe, 2005
[17] Prynne, J.H., Mental Ears and Poetic Work, in Chicago Review 55:1, 2010
[18] The following fragment of a lyric is notable in this context because its structure is reminiscent of a glass bead game move: ‘Russian roulette isn’t the same without a gun. But baby, what’s love? If it’s not rough, it isn’t fun.’ Lady Gaga, 2009. What if all glass bead game moves were expressed in poetry which paid as much attention to the language it was presented in, as its content? This hasn’t been done, yet.
[19] Jakobson, ibid.
[20] For example the poetic record of the Battle of Kadesh, 1274 B.C., which praises a heroic victory of Ramses II when other evidence suggests a much more questionable outcome (Warfare of the Ancient Empires, in Herwig, H., ibid)
[21] Taplin, O., Literature in the Greek World, Oxford, 2000