Elevated speech · 5:50am Nov 3rd, 2022
Praising Sentences for Being Confusing is Bad
I've grumbled recently about the practice, from 1990 to the present, of praising authors for writing terrible sentences. I've mentioned A Reader's Manifesto a couple of times recently, in posts or comments, which details that practice. Mockingbirb sent me a great example published recently (Oct 22), of NPR praising this sentence from Cormac McCarthy's new novel The Passenger:
God's own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl from out of that black and heaving alcahest.
Let me point out some of the reasons this sentence is shit:
- Selvage, sidereal, and alcahest are all words to use at most once or twice in a lifetime. They're too obscure to be considered honest attempts at communication.
There is no such thing as a sidereal sea. "Sidereal" means "pertaining to the stars." What there is, is a sidereal sea and air chronometer. The words in that phrase are grouped like this: sidereal {{sea and air} chronometer}. "Sea and air" modifies "chronometer". "Sidereal" then modifies "sea and air chronometer", giving us a device to use the stars (hence sidereal) to tell your position while at sea or in the air.
McCarthy must have just pulled the first two words out of that phrase because he liked the consonance, and imagined up some meaning for them. But it's senseless; "sidereal" can't modify "sea", unless perhaps it's a sea of stars (which it is not in that sentence).
How are we to read "God's own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage"?
- God's own mudlark trudging cloaked, and muttering the barren selvage...
- God's own mudlark, {trudging cloaked} and {muttering the barren selvage}...
- God's own mudlark trudging, cloaked, and muttering the barren selvage.
- God's own mudlark, trudging (cloaked and muttering) the barren selvage...
None of the above. There is no way to parse that sentence. The last is the closest to English, but while one can trudge cloaked, one cannot trudge muttering. Muttering requires an object. Nor can "trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage" be considered good writing even if we allowed it as technically grammatical. The sequence of parts of speech gives us too many different paths to go down in search of a parse. It's deliberately constructed to be ambiguous. Not the good kind of ambiguity, which can make us aware of possible alternate interpretations; the worst kind of ambiguity, which just wastes our time in pruning away a plethora of interpretations which eventually prove impossible.
- "the storms howl" implies that we're reading a description of that selvage over time, a picture accumulated through multiple storms. It is, in prissy English-teacher talk, in the present imperfect tense. Therefore, either God's own mudlark trudges this barren selvage not once, but habitually; or else Cormac is using two different tenses within the same sentence, without breaking it into clauses with so much as a comma to warn us of this fact.
- It isn't a sentence. A sentence requires a verb. There isn't one! (See Mockingbirb's comment below.)
NPR praises this as an example of one of McCarthy's sentences that "stops you cold." Which it does, not because it's great literature, but because it's incompetently constructed. It is incommunicative. It is a bad sentence, and McCarthy should feel bad. (He won't.)
Praising Sentences for Being Confusing was Always Bad
Today I returned to my project of reading all of the extant ancient Greek tragedies. I decided to listen to them as audiobooks to save time, and I'm too cheap to pay for recordings of new translations when there are free LibreVox recordings of 19th-century translations.
Unfortunately, the 19th century was one of those times when people just lurved them some confusing sentences. Every 19th-century translator of anything "classic" felt compelled to gussy it up with "elevated speech", which was typically an anachronous mess of Anglo-Saxon consonance, Elizabethan meters and word inversions, phony pseudo-archaic morphology, and neo-classical rhymes.
Like this section of Lewis Campbell's 1883 translation of Sophocles' Ajax, which is where I cut off the audio in disgust:
CHORUS: O trouble-tost Tecmessa, born to woe,
Come forth and see what messenger is here!
This news bites near the bone, a death to joy.TECMESSA: Wherefore again, when sorrow's cruel storm
Was just abating, break ye my repose?CHORUS: Hear what he saith, and how he comes to bring
News of our Aias [Ajax] that hath torn my heart.TEC. Oh me! what is it, man? Am I undone?
MESSENGER: Thy case I know not; but of Aias this,
That if he roam abroad, 'tis dangerous.TEC. He is, indeed, abroad. Oh! tell me quickly!
MESS. 'Tis Teucer's strong command to keep him close
Beneath this roof, nor let him range alone.TEC. But where is Teucer? and what means his word?
MESS. Even now at hand, and eager to make known
That Aias, if he thus go forth, must fall.TEC. Alas! my misery! Whence learned he this?
MESS. From Thestor's prophet-offspring, who to-day
Holds forth to Aias choice of life or death.TEC. Woe's me! O friends, this desolating blow
Is falling! Oh, stand forward to prevent!
And some bring Teucer with more haste, while some
Explore the western bays and others search
Eastward to find your hero's fatal path!
For well I see I am cheated and cast forth
From the old favour. Child, what shall I do?
We must not stay. I too will fare along,
go far as I have power. Come, let us go.
Bestir ye! 'Tis no moment to sit still,
If we would save him who now speeds to die.CH. I am ready. Come! Fidelity of foot,
And swift performance, shall approve me true.
It was a universally accepted dogma, from Aristotle's Poetics (circa 330 BC) until about the time of Charles Dickens, that heroic fiction requires the heroes to use "elevated speech". And we all learned in high school that "elevated speech" means Early Middle English syntax in iambic pentameter, like Shakespeare's heroes use.
So I was trying to appreciate the "classical" "elevated" speech, when suddenly I realized: Dammit, it's just the same old shit. Ivy-league twits thinking they can make something more literary by using bad English.
There was no such word as "tost" in English in 1883. Why not just write "tossed"?
But what about the elegant archaisms--the words whose meanings have changed ("wherefore"), the "ye"'s and "thee"'s, the word inversions, the--
--The utterly useless confusing things. Just like Cormac McCarthy's sentences.
But we're supposed to like this shit, right? It's Elizabethan. It harks back to Milton, the King James Bible, Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen.
So, is my hating the stilted prose of today's literary darlings an implicit rejection of Shakespeare? Wasn't he just doing the same thing?
Well, he was doing the same thing. The funny thing about Shakespearian English is that it was never a thing. Nobody ever talked that way. Read Sir Philip Sidney's "An Apology for Poetry" (1580-1583) or Norton & Sackville's The Tragedie of Gorboduc (1565). They're quite easy to understand. Shakespeare isn't. He trawled old books for forgotten words, inverted word order or used strange constructions, and now and then apparently just made words up and threw them into the text.
The truth of the matter seems to be that "thee", "thou", etc., was never considered elevated speech when people actually talked that way. The English nobility used them, as far as I can tell, only from at earliest 1399, when Henry IV became the first English king to take his oath of office in English, to 1600, by which time they were already becoming a phony archaism restricted to Scotsmen and hacks likes Shakespeare, Milton, and the translators of the King James Bible. What was happening then was just an inversion of what's happening now: authors tried to sound elevated not by using some new English grammar, but by reaching back for an older English grammar. [2] Shakespeare wouldn't have used Early Middle English to mark his heroes as uncommon in a time when it was common.
Shakespeare wasn't just doing the same thing. For one thing, he was really good at making up words. For another, his abuses of grammar usually served some purpose.
After thinking about this for a while today, it seems to me that Shakespeare is great despite his unfortunate fondness for forgotten words, not because of it. He's great because he was at times precise, concise, fresh, imaginative, metaphorical, and/or wise.
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.
To thine own self be true.
In time we hate that which we often fear.
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves...
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
The better part of valor is discretion.
A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
This speech is "elevated" by its elevated thought, not by its stilted grammar (which, when present, is mostly just to keep the meter). It's elevated despite Shakespeare's unfortunate fondness for forgotten words, not because of that. "Elevated" doesn't mean "higher-class" as in "what the posh people are doing". It means "superior". Elevated speech, to me, is just smarter speech.
Now go back to that long Ajax excerpt. Is there anything fresh in it? "Sorrow's cruel storm", "This news bites near the bone, a death to joy" and "hath torn my heart". "Alas! my misery!", "Woe's me! O friends, this desolating blow is falling! Oh, stand forward to prevent!" "Fidelity of foot, And swift performance, shall approve me true."
No. There is nothing fresh, concise, precise, imaginative, metaphorical, or even wise. It is not elevated. It's just mundane stuff said stiffly. It is repetitive and confusing, but without any reason for being confusing. Its word-order inversions keep no meter. Its circuitous expressions ("what means his word?" for "what does he mean", "Hear what he saith, and how he comes to bring |News" for "Let's hear his news") don't cause you to look at a thing differently. All that 16th-century grammar does only harm. You can't imitate greatness by imitating its surface. Sounding like Shakespeare is not the same as being like Shakespeare [1].
I guess what I'm trying to write is that when today's critics swoon over badly-written sentences just because they're different, it's no better and no worse than when 19th-century classicists wrote stilted translations using a pseudo-archaic English; and that I don't have to dislike Shakespeare just because I dislike 19th-century translations that try to sound like Shakespeare. Both forms of bad writing are pretentious (laying claim to an excellence one does not have) because, while disguising trite speech with basically random grammatical noise does make it more intriguing, it does not elevate it. Such randomized speech may produce a powerful aesthetic effect, but only by triggering a curiosity instinct which causes us to be intrigued by unusual things.
This is partly just the curiosity of the odd syntax, but also the curiosity produced by degrading meaning to the point of mystification, which often produces an unjustified impression of deepness. The 19th century, which popularized archaic poetry again, also popularized Hegel, whose fraudulent philosophizing relied on producing mystification through confusion and nonsense.
I think that phony archaic speech of the type Shakespeare sometimes used, which is more archaic than the archaics, and the exaggerated sloppy writing of contemporary authors like McCarthy, José Saramago, or Don DeLillo, are both examples of what ethologists and marketers call a superstimulus: an artificial stimulus made by exaggerating a natural stimulus, which gives pleasure or engages the senses more strongly than the original natural stimulus, even though it never delivers the concrete rewards that the natural stimulus co-occurred with. This includes a stick with a large red dot on it shown to a male stickleback fish, and the photos in Playboy when shown to a male human. Superstimuli are a super-category of pornography; perhaps pleasurable, but never fruitful.
In our case the superstimulus exploits our natural pleasure in finding things out by giving us sentences which must be figured out, or which cannot be figured out, which give us some pleasure even if the sentences prove to be mundane once we've figured them out, like the words of a crossword puzzle, or of Finnegan's Wake. I've nothing against crossword puzzles, but I'd rather spend my time studying puzzles whose solutions have consequences.
[1] More correctly: If we were familiar with thousands of 16th-century dramatists, Elizabethan syntax on its own wouldn't make anything "sound like Shakespeare".
[2] Also, the translators of the KJV used "you" vs. "thou" to denote a distinction made in Hebrew and in Roman Greek.
my pet theory is that confusing stuff in general is praised for two reasons:
-They are more memorable
-They can generate more reader interpretations than something clear
which both help create discussions and arguments, which are fun
I almost believe that confusing art is praised in academia because it gives smart people a chance to prove their smartness by generating clever interpretations or showcasing the breadth of their literary and historical knowledge (which concise clear stuff does not allow for), and really what is the point of being smart if you can't showcase it. but that's kind of too cynical
My only real problem with that McCarthy sentence is the lack of punctuation; otherwise its entirely decent but not something I'd say would stop any halfway sophisticated reader in their tracks with awe. I can't fathom why a reviewer would pull it as an example of craft, because what it IS is an example of something a good editor should have marked up; not struck through, but marked up.
I disagree that it can't be parsed; you just need to add the commas and maybe a semicolon back in:
This is the most logical way to parse it, and among other things fixes the tense-shifting issue, although I'm not sure that's an issue to begin with.
You could also try:
The scansion of either of these works; they're different, they change the rhythm and cadence, but they work. I played around with a version with TWO semi-colons, but that seemed actually excessive; when you hit the second semi-colon it's time for a new sentence.
McCarthy seems to have stripped out all the punctuation for some reason that eludes me. You CAN strip out some:
That produces a different kind scansion; frankly I get a little bit of Coleridge from how this thing plays, there's a very sort of "through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea" rhythm to this concoction of McCarthy's. (Not that I'm comparing his actual skill as a writer to Coleridge.) But there's precedent for stripping punctuation to get a different kind of scansion.
I wouldn't write it that way, but you can do it and have it still parse. You could even strip all the way back to a single semi-colon:
This is REALLY borderline, though. I don't think you can write that sentence with no punctuation at all. It reads as a train wreck to me if you simply strip out everything. I can untangle it, but I have to go back and really think about it in the bad way; and I shouldn't have to.
There's at least two other variation of comma and semi-colon I can think of that make that sentence a lot more readable without needing to change word-order or substitute anything.
I'm puzzled by your objection to "sidereal sea;" people have been linking the sea and stars together for... well, literally centuries through allusion, metaphor, and just straight-up comparison. Rhapsodizing the sea as pertaining to the sky goes back ages. It's a kind of pretentious way of getting the same effect as "starry sea" but that's a stylistic complaint, not a structural one. (I personally would have suggested McCarthy use "star-wrought sea" rather than "sidereal sea" to get the same effect with roughly the same scansion and more readability.)
Similarly I'm puzzled by your stance that one cannot trudge muttering. It seems to me that one can indeed trudge muttering; one could also trudge whistling, trudge mumbling, or trudge grumbling, as well as many other things. I had zero trouble at all parsing "trudging cloaked and muttering" as the "the trudger is cloaked and also is muttering." One could also stumble cloaked and muttering, for example.
Note that the original is repetitive, and translations are often confusing, either because the original was confusing, the content itself doesn't translate very well, or the translation is flawed.
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And in the case of King James in particular, translating it into a living language was considered blasphemous. A "translation" that was just as incomprehensible to the layman as the original may have been the goal.
None of that seems particularly confusing to me, just a bunch of vocabulary and literary devices that have fallen out of fashion, in favour of a more minimalist and less... poetic style that dominates modern prose.
5696079
While I would agree that some punctuation would clarify the sentence a bit; adding it interrupts the flow of the words, the "music". I certainly didn't have any trouble parsing it.
5696075
It's easy to be cynical. But it's hard to be too cynical.
5696115
Yes. I'm willing to believe the original may have been more interesting. Attic Greek was a highly ambiguous language, not having very many words. (I think this is why many philosophers have said you can philosophize best in Greek -- it often doesn't require you, or even allow you, to clarify your thoughts. Or, more charitably, it doesn't force you to pull broad concepts apart into too-specific instantiations. The word telos is a good example; its binding together of many different concepts into a single word is one of the foundations of Plato's philosophy.) [1]
But also, the ancient Greeks had a love/hate relationship with repetition. The Iliad contains HUGE passages that are repeated verbatim later on, and this is a thing that Serbian bards still do today. (I know; bard isn't the right word; I forget what is, and in any case I think the Greeks just called them "singers" or "makers".) The Iliad was written in a period when Greek art was transitioning from formal art, made up of repeating patterns (that's why 900-700 BC is called the Geometric Period), to representational art, in which nothing was repeated except during the middle of the transitional period, when entire figures were duplicated as if by a cookie-cutter. (You sometimes see this same cookie-cutter representational repetition in medieval art, which AFAIK never completed the transition all the way back to geometric art except in Britain and in Islamic Europe, and probably Byzantium during its iconoclastic periods.)
And also, this passage includes the chorus, so it was probably sung; and anytime anything is sung, repetition is suddenly good instead of bad in most artistic traditions.
[1] Here's a study of the translation of one word in Euripides' Bacchae, which I just now found in an Amazon review of the Herbert Golder translation:
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It's less-confusing if you've read so much of that sort of thing that you've internalized the grammar. Otherwise, mere unfamiliarity causes confusion, especially when you're listening to audio rather than reading. It's the same as when you're listening to native speakers of a language which you know perfectly well, but they're talking too fast for you to parse it, because you still have to transform the grammar consciously rather than unconsciously.
I guess the main point of my post is that I disagree with your view, which seems to me to be the more-dominant view, and seems to you to be the less-dominant view: that linguistic strangeness is more poetic than plain speech. I don't think it is. I think it may be more aesthetic, but only by triggering a curiosity instinct which causes us to be intrigued by unusual things [1]. There is no higher cognitive component in finding archaic grammar "poetic". It doesn't make speech more intelligent, subtle, wise, or add any good thing to it. It just degrades it, producing mystification, which often produces an unjustified impression of deepness. Notice that the 19th century, which popularized archaic poetry again, also popularized Hegel, whose fraudulent philosophizing relied on producing mystification through confusion and nonsense.
I do believe in the power of enstrangement, the re-presentation of a familiar thing in a new light. But just changing the grammar doesn't do that.
[1] I think that phony archaic speech of the type Shakespeare sometimes used, which is more archaic than the archaics, and the sloppy writing of contemporary authors like McCarthy, José Saramago, or Don DeLillo, are both examples of what ethologists call a hyper-stimulus: an artificial stimulus made by exaggerating a natural stimulus, which gives pleasure or engages the senses more strongly than the original natural stimulus, even though it never delivers the concrete rewards that the natural stimulus co-occurred with.
(I'm going to add these points to the main post.)
I think it's a mixed blessing that I'm not smart enough to write brilliant incoherent prose. Admittedly when done right, it's amazing. The problem is the more complicated the phrasing, the more probable you're going to wind up with a convoluted mess that readers want to skip over... and skip some more.... and what else is available on my Kindle?
Think I peak out at about Eighth Grade Reading Level for my stories, and that's high enough to avoid the 'This Is Not A Step' sign.
I'd just like to point out that Shakespeare's use of archaic speech was for a very pointed reason. He was using it as a way to communicate (and remind the audience of) certain character attributes of the person speaking. Shakespeare was writing for the stage in an era long before the Stanislavsky Method, and actors couldn't be counted on to inhabit their characters in a manner that would communicate such things to the audience without it being imbedded in the lines.
As for McCarthy's sentence, there's lots of clever and enjoyable stuff in there, and that's the problem for me. Taken separately, bits like "God's own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering..." are fine, but then he's gone and crammed the rest of the sentence with more and more cleverness until it's all frosting and no cupcake.
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I was actually going to use frosting as an example of a superstimulus. Yeah, I've also enjoyed some of McCarthy's sentences, but I think that apart from abuses of grammar done from pure cussedness, he has just that one useful trick, the dizzying hyper-velocity sentence, which goes wrong as often as it goes right. Probably because he's lost his ability to notice ambiguous parses after spurning commas for so long.
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He's a victim of his own success and the praise of people who pick the wrong things to focus on, I suspect. I really enjoyed some of his earlier stuff and it could always be counted on to bring me down to earth if I ever found myself enjoying life too much. I think Murcushio made a good point in that he badly needs a good editor, but when someone has reached the level of Literary Deity, I suppose that considerations of status overwhelms those of craftsmanship.
I still maintain, one problem with McCarthy's "sentence" is that it isn't an actual sentence.
It has gerunds like 'trudging' and 'muttering.' It has a subordinate clause, "where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl from out of that black and heaving alcahest." However, the sentence lacks a main verb, and it doesn't achieve any greater good in the breaking of that rule.
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Oh, yeah, that's another reason, and I forgot to list it. Sentence fragments don't bug me as much as ambiguity or unparseability, but it's not good when one is so big that you might not notice it's a fragment.
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With so many things wrong, how could you forget to list one of them?
I've always felt Cormac McCarthy was playing games with the reader. Calvinball, probably.
5696142
This isn't on ANY of their albums. Dude, have you got, like, bootlegs?
I was just re-reading Reader's Manifesto again this week, in response to reading the single most tilting interview of recent memory.
Anish Kapoor, net worth $800 million, on his latest work, an upside-down fountain.
He gives the game away in this interview by being objectively wrong about his big bean sculpture, and I use 'objectively' correctly here; He says there's no edges so there's no sense of scale. The sculpture is filled with crowds and contrasted against skyscrapers in the background, the sculpture has an extremely well-defined presence of scale as long as you see the piece in its full context, which he doesn't and can't.
What offends me most here isn't the total abdication of meaning or purpose, where if it's meant to mean 'anything' then it really means 'nothing'. What offends me most here is that 'because it's pretty' is an explanation beneath this mindset. I rather like the upside-down fountain. I would have loved it if that was its only reason to exist.
But at least it's not just writing. The Emperor may be a Latiner, but he wears no clothes.
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This has to be the answer, because some of those words only a thesaurus or scrabble player would know, which ruins the impression of the author as from another time and place to be just more of a poser.
I like McCarthy and the lack of punctuation, but I specifically remember rereading a few passages to keep track of who's talking and there's some real ambiguity in some places, which is just sloppy.
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I'll concede that it isn't meaningless to say someone trudges muttering. But it seems to me more like "He walked, saying." than like "He walked, whistling." I'd need "He trudged the barren selvage, muttering to himself.", with the comma, the object of muttering, and the relocation of the location of the trudging to be together with "trudged", to give full points for grammaticality. (Grammaticality isn't a zero-one judgement; it's a score.)
5696317
Honestly, there's more horseshit in that single phrase than there is on this entire site.
But that's the fine art world for you; conveniently laundering billions of dollars each year, where the cashflow is critical and the art unimportant except as a vector. I'm sure you've heard the standard defense when someone criticizes a multi-million dollar sculpture that looks like the aftermath of a dinosaur rave in a junkyard: "You just don't understand..." In other words, if you dislike the work, you're stupid.
At least Kapoor's work is pretty. (IMHOOC)
5696446
Rules have their place, but breaking them for effect isn't always bad thing, as long as our hypothetical rule-breaker not only knows the rules, but understands why they exist. Most of grammar is there to make writing as clear and understandable as possible. A gerund or two is just fine if the meaning is unmistakable, and the hypothetical "bad" phrase, being remarkable for violating the rules, can therefor be memorable. That's following the spirit of the rules while knowingly breaking the letter of the law, and gaining something in the process.
Of course, that philosophy doesn't apply to McCarthy's sentence, except perhaps the beginning. I would have been fine with "God's own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering..." if that hadn't been the beginning of a very slippery slope.
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I just wrote this in a PM to Mockingbirb that spun off of the comments above:
I break lots of rules, but nearly always in the same ways that people break those rules in speech. Like,
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I'm 100% with you on that!
5696455
To be fair, it was the journalist who said "intersection". Meaning and no meaning don't intersect; they share a long, disputed border. What Kapoor said was,
That's similar to what I say a lot: that the kind of art I like is in-between art that knows what it wants to say, and art that doesn't know what it wants to say. Art that pulls the viewer along to grope together at something in the dark, trying to piece together what it is.
I think you're right that he's just wrong about Cloud Gate having no scale when it's sitting in Chicago instead of in his studio. And I think "the bean" is at least as good a name as "cloud gate". But those things don't bother me. It's still cool. And he seemed mostly hesitant to say what his sculptures "meant". And I like that fountain, too.
5696317 Oh my god, that interview is bad. The anger hits like road rage
My only regret is that it's been dismantled. I would have loved to take some selfies next to it.
I suppose a body of water could be sidereal if it was reflecting the night sky's constellations. But the "heaving alcahest" wouldn't be capable of that, even IF the howling storms weren't blotting out the stars.
I'm looking for those blog posts, and so far I'm turning up...one of them, I guess? That being https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/808759/pretentiousness-comes-from-modern-art-comes-from-plato, which links to the Atlantic article (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/), which seems to be paywalled now.
Anyway, I was just recently in a discussion of this sentence, a discussion that brought in this blog post.
I think a few interesting thoughts, coming partly from that discussion are:
- This sentence may be seen more as POETRY than PROSE..which may change the standards for comprehensibility.
- The sentence might be better in its ORIGINAL context (the context within the novel helping to show what the stylistic intentions are.)
I'm still not interested in saying 'how DARE Bad Horse (and Mockingbirb) critique this sentence, when Cormac McCarthy is such a very good writer?' I DO think that by looking at how this sentence works and doesn't work (and for some readers vs. others) we may find good food for thought, and even be able to learn some things.
I also still think that the NPR writer's use of this sentence is silly, and that "A Reader's Manifesto" (at least the article version; I haven't read the full length book) is a very worthwhile manifesto to read, for people who care about good writing more than they care about conforming to fads of the historical moment.
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Turn off javascript for the domain theatlantic.com .
In Chrome, this is
settings > privacy & security > site settings > javascript > Add
then add this pattern:
[*.]theatlantic.com
Poems emphasize sound, but I personally don't like poetic-sounding language that doesn't mean anything. The art in poetry isn't communicating less with your words, but communicating more. Poetry should add connotation, not subtract denotation.
Gertrude Stein wrote meaningless poems strictly by sound, like "Yet Dish". I don't like 'em. At all. Some people do.
One of my favorite poets, Leonard Cohen, was sometimes guilty of not communicating. He didn't write meaningless things; he sometimes wrote things which only he knew the meaning of because they were about personal experiences which he didn't want to talk about. I respect that a little more, but it's still kinda masturbatory.
Once I sent some samples of his lyrics to my older sister, to explain that was the kind of poetry I liked. She singled out the one line that I didn't like in a song ("A thousand kisses deep", the sentence "You lose your grip, and then you slip / Into the masterpiece" ) as the only one that she liked. She liked it for the same reason I disliked it: because she had no idea what it meant, and could ponder it endlessly, I guess always imagining that it had a kind of sacred power that comes from hidden meaning, and brought her close to that power.
So, some people like poetry that says something meaningful, while some people are wrong.
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Thank you for the instructions to see the paywalled(-ish?) article. I'll try them when I am on an appropriate setup.
That story about your sister does seem very on point for the iirc point of that article.
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I just realized I'm a hypocrite, because I like a lot of They Might Be Giants songs.