"Kitchen Criticism" - A Guide to Practical Matters in Poetry:Frost's "Mending Wall" and Playful Punctuation.

First, a little theory: Frost's principal contribution to prosody is his somewhat elusive idea of "the sound of sense." I won't go into it in detail--any serious Frost scholar has touched on it in some way, shape, or form already. Basically, it relates to the tension between speech and metre, and the creative possibilities for tone therefrom. Poetic metre is an imposition on speech in order to extract tones of voice for dramatic purposes. I might go into detail elsewhere to tidy up the rough edges of that brief explanation.

Regardless of my imprecision, there is one poetic prescription that follows from Frost's idea: we read a poem to the sentence, to the full stop, to get the full sense of the meaning. Tyler Hoffman, whom I will return to a few times, has a neat phrase for Frost's prosody in practice; he calls it "line-sentence counterpointing." I have always been taken with Frost's theory of the sound of sense--also called the theory of sentence-sounds (Frost couldn't make up his mind), hence Hoffman's useful coinage. 

So, we read the poem not to the line, but to the sentence. There's both a prosodic reason for this prescription, but also a conceptual one, and Frost manages to tease out a little play with both. Despite his claims, Frost most certainly relied, as most poets do, on punctuation to manage the pace of his poems, to manipulate the meaning, just as we see in "Stopping by Woods." He also had tremendous fun with the little dots and squiggles on the page; and it's to one such case I wish to briefly turn before I get too serious. 

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In "Mending Wall," one of Frost's most famous poems, and for a time my favourite, Frost leaves what gamers today might be call an "Easter egg," a little reward for those who know where to find it. There's a lot to say about the poem, but I want to focus on this little Easter egg. The poem is forty-five lines long, unrhymed, written in iambic pentameter, Frost's preferred narrative form. "Mending Wall" is more lyrical, but it does tell a little story. Like "The Road Not Taken" there is a deception, or a trick, at the heart of the tale the speaker tells. More on that poem another time. The Easter egg comes in line 23: 

There where it is we do not need the wall

But you won't see it if I just quote the line. You need the lines surrounding it; in fact, you need a few sentences: 

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

Do you see it yet? There's a tone of gentle mocking in this excerpt, as there is throughout the poem; the speaker finds his neighbour somewhat simple, and makes fun of him, both to his neighbour's face and to us, the reader. 

But there's a little grammatical play being had here, too. Let's look at the middle sentence as a sentence to see: "it comes to little more: there where it is we do not need the wall: he is all pine and I am apple orchard." Surely you see it now: two colons in the one sentence--a very unusual arrangement. Not ungrammatical, but certainly unorthodox. There's no real need to use it in any circumstance. What does it mean? 

The middle most line of the poem, asserting the redundancy of the wall, is bookended by two colons:

: There where it is we do not need the wall: 

Do you get it? The colon makes the line look like a little wall! Specifically, a wall of stones shaped like "loaves and some so nearly balls" that the wall-menders must use "a spell" to keep them in place. 

Unconvinced? There's more. 

The two colons are grammatically unnecessary. They could be replaced by semicolons or full stops. But Frost used two colons instead. The grammar is important here. Colons signify a subordinate relationship. Under normal circumstances, the second half of a sentence with a colon in it is dependent on, or subordinated to, the first half. By contrast, a semicolon is used to divide two independent clauses, or sets of clauses, each with at least one independent clause. 

Two semicolons wouldn't look like loaves and balls of stone stacked on top of each other, but they would indicate parallel clauses. Instead, Frost uses a subordinating grammatical structure to produce an image of a parallel construct: a wall separating two neighbours. But what he is really pointing to is the dependent relationship between the two neighbours, specifically speaker dependent upon his neighbour. 

The speaker mocks his neighbour, about the pine cones and apples, about "elves," and about his (the neighbour's) overreliance on his father's saying, that "good fences make good neighbours." But who called to whom about mending the fence? This from the speaker (my italics):

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line 

And set the wall between us once again.

It is the speaker who lets his neighbour know about the wall. The line is slipped in there and overshadowed by the later joke-making. It's a similar misdirection to the more famous one in "The Road Not Taken." Why does the speaker let his neighbour know about the wall? To make fun of him? Perhaps. That's a question beyond our purposes here; nevertheless, we can say that the speaker is dependent on his neighbour, regardless of how he views his neighbour's dependence on his father's words of wisdom. There are, we might say, parallels of dependency in this poem, and Frost's subtle play with punctuation and grammar is just one layer of the meaning in this poem. 

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That'll do for now. Frost is a meticulous craftsman, right down to the logical implications that follow from carefully selected punctuation marks. This level of grammatical intrigue is common to all poets, but especially formalists I find. Where formal metre is employed, high standards of punctuation tend to be there managing the prosodic tension. In the next blog, I'll look at some more Frost, but I'll bring in some Aussie poets as well. In particular, I'll be looking at silence... 

"Kitchen Criticism" - A Guide to Practical Matters in Poetry:Introduction.

The term "Kitchen Criticism" comes from Clive James' most recent (and probably last) collection of poetry criticism and commentary, Poetry Notebooks: 2006-2014. He borrowed it from Samuel Johnson and the Elizabethans, and I am borrowing it from him (40-43). In short, the term relates to the reading and critiquing of the practical matters of poetry, mostly to do with metre. I'll broaden my use of the term to include grammatical and rhetorical matters, which I think is in keeping with the spirit of the term.

Put another way, I take kitchen criticism to mean looking at--nay, unpacking--the raw ingredients of a poem. How does this differ from regular old criticism? Well, we'll have to see. To me, it's about the basics of poetry, not the highfalutin stuff in, say, Robert Pinsky's The Situation of Poetry (which I read the other day, so thought I'd namedrop), or Seamus Heaney's The Redress of Poetry (haven't read yet, but about to--namedropping again). I'm reading a lot of criticism at the moment, so I'll take this opportunity to do a little myself, starting with the basics.

There's a lot of metaphysics when it comes to poetic criticism, lots of "isms" and other abstractions; I want to get back into the physics, the grammar and the rhetorical choices of poets, to see what they're up to, before we get to the higher order stuff. Perhaps kitchen criticism is just another term for grammatical criticism, or rhetorical criticism. At this point, I don't think it matters much; it's probably just best to dive in and get my hands dirty.

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As a bit of a grammar nerd, I like to see how poets play with punctuation, to observe how it differs to the way we use it in prose, even of the academic sort. I'm a stickler on the semicolon, for instance; it does a certain thing in academic prose, and I want to see it do its job! But in poetry it's another matter. We aren't so much concerned with prose conventions in poetry as we are with sound and suggestion, with intonation and implication. Punctuation performs the role of a non-verbal signifier to the eye and to the voice; it influences both the pace of reading and the logical relations of lexical items, as in the famous debate surrounding the comma from this line from Frost:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.

Later changed to:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

Much meaning rests upon the presence or absence of a comma. The change may play into the perennial debate surrounding the so-called Oxford comma: should you or shouldn't you? (Yes, you should.) The change does, most people seem to accept, change the meaning of the line, and slightly the pace of its reading. The pause after "dark" is dropped, and with it the grammatical listing structure: originally, the woods were lovely, and they were dark, and they were deep; now they are lovely because they are dark and deep. A parallel relationship between the three lexical items (lovely, dark, deep), now becomes one of subordination. This is no minor change; rather, it is a change of perception, like when we change the focus of a photograph by zooming in or out, things in the foreground now blurred or clarified from our fiddling with the lens. Poets, too, must adjust the aperture of their perception to get things how they want them, and a little fiddling with punctuation may achieve just that.

There's nothing controversial about that analysis. You'd be justified in being underwhelmed thus far. So we'll just take that as a bit of practice, or a warm up; but you get the idea.

Being a formalist, Frost is a wonderful subject for such kitchen criticism, and I'll spend a bit of time with him. (I also wrote my thesis on his poetics, so that helps.) I'll be looking at other poets as well, including Australian poets Gwen Harwood, Judith Wright, and Stephen Edgar, as well as American poets Theodore Roethke, Ted Kooser, and Weldon Kees. Those are just some names off the top of my head at the moment. I may even throw in some Henry Lawson. (I'm doing some research on Lawson, so this might be a good place to trial a bit of close reading.)

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I'll leave it there for now, as I have a habit of over-writing these things. I'll pick up a bit more on punctuation and more in Frost and others next time, building towards a deeper consideration of the relationship between punctuation and sound. As I get more technical and more evasive in my criticism, I'll come back to "Stopping by Woods"; there's a lot to look at--and listen for--in this short and beautiful poem.