Measure

In what sense can we speak precisely of the involvement of a poem with measure? Measure necessarily involves two terms, one of which is a normative set of significations, the other of which, if not exactly unknown, is certainly insular and in some way non-signifying. Laid against this second term, the measuring term translates it into a known set of significations, rendering it comprehensible or usable. Its measure has been taken. We measure only by reference to something else, some fixed unit or standard: an ancient, long forgotten Anglo-Saxon girdle or else some bodily appendage. Measure, in one sense, is an act of translation, and, in another, the result of translating accurately and justly. But what of poetic measure?

Poems intersect with measure where they involve the act of counting out some feature of ordinary language, setting the poem, as event, apart from it. Poetic measure has thus long been synonymous with "numbers," as in Samuel Johnson's condemnation of "unnatural thoughts and rugged numbers." What is counted is determined by the normative set brought to bear. Duration, syllables, stress, or some combination of these linguistic features frequently form the normative set, or "constant," although they by no means limit it. Like a ruler held against a sheet of paper, or the calibrations on the lens of a telescope, this "constant" establishes a relational knowledge about the thing measured, integrating it into a signifying set: the page is 8 inches long, the star is 22 degrees above the horizon, each poetic line has five feet and five stresses.

But this is only one focus and measure is never singular. The measuring itself is always in some sense a measure of the measurer. The criteria, the "constant" is a product of choice, of a particular imagination embedded in a particular society in history. On the most fundamental level, every such act indicates a concern with precision and relation. On another level, measure is implicated with certain historical obessions, events, and concerns, as the eighteenth century demand for intense order in poetry is implicated with the Restoration or the astrolabe is implicated with the conquest of America. On still another level, how measures are made and, more importantly, what is chosen to be measured reveal fundamental concepts of space and time.

Some of the earliest known human artifacts, from 135,000 to 200,000 years old, are bones incised with notches which measure or delineate the full cycle of the moon, as if someone nightly watched and tracked its waxing and waning, making sure that indeed it took 29.5 nights to complete its full transformation. Alexander Marshack points out that "whatever the purpose of these objects, their occurrence throughout the Upper Paleolithic is a remarkable phenomenon—the earliest representation we have of a rhythmic arrangement with regular intervals, the beginning of the evolution that led to the ruler, the musical staff, the calendar, and the peristyle of the temple".[1] Those marks, often in conjunction with incised images of creatures and plants, were clearly a measure, apparently playing some now unknowable role in early human ritual.

So what was measured? To begin with, the cycle of the moon. With one of those bones in hand, the bearer could know precisely when the next new moon would occur. The moon's measure had been taken and it now became a measure in turn. After ten such cycles, the geese or the bison would return. After nine such cycles the horse, whose image was sometimes inscribed within the notches' circuit, would bear its young. But isn't the bearer also thus measured? The person who marked the bone clearly was someone who watched the moon with great care. As Marshack reconstructs thousands of these objects, we learn that these were people with extensive knowledge embodied in story. Perhaps most importantly, they were people who knew intimately a certain face of time, who lived and made their homes in time, apparently some kind of periodic or recurring time, though it may have been a face of time no one will ever know precisely again. What shall we call these measures? Calendars? Astronomical records? Poems? Myths? Art? Spiritual texts? Their very undecidability and ambiguity reveal an astonishing commonality of undertaking in the act of measuring.

Certainly no one of them is primary or determinative in relation to the others, any more than economic production governs history or history governs art. They exist as part of a common eidos that touches what those in any given society share with one another. History is, as Cornelius Castoriadus argues, deeply creative.[2] These are measures of that creativity at work, of that eidos which is itself a measure, that is to say, a way of knowing. Here we are with William Carlos Williams when he argues that "[t]he only reality we can know is MEASURE."[3] Poetic measure is in this sense not simply arbitrary procedure but information.

What kind of information? What does poetic measure measure exactly? In Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man it is complicit with certain perceptions regarding a specific concept of order:

The notion of measured language is certainly clear here. This is accentual syllabic verse in the most rigorous form English has produced: strict iambic pentameter, rhymed couplets, a coincidence of line and syntax. The measure is based on factors of ten. Fives and twos: five stresses in every line; two syllables per stress; two lines per rhyme unit. It is the closed couplet. There are, of course, variations. The last couplet, for example, includes two perturbations: the enjambment of the penultimate line and the anapestic penultimate foot. But the rupture introduced by these perturbations, clearly linked to the discussion of order, is immediately closed in the ultimate line and the ultimate foot, and the order of ten is effortlessly reestablished in an astonishing demonstration of virtuosity and skill.

So, in this verse, stresses are measured, syllables are measured, and rhymes are measured, all according to a standard measure, an abstract form, known as the English heroic couplet which is based, ultimately, on factors of ten. In that measuring, time is also measured since the poem is a time factored event, a process, an unfolding. Aside from the syntactic and semantic temporal dimensions, the unfolding of meaning in time, the measure itself is a temporal dimension. One stress leads to the next in a predictable pattern and we follow through time until we reach the expected final stress, at which point we begin again.

Time has many faces. There is slow time, the time a child knows waiting for Christmas, or a prisoner knows waiting for release. For the prisoner there is hard time and easy time. As we get older, time speeds up till the months fly by. The lover knows languorous time, ecstatic time, ruptured time. For the scientist, there is "real" Newtonian time. There is Bergsonian time, mythic time, sacred time, ludic time, profane time, wasted time, productive time. There is time that repeats itself, looping back in dark, convulsive patterns that grip us in inevitability. There is progressive time, full of invention, surprise, promise, emptiness.

The time measured in Pope's verse has two primary observable characteristics: regularity and periodicity. In addition, these two imply two others: reversability and universality. Although subject to the occasional, controlled perturbation, nothing ultimately disturbs the underlying measure. The regularity is established in the march of the measures, the five within the twos, o - | o - | o - | o - | o -, and then the next set, ten over ten, perfection, the time of the metronome with one important difference. Metronomic time marches away into infinity, unbounded, as can be seen with quartz based metronomes where time is measured out in bursts of light. By means of the rhymes, the time of this verse is measured out in closed periods. The march of the measures takes us to a marked limit, where they turn and proceed until they reach another limit marked by an identical sound.

If we were to imagine this movement on a graph of two dimensional phase space, it would form a circle as tracing the velocity and position of a pendulum or a mechanical metronome does. This is the language of the circle, the orbit, the clock face. It is the language of determinist and calculable trajectories of motion translated into time, motion held to an absolute and regular rule which can and will be known within its ordered limits. It is the language of the factors of ten held to the rule of their perfect order. Ten over ten equals one. This is the time of the dominion of One, as Newton has it in the Scholium to the Principia, describing the perfect order of the cosmos revealed in his numbers.

The eighteenth century is drenched in this time. Even Newton's anti-Trinitarian Christ is periodic, returning over and over in a pattern of corruption, restoration, and renewed corruption: an orbital Christ circling through eternity, periodically intersecting with time. Writing in 1779, Joshua Steele argued:

In the time of the world, a natural day (night included) is a single cadence; the setting and rising of the Sun are the thesis and arsis; seasons and years are rhythmical clauses; the beginning and ending of this melody are out of our sight; but to human apprehension, the apparent are birth and death, and life is our part in the song.[4]

Here Nature gives rise to the language of the poem's measure. Nature, the handmaiden of science, docile and obedient, willingly revealing her hidden orders to the inquiring mind, is the measure of the perfection of the poem which iterates those orders. The poem is a copy of nature, a mirror to nature's time, as the painting is a mirror of nature's space, three dimensional, absolute and real, extending evenly by virtue of its own nature, immovable space through which global masses roll, held to their perfect orbits by universal forces, ticking off the moments of eternity in time.

But nature can equally become the mirror of the poem. Charles Gildon writing in 1718 in The Complete Art of Poetry, argues: ". . . the Particles and Seeds of Light in the Primordial Chaos struggled in vain to exert their true Lustre, till Matter was by Art Divine brought into order, and the noble Poem of the Universe completed in Number and Figure by the Almighty Poet or Maker." [5] The poem, rather than an imitation of Nature, is Nature's source and structure. Or rather, the poem and Nature are one, one act of the creator. There is no mirror. There is only the one act, the act of creation, of measured counting which shines through both. The mirror is shattered in this reversability. In its place stands an eidos, and the social imaginary significations, as Cornelius Castoriadus has it, which it embodies. The poem's measure, a signifying act, is the measure of the world of which it is a part.

Almost two centuries later, in another poem about order and transgression, measure looks significantly different in many ways:

By any standards of Pope's world, this collection of words would not qualify as a poem, much less a "metrically regular" poem. Dr. Johnson would be seized with moral apoplexy at the mere suggestion. Yet Dr. Williams, in a 1950 interview with John W. Gerber, describes his poem as "metrically absolutely regular."

In what sense is this poem measured, much less metrically regular? There is no regular syllabic structure. Lines vary from 2 to 5 syllables. Nor are the stresses located predictably within the lines. The lines clearly are not isochronic: line 6, for instance, has about twice the duration as line 5. The same is true of lines 10 and 11. Less obvious durational differences exist between other lines. The poem also seems to eschew rhyme, unlike much of Williams' other work which is full of irregular forms of rhyme. Only two obvious rhymes occur here: the rather weak link bewteen "I" and "icebox" in the first stanza, and the stronger link between the two occurrences of "so" and "cold" which close the poem.

The poem would seem to be a haphazard event, what Dr. Williams' critics call "prose broken into arbitrary lines." Yet it coheres remarkably. One reason for that, and probably the source of the regularity Williams referred to, is the one strong stress in each line. An order of one within the lines binds them together, signalling this as a distinct event. But it is not a dominion of one. The order does not reduce to one. One stress is measured out in each line and this one holds together a proliferation of syllables, an onslaught of "rugged numbers." The irregular proliferation of syllables prevents dominion, holding the order of one to a larger irregularity and complexity, an irreducible multiplicity of phrasal patterns which occupy the lines.

The 12 lines of the poem are occupied by seven distinct phrasal patterns or rhythmic phonemes. Elsewhere they might be called feet, and Williams himself later refers to "variable feet" in his push to maintain a link between his radical measures, the revolution in measurement implicit in relativity theory, and the tradition of English poetry and prosody. Forget, for the moment, that the classical metrical categories were derived not from patterns of stress but from patterns of duration, and call line one a 3rd paeon, line two an iamb, line three an anapest, line four an amphibrach and so on, grafting classical quantitative measures onto these rugged numbers. It won't matter because the measure will not signify. The vocabulary of the dominion of one will not explain this event, which refuses reduction. Although it apologizes for its rupture, allowing room for an order of one, the poem delights in its violation.

There are no feet in this poem in a strict sense. Feet go, from the Sanskrit pad, as to pad, presumably, quietly in that case, or noisily, but always forward, the march of the feet. Feet carry us forward through time and space, padding through the forest, marching to war. One in front of the other, the essential sequence of feet, the endless two within the five within the ten, the ten over the ten, validates their nomination within the dominion of one. They walk a line, round and round, or at right angles to the angle of incidence on out into inifinty, depending on the force applied to them.

No, these are not feet as we have come to know feet, though they resemble feet in their patterns, and may very well be called feet to make a point. This is not surprising since both the classical categories of foot based verse and these phrasal units are ultimately derived from the same source, the rhythmic structure of the spoken language. These are the rhythmical phonemes at the foundation of comprehension, those bursts of noise, of vibration, that shook us, woke us, possessed us, soothed us in the warm, wet dark, long before we knew "one." Is this what Williams means when he asserts that the constant of his measure is the idiom? Rather than abstracting the patterns from the language, organizing them into an absolute extrinsic ruling order which the living language must then be fit to, a dominion of one, Williams' poem derives its measures from the language as it proceeds, building a texture of sound that plays off the idiom at the same time it proceeds in its articulation.

If each line is taken as a single phrasal unit, a measure (a variable foot if you will), then lines 2, 5, and 11 repeat, as do lines 3 and 12, and lines 4, 8, and 9. Three repetitive patterns account for 66% of the lines in the poem. In addition, the unique phrases, 1, 6, 7, and 10, tend, through enjambment, to break apart and recombine in ways that echo the repeated patterns, further increasing the complexity of the metrical structure. But this repetition is fundamentally different than the repetition in Pope's poem. There, repetition works toward a uniformity and predictability of temporal experience, a regular order. Repetition is based on the fundamental identity and regularity of time and space. Any normal moment is characteristically the same as that which precedes it and that which follows it, and any variation quickly returns to the norm. This is the rule of that verse, the rule of the dominion of one.

Although equally involved with repetition, Williams' verse operates differently. Characteristically irregular, repetition creates a sense of time linked in unpredictable loops and accretive textures, an invaginated and curved time nevertheless rooted in the perfectly ordinary. The syntax of dynamics still exists here, still echoes in the order of one, Williams' "absolute metrical regularity," but the time of the poem is no longer reversible. We can no longer turn and march back along the unfolding syllables, the marching feet, without fundamentally disturbing their order. The irregularities are fundamental to the order. The rupture can never be "corrected" or returned to a state of perfection, as the devoured plums can never be restored to the Frigidaire. The concept of an absolute time and an absolute space, what Anton Reiser, whose biographical portrait of Einstein Williams read, calls "the secret religion of physicists and philosophers till the critical year 1905," is gone forever.[6]

Gone with them is any possibility of an absolute or "objective" measure of the order of Newton's "Absolute, True, and Mathematical Time." The measure becomes specific to the event relative to other events, to the speed of the events, their momentum as they approach the speed of light. This is the era of the variable foot and the elastic inch, of curved space/time arching back on itself in great universal loops. Yet within all the weirdness, a unitary order still lurks. Max Planck argued: "But if time and space have been deprived of their absolute qualities, the absolute has not been disposed of finally, but has only been moved back a step to the measurement of four dimensional multiplicity which results from the fact that space and time have been fused into one coherent continuum by means of the speed of light."[7] The reciprocity in the heart of measure still speaks of a distance between ourselves and our measure, an otherness to measure that validates knowing, a narrowing distance, but a distance nevertheless, a gap, the other side of which a rule holds and hidden variables can explain whatever seems to evade us.

In one sense, the narrowing of the gap corresponds precisely to measure's approach to the idom, as Williams has it. In Williams' case, as his own vocabulary indicates, the approach is relative to traditional English foot-based poetries. The order of one still establishes a difference between the poem and the language in our ear, signalling the event as other than ordinary, even while it attains to the realm of the ordinary. It asserts the possibility of measure at the same time it redefines it in terms of the ordinary. What happens to measure when it approaches the idiom, or ordinary language, so closely that distinction begins to fail altogether, where even an order of one disintegrates into the chaotic mutiplicity of unframed language? The following poem by Jack Spicer, from the series "Love Poems" in the book Language, would seem to be, at least partially, of that order:

In much of Spicer's verse, as here, we witness what appears to be the collapse of measure into syntax. Not even an irregular metric seems to rule. There is no order of one, no isochrony, not even recognizable patterns of phrasal repetition. Rather, on the whole, the structure of the poem seems built on the sentence.

What of the sentences themselves? "Sable arrested a fine comb," the poem begins. Looked at from the the point of view of synatx, this is a fine sentence. All the nouns and verbs are in the right places. Count them. It is a healthy sentence, even a handsome sentence. But as we seek to fit in into a signifying structure, just as it seems almost to make sense, it slips from our grasp. "Sable" is fine, presumably someone we will know more of later, though perhaps a strange name at that. Even "Sable arrested" is O.K., though now the semantic dimension starts bifurcating in unusual directions, and we begin to get uneasy. Is Sable a cop? Is he (she) French and in the act of stopping; a rather unusal direction for the sentence, but possible. But a fine comb? How do you arrest a fine comb?

The intense contrast between syntactic order and semantic chaos is extremely disorienting, as the poem itself acknowledges, urging us to "Take a step back and view the / sentence." Normally we would be in the sentence at this point, as the sentence measured out the world in more or less predictable units and order. This sentence, however, repels us, and much like the deer which appears later in the poem, we find ourselves butting against it, trying to force sense from it: "No big white, lightless automobiles for him."

Here, as measure approaches the sentence, as the gap closes, measure fails altogether. Or at least measure as we have known it up till now, measure as a reductionist term translating two different entities to similarity. That mediational act which establishes what Michel Serres calls "the space of similarities" will not work in this spacetime (Watsonville 1945) of absolute dissimilarity ("If he's hit, let them show him"). Instead we are forced out of the sentence and in relation to a non-signifying language/reality, which is all the more frustrating because it seems so badly to want to signify.

If it does eventually, as the poem itself slips into a measured language at the end, it is not as a revelation of truth, but precisely at the cost of truth. Order is achieved only through violence. "Past danger into the fog we / Used the last fuse," Spicer writes, invoking several traditional forms of poetic measure, including obvious lineation, enjambment, and rhyme, as he equates blindness with safety. Safety is order. Safety is the usages which assure us of "knowledge." Safety is the cocoon of language which insulates us, pretending to measure the unmeasurable, pretending to signify in the face of the terrible cloud of energy which incinerates signification (1945) along with human flesh, steel, and stones.

Absolute measure fails absolutely. No backup position is possible. No hidden variables, no secret rule rescues measure from its participation in and determination of the very parameters it seeks to know. The transparency of the Newtonian universe and its homogenous, isotropic space and time where cause and effect are clearly identifiable has given way to opacity, a universe that denies all access to reality. This is a post-quantum mechanical universe, a universe where, as Ilya Prigogine argues, for any given system, "there is an irreducible multiplicity of representations, each connected with a determined set of operators."[9] The mirror reveals, darkly, only the image of ourselves peering into it.

Yet this dark mirror itself is only one possible representation of the nature of this fundamental multiplicity. In John Clarke's sonnet, "Negentropic Islands," this very mulitplicity provides the basis for the restoration of measure, its reformulation or renewal:

Although reflecting enough of the traditional sonnet form to be recognizable as such, this sonnet is not so much bound to a pre-existing order as it is in love with the possibilities of transgression and invention the order offers. It is, in that sense, a profoundly improvisational act. One aspect of the traditional sonnet kept completely intact is the overall number of lines: 14. At the other extreme, a formal pattern of full end rhymes that would establish periodicity and predictability in the poem has been abandoned. [MB1]The pentameter has given way to a range of syllables determined largely by a variable isochrony: the syllable count falls somewhere between 11 and 17 syllables per line. No repetitive stress pattern or patterns appear within those lines. Like Spicer's poem in that regard, the measure here tends to collapse into syntax, though the lineation prevents total collapse, creating a limited range of strong stresses: 3-6 per line, with the majority of lines (11) having either 4 or 5.

While the measure tends to collapse into syntax, the syntax is characterized by transgressions which disrupt the sentence's forward rush. What initially seem to be subordinate clauses moving toward completion of a larger syntactic order switch in mid-stream, becoming coordinate structures which turn against closure, creating a disorder which reopens the syntax turning the entire poem into one long complex sentence. "Sufficiently hobbled" in line 4 seems initially to modify the "I" in line 1, but turns out to modify the new "I" in line 5. Similarly, in line 7, "even without the optical" refers immediately to the appearance of Avalon, but then switches, refering to the formation of a program. This unstable, left-branching syntax works against the unpredictable but steady push of strong stresses downstream, as it were, away from the poem's originating moment.

Each of these elements measures a different time in the poem. The overall form itself, the sonnet, is a measure of permanence. The improvisatory lines and their variable stresses measure a stochastic uncertainty, what Michel Serres calls "the erratic blinking of aleatory mutations."[11] The basic drift toward syntactic closure is fundamentally entropic, while the unstable syntactic interruptions are negentropic. The poem as a whole is a complex entity demonstrating both "order" and "disorder," what Michel Serres, again, discussing organism, calls "a bouquet of times."

No one of these times dominates the poem. Neither order nor disorder prevails. In fact, they stand revealed simply as limits of measure, as faces of complexity, as arbitrary "stations" on a limitless scale. Real meanings exist, not as dominions, but as pockets, unconnected, stochastic, contradictory. Understanding is real. But it cannot encompass all signals at a specific time. Receiving the signal does not cause noise to cease to exist, anymore than noise negates the possibility of the signal. But no signal can encompass the noise or stand for all other signals.

The measure here delineates a world where the dominion of one falls utterly and along with it utter impenetrability, which, after all, closely resembles it. The shattered mirror lies scattered across a wild topos, each piece reflecting us (or not) in place, or a place we are composed in. Whatever relations dwell in the chasms between the pieces, they are other than one. As with the manifold vocality which opens "Negentropic Islands," this manifold commensurability bespeaks a fundamental shift from the entire ontological proposition (and its negation) to a teeming or swarming which never ceases in its turbulent flow to create more and more meanings. The mythic, the scientific, the ordinary, the extraordinary, the here, the elsewhere, the then and the now, all coexist in a "non-seqential, paraxial encyclopedia proposition" which measures out the poem as the poem measures the world of its originating energies.

William Carlos Williams proposed in Paterson that "the measure intervenes," and there can be little argument with that. Measure is relation. One incommensurable term is tamed or made to speak like another by means of an arbitrary code, a language of inches. A meaning is discovered where before there was only incomprehensibility. In so far as the meaning is in terms of what we already know, there is always a threat of dominion, of creating a univocality.

Yet measure is invention, improvisation, as well, the revelation of unexpected significance. Measure is information, not only about ourselves, but about the worlds we are part of, that compose us as we compose them, that we see in ouselves as we see ourselves in them. In that sense, measure always involves the possibility of discovery. The astonishing clarity and control of Pope's measure was a discovery, or part of a discovery, of a new cosmos, or at least a new face of the cosmos. This is equally true of the development of new measures in the twentieth century. Those measures have always been troubled by increasingly unsettled understandings of order and disorder. One consequence of that has been the lingering argument that "disorder" itself is the product of the new new measures and that if only we could return to the old measure, "order" would be restored. The problem is that measure is not an issue of will. As Robert Creeley has stated: "Measure, then, is my testament. What uses me is what I use and in that complex measure is the issue."[12] As invention, measure is shaped in relation forces beyond our control, forces that give rise to measure precisely as measure gives voice to them.

1 Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization, NY: McGraw Hill, 1972, p. 36.

[2] "Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy," in Philosophy, Politics, AutonomyNY: Oxford UP, p. 84. Castoriadus defines creative imagination as the "core compnent in non-trivial thinking."

[3] "The Poem as Field of Action," in Selected Essays, NY: New Direction, 1969, p. 283.

[4] Prosodia Rationalis, quoted by Paul Fussell, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth Century England, New London, CT: Connecticut College, 1954, pp. 39-40.

[5] Quoted by Fussell, p. 39.

[6] Albert Einstein: A Biographical Portrait. NY: Albert & Charles Boni, 1930. Louis Zukofsky translated this book into English. Williams read his manuscript.

[7] Quoted by Reiser, p. 104

[8] Collected Books of Jack Spicer, edited by Robin Blaser, Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975, p. 227.

[9] Order Out of Chaos, NY: Bantam, 1984, p. 225

[10] In The Analogy, Buffalo: Shuffaloff, 1991, p. 29.

[11] "The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, & Thermodynamics," in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, p. 75.

[12] "A Sense of Measure," in Collected Essays, Los Angeles and Berkeley: U of California P, 1989, p. 488.