SOME NOTES ON ACCENTUAL POETRY AND TESS GALLAGHER'S "BLACK SILK"
We’re just back from Africa and it was an amazing trip. We visited four national parks in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana, neighboring countries to the south. The largest of the parks, Kafue in Zambia, is the size of New Jersey. Crocs, hippos, elephants, lions, yes, lots of lions, giraffes, zebras, cheetahs, one leopard, and birds of all sorts. I’ll hold off on writing more about the trip here because I want to think it through and work up a longer piece.
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A while back I posted a Substack about syllabic poetry, where the poet counts the number of syllables in each line. This time I’ll look at another formal option: accentual verse. Accentual poetry counts the number of accents in a line, but doesn’t count syllables. So a line with four accents might have four syllables or seven syllables, or any other number, as long as the accent count is maintained.
When poets manage the number accents in a line and also count syllables, you get “accentual syllabic verse,” which is another name for traditional meter. Iambic pentameter has ten syllables and five accents, though poets often throw in an extra syllable for variety. Accentual syllabic verse in English goes back at least as far as Chaucer.
So, you can count accents (accentual verse), you can count syllables (syllabic verse), or you can count both (accentual syllabic verse). Of course there’s also the option of not counting either syllables or accents and writing free verse. But it turns out that free verse isn’t just one thing: there are various of kinds. More on that in a future Substack.
Here’s a poem you probably know, and I bet you thought it was in free verse. But it’s not.
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens
True, “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams is usually described as an imagistic poem in free verse. But if you hear this vivid farmyard scene the way I do, the accents look like this:
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens
The bold letters stand for accents, and if you agree with my reading, the poem is not in free verse, but rather accentual verse. It’s set up as couplets with a line of two accents following by a line with a single accent. Since the first lines in each couplet have differing numbers of syllables (4,3,3, and 4), and the placement of the accents in those lines varies, it’s not in traditional meter. Incidentally, it’s my suspicion that quite a few poems that are usually taken as free verse are, like this one, covertly in accentuals.
In “The Red Wheelbarrow,” without saying, “Wow! Look!” William Carlos Williams pushes us into seeing just what he wants us to see. Why so much depends on this scene is the central question, and the best answer I can give is that seeing small things with a clear, focused vision is important to living a full life. And that’s one of the issues poetry is about.
Like syllabics, accentual verse isn’t always obvious on a first or second reading. You can be fooled. For years I thought that Elizabeth Bishop’s wonderful poem, “In the Waiting Room,” about a childhood epiphany, was in free verse. Here are the first ten line:
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
Then one day I read it aloud, and here’s what I heard:
In Wor-cester, Mass-a-chu-setts,
I went with Aunt Con-sue-lo
to keep her den-tist’s ap-point-ment
and sat and wait-ed for her
in the den-tist’s wait-ing room.
It was win-ter. It got dark
ear-ly. The wait-ing room
was full of grown-up peo-ple,
arc-tics and o-ver-coats,
lamps and mag-a-zines.
These lines range from five to eight syllables, but each of them—and every other line in the poem—has three accents. Bishop was a formalist and here we have further evidence of her care with a poem’s form. The pattern reflects the way a seven-year-old might speak when telling, slowly and intensely, a life-changing story. Notice that it’s easy to read line six (“It was winter. It got dark”) with just two accents. You have to be aware of the form to find the accent on “got,” but that’s the point. Knowing the form teaches you how to read the line, and the emphasis on “got” works well with a child telling the story out loud. Here’s a link to the complete poem: https://poets.org/poem/waiting-room
And here’s a poem of mine that’s basically accentual, though I cheat on the three accent pattern with a few lines that have two or four accents. The idea for the poem came when I was riding my bike across a bridge and stopped to look down at the water, hoping to see some fish migrating upstream. But instead I just saw a stone poking up like a bald head—and that got me wondering what the stone might be thinking. I was turning 80 at the time, so the idea of reincarnation and a future life came pretty naturally.
NEXT TIME... perhaps I’ll become a stone lying half sunk in a stream waiting for the water to rise. It’s not easy to stay so still and hold your mineral breath while overhead the birds paddle about the sky; not easy to wait for the leaves to brown and drop while the ducks row past with their latest dutiful brood, and salmon tickle your sides as they churn upstream; to count the minutes, hours, days until islets of ice drift by, and not to blink your crystalline eyes when the whiteness spatters down. Sometimes a fox glides past. A cheerful cloud may wink. A poet sits on a log and scatters lines on a page. He thinks he can capture your thoughts but his verses put you to sleep where you dream of your former life as a lighthouse scanning the patterned waves for whales as they breach.
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Among the activities I suggested in my recent “June Break” Substack was to take a prose version of Tess Gallagher’s poem “Black Silk,” and put it into lines. For those who took the challenge, here’s the original version as Tess wrote it:
BLACK SILK She was cleaning—there is always that to do—when she found, at the top of the closet, his old silk vest. She called me to look at it, unrolling it carefully like something live might fall out. Then we spread it on the kitchen table and smoothed the wrinkles down, making our hands heavy until its shape against Formica came back and the little tips that would have pointed to his pockets lay flat. The buttons were all there. I held my arms out and she looped the wide armholes over them. “That’s one thing I never wanted to be,” she said, “a man.” I went into the bathroom to see how I looked in the sheen and sadness. Wind chimes off-key in the alcove. Then her crying so I stood back in the sink-light where the porcelain had been staring. Time to go to her, I thought, with that other mind, and stood still.
There are no stanza breaks in the poem, and for the first half there are no full stops—places where a sentence ends at the end of a line. The effect is to pull us down the page as the situation is established. The speaker’s mother (presumably it’s a mother and daughter poem, though other relationships are possible) finds her dead husband’s old silk vest and it brings back her memories and grief. We don’t know how long ago he died, but in the context of the poem it seems recent. Her grief is fresh. Mother and daughter spread the vest out, flatten it and note that the buttons are all there. And at this point the poem comes to a stop with a period at the end of the line.
Then it takes an unexpected turn. The speaker puts the vest on, and her mother says, “That’s one thing I never wanted to be…, a man.” Up to this point, mother and daughter have been acting in unison, almost as one person, but now they separate. The daughter goes into the bathroom to see herself in the vest, and without her saying so, we sense that she’s thinking about what it might be like to be a man. Here the wind chimes add a lovely sensory detail, and the fact that they’re “off-key” echoes the newly revealed divergence between mother and daughter. The mother is crying but instead of joining her the daughter, caught up in her own private thoughts, stands still.
I want to point out a couple of places where the line breaks have an effect on our reading of the poem. Right at the first line, we get “…cleaning—there is always/that to do.” This line break puts an added emphasis on the words “always” and “that” and brings a personal element into the voice, even perhaps a note of sarcasm. It’s the mother who’s always cleaning, and this hints at the generational difference which plays out later.
Further down, Gallagher writes that they unroll the vest: “carefully/like something live/might fall out” and because it’s at the end of the line, the word “live” takes on a life of its own. Something live—a moth, a mouse perhaps? It’s a lighter moment in this otherwise serious poem.
When the daughter holds out her arms and the mother loops the wide armholes “over/them,” the line break in “over/them” mimics the physical action.
And later, when the mother says, “That’s one thing I never/wanted to be,…a man” placing “never” at the end of the line gives it added emphasis.
These are all subtle touches, but given the poem’s overall delicacy they’re important and help to spell out the degree of closeness and separation between the two women.
If you’ve noticed other significant touches in the poem, I’d love to hear about them.