in verse #48 : Voice of the turtle

That title is not a reference to Mitch McConnell, no matter how much people say he resembles a turtle. No, it’s a reference to “Canticles,” a book of the Bible hitherto unknown by this moniker to me, but familiar to you as “The song of Solomon,” and it is of interest to us not only because that book is the only one Joseph Smith picked out as “not inspired writings,” and in fact only secular wedding poetry (at least he understood the text, which is more than I can say for many of the monks who struggled to understand the book and place it in the Bible).  The phrase “the voice of the turtle” occurs in the 2^nd chapter:

₈The voice of my beloved! behold,
he cometh leaping upon the mountains,
skipping upon the hills.
₉My beloved is like a roe or a young hart:
behold, he standeth behind our wall,
he looketh forth at the windows,
shewing himself through the lattice.
₁₀My beloved spake, and said unto me,
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
₁₁For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
₁₂The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
₁₃The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

This is of interest to us — well, to me — as an example of Hebrew poetic form. It is also an example of how the sap rises in spring. So, appropriately enough, in this context, we will discuss the voice of Walt Whitman.

If you read Joseph Smith’s letter from Liberty Jail in History of the Church[i], which you have been able to do for around 156 years now, you miss the sense of his voice.[ii]  If you compare the transcript of the letter Dean Jesse produced with that in HC, it is clear how it has been edited: what comes through the transcript is the sense of a speaker, rather than a writer, long sentences, abrupt transitions, jumps in topic and logic — and the completion of a single thought over a huge distance. You can hear the same thing in Journal of Discourses, especially in the speeches of Brigham Young, which were taken down in shorthand by George Darling Watt, and, as Young once put it, “cleaned up before they go before the world.”[iii] But it is AWOL in HC.

The Joseph Smith Papers help us even more to hear that speaking voice. It was a voice that Walt Whitman tried very hard to achieve, but the difference between the two is stark: Smith’s voice is known to us from transcriptions of his speech — the books and letters and revelations he dictated (and sometimes corrected in his own hand) — while Whitman’s is known from the Leaves of grass, the single book of verse he kept revising, enlarging and re-publishing between its first edition, on or about 4 July 1855, and its final — either 6^th or 9^th — edition, published in 1891-92[iv]; and possibly from a wax-cylinder of perhaps Whitman reading a section of “America,” maybe recorded around 1890.[v]

Whitman tried hard for that speaking voice, whereas his contemporaries, like Longfellow, tried very hard for the cadences of performance. If you want a fine example of the latter, you could do worse than listen to the Hiawatha melodrama, a setting of parts of Longfellow’s poem to themes from Antonin Dvoŕák’s “New World” Symphony.[vi]  This is appropriate because, as the booklet that accompanies its world-première recording says, “Dvoŕák himself told the New York press that the symphony’s middle movements were inspired by The song of Hiawatha.”[vii]  Longfellow strove very consciously to create an epic meter for his American epic,[viii] but he borrowed his meter, a trochaic tetrameter, from the Finnish epic Kalevala, compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish folk poems.[ix] The song of Hiawatha “was published on November 10, 1855, and was an immediate success. In 1857, Longfellow calculated that it had sold 50,000 copies.”[x]

Just a little earlier than that, on 4 July 1855, Whitman had published the first edition of Leaves of grass, after (according to a radio broadcast called American Icons : Leaves of Grass) at least 8 years of working to find that voice,[xi] and spent the rest of his life refining it. He maybe sold 780 copies of the first printing, and things went downhill from there. What I find more relevant than those dates and sales to this discussion of meter and verse is a point made by one of the contributors to the broadcast, Betsy Urkkila, a Whitman Scholar at Northwestern University, and author of a book called Whitman, the political poet. She says, in the course of the broadcast: “I always like to say he broke the pentameter — he broke the pentameter …and that was, this is the, uh, the line of Shakespeare … and the glo, uh, the line that our language in some ways naturally scans at.”[xii]

That is interesting, but not a new insight. Urkkila, however, offers a further insight, and to follow this for now, the only source I have is this transcript, my transcript, of the radio broadcast. It starts with the interviewer, Sean Cole, summarizing from Urkkila’s book, and then intercutting her voice (which I have transcribed in italics):

Whereas with Whitman there was no set number of beats per line. That was his real innovation, and Betsy says, there’s this one particular moment, where he broke the pentameter, one passage in a notebook dated 1847 [three years after Joseph Smith was assassinated]. He’s writing about the kind of poet he wants to become. It’s amazing, because you see him kind of writing This is what the poet will do, and This is my image, and, and then you see him, Break, into what would become, this major poetic revolution, this free verse, and where he breaks, is at the lines, ‘I am the poet of slaves’ ‘and of the masters of slaves, I am the poet of the body, and I am’ and then breaks off literally he breaks off mid-sentence there, stops — and then tries again — ‘I am the poet of the body, and I am the poet of the soul. I go with the slaves of the earth, equally with the masters, and I will stand between the masters and the slaves. How fascinating, that this major break in poetry, worldwide, comes over one of the most pressing political issues of the moment, right? that, that was threatening to tear the Union apart and ultimately that poem, though not exactly as he initially wrote it, went into Leaves of grass.

Well, as readers of this blog will know, all this is happening about a hundred years after Blake did exactly the same thing: broke the pentameter, developed a long line that had “no set number of beats per line” and aimed it to the wide world. So that is not news. But Cole does introduce, in his broadcast, a more interesting, a more chilling, innovation, and it stopped me cold. I had never heard this before. He is referring to that early period of composition, but to a different process, and it’s worth quoting at length here (again, the interviewee is quoted in italics):

And once he discovered the line, once he made that breakthrough, he did something so incredibly modern, that we usually associate it only with poets one hundred years after him, like William Burroughs, for example. William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, you know, — Matt Miller is a poet, and a teacher at Yeshiva University in New York, and he wrote a book called Collage of myself : Walt Whitman and the making of Leaves of grass. — If you look at this, holy cow! you can see these are each individual strips of paper, and there’s more than one — What he’s showing me is a scanned image of an original Whitman draft, but each of the lines looks like it was snipped, with scissors, from somewhere else, and glued into place. You can actually see the glue stains here and there. According to Matt, Leaves of grass is a word collage, a cut-up. Well his number one source was his own text — um-hm — but it comes from writing that was not originally conceived of as poetry. Prior to 1847 he published some juvenilia, some — early — not very good poems — not very good poems, not — they don’t look like Whitman poems. A lot of them are very conventional, short lines, sometimes even rhyming poems, um, but, aside from those poems, he wrote prose. He wrote notes. He wrote in the margins of other books. He wrote letters. And all of these things — book reviews — all of these things wound up becoming Leaves of grass, wound up getting cut up, stirred up, mixed up, reformulated, sometimes revised, sometimes not, sometimes just moved around. And um, I think Whitman invented that.

I’m not sure that being “incredibly modern” is what we are talking about here. The “Brion Gysin cut-up method,” as I recall, was aleatoric, a way of looking for aid in composition from chance, or luck, or the rhythms of the universe, and involved Gysin flinging down the cut-up fragments of paper on the floor, then kneeling and re-arranging them, looking for art. Or perhaps it was a summons to the unconscious, as James Merrill at the end turned to his ouija board to compose. That impulse seems to represent a lack of faith in language. Whitman did not lack faith in his barbaric yawp.  Whitman’s constant revision of his corpus is not abdication of verse but renunciation of formal verse, and he certainly did not renounce the speaking voice. What this discovery among his papers might show, however, is that for Whitman, verse is no longer about the voice. It is about print.

It is clear, when you read Shakespeare, or Milton, or Wordsworth, that they expect the verse to be heard. They want the lines to be recited, and they are writing heightened speech. Milton, of all our poets, is surely most erotic in the sheer orgiastic nature of the sounds he employs. Whitman is not. For him the book is the goal, not the voice. His lines are often flat, plain-spoken, sincere and earnest.  The voice is always his.  In this same radio program, a third Whitman scholar raises an interesting parallel between Whitman and Blake (and Smith, not that he mentions either of the latter).  Again, we first hear Sean Cole, then his respondent (in italics):

…Whitman didn’t go to college. He didn’t even go to high school. One of the things to keep in mind about Whitman, and one of the things I find charming as, or about, him, is that his formal education ended about age 11. Kenneth Price teaches English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and co-edits an online Whitman archive. He says Whitman got his real education from newspapers – working for them, I mean, setting type, and then later, reporting. Words were passing in front of his eyes all the time, and he also had a kind of sponge-like memory, and so he, he would pick up high learning and quackery, pseudo-science and real science.

Blake was a little better-educated, and as an engraver and visual artist, was less of a journeyman, but he was a working stiff like Whitman. Smith, also ill-educated, also an auto-didact, is a closer fit for Whitman and, I believe, also with a sponge-like memory. But the difference that remains stark for me is that, for Whitman the type-setter, poetry was words in print on a page. The speaking voice, the reciting voice, is gone. The words are text, not speech.

But hold on, I hear you say: “That’s it?”  Yeah, and it’s big.  Have you ever heard a contemporary poet read?

Your turn.

____________________

[i] The letter was published in History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Period I : History of Joseph Smith, the Prophet / by himself. Volume III, revised (Salt Lake City : the Church, c1948), pp. 289-305 (cited hereafter as HC). The publication was begun in 1902 by B.H. Roberts and completed in 1912, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Church_(Joseph_Smith); it was itself, according to the same source, but a revision of the History of Joseph Smith published in 1858 by the Church.

[ii] You can make that comparison for yourself. The transcript is found in Personal writings of Joseph Smith. — Revised edition / compiled and edited by Dean C. Jessee. — Salt Lake City : Deseret Book ; Provo, Utah : Brigham Young University Press, c2002, pp. 429-446 (hereafter Personal writings).

[iii] I heard this once in a lunch-time seminar in the cafeteria at the Church Office Building (or COB, as opposed to the CAB, or Church Administration Building) when I worked in the Church’s Historical Department from December, 1976 through January, 1979.

[iv] The confusion is explained in the article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass, accessed 25 December 2014.

[v] Which you can hear in the radio program American Icons : Leaves of Grass — broadcast Friday, September 27, 2013; full details in note xi.

[vi] I.e., Symphony No. 9 in E minor, “From the New World,” Op. 95, B. 178.

[vii] Booklet for the CD Dvoŕák and America, which includes the Hiawatha Melodrama (afterDvoŕák) as tracks 1-6 (arranged by Joseph Horowitz and Michael Beckerman for a text selected by Angel Gil-Ordóñez) s.l., Naxos, c2014 — catalog number 8.559777.

[viii] Details checked against http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Hiawatha, accessed 25 December 2014.

[ix] I checked my memories of all this against http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalevala, accessed 25 December 2014.

[x] Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Hiawatha, accessed 25 December 2014.

[xi] Most of what follows is transcribed or summarized from a radio program presented on Studio 360 in its series American Icons : Leaves of Grass — broadcast Friday, September 27, 2013, at http://www.studio360.org/story/american-icons-leaves-grass/, accessed 19 December 2014. The program was narrated by Sean Cole; I have tried to keep the voices in this mosaic identified for you, but there are many — I suggest you listen to it yourself; it runs 17 minutes, and would make a dandy Christmas present, my present to you.

[xii] Ibid. This is a point I have made several times in this blog, and what Derek Attridge is getting at in The rhythms of English poetry. When my copy of Urkkila’s book arrives, I can provide a cleaner quote. Keep coming back until I have it cleaned up.