From "For the Record"

Abstract

I have known Denise for many years, and she is an inspiring, loving and lovable person. My admiration for her continually increases. One of the things I like most in her is her commitment. I haven't counted the times she has gone to jail for her beliefs. Most publicized perhaps was the time when she lay down on the sidewalk in front of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington until she was carted off in the paddy wagon. I don't know that she has actually scaled the fence of that nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, but I'm sure she gave it a good try. This passion and courage come through in her work. Some people object to what her politics do to her social poems. Her second English publisher, Tom Maschler at Cape, refused her book containing the Berkeley riot poems. He found it too political. I thought this was odd for a man who was making two trips a year to Havana. As a technician, Denise has the gift that |William Carlos~ Williams had for knowing where to break the line. Free verse is a mess--it's like chopped up prose--if the lines are not well broken, by the eye as well as by the ear. Williams had a fantastic ear (and eye) for breaking his lines. Denise has written me about her metric: To me, the visual appearance is always secondary to its sonic (or auditory) aspect. Thus the lines are broken to indicate, as in a musical score, pitch & emphasis. How the lines look, insofar as they are neat or messy, wild or disciplined in visual pattern, may reinforce the sonic element. So far as I know, Denise has never made use of Williams's which Hugh Kenner, with affection I think, recently called a rubber ruler, but she has given me a very cogent analysis of it: Williams' variable foot I believe to be not very different from Hopkins' sprung rhythm. It has to do with the establishment of a norm of duration in time, per line, which accords to a line of a few syllables, as much time as one with many. This in effect slows down the sparse lines (which if they have monosyllabic words will in any case move more slowly than the swiftly rippling polysyllables) & enforces extra respect for whatever silences are present anyway. Thus the duration of longer and shorter lines is not contrasted but equal. Another, easier way to talk of it is to notice that, long before Williams theorized the variable foot, he wrote in lines that had a freely varied number of feet or syllables but a definite dominance of some strong stress. Denise's background is very interesting. She had told me about her family: My father came from a learned family in Russia & studied the Talmud and would no doubt have been a Rabbi if he had not read the New Testament while a student at the University of Koenigsberg in Prussia, where he was sent to get a regular as well as a Yeshiva education. (Jews could not attend Russian universities in Tsarist days.) My parents met in Constantinople, where my mother, who is Welsh, had gone to teach in the Scottish high school for girls. …