h, aren’t you lucky. Some people just want to play at the weekends, but you get to have a poetry lecture! I started writing this as a reply to a conversation on the Poets on Fire forum, but when it grew to mini-essay length I transferred it here. (I do HAVE a pair of kitty-cat glasses frames, peach-coloured; I should really get lenses in them. What I need is one of those brooches they used to wear, that were like upside-down clocks so they could see the time on their bosom.)
So, this morning’s discussion was about capital letters at the beginning of a line of poetry. Some people seem to insist on using them, especially recently. Is it a throwback? And I said…
Up until very recently – certainly within my lifetime, given the kinds of things children are given to read – capitals beginning a line was the absolute bog-standard standard typographical convention, as unremarkable and ubiquitous as a capital at the start of a sentence, or indeed a full stop at the end If you wanted to deviate from that, you had not only to make the decision, you had to make a whole new style to accommodate it – as where, as has been mentioned, Lowell can be seen making this decision in Life Studies.
That decision – indeed, that period in American poetry, and what immediately followed it – i.e, the Beats and the sixties – turned poetry in America – and then everywhere else – on its head. But those guys were steeped in the old stuff, Berryman was full of Elizabethans and Ginsberg was full of Blake, and everyone then still knew lots of things by heart and how to write in rhyme and metre, even if they chose not to do it. Even ee cummings wrote perfect rhyming, metrical, sonnet-shaped sonnets; his innovations were typographical and synctactical.
So it’s interesting that this discussion is now taking place with lower-case at the beginning of a line assumed as the unexceptional, default mode, and capitals – which did help to indicate that it was a poem, which indicated that the printer had got the line right, which gave a certain weight to an occasion – the beginning of a new line of poetry – as the weird random throwback.
It’s important to remember that giving that up, that weight and solemnity and the whole of the past, was, in its own little way, quite a big thing to do. It was the equivalent of everybody in America (it originated in America) now going around the place in jeans and T shirts. (And you know what I mean: not nice little fitted scoop-neck T shirts: I’m talking women in big, square, crew-neck things that look like sacks; that only happens in America, so I’m not being contentious here.) It was the equivalent of giving up tailoring.
In the beginning, a wonderfully freeing thing, a rebellion, a new style and voice and an expression of that Age of Anxiety that we’re still in (only now is more like an Age of Terror; should we use letters at all??), but what troubles me – and yes, it does, because it’s part of the Zeitgeist and can be seen in other places, like the T shirts and the mainstreamisation of lazy, slangy speech (“Yo, dude!” or business emails beginning, “Hey!”) |(And since when is “sucky” a way intelligent grownups should be describing their dislike of something?) If absolutely everything has to be casual, all the time, and if the only way to vary it is to go more casual, that is a really limiting restriction. It not only restricts the available tones of voice, it restricts what we are able to express. It becomes a tyranny equal to the celluloid collar and boot-buttons.
People are talking on the thread in question (interesting that I find I’ve framed my analogy around “threads”) about the necessity of a poet allowing the poem to find its own form, to negotiate afresh. This is being referred to as “varying your style.” Of course, you can’t really vary your style. The idea is that you encompass,or own, enough of style to be able to wear different bits of your wardrobe on different occasions. And you can’t do that if you’ve accidentally put a centuries-old convention out with the trash, instead of putting it up in the loft, or at least leaving it in the recycling box.
Of course, this is the kind of talk that has in the past got me labeled a “conservative” on that forum. I stick up for prosodic tools. I do worry that, by forgetting all the tools and techniques, and dismissing previous people as not knowing as much as us – when in fact they knew a lot more, because they were used to memorising and remembering and had no google or programmable mobile phones and actually had to do things for themselves – we do ourselves (and them) a disservice. We make ourselves look foolish. And we cheat ourselves of whole spectra of expression.
It’s interesting to think of this line-start-cap issue in conjunction with things like the current ubiquity of brogues, the massive success of The King’s Speech (I mean the clothes, not the politics or the historical inaccuracies), and even steampunk. Bowlers are back in this week’s London Fashion Week.
I sometimes use caps at the start of a line. Sometimes not. Often, in keeping with the prevailing mood these days, and whatever I may be trying to achieve stylistically, not; but sometimes emphatically yes, for the same reason that sometimes you wear different clothes. It’s a different occasion.
Tom Chivers, in the forum discussion, has a good rationale for not using initial caps, because he has a stylistic device of accentuating capital initials after mid-line sentence breaks. That is the kind of deliberate decision I’m talking about.
The thing is that, whichever decision we take at the start of that line, we are always in dialogue with the capital initial, whether we know it or not. It was always there for centuries; 95% of English poetry has it; limiting ourselves to one style is at best limiting and at worst an exposure of ignorance. As writers we need to be – as Henry James said – “someone on whom nothing is lost.”
I know it’s only a typographical style – but as a convention, even a broken one, it is something we must decide either to use or not not to, and that is what negotiation with the medium looks like. And sometimes it’s a good idea to remind yourself that you do in fact know how to dress, and which fork to use, even if it means choosing deliberately not to use it.
There; now must go write a spam poem.
* Pedant week: continuing on from yesterday’s Oxford comma squib.
Yes!
I don’t use caps at the start of a line myself. As far as I know, this convention doesn’t go back to the dawn of poetry, just to the dawn of printing (mediaeval MSS don’t seem to have it) and I don’t see any useful purpose to be served by pretending poetry somehow needs different punctuation.
What I do find odd is this: though I never notice initial caps in “old” poetry and read straight past them, in contemporary verse they stand out and distract my attention dreadfully
do anything
BUT
have a Reason
(unlike this)
Funnily enough, when I was going through choosing poems for my collection I realised, which I hadn’t done before, that I’d gone back to using capital letters at the start of stanzas and line, and full stops and commas at the end, whereas that some of the earlier poems I was selecting from didn’t. This did impact on the poems that I included in the end, as having a few unpunctuate, uncapitalised pieces would have seemed a quirk rather than a deliberate decision. Why had I changed I wondered? I think with me its partly what I’ve been reading, partly how I’ve been writing. I’ve been reading contemporary writers who tend to be more freeform, and though I like them, my recent poetry hasn’t been like that; then secondly during the first half of last decade I wrote alot of poems directly to screen, not always, but enough – and I liked the way the lines looked even, uncluttered, without capitals or commas. More recently I’ve gone back to writing longhand in a notebook. Here the punctuation helps shape the poems during that first or second draft. Whether this is deliberate because of the types of poems I’m writing, or simply because I was taught this way I’m not entirely sure.
I know most poets tend to write longhand, so this might just be my quirk, but think the way we say poems laid out on the page (in a book or on a typescript or printout) does affect what we think of them. I imagine lots of poets use Macs, and they tend to default to Helvetica, which looks good on the screen, whilst PCs used to default to Times New Roman which doesn’t.
Just a thought!
I do use capital letters at the beginning of lines in poems… nearly always. I have wondered and wondered why I do it (when I write with very few other rules…) but in the end it is as simple as I feel like a tosser when I don’t. I just look at the capital-free lines and think ‘who are you trying to impress with that trendy nonsense, you daft cow?’ Your piece is more useful to students of poetry than my conclusions no doubt!
Rachel, thanks! No, that comment is also really useful, because so many people say they find capital initials hard to get. I wonder how many more, like you, are just used to them? I go half-&-half these days, and to be honest one factor for me is this: how many lines of the poem have a capital initial anyway? That is, they’re the beginning of a sentence or are someone’s name? If there are quite a few, there’s no point in bringing the others down to lower case, is there.