to learn how to dance the waltz is a
very specific set or the cha-cha or even
you know ballroom dancing all those
forms have and this is what I think this
would this is the demarcation of the the
modern and the pre-modern world is that
it it's there's a type of do what thou
wilt it's the abbey of Thelema you know
the the the rejection of law and order
and I'm going to be free and and
nobody's going to put constraints on me
and I think the problem with that and
this is why it's very interesting that
the great disciplines of our
civilization are called the liberal arts
they're the arts that free you because
if you if I get on a piano and just
start pounding away that's not music
I mean maybe George auntie all thought
it was but it's not music
you know but if I if I discipline myself
to master this thing then I'm free okay
to do whatever I want and that's where I
would personally I really feel that to
to to encourage people to do these
things without learning the rules then
you're free to break the rules it's like
if I know grammar and I choose like
Dickens to have a sentence with one word
in it
you know I don't the English teacher can
say that's not a sentence because
there's no subject and there's no
predicate but Dickens knows what a
sentence is
right and if he chooses to make a
sentence out of one word he has every
right to do that he can break the rules
because he knows the rules and I think
that's where I really I think free-verse
has has destroyed poetry personally yeah
I don't agree startled me when you came
back to the to to that to that to that
point because I don't think that it's
fully free I think again I think the the
line is still a discipline and what its
freed from is I think if they know what
they're doing X yeah no that's that's
right but most don't but I think that's
always always the case in the sense that
only those who have mastered an art can
transcend it and in that sense I am
traditionalist educationally without a
doubt but when you look and I'm
identifying Whitman in particular
because he ends up being proof of
something you said earlier when you were
talking about the influence of the
English Bible especially the King James
Version on on English and American
literary culture which is really hard to
overestimate I mean he was a great
reader of the Bible including the Psalms
and it's quite clear that he picks up a
lot of his phrasing and Clausing from
the English Psalms in in the King James
Version of the Bible and so in many ways
I think Whitman is actually a
traditionalist that he not only studied
the forms but he studied he studied the
great the great books if you if you will
but but that's always the case it seems
to me that the untrained tend to make
for less compelling revolutionaries than
the trained
they're the ones who are actually free
enough not only to choose when to obey
rules or not but to invent new rules my
father wrote a book on prosody and
really one of his life yeah one of his
lines in there was that he felt Robert
Frost Gordon ace when he said that
free-verse was like playing tennis
without a net I'm just saying there was
still lies I know I really that's my
point about Whitman I do and if you take
a poem like Kensington Gardens by Ezra
Pound I mean that's as good as poetry
gets as far as I'm concerned it's it's a
it's a poem of free verse it's an
incredibly powerful poem but again pound
knew what he was doing
yeah and and my argument is that people
are it's a default setting when when you
don't know how to do something and you
go to the default setting of just doing
whatever you can and and that's where I
think you lose artifice is very
important art and art is from ours you
know power we the word for army is a
cognate of art art is power and and and
and power comes about from discipline
it's it's it's it's a crewed by by
discipline exact a civilization that's
undisciplined will never become a
powerful civilization and and and a
writer who's undisciplined will never
become a powerful writer and that's why
I think great poetry is always there
there's definitely the discipline is
there you can feel it and somebody like
if you if you take somebody like Cormac
McCarthy is it is a good example of that
who
just from one point if you can drive you
crazy with his punctuation but he knows
exactly what he's doing and he has a
purpose behind that I'd like to ask him
if I ever met him
what about particular moments yeah like
what what he's trying to convey in that
usage but I really feel like we our
civilization has lost so much by the
abandonment of rules and one of the
interesting things and Nietzsche brings
out this this idea of the Apollonian and
Dionysian these two impulses we've
become such a Dionysian culture that
we've lost the importance of the
Apollonian that that there's a balance
between the two and wonderfully
portrayed in Sense and Sensibility
with these two Elinor and Marianne and
Austin does an incredible job at showing
us these two ways of being in the world
and and and how they're both in essence
flawed that you know the end where
there's a recognition of the other's
Worth and the beauty of the other that
need one of them they need one another
and and and I think we have an
interesting tradition in Islam in in
Sufism Tasso wolf which is that the
Sufis should be outwardly sober but
inwardly drunk or a static and and I
think that is is that incredible balance
of the Apollonian decorum the idea that
decorum is important I mean one of the
things that troubles me about modern
culture is the complete loss of decorum
mmm the importance of and Richard Weaver
I'm sure you're familiar with that the
ideas have consequences I think he was
really getting at the heart of the
crises that were suffering from in the
loss of a sense of hierarchy that all of
life has hierarchy and and to reduce and
level and I think that's one of the
things about free-verse to me it levels
it makes everybody a poet because
everybody can do it
and
and then you lose something in in in the
in in the discipline that that elevates
one over the other not in terms of a
kind of inherent superiority but in an
acquired superiority the the Confucian
idea of the superior man was a man who
had cultivated his character and his
being and and and that's I think we've
really lost that in our culture and and
and and i think i think that that loss
of meaningful life alive in a discipline
that actually accomplishments are are
something that are relished because they
were so hard-earned when everything
becomes easy when all information I mean
I can just look up the meaning of any
poem on the Internet I can find out what
meter it's in and what verse it's in and
I admitting Lee have done that before
well exactly but that something is
lauded when every well I share your
father's admiration for for Shakespeare
and the way that I would approach what
you're talking about which i think is
right and the loss of a sense of decorum
is a shame
unfortunately we think of decorum as
mere manners we don't think of it as an
ordering an ordering principle of some
of some kind but it's interesting that
one of the reasons that decorum got a
legitimately bad name is that it too
often was used to to support social
hierarchies but what's missed I think in
in decorum especially with respect to
how to train poets how to teach poets
how to write poetry how to teach people
how to read it is that the submission to
a superior artist is how unless her
artist becomes a greater artist and in
fact in in Shakespeare's own example
it's very easy to see that early in his
career he was heavily influenced by
Christopher Marlowe
and he took Marlo as an object of
imitation it's quite clear Marlowe in
great part because he died he died young
tends to have a verse less mature than
the most mature of Shakespearean verse
but I had had he lived we don't know
where he would have ended up that's
right and Shakespeare's own imitation of
Marlowe made it possible for him but to
begin to do things that Marlowe did
quite less quite less frequently so for
example a Shakespearean meter tends to
be much more regular in the early part
of his career and then he starts to
experiment with more and more
interesting metrical substitutions for
example the line changes so that
frequently he has end-stopped lines at
the beginning and relies much more
heavily on rhyme itself we think of him
always writing bankers when in fact
there's a great deal right
in the earlier frequently in the earlier
in the earlier work Romeo and Juliet for
example often has very interesting end
rhymes early early in the play and so
then you get this experiment with
enjambment that actually comes to define
the Shakespearean line which is really
quite distinct and so what I think we've
lost in in in the very loss of decorum
that Europe that you're talking about is
not the loss of submitting to
illegitimate social authority because
let it let it go but the submission to
legitimate artistic Authority in which
your training requires you to recognize
someone's artistic talent is so superior
to your own that you need to pay
attention to learn how to how to do that
and again intuitively we all we all know
this Aristotle says in the poetics that
the human being is the most mimetic of
animals right and he says something very
interesting that I've actually meditated
on my neurons we begin to actually
mirror the person we're sitting with
entrainment the hearts begin to beat in
in sync with the people we're standing
next
no exactly living together their their
their periods synchronized that's right
so that when young when young people are
actually trying to learn something of
course they imitate their heroes they
play their guitar like their favorite
hero does they hold the bat that way you
could always see a young person when
they're when they're imitates Dylan was
imitating James Dean Charlie Chaplin
that's exactly right
right but that is it so he became who he
was
yeah it wasn't just that he became that
but he became it by in a sense mastering
his master I once saw a documentary on
[Music]
one of my favorite there is this Hank
Williams and Hank Williams could imitate
these two singers and he said he
realized that he had to find his own
voice he said so I got right in between
their documentary they showed the two
singers and they blended their voice and
it was Hank Williams it's just amazing
remarkable so again mimesis like he was
a twin B goes in great detail about the
mimetic importance of mimesis in a
civilization that's that that I think is
the paradox of originality and of
finding ones there's not words you know
yeah
no that's right until one masters
another artist one is imitating and then
feels compelled to to innovate and at
that point I think newness is born the
truth of the matter is before
Shakespeare a Shakespearean line of
extraordinary metrical volatility and
varied pacing it jams right oh it's new
yeah it's new the language in languages
he invented words he constantly
inventing it was it was a new it was a
new language and then we think about
somebody like like Milton who's paying a
great deal of attention than to - to
Shakespeare much less so tomarlo
and he himself realizes that that
metrically volatile in jammed line is
something that he himself can do
in Paradise in Paradise Lost in his epic
poem but he there finds that the
Shakespearean syntax is not complicated
enough for the for the collections and
the actions that he wants to represent
and his own Latinate his own Latinate
training at university drives him to
then create a miltonic style that's
distinctly distinctly his own but I
agree the the liberal arts tradition is
a tradition that's ultimately liberated
but próxima discipline that's right
approximately it requires discipline and
and and submission and the submission
the submission to a discipline I think
is something that's a great gift to
young people whether it's the discipline
that music that's my pathetic sand
poetry because that kind of mastery
empowers them much more much more fully
than shall I put it less discipline for
sure forms of expression you know Frost
said life is a series of disciplines and
the first one is the acquisition of
language of words and even the nuances
of words and the means words and poets
great poets they know their words so
well and and and they and they and they
reveal that and you know Shakespeare
sister Mary and Joseph
I think compellingly shows the
indebtedness
of Shakespeare to artifice to to
mastering the the books of rhetoric of
his time and and Marshall McLuhan in his
book on the Trivium the listened
Elizabethan age which created the
greatest English literature that we have
was an age of rhetoric that's what they
were doing and and that's why I really
feel you know just to close this out I
think what you did with the office of
assertion because I'd been looking for a
book for freshmen because
there's a couple of things about our
college students today they don't know
English grammar because they didn't go
to grammar school which to me is a crime
against a young person and and two they
they really struggle with writing partly
because they don't know grammar but more
importantly because they don't know
topics of invention they don't know how
ideas are generated and the the
discipline of rhetoric and what you did
with that very short but incredibly rich
little book was to really give a student
in a very short and concise way the
essence of writing a good essay and I
think the essay in the end about
Telemachus and and from from the Odyssey
is proof in the pudding so I appreciate
that agree - yeah yeah no I mean that's
how we ended up connecting and and
you've now written for the journal and
hopefully it'll you know it'll continue
the dialogue so I want to really thank
you just for coming out or hear it at
the upper campus at Zaytuna College and
and I also for inviting me out to the
University of Dallas I really enjoyed it
your hospitality was wonderful and
meeting all those people and hopefully
we'll do that again here something
similar to that so we hope so and I
wanted to thank you and the community
had Zaytuna or for having me today it
was a delight yeah great all right
[Music]
you
[Music]
From <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vwze1G9y-A>