Free verse and speech

Explorations in Media Ecology

Volume 21 Numbers 2 & 3  

© 2022 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00127_1

Received 1 July 2021; Accepted 1 December 2021

VYACHESLAV KUPRIYANOV

Independent Scholar

Free verse and speech  

texture

ABSTRACT  

Based on the theories of Yuri Rozhdestvensky, this article considers vers libres a ‘third’ genre: neither prose nor poetry, but a separate artistic form where prose and poetry intersect. As other types of speech, free verse is influenced by the changes in communication technologies. Using representative examples of Russian free verse, the article studies this influence. It traces the correlations between Russian vers libres and oral genres, including proverbs and fables, and between vers libre and written genres, specifically sacred texts: psalms and prayers. It explains the influence of print technology on free verse, shows that prose printed texts can be close to free verse, and explains why scientific texts, even well written, cannot. It demonstrates how Russian verlibrists responded to mass media styles and pres sures, highlighting the use of irony. The patterns and regularities observed for the Russian material may be applicable to free verse in other languages, pending further research.

INTRODUCTION: A DEFINITION OF FREE VERSE

Traditionally, free verse is considered a type of poetry. However, Yuri Rozhdestvensky1 suggested that it could be considered an intermediate genre between poetry and prose. Such separation is useful in understanding the nature of free verse. This section explains the logic of Rozhdestvensky’s proposal.

According to Rozhdestvensky, the nature of language allows three ways to ‘condense’ sound: a syllable, a word and a sentence. The term ‘condense’ was  

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KEYWORDS  

free verse

communication technologies

oral speech

folklore

mass media

written genres

cognitive plenitude

1. For more  

information about  

Rozhdestvensky’s  

works, see Hazanova (forthcoming), and  

Polski and Gorman  

(2011).

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Vyacheslav Kupriyanov

suggested by Rozhdestvensky in 1981 (personal correspondence). The basis of the first type of ‘condensation’ is a syllable. A regulated number of stressed and unstressed syllables forms a line, at the end of which there may be a rhyme. This is traditional poetry, or syllabic verse. The basis of the second type is a sentence or a phrase with a logical or phrasal stress on one of the words. This is prose, which (like poems) can be both artistic (novels, short stories) and non-artistic (business  

or scientific prose). The basis of the third type is a word. In an ideal case, each word of such text is distinguished and logically stressed. This is free verse.

In free verse, concentrated logical stresses require a special attitude to the  

choice of words, to their distribution relating to one another, to a stronger link of the logical (the notional) in the language with the figurative. Free verse recorded in the form of a poem might be defined as a verse with stress on each word. Estonian poet Arvo Mets thought the same: ‘[f]ree verse is a qualitative leap – a transition from a syllable style of speech towards the new element – to the element of a fully meaningful word. Any meaningful word becomes the base, the unit of free verse’ (Mets n.d.: n.pag.). A word exists in free verse in a more poetic way than in prose, and in a more prosaic way than in poetry.

The word is, in fact, a more primal way to organize speech than the other  

two. Consider the example from The Gospel According to John:

In the beginning was the Word,

And the Word was with God,

And the Word was God.

(John 1: 1, 1985)

Here the Word is defined through God, God is defined through the Word, and ‘being’ itself (verb ‘was’) – through the formation of the Word by means of God. If we do not count the conjunctions ‘and’, prepositions ‘in’ and ‘with’ and articles ‘the’, then there are six words, and ‘Word’ is repeated three times, ‘was’ three times and ‘God’ two times. It creates a ‘word-by-word’, semantic rhythm. ‘The Word’ turns into a hyperonym.

According to Rozhdestvensky’s idea, if poetry and prose are to be distin

guished, then there should be such texts which could simultaneously be both poetry and prose, not poetry and not prose, and at the same time remain fiction without a transition to scientific or magazine literature. Free verse turns out to be this ‘third’ type of speech. I would define free verse as an artistic genre symmetrical to prose regarding poetry. Here we state for the first time the triunity of artistic speech and that free verse is a separate third genre.

In his Theory of Rhetoric Rozhdestvensky finds a worthy place for it:

Free verse is a metrical construction, but metre is created not by a sound,  

but by a regular repetition of lexical units becoming synonymous – of  

words and word combinations. Such a group of synonyms forms an  

inner semantic metre when the reader’s and the listener’s attention is  

concentrated on a mental operation of realizing the hyperonyms which  

are not named but are presented in the text by a selection of a number of  

synonyms. Hymnographic texts are constructed this way. Consider the  

prayer to the Saints Cyril and Methodius (written in lines like prose, but  

here we arrange the text in poetic lines according to semantic clauses):

[As equal to the Apostles]

[and teachers of Slavonic countries]

[God-wise Cyril and Methodius]

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[Pray to the Lord of all]

[Establish all the Slavonic tongues in the Orthodoxies and  

like-mindedness]

[pacify the world and rescue the souls of ours]

Brackets mark the synonymic rows that form a semantic metre.

[…] Hymnography is the most difficult kind of text, as the selection  

of synonyms should state the main hyperonym’s signs which present  

the essence of an idea and reality. The superposition of a hyperonym,  

whether it is evident or non-evident, conscious or subconscious, makes  

up the ‘correctness of thought’.

(1997: 244–45)

The rest of this article will accept this definition of free verse as a third genre of artistic speech, one predicated on the value of lexical units.

In line with media ecology theory, we believe that all genres of speech  

are influenced by the appearance of new communication media. According to Rozhestvensky (1996, 1997), each speech technology introduces an additional set of speech types, including new artistic genres. For example, the flourish

ing of the novel as a genre was enabled by the print technology, while fables and proverbs are uniquely suited to oral communication; personal letters are a phenomenon which is possible only after the invention of writing. The appearance of new communication media also changes the previously exist

ing genres: each new medium influences the text systems in the old media, changing their semantics and structure, and remediates existing text types.

With that in mind, we will explore the role of different communication  

technologies in the development of free verse. While the examples will mainly come from Russian, we think that the ideas below may be applicable to vers libres in other languages, too, which is a subject for further research.

FREE VERSE AND ORAL SPEECH

In this section we consider the connection between free verse and oral genres: fables and proverbs (paroemia).

Fables and fairy tales

In the 1980s, Rozhdestvensky chaired the Department of General and Comparative Linguistics at Moscow Lomonosov University; seminars were held there for students and post-graduate students on ‘composing free verses’. Students were shown that vers libres may grow out of a fairy tale, out of the typical fairy tale figures where animals are personified and ‘stand for’ human qualities. For models, they selected Vyacheslav Kupriyanov’s texts from The Beasts’ Cycle: ‘How to become a giraffe’, ‘How to become a porcupine’ and in conclusion – ‘How to become a man’:

How to become a man

Stop

crawling

to save

your hide.

Stop

trying

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Vyacheslav Kupriyanov

to fleece others.

Don’t let others

crawl

before you.

Tell yourself one more time:

stop crawling

to save

your hide.

Stop

trying

to fleece others.

Now try to become a man.

For a start,

try putting yourself

in everyone else’s

skins.

(Kupriyanov 1992: 83)

Kupriyanov’s ‘beast’ texts can be traced to the earliest of speech textures – to the oral one, and they can be connected with the folklore tradition. ‘How to become a man’ can be defined as ‘a fable free verse’. According to Potebnjya (2007), fables emerge from folklore, proverbs and sayings. He stated: ‘in some cases, short folklore genres are a rolled up form of exten

sive genres’ (2007: 137). Rozhdestvensky considered these fables fit for extracting poetic sense from physical properties of representatives of the animal kingdom.

For example, Kupriyanov’s ‘Song of the Wolf’ connects with the impres

sions from Siberian tales of his childhood:

The song of a wolf

I am the wolf wolf

I am the winter night wolf wolf

My footsteps serve the spirit of snow

I am the master of crackling someone’s bones

It was I who blew freezing stars

Upon your window glass

While you slept in a dream

I howled the full moon into the sky

When you still couldn’t look up at the sky

It was I who taught you to fear evening trees

It was I who charmed you from dangerous games with one’s shadow

It was I who prompted you to be in a pack

I am the wolf wolf

I am the winter night wolf

I am going from you into your winter tale.

(Kupriyanov 1992: 81)

Paroemia

Oral speech also provides us with paroemia as the seeds of future vers libres. Mikhail Gasparov reminds us:

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These are shrivelled up proverbs: ‘[…] Hunger breaks stone walls’. ‘One  

hand washes the other’. ‘Neither fish nor fowl’. ‘The belly has no ears’.  

‘The first blow is half the battle’. ‘A penny saved is a penny earned’. I.e.  

today we remember only scraps of oral maxims, we forget how a saying  

continues leading to a meaningful proverb, almost to an aphorism.

(2001: n.pag.)

Rozhdestvensky spoke about speech erudition which can, relying on oral clichés, either adorn a text or construct an absolutely new text. Our contempo

rary’s arsenal has fewer and fewer of these cultural clichés; oral speech of a mass communicant is poorer than the speech of a ‘folklore’ character. Russian free verse, on the other hand, rests on paroemia, not allowing a literary text to be trivialized to the level of everyday speech. A contemporary reader, unfortunately, misses folklore allusions. For instance, here is a critic’s misunderstanding of Kupriyanov’s vers libres playing on the Latin proverb ‘Homo homini lupus est’:

In the section ‘In Anyone’s Tongue’ each poem (except for the first one)  

begins with the words ‘in the tongue’ and then it is revealed in the  

tongue of whom or what it is said: of water, of fire, of birds, of snakes.  

For example:

in the tongue of wolves

we are

humans

to one another

[Here is an aphorism of a strange nature, it literally makes you get the  

feel of the suggested ‘we’. The well-known winged expression becomes  

a pretext to another one in which the mentioned creatures become the  

judges of the speaker…]

[…] But there is a question: whether these generalized we,  

mentioned by Kupriyanov not once, are perceived as humans by wolves,  

if wolves are not able to speak and to think like humans? Apparently, it’s  

impossible to answer this question.

(A. Chipiga 2020: n.pag.)

Here, the critic understands the text literally, as ‘everyday speech’, i.e. ‘the wolves’ are just mute beasts for him, but not an image with its folklore history.

In one of Kupriyanov’s free verses In Some Trading World… paroemia are  

used several times for an ironic presentation of ‘a wrong speech behavior’, under the conditions of mass communication. In the example below, a sales ad (the text type that is not supposed to be fully trusted) entangles in the minds of its consumers with wisdom of folklore in a ridiculous way, and the senseless inferences about buying an extra-head are made:

Artificial heads

are on sale.

Before the headless heard the news,

the big heads lapped up all

and declared:

TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

and, moreover, one can now

SHIFT THE BLAME FROM A SICK HEAD ON TO A HEALTHY ONE…

(Kupriyanov 2019: 27)

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Whether the contemporary reader understands the allusions or not, free verse preserves and is made richer by its connection to the oral genres. We have shown that modern Russian free verse has been saturated with the semantics of oral speech, specifically, fable, fairy-tale and paroemia. The fable provides free verse with its animalistic imagery and moral judgements expressed in a humoristic, ironical tone; from the fairy-tale, vers libre derives its narrative features; the paroemia endows verse libre with its folk wisdom formulated in a metaphorical and often paradoxical way. Within vers libre, folk semantics can easily build in and interplay with the semantics of other media, mass commu

nication, in particular, and thus produce an ironic effect based on medley semantic elements.

FREE VERSE AND WRITING

Let us consider three examples to see the similarity between sacral texts (the product, mainly, of the written stages of communication) and free verse.

In the 1920s, Vladimir Vinogradov noted in the chapter about the Archpriest  

Avvakum’s style:

we come across it either in the prayers addressed to God, or in the  

‘akathists’ addressed to Avvakum: the syntactical rows undergo a more  

complicated artistic-rhythmic order, forming what we might call vers  

libres, where we can find the division into stanzas, a dactyl closing each  

stanza, and generally a whole arsenal of poetic devices. For example,  

such is Avvakum’s prayer that he ‘was shouting with a yell towards  

God’ – reminiscent of psalms:

Hear me,

King of Heaven Light,

Hear me!

Let not a single of them ever return back

And do settle a coffin there for all of them!

Attach evil to them,

O Lord, do attach it,

And inflict ruination on them.

Let the Devilish prophecy never come true

(1963: 37–38)

Similarly, St. Basil the Great in his ‘Interpretations on Psalter’ showed the way of composing psalms which reads like the instructions to compose vers libre:

The superiority of Psalms can be cognized either through the matter,  

or through the image, or through the kind of writing. For the book  

of Psalms appears as if a condensed content of the Old Testament.  

Whatever Moses conveyed in History, or ordered in the Law, and  

whether any prophets admonished to virtues or prophesied the future,  

all this David got into the Psalms in the briefest way […]

Nevertheless, all this is expressed not by a simple narration, but by  

various versification skills, by important word-combinations, by wonder

ful metaphors and by some new kind of speaking, and love and praise

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towards God captivates souls so much, that it is impossible to glorify  

and to hear anything sweeter or more salutary.

(Svyatitel Vasilyi Velikyi n.d.: n.pag.)

Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan poet, modernized David’s Psalm – with regard for mass communication:

Psalm 1

Blessed is the man that followeth not

the Party’s slogans

nor sitteth at the meetings of the mean ones

nor at the same table with gangsters

nor with Generals at a military council

Blessed is the man that shall not spy on his neighbours

Nor informeth on his classmates

Blessed is the man that readeth not

commercials

nor listeneth to them on the radio

nor believeth their lies

And he shall be as a tree

Planted by the rivers of water.

(Cardenal n.d.: n.pag.)

Traditionally, the birthdate of free verse is considered to be the twentieth century; however, one could argue that its model is a sacral text, the hymnog

raphy. And this verse was born directly from sacral prose, bypassing the rhymed metrical songs of the pagans. It was born as a more precise defini

tion of poetics, but not as ‘a destruction’ of a traditional verse, which is the view of those who do not know how to deal with fine words in a worthy way, and of those for whom free verse means a simplification of poetics and poetry. However, free verse is probably more complicated than prose. In St. Basil’s ‘Interpretations on Psalter’ much is said about repetitions, now called paral

lelism. The text is constructed as redundant on purpose; repetition appears through negation (‘Blessed is the man that walketh not…, nor standeth…, nor sitteth…’); then through the statement (‘But his delight is in the law…’) and then through likeness (‘And he shall be like a tree…’). What a fine and strict construction! We can also say that a syllogism is hidden in the Psalms; psalms are logical, and therefore persuasive.

Thus, through psalms and other sacred texts, written speech can be said to  

have formed the vers libres syntaxis (repetitions) and gave an ethical compo

nent to the content.

FREE VERSE AND PRINT

Print technology introduced two innovations which were key for free verse: separating words from one another (unlike in handwritten manuscripts), and positioning lines in a column, i.e. in the familiar way we see poetry now. Printed speech maintains the sacral content of the written texts; writ

ten sources are translated from sacral languages into national languages, hymnography starts forming literature, there appear free verses of such poets as Hoelderlin in Germany, Sumarokov in Russia (versification of Psalms) or Whitman in America… Free verse may seem to be a bearer of poetic innova

tions, but only if its background has been forgotten.

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At the same time, by expanding the reach of scientific and technical texts,  

the printing press creates a tension between the artistic and sacral versus the technical.

Artistic prose and free verse

Print technology allows us to look at borderline texts: artistic prose bordering on free verse. In the article ‘Where, after all, the nature of Russian poetry is, and where its peculiarity is’, Nikolay Gogol writes:

for many of us, there is something mysterious about this extraordinary  

lyricism, born by the superior sobriety of mind, – the lyricism that comes  

from our church songs and canons and the dear sounds of our songs are  

so involuntarily touching for our hearts.

(Gogol 1952: 369)

(What an exact definition by Gogol it is – ‘the superior sobriety of mind!’)  

Consider the following examples of prose, created to be printed, which can be transcribed as free verse.

Here is a famous text by Gogol, his description of the river Dnieper, tran

scribed as an imitation of a Psalm:

The Dnieper is Miraculous

Miraculous is the Dnieper

When it doesn’t divide its majestic breadth

Into the left and the right halves

Miraculous is the Dnieper when

A rare bullet can reach

Its golden mean

Miraculous is the Dnieper in all weathers

When its waters don’t play

Into profanes’ hands

Miraculous is the Dnieper

And blessed is the man

As he divideth not

Into the left and right

The majestic breadth

Of his Slavonic soul

(Kupriyanov 2021: n.pag.)

And here is a Dostoyevsky example. In his novel The Idiot, Dostoyevsky speaks through the words of prince Myshkin and I transcribe this text as ‘free verse’:

Since then I’ve had a terrible fondness for asses.

It’s even some sort of sympathy in me.

I began inquiring about them,

because I’d never seen them before,

and I became convinced at once

that they’re most useful animals,

hardworking, strong, patient, cheap, enduring;

and because of that ass I suddenly

took a liking to the whole of Switzerland,

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so that my former sadness went away entirely.

……………………………………………….

But all the same I stand up for the ass:

an ass is a kind and useful fellow.

(Dostoyevsky n.d.: n.pag.)

Here an ironic transformation of ‘an ass’ into ‘a man’ takes place, where irony is a poetic trope; it is a kind of fable without any special moral.

Let us consider some texts by Dostoyevsky from ‘The Writer’s Diary’. From  

notebook no. 1/3 (Central Archives, f.212), transcribed in ‘free verse’ form, following the wave of rhythm caught by intuition:

Passionate and wild impulses.

Neither coldness, nor disappointment,

nothing of what was set going by Byron.

Excessive and insatiable lust for delights.

Lust for life that is unquenchable.

A variety of delights and quenching.

A perfect awareness and analysis of every delight

without any fear that it becomes weaker as it is based

on the legal need of the nature itself, of the body.

The delights are so artistic, almost sophisticated and beside them

there are the rough ones, but exactly because excessive roughness

comes into contact with sophistication. (A severed head)

Psychological delights.

Delights from a criminal violation of all the laws.

Mystical delights (of fear, of night).

Delights of repentance, of monastery.

(Of a severe fasting and a prayer).

Beggarly delights (of begging alms)

Delight from Rafael’s Madonna.

Delights of theft,

delights of robbery,

delights of suicide.

Delights of good deeds…

(Dostoyevsky 1935: n.pag.)

Rozhdestvensky argued that free verse was a ‘lexical entry’. Here, Dostoyevsky gives a poetic and prosaic definition of ‘a delight’. We observe a play of contrasts, a collision of opposites, and all of it awakens emotions, not least of them being the intellectual effort, the strain of thought. In order to put it down as a free verse one should correctly choose the pauses according to the rhythm and the sense. Within the limits of taste, the artist’s intuition, the whims of the operative memory and the author’s scheme, an artistic text is endless inside itself through the infiniteness of its esthetic task. The scheme invents an emotion for itself; the emotion responds to the sense.

Here is an example from Walt Whitman, where the word ‘America’ is thus  

treated:

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,

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Vyacheslav Kupriyanov

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

(Whitman n.d.: n.pag.)

Business and scientific prose vs. free verse

In addition to literary artistic prose, printed speech enhances scientific and business prose. There are eccentric people among prosody specialists who claim that any text written in ‘a column’ is ‘free verse’. However, not every text is ready to become like ‘a column’, and not every column is a work of art. Let us oppose this ‘condensed’ text by Dostoeyvsky to an equally ‘condensed’ text without any claim to poeticism, an extract from Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’:

And if all craves for delight, then delight according to its kind should be  

a blessing. Besides, delight was not recognized as a blessing because it  

was a hindrance. Delight was made to be called a hindrance probably  

because of a wrong way of studies [...]. Indeed, delight from doing a  

job is not a hindrance for it, but if it is a delight from something else,  

then there is a hindrance; for example, delight from hard drinking is a  

hindrance for a job.

(Aristotle n.d. 188–89)

Here the philosopher (a prose-writer!) finds a notional sense for the key word ‘delight’; emotional splashes are absent. This passage does not mean to be included in the verse record; the pauses here will coincide with punctuation marks. But Dostoyevsky distributes ‘passions’ enumerating their shades; his speech can be written as poetic using the emotional strain of the ‘key’ word. His words are more ponderable. With Aristotle, it is different: his is a reason

able business speech.

Let us consider the difference between ‘non-artistic’ speech of good qual

ity, and texts in free verse. Here is a text from training regulations:

The bolt’s function is:

to send the cartridge into its chamber,

to lock the channel of the barrel,

to produce a shot,

to throw out the fired cartridge.

(Zatvor n.d.: n.pag.)

This is an example of business prose written down by a ‘clicker’. Here the action of the bolt is exhausted, its idea is exhausted and it is hardly possible to continue it ‘for ever and ever’. The subject matter of this text defines not only its borders, but also a clear word order; otherwise, the essence of the described action will be misrepresented. Such are directions, instructions, recipes, regu

lations, etc. It is obvious that the ‘idea of delight’ or ‘the idea of disappearance’ in an artistic text cannot be so definitively exhausted.

Free verse, however, is capable of embracing scientific and technical termi

nology which usually looks out of place in rhymed poetry. As an illustration, here is Kupriyanov’s imitation of Whitman:

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I sing the electronic body

Until the high-precision instruments kill me

with electricity in the barbed wire

I bethunder the world with the power

 of my electronic voice

singing my electronic body

shot through with sharp rays of invisible light,

packed tight with the particles of its own shadow,

the shadow that swoons inside its own body,

a body that passes through all the worldwide networks unseen and  

unscathed,

a body absorbed in itself, sane and sensible, sober, well-tempered,

drifting among other such self-connected bodies,

I sing the body that sends succinct and precise signals

to all other bodies whose souls are comfortably lodged in them,

dancing, singing and accepting you,

and nurturing their singing electronic souls.

Oh my body, so noble and impregnable,

successfully fitting within and filling the space assigned to it,

where another content body can readily see your satisfied body

legally obscuring all the earthly landscapes,

cheerfully submerging into the sea that you have yet to drink up,

confidently inhaling the sky that you have yet to eat,

while this sky inevitably fills up with your earthly dream,

the electronic body’s dream of ever more advanced,

 ever more refined technologies

carrying you higher and higher through insignificant alien stars

into whichever newer and newer dimensions,

overcoming all that is seen and bypassing the unseen,

where now and always and forever keeping watch over beloved you

is your personal trusty bodyguard angel.

(Kupriyanov 2019: 509–10)

Thus, print technology may be said to have enhanced the vers libre possi

bilities. According to Rozhdestvensky (1996, 1997), print introduced three new speech types: scientific, journalistic literature and belles lettres. Free verse got nurtured with the semantics of all speech types that arrived with print: the scientific with its sophisticated terminology and syntax; the journalistic with its ideas of variety, novelty and constant change; and, of course, with the belle lettres whose artistism was tremendously enhanced by print.

FREE VERSE AND MASS COMMUNICATION

This section addresses the influence of mass communication on literary language, the reaction of Soviet mainstream poets to mass communication, the reaction of Russian verlibrists to mass communication and the role free verse might play in counterbalancing the effects of mass communication.

On the influence of the style of mass communication on literature

Rozhdesvensky said about the mass-media time: books make a man clever, and newspapers make him nervous. Film, with its technique of montage, and television, with its rule of accessibility (the lowest common denominator),

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Vyacheslav Kupriyanov

make traditional poetry even more nervous. Free verse, however, is less confined by these new conditions. Russian free verse attempts to maintain the traditional ethical impulse and uses irony as defence against the dictatorship of transitoriness in mass media. Such is Kupriyanov’s verse ‘Mass Media’:

Mass Media

Global

guff

traverses

the great ocean

Intercontinental

nonsense

runs between

the east and the west

Super highway

misunderstandings

cross

all the borders

The world’s sense

of moderation

is in transatlantic

trance

(Kupriyanov 2019: n.pag.)

Marshall McLuhan states in his Understanding Media:

Poets and artists give instantaneous feedback on the emergence of new  

means of mass communication like, for example, radio or television.  

Radio, gramophone and tape-recorder gave us back the voice of a poet  

as an important measuring of a poetic experience.

(1964: 90)

We may add YouTube to this list: today we interpret poetic texts presented through video recordings to understand the poet’s design from the way they recite their texts. Such orientation towards ‘the voice’ urges the author towards everyday speech; when accumulated in a book, such speech may become less impressive. One could argue that mass communication brings forward pedes

trian everyday speech. Hence, we have ‘A poet’s vacation’ by Alexei Alyokhin (2001), a consistent vers librist:

A regular French park resembles a sonnet.

An English one – a prudent disorder of free verse.

For the whole August I was editing a dacha’s patch of land: weeding

spondees, sowing pyrrhics, cutting caesuras with a pruner. Here and  

there I used a saw

to divide stanzas.

All the same, later it will be overgrown with everyday speech.

(Aloykhin 2001: n.pag.)

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Free verse and speech texture

Mass communication can be easily overgrown with oral everyday speech, which we already mentioned in connection with forgetting folklore. This is the culture of social media and smartphones, it is communicating with like

minded persons, with ‘the close ones’, it promotes not thinking but exchanging rumours and gossip, and the distance of communicating with ‘the distant ones’ becomes longer. In this culture, speech is a tool. Hence, there are ‘“common life” free verses’, everyday narratives that do not rest upon theexperiencee of the written language and book-printing. For some, it becomes a convenient way of writing down their prose.

Mainstream poets of the second half of the twentieth century, at least in  

Russia, are integrated into mass communication:

• ‘Evtushenko reminds me of television’ – the critic Lesnevsky wrote about the foremost poet of that generation (in Kupriyanov 2013: 216).

• The poet Voznesensky argues: ‘[d]oes the invention of TV rival the book? Thank God if it does. In the beginning was a Word. And who said that  

word should be only a written one?’ (in Kupriyanov 2013: 230).

• In Kurpiyanov’s novel ‘Empedocles’ Shoe’, McLuhan’s ‘global village’ is placed in the mouth of the main character:

I am the last poet of the electronic village! Nowadays we see the  

language dropping behind art more and more, dropping behind culture  

in general, and then the need for it will fall away. What’s the use of it if  

we can communicate silently, watching jointly the same video clip.

(2013: 230–31)

• Literature of mass communication is done, first of all, for feeling, or, as McLuhan says – for effect, which results in the negative attitude to intelli

gence: ‘[i]t is silly to believe reason, it is silly to argue with it’ (Voznesensky  

in Kupriyanov 2013: 230). ‘We think – does it mean that we live? No, we  

suffer – that means we live!’ (Evtushenko in Kupriyanov 2013: 231).

Voznesensky says about his acquaintance with Marshall McLuhan, unhelp

fully illustrating McLuhan’s cryptic writing with his own and Khlebnikov’s cryptic comments:

For some people he is an oracle, for others he is an electronic shaman, but  

he amazed everyone by his books about the influence of mass commu

nication on humans. He presented me with his latest book Counterblast

which says a lot about the word and its inscription. […] In a conversation  

he is as clear and metaphorical as algebra. It’s hardly possible that he  

read Khlebnikov, but the key to McLuhan is in Khlebnikov’s statement:  

‘Here is mankind of numbers armed with both an equation of death and  

an equation of morals, it reflects by seeing, not by hearing’.

(Vosnesensky 2021: n.pag.)

But these are the authors who have been noticed by mass information with gratitude, and these are the authors who were and still are ‘on TV’, and about whom movies were made. They joined the ‘mosaic’ of culture of the second half of the twentieth century through their ‘mosaic’ texts.

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Vyacheslav Kupriyanov

On the other hand, film effects must have made men of letters feel as  

suffering targets: ‘Ignorance shoots us…’, ‘Maturity – is a kind of shooting’ (Evtushenko quoted in Kupriyanov 2013: n.pag.); ‘I am waiting for the night as  

if to be shot’, ‘I am sentenced’ (Robert Rozhdestvensky quoted in Kupriyanov 2013: n.pag.). The authors – ‘mass communicants’, as Yuri Rozhdestvensky called them – similarly speak about shame and conscience which are regula

tors of behavior: ‘[f]urious conscience will quarter you by each syllable again and again’, ‘[g]hostly frost covers my shameless brain’ (Robert Rozhdestvensky quoted in Kupriyanov 2013: n.pag.); ‘[w]e live not getting ready to die, there

fore we forget about shame, but at every cross-roads there is conscience standing as an invisible Madonna’ (Evtushenko quoted in Kupriyanov 2013: n.pag.); ‘[a]nd what if it is my conscience, which I have lost?’ (Voznesensky quoted in Kupriyanov 2013: n.pag.).

We find almost no film- or TV-evidence of the ‘quiet lyric poets’, who were  

still close to folklore or written culture, nor of the vers libres authors, who, in Soviet Union, were beginners at that time (not noticed and not published almost till the mid-1980s) and who contradicted the ‘mosaic’ culture either intuitively or consciously. It was taken by the authorities as an opposition to the official Soviet art.

Russian verlibrists and mass communication

One of the most influential authors among The Sixtiers (the cultural elite of Soviet Union whose world-view formed in the 1940s–50s and who dominated the cultural scene in the second half of the twentieth century) is Vladimir Burich. He says: ‘[f]rom the esthetic point of view, conventional verses are a specific expression of the category of artificiality (one shouldn’t put a nega

tive meaning into this word), and free verse is an expression of the esthetic category of naturalness’ (Burich 1982: 77). Burich is an expressly bookish poet; he considers the ‘book’ language to be natural and orderly.

Burich was among the first ones in Russian and world poetry who, even in  

the 1950s, consciously wanted to find in poems some devices protecting them from the destructive influence of mass media. ‘Creative work’, Burich stated in contrast to the ‘Russian beatniks’ Evtushenko and Voznesensky, ‘should accompany books and the whole book culture. Creative work helps to escape bookishness, but books help to get concentrated and collected. Otherwise one might perish. And they do perish’ (Burich n.d.: n.pag.).

Free verse as counterbalance to mass communication

Free verse of the second half of last century appeared in answer to the raging of mass information, whether it was propaganda or the violence of instru

mental music. It reached out to the book intuitively, but the book was already closed for it. This is its difference from the free verse of the beginning of the twenty-first century. Burich used to say: ‘we are ethical poets, or – “esthetic dissidents”’. He left this vers libre ‘Chronicle’ in his notebooks:

Yesterday as always

I waited

for the advent of Christ

(1989: n.pag.)

In his first book (Texts) Burich shocked his contemporaries by other maxims, e.g.:

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Free verse and speech texture

What do I expect from tomorrow?

Newspapers.

(1989: n.pag.)

Such is the aphorism from mass information! It is related to Rozhdestvensky’s observation about the mass-media times: books make people smart, and newspapers make them nervous. But still, Burich followed the path of book

ish, ‘scientific’ culture, as evidenced by the titles of Burich’s free verses (1989): ‘Adaptation’, ‘Transplantation’, ‘The Formula of Hunting’, ‘The Theoreme of Anguish’, ‘Escalation’, ‘Stagnation’, ‘Syringomyelia’, ‘Migration’, ‘Concepts’. He references scientific, philosophical subjects.

Kirby-Smith (1998) says that good free verse appears as a reaction  

against a set of established conventions. This may be the reason why irony remains the main trope of verslibrists. Burich, in his poem ‘Urban Commandments’, thus describes the ‘path of a citizen’ in the web of mass media cliches:

Leaving I turn all the lights off

I cross the street at the intersections

First look to my left then

reaching the divider – to my right

Watching out for the oncoming traffic

I am careful of the falling leaves

I don’t smoke

I don’t litter

I don’t walk on the grass

I wash my fruit before eating it

Boil my water before drinking

Brush my teeth before going to sleep

Don’t read in the dark and laying low this way

Have lived to a respectable old age

So what good’s come of it? What to do now?

Keep all my dough in a savings account?

(1989: n.pag.)

As another illustration of irony, here is a excerpt from Kupriyanov’s In Some Trading World… cycle:

Finally they announced

in the latest newspapers:

HAVE SOME CONSCIENCE!

While the unscrupulous deliberated –

Why the hell do we need this CONSCIENCE! –

the scrupulous appropriated it all

affirming:

we have after all

FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE,

so now we

WILL HAVE CONSCIENCE

ENOUGH TO SELL

(Kupriyanov 2019: 28)

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Vyacheslav Kupriyanov

Burich wrote in Texts: ‘[l]ooking for a philosophical basis for art, I created a new philosophical doctrine – adaptationism, built on the absolutization of physiological and psychological adaptation’ (1989: n.pag.). In Notebooks he writes: ‘[p]oetry is a way of re-creation and creation of the psychological adap

tation model’ (Burich n.d.: 91). Here is his verse ‘Adaptation’:

We mill and file things a bit

for the hand not to chafe

we whittle things a bit

for the knee not to scratch

we touch up and paint things a bit

to not offend the eye

we bolt and screw a bit

seam and suture

tie together

insulate

Thus we pass the life

making prosthetics

for our senses

(Burich 1989: n.pag.)

Parenthetically, media ecologists will notice here an interesting parallel between Burich’s free verse ‘Adaptation’ and McLuhan’s concept of extension and amputation.

Burich considered free verse poems to be a way of cultural adaptation in a  

culture-hostile environment. In this sense he could be considered an ecologist of poetry.

The hybrid mosaic text of mass information corresponds to postmodern

ism in literature, which deconstructs traditional culture, namely the written (sacral) and print cultures. Such are the contemporary postmodern prose and  

rhymed poetry. They use quotes from the classics to discredit the classics. This is the road towards dehumanization of the classics. Rozhdestvensky writes about the composite mass information texts:

The possibility to divide the text into fragments, as well as cross citation  

and retelling, presupposes that the text is the sum of its parts, without  

any elements that are more than the sum of the parts. Such a text as a  

whole would not contain the artistic literary image of the author.

(1996: 244)

This provides an explanation for Roland Barthes’s ‘Death of the author’! The author attempts to stay outside the text, and the postmodernist technique is to use scandal as the advertisement for the ‘dead’ author.

Vers libres, at least in its Russian tradition, through its emotional sobri

ety attempts to find equilibrium in the mutinous literature, by falling back on the balanced world-view, often under the guise of healthy irony. Russian–

American poet Ian Probstein, the translator of English modern classics Pound and Eliot, in his vers libre ‘A Parable’ paradoxically depicts the postmodern world-view according to Cain, where even the Bible is rewritten by Cain:

For Charles Bernstein

‘A one man show’, said Cain,

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Free verse and speech texture

as he multiplied seven by seven by seven.

Thus he walked, and multiplied

until he composed the multiplication table,

the system of measures and weights,

the periodic table of Mendeleyev,

discovered the theories of probability and relativity,

split the atom, executed tests at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

and at leisure remembered Abel and wrote memoirs.

He also wrote the Bible. At leisure.

To teach others a lesson.

(Probstein 2019: 80)

CONCLUSIONS AND OBSERVATIONS

This work, based mainly on Russian-lanugage material, investigated the media’s influence in the field of free verse, where poetry and prose intersect. It is shown how the new media affect any kind of word, both prosaic and poetic, having an influence on their content and form.

How does modern free verse contribute to the ‘ecology’ of literature and  

philology in general? By its practice, free verse only confirms that oral, writ

ten and printed speech give it their positive patterns to enable it to exist in the sphere of mass communication which is not always favourable for crea

tive work. Each of the old media, through their characteristic/peculiar speech genres, send philosophical charge and inspiration to free verse, utilizing the latter as a most comfortable vehicle of their remediation. This finding can be extended to the study of other literary genres from the point of view of their potential to remediate and/or serve as a ‘vessel’ of remediation. It may also bring us to a better understanding of media capabilities of generating peculiar literary forms and genres, with their special features.

Besides, the correlation of poems and prose changes, which is not imme

diately understood by men of letters and critics. To the authors of prose, it gives an opportunity to get closer to poetry and to embody in a fine way the thesis about briefness being talent’s sister.

It gives another, third opportunity to the knights of the pen hesitating at  

the cross-roads between the long way of prose and the bumps of poetry.

Modern free verse in its best patterns is worth including in the school  

curriculum, contrasting it with the primitive hybrid texts of mass communica

tion and with the noise of kids’ rock. Both mass communication genres and free verse are multimedia by their nature, i.e. embrace the features of oral, written, printed and mass communication in their totality. However, only free verse demonstrates elegant artistic forms of thought expression, unique in their conciseness and cognitive plenitude.

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SUGGESTED CITATION

Kupriyanov, Vyacheslav (2022), ‘Free verse and speech texture’, Explorations in Media Ecology, 21:2&3, pp. 157–75, https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00127_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Kupriyanov is a Russian poet, novelist and short story writer. He has played a central role in developing vers libre tradition in Russia since the 1970s, and translated the poetry of W. Whitman, R. M. Rilke and many other European poets. His awards include European Literature Prize, 1988, Yugoslavia; Branko

Radicevic Prize, 2006, Serbia; Bunin Prize, 2010, Mayakovsky Prize, 2011, and Poet of the Year 2012, Russia; Prize ‘European Atlas of Poetry’, Serbia; Naji Naaman literary prize, Japan, 2018; Sahitto International Award for Literature, 2021, Bangladesh; and Golden Key of Smederevo, Serbia, 2021. Kupriyanov’s collections of vers libre include Echo (1989), Better Times (2003) and Contradictions (2019). Translations of his poems were published in the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation; In Anyone’s Tongue (Forest Books, 1992 [parallel text in Russian and English]); Duet of Iron (Junpa Books, Kyoto, 2018 [English–Japanese]); Fuer den unbekannten Feigling (Pop-Verlag, 2021 [Russian–

German]); Hur Man Blir en Giraff (Faethon, 2022).  

E-mail: viacheslavkupriyanov@yandex.ru

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0622-3822

Vyacheslav Kupriyanov has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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