Yesterday, I was rereading part of Legal Modernism, a book by my friend and former colleague David Luban, and I remembered that it was thanks to this book that I first saw Manet?s ?The Old Musician? as one of the greatest and most interesting paintings ever painted. It?s in the National Gallery in Washington, where I live, and I often force friends and relatives to look at it with me.

Here?s the argument for its enormous significance (drawing heavily on Luban and on Charles Fried, but with some wrinkles of my own):

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I’m wondering what would happen if one tried to combine the rhythm of rap with some of the conventions of written poetry. (This is a naive question; there may be very obvious answers and lots of great examples.) As I understand it, rap lines usually contain four strongly accented syllables. There may also be any number of unaccented syllables, but each line takes an equal amount of time to say. That means that lines with many syllables go very quickly; but the four accented beats occur at a regular rate. Rhyme alerts listeners to the end of each line. Rap is sung/spoken against a digital beat, and the combination of that beat, the changing speed of the words, and the regular occurance of strong accents makes for an interesting form of syncopation. Rap doesn’t work especially well on paper, because it’s too hard to tell which syllables should be accented, and there’s no background beat.

In contrast, it’s hard to hear the length of a line in most modern written poetry. Even if rhymes are used, they tend to be subtle (off-rhymes or slant rhymes) and they are often concealed by enjambment. In conventional forms like iambic pentameter, each line has the same number of syllables, but a varying number of accents. In free verse, the number of syllables varies, but the reader still perceives each line as a meaningful unit. Information about line breaks is transmitted best on paper; it may be lost in speech. (Poetry in which line breaks are completely unimportant is simply prose.)

I don’t really listen to rap, but I understand that it’s a vital cultural phenomenon with tremedous energy and potential. I do read some contemporary “art” poetry, and I deeply admire a portion of what I read. I would probably like even more of it if I understood it better and worked harder at it. Written verse is valuable if only because silent, slow, careful reading of distilled language is good for the mind. Besides, “art” poetry connects to a wonderful heritage of writing as old as Sappho. Yet I suspect that as a whole body of work, current written poetry is not really going anywhere.

So could written verse draw inspiration from rap prosody? If rap performers could be persuaded to write some silent verse, they would contribute their energy and experience to the form. The technical trick would be to signal strong accents and line-speed–two aspects of language that ordinary writing does not automatically convey. I wonder if it would be possible to use subtle typographic clues, like slightly larger print for the accented syllables.

Because she’s one of my favorite critics, I just read Vendler’s new book, Coming of Age as a Poet (Harvard, 2003). It’s a study of the first mature and fully successful verse of four major poets: Milton, Keats, Eliot, and Plath. Vendler argues that poets change their themes, topics, and messages during their careers, but they often achieve a stable poetic personality in their twenties. From their first “perfect” poem to the end of their careers, they retain a hard-won combination of: certain formal and stylistic habits (including characteristic diction); physical and historical milieux that they typically describe; major symbolic references; characters or types of characters whom they include in their verse; and some sort of (at least implicit) cosmology.

Vendler touches on problems of “existential” importance: for example, whether Sylvia Plath’s extreme pessimism can be valid, and whether Plath is morally blameworthy for it. She defends strong aesthetic judgments on the basis of an implicit theory of poetry. She treats any excellent poem as the difficult and worthy achievement of a deliberate artist, which means that she links her aesthetic judgments to judgments about character (and an implied theory of the good life). Vendler’s own writing is dense, careful, perceptive, and concerned with vital matters–not just poems, but the topics that they wrestle with. She works with the even more concentrated, complex, and passionate words of four major poets. The combination of her acuity and theirs is very challenging. I kept thinking, “Why don’t I have a coherent style and world-view? Why can’t I read with this degree of care and accuracy?” Like a good sermon, Coming of Age as a Poet is an exhortation to try harder, be tougher, do better–not necessarily as a poet, but as a person.

I heard a great presentation this morning by Brett Cook Dizney, a muralist/activist/hip-hop artist/teacher. He tells wonderful stories about his own “non-permissional” art works, like the time he erected big (illegal) murals of the police officers who beat Rodney King on a California street, or the time he painted an anti-violence mural on a wall that had been claimed by street gangs. This kind of work is free for anyone to see; in fact, it is often appropriated by anonymous strangers. In one case, a set of his huge murals mysteriously disappeared from a San Francisco street and then reappeared five days later. High-quality graffiti art, typical of the early hip-hop scene, contributed to a kind of “creative commons.”

I’ve written critically about the New York Art World. I’ve argued that art leaders are subversive or radical, but in a way that doesn’t take alternative perspectives seriously and that doesn’t persuade anyone. They create works that are intended to shock bourgeois Middle Americans, but they only reach their fellow bohemians. And when elected leaders resist funding them, they take immediate resort in the First Amendment.

I stand by that argument, but it’s good for me to be exposed to someone like Cook-Dizney. Sometimes, his work reflects the kind of radical politics that I think is over-supplied in the current art world. (For example, he erected a mural of Fidel Castro in Miami–shocking, brave, but offensive and unlikely to generate thought or dialogue in the audience that it reached.) However, he says that he has moved from merely saying what’s wrong with society to helping to create a better world.

A lot of his current work is intensely collaborative, involving (for example) street parties where everyone helps design and make a multimedia project. These projects make city blocks immediately more beautiful; they also create social networks and political capital. The fact that Dizney-Cook’s work is now constructive does not mean that he has abandoned his independence or radicalism.

In any case, a lot of his subversive statements on behalf of marginalized people are valid and thoughtful. (Example: he erected big panel portaits of Harlem residents inside the Harlem Studio Museum when it was not welcoming to people in the neighborhood.) I think if you are going to do political art, you should be judged on your politics as well as your formal technique. On those grounds, I would criticize an image of Fidel in Miami, but I think most of Cook-Dizney’s work is wise and thoughtful.

Hearing live chamber music one night last week, I thought about the visual dimension of music, which we miss when we listen to recordings. Musicians often show a lot of expression on their faces, and they exchange meaningful looks that are interesting to interpret. In a string quartet, they all hunch over when they’re playing fast and intensely, and then sit back during lulls. I also like the general sight of their gleaming wooden instruments and slender bows, vibrating like insect wings.

I suspect that composers often think about visual issues when they write. For example, why give a theme to the first violin and the accompaniment to the second, and then switch their roles after a few bars? On a recording, it would sound the same if the first violin repeated the melody. But it’s visually interesting to see a motif passed around a semicircle of musicians, or bounced back and forth.

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