What is a Couplet?

I was rereading Steve's poem "Nosferatu" from the "Spectres" thingy, and I want to use it as a way of thinking about the couplet. His poem is in couplets, and my recent poems have been using couplets as a strategy.

"Nosferatu" has a sentence that spans four couplets:

The roosters won't give me the thumbs-up,
but held neck-first over cuspidors they come

to order. In inner circles assembled at the kraal--
mom-hen with womb, dad a monk in purplish pall, kids

such sorry dross - my family with candles
swings the senate through its black mass, we green-

horns using Crowley maps and roots
of our tree, reliving Tucson,

lighting an easter fire - yes, now feathery Mother
in Sorrow. Apoplectic laughter might ensue,...

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there's something about the noise of this poem that challenges my idea of the couplet. "to order. In inner circles assembled at the kraal--/mom-hen with womb, dad a monk in purplish pall, kids:" the movement of the poem is musically associative,
"in inner circles" is tightly wound around the initial vowel sound, and yet the way it follows the enjambment and full stop of
"to order" is a challenge to the order of a couplet, enjambment and all. the visual order of the poem allows the freedom to play such chaotic games with this parliament of fowls. My own idea of the couplet, would retain the order, the tidiness of the sight of the couplet, and does not trouble the form as much as this poems does. it uses the balance of the couplet against itself; contrariness in action!

I looked for mentions of the meaning of couplets from reacent readings:

here are a couple of suggestions from the world:

From "The Lives of the Poets," on the subject of H.D's "Trilogy:"

The triplet and couplet stanzas are capable of delivering image *and* narrative, but are most effective in weaving connections between her own age of crisis and those ancient ages that feed her imagination...her father has a symbolic place, the gods become God, eternity is a fact:

Ra, Osiris, Amen appeared
in a spacious bare meeting-house;

he is the world-father,
father of past aeons,

present and future equally;
beardless, not at all like jehovah,

he was upright, slender,
impressive as the Memnon monolith,

yet he was not out of place
but perfectly at home

in the eighteenth century
simplicity and grace;

then I woke with a start
of wonder and asked myself,

But whose eyes are those eyes?...


Whatever the tensions there is a way to find order and connection. It is deliberate and admits surprises.

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and then, this is from the princeton encyclopedia, which refers mostly to the rhyming couplet:

the couplet is open and enjambed, i.e. when the syntactic and metrical frames do not close together at the end of the couplet, the sentence being carried forward into subsequent couplets to any length desired and ending at any point in the line.

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both of these are not very helpful. I think the only other time I've heard the properties of the couplet discussed was something brenda said about the "doubling effect" that the visual effect of isolating the two lines. This seems interesting, but i'm still not quite with it.

i guess my interest in the couplet has more to do with the typographical shape of the couplet. I imagine that the shape of the couplet kind of lets air in. There is a pause, whether there is punctuation that suggests the pause or not. it's kind of a williams/oppen technique (i remember my college professor asking us to take "the red wheelbarrow" out of lines and write it as prose...phew...) and is completely set against kenneth koch and those kind of things, i guess also against "howl." a technique of stasis that plays against the movement of syntax (and also complicates and puns with syntax by making line breaks fuck up sense in a poem. i hate it when k. koch does that - all confusion and glibness.

but also, i think the couplet has an aural component; when reading, you pause across the line and it forces the punniness.

what about the sense of doubleness - what does that mean? i like the idea from the H.D. stuff that the couplet is a way of allowing disparate time periods to interact, but i wonder if it's a kind of romanticism to apply such ideas to the material fact of the couplet? you know, the way that 'major' and 'minor' keys are said to be happy or sad, though that meaning is arbitrary and culturally bound.

what is the relationship of form to the comfort of the writer? is there a natural form peculiar to each poet?

what does the couplet make you guys think of? does the big space interrupt syntax too much?

the couplet seems to me to be the farthest thing from the prose poem, of which i remain a resolute enemy. They proceed in contempt of music.

that said, i read a sonnet of d.b.quick's in poetry recently, which was another case of too much music. the word *precious* comes to mind, but preciousness has its virtues. OK, virtueless preciosity.