Flow

In college, I would count the syllables in my sentences. Turns out, I run between 18 and 22 syllables per sentence unconsciously. Didn’t matter if the paper was about evolutionary biology or circular time in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. I had a flow––something was wired in me to express myself in 18 and 22 syllables.

Now, as a college professor, I tell my students to count their own syllables in an essay they wrote, and sure enough, most of them have a default syllabic mean. Good writing is mostly syntax, I tell them. It’s a set of curated interruptions that don’t sound curated or it can be a deliberately prolonged continuity. Some poems are fed by adrenaline and then slam on the break. Others work with pause, silence, restraint. But each piece has their own logic of flow. I ask them, what are the political aspects of flow in our contemporary culture? How is our flow of consciousness shaped by our digital lives “streaming”? What do certain obsessive patterns of thought tell us about how our own flow is constructed? What does it mean to “go with the flow,” and maybe more importantly, what does it mean to move against it? Flow as internet culture. Flow as mania. Flow as obsessiveness. Flow as internal rhythm. Flow as speaking to God, to your inner child, to the unconscious space. Flow as sermonic, as rhetorical persuasion.

If you grew up in the golden era of 90’s/early aughts’ hip hop, you probably understand something about flow. You know which artists move forward with wordplay. You know who can slant rhyme “Si-mon-Says” with “May-o-nna-ise.” In class, I take students through three different types of rhythms common in hip hop from the late 80s to the current day. Sung (strict rhyme schemes usually in couplets), speech-effusive (irregular, fast-paced, complex rhythms with a focus on enunciation and lyrical intelligibility), and percussive effusive (use of non-signifying utterances, crisp vocals, deliberately off-beat). We listen to a variety of songs, including Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools,” and talk about how Lamar raps as his unconscious/inner child in one flow/meter and answers as himself in another. Different speaking voices, different flows, I say. Dynamic flow even within a poem, I argue, creates a call-and-response. It allows for multiple speakers.

If we think about flow in “canonical” poetry from the early 20th century, it’s hard to miss the metaphoric “stream” of consciousness in Modernist literature, often defined as the unruly flow of the conscious mind. In Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Toomer, and Stein, narratives are often engined by sonic experimentation and semiotic mess. The writing, especially for undergraduates, appears to make no sense and be deeply frustrating to read.

But let’s read this through “flow,” I offer.

On the board, I put up a short stanza by Tennyson and a paragraph from Joyce’s Ulysses. I ask them about the major differences between the two pieces.

WITH blackest moss the flower-pots
Were thickly crusted, one and all;
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable wall.
The broken sheds look’d sad and strange;
Unlifted was the clinking latch:
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

—Tennyson, 19th century poet “Mariana”

O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met him pike hoses frillies for Raoul de perfume your wife black hair heave under embon SENORITA young eyes Mulvey plump bubs me breadvan Winkle red slippers she rusty sleep wander years of dreams return tail end Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return next in her next her next.

—Excerpt from Joyce’s Ulysses

There are numerous differences between them, of course, but the main one is that the Tennyson makes sense to students. They can mentally simulate the speaker, heartbroken, in an old, decrepit house, waiting for a beloved who is not coming back. With the Joyce, even though it’s a paragraph out of context, they have no idea who is talking, what is going on, what’s being described. It’s utter disorder. When I tell them what’s actually happening (that the main character is masturbating to a young girl on the beach who is on her period and bleeding through her underwear), they are shocked. They try to piece meaning together. Forget meaning, I say, read it over and over again. Get into its wild syntax, flow, fragmentation, and wordplay. Its repetition and imagistic references.

I then give them a prompt that they hate at first, but yields the best poems of the semester. By getting them to focus on the elements of rhythm and sonic flow, decentering the “I” as Modernist literature does, inviting multiple speakers, using repetition and non-sensical language, they are forced to push against their syllabic reflexes. Instead, the language is rich and weird, eccentric and defamiliarized. The flow is unusual, surprising, often fast and twitchy. They come to understand how the non-signifying parts of language are musically important even if they are not immediately comprehensible, that not everything that drives expression can be said or can be put into language in the first place. Flow exists where the surplus of energy bubbles at the surface of what is intelligible. It is the river that carries meaning but does not need meaning to carry on.