a) Emotive writing. b) Profound writing. c) Humorous writing. d) Memorable speech.
2. Is a line more or less rhythmic as it goes along?
3. Does one scan poems from left to right or from right to left.
4. Can we replace all the accented syllables in a foot with unaccented ones? Or all the unaccented syllables in a foot with with accented ones?
5. Hard sounds add pop, kick, or "toot", especially before a vowel rather than at the end of a syllable, but do they raise, lower, or not affect the tension level?
6. Hypermetrical syllables are those before (anacrusis) or after (hypercatalectic) the meter. Do they typically use hard or soft sounds?
7. Is Blake's "Tyger" iambic or is it trochaic?
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat. What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp. Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
8. Is "The Red Wheel Barrow" by W.C. Willams metrical or not (e.g. free verse)?
So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
9. Are all song lyrics poetry or does their content matter?
10. Does assonance (or consonance) apply only to accented syllables?
11. In English prosody does quantity (i.e. line duration) matter more in spoken verse or songs?
12. Metrical verse usually uses one cadence. Free verse uses rhythm strings. Which uses more substitutions?
13. What is terminal dieresis? What is its effect?
14. Can the same words be both poetry and prose? If so, how? If not, why not?
15. When and why did poetry (other than song lyrics) die?
16. In what meter is Gordon Lightfoots "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"?
17. What is unusual about "Tecumseh?
"Tecumseh" by EG (aka "Shooting Star" or "Panther that Crouches in Wait")
You, Canadian? The greatest American? You fought to be neither, but nor were you panther that crouches in wait. You were egret, your feet in the mud as you stood above weeds. Both
your fathers would leave you to war. Brock would say no more valorous warrior exists. Sure as apple trees bud, the pleas of a peacemaker can't be imparted while even your traplines have got to be guarded. Time
is gravity, a shooting star descending. Time is charity; too soon you'll see it ending.
The cities were the bellows of the wind that blew at Prophetstown, across the rivers, over you. Gray wolves surround the egret. Foxes slink away, their turn tail coats the colour of your blood.
You'd say: "Sing your death song and then die like a hero returning home." Yours was the song of that egret, your life like a burning poem.
18. Cryptocrappers abide by Earl Gray's 2nd Law: "If you can't be profound be vague." Everyone else goes by Earl's 12th Law, which is:
"___ __ __ __________ ___ _______."?
19. What is the Egoless Motto? Hint:
"If you don't think your poetry is competing against the works of others
___'__ ________ _____."
20. What is The Elizabeth Alexander Rule? Hint:
"Poetry's only selling point is that it is _______ ____ ____ ___."
While doing your crossword puzzle you come upon the clue for 13-down: "a Welsh doggy". Looking at the grid you see it is five letters long. Perhaps some of the crossing text has provided another clue: the first letter is "c" and the fourth is "g". Voilà! The answer must be "corgi"!
Crafting poetry is the same search for the perfect word. Suppose you are writing a children's poem in iambic tetrameter. You come to this acephalous line:
Said | the scar|y la|dy there.
"'Acephalous'?"
Headless. Missing an unstressed syllable at the beginning. We need to replace the flat word, "said", preferably with an iamb.
Among many alternatives an online thesaurus provides we see: pronounced, declared, announced, remarked, observed, affirmed, revealed, disclosed, implied, and proposed. Which of these is best? And why?
"The 'why" is sonics. Once we've nailed the cadence it's always sonics."
Very good! So what are we looking for here?
"A word that has the same sounds in its stressed syllable as those in the rest of the line."
Excellent! Assonance and consonance. So which word is your choice? Pronounced, declared, announced, remarked, observed, affirmed, revealed, disclosed, implied, or proposed?
"Declared."
Precisely! It repeats the "ar" in "scary", the "r" in "there", and long "a" in "lady". Your meter might be a little shaky but your ear for sound is superb!
"Thanks."
Now let's try another crossword clue. Your character is standing outside a crematorium, sensing the smoke and ash "falling earthward". Can we see the problem with that phrasing?
"Duh, gravity. On this planet everything falls earthward."
Exactly. Completely redundant. So what is a more dramatic, evisceral, trochaic or spondaic word instead of "earthward" here?
"Poets: Really, they're the laziest, stupidest people I know." - Christian Bök, 2009
Convenient Poetics is an "aesthetic" formed around ignorances. If we have never learned basic scansion--which most haven't--then meter isn't necessary. We can just write prose and let our ENTER key take things from there. Sonics? Too much effort. Performance? Why bother as long a publisher will put it in print? It's not like anyone is going to want to hear or read this, right?
When the failure of this approach is pointed out Convenient Poets ("ConPos") shrug and say:
"Poetry is subjective!"
While this may be true, three goat herders in Outer Mongolia won't form a market large enough to make the effort worthwhile. Yes, it does matter if people like your work.
As poetry faded into obscurity an insignificant few keepers of the flame remained in the center. Without prosody, the rest were left with nothing except Convenient Poetics and, of course, the dreaded Content Regency.
On the Right
On the monied end of the spectrum are the universities, supported by the public, alumni, and tuitions, and the Foundation, supported by the Ruth Lilly (1915-2009) $200M donation in 2003. To its credit, the Poetry Foundation has a comprehensive online archive and worked with the National Endowment for the Arts Endowment to give us "Poetry Out Loud!" Meanwhile, Poetry Magazine and academia created cryptocrap: artless pseudo-intellectual amphigouri. Brain farts. No technique. No rhythm. No performance value.
"It's too boring to be prose so it must be poetry!"
On the Left
Performance fans skew younger. We might see them as slammers, spoken worders or open mikers. The content is all too "accessible": Heart farts. To their credit, these actors often memorize their presentations.
Thus, technicians understand that poetry is memorable speech while academics insist that it is forgettable writing. And the spoken word poets? By definition, they understand that poetry is speech and they do recognize the value of performance and memory. They just have to add more mnemonics and find content beyond their own navels.
Conclusion
It follows that any hope of creating iconic poems and reviving poetry itself lies in educating spoken verse enthusiasts.
The black Densuke watermelon is grown only on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is known for its sweetness and rarity. An early crop might number as few as 65, fetching a price of $6,100 each.
In gaming theory there is La Macheide: "The perfection of an endeavor destroys it." Machines do our job if/because they do so better, faster, and without human casualties. An ideal mate can spoil us for any future prospects. In a comedy show who wants to take the mic after Derek Edwards?
The "Densuke problem" would seem a wonderful one to have. Suppose you wrote the ultimate contemporary poem, one that towered over lesser products as the Densuke does. If people were to read it they would immediately want to memorize it, making it the first iconic verse since that 1961 limerick about a man from Nantucket. It could, conceivably, revive a dead mode of speech. (For now, we'll ignore song lyrics.)
So what do you do with this work?
"Publish it! In the biggest poetry magazine around!"
Suppose this publication paid you for the rights to publish it but never did so, effectively killing it. Would you be surprised?
"I'd be shocked! Why would they do that?"
Suppose they published it. What would be everyone's first thought?
"It would be: 'Wow! This is excellent!'"
Okay. What would the public's second thought be?
"What do you mean?"
Upon realizing that you've discovered a unicorn, what do you wonder?
[Pause for thought.]
"'Are there other unicorns? A mommy and daddy unicorn...?'"
And if not?
"'...and if not, why not?'"
Exactly! Why can't more poems be this good? Or, at least, close?
"Because poems this good are rare?"
Precisely. To grok what is going on we need to understand Gresham's Law:
"Bad money drives out good."
Suppose you go to an auction with cash backed up by a gold standard. Everyone else outbids you with crypto-coin "dollars", inflating prices in the process. Knowing your money is being grossly undervalued you withdraw immediately.
Now suppose you've written a generational masterpiece. Look around at what publishers are putting out these days. What few readers these enjoy are those trying to discern what type of prose with linebreaks the editor likes (e.g. cryptocrap? Shaggy dog stories? Long-winded aphorisms? Rants? Heart farts?). Do you want your work to be associated with this doggeral and lineated prose? Do you trust the aesthetic judgment of editors cranking this stuff out? Not surprisingly, the best poets of this century don't bother with print publishing. Bad poetry drives out good.
Even when poetry was at its height, canonical poems averaged about one per year [other than the Shakespeare blip]. Since the death of poetry that may be less then one per decade. There is a paucity of originality and a grotesque disregard for technique.
Enter you, with your unicorn/Densuke poem. The editor has to fill pages and your effort is going to make all others look bad by comparison. Even if this editor were a technician--which none of the major ones are--the instinct might be to not publish it.
It follows logically that if we want to reanimate this dead mode of speech we'll need to do so by performing it.
"Every songwriter knows you can sell form without substance. Every prose writer knows you can sell substance without form. You can't sell neither."
"Poetry isn't about what you say. It's about how you say it." - Gary Gamble (rec.arts.poems)
A reporter can produce quality prose in minutes before going on air to present the facts to a waiting population. Prose is timely.
The poetic elements that we've discussed in this series usually take much longer to fashion refined verse. Each word must fit with all of the others, like sculpted stones in an ancient edifice. They may need to stand for ages.
What role does substance have in poetry?
Prose tends to be about information: answers and facts. It may be how many will find your verse (i.e. via web searches). Poetry tends to be about questions and comparisons (e.g. metaphors, similes, contrasts).
Metaphors and Similes
A simile is a direct comparison, typically signalled by the word "as" or "like".
"Like a hurricane" suggests the person or thing being described is tempestuous.
A metaphor is not just associating two similar things; it blurs any distinction between them. The first requirement is that it not be true.
"You are a rock star."
If you're saying this to Rod Stewart it's a literal. If to someone who isn't in the music business it's a metaphor. The tenor is the thing described: "You" in this case. The vehicle is the description--the thing to which the tenor is being compared: "rock star" in this example. Your metaphor should be somewhat fresh. "Rock star" might once have brought up thoughts of hard heavenly bodies but today it is little more than cliché.
Consider this expression about a condition, trepidation, and alternatives: escape or combat.
"In terror, flight or fight."
The different sounds help define the condition, "terror", independent of both actions, "fight" or "flight". Add some alliteration and the distinction between fear and fight/flight blurs:
"In fear, there's fight or flight."
Add rhyme and we mash together all three words...
"In fright, there's fight or flight."
...which may focus our attention on fright and flight because they have a consonant between the alliteration of "f" and the rhyme of "-ight".
Parenthetically, this is but one example of how
poetry--even the crudest commercial or political jingles--may have been humankind's
original form of propaganda.
Genres and Subjects
Consider your own posting habits. How often--or how rarely--do you pass along a poem on social media?
"Maybe once or twice. Funny ones, probably."
Like prose, poetry can be written on any topic and in any genre. No, poetry doesn't have to be emotional, profound, or anything else. In fact, the most popular genre is humor. Personalities and politics are also popular. The seven most memorable poems of this century were about a crazy 15th Century priest, beans, a warrior who died over 200 years ago, WWII nostalgia, sunflowers, non-necessities, and space junk. Not a single love poem came close and, of course, cryptocrap was never a consideration.
"Why not love poems? Are the best poets today not romantic?"
Good question. Let me turn it around, though. How many love poems written in the last sixty years can you recite?
"Uh...well...none. Lots of songs, though!"
Exactly. In this genre in particular, spoken verse cannot compete for attention with song lyrics. It's certainly not an issue of quality...
"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung." - Voltaire
...with music getting worse every day. It's just a matter of numbers. No matter how good your love poem is it will be drowned out by Top 40 hits on the radio. It follows that if you want anyone to hear your love poems you will need to set them to music. Or embed them.
"Embed them?"
Yes. Insert them into something else, such as a television series or a movie.
"How would that work?"
In the case of "The Paradox of Love", you'd write an entire movie script to serve as prologue to a final farewell poem.
Now, instead of seeking attention, you will be presenting something that a multi-million dollar film could be riding on.
"No pressure!"
Exactly.
"Okay, so if not lovey dovey stuff, what do we write about?"
Your listeners. Their interests, not yours. Their emotions, desires, curiosities, environments, and strengths.
"But I don't know their interests."
Look at social media. People will spend all day and night telling you what fascinates them. Write about those things. And humor. Nothing is more effective than making people smile or laugh.
"Okay, but specifically, what works best among the serious stuff?"
SOABs. Sympathetic Or Ambiguous Biographies. Glimpses into the lives of recognized figures. Actors, politicians, newsmakers, reporters, anyone people will recognize.
"Why not unsympathetic views?"
That can work as entertainment--humor--but less antagonistic views can survive both the author and the subject [if only as elegies].
"Can you give examples?"
The three greatest poems of this century have been accounts of historical figures: "Studying Savonarola", "Beans" (about Salvador Allende), and "Tecumseh". If someone were to film a documentary or feature film on any of those they would find that poem online and ask the author for permission to use it in their production.
Because fewer people are interested in history than current events, our biographies will focus on our contemporaries.
Cliché is boring. It won't enter our memory because it can't be distinguished from what is already there. Cryptocrap is an extreme reaction to triteness that ends up being every bit as dull. It reads like rot-13 gibberish:
...and has less than zero performance value. That is, it actually drives audiences away.
The truly great poems, lines, and phrases stop us in our tracks not because they are different/original but because they are better than everything else we've heard recently. "Hookers" by Marco Morales will reside in the memory of anyone who encounters it:
Missing you again, I embrace shallow graves. Pale faces, doughlike breasts help me forget.
N.B.: The second line is startling not because you don't know what it means; it is startling because you do. It is like an explosion of understanding.
The frequency and support for these astounding lines is a style issue. Morales used the "killer and filler" approach with the other lines feeding into "I embrace shallow graves".
In "Studying Savonarola" Margaret Griffiths adopts the standard approach, building to a climax with the cretic "unconsumed".
Say you die, scorched into ashes, say
you pass from here to there, with your marigold eyes, the garden darker for lack of one golden flower, would bees mourn, would crickets keen, drawing long
blue chords on their thighs like cellists? Say you disperse like petals on the wind, the bright stem of you still a living stroke
in memory, still green, still spring, still the tint and the tang of you in my throat, unconsumed.
DPK attacks relentlessly, each line dripping with ambiguity to excite both halves of her polarized audience, pausing only to consider each euphemism carefully:
September came like winter's ailing child but left us viewing Valparaiso's pride. Your face was always saddest when you smiled. You smiled as every doctored moment lied. You lie with orphans' parents, long reviled.
To be successful, you need to master the techniques and produce stunning lines. Quality over quantity. You need to be optimistic, starting with the state of the art. Yes, poetry is dead and you'll need several miracles to resuscitate it but that just means the competition, as numerous as it is, isn't particularly strong.
There is a famous joke about Chicago Bears Running Backs Walter Payton and Matt Suhey camping in the Arctic. A breathless Walter Payton comes into their tent and begins changing from mukluks to sneakers.
"What are you doing?" wonders Suhey.
"There's a polar bear coming!"
Suhey laughs and points out: "You can't outrun a polar bear!"
"I don't need to outrun the bear," Payton retorts. "I just need to outrun you!"
Your listeners want to hear "good stories well told" in 21st century language. You don't need to write better than Shakespeare or Eliot. You might not need to write better than DPK or Maz, who haven't been seen for more than a decade [and weren't well known then].
You just need to outwrite everyone else producing today, virtually none of whom are household names. To recap, these are the 10 commandments for poetry promotion:
1. No diaries. Write about everyone and everything except yourself. 2. Speak. Poetry is a mode of speech, not writing. 3. Forget copyright infringement. Encourage others to perform your work. 4. Form! No one has ever been interested in memorizing prose with linebreaks. 5. Network. Make contact with poets, actors, and producers. 6. Humor. Make poems out of jokes. 7. Concision. Less is more. 8. Repeat sounds: rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration, anaphora, etc. 9. Sonics: Use harsh sounds to create tension, soft sounds to relax. 10. Be humble and helpful. And optimistic.
If you spend time on Q&A sites (e.g. Quora) the most common poetry-related query is "Where can I post my poetry online?"
No one ever asks: "Where can read or hear [contemporary] poetry online?"
The second most popular question from neophytes is: "How can I protect my masterpieces against plagiarism?"
LOL! (By not producing anything worth stealing.)
Is money the opposite of poetry?
When heiress Ruth Lily died in 2002 she left approximately $100,000,000 to the Modern Poetry Association. It wasn't until 2018 that all the lawsuits were settled, by which time it had grown to $257,000,000 or what is now The Poetry Foundation, publishers of Poetry magazine. It has partnered with the National Endowment for the Arts to produce the "Poetry Out Loud!" initiative. For its part, Poetry magazine was established in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Moore. In June of 1915 she published T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" [after Ezra Pound scanned it for her to convince her that it wasn't merely "the muttering of an old man"].
"That's the one with all the different line lengths and extra syllables before them, right?"
Yes. Heterometrical, with a lot of anacrusis--extra syllables before the meter.
After that brilliant start, how has small-p poetry [other than song lyrics] fared? With all of the money, effort, and other publications, how many poems have entered our public consciousness in, say, the last half century?
"I can't think of any--"
Zero. A perfect record, unblemished by success. With all of that money, all of the learning, critical and promotional resources--online and in print--and all of those venues you would think this would be a golden age of poetry. You'd think we'd know at least as many poets as novelists. You'd think we'd quote contemporary verse at least as much as Shakespearean.
Nope. Not a single iconic poem since that limerick about a man from Nantucket in 1961. So how can we revive a dead art form? How do we resurrect verse?
While it may take generations, the course of action is remarkably simple: Do the opposite of what got us into this situation. Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing.
Post Production
Having posted your performance the real work begins: Getting people to hear it at a time when poetry is dead. 99.9% of the verse you and I will hear in our lives will be song lyrics. We're talking about spoken poetry--a virtually impossible sale. It follows that this will require unusual if not unprecedented measures over a long period of time.
No one introduces their novel, news or short story as "prose" so don't refer to your presentation as "poetry". Just start talking. No introduction. No explanation. Tell your story and get off the stage. Provide the text and author's credits below the video. Give your post, if not your poem, an inviting or provocative title and hashtags of intriguing subjects. For example, this meme (i.e. text only) poem, "Paradise Has No Colonies", has tags corresponding to each line's theme, aspects of a prostitute's life: experience, redemption, incest, artifice, subterfuge, education, identity, childbirth, and pedophilia.
Revival
If poetry is to be resurrected it must be as a participatory sport. Two hundred years ago people read verse in every available periodical not as a life lesson but as fodder for home entertainment [before movies, radio, television, the Internet, etc.]. The object, then, is to get people to perform your pieces.
This leads us to Pearl's 14th Paradox, which the uninitiated will regard as heresy:
"Do you mean actual plagiarism? Isn't that theft?"
Consider this famous quote:
"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal."
Some attribute it to Pablo Picasso, but most can benefit from the wisdom without getting bogged down in authorship.
As a poet you need people to do covers--performances--of your verse. 99% will credit you for writing it but what is important is that they treat the words as their own while uttering them.
You need the actor to pause for thought before each phrase as a speaker does normally. In that sense, yes, you do need them to "steal" your words. (As with cover songs, authorship won't be an issue afterwards. Anyone who can see the posting date will know who created the poem.)
This "theft" is and always has been essential to poetry's proliferation.
In order to appeal to people's competitive natures, encourage visitors to record their own performances of your poem and post the URLs to their version below yours. Create a contest out of each of your works. Start by challenging family, friends, then strangers to outdo each other.
We've written and edited our best verse and, poetry being a mode of speech, not writing, we now want to find listeners.
"Why not readers?"
Poetry doesn't attract a lot of those. Given the state of the art, there isn't nearly enough poetry to fill even one page of text in a periodical, let alone dozens in the average journal. What readership there might be amounts to contributors hoping to divine the editor's tastes and interests.
"But people did used to read poetry, right?"
Folks used to read poetry for two reasons: To find something to perform for their friends and family or to analyze why people enjoyed hearing that particular verse. At the very least, when people read poetry they were able to do so imagining how it would sound--something they could well envision because they listened to so much verse during their lives.
"So if we want people to read our poetry we need to recite it to them?"
Perform it for them, yes. But more directly, we want them to hear and appreciate our speech. Or rhymes, if you wish.
Enactments and Narrations.
An enactment involves one or more presenters performing a poem on camera, with or without action. Your laptop camera or your telephone might suffice. If you have the cash, consider getting a tripod (photo at top, often under $20, usually with a remote start button) and, for sound better than a telephone call, a microphone ($6 and up). A popular choice is the Hollyland M2 (a little over $100, about the size and shape of a quarter).
The performers need to look and sound as if they are making it up as they go along. Try to avoid looking up and to the right; this makes it seem like the speaker is trying to recall lines.
Enunciate clearly. Textual subtitles are a good idea if hoping to attract non-anglophone audiences.
It is a good idea to record each stanza or strophe separately, perhaps from different angles. This is particularly effective when there is a change in perspective or tone, as at a sonnet's volta.
Insofar as lighting is concerned, position the light facing the actor(s) from two different angles [in order to avoid shadows]. A room's ceiling light can be augmented by a lamp on the floor.
If you are too shy to appear on camera record your voice and do a slide show with still photographs in the foreground. Networking with a photographer would be a good plan. For this purpose a wired microphone will do, often providing better audio than a similarly priced wireless model.
Speak with natural inflection. Don't give up until you are satisfied with what you have recorded. Above all: Never introduce or, worse, explain your poem. Ever. Anywhere. The only exceptions are "terms and times": a word or phrase that is either archaic (e.g. annotations of Shakespearean verse) or jargon (e.g. a mention of "Dragon" in a piece about chess).
When you post it online you might include the text below your video.
Music https://pixabay.com/music/search/instrumental/
Check out some of the royal free instrumental download sites. These tunes can be snipped for use before, after, or in the background at low volume during your poetry performance. Occasionally, we'll see instrumental slide shows with verse text. No recitation.
This is usually because the poet has a unique, overriding need for anonymity.
Now that you have your final version posted, how do you gather viewers?
