The Outerview Series: Part XVI - Poetry Exam

 1. What is poetry?

   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 _______ ____ ____ ___."

The Outerview Series: Part XV - Crossword Poetry

      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?

      "'Fleshward.'  Falling fleshward."

      Brilliant.

The Outerview Series: Part XIV - Convenient Poetics

 

 

      "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 Outerview Series: Part XIII - The Densuke Problem

 

      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."

      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.