The Outerview Series: Part III - What is Rhythm?

       In our first two outerviews we defined poetry as verbatim speech whose audience is all but limited to song lyrics.  It makes sense to begin by learning about poetry that can most easily be converted to song.

      Over the last thousand years all successful English language poems have incorporated rhythm.  This has usually involved meter, which facilitates the addition of music to create song.

     "And what is 'meter'?"

      Meter is the quantification of something in order to segment the poem.

     "And what are those things being quantified?"
 
      It could be a number of things.  In classical Greek verse and song it is tempo--the time it takes to say or sing a line.  In the latter case, the same number of bars and beats each line.  When that drum is struck the word being spoken is highlighted.  Stressed.  Even if it wouldn't normally be.

      Let's have you read aloud the text onscreen:

      "You carry the weight of inherited sorrow from your first day till you die toward that hilltop where the road forever becomes one with the sky."

       That was a natural enunciation of these words.  It's how you'd say them in a speech or a recital.  Now let's listen to Bruce Cockburn sing these lyrics from "The Rose Above the Sky" (at top):

You carry the weight of inherited sorrow
From your first day till you die
Toward that hilltop where the road
Forever becomes one with the sky

        So, what have we learned so far?

       "With song, it's all about the beat."

       Close enough.  That need to have every line take the same length of time is called "quantitative" meter.  

       Now, going back to quantifying, here are three other things that can be counted:  alliterations, accents, and feet.  Check out these two lines from DPK's "Leaving Santiago":

We come from | a nation | of cowards | and corpses
both roll down | the river | en route to|  the ocean.

       This is alliterative verse--something that goes back to before 1066--because there are three repetitions of an initial sound of a stressed syllable in each line:  two on one side of midway, one on the other;  three hard "c" sounds in the first line, three "r" iterations in the second.

       The same two lines could be considered accentual, with the same number of stressed syllables--four, in this case--in each line.  N.B.:  In accentual meter the unstressed syllables don't matter.

       Finally, these two lines illustrate the most recent evolution of meter:  accentual-syllabic.  This deals in feet:  typically, a stressed syllable and one or two unstressed ones in a particular order.  In this case, it is a pattern of four "de-DUM-de" soundings called "amphibrachic tetrameter":

We come from a country of cowards and corpses
both roll down the river en route to the ocean.

      "Is 'amphibrachic' anything like 'iambic'?"

      Yes, in a "right church, wrong pew" way.  Iambic is a binary because it has two components:  an unstressed syllable, then a stressed one (de-DUM).  It sounds like marching.  Amphibrachs are trinary because they have three:  de-DUM-de.  It sounds like hopping.  Here is a chart of all the cadences and meter lengths, of which iambic is by far the most common:

============================  Meter Types  ===========================

 Beat   Name
   uu = Pyrrhic    (aka Dibrach)
   uS = Iamb        = Marching
   Su = Trochee     = Imperative  (aka Choree)
   SS = Spondee
  uuu = Tribrach
  Suu = Dactyl      = Waltzing
  uSu = Amphibrach  = Hopping        Metres:
  uuS = Anapest     = Galloping      Monometer = 1 foot
  uSS = Bacchic                        Dimeter = 2 feet
  SuS = Amphimacer (aka Cretic)       Trimeter = 3 feet
  SSu = Antibacchic                 Tetrameter = 4 feet
  SSS = Molossus                    Pentameter = 5 feet
 uuuu = Proceleusmatic               Hexameter = 6 feet *
 Suuu = First paeon                 Heptameter = 7 feet
 uSuu = Second paeon                 Octameter = 8 feet
 uuSu = Third paeon
 uuuS = Fourth paeon    * Hexameter = "alexandrine" if iambic.
 uuSS = Ionic a minore
 SuuS = Choriamb                       
 SSuu = Ionic a maiore              Stanzas:
 SuuS = Antispast                   2 lines = couplet
 SuSu = Ditrochee                   3 lines = tercet
 uSuS = Diiamb                      4 lines = quatrain
 uSSS = First epitrite              5 lines = cinquain
 SuSS = Second epitrite             6 lines = sestet or sixain
 SSuS = Third epitrite              7 lines = septet
 SSSu = Fourth epitrite             8 lines = octet or octave
 SSSS = Dispondee                      
uSSuS = Dochmios

 "S" = Stressed (or, more accurately, "long" in the original Greek)
 "u" = unstressed (or, more accurately, "short" in the original Greek)

======================================================================

      Some poems or songs can have more than one meter.  In fact, 4 iambs followed by 3 iambs in so common that it is literally called "common meter":

Amaz|ing grace | how sweet | the sound
that saved | a wretch | like me.
Was lost, | but now, | I'm found;
was blind, | but now | I see.

      "So we want our lines the same length or lengths."

       And durations.  Correct.  And we have names for each kind:  "isometric" if all of the lines the same length, "heterometric" if the lines come in different lengths.

      "Will this be on the test?"

Next:  What is rhythm?

The Outerview Series

The Outerview Series:  Part I - What is poetry?
The Outerview Series:  Part II - Where is poetry?
The Outerview Series:  Part III - What is Rhythm?
The Outerview Series:  Part IV - Scan Poems Backward
The Outerview Series:  Part V - Rhyming is Fun
The Outerview Series:  Part VI - Super Sonics
The Outerview Series:  Part VII - Production
The Outerview Series:  Part VIII - Manufacturing an Audience
The Outerview Series:  Part IX - Crafting Drafts
The Outerview Series:  Part X - Production
The Outerview Series:  Part XI - Attracting and Impressing
The Outerview Series:  Part XII - The Meaning of Meaning

Ta-Da!

 

     When British troops landed in India the residents, who spoke unstressed tongues, noticed a similarity between the "Left!  Right!" marching cadence and the binary stresses of the English language.  We accept the alternating stresses but why do we describe our speech as iambic as opposed to trochaic?

     Part of the reason is in the effect of pronouns and articles on our subject-verb-object pattern:

"She saw | the boy."

     Another reason is that ending on an accented syllable sounds more momentous, decisive or conclusive.  Trailing off seems tentative, wistful, or uncertain.  Thus, our poetry is iambic (de-DUM) or, occasionally, anapestic (de-de-DUM), and very rarely trochaic (DEM-de), dactyllic (DUM-de-de), or amphibrachic (de-DUM-de).

     What do we do when we want to finish with a flourish?  In sonnets we go from ending lines with distant/alternating rhymes to a couplet.  Typical would be the ababcc scheme in this sestet:

Prairie Prayer

Come autumn, combines comb the fields
to harvest gold canola oil
for toast before November yields
its cold. Like whitened coffee, soil
beneath integument snow extols
the blood and bone of remnant souls.

     A less formal approach is to use extra stresses.  In iambic work this creates a "Ta-Da!" effect, often as part of a double iamb.  For example, we note the last line of "Kemla's Aloha":

Kemla's Aloha

You showed me home is a person not a place.
I watch as time collapses in your wake,
as every story, fully told, can trace
a common path, each stream to the same lake.

Classical Diaeresis  

     A more elaborate technique is classical diaeresis, ending a poem with a word in the verse's cadence.  For example, the first stanza of the iambic pentameter "Beans" ends with an iamb;  all previous disyllabic words are trochaic.

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.

     Hand this text to someone and have them read it aloud.  Notice how "reviled" sounds like a finale?  This parallels the finality of the parents' death.  By contrast, the second stanza uses the spondaic approach, creating a sense of lingering consequence.

As close as coppers, yellow beans still line
Mapocho's banks.  It leads them to the sea;
entwined on rocks and saplings each new vine
recalls that dawn in nineteen seventy three
when every choking bastard weed grew wild.

    The stanza contains two iambs, "entwined" and "recalls", but that final line begins with, arguably, three pounding iambs ("ev'ry choking bastard"), setting up another instance of diaeresis, but the slightly less conclusive spondee, "grew wild", leaves on a more ominous note.

     The first thing we should learn about any technique is when not to use it.

How Long Does Poetry Take?

     How long does brain surgery take if you know absolutely nothing about medicine?  Use a club to knock the patient unconscious, drill through the skull, root around until you find something that looks out of place, rip it out, close the wound, and you're done!  As is the patient, but no one said anything about successful  brain surgery, right?

     Newcomers often ask how long it takes to write a poem.  It can take forever but, generally speaking, the answer depends on how good the poet and poem are.  Poor poets produce dreck at breakneck speeds.  Their process involves far fewer steps.

     Jotting down an outline can take minutes.  A newcomer may now say:  "Voilà!  We're done!"  First thought, best though, right?  Time to find an unsuspecting reader... 

     A slightly less raw neophyte might take the rest of the day to produce a draft.  (Note we didn't write "a first draft".)  Then they're done.

     If writing for the "publish or perish" academic crowd the journey is a little longer.  One has to inject some clever, original phrases.  A random text generator can help find the perfectly baffling modifier or metaphor.  One or two of these per poem should suffice.  Thus, we can finish in a weekend and ship the end product off to Poetry magazine or our university press. 

     Because it has to have objective merit, technical verse will take weeks--a month if free verse.  There is a trick to this:  Do the sonics before the rhythm.  Choose soft sounds for reflection, harsh ones for drama, and repeat them (as assonance, consonance, alliteration, or rhyme) as appropriate.  Attend to cadence last, either in meter or in rhythm strings (which distinguish free verse from prose [poetry]).

     At this point, what you have might win a Nemerov but it won't draw a crowd.  Why not?  Because we've forgotten that poetry is a mode of speech.  We need to gear it for an audience, not a readership.  We must perform it (or find someone who can and will).  This usually means memorizing it and practicing our presentation.  We have to sound natural, performing rather than reciting.  And certainly not reading.

     At no point onstage can we look up and to the right, a telltale sign than we're trying to recall something.  This is vital, since our eyes must be free to search the audience for hints of waxing or waning interest.  If the people at an open mic are leaning forward and shushing those around them, we have them.  (This, incidentally, is the greatest feeling in human experience.)  If, on the other hand, we see them slouching backward and whispering to each other we have work to do.

     Once we have something worth showing the world the final step is to create a video and post it to a public forum such as YouTube or Vimeo.  We will address the basics of this process in a subsequent blog.

     With talent, education, practice, inspiration, and some luck, an actual poet can often finish a work in two months.