The Outerview Series: Part V - Rhyming is Fun

     At this point we understand what poetry is:  memorable speech.  We know where it is:  primarily, in song lyrics.  We know that lines find their rhythm, such that we can discern the cadence and meter by scanning whole poems from right to left.  Now we come to the fun part.

     A perfect rhyme is a repetition of a vowel sound and an ensuing consonant sound, if there is one, in a particular position.  Most often that position is at the end ("terminal" rhyme) of the line but it can be at the beginning ("initial" rhyme) or middle ("medial" rhyme) of the line.  For example, here is a closing iambic pentameter couplet:

We see | the rage, | but through | the lie | we learn
that we | don't age. | Not you | and I. | We burn.

     "See" and "we" are initial rhymes.  "Rage/age", "through/you", and "lie/I" are medial rhymes.  "Learn" and "burn" are traditional end-rhymes.

     Perfect rhyme works best with lighter, shorter works:  nursery rhymes, teen-oriented hip pop and rap, and humorous pieces.

     For serious works perfect rhyme is fine for a while but, like fish and visitors, becomes awkward after a while.  Long works like Shakespeare's plays and John Milton's "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" are in blank verse:  meter, yes;  rhyme, no.

     In order to lessen the effect of rhyme in serious verse poets will adopt one of three tactics:  distance, form, or imperfect rhymes.

Distance

      Increasing the number of syllables between the two rhyming words makes their similarity less salient.  For example, in iambic pentameter the end rhymes will be ten syllables apart (e.g. "learn" and "burn" above).  Instead of having the next line rhyme, as in rhyming couplets, we could have rhymes skip a line or more.  For example, sonnets can have odd and even numbered lines rhyme.  We call this a rhyme scheme, with letters starting with "A" assigned to each different rhyme:  ABAB or even ABCABC where we wait three lines before the sound will be repeated.

      In bacchic (i.e. de-DUM-DUM) monometer there are only two words between the rhymes, as we see with "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks:

We real cool.
We skip school.
We lurk late.
We strike straight.

     Note that this involves both initial and terminal rhymes, and the initial one, "We", repeats the exact same word.  This is called "identical" rhyming as we see in the first two lines here:

It takes trouble, and it takes courage to be free.
But you 'll find, it you are soft enough, love will hang around for free.
And the coldest bed I found does not hold one but it will hold three.
I hope you never have to know what that can mean. - "Cactus" by Ferron

Form

      We can break the lines differently so that the non-identical rhymes don't stand out as much.  For example, "We Real Cool" is actually written and performed like this:

We real cool.  We
skip school.  We
lurk late.  We
strike straight.

      This linebreaking is called "curgination".  Its effect is greater when the rhymes are more distant, as we see with DPK's classic curgina, "Beans":

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.

    The hesitations before each tactful euphemism distract us from the rhyme.  For many, only when it is decurginated does the ABABA rhyme scheme become evident:

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.

    Another use of form to hide perfect rhymes is corata:  presenting the poem in paragraph form:

     The spring retreats, its promise spent on tulip kiss and poplar musk.  The summer's greening rays relent when day meets dark at purpling dusk.  Twin tumbleweeds roll past and part the dirt to sketch in chicken tracks, so soon obscured: convectional art mandalas till the winds relax.

     Can you see where the lines end?

     The sonnet exhibits a glaring exception to this distancing:  A sudden tightening of the rhyme scheme from ABAB or even ABCABC into a couplet signals the end of the poem.  Those last two lines sound like a "Ta Da!" finale:

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.

     T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was a masterpiece in terms of distancing and softening perfect rhymes through the use of form.  In this case, that involved heterometric iambic lines with a lot of anacrusis (i.e. extra syllables before the iambs kick in, marked here in curly brackets). 

{Let} | us go | then, you | and I,
{When} | the ev'n|ing is | spread out | against | the sky

     This is in addition to these long lines of iambic heptameter (in addition to trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter) creating distance between the rhymes:

My morn|ing coat, | my col|lar mount|ing firm|ly to | the chin,
My neck|tie rich | and mod|est, but | assert|ed by | a sim|ple pin

Imperfect Rhymes

     The most sophisticated and effective way to de-emphasize rhymes is to avoid perfect ones.  Find sounds that sound similar, not identical.  Think of "m" versus "n", or "layer" versus "air".  Or "bits" versus "bets".  These go by many names:  slant rhymes, half rhymes, off and consonantal rhymes ("pick" & "rock"), etc.  The strongest and most common, especially in singing, is assonantal rhymes where only the vowels are repeated.  "Cool" versus "boot".

     We saw an example of this above with Ferron's "Cactus":  free-free-three-mean.  Here is another from the same song, with "owl" rhyming with "town":

It's been a year
since you left home for higher ground.
In the distance I hear a hoot owl
ask the only question I have found
to be worthy of the sound it makes
as it breaks the silence of your old town.
These letters are another way to love you.

      Think of rhyming as a subset of our next topic:

Next:  Sonics

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.

Melody Is Memory

     All of us understand that poetry is a mode of speech defined by memorable words.  Prosody is the science of making verses easier to recall, either through concision or repetition.  Even if one were to argue that "forgettable poetry" is not an oxymoron a tautological question of relevance arises:  "If no one cares then who cares?  If a tree falls in the forest does anybody give a damn?"

     As with all speech, poetry requires an audience.  The vast majority of people today cannot recite a stanza written in this millennium but can sing thousands of contemporary lyrics.  As a practical matter, poetry is less a mode of speech than singing.  Those concerned about adding the medium of music will bear in mind that long before the 20th century disappearance of spoken verse its most successful example was Shakespeare's theater.

     What aspect of song penetrates our memories most efficiently?  A drum beat might meet with blank stares.  A chord progression might not be identified but two or three notes can spark recognition and many to sing along.  Verse being a participation sport, this defines modern poetry just as "verbatim" has defined it from its inception.

     Technically challenged poets speak vaguely of "musicality", a term that provokes cringing and eye rolls from geeks.  The truth is that poetry needs more than facsimile;  it requires actual music to attract an audience.  (And, perhaps, a readership.  Royalties from all contemporary poetry books combined wouldn't add up to those from one Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan lyric collection.)

      Content regents and corazoners will insist that the profound and poignant will attract attention [sooner or later].  All the evidence points to a very different conclusion.  Melody is everything in song and, thus, verse.  Allow us to demonstrate with two piercing examples:

      As with so many of her songs, "Ain't Life a Brook" (1980) is thought provoking and heart rending.  This song includes one of the greatest throwaway phrases of the last half century.  However, the rambling melody and accentual dimeter is not something you will sing in the shower.  Or remember at length.

I watch you reading a book
I get to thinking our love's a polished stone
You give me a long drawn look
I know pretty soon you're going to leave our home
And of course I mind
Especially when I'm thinking from my heart
But life don't clickety-clack down a straight line track
It comes together and it comes apart
You say you hope I'm not the kind
To make you feel obliged
To go ticking through your time
With a pained look in your eyes
You give me the furniture, we'll divide the photographs
Go out to dinner one more time
Have ourselves a bottle of wine
And a couple of laughs
And when first you left
I stayed so sad I wouldn't sleep
I know that love's a gift, I thought yours was mine
And something that I could keep
Now I realize that time is not the only compromise
But a bird in the hand could be an all night stand
Between a blazing fire and a pocket of skies
So I hope I'm not the kind
To make you feel obliged
To go ticking through your time
With a pained look in your eyes
I covered the furniture, I framed the photographs
Went out to dinner one more time
Had myself a bottle of wine
and a couple of laughs
And just the other day
I got your letter in the mail
I'm happy for you, its been so long
You've been wanting a cabin and a backwoods trail
And I think that's great
I seem to find myself in school
It's all okay, I just want to say
I'm so relieved we didn't do it cruel
But ain't life a brook
Just when I get to feeling like a polished stone
I give me along drawn look
It's kind of a drag to find yourself alone
And sometimes I mind
Especially when I'm waiting on your heart
But life don't clickety-clack down a straight line track
It comes together and it comes apart
'Cause I know you're not the kind
To make me feel obliged
To go ticking through my time with a pained look
In my eyes
I sold the furniture, I put away the photographs
Went out to dinner one more time
Had myself a bottle of wine
Had a couple of laughs
And wasn't it fine

      Contrast this with John Prine's child-like, tragicomic "Christmas in Prison" (or almost any other Prine song), published in 1973:

      Prine's trademark trinaries underscore the melody, creating an earworm.  His lyrics, while evocative and moving, are not near Ferron's in depth but we, individually and collectively, carry them into the future far more readily and easily than Ferron's work.

It was Christmas in prison
And the food was real good
We had turkey and pistols
Carved out of wood
And I dream of her always
Even when I don't dream
Her name's on my tongue
And her blood's in my stream
Wait awhile eternity
Old mother nature's got nothing on me
Come to me
Run to me
Come to me, now
We're rolling
My sweetheart
We're flowing
By God
She reminds me of a chess game
With someone I admire
Or a picnic in the rain
After a prairie fire
Her heart is as big
As this whole goddamn jail
And she's sweeter than saccharine
At a drug store sale
Wait awhile eternity
Old mother nature's got nothing on me
Come to me
Run to me
Come to me, now
We're rolling
My sweetheart
We're flowing
By God
The search light in the big yard
Swings round with the gun
And spotlights the snowflakes
Like the dust in the sun
It's Christmas in prison
There'll be music tonight
I'll probably get homesick
I love you
Goodnight
Wait awhile eternity
Old mother nature's got nothing on me
Come to me
Run to me
Come to me, now
We're rolling
My sweetheart
We're flowing
By God

          Again, the difference is prosody, yes, but mostly melody.  So what can we do with this?

To be continued.

"Why don't people read or 'Like' my poetry?"

Terminal Diaeresis

     Newcomers often ask:  "Why don't people read or 'Like' my poetry?"

     It's not like others are every bit as fascinated by the autobiographies, diary entries, and yearnings of strangers as you are.  Or aren't interested in chatting and being sociable.  Or that poems and poets could focus on something more distant than our navels.  Heresy!

     It's not like you are asking for a significant investment on the part of a reader.  They skim a few lines, say something appreciative and encouraging, then they move on.  What's the problem?

    "So why are people ignoring my posts?  It's not like there is a competition going on here, right?"

     There may be any number of reasons unrelated to the work itself.  Everyone has their favorites, preferring them to unknowns.  Power politics may be in play, with others flattering those they feel may be able to help them.  There may be a quid pro quo playing out, with pairs trading favorable evaluations.  Styles may form alliances, with contributors of like mind supporting a group philosophy or aesthetic.

     Aside from these human foibles, there is a good chance that some of the contributors are using tricks.  Dirty, underhanded tricks!  And not even new ones!  Some of these go back centuries or millennia--even to the beginnings of language!

     These sneaky subterfuges come in two categories:  brevity (no wasted words!) and repetition.  The latter can involve anything from whole choruses and lines ("repetends") to sounds (e.g. rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration) and rhythms (e.g. iambs:  de DUM de DUM; the beats of a song, etc.).  It's as if these people are trying to get people to not only notice  their words but to remember  them as well.  Weird.

     To show what extent these bastards will go to, let us look at an extreme, admittedly obscure example.  Hand this stanza from DPK's "Beans" to someone and ask them to read it aloud to you:

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.

      Listen to the rhythm of those stressed syllables.  Ask them to read it to you a second time.

      Do you hear how final that last word seems?  How it sounds like a triumphant "Ta Da!" at the end of a performance?

      Diaeresis is an ancient stunt usually relating to a break in the middle of a line.  Here we have terminal diaeresis, which is more esoteric still.  The magic effect comes from ending an iambic (de DUM) passage with an iambic word ("reVILED");  all previous two-syllable words were trochaic (DUM-de, i.e. "WINters", "AILing", "VIEWing", "ALways", "SADdest", "EV'ry", "DOCtor'd", "MOMent", "ORPHans", "PARents").

     Over 99.9% of poets wouldn't know diaeresis from diarrhea.  It's that rare.

     How long has this stuff been going on?  Terminal diaeresis wasn't new when Shakespeare developed it in his sonnets, circa 1600.  Thus, today's poets are so desperate for attention that they are pulling 400 year old rabbits out of their butts!  Worse yet, there are sites and articles dedicated to proliferating these dark arts, this being one of them.

What You Need To Know About Poetry

     This is but one of the thousands of options in the hypermodern poet's bag of tricks.  Thousands!

     How are you going to compete with that?

Can Poetry Revive?

Seen on Facebook: 

"Even today, native languages in Africa are comprised of more than 100 sounds ("phonemes"), many of them originally fashioned from noises in nature ("onomatopoeia"). As humankind migrated outwards many of these were lost and not replaced. Mandarin has 67 such phonemes, English has 44, Proto-Algonquin 23, Hawaian only 13.

"Thus, when you and I speak we use the sounds of African wildlife species, some of which may have been extinct for eons."

      Aside from communication, the purpose of language [as a whole] is preservation.  The purpose of poetry is to preserve [specific] language.  Hence, poetry distinguishes itself from prose in that it is verbatim or, if you prefer, memorable speech.  Not writing.  Speech.  Shakespeare's plays weren't recorded for posterity on behalf of English professors;  they were committed to paper from memory as scripts for the benefit of other actors and producers.

  The expression "poetry book" or "poetry magazine" is something of an oxymoron.  Yes, both have existed even before the printing press but, unlike today, they had readers, not just writers hoping to see their names in indices, and those readers were interested in importing that language into their speech.  Yes, archiving poetry as literature is vital but not if it has no appeal to audiences, contemporary or future.  Not readers.  Audiences.

      Flash forward four centuries and the most widely quoted poet is Leonard Cohen.  This is a man who authored three "best-selling" volumes of poetry before picking up a guitar, but more than 99% of the time he is quoted from memory it involves one of his lyrics, not his books.  Thus, poetry already survives, but only in song.  Most people know thousands of lyrics but can't recite eight consecutive lines of a poem written during their lifetimes.

     Thus, if we understand what poetry is--verbatim speech--we understand how to revive it.  Speak it!  To be clear, insofar as modern work is concerned, it isn't the presence of poetry writing [or the concomitant lack of reading] that has killed the art form;  it is the absence of poetry performance. 

     Ergo, reviving poetry is a simple matter of encouraging people to perform it, most conveniently and economically on social media.  Offer prizes for the best videos of selected stageworthy masterpieces  (after obtaining the necessary permissions) et voilà!  Problem solved.

Cheap Prosody Parlor Tricks - Part II

In Cheap Prosody Parlor Tricks - Part I we saw how a knowledge of scansion can help us predict what sections of a poem or song will be retained in memory. Let's continue the fun with a test my friend conducted during an open mic.

The rules couldn't be simpler. Participants will be presented with four poems--parts of poems in my buddy's 3-minute version--and then be asked whether each one is metrical or not. No, really. That's all there is to it. In fact, to make it even easier, the metrical poem(s) will rhyme and at least one of the works will be familiar to us.

Why not play along? If music will distract you, turn off your volume for all except #2, which is recited. For #1, #3 and #4, feel free to read the poems aloud to yourself as the words appear. In any event, please view each video only once before marking the poem as Metrical or Free Verse.

---

1. "Studying Savonarola" by Margaret A. Griffiths

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRlHq0JGFdI

---

2. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by Thomas Stearns Eliot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BykfGCPn5IU

---

3. "How Aimee remembers Jaguar" by Erin Hopson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiWTD6PVItE

---

4. "Beans" by D. P. Kristalo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJBiVwRRRVc

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When you're ready to see the answers, please scroll down past these photos:






"Beans" (iambic pentameter) and "Prufrock" (iambic heterometer) were verse. "Savonarola" and "Aimee" were free verse.

So, how did you fare?

When my buddy did this he had 35 people in the audience but, because it came after a poetry reading, three of them were fast asleep. Let's do the math:

32 / (2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16) = 2

If the audience were stone deaf and guessing blindly, then, two of them should have gotten all four right. By my friend's count there were at least eight MFAs, graduate students or PhDs in the crowd so our minimum expectation should be...what? 8 contestants getting all of them right? 9 out of 32?

No matter. Only one person in the crowd (a PhD, yes, but in History) got all four correct. Ever the diplomat, our hero told those assembled that the purpose wasn't to test people's ear for poetry but to show how the best free verse is virtually indistinguishable from metrical.

For what it's worth, here are the four snippets my friend used in his 3-minute version:

1. from "Studying Savonarola" by Margaret A. Griffiths
   
   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.
   
   
2. from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot
   
   And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
   The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
   And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
   When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
   Then how should I begin
   To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
   And how should I presume?
   
   
3. from "How Aimee remembers Jaguar" by Erin Hopson
   
   Sheets
   sink into the spaces between knees, brush bottoms
   of feet. The softest parts pursue something equal
   to spoon, fingers trace patterns over smooth
   and slick terrain. How pliable, the chasm between lovers
   where welcome linen soothes the burn.
   
   
4. from "Beans" by D. P. Kristalo
   
   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.
   

Try this with your fellow poets or students. It's a hoot.

---

Premises and Recommendations

Premises and Recommendations

The opposite of popular poetry is literary (aka "academic", "aesthetic", "non-commercial" or "poets'") poetry. If we conceptualize fellow performers ("us") as being distinct from audience members ("them"), we can say that aesthetic poetry is not written with an audience in mind. Indeed, no such audience exists.

It follows logically that in order to write for an audience we need to observe those who eschew one and do the exact opposite. To wit:

1. Premise: Scansion is no longer taught in school. To no one's surprise, verse is now a minority of the poetry published in lit mags. Free verse is rarer still, simply because writers who cannot handle one rhythm can hardly be expected to juggle five. The vast majority of the academic poetry being published today is, at best, prose poetry (with or without linebreaks). N.B.: Acccentual-syllabic verse is quantified and rhythmic. Free verse is rhythmic but not quantified. Prose poetry is neither.
   
   Recommendation: Learn the basics of scansion. Write nothing but verse, at least until your next-door-neighbour can name a single prose poem.
   
   
2. Premise: Little, if any, academic poetry qualifies as "memorable speech". This is evidenced not only by no one quoting it but by the fact that the authors themselves don't bother to memorize it. Enter the poetry reading. Exit the poetry audience.
   
   If a poem isn't worth memorizing it probably isn't worth reading. You wouldn't watch a play or movie where the actors read from scripts. Why accept such a lack of professionalism from poets?
   
   Recommendation: Don't just recite poems from memory. Perform them.
   
   
3. Premise: Academic poets seek notice by publishing books.
   
   Recommendation: Use books to capitalize on fame, not to achieve it. Consider the stage, magazines (literary or not) and the internet instead.
   
   
4. Premise: Literary poets ignore performance.
   
   Recommendation: Every moment alone and every captive audience is a chance to practice performance. Use these.
   
   
5. Premise: Literary poets study other poets.
   
   Recommendation: Study poets and audiences.
   
   
6. Premise: Literary poets avoid objective pre-publication critique.
   
   Recommendation: Seek out critique.
   
   
7. Premise: Literary poets write about themselves, individually and collectively.
   
   Recommendation: Surely there is something more interesting to write about than poets' navels.
   
   
8. Premise: Literary poets abide by the maxim "if you can't be deep, be vague".
   
   Recommendation: Try to be understood too quickly.
   
   
9. Premise: Literary poets blame the audience's lack of sophistication.
   
   Recommendation: Respect your audience. "The customer is always right."
   
   
10. Premise: Literary poets aspire to teach.
    
    Recommendation: Popular poets: aspire to learn.

So you see, you really can learn a lot from academic poetry.

-o-