I) Poetry is verbatim. II) Poetry is most often rhythmic. III) Poetry was subsumed by song in the 20th Century. IV) Verse is scanned from right to left because lines find their rhythm. V) Rhymes are crowd-pleasers. VI) In addition to concision, poetry relies on repetitions of sounds. VII) Poetry has lost its audience [and readership].
There are more people writing "poetry" now than ever before but no one is listening to [or reading] it.
"So what is the purpose of learning how to write it? To be ignored?"
Mastering the art form's essentials and understanding its mordant status quo allows us to comprehend the challenge: "Other than setting verse to music, how can we manufacture an audience?"
In 1972 the National Football League was still competing against baseball, basketball, and, to stretch the point, golf and hockey for lucrative television contracts. Some commentators came up with an idea: Each would pick players and whichever such group scored the most points that season would win that pundit a prize. By fashioning their own such lists ("leagues") fans could have a stake in the game. This became known as "Fantasy Football". Today, it is the NFL's largest single source of profit and has made it, by far, the most successful sport in America, if not the world.
Thus, "How can we get audiences?" evolves into "How can we get audiences involved in poetry?" Not poets, mind you, but audiences. The public.
This may be the most difficult task in the world. Others have tried and failed to engage people in contemporary verse.
In the 1980s Marc Kelly Smith and some other Chicago poets came up with the idea of poetry competitions called "slams". These had some success because, as we've said, there are many people writing "poetry" today. Unlike Fantasy Football, though, slams never appealed to a broader fandom because virtually no such fans existed. The audience was limited to other poets and their tiny entourages. (In accordance with Earl Gray's 72nd law, experienced participants avoid the term "poetry"; these are merely "slam" or "spoken word" events.)
The Poetry Foundation and National Endowment for the
Arts came up with another good idea: Get teens across the nation to
perform verse. This has had limited success for a number of reasons:
it is expensive, requires a lot of organization, the selected verses
lack performance value, and it underutilizes the Internet.
Poetry Covers
We are all familiar with cover songs.
Find [or write] a poem you feel others will like. Make a video either narrating it [in the background] or performing it, properly attributing it to the author. Post it on social media, calling it "a story", "a perspective", "an account", anything other than "a poem".
"Wait. What about copyright?"
Try to contact the writer for permission. If they are unavailable, proceed. In the very unlikely event that the poet objects to this homage, take it down. Much more likely, the author will be complimented and will thank you for the promotional effort.
Not a performer? Be the camera operator for an actor friend. Or buy a cell phone tripod (for under $20) and be the facilitator. Network.
As an illustration, consider making a recording of this poem with spoken words instead of background music:
Lover's Will
Forget those walks, the turns we took; those glaring trinkets won't remain: the warming touch, the neighbour's look, our way washed clean by autumn rain.
Forget me now, embrace the rest of this new course, unseen, unsought, and grant me only this request: reserve for us your final thought.
Form contests, asking people to submit similar efforts. For example, you could send us the URL after posting your version of "Lover's Will" online. We can list these here and see which rendition our visitors prefer.
Ideally, sponsors would get involved. If not, ally your contest with a favorite local business, cause, or group. To wit, we might say that the "Lover's Will" performance prompt/contest honors the Thailand Restaurant at 617 Selkirk Avenue, whose delicacies sustain me and deserve worldwide recognition. LOL!
At this point we know that poetry is memorably speech, how to scan verse, rhyme, and use sounds to stitch words together. So what do we do now?
"Write poems and get them published?"
To what end?
"What do you mean?"
How many contemporary poems do you read each day?
"Well, none, but..."
Exactly. No one is going to read your poem, even if it is printed in a magazine.
"Okay, post it on my blog then."
And how much time do you spend reading verse on blogs? Or social media?
"Probably none..."
Precisely. No one reads poetry. Except, perhaps, others who want to be published there and trying to get a feel for the editor's preferences.
Thus, the question becomes: "Under what circumstances would anyone want to read or hear our poetry?"
"If it's set to music, maybe?"
Yes, but let's just talk about spoken verse here. When might people want to read or hear poetry, as opposed to song lyrics?
"Never?"
Pretty much, yes. Never.
"So what do we do?"
We create an audience.
"And how do we do that?"
We ask ourselves: What do people find interesting?
"Movies? Television?"
Right. So our task is to get our poems into movies and/or television.
Consider the three best poems of this century. All were made into slide shows. They attracted 1444 hits over a combined (14+14+15) 43 years. That is 33.58 hits per year. All were historical perspectives, the idea being that anyone making a documentary or feature film would web search the subject, find the poem, and consider including it.
Never happened. A more targeted approach is in order. Find out what your favorite director's upcoming project is, write a poem about that, make a video, post it onto social media, then join an online discussion group for that director or genre and, after establishing yourself, casually mention your piece there.
If that is not your style then write for an upcoming event. You have four months from now (2024-08-25) until Kamala Harris is sworn in as POTUS. Use that time to write, perform, record, and post an inaugural poem. Get going on it!
Other Venues and Embedded Poetry
In addition to songs there are open mics and slams. These attract participants and their entourages more than listeners, per se.
Shakespeare didn't publish his sonnets. What poetry he did publicize was his dramatic verse. Plays. He made enough to sustain two theatres--not just the troupe of actors but the actual buildings. It is unclear that the Bard could do that today but it is certain that no one else has managed to do this in the 21st Century.
A different approach is to write a novel or movie script that includes (i.e. "embeds") poetry. For example, "The Paradox of Love" is a novel/movie about two open mic poets who fall in love. One has to depart [because of an undisclosed illness] so the poem she wrote as her wedding vows now serve as her farewell.
Consider this: There is only one time every four years when the anglophone world listens to a poem: the U.S. presidential inauguration ceremony. At that, only after a Democratic victory.
So here's a practical suggestion for American versers: Write an inaugural poem and have it performed (i.e. by yourself or someone else) on a video posted to YouTube. Add "2025 Inaugural Poem" after the title (e.g. "Locked Towards the Future" - A 2025 Inaugural Poem) so scouts can find it. Not an American? Pair up with one.
You may need to network, joining up with a performer and, perhaps, a songwriter. In any event, writing and producing a performance (even on your telephone) will be only half the battle. You will need to spent at least as much time, energy, resources, and imagination finding an audience.
So far, we've learned that poetry is memorably speech. It uses a lot of memory aids ("mnemonic techniques"), including cadence and meter, both of which are best identified if we scan the whole poem, line by line from right to left. Two elements are key: concision and repetitions of sounds, starting with rhymes.
Every language has a set number of sounds, called "phonemes". Even today, some African languages have over 100 distinct sounds. As humankind emigrated to other areas many of these were lost. Mandarin has 56. English, 44. Algonquin, 29. By the time people inhabited Hawaii they were down to 13. There is a tribe along the Amazon with as few as 7; their babies learn to communicate through humming before they can speak!
Many of these phonemes were originally onomatopoeic, like "moo", or "hiss". Thus, regardless of what language you speak, you might be imitating the sounds of animals, some of which may have gone extinct thousands of years ago.
Rhymes are a subset of sounds. In going to the superset we transition from the easiest aspect of poetry to the most complex.
"I just read ahead. Do we have to know all of these different type of sounds?"
No, but we need to know of them and the importance of their length and strength. Sonics are what separate an amateur's work from an experts. It is what attracts praise from sophisticated editors and contest judges. In close decisions, it wins slams. We will go with a "quick and dirty" approach, focusing on what someone needs to know, and footnote two excellent articles by Rachel Lindley at bottom.
For now, we'll begin with, arguably, the five most pleasant sounding words ever written:
Ozone on the midnight wind
...and examine what makes these lyrics so unforgettable.
Length
The time it takes to make a sound can set a pace [with other sounds of that duration] or make a phoneme stand out [from sounds of different lengths]. For vowels, the "i" and "e" in "bit" and "bet" are called "short" for a reason. A long "oh", as in "ozone", is medium length. A long "i" (e.g. "lie") sounds like "ah-ee" or "uh-ee", a combination of sounds tantamount to a dipthong (e.g. "oi" as in "oink" or "ou" as in "out"). Similarly, a long "a", as in "cake", sounds like a short "e" followed by a long one: "eh-ee".
Among consonants, ones that we can spit out (e.g hard "g" as in "get, "b", "k", and "p") are very quick. The "s" sound in "yes" or the "zh" sound in "pleasure" or "joie de vivre" take longer. The "sh" (e.g. "shop") and "ch" ("chop") sounds are longer still. We make "m" and "n" sounds largely through our noses and it takes a while to distinguish them.
Thus, "Ozone on" ("Oh-zohn awn") is a very slow start to our example line, as is "night" ("na-eet" or "nuh-eet"), but the "i" in "mid" and "wind" is quick. The line drives along slowly, as if in a construction zone, pumps its breaks with "mid", and then comes to a slow stop with "wind". The word "the" ("thuh") is medium in duration, transitioning from the slothlike first half of the line to the cautious arrest.
A | E | I | O | U ah aw ai | eh ee | ih uh-ee | aw oh | uh oo oo yu cat paw ate | pet see | sit eye | pot low | cut put gnu cue
Y | Shwa <- Like a shortened "u" from "put" ye uh-ee ee | ½ oo <-- between the b and l in "able". yet sky any | cook <- Sometime written with an inverted "e".
B | C s | D | F | G j | H | J zh | K | L but | cow ice | die | foe | go age | hot | jut raj | kit | lit
M | N | P | Q | R | S zh | T | V | W | X | Z man | now | pin | que | raw | see leisure | tea | vet | wet | ks | zen
Ch | Sh | Ph | th | th chi | she | phil | the | thin
As an exercise, try grouping the above sounds as "short", "medium", and "long" in duration. Then create a second list, categorizing them as "soft", "medium", or "harsh":
Strength
The softness/weakness or harshness/strength of consonants can echo and enhance an atmosphere of relaxation or tension, respectively.
Poe's famous trochaic heptameter opening in "The Raven" uses a lot of strong consonants before vowel sounds to create tension/suspense:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
Linking the sounds of "weak" and "weary", internal rhyming with "dreary", highlights our sense of ominous vulnerability.
In our example line, most of the sounds are soft ("m", "n") or medium ("z"):
Ozone on the midnight wind
The only hard sounds are "d" and "t" and those come after vowels, not right before them. The "t" at the beginning of, say, "tight" is harder than the one at the end, or the one at the end of "night". Similarly, the consonants at the beginning of "bib", "dud", "gig", "kick", and "pop" are sounded more strongly than the same consonants at the ends of those words.
Connection
Note that in the words "midnight wind" the "d" and "n" sounds switch, both coming after a short "i". As with all sonic repetitions, this links the two words in our subconscious minds. This linkage is made firmer by the fact that the two words, "midnight" and "wind", have more than one sound in common. This is particularly strong if the sounds occur in stressed syllables. Meanwhile, the "n" phonemes in "Ozone on" link those two words, creating the sense of being high--perhaps literally and figuratively. This creates a mood of being euphoric in a dark breeze.
In this way our words and our sounds can have different meanings, or the same meanings with different emphasis.
Which of these two fabrics did Erin Hopson choose in her ekphrastic masterpiece, “How Aimée remembers Jaguar"? Satin or linen?
where wel|come sat|in soothes | the burn.
where wel|come lin|en soothes | the burn.
Both lines work as iambic tetrameter so rhythm/meter aren’t an issue.
If Erin wanted to alliterate with “satin soothes” she’d have gone with the first line.
Instead, she wanted to link the “l” of “linen” with the “l” in “welcome”. This makes the line about hospitality more than healing. More about the care than the cure. A poet has to do this with every phoneme in every word. Think of a game of Jenga. One wrong word and the whole poem collapses.
To recap, in general:
- A group of long sounds slows the pace, creating a sense of ease. - A group of short sounds quickens the pace, creating tension. - A group of soft sounds eases tension. - A group of harsh sounds creates tension. - Hard consonants sound more so before vowels than at the end of words. - Repeating sounds links the words that contain them. - Repetitions involving stressed syllables make stronger links. - Multiple repetitions (e.g. "wild" & "life") make stronger links.
AI: A heavy syllable is a syllable that contains a long vowel sound or ends in a consonant. Heavy syllables are considered "stronger" or "weightier" than light syllables, which contain short vowel sounds and no final consonant. In prosodic analysis, the distinction between heavy and light syllables is important for determining the rhythmic structure and stress patterns of words and phrases.
Consonants come in two general "flavours" - voiced and unvoiced. Voiced consonants occur when you let your vocal chords vibrate as you form them. Unvoiced consonants occur when you don't. As a general rule of thumb, unvoiced consonants have a harsher sound than voiced consonants, which generally take longer to form because of the vocal chord involvement and are also softened by the vocal chord vibration.
The Speedy Ones
1. Unvoiced Plosives - that's a fancy way of saying that these are sounds you make when trapping air behind your teeth or lips and then releasing it explosively without letting your vocal chords vibrate. Unvoiced plosives include T and P. They're fast, they're harsher, and they're made in a "spitting" fashion. Using these sounds can help you create a sense of staccato speed. You could use them to emphasize a sense of shock or surprise, irritation, physical lightness, a sense of lightheartedness, and so on.
2. Voiced Plosives - the talkative version of the above. Voiced plosives include D and B. These sounds can create more sense of forcefulness than the above, but without the same harshness of sound and as such without the same effect in communicating, say, irritation. These are "bouncy" sounds and "demanding" sounds. Just look at what those two words start with. B's are great for building humour in imagery, and D's are great for building forceful urgency.
3. Unvoiced Glottals - Glottals in general are sometimes lumped in with plosives, because they are also made by trapping air and then explosively releasing it. However, in this case this is done in the back of the throat. The lone unvoiced glottal is K. Because of its clicking effect, it's great in enforcing quickness and urgency, and because of its unvoiced nature it's great at enforcing a sense of anger or danger, or a sense of snatching something quickly.
4. Voiced Glottals - The lone voiced glottal is a hard G. It can be used to create a "gurgling" effect ("gurgle" being a perfect example). Say you wanted to get across a sense of someone choking on their words or feeling indignation - a lot of G sounds can help build that effect. It has some of the demanding nature of a D and can also be used to enforce humour. It can increase speed, although not to the same extent as an unvoiced glottal can.
The Slowpokes
5. Unvoiced Fricatives - These are formed when you release air continuously through a small opening between the teeth, lips, or throat without letting your vocal chords get into the game. These include SH (as in "sheep"), S (as in "sleep"), H, TH (as in "thick") and F (as in "fur"). Because of their hissing nature, lots of fricatives are used to good effect in creating a sense of threat, intensity, and sensuality. H can also have an effect found in voiced fricatives: it can communicate a sense of heaviness of atmosphere or physicality by the way the air has to be forced out the throat in order to create any sound at all. "Heave!"
6. Voiced Fricatives - the effect of the hissing sound is changed dramatically when you let your vocal chords vibrate. They include Z ("zoom"), ZH ("azure"), TH ("soothe"), and V ("vapid"). These are more sensual, buzzing sounds, long and drawn out. They can help create an erotic atmosphere, a relaxed one, a sense of peace, a sense of heaviness. Because Z and ZH are a higher-pitched vibration and are therefore more strident, they can also be used to enforce a constant annoyance, like a fly buzzing.
7. Nasals - nasals are formed by almost completely closing off the lips, teeth, or throat and letting things hummmmmmmm. These include M, N, and NG. These sounds are some of the most drawn out. I mean, you can hum on one breath for a long, long time. These sounds can have a huge range of effect. M tends to get the best job, and can be used to create a sense of relaxation, sensuality, and largess. N is middle of the road. It can be used to create similar effect, but it also has a touch of a higher-pitched nose vibration in it, which can create a more strident effect. The one with the ugliest job is NG. Because it is a seriously high-pitched nasal vibration, it can be used to create an atmosphere of irritation and annoyance and emphasize strong vibrational environmental effects. (for example, "clang").
8. Approximants - these are sounds that don't know whether they're vowels or consonants. They are the missing link between the closed sounds of consonants and the open sounds of vowels. There are two kinds of approximants: liquids / resonants, which include R and L, and semi-vowels, which include W and Y (although some would say that Y and W could also be diphthongs, they're so close to the edge). These sounds can seriously smooth out rhythm and tone, having a "liquid" effect on sound and imagery. R, being formed so close to the vocal folds, has more vibration and therefore can create a sense of "growling", good in communicating anger, desire, and such.
9. Affricatives - these are the diphthongs of consonants, made with a rapid-fire switch from one consonant sound to another. These include CH (chair) and J (judge). Since CH is a combination of T and SH, it has the explosive effect of an unvoiced plosive in combination with the hissing effect of an unvoiced fricative. It's the brother of SH, only more demanding. "Chomp!" J, being a combination of D and ZH, has a softer side, is more sensual, but has more oomph and emphasis than a standard voiced fricative. "Jump!" It's meatier than the slithering fricative types, juicier. Affricatives don't creep up on you with their charm, they beat you over the head with it.
Now let's add consonant and vowel phonemes to the mix. When you read a poem aloud, keeping in mind the rhythm as you do so, you may begin to get a sense, not only of the relative speed and pitch of the voice, but the overall "feeling" or "atmosphere" that may be generated by the sounds. (Remember: always read aloud.) For instance, if you have a lot of short, quick phonemes, such as a lot of unvoiced plosive consonants or glottal consonants like "t", "k", "p", or "g" and a lot of short vowel sounds like "eh", "ih" or "ah", a line moves quickly and sharply. Enough sharp, unvoiced consonants like "p", "t" or "k", and when read aloud you will feel as if you almost spit the words. Add a lot of unvoiced sibilant fricatives or affricatives like "s", "sh" or "ch", and a line may sound hissed, which can be either threatening or alluring, depending on the length of the vowels. Short vowels like "ah", "ih", and "eh" can increase pitch and speed; long, open vowels (especially dipthongs) like "aw", "oh", "ow" and "oo" deepen and slow the pitch and speed. Voiced fricatives like "th" in "them", "v", "z" or "zh" sounds in combination with nasals or semi-vowels like "w", "m", "n", or "y" will generally smooth (a perfect example, by the way) and slow a line.
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.
So far, we've established that poetry is the speech we preserve verbatim and that it is currently found almost exclusively in song lyrics. To fit the music, poetry is in set lengths called "meters", alongside other lines that take about the same amount of time to bring forth. In a sense, all meter is quantitative.
Today, we're going to see how these meters work to create rhythm, especially in spoken verse.
"Why the sudden focus on spoken poetry?"
Because if it works in speech it will do so even more mellifluously in song. Determining how we build cadence is called "scansion". Knowing that meter involves counting something--alliterations, stressed syllables, patterns, tempos--let's begin with a historical perspective: In 1066, the French counted syllables, perhaps because they didn't stress them as strongly as the English, who counted only accented syllables. The result of the invasion was a mashup or compromise, with subsequent English verse being "accentual-syllabic". Each line would have the same number of syllables with stressed ("DUM") ones interspersed with unstressed ("de") ones. These form patterns called "feet" because each stress corresponded to a dance step. These are the most common feet:
the pleas of | a peacemak|er can't be | imparted while even | your traplines | have got to | be guarded.
de-de-DUM = dactyl -> Dactyllic pentameter:
Yours was the | song of that | egret, your | life like a | burning poem.
This is one of the myriad reasons why we need to hear poetry. Our ear will learn to detect these cadences--typically after only seven syllables. All of this is, and so much more, lost on the page.
"Wait, hold on. I heard a lot more accented syllables than you highlighted. Are you cheating here?"
Good catch! Yes, I "omitted" a number of stresses here to concentrate on the base rhythm. Here I've added them back in for reference:
Graywolves | surround | the eg|ret. Fox|es slink | away
Brock would say | no more val|orous war|rior exists. | Sure as ap|ple treesbud
the pleas of | a peacemak|er can't be | imparted while even | your traplines | have got to | be guarded.
Yours was the | song of that | egret, your | life like a | burning poem.
This shows that we can add accents to give the cadence some variety, some flair. Toward the same end, we can delete all of the stresses in a foot. For example, the second last foot in these two lines are "pyrhhics" (i.e. "de-de"), having no beat, when reciting the verse without music:
The rain | in Spain | falls main|ly on | the plain.
But I | have prom|ises | to keep,
Here is a tribach (de-de-de) followed by a molossus (DUM-DUM-DUM):
out on the | wine dark sea
These deviations are called "substitutions". Do not confuse these with their evil twin, the dreaded "inversion", where the poet switches the order of the cadence. Note the switch from de-DUMs to DUM-de in the second line here:
Pale fac|es, dough|like breasts <- Spondee (DUM-DUM), iamb, iamb. help me | forget. <- trochee, iamb.
Lines often "find" their rhythm as they go along, such that patterns at the end of the line are more reliable than those at the beginning. Thus, don't sweat the first foot. In fact, we'll often see unaccented syllables--second class citizens, essentially--dropped entirely from the beginning of line. For example, is this line trochaic, missing a syllable from the end ("[x]" marks the spot):
Tyger, | tyger, | burning | bright [x]
...or is it iambic, missing a syllable from the beginning :
[x] Tyg|er, tyg|er, burn|ing bright
Trusting the ends of lines more than their murky beginnings, we already know the answer: iambic tetrameter. We have already discerned that, if scanning a line to detect its cadence or meter, we should start at its end and work backwards.
There is another critical aspect in this particular poem. Were we to have seen Blake's entire piece there wouldn't have been a mystery in the first place:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame | thy fear|ful sym|metry?
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 sin|ews 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 wat|er'd heav|en 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 fear|ful sym|metry?
We note that, while 18 lines are ambiguous, trochee or iambic, there are six lines of perfect iambic tetrameter and zero lines of complete trochee. Ergo, when someone hands you one line and asks you to scan it, the proper response is not iambic, trochaic, dactylic, amphibrachic, or anapestic; it's: "Let me see the whole poem!"
This is line 1 from the first canto of Lord Byron's "Bride of Abydos" (1813):
Know ye the land where cypress and myrtle
Can you tell me what meter this is in?
"Where's the rest of it?"
Perfect answer! When Edgar Allen Poe read this he said the poem could not be scanned, but if he had continued reading he'd have seen many verses of perfect anapestic tetrameter and no lines of anything else:
Where the light | wings of Zeph|yr, oppress'd | with perfume, Where the cit|ron and ol|ive are fair|est of fruit, Where the tints | of the earth, | and the hues | of the sky, And the pur|ple of Oc|ean is deep|est in dye; 'Tis the clime | of the East; | 'tis the land | of the Sun — Where the vir|gins are soft | as the ros|es they twine, Can he smile | on such deeds | as his child|ren have done? Are the hearts | which they bear, | and the tales | which they tell.
He'd have been able to see that this line is simply missing two unstressed syllables in its initial foot:
[x] [x] Know | ye the land | [x] where cyp|ress and myrt|le Where the rage | of the vul|ture, the love | of the turt|le,
"Wait, what about the "-le" at the end of the lines, messing everything up?"
These have a weird "schwa" sound. We see it most often in "-er" and "l" sound endings (e.g. "pencil"). Consider these semi-syllables: counted if needed, ignored if inconvenient. In the same poem we see the "-er" overlooked in "flowers" while the very same "er" is counted in "ever" twice, and "never" in a subsequent line:
Where the flowers | ever blos|som, the beams | ever shine; And the voice| of the night|ingale nev|er is mute;
"I see what you mean when you called unstressed syllables 'second class citizens'."
They are like Rodney Dangerfield. They get no respect. In fact, the might even be replaced by commas. Check out the second of these two lines from Shakespeare:
The best | of men | have sung | your at|tributes, Breasts, | lips, | eyes, | and gold|en hair!
That's iambic pentameter with only 7 syllables! Imagine the shame: three perfectly good syllables, the basis of our language and civilization, replaced by lowly commas!
There are fancy names for most of these irregularities. Syllables missing at the beginning of lines? Acephaly, meaning "headless". Missing syllables at the end of lines? Catalexis. Extra syllables--full ones, not just the semi-syllables we mentioned--at the end are hypercatalexis. Extra syllables at the beginning of lines? Anacrusis, as we see with T.S. Eliot's heterometrical "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
Let | us go | then, you | and I, (iambic trimeter with anacrusis) When | the ev'n|ing is | spread out | against | the sky (iambic pentameter with anacrusis) Like | a pat|ient eth|erised | upon | a tab|le; (iambic pentameter with anacrusis) Let | us go, |through cert|ain half-|desert|ed streets,
While we often use the terms "line" and "meter" interchangeably, "meter" refers to the syllables that form feet (iambs, in this case). The syllables elsewhere (e.g. the first word in all four of the lines above) and the semi-syllable at the end [of "table"] are part of the line but not the meter.
We now know the key to scansion: scan poems backwards. Not just one line in isolation but the whole poem. Practice this with your favorite poems and songs [bearing in mind that they could be accentual instead, in which case just count the stresses in each line].
200 years ago every grade six graduate (which Poe was not) understood this. Today? Not so much.
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 bothroll 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.
In our first outerview we established that poetry is a mode of speech,
coming about because audiences feel the words are worth preserving in
memory verbatim.
Our next question is: "What happened to poetry? Where did it go?"
Two centuries ago the average literate person knew hundreds of poems and hundreds of songs. Most of the latter may have come from church attendance. Today, the average literate person can sing along to thousands of songs but not recite a single poem written in the last half century.
Before performing her song, "Motherland", in this video Natalie Merchant interrupts herself to say: "Oh, this is a poem by Natalie Merchant." Here are the lyrics, with some color added to highlight some of the repeated sounds, including rhymes:
[Verse 1] Where in hell can you go Far from the things that you know Far from the sprawl of concrete That keeps crawling its way About one thousand miles a day?
[Verse 2] Take one last look behind Commit this to memory and mind Don't miss this wasteland This terrible place, when you leave Keep your heart off your sleeve
[Chorus] Motherland, cradle me Close my eyes Lullaby me to sleep Keep me safe Lie with me Stay beside me Don'tgo Don't you go
[Verse 3] Oh, my five-and-dime queen Tell me what have you seen? The lust and the avarice The bottomless, the cavernous greed Is that what you see?
[Chorus] Motherland, cradle me Close my eyes Lullaby me to sleep Keep me safe Lie with me Stay beside me Don't go
[Verse 4] It's your happiness I want most of all And for that, I'd do anything at all, o mercy me! If you want the best of it or the most of all If there's anything I can do at all Now come on, shotgun bride What makes me envy your life? Faceless, nameless, innocent, blameless, and free What's that like to be?
[Chorus] Motherland, cradle me Close my eyes Lullaby me to sleep Keep me safe Lie with me Stay beside me Don'tgo Don't you go
The music couldn't be much simpler and the singing adds immeasurably to the experience. Note the repeated sounds: rhymes, assonance (i.e. vowel sounds), consonance (i.e. consonants) and alliterations (i.e. at the beginnings of words). These make the poem easier to remember. As memory aids called "mnemonics". We remember the choruses because they are repeated but which verse do we remember most? Might it be the most colorful one, with the most sound repetitions?
Would this work as spoken verse?
"Why would anyone want to hear a song without its music?"
Great question! With the introduction of radio in 1923 people could listen to music 24/7. This was much more convenient than going to a saloon, church, or music hall.
Think of how many lyricists you know.
"Isaac Brock, Max Martin, Sly Stone, Claudio Sanchez, Barry Mann, Justin Vernon, Lana Del Rey--"
I'd have gone with Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Ferron, and John Prine, but your list is fine. Now, how many 21st Century poets--not counting lyricists--can you name?
Crickets.
Really? Okay. How many 21st century poems can you recite?
More crickets.
In the shower or while playing air guitar, how many 21st century songs can you butcher?
"Jillions!"
Alright. So which should we learn first? Metered verse, which can be turned into songs, or free verse, which aren't? Something with billions of listeners worldwide or something with virtually none?
"Is this a trick question?"
No.
"Then meter, of course!"
Good choice. We'll need to learn about rhythm, which we call "scansion", and sounds, which we call "sonics", including rhyme.
"Can we learn about slams? My friends say they're a lot of fun."
We can have you competing in slams within a few weeks. As for fun, that is another of Pearl Gray's paradoxes--
"What's a paradox?"
Something that seems contradictory but is actually true.
"Okay. So...why do some people write free verse?"
Because they think it is easier and they figure, since no one is listening, why not take the path of least resistance?
"And is it easier?"
No. In fact, it's five times as difficult, and there is no real chance of serious benefit--to the author or the public--because of the minuscule audience and, for that matter, readership.
"So why do they bother?"
Because being a poet has a certain cachet. Status. People who don't get enough attention love the thought that their words will be preserved in memory.
"Even though they won't be."
Exactly. A person can dream. It's a free country.
"Is there any way to get people to read your poetry? Without setting it to music, I mean."
A person could get their work published in their university's press and hope students will be forced to study--sorry, interpret--it. Or be selected to read a poem at an inauguration. Or state funeral, perhaps. We call these "occasional" poems. Unfortunately, the last few of these have not been memorized, even by their authors.
"That's it?"
People just don't listen to poetry without music.
"Is there a workaround? Some kind of cheat code?"
Well, it's possible to embed poetry in prose. For example, imagine a movie about someone who performs poetry at, say, open mikes. Beyond that, we're really only talking about song lyrics. For now, at least.
"That's depressing."
It can be, but consider this: There is more verse being published and heard today than ever before.
"Yeah, but there's more people than ever before."
True, but I mean as a percentage of the population. Granted, 99.999+% of the verse is in song, but the hours individuals spend listening to verse are at an all time high. And rising.
