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

---

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.

---