Creative Writing: Week Three
Chapter Six, "The Rhythm of Poetry" (105-119)
This short chapter builds on the previous chapter's emphasis on sound, with which you experiment in the various poems you will write this week, from verses about objects not normally seen as fit subjects for poetry to stanzas about an action that interests you.
With the action poem in particular, you will apply techniques discussed in this chapter.
You might want to read as well about scansion and related topics, from free verse to enjambment. When you write, have fun and take changes--write without fear.
Note what your authors say about sound and rhythm:
Rhythm is a result of cadence, or the natural sound pattern created by the spoken word. (106)
You hear this particular cadence all the time. Pause and take note, for instance, of the lilt in someone's voice, the rhythm of an elderly woman as she speaks, the manner in which a politician gives a talk. Your ear, if you make an effort, will begin to pick up particular patterns.
You felt these patterns, for example, in the jazz-influenced poems of Langston Hughes and others.
We will this week talk a bit about meter, with which I invite you to experiment; but our conversation will focus primarily on "free verse." Now, as the "Song of Songs" poem on 107 indicates, free verse is neither new nor free: this poem has an organizational pattern, going from toe to head:
How beautiful your sandaled feet, O prince's daughter!
Your hair is like royal tapestry; the king is held captive by its tresses.
That repetition of "your" gives the poem a definite sound pattern. And as the lines are rather long, the repetition does not become either a bother or comic, but a device to unify the lines and the images.
Anaphora, repetition of structure for rhetorical effect, binds a poem.
Within the poem, the poet also practices end-stopped lines, and as the line about the woman's hair indicates, caesura.
All the similes, and the poet uses many, also help unify the poem. They all refer to the environment in which the poem, if you will, dwells: from Mount Carmel to twins of a gazelle.
The cadence also comes from speech patterns, not unlike the Blank Verse Shakespeare utilizes.
So, Free Verse is not free, but organized in various ways to give the poem depth and emphasis, among other things.
Take a look now at "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas. This poem includes an organizational pattern called syllabics.
Count the syllables in each line, and you will discover that the pattern repeats itself.
What else unites this marvelous poem? What does Thomas discuss? Note the repetition of certain ideas, especially those connected with the sun and time and change, leading to the tremendous and contradictory conclusion:
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the seaSo, as you read, note that the poem has a specific organization, taking us back to a specific place of the poet/narrator's youth.
You should, in fact, read the poem out loud, for the sound is wonderful. And you will have a chance to talk about it and Twyla Hansen's Poetry on the second Discussion Thread. So read the poem carefully and with interest.
As you go through the chapter and read about the various kinds of "feet" and the usefulness of "scansion," remember that "Scanning is an inexact science, and different scholars have different methods of scanning a poem" (110). You should go through, for example, Macbeth's speech on Page 111. As you will note, the "unrhymed iambic pentameter" is not all that consistent in this famous example of Blank Verse.
Shakespeare does, however, maintain a consistent pattern of speech, breaking the normal to provide variety and to emphasize, as in the final line: "Signifying nothing."
Experiment, if you like, a bit with meter. You have an opportunity to utilize meter this week. Just let me and your classmates know which poem is metered. And your writing projects also provide an opportunity to experiment with poetic forms such as a sonnet or a sestina, both fun and challenging.
In your writing for this week, especially in your object and action poems, put the tools described in this chapter (and, of course, the others) to work.
And in the discussion threads, comment on how the featured writers from e. e. cummings to you or a fellow writer put the tools to use.
As Stanley Kinitz writes:
"The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self. The solution is to become one's language. You cannot write a poem until you hit upon its rhythm. That rhythm not only belongs to the subject matter, it belongs to your interior world, and the moment they hook up there's a quantum leap of energy."
Well, continue mining and sharing your hidden head.
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