Quote:
Originally Posted by A. E. Stallings
I don't understand the argument that syllabics are not also written for the ear or that they would not have "sonics". They can have rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration, assonance, rhythms of all kinds--though they would tend to eschew "regularly" patterned beats, else they are accentual syllabic. All of the poems I have presented here gain by being read aloud.
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Alicia, I don't understand that argument either. Who in their right mind would say that "Fern Hill" is not written for the ear? There's nothing about syllabics that's intrinsically incompatible with the richest sonics.
The assertion I've been making is that "lots of" poems in syllabics are "not necessarily" written for the ear. "Lots of" is imprecise - I suppose I would change that to "at least some." Moore's, for instance, I don't think are written for the ear - though on reflection, that phrase "written for the ear" is imprecise, too. What I mean in Moore's case is that she didn't break the lines so that the reader would "hear" the lineation. This is supported by having heard recordings of Moore having read her work, which she reads as if it were unlineated prose. It still offers a certain amount of aural pleasure, but not because of the end-rhymes.
Anyway. The point is that one can find some poems in syllabics that are richly and obviously "for the ear," and at least some that are not obviously for the ear, and lots in between. The same is true of blank verse, and even rhymed accentual-syllabic verse. Syllabics don't necessarily make verse less "sonic" or more. They're just a way of measuring a line, purely a prosodic scheme, compatible with any number of other choices about how to make a poem.
P.S. I'm not a big fan of "What Are Years?", but I love the way Annie Finch describes the experience of being taken "into the zone" by Moore in a way that doesn't comport with, perhaps, more expected ways of going there, ways that usually involve "the musical part of the brain." Moore's music is very, very weird. The reason I keep harping on her is because I think she represents an approach to syllabics that takes prose, rather than rhymed iambics, as a formal starting place.