Roy,
Glad to be of assistance.
For note, my objection to the word "theory" is because of the religious right's recent attempts to equate "scientific theory" with "cockamamie theory." Doing the same with "prosodic theory" makes me bristle even more.
With both scientific theory and prosodic theory, the theories are the explanations for the huge and substantial body of evidence and results of thousands of years of experiments. Likewise musical theory, mathematical theory and the theory of relativity. They're not just silly, untested ideas that someone came up with last Tuesday.
By the same token, I use "myth" to mean "interesting old story that not many people believe these days" and not "disproven lie," if simply because most myths have some significant truth behind them, psychological if not literal.
Inserting extra line breaks into a structured stanzaic form to emphasize various words that were formerly hidden within the line is kind of like beating a ukelele with a hammer -- you may get a few interesting and even the occassional pleasing sounds out of it, but you end up with a smashed ukelele.
Yes, there are experiments that work -- nonce stanzas, for one; skeltonics, for another -- but a lot of things end up just looking broken and ugly. And when they're broken and ugly, they don't work any magic.
Let me explain a bit more, and yes, I'm going to get into an abstruse bit of theory here: incantation, enchantress
What's the root of those words? Cant, chant -- language, singing. When Tim says something "sings" to him, that's what he's talking about. There's a certain pattern of rising and falling notes, of repeated sounds, that sings to the heart and affects the emotions more than mere base words can do. An enchantress's incantation is exactly that: a song to weave her spell around you, even when done as a spoken word performance.
Listen to a tape of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech sometime. Listen to the way he's punching the words, accenting them, inflecting them. That's the incantatory voice. It's what's locked into the simple iambic dimeter of "i HAVE a DREAM"
There's another old rule of magic, often (stupidly) overlooked: The Rule of Three. It's most often stated as "Thrice spoken, once fulfilled." You speak something's name three times, you conjure it up or you send it away. Having something's name gives you power over it.
Yes, yes, an old, silly myth, suitable for writing versions of Faust but... Think. What is the sound of dread? What is the sound you make when you wake in the night, paralyzed by night terror, struggling to make a sound? Your upper teeth touch your lower lip as you shiver.... Fffff...
Listen: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself...." Thrice spoken, once fulfilled. A banishment charm, by the ancient rules. Phobos has been called by name.
It may sound silly, but frickatives are frightening and frigid, which is why the proper name for "goose pimples" is "frisson." You conjure up memories and emotions with the echoes of their sounds, since the mind is suggestible.
Admittedly, I'm wandering a bit far afield from stanzas and stanza breaks, but as with line breaks, periods and commas, they affect how a poem is said, where the pauses are, and what's not said is as important as what is said, if not more so. It's timing. A "dramatic pause" or a "break for laughter" are just that: You conjure up an emotion, you need to give it somewhere to grow and blossom.
And yes, if you crack open a line to expose some powerful word in the middle and thereby give it extra emphasis, you may create an effect, but the reason that powerful word was hidden in the middle of the line may have been to foreshadow and add power to the word at the end of the line or stanza and pulling it out will make the rest of the line fizzle.
Over at the Deep End, you've got a lot of people listening for the frisson, trying to hear what will make the line sing. Beating a ukelele with a hammer is not it.
And before someone accuses me of bashing FV, I'll say that grabbing a FV poem and binding its feet into a blank verse slipper would wreck it just as equally.
|