formal metrics should be mastered before venturing into "free" forms. That is why I, and I believe most of us, spend so much time on "The Deep End."
This has been informative, Kevin.
Not so humbly,
Roy
Kevin Andrew Murphy
Roy,
Glad to be of assistance.
Kevin, by your leave, I would like to continue this as dialogue.
Roy
Kevin: 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.
Roy: I, too can be reactionary to the winds that blow around us, but that is what it is, reactionary. They don't understand that "myth" may be the only truth there is, and a faulty myth will lead to faulty truth, as has occurred with the various "theories" of Christianity, with all its reactionary churches: the New Church of the Old Gospel, then the Newer Church of the Old New Church, then they got mad and etc until they founded the Holy Church of the Frozen Chosen. To quote Bly, "The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved."
But that is no reason to make a religion of established prosodic theory. While your knowledge of music is admirable, there are those who can play a piano by ear who have never been tutored, and who have never read one note of sheet music. And is their music any less music?
So theory and myth are just another word for projections of perceived truth, whether in analytic language or in poems.
Kevin: 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.
Roy: Scientific "truth" is rigorously tested by experimentation, having a hypothesis and designing a way to prove or disprove it. Prosodic theory is an organism that has evolved by trial and error, with the test being how it is received and perceived by a listener or reader, educated in prosody, or not. It has had "revolutions" when one school of poets challenged the previous poets. Tastes change in image, rhythm, line length, spacing, sound, texture of wording, roots of words, and on and on. That it is time tested means that the organism is today as it has evovled, and it doesn't mean that it can't evolve further.
Kevin: 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.
Roy: I use myth to mean the group of poems and stories by which a society keeps its sanity, by entering that edifice of word and story and freeing their unconscious, shadow side that has so much to do with our behaviour, our happiness, our enlightenment. I believe that myth is the only real truth that we are capable of grasping. DNA-->RNA-->protein is fact, but not truth. Facts allow clever and infinite manipulation of the environment by man without revealing to him what he is about. Only through myth that is poetically "spot-on" can man free his soul. Christian myth has been so literalized and terror-filled that it no longer reflects the battles in the unconscious of today's man and woman, unless one is able to cut to the true poetry and ignore all the interpretative criticism, ie, the dogma.
It was Hebrew poetry translated to Greek and then to us through King James 17th century English, then to modern English in some versions. And what can we say about poems when they are translated? They are not the same poems anymore.
Kevin: 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.
Roy: Interesting image, but not necessarily spot-on poetic. Breaking lines may be more like taking a smaller or larger bite of your steak so you can enjoy the differnce in the texture of the meat as you chew, letting the steak sauce pique your taste buds a little differently, or not using any steak sauce, but adding a little more pepper and salt to that particular bite.
Kevin: 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.
Roy: While I can relate to that, we must remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and magic is in the mind of the believer. I think rap is ugly, but it is very popular, and when one gets into it, I am certain that some of it is actually poetry.
Kevin: 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.
Roy: Now you are talking my language. And I notice you did not say one thing about stanzas or line cuts.
Kevin: 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.
Roy: Well, you were at your most eloquent and truthful when you got away from stanzas and line breaks and started talking about what poetry really is: inspired speech. And how we bring that about is a function of the heart of the speaker, and the heart of the poet intertwined.
All else is so much math that we do while we hope for the muse to bring us that frisson, that chant.
Again, an inspiring talk, Kevin, and I hope you find my mockingbird answers somewhat stimulating as dialogue.
Sincerely,
Lynn
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